I copied this behemoth into blogger yesterday. When I hit 'publish' it was gone. So, here it is again...
"In such moments, Dick's work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories and that nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of the individual or existential experiences into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics. Dick's force lies in the effort to retain possession and use of apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once. The casual attribution, then, of the hallucinatory experiences to drugs, to schizophrenia or to the half-life, is not so much a concession to the demands of the older kind of reading or explanation as it is a refusal of that first, now archaic solution of symbolism and modernism: the sheer fantasy and dream narrative. To attribute his nightmares to drugs, schizophrenia, or half-life is thus a way of affirming their reality and rescuing their intolerable experiences from being defused as an unthreatening surrealism; a way of preserving the resistance and the density of the subjective moment, of emphasizing the commitment of his work to this very alternation itself as its basic content. And this discontinuity is at one with our fragmented existence under capitalism; it dramatizes our simultaneous presence in separate compartments of private and public worlds, our twin condemnation to both history and psychology in scandalous concurrence." - Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (350-351)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can read the quote in context here.
