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By Lawrence Sutin
Copyright 2003
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Here
is a subtle but startling irony: in several of his best novels, Philip
K. Dick - world-famous as a science-fiction writer and hence, by definition,
a creator of futuristic worlds - set his narratives in the late twentieth
century, an epoch we left behind with great pomp in the celebration
of the New Millennium. And yet the novels, and the stories, and the
essays of Dick seem as futuristic as ever, which is to say - as vitally
relevant to our own time as only great literature can be.
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Science Fiction Visionary
Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary
growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were
largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is
no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear
on university curricula devoted to modern American literature. But
that is only the beginning of the transformation. Since 1982, when
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
(based on Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) made
its debut, eight feature films based on Dick's fiction have appeared,
the other seven being Total Recall,
The Minority Report, Screamers,
Impostor, the French film Confessions
d'un Barjo (based on Dick's mainstream novel, Confessions of a
Crap Artist), Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Next (April 2007). That's
an average of roughly one movie every three years since Dick's passing
- a rate of cinematic adaptation exceeded only by Stephen King. And
there are other big-money film options currently held by Hollywood
studios.
Philip K. Dick has done more than arrive. He has become a looming
and illuminating presence not merely in American but in world culture,
with his works translated into major European and Asian languages.
There is even a bastard adjective - "phildickian "- that makes its
way into print now and then to describe the baffling twists and
turns of our times. An understanding of the basic facts of Dick's
life not only casts light on the themes that predominate in his
writings, but also brings to view a fascinating story in its own
right.
The Early Years
He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane,
in Chicago on December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his
mother Dorothy Kindred - from her maiden name came Dick's middle
initial. Jane died six weeks after her birth, a loss that Phil felt
deeply throughout his life. As time went on, Phil came, with whatever
justice, to blame his mother for Jane's death. His relationship
with both of his parents was decidedly difficult, and made only
more so when they divorced when he was five years old.
Sister Jane,
his mother, and his father served as models for many of the characters
who would populate Dick's fictional universes in the decades to
come. In particular, the death of Jane - and Phil's traumatic sense
of separation from her, an experience common to many twins who have
lost their sibling - contributed to the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas
that dominated his creative work - science fiction (SF)/mainstream,
real/fake, human/android. It was out of these pressing dualities
that the two vast questions emerged which Dick often cited as encompassing
his writing: What is Real? and What is Human?
Mother Dorothy retained custody over her son, and they eventually
settled in Berkeley, where Dick grew up, graduated from high school,
and briefly attended the University of California in 1949 before
dropping out.
Starting in seventh grade, however, Dick began suffering
from bouts of extreme vertigo; the vertigo recurred with special
intensity during his brief undergraduate stint. In his late teens,
Dick later recalled, he was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia
- a label that terrified him. Other psychotherapists and psychiatrists
in later years would offer other diagnoses, including the one that
Dick was quite sane.
Leaving aside medical terminology, there is
no question that Dick felt himself, throughout his life, to suffer
from bouts of psychological anguish that he frequently referred
to as "nervous breakdowns." His experience of these was transmuted
into fictional portraits, most notably of "ex-schizophrenic" Jack
Bohlen in Martian Time-Slip (1964).
A Genre of Ideas
In a 1968 "Self Portrait" he
recalled the moment of discovery of the genre that would ultimately
set him free to write of the complex realities of his own personal
experience:
"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine…it
was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues….I
came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking
for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At
once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times,
in the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but
with science…In any case my view became magic equals science…and
science (of the future) equals magic."
This is not to say that Dick
read only SF during his coming of age years. On the contrary, he
was an omnivorous and devouring reader, taking in Xenophon's Anabasis,
Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the French realists such as Stendhal, Flaubert
and Maupassant - all this and much more by his early twenties. Dick
gave credit to the American Depression-era writer James T. Farrell,
author of Studs Lonigan, for helping Dick see how to construct the
SF stories that he sold in such numbers to the SF pulps in the early
1950s.
And even though Dick never lost his yearning to be accepted
by the literary mainstream, he always regarded it as a kind of treason
to deprecate the SF genre he grew up on and flourished in. As he
wrote in 1980, two years before his death:
"I want to write about
people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my
own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually
have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards;
I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded
to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to
reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment
mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to
read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities
but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God;
what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."
An Author Finds His Voice
From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two
Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis,
a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind
of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number
of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), who, in the memo to his
employees that serves as the frontispiece to that novel, gruffly
affirms the human spirit:
"I mean, after all; you have to consider
we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on
and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's
a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally
have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we
can make it. You get me?"
Three Stigmata, which deals with a terrifying
Gnostic-style demiurgic invasion of earth by means of the eerily
permeating hallucinogen "Chew-Z," so fascinated Beatle John Lennon
that he considered making a film of it.
In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and
Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories
in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his
stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment
in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of
an SF writer.
In 1954, Dick later recalled with humor, he met one
of his SF idols, A. E. Van Vogt, at an SF convention, where Van
Vogt proceeded to convince the neophyte writer that there was more
money to be made in novels than in stories. Henceforward, Dick's
rate of production of SF novels was as remarkable as his story output
had been. At his creative peak, he published sixteen SF novels between
1959 and 1964. During this same period, he also wrote mainstream
novels that went unpublished, much to his anguish. To this day,
it is his SF work for which Dick is best remembered, and justly
so.
After a very brief failed first marriage in 1948, remarried
four times - to Kleo Apostolides in 1950, to Anne Williams Rubenstein
in 1959, to Nancy Hackett in 1966, and to Tessa Busby in 1973. There
was one child born in each of the latter three marriages -respectively,
his daughters Laura and Isa and son Christopher.
During his lifetime,
Dick was regarded with respect by SF fans and fellow writers, though
his sales never came close to matching those of the most popular
SF writers of his era such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and
Frank Herbert.
Dick received the Hugo Award in 1963 for The Man
in the High Castle, which tells of a post-World War II world in
which Japan and Germany are the victors and the continental United
States is roughly divided between them. In devising the plot, Dick
employed the I Ching on several occasions and also integrated that
divinatory text into the narrative itself - marking its debut in
American fiction.
A Life-Changing Experience
In February and March 1974, Dick experienced a
series of visions and auditions including an information-rich "pink
light" beam that transmitted directly into his consciousness. A
year after the events, in March 1975, Dick summarized the 2-3-74
experiences that would pervade his writing for the final eight years
of his life:
"I speak of The Restorer of What Was Lost The Mender
of What Was Broken."
"March 16, 1974: It appeared - in vivid fire, with shining colors
and balanced patterns - and released me from every thrall, inner
and outer.
"March 18, 1974: It, from inside me, looked out and saw the world
did not compute, that I - and it - had been lied to. It denied the
reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, 'This
cannot exist; it cannot exist.'
"March 20, 1974: It seized me entirely, lifting me from the limitations
of the space-time matrix; it mastered me as, at the same time, I
knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake. Through its
power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power
of no-thought decision, I acted to free myself. It took on in battle,
as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every
Iron Imprisoning thing."
There are those who are eager to create a "Saint Phil" who emerged
from this experience. In that regard, it is wise to remember that
Dick himself always bore in mind what he called the "minimum hypothesis"
-that is, the possibility that all that he had undergone was merely
self-delusion.
On the other hand, there are those who regard Dick as a charlatan
who foisted upon his readers a pseudo-mystical revelation fueled by
mental disorder. But surely a charlatan is one who insists on the
seriousness and accuracy of his claims. This Dick never did. One has
only to go and read VALIS (1981)
to find a piercingly knowing humor in Dick's portrayal of himself
as Horselover Fat:
"…Fat must
have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe.
Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and
more fucked."
Those who insist on the "truth" or "falsehood" of
Dick's experience of 2-3-74 are missing the central point: that
those experiences provided him with the means to explore, with integrity,
insight, and humility, the difficulties of making sense of any spiritual
path in a relentlessly secular and cynical Western culture in which
even apparent revelations can be instantly repackaged as popular
entertainment.
On the Edge of Eternity
Dick died on March 2, 1982, the result of a combination of recurrent
strokes accompanied by heart failure. In a 1981 entry in his Exegesis
(an extensive journal he kept to explore the ramifications of 2-3-74)
Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents
as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays,
and interviews:
"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist;
my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate
my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus
what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it,
either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a
certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think
I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps:
they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational,
mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long
ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration
& presentation, analysis & response & personal history."
One can
readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka
in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers
of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett,
Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history
lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his
ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form.
Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master
of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political
conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much
as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting
realities of the twenty-first century.
Lawrence Sutin is the author of "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" and "A Postcard Memoir".
He edited the Philip K. Dick collection "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings". and "In the Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis."
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