The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a madman, an agoraphobic amphetamine addict periodically hospitalized for mental problems and profoundly psychotic for the last eight years before his death in 1982 at the age of 53. He was a clumsy prose stylist, whose disorganized, maniacal, and slipshod work was unsuitable for a generation of writers like John Updike and J. D. Salinger — masters of the meticulous and the careful. While they thrived under the patronage of the New Yorker’s fastidious editor William Shawn, Dick made a hardscrabble living by hacking out pulp as fast as he could type. Between 1952 and 1960 alone, Dick published 89 stories in magazines like Astounding, Worlds of If, Galaxy, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, as well as a half-dozen novels. He wrote 40 books in all, most of them out of print at the time of his death.
Philip K. Dick was also brilliant, and in the 15 years since his passing, he has proved a more influential writer than his meticulous and careful contemporaries ever were. Ask a young would-be artist or a garage-band guitarist what he thinks of Updike and the rest of the old New Yorker crowd, and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Ask about Philip K. Dick and be prepared for a long conversation.
Dick’s novels are as current as the latest issue of Wired and contribute to the cultural vocabulary at the end of the millennium in a way that the meticulous short stories of the 1950s can’t. All of Dick’s books are back in print. Several movies have been adapted from his stories and novels, most notably Blade Runner and Total Recall. “Cyberpunk,” a fiction genre dedicated to the idea that a new human consciousness is being created by computers, has simply taken Dick’s atomic-age obsessions and transferred them to the world of the Internet. What’s more, some of the most-discussed (and longest) American novels of our time, from Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City to David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest, read like Talmudic glosses on ideas explored in more interesting ways in Dick’s hack work.
As technology blurs the distinction between the human and the artificial, the real event and the simulated, Dick seems like a prophet to his fans. Why? Because his writings center on the idea that the universe itself is a conspiracy, a cosmic scheme to keep us confused and misdirected. “Often my characters have this feeling,” he told an interviewer, “that they’re being watched probably by something that’s going to get them.” That’s putting it mildly. In Time Out of Joint, a small-town ne’er-do-well makes a meager dollar by winning a peculiar newspaper contest every few weeks. Over time, he realizes that he is, in fact, a mad genius being housed in a Potemkin village, his contest entries actually plans for Earth’s war against invaders. He begins to uncover the truth when he has a series of experiences in which the surface of reality begins to dissolve before his eyes — a bus, for example, is actually two-dimensional, like a cardboard cutout on a stage, and his hometown is itself an elaborate stage set.
Such an idea may typify paranoid delusion, but in Dick’s work, it is the only evidence of sanity. So it makes sense that Dick’s worldview has become popular at a time when Oliver Stone is considered an American historian of note and lunatic Internet conspiracy theories are promoted into front-page news by the one-time press secretary to President Kennedy.
And yet the contemporary craze for Dick misses what lies at the center of his fiction, and what makes him an American original. For while Dick wrote prose that was serviceable at best, and devised plots so ridiculously sloppy that you could fall through the gaping holes, he had gifts many technically superior writers lack. His best work is shot through with a wondrous empathy for the petty troubles and small glories of everyday life, a bone-deep sympathy for marriage, domesticity, and long-term relations between men and women. And there is something deeper at work as well, something that gives his writing a timeless resonance: an ability to understand, and portray, the power of the religious impulse in the lives of ordinary folk.
Science fiction, Dick once observed, takes as its true protagonist an idea rather than a person and thus differs from other fiction by deliberately ” dislocating” the world rather than trying to reveal it. Dick’s leading characters share an inchoate intuition that there has been a deep dislocation in their universe and a feeling that some unfathomable power is experimenting with them. In the universe of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, things literally disappear when the characters stop looking at them. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, the insane populace of a planet that serves as a psychiatric hospital develop their own stable, if crazy, culture after they are abandoned by their caretakers.
Dick was writing about what a theologian would call “fallenness,” the sense that there is something innately skewed about human life. “There is evil! It’s actual like cement,” exclaims a character in The Man in the High Castle, his most celebrated novel. “It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”
His characters are aware that all is not well in their world, that they live in a skewed universe they are incapable of changing. Yet they soldier on, living their lives as best they can, and in some way discover that they are being offered a gift in their suffering and confusion. They are offered hints and tokens, cryptic messages and mystical signs, of a divine explanation for their plight, a divine justification for human suffering. They have reason to believe that they are in the hands of an all-knowing and unknowable intelligence.
From early novels like Solar Lottery and The World Jones Made to his more complex works of the late 1960s, Dick actually invented religions for his characters. His finest such creation is “Mercerism,” the religion in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the source for the movie Blade Runner). The characters in the novel live in an increasingly infertile and lifeless world. Their pets are artificially engineered; they are finding it increasingly difficult to tell themselves apart from the human- like robots they have invented. They spend years saving up to buy a real goldfish — the insanely wealthy can actually afford a goat or a sheep — and then devote themselves to tending the little life they think themselves deeply fortunate to possess. Many find solace in the empathy they achieve through Mercerism: Gripping the handles of a “Mercer box,” the communicant experiences “fusion” with the thousands of others who are performing the rite at the same moment. In its very conception, Mercerism shows the kind of religious impulse Dick’s best science fiction was able to capture. But Dick’s own religious impulses were to prove his undoing.
Born in 1928, Philip K. Dick was raised by his divorced mother in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley. At 14, he wrote his first novel and began his lifelong flirtation with psychoanalysis in therapy for agoraphobia and other psychological troubles. Married for the second time at age 22, he settled in Berkeley and became a professional writer, taking amphetamines to maintain the output of 60 pages a day he needed to support his family. In the 1960s, he turned almost exclusively to novels, producing 20 books in a decade. And in one of them, The Man in the High Castle, published in 1962, he found the proper match of novelist and subject.
Set in 1960s California after the Japanese and Germans have won World War II, The Man in the High Castle portrays the social and political crisis created when someone writes a science-fiction novel in which England and the United States have won the war instead of the Axis. It becomes clear, by the end of the book, that the science-fiction novel has told the truth and that the reality we have been reading about is the lie. In other major novels of the 1960s, like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Now Wait For Last Year, Dick finds a way to describe “fallenness” such that it is written into the very structure of the universe, just as he does in The Man in the High Castle.
By 1971, the period of his best writing had come to an end. He was still taking huge quantities of amphetamines, his fourth wife had left him, he attempted suicide and was involved in a series of paranoid incidents (including a break-in he may have staged himself). To read the novels he wrote during this time is to experience the unsettling sensation that their author is in real danger, keeping himself from a psychotic break only by an enormous act of will.
A break finally came in February 1974, when a delivery girl from the local drugstore arrived at his door with a painkiller for his toothache. He asked her about the fish-shaped pendant she was wearing, and she explained that it was the “ichthys” symbol of the early Christians. For several weeks afterward, Dick believed he was living simultaneously in 20th-century California and 1st-century Rome: “The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate in cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.”
After hanging an ichthys symbol in his own window, Dick began to see its reflections of sunlight as coded divine communication and claimed the coded beams of light showed him how to do everything from obtaining overdue royalties to adjusting the margins on his typewriter. His confidence in his revelations was strengthened when “tutelary” voices issuing from his unplugged radio at night told him that his son needed immediate surgery for an undiagnosed hernia. Rushed to the hospital, the child was discovered to be in real danger and was operated upon the same day.
For years, Dick scribbled night after night on a manuscript that exceeded a million words by the time of his death. Its title — THE DIALECTIC: God against Satan, & God’s Final Victory foretold & shown to Philip K. Dick, together with AN EXEGESIS: Apologia Pro Mia Vita — is an indication of its author’s condition. The manuscript is a low-rent version of William Blake’s mad, late work. But where Blake conversed with Isaiah, Michelangelo, and the angel Gabriel, Dick received revelations from a “transcendentally rational mind” he came to call VALIS (a “Vast Active Living Intelligent System”).
VALIS was an attempt to unite all his mad, mystical experiences under a single sign, and he wrote a trilogy of novels on the subject — The Divine Invasion, Valis, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. They were the last things he published and are so profoundly bizarre it is hard to imagine that any editor could have read them without despairing at how unhinged their author had become. Even though religion dominates the trilogy, it is a self- created religion that could make sense only to its creator, Dick himself. It is as though Dick had come to believe his own fiction and thought he could invent a religion that would be true in this world. Some grasp of an orthodox religious discipline might have prevented his worst excesses. Indeed, Dick’s late muddle of mysticism, theology, and comparative religion makes an excellent example of the kind of thing orthodoxy exists to save us from.
The Valis trilogy makes for painful reading, and probably should never have been published at all. But when Vintage began in 1991 to publish oversized paperback editions of his works, the first volume the firm released was . . . Valis. Crazy and dark, psychotic and paranoid: That’s the fashionable Philip K. Dick, the supposed icon and prophet. In the world of his self-proclaimed children — the brilliant stone-cold hipness of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the slick techno-fantasies of Wired magazine — there are no ordinary people, there is no ordinary life. Everything small and human and domestic is stripped away, replaced instead by a grandiose and antinomian libertarian vision of humankind.
It seems that the very people who have made Dick a posthumous icon have misunderstood his work completely. The movie that first made him famous, Ridley Scott’s visually staggering Blade Runner, got it all wrong even as it began the creation of the Philip K. Dick myth. Blade Runner begins with the protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) living the solitary life of a sexually twisted Philip Marlowe in a gorgeously hellish Los Angeles slowly disintegrating in a constant flow of acid rain.
Now look what Dick does in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: He begins with Deckard and his depressed wife quarreling about her dependence on the feel-good device called a “Penfield mood organ” and concludes 24 hours later with an exhausted Deckard asleep as his wife, “feeling better, fixed herself at last a cup of black, hot coffee.” The Deckard we meet at first is unable to grasp the emotions of anyone, even his wife. But at book’s end, he is experiencing an empathy so capacious that it extends down to an artificial toad he has found on a dusty road.
The author’s contemporary fans have a vision of human life strikingly false to Dick’s own. For when he was not in the grip of madness, when he was not writing solely to produce words for money, Dick was able to show his readers that life could go on even in a “dislocated” universe. In the worlds of Philip K. Dick, dislocated or not, there will always be quarrels between husbands and wives, small betrayals and reconciliations, modest pleasures and simple love — just as there will always be hints and tokens of the complex love of God.
Contributing editor J. Bottum is associate editor of First Things. John Wilson is managing editor of Books & Culture.
