The Desperate Recreation of Place

Above: Portrait of PKD by "Objective"

I have discovered what I believe to be a genuine insight into PKD's work in Frederic Jameson's essay "History and Salvation in Philip K Dick." It's not something he spends a lot of time on, and he provides scant examples, but he's onto something, writing:

"Yet something more than the standard psychology (or psychopathology) of the collector seems at stake here: for objects would seem to set in place what Kenneth Burke might have called the category of the 'scene' as such: places lovingly devised and composed for a human activity which has disappeared, as living hosts disappear in course of the generational process, leaving their empty shells and housing behind them. Collecting in this sense then suggests a desperate repetition, which, by reconstructing the scene, struggles to restore the human acts and interpersonal events it once housed. But such an analysis immediately clarifies our earlier thematic material as well, for the [Perky Pat] layout is just such a scene, and fusion with Mercer in some sense replaces the novelty of fresh action and eventfulness with a kind of eternal return of the televisual image. In this particular semic cluster, then, a historically marked object-world joins hands with the phenomenon of 1950s media to make up the space and category of empty scene as such; and this is something like a pure form, which can be inflected in either a negative or a positive way, and accommodate either malign or redemptive content" (372).

There are tons of examples of this: Wash-35, Perky Pat layouts, Christ, the whole town of Millgate in The Cosmic Puppets. I'm rereading Ubik and just the weird way they bring the half-lifers in this weird routine/ritual seems to fit. List some more in comments please.

One interesting thing about this motif is that it mirrors the act of creating fiction. An author toils in isolation in hopes of connecting with some other person. Fiction uses language, inanimate words on the page, to affect change and spur action in our larger reality. The construction of wholly artificial worlds in hopes of sparking something real in a reader seems roughly akin to these Potemkin-villages that exist to evoke authenticity among the people that commune with them.

But likewise, the motif suggests a rough allegory in our late capitalist existence, in which nostalgia and kitsch are used to conjure feelings of patriotism, loyalty, and a perverse desire for stuff. Our nostalgia is exploited for profit, and as a result, the objects of our nostalgia are tainted. Seems like so much of Dick's work revolves around again making sacred what we made profane through sale and commodification .

A Thought About A Dream Within A Dream

I'm up to my eyeballs in essays to grade, and yeah, there's that PKD Weekly Roundup I want to write. But today I'd like to riff on an idea that occurred to me while watching Cronenberg's eXistenZ (now on Netflix instant watch). The movie uses the Dickian notion of the "dream within a dream" (a phrase coined by Poe, so exactly how Dickian the notion really is can be debated). Anyhoo, in the movie the main characters awaken into a number of wholly new realities, and we as the audience learn that the previous, seemingly stable realities were in fact some sort of illusion. Dick's use of this motif generates quite a list:
Time Out of Joint
Maze of Death
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ubik
Feel free to name some more in the comments section.

Likewise, Hollywood has become enamored with this motif and films that use this style hard reverse are in no shortage:
Dark City
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Thirteenth Floor
The Matrix
Inception
The list goes on....

One way to think about this motif's popularity is to relate it to the way our own reality is basically a bubble. I mean go someplace else, someplace totally different, go far enough away so that the beliefs and worldview you hold become alien to the people around you. If you encounter a group of people who see the world in a fundamentally different way from you, you'll soon realize how subjective everything is. You'll see the way people travel within their presuppositions like a fish in water that's invisible to them. And you'll see that you do it too. It can be a powerful experience. Think about Barney Mayerson and how the alien-ness of Mars re-calibrates his priorities and allows him to regain some semblance of human dignity and humility.

But the idea that got me more excited was how these hard reverses reconstruct what Heidegger called our 'thrown-ness.' Check this:

"Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture. Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone (Steiner 1978). Heidegger wrote;

“This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the ‘thrownness’ of this entity into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the ‘there’. The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.”

No biology of parentage can answer the question of whence we came into Being. Neither do we know toward what end our existence has been projected, apart from our position in relation to death. Yet for Heidegger, it is this twofold mystery that makes the ‘thrown’ state of human life the more absolute and tangible. Human kind is ‘delivered over’ to a total, all-encompassing ‘thereness’ and Dasein must occupy this presentness and take it up into its own existence. Heidegger wished to emphasize the unmistakable ‘thereness’ of the world into which we are thrown (Steiner 1978)"

So when these characters are thrown into utterly new realities, they replay for us, in abrupt drama, our own sense of alienation we all feel because we can't really know our ultimate origins. Why are we here? Who made us? What is our purpose? We can't ever really answer these questions.

The revealing of a new level of reality is both stabilizing and destabilizing for us. The possibility that we could be hoodwinked into thinking this is the real world undermines lots of traditional philosophy and it even creeps some people out. On the other hand, once reality is shown to be an illusion and the character remains relatively unchanged, that speaks to the strength of the individual, and the personality's independence from the world around it.

But let's not forget that in every one of these hard reverse narratives the artificial reality has been produced for profit or other material gain. This speaks to the way our own surroundings are a capitalist tapestry of advertisements and hard-sold lifestyles. We are surrounded by an illusion otherwise known as 'The American Dream.' But any reality that dream once had is dissolving and so our experience under late capitalism is but a dream within a dream.

Quote of the Day

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.

Next Stop Pottersville

Way back when I started this blog (a little over a year ago) one of my first posts was about an Italian scholar named Frasca Gabriele and his contention that the 1946 Frank Capra film "It's A Wonderful Life" may very well have inspired PKD's notion of false realities. In that post I quoted another Italian Dick-head, Umberto Rossi, as saying,

"Well, I saw [the film] yesterday and I have to admit it's so true it's almost ludicrous. The Cosmic Puppets comes from that. But also other things (the scene in CASTLE where Tagomi visits our world, plus some aspects of UBIK)."

Well I just finished watching the movie and I have to agree. Especially after reading The Cosmic Puppets.

Whether or not PKD was consciously influenced by Capra's film or the short story it was based upon is irrelevant. The moral of Capra's film is the moral in any number of PKD stories: that in small and seemingly insignificant ways people are heroes; ordinary people, through kindness, and most importantly, through a kind of empathic connection to those around them, make this world real for us. It's late so I'll just quote Ursula Le Guin:

"There are no heroes in Dick's books but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

Everybody has seen 'It's A Wonderful Life' right?

I hadn't. I recognized some of the lines, and the famous scenes, but I didn't know the story. And, my friends, the Dickian lies in the details here, so please allow me to recap.

Capra's protagonist George Bailey (famously, and I must say brilliantly, portrayed by little Jimmy Stewart) is torn between his own dreams of travel and adventure, and carrying on his family's small loan business after his kindly old father dies suddenly of a stroke. George decides to postpone his dreams of "kicking off the dust of this old town" and stays in New Bedford in order to continue the family business as it battles with Scrooge-like tycoon Henry F Potter who embodies miserly greed completely untempered by any compassion for the townspeople upon whom his shadow falls. Imagine Montgomery Burns without the gentle ethics of Smithers to restrain his malevolence.

When George's uncle accidentally loses an $8000 deposit to the bank, threatening not only the family business but possible jail time for George on charges of fraud or embezzlement, George considers throwing himself off a bridge so that his family can collect his life insurance policy and settle his debts. Of course, a Twain-reading angel (second class) named Clarence shows George what the world would be like if he had never been born.

What's important in relation to PKD's work is the way the Joe-everyman hero, of modest means and high ethics, is set against the knife-edge of ruthless, cutthroat, Wall Street-style capitalism (uh, there's this one book called Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch that is kind of like that). In fact the entire town of Bedford Falls lies in the balance. In the reality in which George was never born, Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, the entire city transformed into a den of iniquity with bars, Burlesque houses, boxing arenas, pimps, hos - you know, straight thug life. You gotta see the way Stewart plays this. His panic upon discovering the "wrongness" of this reality is so perfectly Dickian - don't you think?).

Note to actors in this Ubik film this is how you play it.

In the most Dickian scene never featured in a PKD book, George Bailey stumbles around the dusty, decaying house he shares with his wife and family in his other reality. He's brushing aside cobwebs and dust, searching desperately for his family in his new reality of decay and emotional emptiness.

Of course when he finally sees his wife Mary (an old-maid librarian in this reality) he delivers his famous, "Mary, Mary, don't know me?" line.

While on the surface 'It's A Wonderful Life' appears to be a pretty straightforward anti-suicide, pro-God, Jesus, and family pic, a little deeper, it's is a scathing indictment against Ayn-Rand-style capitalistic greed. That's not to say that the film is anti-capitalism (or a Marxist critique of any kind), but rather that it promotes the same kind of honorable, decent, marketplace that PKD venerates in his books: small business owners who sweep the sidewalks in front of their store before it opens (I think you need more than two hands to count the number of times this scene has appeared in various PKD books); banks that provide loans that enable lower-middle class workers to buy a home; small town business, handshake deals, and a code of honor. The kind of business ethics I like to imagine PKD learned from his boss and mentor Herb Hollis. What both the movie and PKD's work seem to reject is ruthless capitalism, dehumanized capitalism, Palmer Eldritch-style capitalism, corporate thug capitalism. George Bailey, like so many of Dick's characters holds this tide of oligarchical evil at bay by simply by adhering to a higher ethical standard.

What's more 'It's A Wonderful Life' depicts the celestial world of Heaven as a fundamentally bureaucratic one in which angels are given ranks and promotions, and where prayers, when enough people say them, can get God of his couch and into action.

I'm currently reading Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and there are a number of similarities to 'It's A Wonderful Life': basically both depict people encountering worlds where they never existed. But a book like The Penultimate Truth also resonates with the film because in that novel the fake reality is perpetuated for profit. Similar to 'The Matrix', there is a stake in maintaining the illusory reality; certain entities are profiting off the bamboozlment and exploitation of others. These false realities lack realness because an essential human element is missing: the empathic connection between citizens that keeps everyone's greed in check.

Perhaps a better way to explain this is to note that in PKD's books and the film it is greed that alters and perverts reality, in both cases, until it is no longer 'real.'

Stay tuned for another post on the similarities between 'It's A Wonderful Life' and The Cosmic Puppets.

Chrome Eyes, Teeth, and Arms - Everywhere I Look

Above: An awesome portrait of Palmer Eldritch by reader Karla who many of you may remember as our Galactic Pot Maker.

In an article a couple months ago titled "Novel Inspriration For Would-Be Entrepreneurs", The Financial Times created a list of "the best novels featuring entrepreneurs", writing:

"We all need inspiration in life, and never more so than when starting or buying a business. So I believe that heroic examples of entrepreneurs in fiction can serve an important purpose beyond their literary merit - they might just motivate someone to go out a build a company."

Guess what their number one pick is?

Yep, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick. The author is easily the best science fiction writer of all time. This book, published in 1966 and one of his best, tells the tale of a sinister interplanetary businessman who discovers a new compound called Chew-Z. It seems to be the perfect recreational drug. Those who take it are taken to an imaginary universe - where entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch is god."

So, just by a show of hands, how many are feeling inspired to go out and build a company after reading T3SoPE? Could the answer to Rand's famous question: 'Where is John Galt' be "he's on his way back from Proxima Centauri"?

In other news, the SF site i09.com recently ran a list of Science Fiction Rupert Murdoch's:

"Eldritch is the ultimate media mogul, because he controls your dream afterlife, via his substance Chew-Z. Forget controlling what you watch on TV or at the movies -- getting to be in charge of your eternal afterlife is the ultimate media-whore rush. At least this guy is convinced Palmer Eldritch is a Rupert Murdoch archetype."

Yeah, he's using me as his sole reference. But I'm right, and so, by extension, is i09.com. Good for them! At least I've read the book. I'm not so sure about the Financial Times people. I hope they can tell the difference between a cautionary tale of capitalism run amok and Rand's fetishization of greed (which is number four on the list).

You may have noticed, I've added some Google Ads to this blog. All this talk about capitalism has made me even more determined to get that paper! So far I've made .04 cents! I'm starting to rethink quitting my high-paid job as a pre-fash consultant in order to make money at home.

Finally, I'm sure you've all given up on me, figuring I'll never finish blogging The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Good news, I'll take up right where I left off as soon over my summer vacation begins in late May.