Who am I? : "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick

I'm a big Pynchon fan, too, so don't get me wrong here, but it seems to me like the main difference between Dick's writing style and Pynchon's--or at least, the difference that mostly accounts for Dick being treated as a "pulp" author with some interesting ideas whereas Pynchon is considered a major "literary" figure--is simply that Dick tends to write in crisp, straightforward sentences that just directly say what he means to say, whereas Pynchon's writing is (in)famously dense with allusion and rambling esoteric figurative expressions to the point where it can be an intellectual exercise in its own right just trying to figure out what the hell Pynchon is trying to say.

All of which makes major Dick novels like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” or “Radio Free Albemuth” sort of resemble, IMHO, what “Gravity's Rainbow” might have looked like if Pynchon had been working with editors who expected him to actually keep tight deadlines.

I think Dick was really gifted as a wry satirist, too, and this is something I think he's often under-appreciated for. Probably my favourite single episode in all of Dick's stories I've ever read--and I was quite overjoyed to see this faithfully recreated in the film adaptation--is still the "suicide" sequence from “A Scanner Darkly”. In short, I don't think Dick was ever bad at writing--he just doesn't seem to have had any real interest in the kind of writing that people like James Joyce or William Burroughs (or Pynchon, for whom to my mind it seems that both Joyce and Burroughs were major stylistic influences) were famous for. I mean, in the 60's it was still nigh-impossible for anyone writing SF at all to be taken seriously by the "literary" world, which is important to remember as well--in the minds of smart, educated, respected literary critics, you simply didn't write about aliens or robots or time machines if you even wanted to be taken seriously as a "good writer", so I think it stands to reason that people like that were never an audience that Dick was even trying to impress or appeal to. He was writing for teenage boys and maladjusted stoners who didn't exactly run in sophisticated high-culture circles, so I imagine those audiences were really the people to whose tastes he tailored his style. I do think that with Dick, the whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts. There are a few books that stand out as more perfect, or more complete, than the others, but in general I think it is the cumulative impact of the themes across the whole body of work that is his greatest achievement. Some of his books are quite flawed, or even weak - yet almost all feature at least one startlingly brilliant idea.

I read lots of Phil Dick as a teenager and it really put a perspective on the world that all the Asimov, Clarke and other SF authors really didn't... It's not that Phil Dick was more SF than the others; it's just the psychedelic perception manipulating stories seemed to be more vivid...One of the things that I enjoy about Phil’s books are that his lead characters lack "agency." When things go cross-eyed, they have a tendency to freeze up and simply endure whatever madness their damaged universe dishes out. It adds a certain plausibility to his stories -- we've all been, or we know, the guy who can't get it together, even when reality itself is up for grabs.

The thing to remember about Dick is he was inventive. The mechanical SF of today is pre-packaged, made to order product. Dick (who could have written about that) explored darkly funny worlds. When someone says he couldn't write, who are they comparing him to... today's writers with the publisher's crack team of craftsmen: Alpha & Beta readers, Restructuring, Copy-editing, Proofreaders? (Martin and Rothfuss come to mind) For that level of writing support, the books of today had better be good. And yet they don't have a tenth of Dick's creativity. Did Dick even have an agent? The Scott Meredith Agency - his last attempt to get a literary agent, returned his manuscripts, didn't it? Those who say he couldn't write are glossing over the reality of publishing. The question is: does the carefully crafted fiction of now bear comparison with him? I've studied Trad-Pub genre offerings for the last twenty years; I know what my answer would be.

Dick was not at all into dystopia or any kind of prospective/political SF. His main interest, in his life like in his art, was personal identity and all the doubts surrounding it. Who am I? Is the world around me true or an illusion? It was a philosophical and idiosyncratic SF that put him in another dimension than the rest of the genre. Emmanuel Carrère calls Dick the Dostoevsky of the 20th century, which is something I never agreed with. There is only one Dostoevsky, who was moments from being executed, reprieved and sent to a Siberian prison. Later released, became a gambling addict and after authoring some of the most distinctive, profound works of Literature became a national figure in Russia. Carriere is not correct with his comparison. Any more than Dostoevsky was a Russian Phillip K. Dick. "Who am I? What is my place in the world?" I can see why Carrère would appreciate Dick the same way Truffaut and French cultural commentators idolized David Goodis. He reads differently in their language and culture. Whereas in English, both of them come across as unable to escape from their pulp vision of the world. Orwell was always suspicious of novels that eschewed politics completely. Rightly so. I would think that Dick like Ayn Rand who asked the same questions, "who am I?, etc.) fantasize about an island or planet all their own in which they do not have to share anything with others. Dick inhabits a solipsistic universe and I like some of my fiction thus. Heinlein  is another case in point when it comes to solipsistic universes...I've written about it elsewhere.

“A Scanner Darkly” is a fine example of his literary world; he inhabits a solipsistic terrain which is the most extreme form of subjectivity. I get a measure of nihilism, and full-fledged meaning, reading him. I have to say, though, Kafka and Borges are two authors that I don't particularly enjoy reading. I know they are stalwarts of the modernist canon but I find them gimmicky, Borges with his inverted, convoluted, Kabbalistic fables and Kafka with his Central European father/Emperor psychological complexes. Banishing politics from literature has robbed it of much of its context. This is why Phil Dick is such a hero to me. Yes, he could set it aside but he addressed it, as well. I am almost sure Phil Dick and his descent into self-destruction via drugs was a response to the direction America went in from the 50's to the 80's. It's evident in many films and books during that period.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Beckettian SF: "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick

“The Man in the High Castle” is my second favourite PKD novel, after “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. I read both novels in the same year, back in the day, along with “Ubik”, “VALIS” and “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, and most of PKD's short fiction. Without doubt the most mind-bending year of reading I've ever had, and the one that hooked me on SF more than any other. The thing I love about his stories more than anything else is their mastery of chaos and illogicality. Reality in a PKD story is held together by the desperate hopes of his characters, and it's always falling apart beneath their feet. Love it!

As for PKD's prose not keeping up with his ideas and co... I agree... and also agree it's often part of the fun. Although here, as noted, I found his writing mainly quite elegant.

I've been hunting around for speculation as to why PKD called Hawthorne Abendsen's book “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”. Dick says in the book that the title is a quote from The Bible, but if so it is not in a common translation. You can find some speculation elsewhere; being speculative about a Dick novel means we'll be wandering into some fairly strange territory... I've also asked the question on my own blog, so there may be enlightening comments there.

I suppose I've never really considered him as SF and therefore haven't really considered him as SF. I realise this is rather weak and tautological but it’s the fact of the matter. I suppose probably because I have quite restricted notion of what SF actually is. Perhaps I should try more. I make the further claim because it often seems to me to be too far away from how we experience the world. I find it often too far removed from reality to effect the way I perceive it. I've always been away of a porous boundary between what we take as truth and fiction and the most effective novels seem to me to find a way to weave the two together questioning both. I'm never sure that SF takes enough of the former to do that.

It is part of what SF often does to propose realities different from our own. And often proposing that our own reality is not even really reality. Metaphysics, including religions of every ilk, has routinely done the same thing over long millennia, and convincingly enough for religions to have dominated much of human history and metaphysics to have dominated, in full or in part, the thinking of many of the best minds in human history. Science fiction has only been at it for decades, but PKD managed to bring it to a level still unsurpassed by any other SF writer, perhaps any other writer at all. Although, in one way or another, many philosophers have questioned the phenomenal world and our lives in it, Descartes brought to the table the "I", the individual identity, and that "I" has more than held its own for going on 500 years, as a, perhaps THE, preoccupation in Western thought and feeling, very much including Literature.

Beckett has put his "I" character into strange wavering limbos where it manages to unwaveringly 'go on'; PKD's 'I' exists in equally strange bizarre worlds (that often somehow make too much sense), but they waver and shift in a constant struggle to adapt to relentless rifts and shifts in the world around them, and in all that they know. Paul Williams in his 1974 Rolling Stone interview with PKD says: "Dick's characters are all ultimately small (that is ordinary, believable) people made big by their stamina in the face of an uncertain world." This would almost apply to Beckett's characters too, but where 'uncertain world' in Dick's case doesn't mean the vicissitudes of an individual's life at the ultimate bottom of the lowest of the barrels, but a world whose very reality is an uncertainty that is bottomless, and whose uncertainty is very much in the individual identity's (the "I"'s) life as a problem and condition of life. This "I" too "goes on".

I wouldn't take away Beckett's Nobel in Literature and give it to PKD, and I don't in the least believe Beckett will not stand the test of time, but I do believe that PKD's work will keep on being evaluated upwards as Literature as the years roll on. My PKD’s re-read project shows how very alive and well his body of work is, which means people still read it and feel it is a relevant artistic vision. For me, artistic vision is the most important thing a writer can have. Dick's was a strange and evolving visionary critter, but it was powerful and still is. Dick brings it to life in his reader's minds. He's a great writer thereby. Beckett may have the Nobel and the literary criticism reputation but it's PKD who continues to have the social influence thanks to his peerless imagination and paranoia (which grows increasingly justifiable as time goes by).

Since I think of PKD in terms of Literature I tend to think about him more in the context of Kafka, Beckett, and Burroughs. I rarely try to put him into a science fiction genre series of writers, although some may have written better SF (as genre) than him. What makes him transcend, if you will, the sci fi genre is that 'science fiction' is now, and increasingly, defining our daily 'mainstream' lives as technological innovation, but mainstream Literature has not caught up with what is happening, and veers away from it, looking for the meanings of human experience elsewhere. It's a weird kind of disconnect between contemporary literature and modern life. But PKD's writing was and is thoroughly aware of the entanglement of brave new science-fictional realities with our age old humanity. Even his metaphysics involve supercomputer gods, temporal interpret rations, and the like. He does it better than anyone and that's why I don't flinch to think about him being in exalted literary company. And it's why I think that sooner or later readers and lit critics and academics are going to reconnect mainstream literature with mainstream daily life. Dick's fiction will be right there in the forefront.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bath Water: "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick

"'I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. ‘“

In “Ubik” by Philip K. Dick

This would feel like a meaningless read indeed if it wasn't, in fact, a very FUNNY one, full of a dry humor. In Ubik the characters are taken in such a subjective maze of crumbling reality, unexpected time-travelling and personal doubts, that it becomes a materialization of the absurdity of the human condition, in the form of an exhilarating fiction. If you are not into the humor of Kafka and Borges, it makes perfectly sense that you are not sensible to Dick's one. What makes Ubik a wonderful read still today? Dick didn't nail everything too tightly to the plot. The result may seem a potpourri but his worlds live and breathe. If he were writing now this book would make him a rebel and, given what he was like, would give most editors / publishers gray-hairs. It also begs the question (of others in the genre): Can you really do that?

I think the current fascination with Dick seems tied to the fact that most of his most popular books have dystopian or control themes. The other worldliness, or just around the corner-ness, of his stories, make it seem fictional, therefore enjoyable, yet also real and possible. I had been seeing a resurgence in sales of his books a couple of decades ago. This is just a speculative thought, but I wonder: If we had really been reading him for a spooky window into the future, then that means that the "seeds of the future dystopia" already started back then. Nixon had been around in Dick's time, but Reagan and the Republican nasties was their second coming. AI was only just poking its nose into things. 2000 was around the corner. Was Dick one of our clues to the future?

What nobody ever mentions when they write so earnestly about Philip K Dick is just how funny a lot of his stories and books are. None of his jokes have made it too small or big screen because they rely on wordplay. So how can one square that with the assertion he was a crap artist unless you have never read his books?

One of the joys of his stuff, and Ubik in particular, is that despite lots of functional detail, there's usually very little decorative embellishment in Dick's writing. Reading it first lets you paint your own pictures which are sometimes, but not always, much richer (and weirder) than what ends up on screen, and I’m just re-reading Phil Dick for the umpteenth time...

Phil Dick is like in a Goldilocks position for tapping into the creative world of the subconscious. He is not so straightforward and representative that you feel like a detail of his prediction being wrong or outdated invalidates the work (Asimov), but he is not so deep into the world of the subconscious that the makes no narrative sense and creates works that cannot be interpreted by many (Burroughs). Interestingly Asimov is more inspirational to people involved with "innovation" in organizations while Burroughs is more inspirational to musicians. Dick also taps into Gnostic Christianity which makes him a distinctive voice like William Blake who worked with similar themes. A lot of people are still Christian so they find something to latch onto him as opposed to the cold technocratic atheism or nihilism of some other fiction.

I’ve read this novel at least 10 times; questions left unresolved:

1 - Ubik- what is it?

According to the body of the novel it's a substance that reverses the disintegration, or reversion to earlier forms, of matter, and a prophylactic against energy vampires like Jory. But according to the comic advertisements at the beginning of every chapter, it's a universal panacea, a solution to pretty much every problem. What are we to make of those ubiquitous adverts? Are they in the 'real world' or in half-life? In our world the solution to almost every problem is digital. Maybe in Runciter's world, the solution to every problem is Ubik, and he just applies it, or uses the name, for a new purpose.

2 - Runciter's body

If Runciter is alive, (and I think we have to assume he is, and all the others are in half-life- that's left pretty unambiguous) what is his corpse doing in a moratorium in the half-life world? His corpse behaves in the same way as the other corpses of the half-lifers, but Runciter's situation is totally different. Is his corpse just a construct created by Jory, like so much else? I think it must be.

3 - Pat Conley- what's her role in the 'betrayal'?

We know that she has a special talent- her ability to rewrite the recent past and thereby reshape the present- and she demonstrates them early on, before the ill-fated trip to Luna. We also know- this becomes clear from the conversation between Joe and Runciter near the end, that Pat is in half-life like the others, that her 'gifts' do not work there, though she thinks they do, and that although she believes that she is in control, actually she has no more power than the others and Jory is the one who is draining the half-lifers of their remaining life, one by one. But it's also clear that she betrayed them all, was involved in the ambush on Luna, and was herself a victim of the explosion. What did her betrayal consist of and did it involve her special talent? My view is as follows: however dangerous her talent was to Runciter et al, her powerful (and unique) anti-precog talent is more dangerous to Hollis and his spies. They therefore lured her, their greatest threat, to Luna with the others. Like so many double-agents, she was double-crossed by the more unscrupulous of her two employers. Let us pity her- she is more a victim than a betrayer.

4 - Joe Chip- what are we to make of the final chapter?

Well, I think the final chapter, short as it is, is a master stroke. It reaffirms the ubiquity and all-powerful nature of the enigmatic Ubik. It brings the novel back to its starting place- the Zurich moratorium. And, like the ending to Gillam's film "Brazil", it introduces a moment of existential doubt, or ambiguity, just in case we thought we had a happy ending. My view is that Runciter here is still alive, he's become a regular visitor to the moratorium. Up to now artifacts from the "real" world have appeared in half-life world: Runciter money, the television commercials, the graffiti, and most importantly, Ubik. But the reverse communication is more limited: the only way half-lifers can affect the "real" world is by speaking through the moratorium's telephone equipment. Up to now. When he sees the Joe Chip money, Runciter realises that this is the beginning of something new.

Look at Joe Chip's initials. J.C. The initials of Jesus Christ- in Christian tradition the first man to die, descend into Hell, do an important job there, and come back (albeit briefly) to the "real" world, having changed the status quo for the rest of us mortals. Michael Moorcock used the same initials for his "Eternal Champion". Is it too much to see Joe Chip as the first person who is able to break free from the prison of half-life and infiltrate the "real" world. Considering how hopeless he is with money, it's kind of satisfying that the first manifestation of his power is his infiltration of Runciter-world currency.

5 - Ambiguity- flaw or strength

I think all these ambiguities make the novel stronger. If it was a detective novel, they might be flaws. But uncertainty, paradox, and concepts that give you a headache if you think about them too hard, are crucial to Dick's world view. Actually, the plot of Ubik is, on the whole, despite some of the obscurantism on this thread, pretty clear. If Dick leaves a few loose ends untied, I see that as reflecting the essential “unknowability” at the heart of life, rather than any oversight on the part of the writer.

As a footnote, I have been puzzling over why objects regress at different rates, e.g., the bottle of Ubik inside the car, and can't quite figure out why that would be. I wondered if it had something to do with Einstein's theory of Relativity but can't quite work it out. I'm also wondering if Phil was using the idea that consciousness of a dying person recedes in a nonlinear manner and so the time regression acts similarly. If you think of a person with dementia as well where the access to memory and the capacity make new memories fluctuates over time. There may be a further corollary in terms of how such a person is perceptually on occasion going back in time with kinds of distressing thoughts for example of for example of an 85 year old wanting to leave a nursing home in order to not be late home for the meal that her mother has prepared. Objectively unreal to all around her, this event has all the emotional impact of its veracity and immediacy to her.

Phil Dick had some interesting ideas about time and the evolution of man. He appears to believe that human beings will ultimately reach an enlightened stage where time becomes irrelevant and we gain awareness of all past lives, a bit like Buddha. Don't ask me how that is all supposed to work, but Pat, indeed, all the paranormal people in Ubik, may be intended to represent a stepping stone in that process.

I can't help coming to the conclusion that Phil Dick's beliefs might not be necessarily understandable, based as they on a rehash of fragments from religious texts and the ideas of many philosophers and psychologists throughout history. The resulting mix emanating from Phil Dick's far from ordinary mind is very complex and contains some elements that seem to be mutually incompatible. I think that probably goes a long way to explaining why his novels are so difficult to unravel in terms of plot and symbolism.

Bottom-line 1: For me, Ubik works as a theophany, an expression of the will and power of an omnipresent sentient being from outside our reality, and also a way of merging man with god, creating a saviour figure in the form of Joe Chip/JC. For me, the biggest question in Ubik is possibly, who is Dr Sonderbar, the founder? Ella and Jory may be the end of the chain of entities, representing as they do the forces of good and evil, rational and irrational. Then again, maybe not. For Phil Dick, reality seems to be like the layers of an onion. There are a lot of eye watering bits to peel away before you get to the middle, if you ever do.

Bottom-line 2: The writing is somewhat pedestrian, the characters are not fully developed and it is blatantly sexist. However, I don't agree that the novel should be dismissed purely on those grounds, even though in the vast majority of cases any one of those would be considered a terminal flaw. I've always thought that the envelope of human understanding is not expanded by those of us with average minds, sitting safely tucked in the middle. On the contrary, it's the people struggling on the boundaries of genetic diversity that enable change. They can connect the dots of existing knowledge in new patterns, and sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don't, but it is a skill the vast majority of people do not possess. The more I read of Phil Dick's work, the more I realise he had one of those rare, extraordinary minds. As my Granny used to say, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

NB: And where's the film of Ubik??? Of all the Phil Dick books that have been adapted I'm surprised no one has had a go at making Ubik in to a film or mini-series as I think it would be great even though the plot is complex. He was a master of world-building and fantastic technological concepts, which is why his stories translate so well to Hollywood. They can hack and slash the characters and plot as much as they like, and it doesn't matter. The worlds and MacGuffins endure and give the breathtaking element.