Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations

227 Pages·1995·17.158 MB·English

by  Samuel J. Umland

Philip K. Dick
Contemporary Critical
Interpretations
Edited by
Samuel J. Umland
Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction
and Fantasy, Number 63
Donald Palumbo, Series Adviser
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut. London
Contributions to the Study of
Science Fiction and Fantasy
State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of
Fantastic Literature and Film: Selected Essays from the Eleventh
International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 1990
Nicholas Ruddick, editor
The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth
Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, editors
Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modem Drama
Patrick D. Murphy, editor
Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors: Critical Essays on His
Science Fiction
Charles L. Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg, editors
Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction
Nicholas Ruddick
Science Fiction for Young Readers
C. W. Sullivan Ill, editor
Science Fiction and the Theatre
Ralph Willingham
Odd Genre: A Study in Imagination and Evolution
John J. Pierce
Robbe-Grillet and the Fantastic: A Collection of Essays
Virginia Harger-Grinling and Tony Chadwick, editors
The Dystopian Impulse in Modem Literature: Fiction as Social
Criticism
M. Keith Booker
The Company of Camelot: Arthurian Characters in Romance and
Fantasy
Charlotte Spivack and Roberta Lynne Staples
Science Fiction Fandom
Joe Sanders, editor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Philip K. Dick : contemporary critical interpretations I edited by
SamueIJ. Umland.
p. cm.-(Contributions to the study of science fiction and
fantasy,lSSN 0193-6875 ; no. 63)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-29295-7 (alk. paper)
I. Dick, Philip K.-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Science
fiction, American-History and criticism. I. Umland, Samuel J.
II. Series.
PS3554.13Z795 1995
813' .54--<1c20 94-29271
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1995 by Samuel J. Umland
All righL<; rcserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduccd, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-29271
ISBN: 0-313-29295-7
ISSN: 0193-6875
First published in 1995
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
For my mother, Sarah Elizabeth Witty Umland,
and in loving memory of my father,
Lale Edward Umland, 1921-1993
Contents
Introduction
Samuel J. Umland
1. Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. 7
Dick
Carl Freedman
2. Dianoia/Paranoia: Dick's Double "Impostor" 19
Neil Easterbrook
3. Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit: Dick, Lcm, and the 43
Preestablished Cacophony
Karl Wessel
4. Philip K. Dick and the Nuclear Family 61
Christopher Palmer
5. To Flee from Dionysus: Enthousiasmos from "Upon the Dull 81
Earth" to VALlS
Samuel J. Umland
6. The Swiss Connection: Psychological Systems in the Novels 101
of Philip K. Dick
Anthony Wolk
7. Unrequited Love in We Can Build You 127
Rebecca A. Umland
viii Contents
8. "What Is This Sickness?": "Schizophrenia" and We Can Build 143
You
Gregg Rickman
9. "Man Everywhere in Chains": Dick, Rousseau, and The 157
Penultimate Truth
Merritt Abrash
10. Two Cases of Conscience: Loyalty and Race in The Crack 169
in Space and Counter-Clock World
lake lakaitis
11. Chinese Finger-traps or "A Perturbation in the Reality Field": 197
Paradox as Conversion in Philip K. Dick's Fiction
Michael Feehan
Primary Bibliography 207
Secondary Bibliography 211
Index 221
Contributors 227
Introduction
J.
Samuel Umland
"It happens now and then," T. S. Eliot wrote, "that a poet by some strange
accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is
expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his
generation." Eliot made these remarks about Tennyson over fifty years ago, in a
different age about a different writer, but his words aptly describe the relationship
of Philip K. Dick to a generation of readers and critics which came of age in the
latter half of the twentieth century, the age of the cold war. Just as Tennyson
.came to represent his age, or Johnson's Shakespeare typified his, Philip K. Dick
has come to represent the second half of the twentieth century. Though he died in
1982 at age fifty-three, Dick's life was so propitiously placed that he was in
touch with the major social and political convulsions of twentieth-century
America.
As a small boy in the early 1930s, Dick listened to thc war stories of his
father, who, as a teenage Marine, had experienced some of the most vicious
fighting of World War I. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother in
Washington, D.C., in the mid-1930s, where hc experienced firsthand the poverty
of the Great Depression. Later, after he and his mother returned to California
where he was to spend the rest of his life, he became fascinated, if not obsessed.
with World War II, which also coincided with his preoccupation with German art
and culture. After some time in a private school, he entered Berkeley High
School early in 1944; finally, after three years rife with personal difficulties, he
graduated in 1947. He briefly attended the University of California at Berkeley in
the fall of 1949, where he declared himself a philosophy major, attending a class,
by his own account, with the analytic philosopher Stephen C. PeppeL! Dick
himself claimed that he inherited the left-liberal, anti-authoritarian politics of the
Berkeley milieu, but he also, and perhaps most importantly, inherited the
philosophical skepticism that has been one of the more profound and lasting
effects of the cold war.
2 Samuel J. Umland
In a life of unpredictable turns, one of the more unpredictable ones, with
the longest-lasting and most insidious effects, was how Dick became entangled
in the political intrigue of the cold war. Early in the 1950s, probably late in
1952, a<; a result of perhaps his own association and his then wife's acquaintance
with Communist Party fellow travellers on the Berkeley campus, Dick and his
wife Kleo were approached by two FBI agents and recruited to spy on suspected
enemy agents at the University of Mexico. The extent of his subsequent
involvement with the FBI will forever remain vague, but his tangled relationship
with the U.S. government that began that unspecified day in the early 1950s
forever complicated his already troubled life, his thought, and his action,
affecting both his personal relationships and his more overt clashes with
authority. Moreover, both his fiction and his recorded interviews, as well as his
correspondence, never ceased to make allusive references to the paranoia, the
distrust, the suspicion, and the repressive domestic surveillance that emerged in
post -World War II America.
Knowledge of Dick's biography is essential to an understanding of his
work, yet in a remarkable irony, one of the effects of the cold war on
contemporary literary criticism has led to the deliberate avoidance of an author's
biography as a primary methodological step. This is generally expressed in a
form of the "biographical fallacy" that calls biographical evidence
"psychologistic," hence "reductive" and therefore "vulgar." The historical and
cultural contexts which coincided with the rise of New Critical commonplaces
such as the "persona theory," the "biographical," "affective" and "intentional"
"fallacies" are only now beginning to receive serious scrutiny.2 In an irony that
is thoroughly Dickian, William H. Epstein has revealed in his article "Counter
Intelligence: Cold War Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies" the origin of
the alleged critical "fallacy" known as the "biographical fallacy" as well as the
"pcrsona theory" in the late 1940s and early 1950s by literary scholars who were
to become CIA employees or were to work closely, wittingly or unwittingly,
with the intelligence establishment. The "persona theory," for instance, is
analogous not only to an author's "cover story" but the critic's, allowing the
critic to authorize a critical interpretation by taking on an "assumed identity" that
the text permits under the auspices of the putative authorial "persona." Both the
"biographical fallacy" and the "intentional fallacy" allow for much the same
thing, a critical "gesture" or "way of sanctioning critical activity under the cover
of some other activity" (64).
Tobin Siebers observes that "modern criticism is a product of the cold
war, and the repeated emphasis by the New Critics on objectivity, ambiguity,
paradox, the impossibility of paraphrase, and double meaning are part of the cold
war climate" (Cold War Criticism 30). Cold war literary criticism takes place in
a paranoid analytical situation, in which the critic becomes something of a
double agent like the utterly dissociated Bob/Fred duality of Dick's A Scanner
Darkly (1977), a novel that seems to have as much to do with double and triple
agents as it does with the drug subculture. Dick had his finger on the pulse, and
Introduction 3
the pulse was an America beginning to dissociate under the stress of cold war
paranoia, "a situation in which," Epstein observes, "betrayal and patriotism are
mutually reciprocal and virtually indistinguishable" (77). Dick's first published
novel, Solar Lottery (1955), makes allusions to "minimax" strategy which, as
William Poundstone has shown in Prisoner's Dilemma, was a developed by the
brilliant mathematician John von Neumann under the auspices of the RAND
Corporation expIicilIy as part of the United States' cold war nuclear strategy (7,
52-59,94-96.) (Dick was later to employ minimax strategy as a way to defend
himself against the mysterious origins and motives behind the "Xerox missive"
two decades later.) In Ubik (1969), RUDciter's "inertials" are given a thin SF
veneer but are in fact engaged in nothing less than counterintelligence-or
industrial espionage: "Counter-intelligence is the penetration of the enemy's spy
system and the prevention of his penetrating yours," Epstein writes (84). Even a
late novel, Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976: published 1985) reveals his
obsession with domestic surveillance and his relentless dissection of the form of
counterintelligence known as "collaboration." Dick's fiction is populated by
assassins (Keith PeIIig in Solar Lottery, Spence Olham in "Impostor," Joe
Cinadelia in The Mall ill the High Castle), informers (Kathy Nelson in Flow My
Tears, The Policeman Said), double agents (Donna Hawthorne in A Scanner
Darkly, Vivian Kaplan in Radio Free Albemuth), agents with blown covers
(Douglas Quail in "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"), and triple agents
(Roni Fugate in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch). Examples could be
multiplied. Dick's fiction was nurtured by the cold war and has been, in turn,
criticized within that same cultural climate. Perhaps it is time to reexamine his
life's work, to open the entire oeuvre to scrutiny, and not simply talk about
those few novels treasured by SF critics.
The essays in this volume are, in many respects, attempts to reassess
Dick's fiction, investigating the fictions and ideologies of the popular critical
modes which have structured our perceptions of it. The essays are united by their
interest in a broad range of contemporary critical approaches to the fiction of
Philip K. Dick, as well as by their commitment to the spirit of frank intellectual
debate of a figure whose own range and complexity create writings that form a
corpus which demands a reassessment. Many of the essayists chose to examine
texts which have been unaccountably neglected in contemporary criticism of
Dick and have found rich ore.
The essays are roughly organized according to the decade in which the
fiction appeared, following a loose chronological order beginning with an
overview of Dick's work. Carl Freedman's essay, "Towards a Theory of Paranoia:
The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick," is one of only two previously published
essays reprinted in this volume. [The essay originally appeared in Science
Fiction Studies 32 (March 1984): 15-24.] Freedman develops a theory of
paranoia drawn from Freud and Lacan that seems a particularly appropriate one
for cold war America. and then he applies it to the animistic world depicted in
one of Dick's essential works, Ubik.