Valis: A Quintessentially Phildickian Novel

2019

The journeys of the protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s novel Valis across different personalities, points in time, and realities become a penetrating exploration of the very fabric of the real through his heteromorphic cosmogony that can serve as a paradigm to understanding Dick’s literary-philosophical matrix. Whether a diagnosis or a profound insight into other realities, both insanity and schizophrenia in Valis develop into a means to diagnose the nature of reality by projecting the microcosm of an individual to the macrocosm of the entire universe and vice versa. Dick’s earlier major works of fiction are reflected in Valis as is Valis reflected in them in a way that shows the line between insanity and reason, and reality and hallucinations, is not only thin but often non-existent. Unlike many who consider themselves normal, Dick never recoiled from an opportunity to embark on an exploration of other realities, both in life and in his fiction, as is evident from the close and intima...

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and influential SF authors of the 20th century. However, Dick’s literary success did not come without major biographical pitfalls. While Dick published thirty-nine novels in his lifetime, many of which were ground-breaking, radical reimaginings of the SF genre (such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip) many were trashy, underdeveloped and rushed (Vulcan’s Hammer, Dr. Futurity, and Our Friends from Frolix 8). On closer inspection, this literary division corresponds closely to issues in Dick’s own personal life. Dick was a torn individual. On the one hand he was a literary-SF genius who pushed the boundaries of the genre by redefining postmodernism as a spiritual phenomenon (as in Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?). On the other hand, he was an alienated failure who had numerous mainstream works rejected for publication. Interestingly his moments of literary genius correspond to high points in his life when he was doing well with family, friends and spouses, and his trashy lows link closely to struggles with amphetamine abuse, the death of friends and psychotic episodes. This paper will address the fluctuating mental health of Philip K. Dick by deconstructing the narrative dynamics of A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. I will show how these texts represent forms of biographical self-exploration where Dick addresses the material causes of psychological ill-health in postmodernity (and himself), at the same time as generating transcendent salvific responses to fragmentation and alienation through creating his own postmodern theologies.

Philip K. Dick, one of the most visionary practitioners of science fiction in the 20th century experienced a series of quasi-mystical events starting in February 1974 that profoundly altered the course of his life and his work. Known by the shorthand of 2-3-74, these experiences defy rational explanation, something Dick himself would attest to as he spent the remaining 8 years of his life obsessively trying to figure them out. By focusing on Dick's work during and after 2-3-74, the novels A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981), this thesis will argue that the events of 2-3-74 led Dick back from an abyss and gave his work a new direction. Dick's work, so overtly social and political in nature, will provide the backdrop to critically examine the decade of excess, the swinging 60's in America and will show how Dick's fiction had reached the same impasse that the counter-culture had reached in its promises of revolution and a new mode of consciousness in society. Using the works of such cultural theorists as Zygmunt Bauman, Anthony Giddens and Daniel Bell, Dick's vitriolic A Scanner Darkly will reveal the end of the road that Dick was travelling on and VALIS and The Divine Invasion¸ both works which deal with 2-3-74 will help us construct a map for the trajectory that Dick's work took after 2-3-74. Leo Tolstoy's A Confession (1882) will elucidate the universality of Dick's despair and using William James's excellent study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as a backdrop, the thesis will also compare Dick's experiences with those of Carl Jung, who's experiments with his own unconscious, documented in Liber Novus (2009) have finally seen the light of day after almost a century of secrecy and who's analytic experiments bore similar fruit to Dick's own metanoia.

The subject of this paper emerged from a desire to contribute to a growing body of science fiction scholarship and studies of Philip K. Dick. The worlds of his novels are often surreal, strange; fabulous and frightening, often featuring ordinary people encountering something that disturbs their sense of reality, or selfhood. From the androids in 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', to the paranoia inducing Substance D in 'A Scanner Darkly', or the fake historical artefacts and kitsch encountered in 'The Man in the High Castle' and 'Confessions of a Crap Artist', readers of Dick often encounter entities that unsettle concepts thought previously to be stable. The power of these beings renders the reality of his characters strange, yet familiar, or familiarly strange. Often, Dick's characters must navigate what Fredric Jameson has termed a 'nightmarish uncertainty'. For this study, I borrow Umberto Rossi's term 'Ontological Uncertainty' to refer to the phenomena in Dick's fiction that disturbs reality in a number of ways. I feel it is a fitting term, as this effect is utilised in a way that conforms to neither philosophical realism, nor anti-realism. The disturbances of reality that Dick describes are many and varied, sometimes being the product of drugs, mental illness, SF-nal powers or objects, political ideologies, or any number of factors. The multifaceted nature of these disturbances, which characterise Dick's fiction, makes a truly comprehensive definition of ontological uncertainty hard to obtain. For this study, I will follow Rossi's definitions. Ontology in this context is a critical meditation on the nature of being, existence or reality, and the basic conditions of reality as they appear in a piece of fiction. As regards the uncertainty, it defines a condition in which the characters and readers alike do not know what is real and what is not in the text. They must, therefore, search for a fictional reality behind a fictional simulation, or succession of simulations. However, though reality exists for Philip K. Dick, this does not mean it is self-evident. It is often out of reach, shy and retiring, fleeting and often shattering at a personal level. The Real, in Dick's novels, exists in a realm of reversal, similar to the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth; real is fake, and fake is real. As Stanislaw Lem points out, Dick and his literature foresee a future in which philosophy will descend to people in the street and every person will have to make sense of the complex and contradictory positions of 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' (Lem, 1972, 97). Not least as their lives may depend upon the result. This study thus focuses on both 'objective' and 'subjective' forms of uncertainty in four novels. The first section, referred to as 'External Reality', deals with ontological uncertainty that arises from objective reality. The first part examines 'Ubik', Dick's studies of reification and the nature of virtual reality through a quasi-gnostic lens. The second deals with Dick's use of alternate history in 'The Man in the High Castle', as well as his treatment of historical artefacts. In the second part, entitled 'Individual Authenticity', this study examines Dick's treatment of ontology and ethics at a personal level. The first part of this segment deals with his treatment of human and non-human consciousness in the androids of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'. The final segment touches on Dick's examination of how individual agency is disturbed by drugs, mental illness and capitalist ideology, through an analysis of 'A Scanner Darkly'. Science fiction as a literary genre is evocative and personal, exploring new ways of thinking and imagining the world and fewer authors illustrate this better than Philip K. Dick.

Beyond these Walls: Confronting Madness in Society, Literature and Art

Initially, the controversial writings of the science fiction author Philip K. Dick did not sell well, so he was relatively unknown at the time of his death in 1982, shortly before the release of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, adapted from Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film soon gained cult status and Dick's reputation as a genius began to spread. In this dystopian yet deeply moving novel, set after World War Terminus, Dick questions what it means to be human and in the process deconstructs the opposition between humans and androids. Dick was obsessed with the effects of technology and its potential to radically transform human existence. In A Scanner Darkly, a novel set in the 1990s but written in 1977, the distinction between the one doing the surveilling and the one surveilled is blurred while the pitfalls of drug abuse are addressed. The tone of Dick's work is often bleak and infused with melancholy. His concerns were philosophical as well as metaphysical, as evidenced in VALIS, a fictionalized autobiography in which Dick recounts the perplexing events that led to what he describes as his conscious contact with god. While almost all of Dick's readers readily acknowledge his genius, some insist on labeling him as mad. Few however will deny that Dick's brilliance lies in his lucid visions of a future that resonates with our present. His recent popularity attests to the uncanny insights his writings provide, insights that challenge the assumption of madness.