Diving Into We Can Build You

I'm about a hundred pages into We Can Build You and am just loving it. This is a book I've read a number of times - even wrote pretty extensively on it in grad school (I'm looking for the file and hope to post it) - but, for some reason, I'm getting a lot more out of it during this read.

First off, pictured above and below is a mural Anne Dick made in the bathroom of her Point Reyes home during her marriage to PKD. I took the photo during one of my visits to Anne a year or so ago. This is the never-before-seen thing I mentioned in the last post.

This is how PKD describes the mural in WCBY:

"[Pris] was seated on the floor in the living room wearing pink pedal pushers. Her hair was cut short and in the years since I had seen her she had lost weight. Spread around her lay colored tile; she was in the process of cracking the tile into irregular pits with a huge pair of long-handled cutting pliers.
"Come look at the bathroom," she said, hopping up. I followed warily after her.
On the bathroom walls she had sketched all sorts of sea monsters and fish, even a mermaid; she had already partially tiled them with every color imaginable. The mermaid had red tiles for tits, one bright tile in the center of each breast" (23).

Apparently the tile mural was damaged a few years ago when a full-figured maid slipped in the tub while cleaning it and fell through one of the walls, but this has been repaired. One of the things that interests me about this book is the character Pris and how closely she has been associated with Anne, which of course makes sense, but when looking a little closer, I see the biographical origins of her character as more complex.

I think it's interesting that at one point, Dick ascribes his own psychological history to Pris. Louis narrates:

While he ate his breakfast Maury told me about her development. Originally she had been a withdrawn child, what they call encapsulated or introverted. She kept to herself, had all sorts of secrets, such as a diary and private spots in the garden. Then, when she was about nine years old she started having fears at night, fears so great that by ten she was up a good deal of the night roaming about the house. When she was eleven she had gotten interested in science; she owned a chemistry set and did nothing after school but fiddle with that--she had few or no friends, and didn't seem to want any.
It was in high school that real trouble had begun. She had become afraid to enter large public buildings, such as classrooms, and even feared the bus. When the doors of the bus closed she thought she was being suffocated. And she couldn't eat in public. Even if one single person was watching her, that was enough, and she had to drag her food off by herself, like a wild animal. And at the same time she had become compulsively neat. Everything had to be in its exact spot. She'd wander about the house all day, restlessly, making certain everything was clean--she'd wash her hands ten to fifteen times in a row" (32).

So, at this point I think it's an oversimplification to say that Pris is a depiction of Anne.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what Rickels has to say about WCBY. As difficult as his prose is, I think he may be able to offer some insight. Specifically, I am intrigued by Louis Rosen's reaction to meeting the Stanton simulacrum: Louis begins to suspect he, himself, might be a simulacrum, a mechanical replacement of a man no longer living. This is odd to me. Many people with mental illness, especially paranoia and schizophrenia, see others as possible simulacra - this is actually quite common, and I think related to Viktor Tausk's notion of the "Influencing Machine" in schizophrenia. But Rosen's preoccupation with his own inauthenticity is different and I hope Rickels can point to a specific case study that features this idee fixe (as he does with Richard Kongrosian's phobic body odor in The Simulacra). Perhaps this may shed some light on Rosen's preoccupation. Rollo May wrote:

"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."

I think Pris shares a lot in common with Ellen West, one of Ludwig Binswanger's more famous patients. The problem is most of Binswanger's work is written in German so it's hard to study (interested parties should consult Rollo May's anthology on Existential Psychology Existence). You can read a very short account of West's life here. West was an anorexic who battled depression, but as a gifted poet she provided her analysts with incredibly vivid depictions of her mental illness and elements of these accounts appear almost verbatim in some of Dick's books. West talked extensively of a 'tomb world.' Boeree writes:

"Ellen, somewhere in her childhood, has split her life into two opposing camps: On the one hand there is the "tomb world," which includes her physical and social existence. Her body, with its low needs, distracts her from her purposes. It gets older every day. Her society is bourgeois and corrupt. The people around her seem oblivious to all the evil and all the suffering. In the tomb world, everything is degenerate and degenerating, everything is being pulled down, into the grave, into a hole.

On the other hand there is the "ethereal world," the world of the soul, pure and clean, a world where what needs to be done is done, where acts are effortless because unencumbered by the weight of matter. In the ethereal world, we can be free and fly.

There are some people who try to ignore the "ethereal world." They don't like the anxieties and responsibilities that come with freedom. Some would rather be told what to do, and so join a cult or a gang or a multinational corporation. But they are still frightened, because they know this isn't right. They are not living their life, and so they can never be happy" (read the rest here).

Like West, Pris battles weight loss and despair. Louis describes Pris:

"...the skinniness of her body put the capper on the effect: she looked to me like a dance of death creation animated in some weird way, probably not through the usual assimilation of solid and liquid foods . . . perhaps she chewed only walnut shells. But anyhow, from one standpoint she looked good, although unusual to say the least. For my money, however, she looked less normal than the Stanton" (23)

I'm going to stop here. Not that I don't have a lot more to say, but the first rule in blogging is 'Don't write too much because people won't read it'

Stay tuned for more, including the hidden double meaning in the title....

We Can't Read It For You

Other projects have kept me from my reading and, to be honest, I'm just a few pages into We Can Build You. I haven't delved into secondary sources yet either. Just want to kind of read the book with an open mind. I noticed a couple things right off the bat:

WCBY is written in the first person! I've never made a serious survey of the different perspectives Dick used and when, but stories of his written with the 'I' voice are not particularly common - especially during this period in Dick's career. According to most of the bibliographic studies, Dick wrote Man in the High Castle, then Martian Time Slip, then We Can Build You (Dick characteristically mis-remembers this ordering in his most famous interview with Paul Williams) - and of course WCBY hiked a long, painful road to publication. But PKD's blending of high-brow literary techniques and science fiction settings makes his writing particularly interesting to me.

Much like Galactic Pot-Healer (and many of Dick's other books) lots of PKD fans have mixed feelings about WCBY - the most common criticism being the slow pacing which makes the book boring for some. I have a new pet theory that the first-person narration may not allow the novel to switch perspectives, a technique Dick uses to keep his early books moving. Question for the comment section: Are there any other early novels written say after Man in the High Castle but before Ubik that are in the first person? Dick's most famous use of first person is in the remarkable personage of Angel Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. What we may be seeing in WCBY is an early stab at the immediacy of the first person voice lifted from mainstream or high-brow literature and spliced into pulp-sf. This experiment may be boring for some, but I think the mundane aspects of the novel are precisely the place where it gets interesting.

We Can Build You is very autobiographical - from the very first organ ad seen in the paper which was inspired by PKD and Anne Dick's search for a piano in the house. And of course, there's the Jaguar:

"The Mark VII Saloon Model Jaguar is an ancient huge white car, a collector's item, with fog lights, a grill like the Rolls, and naturally hand-rubbed walnut, leather seats, and many interior lights. Maury kept his priceless old 1954 Mark VII in mint condition and tuned perfectly, but we were able to go no faster than ninety miles an hour on the freeway which connects Ontario with Boise."

Sutin writes: "For Phil, one of the greatest joys of his new "good life" was sports cars. [Phil and Anne] bought a used Peugot then traded it for a '53 white Jaguar Mark VII Saloon with a mahogany dashboard, gray leather upholstery, and a sunroof. Phil cranked it out to 96 MPH on the freeway."

Anne Dick writes a lot about the connection the autobiographical connections in We Can Build You and I'll get into those soon enough. For now, I just wanted to let you know I'm reading the book and should have more to say about it over the weekend.

We Can Build You It Is!

The results are in! I've just one last stack of essays to grade before diving into We Can Build You. A cursory search reveals there's been more written about WCBY than I would have first expected. So I will begin reading the book and gathering secondary sources for our upcoming discussion as soon as I get these essays out of the way.

Obviously, Ubik was a close second. Let's plan on getting to to that over the summer!

More Bertrand on GPH

Frank Bertrand is on a roll, cracking the GPH-egg wide open. I fully endorse any and all T.S. Eliot related PKD research:

It seems a curious thing happened on the way to the realization of Phil Dick’s novel The Galactic Pot-Healer. In a 11-3-67 letter to his literary agent (Scott Meredith), Phil writes, “Here are the three signed contracts back, to be given to Berkley Books for their signatures. (The contracts are for the outline called THE GALACTIC POT-HEALER.)” Some three months later, in another letter (2-28-68) to his literary agent, Phil writes, “I have finished the novel for Berkley Books, the outline of which is called, THE GALACTIC POT-HEALER. All that is left is doing the final draft, which usually takes me no more than ten days to two weeks…. The novel came out quite well, I think. If Berkley doesn’t buy it I’m sure Doubleday would.”

Then, some thirteen years later, during a 9-30-81 interview with Gregg Rickman, Phil says, “Somewhere I just dashed off Galactic Pot-Healer, and there I just winged it. I had no plot or anything. It was very much like that second half of The Unteleported Man….Ursula LeGuin liked it, and John Brunner knew that it was out of control. He told me, look, that book got out of your control. And he was quite right. I had no idea from page to page what I was doing [sic] to do.”

What happened between having an “outline,” “ doing the final draft,” and “The novel came out quite well, “ to “just dashed of,” and ending up with “no plot or anything?”

When I’ve re-read Galactic Pot-Healer it reminds me of a lot of Phil’s other novels, and some short stories. That is, and without getting into a pedantic/esoteric discussion about “The Intentional Fallacy,” there are almost too many multi-layered/interrelated ideas/concepts (DNA strand like!) thrown together in it. And while it’s certainly true, as Josh Lind has incisively noted, that some of Jung’s ideas were an influence, and can be gleaned/culled from the novel, there is a lot more than Jung going on in Galactic Pot-Healer.

As an initial example, let us consider about halfway through chapter one, wherein Joe is talking on a vid-phone with Gauk, a minor Soviet official, about The Game, and Joe reflects, “…with nothing to do, no tasks or sorrows or difficult problems. Nothing but the harsh vacuity of their collective society….” And let us juxtapose this with what Joe thinks, about two pages later, “Because, he thought, I am too hollowed out to participate any longer. Even if they – the others who play The Game – need me, need my corny contribution.”

It’s almost too easy to interpret the phrase “too hollowed out” as an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s 1927 poem, “The Hollow Men,” as an indicator of the angst and/or alienation that Joe Fernwright feels. Perhaps these lines from the first section of Eliot’s poem help us to make sense of what Joe is experiencing:

“We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rat’s feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;”

But, then, we have the other phrase, “harsh vacuity,” which is, I would argue, an implicit reference to Viktor E. Frankl’s (1905-1997) notion of “existential vacuum.” In the third edition of his book, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (NY: Touchstone, 1984), he writes about what logotherapy is meant to cure:

“…the feeling of the total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a void within themselves; they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum.” (pgs. 110-111)

I would also like to remind us, as I’ve done more than once before, in a variety of places, that in a Philip K. Dick novel, “things are not what they seem” (Phil’s favorite quote from Gilbert & Sullivan).

Is our primary protagonist in Galactic Pot-Healer, Joe Fernwright, suffering from at least alienation, if not existential vacuum? The evidence does seem to support this interpretation.

Yours in kipple,

frank c. bertrand

Thanks Frank!

Isn't there an interview where Dick says the Glimmung is the primary protagonist in GPH?

Eric Carl Link on GPH

I'm enjoying the various readings of the end of GPH. Reading through Erik Carl Link's Understanding Philip K Dick, I found this paragraph from his four page discussion of Galactic Pot-Healer and thought I'd add it to the stew:

"Critics often read this seemingly cynical ending in positive terms, arguing that although the pot is 'awful' that it is nevertheless a positive step forward for Joe, and that future pots will improve as his skills improve. This might be wishful thinking on the part of these critics, however, for there is no evidence in the text that Joe's future pots will improve. On the contrary, it is clear that the creation of the awful pot, Joe poured all the talent and skill at his disposal, and it still resulted in failure. If there is anything positive to take from this comically tragic ending of the novel, it is only to be found in the nobility of the effort itself: the world may be subject to relentless cosmic decay, but there is something noble in the efforts of the individual to repair that which is broken" (73).

Doesn't it seem like Link is assuming that art has to be good to be fulfilling or meaningful? I can think of two pieces of evidence to support my positive reading of the ending. 1) The fact that Joe, before he even contemplated becoming a pot-maker, had decided to travel on to Mali's home planet rather than return to Earth. This pretty clearly demonstrates he's become self-actualized, which, for Dick, is often the heroic deed. 2) If we go back to Dick's interview with Rickman, he says, " I was afraid I would fall back into that opening sort of dreary monotonous thing that [Joe Fernwright] is stuck with, and lose the whole point of the book that way." Isn't Dick suggesting implicitly that the point of the novel was Joe's escape from dreary monotony?

Do the two interpretations of the ending mirror one another? Seem to... Is there a dark, depressing, negative interpretation? Yep. Also a hopeful, upbeat, mentally hygienic reading? You see where I'm going with this...

Link's book is a good introduction to PKD. I'll be writing more about it in the future.

Robert Bee on Galactic Pot-Healer

Frank Bertrand pointed me to Robert Bee's article on GPH written for the Internet Review of Science Fiction, An Alien God and a Jungian Allegory, in which Bee concludes:

"The last sentence [of the novel] emphasizes Joe’s failure: the pot is awful. Joe has returned to isolation and failure, the state he was in at the beginning of the novel. The characters that remained with Glimmung are part of a group mind that makes them greater than they were before; they retain their individuality and remain in touch with their deeper collective unconscious. Joe cannot create art because he has returned to a spiritually impoverished existence. Joe is the "hero" who does not complete his quest and cannot ultimately accept the integration of conscious and unconscious. Dick’s ending is an unusual take on Jungian style allegories, but it coheres with his desire to depict ordinary people in extraordinary situations; after all, an ordinary person might be overwhelmed by the attempt to recover spirituality in the modern world."

I can only assume that, after writing this, Mr Bee placed the gun against his head and gently pulled the trigger. Besides, the question is not whether the pot is 'good' or 'awful' - it's about whether or not it has wu. I think it does. From The Man in the High Castle:

"'The hands of the artificer,' Paul said, 'had wu, and allowed that wu to flow into this piece. Possibly he himself knows only that this piece satisfies. It is complete, Robert. By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquility associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of some medieval saint could be examined. However, this is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I am deeply moved, as you may see.'"

Bonus Bertrand on GPH

In an addendum to yesterday's guest post, Frank Bertrand clarifies his point (which I thought was perfectly clear), and, in addition, provides three important quotes to show that while critics have flirted with Jungian reads of PKD's work, Lind's essay on GPH was perhaps the first exclusively Jungian analysis of GPH to see the light of day:

Methinks I need to do a bit of self-correction; I’m quite willing to admit my mistakes. What I was trying to state about Josh Lind’s essay is that not only is it the first in quite a while that I actually enjoyed reading, but is also the first, that I’m aware of, that uses some of Carl Gustav Jung’s concepts throughout the whole essay to explicate one of Philip K. Dick’s novels, in this case, Galactic Pot-Healer. And as far as I know there is no book-length study about any of Phil Dick’s fiction using just Jung’s concepts. Yes, indeed, there have been brief mentions (at most several pages) here and there over the years applying Jungian ideas to Phil Dick’s fiction. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My error, if I did that. Here are three to consider:

In Fredric Jameson’s 1975 essay, “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr Bloodmoney,” he proposes that Phil Dick’s work can be put into three distinct cycles, the Nazi, Jungian, and metaphysical. About the Jungian he states, “…of which the best effort is undoubtedly Galactic Pot-Healer.”

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his 1982 PhD dissertation titled, The Novels of Philip K. Dick, writes in chapter 8, “…the cathedral is appropriate to Jung’s own religious art; and the Glimmung and its Shadow stand as figures for archetypal characters that Jung described.”

In chapter 5 of Patricia S. Warrick’s 1987 book-length study of Philip K. Dick, titled Mind in Motion The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, she writes, “Dick freely acknowledged that Carl Jung with his theory of archetypes and the creative process was a major influence in his thinking and writing. Nowhere is this influence more apparent than in Galactic Pot-Healer.”

This is perhaps why I was a bit perplexed when Josh Lind mentioned “critics” (plural) several times in his essay, but there was only one critic (singular) listed in his notes, Douglas A. Mackey. And in chapter 5 of Mackey’s 1988 book-length study of Philip K. Dick (titled: Philip K. Dick), we can find, “…the work [Galactic Pot-Healer] is almost a Jungian allegory. It does not lack Dick’s characteristic humanizing touches, but its tendency toward myth makes it unique among his novels.”

If the phrase “Jungian allegory” seems partly familiar, consider Stanislaw Lem’s 1975 essay “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” wherein he writes, “ For all that Galactic Pot-Healer leans toward allegory, it does not adopt this position either unambiguously or definitively, and a like indeterminacy as to genre is also characteristic of other novels by Dick….”

In that this evidence does indicate the influence of Jung on Phil Dick has been noted since at least 1975, why has it taken until now for a full essay exploring said influence (Lind’s) to finally appear?

Yours in kipple,

frank c. bertrand

Thanks again, Frank. Also see Mr Hand's comments to the last post. You guys are firing on all cylinders and I'm just spinning my wheels! I also think Rickels makes a compelling case the that the Black Glimmung is related to Lacan's notion of the mirror stage. I hope to get into this in more detail later.

Frank Bertrand on Galactic Pot-Healer

Veteran Dick-Head Frank Bertrand sent me the following post which raises some interesting questions about the narrow range of literary approaches currently being applied to Dick's irv:

My sincere thanks for posting the essay by Josh Lind titled: “Vessels of Spiritual Transformation” C.G. Jung and Philip K. Dick.” It’s the first one is quite a while that I actually enjoyed reading all the way through. Lind’s essay was cogent, relevant, and not laden with obfuscating academic jargon. Might this be the same Joshua H. Lind who wrote a 151 page MA Thesis titled: Expansive Reality and Restricted Desire in Three Novels by Philip K. Dick, that was accepted in 2004 at George Mason University?

Josh is correct to write “In fact, there have been no significant Jungian readings of any of Dick’s work – despite his documented knowledge of, and interest in, Jungian theory.” Some of this documentation would be that as early as a 6-7-64 letter to fellow write James Blish, Philip K. Dick writes “…as Jung says, by the unconscious, by your repressed hostilities,” to a November 1977 interview wherein Phil Dick states, “Yes. Yes, definitely. He [Jung] was a major influence on me,” and more recently in a 12-27-80 letter to Patricia Warrick in which Phil Dick writes, “I started out with Jung and Parsifal when I was 15 years old….”

The important and neglected question here is WHY have critics, academic or otherwise, chosen to overlook and/or ignore such an obvious connection between Philip K. Dick and Carl Gustav Jung? Is it, perhaps, not as fashionable and faddish as postmodernism, mysticism, and structuralism?

This seriocomic situation is reminiscent of a 2-1-60 letter Phil Dick wrote to Eleanor Dimoff, wherein he writes: “I call your attention to various critical articles on the novel, one by Trilling and another by José-Ortega y Gasset. It is the job of the novel to stuff up all the cracks in the walls, to shut out the “actual” world by being entire – and my novels evidently are not quite entire.”

Has anyone yet read an essay or book about Philip K. Dick that uses the literary criticism of Trilling and Gasset to explicate Dick’s fiction?

Again, why are the denizens of academia choosing to use only certain favorite critical concepts while putting aside much more obvious associations that Phil Dick himself mentions?

I really would like to try and understand this. Cogent responses would be most welcomed.

Yours in kipple,
Frank C. Bertrand

Thanks Frank! This guest post actually comes at the perfect time as I'm tearing through a four-week summer semester, preparing for a family gathering next weekend, and working on some paying gigs. And all this happens before I hop in van with Erik Davis next week for a two-day drive to Colorado for the PKD fest! So, gentle readers, ever wanted to see your name up here in lights? Now's the time to write a guest post.

First Thoughts on Galactic Pot-Healer

Photo from The Heldscalla Opening Exhibition 2007.

It occurred to me while writing my last post summarizing secondary sources on GPH that perhaps I was stalling, running in place, reading what others have said because I don't know what to make of this book. Later, I realized that was a very Dickian conundrum... So, whatever, here it goes.

I think this is an important PKD novel. I wouldn't, however, give it to someone as the first PKD book they should read. This is not a first-tier PKD novel like VALIS or Do Androids Dream, but it's not an unimportant one, like say Vulcan's Hammer.

One weird thing about the novel is the lack of detail. Did you ever notice PKD rarely describes natural settings (aside from the breast-like mountains what's-his-name drives off between in Cosmic Puppets)? This book has extensive underwater scenes and yet there is almost no detail, no descriptions of the smells, the feel of the water, nothing. It's very disconcerting. Let's not argue about whether that's intentional; it may be. But it had a weird effect on me as a reader. Here's the first description of Plowman's Planet:

"Strong-armed members of the ship's crew manually unscrewed the hatch; outside air eddied in, smelling odd and cold. It seemed to Joe that the ocean was close; he sensed it in the air. Shielding his eyes he gazed out against a weak sun; he distinguished the outline of a reasonably modern-looking city, and, past it, hills in a mixture of brown and gray. But the ocean is somewhere nearby, he said to himself."

Here's a the first look below the surface of Mare-Nostrum:

"The light of the staging chamber faded out above him. He snapped on his own torch and allowed himself to be tugged along, down and down; the water became utterly black, except for the vague, seemingly half-real quadrant illuminated by his torch. And, below him, Mali's torch glowed, like the phosphorescent light of an exceedingly deep sea-fish."

I appreciate efficient, economical prose, but Phil, man, we're on another planet! You gotta tell us what it looks like... Of course, you know I'm hesitant to give writing advice to PKD.

When I started telling people I was going to read GPH this summer, several Dick-heads I respect said immediately, 'Oh yeah, that's one of my favorites.' I remember Rickman saying somewhere it was one of his favorites too. But others, including some commenters here, were let's just say, underwhelmed. As you have read in my quoting of PKD in the secondary sources, he both bragged about this novel to Rickman and called it 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' in the Exegesis. So we have a hung jury. While I don't think GPH is one of Dick's best works, I think it is an important work. I also really enjoyed it.

I think there are three important ways to consider this book:

1) As a novel about craftsmanship and salvation through creation.

2) As a religious/psychological allegory.

3) As prescient autobiography.

So let's start with number one. As Umberto Rossi noted in the comment section and Josh Lind argues in his essay on GPH, this is a book about making art. Furthermore, the novel chronicles the personal journey one must make in order to transcend the oppressive shallowness of our society and become an artist. When we first meet Joe Fernwright he's living an eerily familiar life. Well not my life, because I teach in a classroom and have an office rather than a cubicle - PKD actually uses the word 'cubicle' - but he's depicting the world that a lot of us live in now, in 2010: networked to our friends, playing time-killing games with each other, enjoying artificial views. Instead of being our becoming complacent, the comfort of modern life is slowly devivifying.

GPH breaks the mold of many PKD novels by following only one character for the first few chapters, a far cry from the multi-foci plot of Man in the High Castle or even Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep... This is Fernwright's novel, and his isolation intensifies his despondency.

For me, Fernwright is a immediately sympathetic as a pot-healer, a repairer of old ceramics in a world of throwaway plastics. Fernwright is not a Jack Isidore, dangerously retreading tires to eek out a few extra bucks for the auto shop; his is a career that stands in opposition to the disposable future, and his craft is becoming obsolete. Sadly, this is a kind of American archetype: the skilled worker who's been replaced by innovation, and Joe(!) represents this perfectly. The way I read the book, if Joe were getting enough broken pots to fix, he wouldn't be worried about the ultimate significance of his life. Joe's solution to his problems is also strangely American: frugally saving his money, so he can spend it on a psychic. Our boy Joe is a follower, not a leader.

Fernwright embarks on his journey when he is contacted by the Glimmung who first offers him 35000 Crumbles to travel to Plowman's Planet and assist in the raising of Heldscalla. Interesting that the first offer is money rather than purpose and significance. But when Joe gets to Heldscalla, even when Fernwright has a vase to repair, he is in some fundamental sense still passive, still repairing what others have made, and while I think this is a job he also would have found fulfilling and could have been satisfied doing, this is not where he ultimately ends up.

Fernwright trades the certain but mundane life he has on Earth for this much more exciting but uncertain existence. When Joe enters the wider world of mystery, he also finds that he can no longer be certain of anything: the Books of the Kalends predict seemingly contradictory outcomes, the Glimmung's powers are clearly quite advanced, but it's also accident prone.

Joe and the other assembled artisans are there to assist the Glimmung and this complicates matters for Joe. Part of the danger of being a follower is the real possibility that you will be made to do something you either don't want to do, or something you think is fundamentally wrong. Now Joe must trust the Glimmung's intentions in addition to his ability to accomplish its objectives. Ultimately, the artisans must merge with the Glimmung in order to raise Heldscalla.

Joe Fernwright ultimately leaves the Glimmung, opting instead to strike out on his own. Now he is ready to go to Mali's planet rather than return to Earth. Our follower is now marking his own course forward, free to follow his own desires. How is the final bit of this transformation accomplished? Through the creation of a ceramic pot of his own.

Many readers complain the book ends abruptly; others say it kind of peters out. I think readers get this feeling mostly because the theophanic climax is so hokey (there, I said it). I actually like the ending, because it suggests perhaps the greatest victory Joe (or any of us) is capable of is pursuit of our own artistic desires. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, written the year before GPH, features a similar character arc for Deckard who goes from operating under society's (flawed) moral code to living based on his personal moral code, and it turns out that what he thinks is right and wrong is a lot better than that society's formulation. Fernwright goes from mending others' ceramic art to making his own. Joseph Campbell quotes someone (is it Schopenhauer?) who said that at the end of your life you look back and it reads like a novel, replete with irony, comic relief, unexpected twists and turns, recurring themes. You either write that novel for yourself, or it is written for you.

And so Joe Fernwright goes from saving up money to pay a psychic to divine his future, to giving his life over to a superior being in service of its goals and objectives, to creating his own future, with his own hands. As Josh Lind points out in his essay, 'Vessels of Spiritual Transformation' the final line about the pot has a double meaning:

"...the pot is ‘awful,’ an object that inspires awe. It is a sublime object that is simultaneously greater than him, but also somehow his own product. It joins matter and form, conscious and unconscious, and therefore reflects what Jung referred to as the coniunctio, the joining of opposites (Hopcke 124)."

Stay tuned for our next exciting installment when we'll discuss the novel's allegorical meanings...

More Pot-Healer Secondary Sources

Just as I suspected, PKD has a good bit to say about Galactic Pot-Healer in Rickman's indispensable interview book: Philip K Dick: In His Own Words.

Rickman and PKD are talking about how PKD occasionally writes himself into a corner. Rickman asks if PKD makes up the books as he's writing them and PKD says this was especially true of GPH:

PKD: ... Ol' Brunner, John Brunner said to me one time about Galactic Pot-Healer, that one got away from you completely, didn't it? And I said, yeah, it completely got away from me.
But it didn't get away from me in the sense that it was running ahead of me, that I was trying to catch up with it. I mean, I was the one who was dragging it along behind me. I was winging it, but I was the one who was doing the work. That novel did not write itself. That was a very difficult novel to write. But once I established that kind of soaring quality, you know, where they just move so rapidly, it was hard to maintain. I was afraid I would fall back into that opening sort of dreary monotonous thing that [Joe Fernwright] is stuck with, and lose the whole point of the book that way.
So once I took off, I had to keep it going. In a way the book got away from me, but in a way I had to carry the book all the way to the end.
I liked that book. You know, you made some interesting points in your essay, like the Books of the Kalends tell the truth, and sometimes they lie" (90).

In the essay PKD is talking about, Rickman actually compares the Kalends' Books and the Tench (in Maze of Death) with the I Ching, which PKD used famously in writing The Man in the High Castle, among other things. One could certainly trip out for awhile on how writing science fiction is like casting the yarrow, and to have these other oracular elements in PKD's texts that use language in a dynamic relationship with reality... (sorry too much Rickels). In other words, the Books of the Kalends' seem to shape and alter reality, rather than just reflecting or recording it, however, their power to predict future outcomes is flawed (the question of free will versus destiny is indeterminate). Of course, in Maze of Death (MoD -- SPOILER ALERT!) the Tench is an avatar representing the computer that is creating the characters' reality; like the author of the novel, the Tench is the weaver of the illusory world. I'm pretty sure, I Ching folks think that you alter the future when you cast and divide the yarrow, but I don't honestly know. These kinds of Schroedinger's what-if conversations are probably best left to the people properly versed in quantum mechanics, and that ain't me.

In another chapter, Rickels talks at more length about The Game in GPH. Did you get that? In a chapter unrelated to GPH, Rickels talks again about GPH. That's why the book so desperately needs an index! Rickels draws our attention to the way the game is introduced. First Fernwright goes for a cigarette, but then, realizing he will be caught and fined, he puts the cig away and starts thinking:

What do I really yearn for? he asked himself. That for which oral gratification is a surrogate. Something vast, he decided; he felt the primordial hunger gape, huge-jawed, as if to cannibalize everything around him. To place what was outside inside.
Thus he played; this had created, for him, The Game.
Pressing the red button he lifted the receiver and waited while the creaking, slow relay machinery fed his phone an outside line.
"Squeeg," the phone said. Its screen displayed nonobjective colors and segments. Electronic crosstalk made blurrily visible.
From memory he dialed. Twelve numbers, starting with the three which connected him with Moscow.
"Vice-Commissioner Saxton Gordon's staff calling," he said to the Russian switchboard officer whose face glowered at him from the miniature screen. "More games, I suppose," the operator said.
Joe said, "A humanoid biped cannot maintain metabolic processes by means of plankton flour merely."

Interesting, right? From the very first mention, Dick associates the game with a kind of oral fixation. Rickels talks about Ludwig Binswanger's dissertation work under Jung which involved testing word association in schizophrenics (I didn't know about this) and then writes:

"The word association game whereby otherwise suicidal nerds keep themselves from killing themselves or taking a psychotic break produces, in the one patch of writing that is clinical evidence of Dick's own sense that Galactic Pot-Healer was his one completely psychotic work, the other schizophrenic word for world and time and of the things in it. In Martian Time-Slip it was 'gubbish,' which enters sentences as gubbler gubbling that which, once the sentence is delivered, is gubbish" (149)

What Rickels is getting at there (and I'm at least partially guessing about this -- I mean did you read that?) is that the following exchange in GPH introduces the world 'kipple.' (Yes, even though that lady said she made the word up in The Gospel According to Philip K Dick):

Fernwright thinks to himself:

Q. Do you like Yeats?
A. I don't know, I've never tried any.
For a time his mind was empty and then he thought this:
Q. Do you like Kipling?
A. I don't know, I've never kippled.

Kipple, a word seemingly derived from similar play with language, goes on to become a central term in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a term for the all-consuming disorder that slowly destroys all form. Rickels calls 'kipple' "the schizophrenic word for world and time of and the things in it." (He astutely notes that 'gubble' is the other PhilDickian word for this universal entropy). This is precisely where The Game takes its players: to that schizophrenic isolation where words and concepts contain only personal meanings.

I think what Rickels is getting at here is that this Game is sort of schizophrenic in the sense that it involves unhooking words from consensual meaning. The collection of words 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' contains most of its meaning in a social context; the phrase coheres for all those who understand the collection of words as being a) a reference to John Donne's famous line, or b) Hemingway's lifting of Donne's phrase for the title of one of his novels, or c) a Metallica song of the same name (which could be traced to either Hemingway or Donne's use of the phrase). The cohesiveness of this phrase, its meaning, is embedded in a social context. You could not explain the significance of the phrase 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' to an alien without mentioning art, literature -- in short, culture. A schizophrenic is locked in a private world, where all meaning is personal, idiosyncratic. The Game involves transposing a familiar phrase we understand based on our shared cultural knowledge into a collection of synonyms which are meaningless without their unifying cultural referent(!). In The Game, language moves counter to meaning, and yet, while this seems like a metaphor for schizophrenia (the condition under which personal meanings subsume societal meanings and perceptions), the goal of The Game is to restore the collective meaning of the phrase, to emerge from the isolation of the Idios Kosmos.

But, and this is important, I read The Game as symptomatic of the dystopian Earth portrayed at the beginning of the novel. The Game, like the cubicle, and Fernwright's windowless apartment (con-apt?) with the artificial view projected on the wall, is an agent of derangement. But perhaps it is therapeutic as well.

Now here are some discussion questions, things to think about as I begin writing up my thoughts on the novel:

Is the Glimmung a God?

Is the Glimmung a Christ-like figure?

What is the significance of Fernwright's journey in the book? How does he change?

What is the significance of Joe's decision to exit the Glimmung rather than staying inside?

Poetic Allusion of the Day

Here's an interesting allusion from Galactic Pot-Healer. As Joe and Mali prepare to descend into the depths of Mare Nostrum, Joes waxes poetic:

"'I must be gone,' "Joe quoted, trying to remember how it went. " 'There is a grave where daffodil and lily wave.'"
The robot said, " 'And I would please the hapless faun, buried under the sleepy ground.' A favorite of mine. Yeats, I believe. Do you think, Mr. Sir, that you are descending into a grave? That what stands before you is death? That to descend is to die? Answer in twenty-five words or less."

The reference is to Yeats's 1889 "The Song of the Happy Shepherd":

THE woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? - By the Rood,
Where are now the watring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass -
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs - the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell.
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be.
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

Descending Into Pot-Healer

After a short road trip with the band to SoCal, I'm back at my copy of Galactic Pot-Healer. In fact I'm only 30 pages from the end. I was a little overwhelmed thinking about how I would write about this book. It's kinda 'floopy' -- sort of elastic and weird. Critically speaking, it's a slippery critter to cage.

Luckily, today in the mail I received (no not an invitation to raise an ancient and mysterious cathedral on a distant planet) but rather a sample copy of Rickels's I Think I Am: Philip K Dick which features a whole chapter on GPH. It may take me some time to digest it, but it looks to be good stuff. And perhaps he will help me corral these elusive thematics.

I'd also like to point to Mr Hand's comments for the previous post. He got me thinking about how the Mare Nostrum represents more than just the Freudian or Jungian unconscious, but rather seems to represent a field of experience outside our normal reality. In the dark ocean all things seem to conform to an opaque and unknowable logic. All the elements related to the Glimmung and Plowman's planet, the sacred books, the shards of pottery with pictographs, the messages from the Glimmung, ring with an air of certainty, but unfortunately, they are almost instantaneously contradicted by some other equally certain divine proclamation.

Joe Fernwright, by leaving his mundane life, is forced to operate in this state of extreme uncertainty. What he substitutes for routine is an unceasing questioning of the Universe and his own place in it. He confronts death, in the form of his own rotting, submerged, and of course talking corpse. He confronts both the Glimmung and the anti-Glimmung; this opposition suggests that one of the entities is good and the other is evil, which in turn may suggest that these are only these two spiritual forces which permeate the Universe.

What's important is that every effort Joe makes to understand what is happening around him fails, and I think all efforts to understand this unknowable field of experience are doomed to fail.

I'm also struck by how GPH reads as prescient autobiography for PKD who can be seen as our lunch-pail hero, called by the Pink Light in 1974 to a higher purpose, asked to make sense of the nonsensical. Horselover Fat, often in VALIS, interprets his 'mystical experiences' as a call to action, and yet what I suspect we will learn when a larger culling of the Exegesis is finally available is that all of Dick's visions, all of these calls to action, were unresolvable, an insistent prodding towards some act of unification, by which what is fragmented will be made whole. Think Sisyphus, but instead of a obeying a punishment for some crime, the guy pushes the rock up the hill because obscure signs (of divine origin??) on the side of the path suggest it's the right thing to do. You'd certainly read the signs differently the second time up the hill wouldn't you?

Starting Galactic Pot-Healer

So, here we go. Let's keep our discussion of GPH here in the comments section, since I've learned that many of my readers avoid Facebook like the plague.

What I'd like to do is start by talking about the dystopian future where (when?) the book begins. Reader PAK writes in the comments section: "The description of a managerial-society on Terra, especially the apparent merging of the US and USSR into one bleak, super-bureaucratic edifice, is especially reminiscent of Erich Fromm's description of mass-neurosis in The Sane Society." I will ask Anne Dick if PKD talked about this book, or Fromm in general. The Sane Society came out in 1955 so it may very well have influenced Dick's future world.

Erik Davis, in an email to me, writes that he especially loves the beginning of GPH because "it's so...now: people working in shitty cubicles, trying to connect to one another by playing networked games..."

Now I've thought a lot about The Game and I'd like to write a bit about it. The Game suggests, like much else in PKD's irv, that he thought of language as living, dynamic, and capable of changing the world outside itself. Think of the T.E.N.C.H. in Maze of Death. But The Game is slightly different. It exploits an aspect of language (the fact that we have more than one word to denote something) to create recreation, a way to pass the time. Insofar as the The Game is unproductive, it is actually counterproductive, as it distracts citizens from the degraded state of the society around them; it's an opiate of the masses. I was especially struck by the example 'water sheep,' which, it turns out, is a transliteration of 'hydraulic ram.' By translating the individual words in the sentence, players of the game are able to eliminate the meaning of the sentence, thereby destroying the phrase's cohesiveness. The object of the game is then to translate the words back by apprehending the original meaning of the sentence. In other words, you begin by imagining cohesiveness and then trying to attain it in the sentence. Do we play a game like this in our society? Yep. When you talk to Conservative Uncle and he says something about 'Global Climate Change' and you think to yourself 'oh, Global Warming!' When you go to buy a used car and they insist on calling it 'Pre-Owned.' This use of language is as mundane, circular, and unsatisfying as the rest of the society. I need some more time to suss out exactly what it is I'm trying to get at here - maybe in the comments section.

The opening of GPH reads very much like the beginning of any hero's adventure (Joseph Campbell anyone? PKD knew his work well): the protagonist struggles with a mundane and unsatisfying existence - think Luke Skywalker under uncle Owen's thumb. The Glimmung seems to be offering exactly what Fernwright is looking for. Isn't that usually a bad thing in literature?

I love the little touches, especially the simulated panoramic view projected on the wall of Fernwright's home, the broken component in the closet that tricks your brain into thinking the view is real.

What say you?

Summer Reading... Milky Way Street Professor of Treatment of Container

As summer heats up, it's time to pick a PKD novel to read and discuss this year. In the spirit of our times, this year the selection will be made by me, as opposed to some pseudo-democratic 'voting.' I'll bet you're dying to know which novel we're going to read. (Oh right, I gave that away in the title of the post). The answer is (drum roll please) Galactic Pot-Healer.

About 50 pages into Pot-Healer, I'm discovering this may be one of Dick's most underrated novels. It's got all the important elements: the importance of craftsmanship, the personal search for meaning, the societal trend towards mass production and mindless consumerism, and a huge, submerged, Cathedral on a distant planet!

Much like our discussion of Maze of Death, our examination of GPH will not be an exhaustive annotation of the text, but rather an exploration of its themes, plot, characters, and maybe even 'meaning.' Additionally, I will be trying to locate anything academic that may have been written about this book.

The comments section here on Blogger has worked pretty well for our discussions in the past, but I'm wondering if we should give some thought to creating a Facebook page where we could discuss the book in a slightly more open forum. Please share your thoughts about this and anything else you can think of in the comments.

I think I will write three posts as I go through the novel, one on roughly each third of the plot, summarizing the material and offering my commentary. Additionally, I am preparing a pre-reading post that covers the details of the book's writing and publishing. Please feel free to email me or contact me through the comments section if you would like to contribute to our discussion in any other way.

Even More on Maze of Death

Man I had a crazy day. Being an adjunct lecturer at a California state school with the Terminator running things is crazy! A full eight hours of teaching sure gets my mind revved up though, and on my BART ride home, I kept thinking about A Maze of Death. That novel is kicking my ass.

Got home and did some research:

Ian Watson in his essay Lathe of Heaven and the Role of Dick [published in SFS]:

"The religion of A Maze of Death is a construct imposed on the crew of a starship during a voluntary trance state by a computer originally provided as a toy to while away the long years in space, which has become their only form of mental "salvation" once their ship is crippled. Yet the godlike figure of the Intercessor, invented as part of the false reality, reaches into the reality of the ship objectively, to offer salvation of a kind. (Seth Morley's salvation is to be reborn as a desert plant on a world where no one will bother him, where he can be both conscious of life, and yet asleep, enjoying a vegetable dream consciousness [§16]). Thus the human generates God."

I like this.

But better is the notion of the starship at the end of the novel as a stage in the Bardo - the nebulous worlds between lives. Remember the polyencephalic world ends when Seth dies in the noser crash, and the scenes in spaceship with the rest of crew read like the liminal state of the Bardo: as Seth is guided by the intercessor (bodhisattva?) to his next life as a desert cactus.

From Wikipedia (I know, not the best source, but, well, it's late):

"Used somewhat loosely, the term "bardo" may refer to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, to, later on, terrifying hallucinations arising from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions."

My question for anonymous (who asked in a previous comment thread if Seth has any corporeal form outside the polyencephalic worlds) is if the rest of the crew have any corporeal form outside of Seth's consciousness? The only problem with the theory that they don't is that the book starts with Ben Tallchief's POV. I think Erik Davis did his master's thesis on Maze, and I think if he did he probably tackled this angle, so I'll drop him an email and see what he's got to say.

Regardless, the novel's narrative devours itself like an oroboros in a really brilliant way that makes me think I should read more PKD books. Tomorrow I'll find and post PKD's description of his bad LSD trip with Ray Nelson in 1964 that he included in Maze - the part with the snow world and the Latin.

Chime in in the comments!

Maze's End

I finished the novel over the weekend, and just in the nick of time. Classes start tomorrow.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Oh man, it was just a big simulation in their brains! "This is a huge oversimplification, but you can think of it as The Matrix times a million!" But, I gotta say, I wasn't disappointed with the ending. However, I think if you tried to adapt the movie to the screen now, with the ending intact, you'd have audiences rioting in the aisles, hurling Jujyfruits at the screen.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Delmak-O was going to be an illusory world. In fact I kept remembering this quote where PKD lists all of his 'solipsistic novels' (that's a term I use to describe his stories in which a reality turns out to be contained in someone's head). It's from the Exegesis:

"Eye," "Joint," "3 Stigmata," "Ubik," & "Maze" are the same novel written over and over again. The characters are out cold & lying around together on the floor.* (*Mass hallucinating a world.) Why have I written this at least 5 times? [...] What's to be gotten over is the false idea that a hallucination is a private matter. Not hallucination but joint hallucination is my topic, inc[luding] false memories" (Sutin, Divine Invasions 95-96)

I couldn't remember if Maze was on that list and I didn't want to look and ruin the ending. What's interesting to me about the ending is that it opens outward. PKD spends two chapters connecting the hallucinated world with the 'real world' aboard the spaceship. This is certainly an area for further research and discussion in the comments section.

Another thing I liked about the ending is how depressing it is - especially my reading of the ending: you see we're all on a pointless journey to nowhere. Maybe some of us will see more interesting territory on the way, or blaze a better trail in our wake, but the end is pretty bleak, and so, in a way, all of us (and a certain underrated science fiction writer) are members of this crew, cast adrift in purposelessness. This is where that initial tension between technology and faith returns to complicate matters - like Beethoven, Dick can build endlessly upon a theme. People of faith, like Seth Morely, can achieve some kind of salvation (if you believe he actually left the ship - raise your hands, how many think so?), but for the rest of the group technology (their spaceship) has failed them, they are stranded, thrown into an unfair drudgery that ends only when they die. This is what the existential psychologists that Dick was into thought about our lives. They must have been fun at parties.

But back to that faith/technology thing. Near the end of the novel, Dick dissipates the tension between technology/science and faith/prayer that he so brilliantly developed earlier in the novel. At the beginning of Chapter 15 it's clear that all the experiences of the characters can be explained technologically: their reality is simulated by an advanced computer system. Even Seth's memory of his encounter with the Walker on Earth before departing for Delmak-0 was part of the illusion. A SF writer like Asimov would leave a science fiction story in this place - with a plausible, materialistic explanation rather than a supernatural one. But Dick reignites the tension and cranks it up when we see Seth talk to the Walker-on-Earth and the Walker leads Seth off the ship and to a better reincarnation.

Commenter giospurs wondered after the last post: "What's the significance of the Intercessor existing outside of the polyencephalic world?" which brings up an interesting connection to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which was written pretty close to the time of A Maze of Death. In DADOES? you see Wilbur Mercer, this semi-real religious figure who helps Deckard out in his time of need. When I teach DADOES? one of the most frequently asked questions is "is Wilbur Mercer real?" and the response is a frustrating, 'yes, and, no.' For while something clearly happens to Deckard when he meets Mercer, there is no explanation for his appearance (or Deckard's wounds), at least no explanation that doesn't involve something supernatural. I guess I'm getting around to answering giospur's question by saying that if the Walker on Earth appears at the end, and saves Seth, doesn't that imply that the Walker was created by Seth's belief? After all, the Walker was created by the computer as a religious figure, an assemblage of savior archetypes that had no corporeal form outside the computer.

In these two novels it seems like if someone has enough faith, their faith can literally be 'embodied,' personified, but the manifestation requires faith . Deckard and Morely must believe - or be so bad off they're willing to believe anything for some simple relief. This faith, of course, compromises their objectivity which introduces doubt. The weaving of faith and technology in the these novels (Mercer uses a TV-like box to connect with his followers) makes it almost impossible to untangle these supposedly mutually exclusive world views at each novel's end.

As for the chapter headings: I think these are summaries of what the participants thought they would be seeing and doing in their planned polyencephalic world, but that their world didn't pan out as expected, not through the fault of technology, but because the characters themselves act out, in the polyencephalic world, their worst fear they have about their lives on the ship: that they will slip into private worlds of insanity. I love this bit:

"We could have survived the twenty years, Seth Morley said to himself, Knowing it would end; that would have kept us sane and alive. But the accident had come and now they circled, forever, a dead star. Their transmitter, because of the accident, functioned no longer, and so an escape toy, typical of those generally used in long, interstellar flights, had become the support for their sanity.
That's what really worries us, Morley realized. The dread that one by one we will slip into psychosis, leaving the others even more alone. More isolated from man and everything associated with man" (174)

This is a deep novel, and I think I still have a bit more to say about it. But this post is long enough. I'll pass this to you for more discussion in the comments section.

More Thoughts On Maze

Reading A Maze of Death late last night, I just about lost it when the crew of the raft encountered the gelatinous Tench beside the river. What an amazing scene! For some reason the cryptic written responses provided by the Tench reminded me of an image from the beginning of the novel I haven't been able to shake. Ben Tallchief holds the punch cards encoded with the information about his assignment,:

"Frowning, he studied the coded information, trying to decipher it. In numbers, punch-holes and letters it spelled out his new life, his world to come."

A few paragraphs later, Ben elaborates:

"He could not discover what his job would consist of. The letters, numbers and punch-holes failed to say, or perhaps it was more correct to say that he could not get them to divulge this one piece of information--a piece he would much have wanted."

I don't know why this image stuck with me, but I know why I remembered it when the Tench began responding in cryptic riddles. Wikipedia sorta gets that the Tench answers with particular hexagrams from the I Ching, but there's something more at work. The Tench conceives of language as an object, that's why it can communicate with the colonists only through the same kind the assimilation it uses to duplicate wristwatches. Language isn't information transmitted verbally, but from the Tench's perspective language has form. Isn't it interesting to compare the Tench's responses to the encoded info contained on the punch cards? In both cases the reification of language is literal, and the resulting signal loss obscures the meaning of the communication.

Here are some of the I Ching chapters that coincide with the Tench's responses:

"There are secret forces at work, leading together those who belong together. We must yield to this attraction; then we make no mistakes"

"Often a man feels an urge to unite with others, but the individuals around him have already formed themselves into a group, so that he remains isolated. He should then ally himself with a man who stands nearer to the center of the group and can help him gain admission to the closed circle"

"Every step, forward or backward, leads into danger. Escape is out of the question. The danger comes because one is too ambitious."

Notice that both the encoded information on Ben's punch-card and the Tench's prophesies concern future events. I think it's important to pay attention to how texts are working in Dick's novels. Here, we see two examples where the future seems to be laid out, set in stone, beforehand, but even so, this future is inaccessible and therefore unknowable.

Lost in A Maze of Death

Chapters 5 - 10 [minor spoilers ahead]

Something's rotten in the state of Delmak-0! Colonists are dropping like flies, inscriptions on buildings are changing, tiny model buildings (made on Earth) are shooting at people! It's crazy. What can I say? I have some theories about what's happening, but they're not very good.

Here are some things I'm paying attention to:

Numerous references to the egocentricity of the group. This is borne out not just by the doctor's psychological profiling before Ted and Morely arrive, but by the anguished inner dialog of the characters:

""I don't agree," Frazer said. "My preliminary testing indicates that by and large this is an inherently ego-oriented group. As a whole, Morley, they show what appears to be an innate tendency to avoid responsibility. It's hard for me to see why some of them were chosen.""

and

"Why aren't I in there? [Morely] asked himself. Functioning as part of the group. But the group didn't function as a group anyhow; it was always a finite number of self-oriented individuals squalling with one another. With such a bunch he felt as if he had no roots, no common source."

I think this repeated theme is significant -- especially in light of the building's inscription which seems to each person to indicate that they alone should enter. Anyone else entering the building would be killed, defeated, etc.

Please note, that although it has nothing to do with the story (so far at least) the cover of this DAW edition is awesome!

As I would say to my class, "Let's explore some of the imagery." In the comments, talk about what images are jumping out at you, what interpretations you've developed, details you think are relevant etc.. I'll get you started: How about Betty Jo Berm's suicide/murder by malaise?:

"The water will help, she said to herself. Because in water you no longer have to support your heavy body; you are not lifted into greater _mekkis_ but you do not care; the water erases everything. You are not heavy; you are not light. You are not even there.
I can't go on dragging my heavy body everywhere, she said to herself. The weight is too much. I cannot endure being pulled down any longer; I have to be free."

Reminds me of Ludwig Binswanger. Read this, then you'll know:

“Loneliness is an unhappy compound of having lost one's point of reference, of suffering the fate of individual and collective discontinuity and of living through or dying from a crisis of identity to the point of alienation of one's self.”

REMEMBER NO SPOILERS! (I've read through chapter 10)

The Maze's Entrance

I finished the first five chapters of Maze of Death yesterday and am enjoying the book. I think I either read it a really long time ago, or this is my first read, since it doesn't seem at all familiar to me. Maze was written in 1968, the same year PKD wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I think the two books are quite similar, right down to the poop sheets and the kipple.

In Maze, Dick creates some amazing tension immediately by creating a science fictional world with a religious element - more specifically, a reality where matters of faith are 'technological,' where prayers are transmitted not on faith but by technological means (by connecting your pineal gland to the ship's transmitter). The disjunctive nature of this reality, where opposites like religion and technology overlap, works immediately to confound the expectations of the science fiction reader. Personally, it makes me suspicious. Dick later revisited this teleological juxtaposition brilliantly in Divine Invasion.

There have already been some very astute comments on the book in the last post. I agree with Joshua about the value of work, more specifically, doing something satisfying and creative as a vocation, rather than just working as a bureaucrat somewhere. I also think Nick made a good comment about each of the characters using a particular problem-solving mindset related to their career. This certainly seems to be a component in many mysteries (and of course Maze is most often compared to a kind of space age Agatha Christie murder mystery) and I remember this trope on repeats of 'Fantasy Island.'

Here are a few other things I noticed:

Interesting literary allusion to the Lord of the Rings in chapter one: Ben appears to be watching a 3-dimensional cinematic adaptation. Anyone know the books well enough to tell us if 'unsaying' is significant to Gandalf's character or the story in general? Here's a link to the passage quoted from The Two Towers. I think this allusion is relevant, but perhaps Dick just picked up the book closest as hand.

Ubikcan, in the comments of the last post, noted that the theological overtones of the book appeared relatively simple. Could be, I honestly don't know know where Dick is going with this, but I associate the term 'Destroyer of Forms' with Dick's novel The Cosmic Puppets. Rickman, in his intro to In His Own Words, writes:

"...Dick is fundamentally a moralistic writer, with a strong belief in Good and Evil literally battling for men's souls, battling on the shifting, untrustworthy fields of an ever shifting "reality." On the one hand, generally dominant, is Evil -- entropy, the Form Destroyer, the gubble god, the tomb world[...]"(26)

We'll simply have to wait and see where Dick takes us, but this reminds me of the bi-theistic cosmology Dick borrowed from Zoroastrianism, and used in novels throughout his career. I'll have more to say on this if it develops as a core theme of the book.

Did the repeated bits of dialog throw anybody else for a loop? For instance the bit about Color Theory prior to 1800, or the bit about the bugs that squeak at night. It's not the same conversation being heard by two different people, because it happens twice. Near the beginning of Chapter 3 the group discussion starts with the topic of cucumbers on Betelguese 4. Then the same conversation is repeated after Morley (the last colonist) arrives, this time at the beginning of Chapter 4. I'm hooked!

It was interesting to see the reference to, "Specktowsky's theory of God entering history and starting time into motion again" - as this is a central preoccupation in the Exegesis, from what I gather. I think it's worth noting that this idea appeared at least once in Dick's fiction years before 2-3-74.

Finally, from a character perspective, Morley is a fascinating protagonist, and Dick does some very economic characterization, during which we learn that, while likable and sympathetic, Morely has some issues. If I were teaching this book in a class I'd point my students to this quote:

"What have we in fact accumulated in eight years of work here? he asked himself. Nothing of any worth. And in addition, he could not get it all into the noser. Much would have to be thrown away or left for someone else to use. Better to destroy it, he thought gloomily. The idea of someone else gaining use of his possessions had to be sternly rejected. I'll burn every last bit of it, he told himself. Including all the nebbish clothes that Mary's collected in her jaybird manner. Selecting whatever's bright and gaudy" (pg 14).

Like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Morley has a way to go, but the beautiful bit about Morely loving his mean old tomcat just the way it was, shows us he's capable of moral transformation - though in Dick's books these evolutions are often overwhelming, stirred by grave misfortune, and tend to last only as long as the protagonist remains in mortal danger. On a personal note, I have a very cranky cat, whom I love very much, so I figure I'm pretty well set.

Let's put the following quote in the file, so that when these 'writers' come along and proclaim Dick couldn't string a sentence together we have exhibit A:

"The Walker said, "Once years ago you had a tomcat whom you loved. He was greedy and mendacious and yet you loved him. One day he died from bone fragments lodged in his stomach, the result of filching the remains of a dead Martian root-buzzard from a garbage pail. You were sad, but you still loved him. His essence, his appetite--all that made him up had driven him to his death. You would have paid a great deal to have him alive again, but you would have wanted him as he was, greedy and pushy, himself as you loved him, unchanged. Do you understand?" (17).

What do you think about the first 5 chapters? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE) Keep those fantastic observations and discussion questions in the comments section.

Summer Reading Club

That's right, the fates, and your votes have spoken. I'll start reading Maze of Death tomorrow morning and hope to have a post or two up by the end of weekend. For now, use the comments section of this post as a place to get the discussion started.

I'll be reading the super-cool Bantam edition pictured above. My copy appears unread, and comes from 'Book Rack' in Paducah Kentucky (part of a collection of PKD paperbacks I bought on ebay). It'd be cool if someone had the LoA edition any case Lethem has added any footnotes.