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.

Reality and Illusion: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick

The one faithful film adaptation of a PKD story I'm aware of was the Linklater version of A Scanner Darkly. All the others take a major conceptual element of the story's basic premise, but then seriously alter the narrative in ways that often make them very different thematically. I really liked the Linklater film, too, because I think the "slavish" recreation of the story does a far better job of presenting the ideas that Dick had in their full nuance and depth than any other film version of his work ever has.) Most other adaptations of his work (there are some I haven't seen) tend to fall far short of that, which is really a shame. I mean, Blade Runner (the 1982 version) is a great movie. I like it a lot, but the novel has layers of philosophical depth that the film just doesn't get anywhere near. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” is one of Dick's many explorations of what was clearly his favorite philosophical topic, namely "what is the difference between reality and an illusion?" The movie is reasonably accurate in its representation of the basic plot points (a police officer hunts for escaped androids from space colonies, who are illegally living on Earth and posing as humans) but doesn't even attempt to probe the weirder, but more thought-provoking elements of the story--e.g. that the human race is actually going extinct, and that the robots' brains are distinguishable from those of humans by the robots' inability to feel empathy toward living things. Or how keeping pets has become a quasi-religious practice because there are so few living, non-mechanical things left on the Earth in general. (Or the whole weird virtual-reality religion where people experience the pain of a man who is perpetually pelted with rocks while struggling to climb a steep mountain--again, the capacity for empathy being something that people in that world see as a definitive difference between genuine life and a mere mechanical imitation of life. All of this makes “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” a classically PhilDickian work--the theme and general unsettling ambiance of existential paranoia from living in a world where nothing can be assumed to be what it appears to be, and in which the future of the Earth is to be virtually devoid of life yet filled instead with mocking superficial simulacra of life--in a way that Blade Runner, for all its own copious merits as a work of art in its own right, just isn't. And while I understand the critique, I've never personally found Dick's writing style to be bad. It's just not very literary--if what one means by "literary" is basically "florid, convoluted, and abstruse." E.g. I find that a lot of Dick's science fiction is similar in its thematic content and general tone to most of Thomas Pynchon's famous novels as well as the fact some of Phil Dick's novels seem to me to have a somewhat Beckettian feeling. But maybe that's just me. Food for thought. When I'm in the mood, I'll explore this further.

The Holy Book of Blake: "The Poetic Image" by Cecil Day-Lewis

Word of Warning: What you're about to read might not make much sense if you don't have read the book. Read at your own peril...

Perhaps what Blake also represents to me is the “thou” in performance, on a threshold over which lay different spacial awareness, new, thee in triplicate state, digital long haul through double-number's realm - restoring boring patter to the even lie that led to this.

PS

Goodbye

I cannot go on for very much longer, because Carol's shelf-life, at the bottom of a reject-pile, thee's words, alert the authorities to one's 'undercover' performance as thine own Songs of Experience and Failure, 'shit', you know how it is. Blake here, he did you feel injustice because it is all there?

Anonymity, rejection, failure. It's all you knew and experienced, as a prophet: not only unrecognised by the community in your own land of 'Albion', as their Prophet; but also viewed with bafflement, indifference, disconnection, de-friend quality in personal dealings with your fellow bards, more or less, wholly inconsequential; you have, like, 'zero' effect you, in Albion thine of a too, too soppy mug, sceptic tank, this beach, this hut, this sea, this dump, this fecking Portugal’s greater glory, God and Lady AD's words, offering tokens of animal sacrifice and conditions on a toilet by the lake where

Homeric chimes will bring back to you, Spoils from Annwyn's cauldron of song.

Platonic Romantic poets. No need to hype you, for being aware of the crooked source, you're all the same.

"...cracked country lips,

I still wish to kiss,

As to be under the strength of your skin."

Bob

Your magnetic movements

Still capture the minutes I'm in,

But it grieves my heart, love,

To see you tryin' to be a part of

A world that just don't exist.

It's all just a dream, babe"

To Ramona..

"I experienced 'The Sick Rose', with the voice of Blake reading it, as something that applied to the whole universe, and at the same time, the inevitable beauty of doom ... '

It was all very beautiful

All very awesome

"As if Blake had penetrated the very “secrety” core of the entire universe and had come forth in some little magic formula statement in rhyme and rhythm that, if properly heard in the inner inner ear, would deliver you beyond the universe,' I said.

Blake

Boring person: stuck up and preying on the names of real talent and radical Art, but it's OK, I forgave her, 'Carol' who wrought every success, just that little bit better, that

'..vacuum, a scheme, babe,

That sucks you into feelin' like this..'

'I who wrote a song for you

About a strange young man called Dylan

With a voice like sand and glue

His words of truthful vengeance

They could pin us to the floor

Brought a few more people on

And put the fear in a whole lot more'

David, Blake and Bowie Jones

'...call yerself poets? arseholes more like it, little drippy idols of a forgotten mass of dead and dying core 'in the Rainbow at the final Ziggy Stardust gig' mugs, getting served up for the last time, when Dave killed him off, live as teenagers dreaming of suicide, broken, racked with responsibility into a dangerously offence state, the kids and fan-base of idiots who talk utter tripe, then and now David Bowie, since last we met in the realm of Albion, you little wonder, little wonder, little wonderful londoner, OAP, Anonymous you read only half of your self and show respect, I and the rest of you who can go fuck yerself.

Life, it is a dress rehearsal for ourselves as petty minded criminally academic interests, in numbers adding, subtracting and the time we feel the 'entire universe as poetry' with, just like it says in and on the tin

Ana

..thinking is more than thee's pals, at least, well, have a go, go and live in a small, confined space, a bedsit, and try being the least intelligent of all of you feckers. You haven't got it sorted from fact, not sussed out how you got it straight in the new dispensation - myth ... ha ha ha ...i can satirise to make you appear divs who wanna be like me ... get gassing about Carol's words, Beckett, Bowie, Bob, Blake and Milton, dickheads in shite and tatty tossers, Joyce, Shaw, Wilde and yeah ... Yeats?

. you are not even funny anymore than MacMillan bending for His Position, as god is marm, stuck up Unity, you are yer

'Oh hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you'

Tits, it's called, and it's all about a bloke called Dave who is consumed by you, and who stole some of your make-up to create one of his most infamous incarnations, passing himself off as you.

Tosser

Enter the world of Harry Potter. Be alert, be extraordinaire and ask yerself a big phat Q: What is it about you, I don't like and why?

Wankerz Massive - Deptford.

Blake

Ah! Feck off! We don't do flowers

so will you ever just go and stick the whole of yourself, up your own arse

Bowie

Carol Anwynn's words

Get over me, you I.

Lady D.

Postscript: I find it interesting about this business of interpretation. As has often been said on this blog, the best interpretation now may not be the best interpretation of a work. In say, Shakespeare's play, “King Lear”, his choices of words may have meant something interesting to audiences in the 16th century, giving lines a significance that we cannot grasp. Their best interpretation may be quite different from our best interpretation. But that leads us to conclude that the work meaning today differs from the work meaning when the play (or poem) was written. It seems too easy to have works of art, for which almost no one will be in a position to give the best interpretation, not even the specialists, always defeating the point of identifying work meaning with the best hypothesis.

There!

A Strangely Claustrophobic Experience: “How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain de Botton

“To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”

Quote from one of Proust’s books, In “How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain de Botton

“Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.”

In “How Proust Can Change Your Life” by Alain de Botton

I read Proust's masterpiece back in the 80s when I was attending the British Council. I still remember all too well one particular hilariously snippy Monty Python sketch (“the Summarize Proust Competition”). Back in the day, I too wanted to be able to rub elbows with the elite intellectuals who mocked Proust, so I picked up the first of three volumes (the weighty Moncrieff editions) and got started. The first few pages were tough going, but soon I became mesmerized, then I fell in love, and by the end of the summer I was tucking flowers into the plackets of my trousers and wearing bows in my shirts. Oh childhood! Swann's Way is the swiftest, plottiest volume in the monster, with “Un Amour de Swann” a little novel in itself, with a beginning, middle, end, and all that sort of thing. Originally drafted in a mere three volumes, the “Recherche” grew as Proust re-Proustified the later volumes while waiting for publication; many readers have wished that that long mini-book could be recovered. The pace picks up again in the last volume, which the author's death prevented him from reworking, so that a dinner party—one of the greatest scenes in all literature, by the way—takes only a few hundred pages to describe, what with the jolts of consciousness with which Proust bracketed it, while the first half of the volume is impossibly brilliant about the first World War without ever leaving Paris. It's best to have time for such idleness, best to be so besotted with the possibilities of literature that you love rather than loathe the lengthiness; which is to say that you need to encounter Proust at the right time of your life and possibly even the right place, so that Proust's times and places become yours. I’ve been avoiding re-reading Proust. More than 30 years later should I re-read him? My advice for those of you who haven’t read it yet. I hope that luck will be yours; without it, the task may prove impossible. If you find yourself fatally at a loss to know what and why you're reading his work, check out Samuel Beckett's slim monograph; for all its showy intellectuality—it's a youthful work—it's still the best compass for getting across that ocean. De Botton’s attempt is not the best way to go about it. I also recommend the Proust Screenplay by Harold Pinter, which accomplishes the amazing feat of boiling the whole thing down into a 90-minute screenplay without losing any of the flavour. When I felt lost at the beginning of my first reading of Pinter's work, revealed the whole structure to me and enabled me to carry on. Reading De Botton’s book, full of Proust’s excerpts, proves that I’m still finding reading Proust a strangely claustrophobic experience. I got the overwhelming impression of a man who observes, dissects and minutely describes life, but perhaps forgets to live it? As a reader, I feel the novel takes me over. There is no room for separate interpretation or thought. Proust leaves no margin for error. It's a bit like the difference between watching butterflies fluttering in a meadow and having them pinned and labelled, dead, on a board for inspection.

When someone asks me why I read so much, and why “I don’t think for myself”, I always like to refer them to this quote by Proust:

‘The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgment of part of its independence. “What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself” […] There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has left. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with this.’

Beckettian Theatre: "O Relógio" by Flor na Boca Projectos

"O Relógio" = The Clock

Is there a way to objectively know what an art object is all about? Be it a book, an opera, a painting, a book, a poem, or a play? At least not in my mind.

When I attend a theatre performance, all I can ever do is say, or write, what I think I saw.

There are times when my mind conjures up things that aren’t there at all and there are times when I miss things that are definitely there. I can just try to grasp that indefinable feeling of "getting it". In this case, what "O Relógio" meant to me, what it felt like for me to be there and the effect it had on me, are something I'm still not prepared to talk about. I'm still thinking about it. I'm not even using the alibi of having read the book on which it was based on, because I haven't read it, and I don't plan on doing so, in case it destroys what I've just seen (instead I'll just read Samuel's Pimenta's other books).

I went to see this play with my eyes completely closed, i.e., I didn't have any kind of expectations on what I was about to watch. At the end of it, what was the play about? As a once regular theatregoer (now not so much due to my personal life), it's quite wonderful not to worry my pretty little head on working out exactly what the play was all about. I just let it flow.

That's also one of the reasons for loving to see Shakespeare performed on stage. At the best of times, even when I know the story inside out, as I always do, Shakespeare is at times extraordinarily abstract. Should we stop watching it? Nope. Theatre, when done right, has a unique capacity to bonk you in the head, heart and other innards all at once. There are some forms of theatre that are more difficult to relate to without a textual medium to be used as a crutch. When along comes a play where the content rather than the visceral experience is not as important, I just enjoy it to the fullest of my abilities and stay silent to enjoy the silences in the play.

Visually, the play works wonders. Light (or lack thereof) served to organize the various structural changes that underlay the performance. As in a Beckett play, where the beginnings and ends of plays derive from the intensity of light, or rather the variation between light and darkness, Vicente Morais' and Paulo Vaz's stage direction emphasized the juxtaposition between light and darkness. The effect was mesmerizing. If it were possible to "watch" this play without sound, I'd say I was watching a play from the Hammer Film Studios, where Paulo Vaz would be a Peter Cushing doppelganger. The fading-up and fading-out of the actor in terms of light and, shadow, and darkness, for me, visually, and in terms of (trying) to interpret the play, represented the focal points of dramatization against the spatially notions of presence and absence.

I don't know whether the intention of inserting a Beckett's play extract at the beginning and at the end of the play and the juxtaposition of light and darkness was an intentional move on the part of stage director and actor, but it worked like a charm.

Things I noticed. Once again the silence/pauses between lines of text is done masterfully and beautifully.

As in a Pinter play, we get to enjoy more, because what's beneath the text is more important than what I can see and hear. There were some parts in the play where I just wanted to close my eyes (I couldn't unfortunately) and "listen" to what was beating underneath. Without a full and well-done articulated pause/silence, I wouldn't have a certain amount of time, during which I could ponder on a single given utterance (be it text, or a pause) to the exclusion of anything else. I was able to do it. That's why the "Überschreitung" between the performer, Paulo Vaz, the stage, and me, as I said above, was achieved beautifully.

Theatre, much more than film, it's all in the hands of the stage director and the actor giving voice to the part.

I was not familiar with Samuel Pimenta's work. It bears digging deeper into (unfortunately the site is only available in Portuguese) ...

NB: Stage Director, Vicente Morais; Monologue, Paulo Vaz (literary persona Álvaro Cordeiro), based on a book by Samuel Pimenta at Sociedade Guilherme Cossoul.