The Grammar of We Can Build You

As I mentioned in my return-from-beyond-the-way-over-there post yesterday, one of the things that inspired me to get back to blogging about Dick is my recent reread of We Can Build You. I have done a fair amount of work on this book in the past, most of it right here on this blog, and this research turned out to be super useful on this rereading.

Of course, We Can Build You, is a lesser known Dick novel, in fact it sat on his shelf, unsold, for basically ten years. It's not a novel I would give to someone as their introduction to Dick (that would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). But it's always been a favorite of mine and I think it's an important "android" novel.

One thing I realized on this read through was that We Can Build You was unsold when Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. One way to read the pair of novels is as existing in the same world, and telling the story of the rise of the Rosen family. There are lots of similarities including the production and use of "mood organs" (still one of my favorite Dick gadgets, and not just cause Wilder Penfield was my grandmother's uncle). But another way to read the two novels is to imagine Dick is cannibalizing his unpublished novel to stock We Can Build You (Dick would similarly pull the Isidore character from DADOES? from Confessions of a Crap Artist (which was also unpublished at the time).

In this way, We Can Build You can be read as a rare first draft of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  which is a much better plotted, thought out, and executed novel. We Can Build You, while it has a lot to recommend it, has one of the worst endings in the entire Dick irv. I told my reading group discussing this book (with very mixed reviews btw) that this novel felt like a demo-tape, like a bonus track that allows you some additional insight into an artist's creative process.

But here's what got me upon rereading: on the second page of the novel, in a rare first person narration, Louis Rosen explains, "Now, this enormous balance in favor of the spinet over the electronic organs, in terms of sales, led to an exchange between I and my partner, Maury Rock; and it was heated too."

Did you catch it? "led to an exchange between I and my partner"? - check out the grammar error. It should be "me and my partner." Grammatically speaking, in this sentence Louis ("I") is the object and not the subject. I tell my students that to check for this error they should remove the other pronouns in the sentence. You wouldn't say "this led to an exchange with I."

Louis makes this exact grammatical error at least three times in the novel (as of now though I only have the first example marked. If you find the others let me know). I'd be willing to bet any amount money that this is not Dick making a proofreading error.

So what does it mean? Well luckily I already stumbled on the answer. Even though I'd never spotted the grammar issue in previous reads, I had connected the novel to one of Dick's favorite existential psychologists, Rollo May, who had this to say:

"...I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary -- necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides -- for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples -- is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox -- the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma -- man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity." (Psychology and the Human Dilemma, 1967, p. 20)

I'm sure some of you are thinking that I'm reading too much into this. All I can say is you're wrong. This connection is the reason for the repeated grammar error.

May's observation is literalized in the character of Rosen. The human dilemma involves the fact that we can observe ourselves as objects, taking note of how we feel and what we want, while also conceiving of ourselves as subjects, agents capable of seeking out and satisfying our desires.

Why is this weird? Well, I'll bet there's something you do in your life that you're aware of and don't like. Perhaps you eat more than you feel is right, or you can't seem to stop smoking DMT, or you're dating someone you know is toxic and dangerous for you. You are acting as a subject in a way that you dislike when observing yourself as an object.  We contain multitudes.

In terms of Louis Rosen's character this existential bifurcation plays out in a number of ways, most notably his vacillating between action and reflection. He surprises himself by suddenly threatening Sam K Barrows. At other times, Rosen is simply passive, going with the flow of the family and business associates around him.

I've written about the weird saga of the story's end. When Ted White bought the manuscript to run in Amazing Stories, he wrote a four page ending, sent if off to Dick who changed three words, and then ran it. When DAW bought the novel, after its appearance in Amazing, White's ending was cut.

Here's an amazing PDF archive for Amazing Stories. Scans of the ending can be read at the bottom of this post. I'd never read White's conclusion. And you should read it before going on, because, spoiler alert...

I think White's ending feels gimmicky and half-hearted. I also think White's ending throws the whole mental asylum part of the plot into question: can you drug a robot into a fugue state? - asking for a friend.

But I think White was picking up a thread that Dick dropped earlier in the novel. When Louis Rosen is first shown the Stanton simulacrum, Rosen fears that he, himself, might be an android. I always read this as a revealing psychological insight, but perhaps Dick was toying with this hard reverse before giving it up.

Androids complicate May's dichotomy. Do these robots belong to their creators as objects, or are they entitled to their own identity and freedom? Can they transcend their programming to become more than they are designed to be, agents with a will that can truly be said to be their own?

The fact that Dick could use a grammatical error to open this can of worms, in a lesser known work that very few people think ranks as a great novel, well that was inspiring to me. And the fact that I spotted it and tracked down what I think is its significance made me think I need to get back to reading Dick, cause this kind of stuff doesn't happen with the other writers I love, James Baldwin, Dashiell Hammett, and T.S. Eliot, to name three.

I recognized something about myself, when reflecting on myself as an object, and then I decided to do something about it, as a subject.