Gary K. Wolfe
Not Quite Coming to Terms
Patricia S. Warrick.
Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale
& Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. xxiii + 223pp. $18.95.
Patricia Warrick is probably as well qualified as anyone to undertake an extended study
of Dick's fiction, having corresponded with him and having interviewed him extensively
before his death in 1982. Obviously deeply moved by Dick's real torment and tragedy, she
has produced a work that in many ways is as much eulogy as criticism. Dick's passion and
paranoia haunt the book, as quotations from these letters and interviews repeatedly draw
us back from literary questions and into his unhappy world. As with Paul Williams's
earlier Only Apparently Real (NY: Arbor House, 1986), which was little more than
an extended conversation with Dick (originally published as a Rolling Stone interview),
Dick himself dominates this book in ways that constantly subvert Warrick's attempts to
locate him in some sort of critical context. Almost no one but Dick is ever cited as a
reference, and the considerable body of commentary on his work--from Hazel Pierce's 1982
Starmont House volume to Daniel Levack's 1981 bibliography for Underwood-Miller to
essays by Ursula Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, Ian Watson, Darko Suvin, and many others--is
mentioned neither in the text proper nor even in the bibliography.
What Warrick does provide is a generally informed and straightforward discussion of
Dick's major fiction, intelligently organized around eight major works which illustrate
key recurring themes in his fiction. The works she chooses for extended treatment
constitute no great surprise: The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and the VALIS novels. She discusses the secondary
novels and short stories as they relate to these major works, and pretty much ignores his
mainstream fiction. I found particularly helpful her argument that Martian Time-Slip is
"his most successful work artistically" (p. 66) and her energetic attempt to
unravel the complexities of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. She also
persuasively argues that The Penultimate Truth is among Dick's most underrated
novels. On the other hand, I find Ubik a much richer novel than she does. Apart
from such matters of taste, Warrick's work as an explicator is admirably detailed and
readable, and free of theoretical ax-grinding.
What is her theoretical approach, though? What exactly is she hoping to achieve in this
study? Even though she considers none of his non-fantastic work (except for brief mentions
of Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer),
she has subtitled the book "The Fiction" rather than "The Science
Fiction" of Philip K. Dick. This suggests she wants to achieve for Dick what he could
never achieve for himself--namely, to liberate him from the stigma of SF. She describes
him as "a man who had to hide his love of the classics under the tattered cover of
science fiction" (p. 1) and who tried "yoking the loftiest metaphysical
speculation with the most mundane fictional form" (p. 21). She in fact argues that he
invented a new kind of writing, which she calls "quantum-reality fiction," a
term not likely to catch on with anyone, least of all bookstores. In brief, she does not
want to deal with Dick as an SF writer--his relations with other SF and fantasy
writers and editors are studiously omitted from mention, and we are given no indication
that he ever read anything but the classics, even though we know from other sources that
he had been an energetic SF reader since 1941.
This leads to a few problems. For one thing, the tone of the book is uncertain. At
times it reads like an argument made to a recalcitrant department chairman that this stuff
is really OK, since it has more in common with Camus and Freud than with Budrys and van
Vogt. (I mention those names deliberately, because among the many questions I had hoped to
find clues for in this book were whether Budrys' Who might have influenced Palmer
Eldritch and whether van Vogt's pulp-paranoid universes had helped Dick develop his
sense of pacing and setting.) At other times, it lapses into simplistic explanations of
everything from Taoism to quantum mechanics to what happened during Dick's life ("In
1950 the United States engaged in a war in Korea that lasted three years. Soon after its
conclusion, we became involved in the Vietnam conflict....In 1959 a Communist government
was established in Cuba. Kennedy's assassination occurred in 1963" [p. 41]). There
are pages of this sort of thing. I am heartily in favor of avoiding obtuse critical
jargon, but seeing a writer as complex as Dick described in the language of Mister Rogers
is at best unsettling. "As we read," says Warrick, we "recreate for
ourselves the metaphors Dick paints as he dips the brush of his imagination into the rich
pallette [sic] of language" (p. 31).
A "pallette," by the way, is the armpit of a suit of armor. Such an error
might be typographical, but there are enough of them in the book to give at least some
pause. Dick's 1964 novel Clans of the Alphane Moon consistently becomes Clanes
of the Alphane Moon, and the character Ragle Gumm in Time out of Joint becomes
"Raggle Gumm." Alfred Jarry is "Alfred Jary," and Aldous Huxley's Doors
of Perception is New Doors of Perception. More important is
"Fomalhaut," which Warrick uses to name Dick's overall cosmos in an attempt to
link it somehow to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Quite apart from the fact that this
doesn't work (Warrick never demonstrates that the various novels in Dick have a shared
history or shared characters as did Faulkner's), Warrick makes much out of Fomalhaut's
meaning of "whale's belly," and how this is appropriate because it suggests
Jonah's metaphorical inner journey in the belly of the whale (pp. 16-17). But
"Fomalhaut" doesn't mean "whale's belly." It means "fish's
mouth," because that's where that star appears in the constellation of the fish.
If there is a certain laxness in such matters of detail, it is more than made
up for in colorful critical arguments. Dick's work is neatly divided into five
chronological periods, each with its own label. They are: the Apprenticeship
Period, the Mature Period, the Entropic Period (he was ill and didn't write
much), the Regenerative Period (he got better), and the Metaphysical Period.
Ever though she invents these labels, Warrick later comments of Dick's best work
"that critics...would hail it as his Mature Period" (p. 61). Is she paying
herself a compliment? Dick's characteristic symbolic device, wae are told, is a
"dynamic four-chambered metaphor," of which Warrick is so enamored with that she
turns it into a verb. ("Rick metaphors law," she says of Androids [p.
124].) His plots have both an outer level and an inner level (p.
41; her italics). In fact, much of what literature has been doing for centuries
has been invented by Dick.
At the 1981 Eaton Conference, Leslie Fiedler argued that any valid approach
to SF would have to have some means of describing the appeal of A.E. van Vogt as
well as that of Olaf Stapleton. There can be little doubt that Dick is one of
the richest of modern SF writers, and that his work far transcends that of van
Vogt or most of the authors whose names appeared on the same garish Ace
paperbacks as his own. Yet Warrick's book as useful as it ism provides a kind of
case study of what can happen when one tries arbitrarily and posthumously to
yank an author away from the context in which he was published and read during
his lifetime. On the one hand, she finds herself writing a kind of
freshman introduction to literature, overexplaining familiar concepts in order
to demonstrate how marvelous it is that a fantastic writer can yield to
conventions of mainstream literary analysis. On the other hand--and this is
really her greatest strength in Mind in Motion--she must at the same time
demonstrate what is unique in Dick, and what defies those conventions. The
unarticulated argument of her book--perhaps of any serious study of Dick--is
that he was able to use SF in a way few writers before had been able to , that
his bizarre imagination was in many ways more attuned to this genre than any
other, and that he did after all owe much to SF. Had she explained why his
mainstream novels failed, this might have become clearer. As it is, she gives us
powerful evidence of Dick's greatness. It may have been tragic for Dick that he
felt constrained to write in the SF mode, but it is far from the rest of us.
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