DISCovering Authors Modules Copyright � 1996, Gale Research

SOURCE: DISCovering Authors, Gale Research Inc., 1996.

[Overview of Author�s Works and Career.]
 

The central problem in much of the late Philip K. Dick�s science fiction is how to distinguish the real from the unreal. He once told Contemporary Authors: "My major preoccupation is the question, �What is reality?�" In novel after novel, Dick�s characters find that their familiar world is in fact an illusion, either self-created or imposed on them by others. Dick "liked to begin a novel," Patricia Warrick wrote in Science-Fiction Studies, "with a commonplace world and then have his characters fall through the floor of this normal world into a strange new reality." Drug-induced hallucinations, robots and androids, mystical visions, paranoic elusions, and alternate or artificial worlds are the stuff of which Dick�s flexible universe is made. "All of his work," Charles Platt wrote in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, "starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person�s dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."

Despite the mutable and often dangerous nature of Dick�s fictional worlds, his characters retain at least a faint hope for the future, and manage to survive and comfort one another. Dick�s characters are usually ordinary people�repairmen, housewives, students, salesmen�caught up in overwhelming situations that call into questiontheir basic beliefs about themselves and their world. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, powerful drugs create such believable hallucinations that users find it difficult to know when the hallucination has ended and the real world has returned. A character in Time Out of Joint discovers that he does not really live in a mid-twentieth-century American town as he had believed. He lives in an artificial replica of an American town built by a government of the future for its own purposes. In Eye in the Sky, eight people at a research facility are pushed by a freak accident into a state of consciousness where each one�s subjective reality becomes real for the entire group for a time. They experience worlds where the ideas of a religious cult member, a communist, a puritan, and a paranoid are literally true. The ability of Dick�s characters to survive these situations, preserving their sanity and humanity in the process, is what Dick celebrated. His novels presented a "world where ordinary people do the best they can against death-driven, malevolent forces," Tom Whalenwruot; Dick said in an interview for the Missouri Review. "I had prime-source material at the Berkeley-Cal library right from the gestapo�s mouth�stuff that had been seized after World War II.... That�s ... why I�ve never written a sequel to it: it�s too horrible, too awful. I started several times to write a sequel, but I [would have] had to go back and read about Nazis again, so I couldn�t do it." Dick used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divining system, to plot The Man in the High Castle. At each critical juncture in the narrative, Dick consulted the I Ching to determine the proper course of the plot.

The alternate universes in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are created by powerful hallucinogenic drugs. The novel is set in the near-future when the increasing heat of the sun is making life on Earth impossible. The United Nations is forcing people to immigrate to Mars, an inhospitable desert waste where colonists must live in underground hovels. Because of the boredom of colony life, a drug-induced fantasy world has been devised which uses small dolls and miniature settings. When a colonist takes the drug Can-D, he becomes one of the dolls and lives for a brief time in an Earth-like setting. The manufacturer of the dolls and settings�a company named Perky Pat Layouts, after the female doll�also sells Can-D. When Palmer Eldritch returns from a deep-space exploration, he brings with him a supply of the new and more powerful drug Chew-Z. Eldritch has also acquired three "stigmata"�an artificial metallic arm, enormous steel teeth, and artificial eyes. His Chew-Z is cheaper and longer-lasting than Can-D and he soon is selling it to the Martian colonists. But Chew-Z doesn�t seem to wear off. The user is moved into a world that seems like his own but with the important difference that Palmer Eldritch has god-like powers. Bruce Gillespie, writing in Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd, called Palmer Eldritch "one of the few masterpieces of recent science fiction."

Dick received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a near-future novel in which popular television talk show host Jason Taverner wakes up one morning in a world where he is unknown. No record even exists of his having been born, an awkward situation in the records-conscious police state that Taverner�s California has become. The explanation for this impossibility is that Taverner is living within the drug hallucination of Alys Buckner, and in that hallucination there is no place for him. The powerful drug, able to impose Alys�s hallucination on reality itself, eventually kills her, and Taverner is set free. "Dick skillfully explores the psychological ramifications of this nightmare," Gerald Jonas commented in the New York Times Book Review, "but he is even more interested in the reaction of a ruthlessly efficient computerized police state to the existence of a man, who, according to the computers, should not exist."

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick�s most celebrated novel about simulacra, mechanical objects which simulate life. In this novel Dick posits a world in which androids are so highly developed that it is only by the most rigid testing that one can distinguish them from human beings. The key difference is the quality of empathy which humans have for other living things. When some androids escape from a work colony and make their way to Earth, bounty hunter Rick Deckard must find them. But Deckard gradually comes to feel compassion for the androids, realizing that the tests he gives measure only a subtle difference between androids and humans. In contrast to this officially-sanctioned tracking and killing of androids, this near-future society accepts artificial animals of all kinds�everything from sheep to spiders. With most real animals extinct, replicas are fashionable to own. One of the rarest animals is the toad, and when Deckard discovers one in the desert he believes he has made an important find. But even in the desert there are no real animals. Deckard notices a small control panel in the toad�s abdomen. Nonetheless, he takes the toad home and cares for him. His wife, touched by his concern for the "creature," buys some electric flies for the toad to eat. "Against this bizarre background of pervasive fakery," Philip Strick wrote in Sight and Sound, "the erosion of authentic humanity by undetectable android imitations has all the plausibility of a new and lethal plague whereby evolution would become substitution and nobody would notice the difference." Writing in Philip K. Dick , Patricia S. Warrick called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "one of Dick�s finest novels," citing its "complexity of structure and idea." Androids was loosely adapted as the film Blade Runner in 1982.

Several critics have commented on the structure of Dick�s fiction, pointing out that many novels end inconclusively and are often filled with deliberate paradoxes and inconsistencies. Angus Taylor, writing in his Philip K. Dick and the Umbrella of Light, explained that Dick "undermines the plot in its superficial aspect by throwing roadblocks in the way of the smooth succession of events, and asks us to divert our attention, to search out and accept the poetic core of the work; he tries to focus our attention on the plot as a �net� for catching something strange and otherworldly." In similar terms, Roger Zelazny noted in Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd that "the subjective response, ... when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain." Writing in Extrapolation, Mary Kay Bray saw Dick�s novels as using a "mandalic" structure. "The key to mandalic structure," Bray wrote, "is that it radiates from a center and must suggest that center in all its patterns and images. In point of view and details of landscape and character, Dick�s novels manage just that." Also writing in Extrapolation , Warrick argued that in Dick�s novels, he creates a "bi-polar construction" of reality. This construction presents both sides of a question simultaneously, expecting a synthesis from the reader. This synthesis results in the reader seeing "from opposite directions simultaneously. He is rewarded with a fleeting epiphany�Dick�s vision of �process reality,"� Warrick wrote. "Ultimately, however, one intuits, not analyzes, Dick�s meaning."

In writing several novels, Dick drew upon his own life experiences. A Scanner Darkly, for example, is dedicated to a list of Dick�s friends who died or suffered permanent health damage because of drugs. The novel concerns undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor, who is assigned to investigate himself. His superiors are unaware of his undercover identity and Arctor cannot afford to reveal it. He investigates himself to avoid suspicion. While conducting the investigation, however, Arctor is taking the drug Substance D. The drug splits his personality until he no longer recognizes himself in surveillance videotapes. Arctor�s condition worsens until he is finally put into a drug rehabilitation program. "The novel," Patrick Parrinder wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "is a frightening allegory of the process of drug abuse, in which some of the alternative realities experienced are revealed as the hallucinations of terminal addicts." "Drug misuse is not a disease," Dick wrote in an author�s note to the novel, "it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car." Dick himself suffered pancreatic damage from his involvement with drugs. His use of amphetamines resulted in the high blood pressure which eventually ended in his fatal stroke. Dick told Platt that he had "regarded drugs as dangerous and potentially lethal, but I had a cat�s curiosity. It was my interest in the human mind that made me curious.... These were essentially religious trivings that were appearing in me."

This interest in religion crystallized in 1974 in a mystical experience which changed the course of Dick�s career. "I experienced an invasion of my mind," Dick explained to Platt, "by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane." For several months, this presence took over Dick�s mind and directed his actions. He claimed that it straightened out his health and finances and put his business affairs in order. Despite numerous efforts to rationalize the experience, Dick was unable to come to any conclusions about it. In VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick wrote of theological paradoxes and seekers after truth, exploring various religious concepts for possible answers. Dick realized the disturbing appearance of his claims. In VALIS, he questioned his own sanity through two characters who are aspects of himself. Horselover Fat is a half-mad mystic who hears God�s voice in his head. The other character, Phil Dick, is a writer who tries to understand Horselover, although he regards him in a bemused manner. It is revealed in the course of the novel that Horselover is actually a psychological projection of Phil. He has been created as a way to deal with the death of Phil�s loved ones, to act as a shield against accepting those deaths. With this revelation, Clute observed, "we begin to see the artfulness in the way Dick has chosen to handle (like a magician, or a writer) material too nutty to accept, too admonitory to forget, too haunting to abandon." After asking the question "Was Phil Dick sane?," Peter Nicholls wrote in Science Fiction Review that "the question has no absolute answer.... Phil thought that God had reached into his mind. To this day I am not sure whether he meant this literally or metaphorically."

At his best, Dick is generally regarded as one of the finest science fiction writers of his time. Nicholls believed him to be "one of the greatest science fiction writers in history, and one of this century�s most important writers in any field." He was, Whalen maintained, "one of America�s best writers.... He was a great science fiction writer, so much so, that one is reluctant to apply the SF label, with its undeserved stigma, to his writing." Similarly, Clute held that Dick was the "greatest of science fiction writers�though he�s by no means the best writer of science fiction" to clarify that what Dick wrote was concerned with the human condition, not with the technological progress of the future. Kosek believed Dick had a "very intense and morally significant vision of life" which he made evident in "a long string of compelling, idiosyncratic novels..., most of which embodied a single urgent message: Things are not what they seem to be." In her evaluation of Dick�s work, LeGuin stressed that it was easy to misinterpret him. A reader "may put the book down believing that he�s read a clever sci-fi thriller and nothing more," LeGuin wrote. "The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation�this has escaped most readers and critics. Nobody notices; nobody notices that we have our own homegrown [Jorge Luis] Borges, and have had him for 30 years."

DISCovering Authors Modules Copyright � 1996, Gale Research

SOURCE: Carl Freedman, "Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science

Fiction of Philip K. Dick," in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1,

March, 1984, pp. 15-24.

[In the following excerpt, Carl Freedman examines Dick�s works from the perspective of economic and psychoanalytic theory.]

"The ultimate in paranoia," writes Philip K. Dick,
 

is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of �My boss is plotting against me,� it would be �My boss�s phone is plotting against me.� Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don�t do what they�re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change.

This comment on the early short story, "Colony," has a direct and obvious relevance to representations that appear throughout the Dick canon. Examples include the Lovecraftian house-creature in Eye in the Sky, the assassination machine which masquerades as a television set in The Penultimate Truth, the comically insolent and litigious door in Ubik, and the occasionally murderous car-repair factory in Deus Irae. Rarely for Dick are objects what common sense would suppose them to be, and the will with which they are invested can even constitute a precise mimicry of such quintessentially "human" types as the benignly authoritative father (Kindly Dad in Martian Time-Slip) or the irresistible and dangerous sexpot (Rachel Rosen in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the major theme of which is the practical difficulty of distinguishing between human beings and one variety of objects).

That objects have a will, and a quasi-human will, of their own is, of course, also an idea long familiar to historical materialism. Capital itself opens with the intricate analysis of the fetishism of commodities�definable as the process whereby "the definite social relation between men themselves ... assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things"�and some of the metaphors which Marx employs in explaining how products of human labor appear to be "endowed with a life of their own" have what one may be tempted to call a Dickian ring:

The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, with relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

Since Capital, commodity fetishism has become a central category in many versions of Marxist cultural theory, and has been developed and reformulated in various ways�as reification, for instance, by Lukacs, and as counter-finality by Sartre. Yet Philip Dick, when writing discursively of quasi-living "things," chooses a term not directly related to Marxism at all but one drawn from the different science of psychoanalysis: paranoia.This apparent displacement, I suggest, is not necessarily a vulgar psychologistic reduction, but a potentially fruitful hint which may shed some light on the historical status of certain psychoanalytic categories, on the nature of signification under monopoly capitalism, and on the materialist reading of SF. In what follows I will outline a Marxist theory of paranoia and will then suggest its relevance to SF in general and to the work of Dick in particular, reserving my main critical emphasis for the novel which I take to be Dick�s finest, Ubik.

For Freud, the ideational structure of paranoia is that of a ruthless hermeneutic. In one essay, indeed, he defines the disease as "the hypercathexis of the interpretations of someone else�s unconscious." The point here is that the paranoiac has an abnormally high investment in the hermeneutic practice which he or she performs on the symptomatic actions of other people. Somewhat similarly, in the Schreber case-history Freud conceptualizes the alleged homoerotic basis of paranoia by means of a semantic decoding of the various possible contradictions of the sentence, "I love him": each contradiction constitutes one mode of interpretation of worldly phenomena, and corresponds to one variety of paranoia. But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of an especially systematic and ambitious type. In the essay "On Narcissism," Freud explicitly links paranoia with the formation of speculative systems, and in the reading of Schreber he notes a profound affinity between paranoia and megalomaniacal delusions of world catastrophe. The paranoiac is not only someone for whom every detail is meaningful�for whom nothing can be left uninterpreted or taken for granted�but someone who holds a conception of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thoroughgoing, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her own grand system. The totalizing closure of paranoia is, in fact, noted as lucidly by Dick as by Freud: in "Shell Game" (one of Dick�s finest stories and the germ of Clans of the Alphane Moon), the massive frustration of attempting to break down such closure is powerfully recorded, and the basic problem is clearly stated. "The paranoid is totally rigid," says one of the characters. "He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system."

Freud is similarly baffled. One can detect an unusual tone of weary exasperation when he reports his experience in treating jealousy (always closely related to paranoia and, beyond a certain point of delusionality, one of its varieties): "one must refrain from disputing with [the jealous patient] the material on which he bases his suspicions; one can only aim at bringing him to regard the matter in a different light." On the other hand, though Freud never considers paranoia as other than a sickness, it is a sickness for which he seems to have an unaccustomed intellectual respect. Not only does he associate paranoia with philosophy; he suggests that there may be "more truth in Schreber�s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe," and as early as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life he concedes a "partial justification" to paranoiac interpretations. Or, as the paranoiac Horselover Fat says of himself in Dick�s Valis, "What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

Jacques Lacan, however, goes one step further. What Freud regards as an especially interesting disease Lacan situates as crucial to the "normal" human psyche. The rationalizing interpretations of paranoia, elaborated into a system at the center of which stands the "I" of the paranoiac, are for Lacan paradigmatic of human psychic development as inaugurated by the "mirror stage" of objectifying identification, when distinctions and links are first established between an alienated "I" and an alienating not-"I." It is in this way that, in such early essays as "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" and "The Freudian Thing," Lacan maintains that the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge operates according to a paranoiac principle. But the largest significance of these well-known formulations becomes evident only in the context of Lacan�s later attempt, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, to provide a materialist historicization of the major psychoanalytic categories. He argues that the subject known to Freudian analysis�which seems to itself to be centered and autonomous but which analytic theory and practice show to be divided or "de-centered" between the Imaginary (or specular and dualistic) and Symbolic (or linguistic and structural) Orders�is by no means an eternal, ahistorical phenomenon. On the contrary, Lacan repeatedly links its emergence with such cultural products of the period of nascent bourgeois hegemony as perspectival optics and the Cartesian cogito: the Freudian subject and the subject of capitalism are inextricably related.

Again, paranoia plays a crucial role in Lacan�s formulations. "At the basis of paranoia itself," he says, "there reigns the phenomenon of the Unglauben," which is in turn defined as "the absence of one of the terms of belief, of the term in which is designated the division of the subject." But the designation of the division of the subject is, of course, precisely what the bourgeois ego constitutively and necessarily forecloses; and, again, there is no basis for a sharp distinction between the paranoiac and the "normal" subject of capitalist society.

It is in a Lacanian framework, then, that we can draw the most radical conclusions from Freud�s descriptions of paranoia, which Freud himself was prevented from drawing by his ahistoricism and by his decisive clinical dichotomy between disease and health. Paranoia, we can conclude, is no mere aberration but is structurally crucial to the way that we, as ordinary subjects of bourgeois hegemony, represent ourselves to ourselves and embark on the Cartesian project of acquiring empiricist knowledge. In this sense, we can accept Freud�s urgency when he insists of certain paranoiac delusions that "There is in fact some truth in them."

But what is it in the workings of capitalism that interpellates individuals as paranoid subjects? If, as we have seen, paranoia operates by a hermeneutic logic, what is it in bourgeois society that we are compelled to interpret? Capitalism is definable as generalized commodity production, which, as Marx shows, necessarily encompasses generalized commodity fetishism. But the secret of the commodity itself�the basic distinction between the commodity and the noncommodified object of traditional societies�is its dual aspect, its status as both a use-value that satisfies some human need and an exchange-value that renders it an interchangeable atom in the total system of exchange and that mystifies its origin in human labor. Furthermore, use-value, though indispensable to the commodity, is also, paradoxically, irrelevant to its status qua commodity: capitalism constitutes the hegemony of exchange-value (or simply "value," as Marx more often calls it). I suggest, then, that the commodity as bearer of value�both the basic economic "cell" of capitalism and a mystifying signifier�is the ultimate object of paranoid hermeneutic by the historical subjects of bourgeois society. If we are economically constituted as capitalists and workers who must buy and sell human labor that is commodified into labor-power, then we are psychically constituted as paranoid subjects who must seek to interpret the signification of the objects�commodities�which define us and which, in a quasi-living manner, mystify the way that they and we are defined. "Value," says Marx, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men�s social product as is their language.

From a Lacanian perspective, it is easy to see that there is nothing accidental in the collocation of language and value: both are signifying orders which demand interpretation. In addition, it is, I think, also arguable that what is generally true of capitalism is particularly true of 20^th-century monopoly capitalism. "Consumerism"�that is, the increased importance of individual as distinct from productive consumption and the organized stimulation of the former by techniques such as advertising�saturates the social field with hieroglyphics to an extent unprecedented in all of human history. Virtually no aspect of life is left untouched: if our sexual lives are as dependent on over-the-counter contraceptive devices as our political awareness is on televised representations of the "news," yet all of these components of what has been called "the society of the spectacle" are first and last mystifying bearers of exchange-value. When writing discursively, Dick may speak merely of "objects," but in his novels the commodification of these objects is made evident.

The androids manufactured by the Rosen Association are primarily for sale, while in Ubik the ordinary accouterments of Joe Chip�s middle-class life (his coffee-pot, his door, his shower, his bathroom, his refrigerator, et alia) actually foreground their role as exchange-values by verbally (and not too politely) demanding money before each act of use. If, as has often been noted, Dick is a paranoid writer, this is true not only because, on the level of character representation, his protagonists tend to be fearful and harassed men who strive to interpret and deal with alienating forces beyond their control. Even more importantly, the logic of Dick�s paranoia is constituted by his representation of those forces themselves as commodities. In The Unteleported Man, even a nightmare vision of German totalitarianism is based on a popular consumer-oriented business. In The Zap Gun, even the world-wide arms race resolves into the production and marketing of consumer goods. Commodities for Dick are frequently "alive" in a more than metaphorical sense, for they are shown to participate in the paradigmatically "human" exchanges of linguistic and sexual intercourse. Like Joe Chip, one can argue with them, plead with them, scold them. Like Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one can even go to bed with them. It is, to put the matter mildly, unlikely that Philip Dick ever intended to represent the subjective or ideological state that a Marxist-Lacanian theory, which co-ordinates paranoia with commodity fetishism, would lead one to expect as paradigmatic for the bourgeois ego. But, objectively, this formulation seems to me a valid description of one major aspect of his work. Marx illustrates commodity fetishism through the metaphor of the acrobatic, thinking, dancing table. Lacan, in "The Freudian Thing," illustrates the paranoiac structure of the ego through the metaphor of the speaking desk. Dick accepts this kind of metaphoric structure and novelisticallyliteralizes it.

But it is not only commodity fetishism which, as Dick�s texts also suggest, can be co-ordinated with paranoia. Second only to this economic category is a more specifically political category whose pressure is also felt in Dick�s paranoid texts: conspiracy. Conspiracy (in sharp contrast to commodity fetishism) is a woefully under-theorized term in the Marxist tradition, which has, indeed, tended to be extremely wary of it. Marxists have suspected, often justly, that to invoke conspiracy in political discourse is to replace structural analysis with merely ethical finger-pointing. Yet it can also be argued that in a monopoly-capitalist state like modern America�intensely centralized and militarized but still governed according to bourgeois-democratic forms�conspiracy is no voluntaristic aberration but a structural necessity for ruling-class politics. When actual political power is largely concentrated in a relatively compact network of corporate, military, and governmental bureaucracies�and yet when it is unfeasible to exercise this power in despotic ways that too openly flout popular sentiment or legislative and judicial sanctions�then the ruling elite may have only two choices. It can curtail the enforcement of its perceived interests out of prudence or (ethical) respect for republican parliamentarianism; or it can adopt conspiratorial methods. There is, I think, substantial evidence that the latter course has frequently been taken, from the still murky affairs at Dealey Plaza and the Watergate, to the open expressions of contempt for and evasion of democratic sanctions that Noam Chomsky and others have repeatedly documented in publications of elite groups like the Trilateral Commission. But a fully rigorous Marxist theorization of conspiracy has yet to be undertaken. Though I can hardly develop such a theory here, I will suggest that it is at least provisionally plausible to regard conspiracy as crucial to a theoretical description of the political level of society under certain varieties of monopoly capitalism.

Such a theory would, in any case, tend to explain the representations of conspiracy in Dick�s fiction, where conspiracy is often as powerful as commodity fetishism and where the hermeneutic of paranoia works to decipher signs of conspiracy as well as exchange-values. In Dr Bloodmoney the ultimate conspiracy of nuclear war (one of Dick�s recurring obsessions) is metaphorically located in the brain of one right-wing military scientist, but usually Dick�s treatment is more literal. In Time Out of Joint, for example, Ragle Gumm�s paranoid delusion of being the object of an immense governmental conspiracy and the most consequential person in the world turns out to be the precise, unproblematic truth. Similarly, in A Scanner Darkly, Robert Arctor is finally destroyed by the conspiratorial collusion between the state authorities which employ him and the criminal drug syndicate which he is employed to fight. In Ubik, the plot structure itself is based on the interpretative attempts of Joe Chip and his colleagues to discover the nature and perpetrator of the horrifying conspiracy that has enveloped them�questions which, after several apparent answers, the novel finally leaves in permanent suspense. If Dick�s protagonists tend to be paranoid, there is always much for them to be paranoid about. For they live in a world dominated by commodities and conspiracies; which is to say, a world not wholly unlike our own. I will later discuss whether paranoia can finally be considered "true." But it is normally the truth for Philip Dick.

And not only for him. There is, I suggest, a privileged relationship between paranoiac ideology and the genre of SF in general. For SF, far more than mundane fiction, requires what seems to be the fictional creation of a new world, one whose assumptions are radically at variance with those of everyday life. Yet (unless we are willing to invoke a theological concept of poetic inspiration or imagination) creation in this context can only mean an ideological interpretation of the actual world. The radical novelty of SF interpretations�which helps to produce what Darko Suvin has termed the "cognitive estrangement" of the genre�tends to require a rather thorough and totalizing presentation; for little can be taken for granted or left to the reader�s common sense. It is in this way that Dr Schreber, with his estranging, self-consistent, paranoid world-vision, is himself very nearly an SF author. Furthermore, the great majority of SF inherits certain basic formal properties from the realist, as distinct from the modernist or post-modernist, novel: the typical SF text has a smoothly diachronic narrative line and offers its characters as mimetic representations of human beings. Such formal tendencies work to reinforce the pressure toward logical coherence and expressive totalization. In both estranging "content" and realist "form," then, SF closely corresponds to the weird and coherent interpretative systems of the paranoiac.

One could, I think, write a history of the genre in these terms�from the pioneering efforts of H. G. Wells (the negative utopias of The Time Machine [1895] and When the Sleeper Wakes [1899], the nightmare representation of extraterrestrial imperialism in The War of the Worlds [1898]), to such more recent and sophisticated efforts as Ursula Le Guin�s The Dispossessed (1974), where the luxury commodities of A-Io have an always ominous and finally sinister aura, or Samuel Delany�s Babel-17 (1966), where language itself is reified into a conspiratorial weapon of war. If Philip Dick, however, is, as some have claimed, the greatest of all SF authors�"the Shakespeare of science fiction," as Fredric Jameson has called him�then I suggest that his stature can be at least partly explained by his pre-eminence in the production of paranoiac ideology, his uniquely rigorous and consistent representations of human subjects caught in the web of commodities and conspiracies. These two paranoid themes are perhaps most fully worked out and combined in Ubik, which, however, may also imply a certain critique of paranoia itself.

The world of Ubik is thoroughly saturated by commodities that foreground their status as quasi-living, mystifying signifiers. Not only do doors threaten to sue and coffee-pots demand money for services rendered; creditor robots dun free-spending debtors like Joe Chip, and animate homeopapes read the news for a specified fee. Telephones and TV sets occasionally adopt a will of their own and, much to Joe Chip�s confusion, transmit their messages in a way only very dubiously related to any human agency. One of the first clear indications in the plot that things have gone desperately wrong, that the characters may have been killed, is that money�the universal equivalent of all exchange-values�begins to alter its form. Later, the time-regression which the characters experience is charted primarily by the backward technological march of commodities, as when an ultra-modern TV set regresses into an old-fashioned radio. Furthermore, it is not only that commodities make their presence insistently felt, sometimes comically, sometimes nightmarishly, but always in an estranging manner which invites interpretation; the world of Ubik is also one in which virtually everything is in one way or another commodified. Pat Conley, perhaps the most frightening femme fatale in the Dick canon, becomes Joe Chip�s mistress by paying a straightforward cash sum, and appropriately wears the tattoo caveat emptor (which Joe is unable to decipher). Expensive moratoriums maintain the dead in a state of "half-life," the commodity structure having produced the technology to deconstruct even the distinction between life and death. An important role in the capitalist economy of 1992 is played by Ray Hollis�s firm of hired "precogs" and telepaths, and also by the prudence organizations like Runciter Associates, which, on a strictly commercial basis, will provide "inertials" to neutralize unwanted eavesdropping and prognostication.

It is not accidental that the most intimate and valued human relationship represented in the novel is that between Joe Chip and Glen Runciter: that is, between employee and employer (as both are frequently noting), between seller and buyer of the commodity called labor-power. Finally, the entire text is semantically dominated by Ubik itself, the ultimate and universal commodity and the symbol of the ubiquity of the commodity structure. Introduced in the small commercials that serve as epigraphs to each chapter (where it is in turn presented as a make of car, a brand of beer, a brand of instant coffee, et alia), Ubik finally enters the narrative itself as a mysterious spray in an aerosol can that seems to be the most powerful "reality support" available, the only force capable of at least temporarily reversing the processes of regression and death. In the end, this strange but paradigmatic commodity is identified with theological mystery: "I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am.... I am. I shall always be."

From every direction, then, the characters of Ubik, who become increasingly paranoid as the narrative progresses, are dominated by�indeed constituted by�the commodity structure. But their paranoia is also, and even more directly, determined by the terrifying conspiracy or conspiracies that trap them. That they and their (commodified) surroundings should be made to regress, to go backward in time and be drained of vital energy, is itself a conspiracy worthy of Kafka or Pynchon. But even more powerful is the extreme importance and difficulty of deciphering the conspiracy. First, it seems to be the effect of the bomb blast arranged by Ray Hollis; later, it appears that it may possibly be a weird practical joke by Glen Runciter; for some time, Joe Chip and his friends are convinced that the psionic powers of Pat Conley are responsible; finally, the childish half-lifer Jory is found to be the perpetrator. Yet even this hard-won knowledge is problematized in the novel�s last lines, where Glen Runciter (whom we had assumed not to be conspiratorially trapped) is left holding a Joe Chip coin, as Joe and the other characters had earlier found Runciter�s face on their money. "This was just the beginning," the novel concludes, and the definitive explanation of the conspiracy is indefinitely postponed.

Likewise, of course, the mystical veil finally thrown over Ubik precludes any final explanation of the commodity structure. This indeterminacy, this textually explicit failure of closure, is rare in Dick�s fiction, and can, I think, be read as hinting at the conceptual limits of paranoia itself. For this fissuring of the text, this refusal to provide any unproblematic narrative resolution, constitutes precisely the kind of epistemological disjunction that paranoia cannot allow. The novel may thus suggest that paranoia�and no Dick character is more paranoid and most justly paranoid than Joe Chip�is in the last instance not an adequate response to the structures of commodification and conspiracy, however inevitably and "naturally" it is produced by them.

In this case, then, Ubik marks in the Dick canon a theoretical high point in relation to the Marxist-Lacanian problematic which I outlined earlier. For paranoia, with its easy hermeneutic passages from appearance to essence, and its assumption of a totality that is symmetrical and expressive rather than structural and de-centered, is an ideology in the strictest Althusserian sense: a "�repre-sentation� of the Imaginary relationship of individuals to their Real conditions of existence." Like any ideology, paranoia is finally based on a refusal of any complex theoretical structure of differentials, remaining instead within the specular or dualistic reductionism proper to the Imaginary. Only thus can its unswervingly hermeneutic logic operate. It can no more be identified with theoretical knowledge than commodity fetishism can be identified with Marx�s discovery of the basis of generalized commodity production, or the paranoiac structure of the ego with Lacan�s concept of the de-centering of the subject.

Yet paranoia remains, I think, of all ideologies perhaps the most "reasonable" and the most nearly approximating to knowledge of capitalist society. If, as Ubik suggests, the hermeneutic of paranoia is finally doomed to failure, yet our social and psychic constitution as bourgeois subjects makes the temptation to such hermeneutic irresistible. If paranoia is an ideology, it nonetheless remains a stubbornly privileged one. And no modern writer�certainly none since Kafka�has fictionally produced that ideology more rigorously than Philip K. Dick.

DISCovering Authors Modules Copyright � 1996, Gale Research

SOURCE: John Huntington, "Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity,"

in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, July, 1988, pp. 152-60.

[In the excerpt below, John Huntington discusses the themes of authenticity and insincerity in the Dick�s works.]
 

In Sincerity and Authenticity, one of his last works, Lionel Trilling traced the growth of sincerity as a value in the late 18^thcentury and its gradual replacement in the 20^th century with the idea of authenticity. The sense of divided consciousness that the great social and psychological thinkers of the last century have explicated renders the older idea of sincerity�most neatly stated in Polonius�s "to thine own self be true"�problematic and untenable. What more recently has been called "post-modernism" can be seen as a cluster of strategies to deal with this perception of the impossibility of sincerity.

Philip K. Dick�s work belongs in some ways to this new tradition. I would propose that Dick�s work is special because it has so thoroughly embraced insincerity, especially by its thorough dependence on the mechanical creative formulas of pulp fiction, and has thus become "authentic" at a new level. Dick�s insincerity is not qualified by irony (though there is plenty of irony in his work). His work is not like Roy Lichtenstein�s massive, isolated moments from newspaper comics which render pathos and excitement from a consciousness outside the experience itself. Dick, whatever sophistications he achieves, builds his art out of the techniques of the pulps. He is an "authentic" "SF writer." Of course, the moment that posture becomes comfortable, it too becomes problematic. SF writers and fans are a notoriously evasive lot when it comes to understanding and defining their art. As Stanislaw Lem observes, they play a contradictory game. They claim that the work is "important," but then, as soon as people raise any kind of objection to its ideas, they say indignantly that these people are taking too seriously something that was written only to "entertain." Then, later, at other tables, in other rooms, we find these same enthusiasts again announcing the deep importance of SF.

Dick can play just such a double game: �Important� is a rule from another game that I am not playing. I did not begin to read or to write sf for reasons dealing with importance. When I sat in high school geometry class secretly reading a copy of Astounding hidden within a textbook, I was not seeking importance. I was seeking, probably, intellectual excitement. Mental stimulation.

Dick�s terms�"important," "intellectual excitement," and "mental stimulation"�are slippery. While we can recognize the vague and broad distinction Dick wants to make here�geometry is "important," SF is "exciting"�his language allows him to reclaim the importance that he has just rejected; for what is more "important" intellectually than "intellectual excitement" and "mental stimulation"?

We may suspect that the motive for such a statement is more psychological than philosophical or critical. One reason for seeing this passage in psychological terms is that it seems made up: in the late �30s or early �40s, when Dick would have been studying geometry, the textbooks were usually too small to have hidden a copy of Astounding. Dick�s image is a conventional one, lifted perhaps from a film, of the slightly rebellious, secret reader who stands for something imaginative in the face of the pedantry of authoritarian "importance." Dick�s reason for assuming this posture may be that he does not want to be held to a standard that he is not sure he can meet. Yet, when Dick made this statement in 1980, he had recently finished VALIS, a book which certainly aspires to "importance" even if it also undercuts it. This double standard, by which the writer or fan demands recognition and denies responsibility, is duplicitous and insincere as a strategy of defense, but it is also the main enabling device of Dick�s imagination.

Despite Dick�s own disclaimer that this is not the "game" he is playing, the critic who engages his work always finds that things of "importance" are being said. But if the critic tries to criticize the categorical values that Dick frequently invoked�such as rationality, sanity, naturalness, or goodness�Dick will evade the issue by saying that all he is after is "mental stimulation." But then, next page, next chapter, next book, he is philosophizing again.

Of all his works, VALIS is the most disconcerting this way. The lengthy appeals to gnostic ideas of hidden truth, even if they are called into question within the text itself, sanction a way of reading that would disregard the mechanisms of disavowal. VALIS is full of images (such as "lamination"), references to specific texts (such as Hermes Trismegistus or the Secret Gospels), and to genres (such as the parable) which authorize our reading two ways and treating one reading as the "real" one and the other as the veil to keep the true reading from the eyes of the uninitiated. Even if this process is parodied, it may be that we, if we are true initiates, will be able to read the truth even in its parody. Within the novel the same puzzle confronts us: the reading of the film "VALIS," like the interpretations of the cover of Abbey Road in the late �60s, feels like a deciphering of a hidden truth but may well be a foolish construction of meaning out of nothing.

In VALIS, having indulged one interpretation for a while, Dick will simply reverse himself and indulge another. Sometimes it is a book of wisdom, and sometimes it is just the case-history of a wordy madman. Much of the readers� problem in VALIS is generated, not by philosophical complexity as such, but by the mechanisms of narration that Dick has learned from popular SF. The important figure for Dick, as has long been recognized, is A. E. van Vogt, known for his confusingly intricate plots. But it is not the model of the plots themselves that we need to be aware of so much as the rule by which he generated them. Van Vogt advised young writers that in order to keep their readers� interest they should introduce a new idea every 800 words. For van Vogt this is not a "philosophical" rule, but simply a practical technique to make a story interesting, on the level with the rule which requires that the first paragraph of a story make mention of each of the five senses. In van Vogt�s own work one is aware of a disorienting series of changes which may be exhilarating as long as one is able to hold on. Often the change at word 800 involves a blatant reversing of the values some character or thing has represented: a friend turns out to be an enemy, an enemy a friend, what we thought was useful is useless, an escape is a trap, etc. Often the reversals are given some coherence by the continuity offered by the hero (as in Slan ) or by a fixed deep structure (such as the truth in "The Weapon Shop" that the armed strangers are liberators, while the familiar authorities are oppressors). What is remarkable about these fairly mechanical and hasty exercises is how profound they can seem. The van Vogt rule of a new idea every 800 words is a way of generating complexity and of enforcing at least the illusion of a relentless dialectic.

What I am calling the 800-word rule is an explicitly acknowledged device for van Vogt. I do not know of any such explicit acknowledgment on Dick�s part. Yet the central importance of van Vogt�s practice for Dick�s sense of SF is easily documented. In his interview with Charles Platt, Dick twice points to The World of Null-A as a central text which "absolutely fascinated" him. "A lot of what I wrote, which looks like taking acid, is really the result of taking van Vogt very seriously." To state this from a different angle, Dick, like van Vogt, and like other popular SF writers such as Heinlein or Herbert, has learned how to give the impression of deep understanding simply by contradicting himself. The more clearly one side is affirmed, the more profound it seems later to find its opposite unexpectedly affirmed with equal unambiguousness. This process is not the same as what we usually think of as ironic reversal. In Dick there is no telegraphing of impending change. There is no implication that the alert, understanding reader will see the correct reading and discard the false one. There is no period in which the reader must balance two antithetical possible readings and then choose which is the moral or true one. In this van Vogtian system the reader is simply yanked from understanding to understanding.

Frequently the reader is returned to understandings that seem to have been superseded. Thus, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? we can at one point be led to see the androids as anti-social, pathological creatures preying on society, at another to see them as pathetic victims exploited by society, but then at a later time to see them again as simply cruel "killers." By moving without mediation from one moral perspective to the other, the novel gives the feeling of moral three-dimensionality, of depth. At other times, as in the whirligig of exchanges at the end of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or in the baffling regressions and exhaustions in Ubik, the van Vogtian technique generates more perspectives than a reader can absorb, and the effect is not so much of depth as of a suggestive complexity.

Van Vogt himself seems to enjoy the surface disarray and instability because he trusts to a few deep and unchanging principles. In this respect, he is in the same company as a conservative like G. K. Chesterton, who in The Man Who Was Thursday can indulge in any new complexity because all surface phenomena are layers concealing and at the same time revealing the fundamental and unchanging reality of divine presence. Dick, on the contrary, allows that the surface disarray may disrupt the deepest structure. Thus, whether or not VALIS is a seriously religious, ontological book, by its reversals it poses the possibility that Horselover Fat�s insight into the bases of reality may be just a form of insanity. For a writer like Dick, who has a strong streak of Horselover Fat in him and could, one imagines, happily treat us to hundreds of pages of deep, repetitive, and vague philosophy about the nature of reality, the very arbitrariness of van Vogt�s mechanical 800-word technique prevents the domination of a single idea. Like the I Ching, which figures prominently in The Man in the High Castle, the procedure enforces randomness. Writing under the constraints of such a method must be somewhat like working in a difficult verse form: the change is dictated by the mechanics of the form; the creative moment comes when the author finds a way to link form and content. The episode of the pseudo-police station in Androids feels like such a moment, and the pleasure towards the end of it, when the crazy, unaccountable event finds an explanation, is like the discovery of a brilliant, unexpected final rhyme.

For van Vogt the device of a change after 800 words is simply a machine that produces "interesting text" and "mental stimulation," but for Dick the device itself is both liberating and thematically expressive. The "insincerity" of the van Vogtian mechanism has permitted Dick to engage "authentic" issues that, for reasons that can be traced back to the fashions and politics of popular fiction and to the psychology of the author, he would not have been able to deal with otherwise. In Dick�s situation the evasion that Lem complains of becomes an important device that will allow the writer and the reader to undertake briefly issues that the author and the SF readership have difficulty bringing to consciousness.

We can readily observe that Dick differs very much from van Vogt and from most SF writers of the �50s and early �60s in the US in his explicit use of intensely personal material. Even the reader who knows nothing of Dick�s biography will be aware of the repeated motifs that suggest deep personal investment: the difficult or broken marriages; the high expectation for the effect of art and holy books; the ambiguous, authoritarian father figures who most often appear as corporation executives; the harried everyman figures trapped in compromises; entropic decline; and�everywhere�imitations, fakes, people or things which are not what they seem. These themes and images, important to Dick for reasons quite apart from the needs of the immediate plot, are turned and turned by the van Vogtian method until every realistic and absurd possibility that Dick�s ingenious and tireless mind can discover has been examined. Mr Tagomi can be our model for this ruminative procedure as he subjects the triangular pin to all the perceptive texts he can think of as he tries to uncover its wu. Quite apart from the access it gives to elements of Dick�s own life, the 800-word device is of general thematic importance to Dick because it mirrors the arbitrariness that he sees in the universe itself. And we who read this confusion are, again, like Mr Tagomi, this time putting a seashell to his ear and "[h]earing in its blabber the wisdom of the sea."

Dick is fascinated by the incompatibility of absolute and relative value systems, and by means of the van Vogtian device he is able to give full attention to both. The van Vogtian method allows Dick to dramatize tensions that tend to get clotted when he becomes simply expository. We can see the advantages the device gives him if we begin by looking at a passage that attempts to make a "philosophical" statement. In the following passage from VALIS, Dick moves from an absolute position, to a relative one, and then back to an absolute one:

The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind, the creator deity. If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it might seem irrational, since it would not belong. But Fat, having reversed everything, saw the rational breaking into the irrational. The immortal plasmate had invaded our world and the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not. This structure forms the basis of Fat�s world-view. It is the bottom line.

The dichotomy of rational/irrational, like the one of sane/insane that also dominates this novel, tends to be more polemic than it is analytical. What interests us here is the way that, towards the end of the passage, rationality becomes absolute: "the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not." The sentence is, in itself, ambiguous about what it claims the world is�it can be totally irrati��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������onal or simply not totally rational�but the main line of the argument of the paragraph would seem to suggest the former. And not only is Fat�s analysis committed to a single, absolute, defining concept, the "totally rational"; but the narrator�s analysis of Fat�s analysis seeks this same defining unity: this is "the single most striking realization." It "forms the basis of Fat�s world-view. It is the bottom line." The complication that the narrator is himself Fat does not diminish the absoluteness that is reinforced at a second level here.

In the middle of the paragraph, however, we find a moment of a different kind of reasoning: Dick here uses subjunctives and allows for a relativistic and structural reading of rationality: "If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it would seem irrational, since it would not belong." Rationality here is posed not as an absolute category, but as that mode of thought by which we define ourselves. In this statement, the irrational is simply the Other.

When he reverses this statement, Fat not only reverses the values of rationality and irrationality, but he also turns a statement of structural opposition into a statement of absolute value. One opposite of the hypothetical premise could be an equally hypothetical statement in which the "rational" is the "other" and, somehow, the irrational is us. But the opposite that is generated is a non-hypothetical statement in which the rational becomes the "totally rational." Such a moment asks to be criticized, and we will cry out with Lem, "unfair!" if the response we receive is the evasion: "the passage is not trying to say something important, it is only trying to entertain."

It is in his dramatizations of the problem of the real that Dick most successfully renders the absolute/relative conflict. Throughout his work Dick pays obsessive attention to imitations, whether of antiques from the pre-war US, as in High Castle, or of animals, as in Androids, or of experience itself, as in the Perky Pat layouts in Palmer Eldritch. And, as any reader of Dick knows well, the issue of imitation goes beyond the explicit thematics of his work.