E

ssay

by Ted Gioia





During February and March 1974, science fiction

writer Philip K. Dick experienced a series of strange

and exhilarating visions. Almost exactly ten years

earlier, Dick had first taken LSD, and his perceptions

while tripping on acid prefigured this later mystical

mid-life crisis. In a 1965 letter to a friend, he enthused

about the "joyous coloration, especially pinks and reds,

very luminous" and the "great insights into myself"

induced by hallucinogenics. A decade later, now

apparently without the aid of illegal drugs, Dick was

again overwhelmed by an intense pink light, and

believed that it was transferring information to him

at blazing download speeds.

"It seized me entirely," he

later explained "lifting me

from the limitations of the

space-time matrix."



Others might look on this

incident as the incipient

sign of acute mental dis-

order, but Dick had the

exact opposite interpretation.

"I experienced an invasion

of my mind by a transcend-

entally rational mind, as if I

had been insane all my life

and suddenly I had become sane," he later told

science fiction writer Charles Platt. Even more striking

—or ridiculous, depending on your perspective—

Dick was convinced that he had experienced an

extraordinary epiphany, rich with theological

implications. He had encountered God, or something

roughly fitting the description, the deity as data

overload. Dick started scribbling down jumbled notes

and journal entries in an attempt to decipher the

'wisdom' handed on to him, and the resulting

manuscript, which he called the

Exegesis

, eventually

amounted to some 8,000 pages.







RELATED REVIEWS



The Man in the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick



Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

by Philip K. Dick



Ubik

by Philip K. Dick







Inevitably, this life-changing experience impacted

Dick's science fiction writing, most notably in his

autobiographical 1981 novel

VALIS

—the title an

acronym for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System."

Sci-fi novels are rarely autobiographical, but

VALIS

is

not your typical sci-fi book. Indeed, it is the strangest

work of genre fiction I've ever read. Even if you're

familiar with Dick's other major books, nothing in

them prepares you for this one.



Dick appears as two separate characters in

VALIS

. He

is both Philip K. Dick, a noted science fiction writer,

and Horselover Fat, a wreck of a fellow who has

attempted suicide and been institutionalized for

psychiatric evaluation…after having experienced strange

visions in March 1974. But are they really two separate

protagonists? At one point in

VALIS

, another

character points out that "'Philip' means 'Horselover' in

Greek" and "'Fat' is the German translation of 'Dick'."

Thus Horselover Fat equals Philip Dick. At moments

in

VALIS

, Horselover Fat even disappears back into

the psyche of Philip K. Dick, a development that the

author's friends treat as a sign of Dick's return to sanity.

But these interludes do not last for long, and Dick's

mental disintegration soon manifests itself again as two

separate individuals. The result is an unnerving new take

on the old meme of the "unreliable narrator"—or what

we might call, in this instance, the "multiple-personality

unreliable narrator(s)."



Despite all the strangeness, Dick's familiar themes come

to the forefront again and again in this book, the same

concepts he had been pursuing in his writings during

the previous three decades. In fact, some surprising

convergences can be found between

VALIS

and

Dick's long unpublished first novel

Gather Yourselves

Together

, which he had started writing in the late 1940s

—the character Carl Fitter in the latter work even keeps

a journal akin to Dick's

Exegesis

. (And the title of that

early work could serve as an admonition to the late-

stage Mr. Dick with his troubling multiple personalities.)

Over the course of around 40 books, Dick had contrived

many stories and characters, but his chief recurring

obsession could be summed in a simple idea, a concept

that is at the heart of

VALIS

—and all his other major

works—namely that

reality isn't really very real

.



The number of variations that Dick worked on this

theme is impressive. Things are never what they seem

in a Philip K. Dick story. And I don’t mean that the

butler turns out to be the killer or any of those other

plot twists, predictable even in their surprises, that genre

fiction has long employed. In Dick's universe, the very

fabric of the universe is prone to give away at any

moment. The characters themselves hardly change, but

their context is as likely to tear asunder as a wet paper

bag soaking in a parking lot puddle.



Sometimes Dick provides a technological reason for

these radical reformulations of reality, but often he just

lets them occur unexplained in his stories. For a writer

who devoted his career to the sci-fi field, Dick seemed

almost perversely unconcerned with explaining the

disjunctions that send his characters reeling in confusion

into an alternative universe. As a result, his tales often

come across more like applied metaphysics than science

fiction. And this explains much of the appeal of Dick's

storytelling: where other sci-fi authors would blame

everything on aliens or weapons, Mr. Dick describes

similar plot twists in terms of transcendent events and

personal crises. As a result, he has more in common

with existential novelists such as Walker Percy or

Albert Camus than with space opera authors like Arthur

C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.



But in

VALIS

, Dick reveals a very different attitude.

He is no longer content to accept these tears in the

fabric of reality; he now wants to understand them.

With almost desperate intensity he seeks for reasons,

and the result is something we never expected from

Philip K. Dick: a novel of ideas. Sometimes crazy ideas,

usually implausible ideas, but ideas nonetheless. Many

of these are taken verbatim from the

Exegesis

, and Dick

even includes an appendix that features a selection of

these journal entries. They are like a distortion of

Wittgenstein's

Tractatus

, as encountered in a nightmare.



During the course of this novel, the narrator explores

almost every possible explanation for a universe in

which different planes of reality exist. He looks to the

pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides

for explanations. He considers Jung's theory of

archetypes. Or does the Buddhist critique of reality

hold the answer? He explores the connection between

the split in reality and the Yin and Yang of Taoism. He

draws on hermetic alchemists, Apollonius of Tyana,

Gnosticism, Asklepios, Richard Wagner, the story of

the Grail. He looks to Elijah. He looks to Christ.

He looks everywhere, with intensity and anxiety.



But our narrator also stares into the television set,

searching for coded messages from a higher power

amidst commercials and cartoons. One day, a friend

takes him to a motion picture that seems to present

images connected to Horselover Fat's visions, and this

opens up new theories and possibilities. When Dick,

Fat and their friends meet up with the rock star who

made the movie, they believe that they have finally

arrived at the brink of an explanation—indeed, at the



explanation to end all explanations

. Or maybe they've

just finally met people even crazier than Philip K. Dick.



Eventually Dick offers possible sci-fi solutions to his

enigma. The visions may have come from aliens. Or

maybe from a new microwave technology that zaps

your brain instead of the baked potato you plan on

eating for dinner. But the reader can see that Dick is

hardly satisfied with these options. He’s not looking

for aliens; he's looking for the meaning of life.



There are many strange things about

VALIS

, but one

of the strangest is the new-found brilliance to Dick's

prose. For all his creativity, Dick often wrote in a

cartoonish, pulp-fiction manner—his biographer

Lawrence Sutin describes it as a "slapdash quality" and

notes that it prevents many critics from considering Dick

in the same category as Kafka, Calvino and other writers

who dealt with similar themes. Even Dick's most

famous works from the 1960s and 1970s are filled with

clumsy passages that seem churned out to meet a

deadline, not lay the groundwork for a posthumous

literary reputation. As a result, you typically read this

author for his imaginative daring not stylish descriptions

or clever dialogue or poetic metaphors. But in

VALIS

,

Dick actually starts writing at a dazzlingly high level.

The coarse pulp-fiction author disappears completely

from view and instead we have an edgy prose stylist

whose work can stand comparison with Pynchon and

Heller and Vonnegut and Kesey and all those other

renegade who redefined American fiction in the 1960s

and 1970s.



So, if I can borrow Jonathan Lethem's pun, you really

don't know dick about Dick until you've read VALIS.

I believe it is his finest novel, and the starting point for

any reader who wants to see how close sci-fi can get to

avant-garde fiction. But the fact that Dick wasn't trying

to conduct an experiment in writing, but was grappling

with his own demons and—this is no glib exaggeration

—the very meaning of his own life, gives these pages a

pathos and power that few other avant-garde novels

possess. In short, it all comes together here although,

sad to say, it had to come apart for Mr. Dick in order

for that to happen.





Published: February 21, 2013



Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture.

His newest book is

The Jazz Standards:

A Guide to the

Repertoire