Philip K. Dick. What more can be possibly said about this outlandish individual when there have already been tens of fountain pens emptied, hundreds of typewriters jammed and thousands of keyboards broken in two over his bizarre, “precise-adjectives-proof” prose? Not to mention millions of film spools exposed and billions of hard drives filled to the brim with movie and TV series adaptations of his works. The California-based SF writer single-handledly used to and still continues to rack more brains and overheat more imaginations than all the psychodelics combined were doing so during the 60’s. Now, I know the previous statement may sound like a little exaggeration on my part but wait till you hear the next one. I personally believe (and it would not be only me) that Dick must have been some kind of otherworldly entity or, how he would put it himself, entelechy whose ability to camouflage among earthlings had been impaired upon arrival and the subsequent sojourn in this “wonderful” planet of ours, resulting in a prolific output of novels, novelettes and short stories, all of this to our unmeasurable luck! How else could we substantiate the cause of his preposterous ontology-bending writing whose form is not far from bearing a striking resemblance to Vonnegut’s, Salinger’s or even Hemingway’s, but whose matter easily surpasses most of his SF contemporaries? Putting it all aside for a while, how are we supposed to repay you, Phil?

Having read several of his novels and being vain enough to risk biting off more than I can chew, I have decided to transform myself into another completely superfluous Dickologist. The novel I am going to ponder upon today is VALIS, one of his latest children as well as the first part of the unfinished trilogy which was initially planned to consist of two more titles: The Divine Invasion and The Owl in Daylight. All three of these pieces, along with the posthumous The Transmigration of Timothy Archer are more or less direct aftermath of the (in)famous Pink Lightbeam Strike To The Head event of March 1974 which subsequently had a transcendentally profound impact on our dope-abusing writer who afterwards shifted into divine meditations, claimed that he had lived simultaneously during two different epochs, and crossed his heart that he had been thinking in another language for a while, etc. For more detailed confessions I send you to his journals – The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick – which were edited in 2011 by Jonathan Lethem. They cover all of Dick’s exotically epiphanic experiences in an extensive fashion right there so if you have ever fancied, e.g., writing some classically hermeneutical texts on Philip K.’s prose, be Lethem’s guest. I, on the other hand, will stick to the VALIS.

The plot of the mentioned highly autobiographical novel revolves around one Horselover Fat (if you are laughing yourselves silly at this absurd name right now, go check the ethymology of the name Philip and translate “fat” into German) and his speculative ruminations on numerous matters regarding God and his/her/its involvement in creation and/or “maintenance” of the reality and mankind. Being a slightly new-aged byproduct of the second half of the 20th century, Fat as a character is an exceptionally memorable personification of Philip K. Dick’s own mental derangement (I would have used less inaccurate psychological term, however I am not into the “couchy” stuff at all). The whole book is bristled with psychological nomenclature and its outwork-like elaborations, however they get easily outshined when religious ratiocination steps in. Every time Fat/Dick and his friends are engaged in divine contemplations we surely cannot help but admit that we are peeping the modern incarnation of Anselm of Canterbury mulling over all the inferences of his ontological argument for the existence of God. The passages of Fat’s theological tractate which is being meticulously penned down by the protagonist during the course of events only reassure us in this notion. Fat is quite an eclectic gnostic – he derives from many sources: Christianity, Judaism, ancient Greece, Dogon people of western Sudan and things only a certified fruitcake or a dicky (yes, pun definitely intended!) version of H. P. Lovecraft would come up with. A direct quote from his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura included in the appendix of VALIS speaks for itself: “The three-eyed invaders are mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton, and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius.” Nevertheless, we should not fret over such trifling whimsies and flimsy details too much. As usual, what really counts is that what hides itself behind the hidden.

So what is this meta-concealment I have just hinted on? For an ad hoc clarification I will use a demonstrative, encapsulated example. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Lá-Bas opens with a fierce criticism of Naturalism which was grounded, not only as a literary movement, in the portrayals of a daily ordeal of human existence to the extent of suffering from short-sightedness and negligence of other, more spiritual aspects of life (or so one of Huysmans’ characters claims). Cutting to the chase, it was to reveal the slogs and toils of working man’s everyday life without any form of beautification, “slack-cutting”, mythologization or watering down. The remarkable trait Dick’s prose possesses is that it seems to be a late descendant of Naturalism (most of its protagonists and secondary dramatis personae are average Joes struggling to make ends meet, occasionaly indulging themselves in some oddball activities provided to them by the ludicrously turbulent 20th or 21st century) and yet it does not seem to be so. Nay, I would say that Dick has sometimes less in common with Naturalism than Jorge Luis Borges himself. As if he (Philip not Jorge) was able to pull something absolutely astonishing, something that plunders the ability to find our bearings among the “jumbly”, terraform-ish reality, leaving us at the mercy of unnamable perplexion dipped in a sauce of hysterical nonplus. All of this while keeping the cogs and sprockets of his writing as oiled and dovetailed as a recently overhauled dragster – another feature that allegedly links him to his Naturalistic heritage. Concision and precision have always pervaded Dick’s twisted attempts to turn the reality inside out or, rather, to show its concealed (ir)real nature. Along comes his distinctive treatment of clichéd SF motives too which are used as a mere decoration for the proper chrono-spatial dismantling going on parallelly. That’s what we find in, e.g. Ubik. But does VALIS fall within above characteristics?

I would lie if I admitted that it does and I would not tell the truth if I wrote that it does not. Dick’s divine novel somehow boosts up and formalizes its naturalistic and anti-naturalistic components on its own. Heavily distilled is the mimetic streak: characters serve a strictly expressive purpose of demonstrating Dick’s logical brainwork to prove that the godly existence in this or other form is actually present “out there somewhere” – to quote innumerable B-class horror movie characters trembling with terror and hiding themselves from the perfectly predictable killer inside their bedroom closet upstairs. On the other hand, pumped up with anti-naturalistic steroids, there is VALIS’ general ambience of an infinitely indescribable “waiting” for something which neither can nor will appear. As we move along the pages, it builds up gradually – a shapeshifting indiscernibleness – triggering tremors of uncertain anxiety bit by bit. While being trapped inside its insufferable pangs, we unexpectedly begin to feel for Horselover Fat and his pals, especially when our overly speculative bunch of guerrilla gnostics has just been intoxicatingly fascinated by the movie Valis… What strikes me the most is this vague foreboding that the world is a totally hopeless unattainability, a hapless mishmash of occurences and recurrences, of twisting and bending, of echoing conundrums and dilemmas whose gravity somehow surpasses that of Sheakspeare’s immortal “to be or not to be”. Of course all of this does not resonate in a blatant in-your-face form. Its iteration, repetition, superimposition comes from a different land of unknown overlays. All we can detect is the shuddering – perhaps metaphysical, perhas some other, even more abstract – the feverish quivers of raw naked fear. Is that what one feels while being exposed to the (un)godly presence? Perhaps Manichaeans were right believing that Demiurge was actually flawed and therefore prone to allowing evil to appear and evolve within the realm of material world. As Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves”.

VALIS – a bittersweet modern-day story of fear and trembling (Søren, don’t be so grumpy!) – and its occluded “neitherness” may be a trial by (u/U)nknown to disclose itself, to really reveal (whatever that REALLY means) what underlays deep inside the outside-ish…hmm… generality of the Universe. Nonetheless, if we are to be condemned to freeze between the state of knowing and not knowing without losing one or few of our marbles along the way (what an abysmally diabolic perspective indeed!), it is a genuine blessing (in disguise) to receive this ridiculously tiny bit of consolation buried in shapelessness and spacelessness of the shuddering which VALIS has provided us with. So maybe Manichaeans and Wittgenstein were not 100% right after all? I do not know…

Amonne Purity

The following text is a result of taking a deliberate plunge into absorbing waters of the Gun, with Occasional Music River. As one may suspect, the word “deliberate” suggests that the book I have recently decided to tame – this time not only with eyes full of deliberation but also with a reservoir of letters and sentences – should definitely be labelled with a touch of chipped linguistic playfulness as “The liberation from choice”, traceable at least in three tributaries which could be found in the novel’s catchment: the reader, the protagonist’s reality and the whole text itself. The first one was sourced from a grasping blend of baby blue runs of narrative’s lightness and turquoise rapids of flawless generic duality: hardboiled detective fiction and Philip K. Dick’s soft sci-fi influences, all of which are nothing but dashing appearances of the third tributary itself. In other words, the waters which had evaporated with all the possible and impossible reflections and gleams from the main stem of Jonathan Lethem’s debut novel, replenished the spring of my little brook and carved its mouth in the shape of the ensuing text. But what about the second tributary? What does it actually look like and how does it affect the remaining two?

Set in an undisclosed future, Gun, with Occasional Music tells a story of Conrad Metcalf, a worn-out, smart-mouthed private inquisitor in his early forties, who is always very fond of snorting one too many of his favorite make lines to get things going as well as throwing in cheeky, one-line metaphors and retorts while talking with someone, especially women and shady-looking individuals. Metcalf strongly resembles a future incarnation of Raymond Chandler’s best-known character – Philip Marlowe – however the former is enriched by some postmodern ‘uncertainties’. For instance, one day our ‘private inquisi-dick’ exchanged nerve endings of his genital area with his then girlfriend in order to broaden their sexual experiences. Unfortunately, his other half fled unexpectedly, leaving his privates still very private and fully operational (as the flesh without nerves can only be), although totally devoid of an ability to provide him with male sexual sensations. Having been shattered by the dismantling sex swap, Metcalf took a self-imposed vow of celibacy and decided to fool around with drugs instead, only to find himself ridden with an inflamed misogynistic resentment and a general rudeness of his character which has been counterbalanced by a strangely twisted persistence and an inner inclination to help lost souls get back on their feet.

Even though the protagonist’s sophisticated existence might evoke images of skillfully crafted characters from many other novels, it is only the world we are witnessing through Lethem’s first-person narrative that leaves us with nothing but the necessity to bow to the mastery of its construction. The author – using linguistic concision or even condensation which, on the other hand, should never be regarded as deprived of an articulate yet pleasantly rough-edged flow – depicts a dystopian reality with children turned into so-called “babyheads” – a gloomy result of some universally implemented intelligence enhancement therapy, the very same which made all the animals stand upright, use language and behave like people in general. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The whole society is alienated so extensively and intensively that asking about somebody’s personal life is considered a sign of outrageous impoliteness (each case is therefore an exceptionally tough nut to crack for every private inquisitor, provided they are hired by anyone at all), the printed word is prohibited (Metcalf is watching “Oakland Photographic”) and psychology has been downgraded from science to itinerant, proselytizing religion. Not to mention the fact that almost everybody is addicted to legally sold drugs which alter human psychosomatic balance on purpose (for example, if you snort a few lines of forgettol, you can kiss your short and long-term memory goodbye for the rest of the evening). Karma points also play a crucial role in everyday life, being an official indicator of resourcefulness as well as justification for continuity of individual’s existence (if your karma level drops to zero, you are sentenced to hibernation). Astonishingly, all of these civilizational ‘marvels’ are fused with the rest of the hard-boiled features so naturally that it is almost impossible to perceive them as something disturbingly bizarre at all. Lethem’s writing skills are on a par with Dick’s ability to merge even the most ridiculous elements and concepts with the background reality. He strips their strangeness away and leaves them covered only in a thin layer of ‘invisible normality’, the trait expressed, for instance, by intelligent coin-operated household appliances and doors in Ubik which threaten to commence legal proceedings against every individual stupid enough to use them improperly or hack their CPU’s.

Focusing attention on this ‘unintentional’ world which is, in my humble opinion, far from wearing a badge of symbolic critique of contemporary times (however, it is getting harder to defend the above statement after reading the second part of Gun…), there can be traced one deliberate aspect of it after all. “The liberation from choice”, mentioned in the first paragraph, an idea which neither serves as an example to construct a thorough (or lightweight) assessment of the present-day condition of mankind nor possesses the ability to prove, envision or justify anything. It is more like an abutment which is hatching its bridges – spanning the third tributary in many unrecognizable dimensions – and lurking somewhere between (or rather ‘behind’) the lines of protagonist’s reality like some mysterious specter, dressed in a delicate unobtrusive conceptual superficiality. When we are co-investigating the murder case along with Metcalf, it suddenly overflows us and we know that we – as readers – ‘overflow’ it too. And our stream beds are beginning to convert into the unavoidable, the necessity of words and sentences to simply be written down…

My little brook formed an estuary in the shape of this review. It had no choice – it was liberated by reaching a confluence of itself and inevitable meanders of the Gun, with Occasional Music River, bristled with an infinite number of bridges like a non-existent mythical hedgehog or a porcupine made out of three elements – water, concrete and steel – which are not what they seem. What would your and Jonathan Lethem’s confluence look like?

Amonne Purity