Showing posts with label The Galactic Pot-Healer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Galactic Pot-Healer. Show all posts

Sunday, August 8, 2010

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?

Saturday, August 7, 2010

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.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

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.'"

Monday, July 26, 2010

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.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

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.

Friday, July 9, 2010

First Thoughts on Galactic Pot-Healer


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...

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

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?

Thursday, July 1, 2010

GPH Secondary Sources


I finished Galactic Pot-Healer yesterday. Before I write about the novel, I want to do some more research. Regular reader Josh Lind was kind enough to send me a paper he wrote on GPH for grad school. I've set up a place to read Josh's essay in its entirety here - which I suggest you do - but I will also quote from it.

I also read Laurence Rickels's chapter on Glimmung in I Think I Am: Philip K Dick (I read it 5 times). He obviously has an insightful take on the book -- I have very little idea what it is however. Frederic Jameson called GPH a Jungian allegory, but Rickels calls it Wagnerian fantasy, and draws attention to its similarity to the Faust legend. I guess I buy that. Except while Joe makes a deal with a powerful deity to spice up his life, he is never promised infinite knowledge, merely satisfaction. I am ashamed to admit this, I had no idea that there was a second part to Faust, a Faust II, published the year of Goethe's death (1832). No doubt Dick read this, but I've never even heard of it. C'mon, Mephistopheles saving the Kaiser with paper money!? It sounds made up. Read the wikipedia entry though, some of it sounds relevant.

Here's a sample paragraph from Rickels's chapter on Glimmung:

"The troubling conflict between the Glimmung and the Black Glimmung however, occurred once before, the robot remembers, at the time of the Berlin Olympics. One far-flung but snapping back approach to this reference is available through Jacques Lacan's mirror stage address, which had its premiere in 1936 in Marienbad, Lacan's stopover on his way to Berlin to witness, in his perfectly Jungian formulation, the spirit of the times. In the essay itself Lacan gives as typical dream the dream of the stadium, towered over, moreover by a grim fantasy castle. By this point we can fold it all back inside the Glimmung striving unto triumph or suicide."
Now that reference to the Berlin Olympics is interesting as hell. Here it is in more detail:
"Has this ever happened before?" Joe demanded. "Glimmung pulled under?" Instead of lifting Heldscalla up, he realized, Glimmung had been dragged down . . . to join the Black Glimmung and the Black Cathedral forever. Like _my_ corpse; a lifeless thing floating about in the form of mere debris. Dwelling in a box.
"I can fire an HB cartridge into the water," the robot said. "But a warhead like that would kill him, too."
"No," Mali said emphatically.
"This did happen once before," Willis said, reflecting. "In Terran time--" It calculated. "Late in 1936. About the time of the summer Olympics, held in Berlin, that year."
It seems Rickels has explained the reference, and it's quite an obscure one, one that would never occur to me. But, ...WTF? If I were grading Rickels as an undergrad in a writing class I would mark him down for failing to clarify his terms (snapping back approach, typical dream, 'we can fold it all back inside'). I have only the foggiest notion what he's on about.

Here's an overview of Lacan's Mirror Stage theory, and this seems relevant:

For Lacan, the mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. As the so-called "individual" matures and enters into social relations through language, this "other" will be elaborated within social and linguistic frameworks that will give each subject's personality (and his or her neuroses and other psychic disturbances) its particular characteristics.

Stanislaw Lem, in his essay A Visionary Among the Charlatans, sorts GPH along with Three Stigmata, Ubik, Now Wait For Last Year, as stories of "the conversion of the order of the universe to rack and ruin before our eyes" (59), but Lem continues, more profoundly a few pages later:

"For all that Galactic Pot-Healer leans towards allegory, it does not adopt this position either unambiguously or definitively, and a like indeterminacy as to genre is also characteristic for other novels by Dick, perhaps even to a higher degree" (62).
In Christopher Palmer's essay Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's "Valis" (Postmodernisme et la naissance de l'auteur dans "Valis" de P.K. Dick) he points out that Dick's deities are "highly fallible" and illustrates his point with the example of Glimmung falling through ten floors to a basement in front of his gathered artisans.

Darko Suvin wrote in his 2002 essay Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating within Later P.K. Dick:

In Galactic Pot-Healer (written 1967-8, published 1969), the emblematic artist-craftsman is chosen as the necessary helper of a very unclear godhead. Though any novel by Dick will have its share of felicities, the central flaw of this one is a hesitant approach to an "inner space" quasi-Jungian allegory, which is neither clear nor cogent enough to sustain the weight put upon it. It also ends abruptly, and such perfunctoriness will increase in the following three novels.
Rickels found something PKD said about GPH in the Exegesis (it looks like Rickels only had access to Sutin's previous excerpts):
Galactic Pot-Healer shows the very real possibility of encroaching madness. The archetypes are out of control. Water -- the ocean itself -- which is to say the unconscious, is hostile & rises to engulf. The book is desperate & frightened, & coming apart, & dream-like, cut off more & more from reality. Flight, disorganization: the way has almost run out. Those elements dealt with in earlier novels -- ominous elements now escape my control & take over" (195)
Rickels excerpts another, more specific, passage from Dick's Exegesis:

Thinking back to when I wrote Pot: I felt so strongly --& correctly -- at the time that when it came time, in writing the book to have the theophany occur (i.e. for Glimmung to show himself). I had nothing to say, nothing to offer because I knew nothing. Oh, & how I sensed this lack of knowledge! & now this is precisely what I do know because now I have experienced it (2-3-74).... I had no idea about the theophany at all,.... which would not and could not come with Pot; that in writing Pot that was exactly where I reached the end -- wore out and died as a writer; scrapped the bottom of the barrell & died creatively & spiritually. What misery that was! Paisley shawl, hoop of water, hoop of fire; how wretched it was; how futile" (198-199).
Speaking of futile, I spent almost all of my free time today summarizing these secondary sources. And I still have one more important place to look: Rickman's PKD In His Own Words (I know Rickman is a big fan of GPH so I bet he asked good questions about the novel).

Well, Heldscalla was not raised in a day. Stay tuned for more secondary source info, and some of my own thoughts on the book.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

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?

Sunday, June 20, 2010

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?

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

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.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

“Vessels of Spiritual Transformation”

“Vessels of Spiritual Transformation”

C. G. Jung and Philip K. Dick

By Josh Lind

Introduction

This paper began as an attempt to understand Philip K. Dick’s 1969 science fiction novel Galactic Pot-Healer. In preparing a literature review it became clear that, although critics agree the novel is an exploration of Jungian psychology, none of these critics were willing to provide an in-depth Jungian analysis. Douglas A. Mackey, in his survey of Dick’s work, provides the best short analysis, but he only points out Jungian ideas in the novel, stopping short of an earnest consideration of their wider implications or how they may connect to Dick’s larger project. Most critics see the novel as a misguided curiosity rather than an effective work of art that exemplifies Dick’s social and philosophical vision. 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.

In spite of an initial lack of familiarity with Jung, I have set out in this paper to rectify this gap in the critical work on Dick. Because this paper represents an initial engagement with Jungian literary theory, I also see this as an opportunity to assess the value of Jungian literary criticism more broadly. While Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic ideas have been legitimized as literary to some extent (e.g. represented in literary theory anthologies), Jungian concepts have not been as influential. This paper attempts to find the use-value of these concepts. In that spirit, the paper will conclude with a deeper look at Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer as a case study in Jungian literary criticism. I will show how Dick employs Jungian psychoanalytic concepts in order to work through the protagonist’s – and perhaps his own – relationship to creativity and vocation. Dick dramatizes Jung’s ideas of personal transcendence in order to reveal their social importance. Through the protagonist’s psychological transformation, Dick valorizes creative labor and, by extension, advances a social vision in which personal and social well-being depend on free, non-exploited labor. My hope is that the reader will discover Jungian literary criticism’s potential and at the same time appreciate an otherwise under-valued Dick novel.

Psychoanalytic Concepts: Freud and Jung

In order to cogently dissect Galactic Pot-Healer from a Jungian perspective, it is necessary to provide a brief sketch of the Jungian concepts most clearly enacted in the novel. And, in order to understand Jung, one must lay out some basic psychoanalytic concepts, which necessarily entails a summary of Freud. Any brief summary of Freud is destined to seem reductive, but the general concepts can be derived quickly by outlining the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is Freud’s most prevalent formulation, and arguably his most fruitful. Freud suggests that the male child desires his mother because she is the source of all his early satisfactions; however, his father prohibits this desire. Unable to act on his desire, the child represses it, keeping it in the unconscious mind. The male child can pass through the Oedipus complex by diverting his desire onto a different and more acceptable love object, but the psychological difficulty of repression lives on in the unconscious. Neuroses can develop if this process of diversion and rearticulation is dammed up during sexual development or otherwise experienced traumatically.

Freudian critics find this formulation useful because it tracks the subject’s desiring energy from inception, to prohibition, and ultimately to its modified release. Subjectivity, from this perspective, is a product of repressed desire. Rather than existing as merely a family drama, however, the Oedipus complex is often used metaphorically to understand sociopolitical issues. Repressive social systems, for example, can be understood in terms of how they make use of such subjectivities. In The Ego and the Id, Freud explains that one’s experience of repression is internalized in the creation of the individual superego, an internal ideal that enacts and enforces the repressions first of the father and then of society. For Freud, the antagonism between internalized prohibition and repressed desire causes the subject to feel guilt. Freud suggests that “the sense of guilt of mankind as a whole, which is the ultimate source of religion and morality, was acquired in the beginnings of history through the Oedipus complex” (Introduction 341). In this way, our entire ideological framework can be seen as replicating the original repression of desire experienced as a child.

While the Oedipus complex has been subject to a host of critiques, Jung provides his own unique criticism. He argues that the Oedipus complex is not necessarily wrong, but that subjectivity cannot be reduced to this family drama. Freud’s mistake, in this sense, becomes one of omission rather than one of error per se. The image of the father’s restriction is so pervasive, from Jung’s perspective, that it threatens to obscure other operations of the psyche. Jung criticizes Freud’s “gloomy superego,” which “became a daemon who created a world of disappointments, illusions, and suffering” (Memories 201). Under Freud’s theory, the superego becomes a creator god who fashions an adversarial world based on restriction. Jung counteracts this construction using the Gnostic concept of a “higher god who gave to mankind the krater (mixing vessel), the vessel of spiritual transformation” (Memories 201). We will come back to this vessel during our discussion of Galactic Pot-Healer, but for now it is enough to suggest the expansive and liberating possibilities of this theological maneuver. Instead of a stern and vengeful god of ultimate authority and restriction, Jung posits a higher god and many possible manifestations of the human spirit. He argues that “a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fulness of life” (Essential 265). Creation itself, or our entire relation to it, is radically changed using this formulation. The model of restriction is only one of a number of possible ways to conceive of the world.

Against Freud’s narrow vision, Jung develops the broader but more complicated notion of the collective unconscious in which a vast number of archetypes represent other possible permutations of psychic energy. Jung defines an archetype as a “typical mode of apprehension”; they are the “correlates” of our instincts (CW 8; 137-138). The Oedipal father is only one of a number of archetypes through which our instincts flow. Archetypes exist as the historical store of meaningful forms. Frequently discussed archetypes include the Trickster, the Anima/Animus, and the Wise Old Man (Hopcke 15). Individual objects, which work as symbols, can also be avenues to the collective unconscious. Dreams and literature can make use of archetypes in order to initiate communication between the conscious and unconscious. Contrary to Freud, Jung felt that this interplay between the conscious and unconscious was productive and meaningful: “I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a ‘façade’ behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness” (Memories 161). Dreams, or the dream-like narratives produced by writers such as Dick, become opportunities for self-knowledge and growth.

The exploration of the unconscious leads to Jung’s concept of individuation. He writes that “the unconscious is a process, and […] the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious” (Memories 209). In this sense, the unconscious is connected to literary narratives because they each describe a person’s transformation after passing through experiences that lead to new conceptions. Jung argues that “[t]he aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images of the other” (CW 7; 174). This suggests a careful balance between conscious and unconscious thoughts, that we must access the unconscious, but work through it consciously. Individuals can attempt to activate this process by “consciously inducing a waking dream in order to experience the workings of one’s own unmediated fantasy life” (Dawson 264). In essence, Galactic Pot-Healer is just such a case of active imagination. As literary critics, we must bring to bear the knowledge of archetypal symbols in order to understand the sudden, in-rushing epiphanies that follow the contemplation of texts containing such archetypes or symbols. Jung insists that “knowledge of the symbols is indispensable, for it is in them that the union of conscious and unconscious contents is consummated. Out of this union emerge new situations and new conscious attitudes. I have therefore called the union of opposites the ‘transcendent function’” (Essential 226). As I have suggested, Dick gives us a text that employs certain of these loaded symbols in a complex narrative of transcendence. With these Jungian concepts in mind, we can turn to a closer examination of Dick’s challenging novel.

Galactic Pot-Healer

Because Galactic Pot-Healer is not in the American literary canon, or even the canon of well-regarded American science fiction novels, a brief plot summary is in order. The novel begins by describing a dystopian future, economically devastated by high inflation and scarce opportunities. The novel’s protagonist, Joe Fernwright, is a craftsman who repairs pottery. Although he gets by on the veterans’ dole, he does not receive any work orders to keep him busy and productive. Each day is empty and unrewarding. He accepts a mysterious offer from an alien, godlike figure called Glimmung to help raise a sunken cathedral from the bottom of an ocean on an alien planet. Joe travels with a team of other desperate craftsmen to Plowman’s Planet, where they discover that Glimmung is less powerful than first believed. The party nevertheless agrees to be incorporated into Glimmung, and together they attempt to raise the cathedral. After they fail, however, Joe separates from Glimmung, withdraws from the project, and tries to create his own pottery. The novel closes as he holds up his first completed pot, which he declares “awful” (§16; 177).

This figural science fiction narrative is clearly open to a psychoanalytic reading. However, at its most basic, it is a novel about work. Joe Fernwright’s struggle is essentially about the hopelessness that accompanies the lack of meaningful work. From the novel’s first page, the reader is told about the difficulty Joe faces in vocational terms: “For seven months his bench had been bare. During those months he had thought many things. He had thought that he ought to give up and take some other line of work onto himself” (§1; 3). The complex psychological journey that follows is really an exploration of vocational crisis. In this journey we can see how Dick imagines labor and the psyche as inextricably connected. After a long psychological journey, the novel closes with Joe taking up a new vocation: creating pottery. This emphasis labor is confirmed by a narrative book-ended by considerations of labor, exhibiting a trajectory that takes Joe from non-work to work, pot healing to pot making, labor crisis to resolution. This fundamental comment on the novel (i.e. its interest in labor) is important to keep in mind during what is a symbolic – and symbolically strange – narrative. For Dick, the symbolic permutations through which characters move have both a material basis and material repercussions. Joe’s transformation at the end of this long psychological allegory represents a social transformation, one which finds Joe participating as a creator rather than an out-of-work repairer.

A crucial aspect of Dick’s social theory, however, is that the crisis of labor, and indeed any crisis, must be worked out psychologically. External resolution requires internal work. Joe first seeks escape from perpetual unfulfillment by taking part in ‘The Game.’ He suspects that he began playing The Game because it would satisfy a psychological need: “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” (§1; 6). But the process through which this incorporation takes place occurs at the conscious, rational level. The game involves using a translating computer to translate phrases (such as book titles) into a foreign language, translating it back into the original language in garbled form, and then asking another player to decipher the original phrase. The Game is therefore merely an intellectual exercise. Although Joe feels it allows him to subsume the exterior unknown into the interior known, it actually just filters the temporarily unknown through an external interpretative system (language) to be understood by the conscious mind. In a Jungian sense, the act of deciphering deprives the unknown of its power to activate the unconscious.

In a way, Joe reverses the process needed to solve his dilemma. Rather than ‘placing the outside inside,’ he needs to bring the inside outside. The problem of this reversal is made clear when he cannot decipher another player’s title: “It rang no bell, no bell at all [….] In his mind no solution appeared. ‘I can’t make it out’” (§1; 9). He unwittingly names the problem with The Game: that the crucial part of the psyche, the unconscious, cannot find release. It is for the intellect along. When he finally realizes The Game has failed him, he reflects that, “through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances” (§1; 10). These countenances do not reveal the self, as an integrated variety of psychological processes. They are merely masks. Joe finds only outlines of bodies, presentations of self that Jung calls personas:

The construction of a collectively suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be. The “soullessness” of such an attitude is, however, only apparent, for under no circumstances will the unconscious tolerate this shifting of the center of gravity. (CW 7; 193)

The mask, the ‘feeble countenance,’ conceals the full richness of the human self. Joe is ultimately unsatisfied with The Game because it does not allow him to let the inside out.

Joe is plagued by psychological despair partly because, through this mask, he is like everyone else. He comprehends himself as undifferentiated. The internal process of transformation comprising Galactic Pot-Healer begins with a need to identify the full self. Joe must first emerge from amongst the undifferentiated mass of humanity that surrounds him on Earth. While reflecting on his dead-end existence, he realizes that he is part of the problem: “After all, he, too, was a part of the planetwide Party apparatus, the network of tendrils which had penetrated and then in loving convulsion clasped them in a hug of death as great as the entire world” (§1; 4). The ‘hug of death’ represents both the dangers of communism (in which all comrades become one)[1] and the lack of psychological energy that causes one to stand apart. With a lyricism too often overlooked by critics, Dick writes: “Along the sidewalks of the city the vast animallike gasping entity which was the mass of Cleveland’s unemployed—and unemployable—gathered and stood, stood and waited, waited and fused together into a lump both unstable and sad” (§4; 33). Joe must work against the slow entropy of the self in this fusing process. He tries not only to find work, but to find the self through work. In Jungian terms, he seeks individuation.

Individuation, according to Jung, is not the concretizing of the ego as a rational center, nor is it the perfection of the persona as a presentation of self. Instead it is “the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘in-dividual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole’” (Essential 212). In this sense, individuation requires one to engage the unconscious. Jung argues that, “[i]f unconscious processes exist at all, they must surely belong to the totality of the individual” (Essential 212). As he despairs about the lack of work, Joe’s unconscious makes itself known to him. Although the events of the novel are presented as objective events that really occur, critics are united in reading these events as psychological allegories. The unconscious appears when Glimmung first contacts him. Glimmung is the first of a series of archetypes that Joe works through in order to come to terms with the unconscious. Any candid reader of the novel must admit that Glimmung is an erratic figure whose variable characterization destabilizes readers’ expectations so severely that the novel threatens to fall apart or turn into a confusing throw-away. Some commentators have naturally had this reaction. But in a way, this fungible characterization suits Dick’s purposes. The unconscious is unknowable in any direct, intellectual sense and has much to reveal to us. Glimmung is a mutable figure who takes on a shifting array of archetypal roles. Jung himself points out how the “harmonizing of conscious and unconscious data […] cannot be indicated in the form of a recipe. It is an irrational life-process” (Essential 226).

Glimmung is by turns the Trickster, the Wise Old Man, and the Shadow. As manifestations of the Trickster, Glimmung communicates with Joe by written messages left in his toilet tank (§2; 18), a voice from an “ancient wind-up Victrola” (§4; 42), and through Glimmung’s personal secretary (§10; 99). Like the unconscious more generally, he persists in making himself known, but he does so in quirky, humorous ways. The novel is littered with jokes, which themselves work by disrupting conscious expectations. The Trickster is known for subversion and for breaking social rules. For example, Glimmung asks Joe: “Why didn’t you go to a nearby museum and break a number of their pots anonymously…and you would have got their business” (§4; 41). Exposure to this archetype allows Joe to imagine life outside certain social strictures. This aspect of his psyche, the breaker of conventions, is perhaps the most important in allowing Joe change his vocation, a vocation given to him by the expectations of society. In fact, the first line of the novel is, “His father had been a pot-healer before him” (§1; 3). This concern is repeated at the end of the novel when he is contemplating the change in vocations. He says, “But […] my father was a pot-healer before me,” to which another member of the team replies, “Observe the success of Glimmung’s aspirations. Emulate him” (§16; 176). Glimmung’s goal of raising the cathedral subverts convention and works against the status quo.

These aspirations also lead to another archetypal aspect represented by Glimmung: the Wise Old Man. Glimmung is described as “the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts” (§5; 47). Through this archetype, Glimmung is a comforting figure who appears to dispense knowledge and wisdom. He allows Joe access to those parts of his psyche long submerged in the unconscious. He appears as the conduit to a world of exploration, a newfound epistemological process, an invitation. The meaning of Glimmung’s offer is made explicit when Joe is told: “Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you—all of it will become actualized” (§5; 49). The change from potential to kinetic energy staves off the decay or entropy that threatens the underwater world of the unconscious.

In another example of Dick’s insistence on the primacy of vocation, Joe only gains access to the unconscious through a massive labor project. He begins his psychological journey by accepting Glimmung’s mysterious offer to plumb the depths of the sea on Plowman’s Planet. Dick perhaps chooses the name Plowman’s Planet from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the medieval English theological allegory that traces the protagonist’s mystical dreams. Like Langland’s enigmatic poem, Dick’s novel is concerned with the soul’s well-being, which may, in the Jungian context, be called the self’s transcendence. The robot on Plowman’s Planet explains the metaphysical implications of the project, calling the underwater world “an oceanic grave” that “will kill all of us unless the cathedral can be raised” (§10; 101). The robot continues, saying “[i]t is you and others like you who will forestall the decay process by your abilities and work” (§10; 101). The psychological work of entering the depths of the unconscious may be rewarded by solving Joe’s vocational dilemma – and his life – by allowing him to work through his despair.

Once Joe enters the ocean, however, Glimmung’s nature begins to change. He becomes the Shadow, a Black Glimmung. When Joe descends into the sea, called Mare Nostrum or ‘Our Ocean,’ each living thing is doubled, and he discovers the dark half of everything. It is explained to him this way: “As with antimatter; you can talk about it but you can’t really imagine what the words mean. There are Glimmungs and there are Black Glimmungs. Always on a one-to-one ratio. Each individual Glimmung has his counterpart, his opaque Doppelgänger. Sooner or later, during his life, he must kill his Black counterpart, or it will kill him” (§11; 113). As he floats next to the hulking and terrible Black Glimmung, Joe encounters his own dead and decaying body, who warns him about Glimmung. This warning admits of the dangers associated with a too long a plummet into the unconscious.

The corpse exposes the paradox in Dick’s work, based on Jung’s admission of the same paradox: one must release the Shadow to see the light. The corpse explains: “Until you come here and release me I am caught in the totality of time” (§11; 116). The dead exist as the dead until released; the Shadow exists as the Shadow until released. When the Black Glimmung is released, he engages Glimmung in mortal combat in the depths. While this struggle is presented as a battle to the death, the paradoxical insight of Jung’s theory is that this tension of opposites is crucial to psychic well-being: “Seen from the one-sided point of view of the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance. But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible” (CW 7; 53-54). Dick retains this productive tension by refusing a victor in the struggle between Glimmung and the Black Glimmung. Glimmung lives on as an active part of Joe’s psyche.

The productive tension of Glimmung with Black Glimmung (i.e. Joe activating the archetypes of his unconscious) leads to the creation of Joe’s first pot. Our attention falls upon the pot, or vessel, as the symbol of transcendence. The pot is the final image of the novel, one toward which the novel works through all its twists and turns, the culmination of Joe’s difficult journey. Jung explains that the vessel is a symbol that represents the womb and its function of creation and gestation (CW 5; 203). Throughout human history, the pot has reflected the concept of containing and protecting precious substances. But the pot is more than just a sign. For Jung the process of symbolization is more significant than mere metaphorical substitution. Jung posits two types of thinking, which can be differentiated in terms of their mode of moving; one is a ‘directed’ thinking, while the other moves less as a result of conscious thought and is instead moved by the unconscious: “Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness” (CW 5; 77). A symbol is a productive and deeply embedded element of the collective unconscious. A symbol becomes an active force in the psyche.

The pot Joe makes is just such an image. It is the activation of his integrated psyche, the product of his individuation. It sets free the psychic energy dammed up when he was unable to work on Earth. The pot is the embodiment, the sensualization, of psychic transformation. But, as the text points out, the pot is “awful” (§16; 177). This is more than just Dick’s wry sense of humor. Instead, it is actually an ambiguous, suggestive statement. On one level, the pot is a failure. Joe is disappointed by his substandard workmanship. But this can be read positively in two related ways. First, the pot is merely a first expression. Any individual pot he makes can only be an enactment of his self – even his transcendent, integrated self – at a given moment. The pot can never fully express the self. Joe’s creative process brings forth not just the pot, but the very active principle of transformation. Joe’s psychological journey into the symbolic ocean of the unconscious produces a pot draws upon the archetype of the vessel as an object of continual creation. Despite the ‘awfulness’ of the pot, the reader understand that Joe now has access to the power of creation and, by extension, the power of self creation. Rather than a tale of discovery, Galactic Pot-Healer gives the reader an example of creation and transformation, a labor that produces the self as a dynamic union of conscious mind and unconscious instinct.

Second, 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). Jung saw this as the highest function of psychoanalysis. And it is what the coniunctio makes possible that allows for such a positive reading of Dick’s ending: “Using his strong thumbs he began to dig in to the lump, meanwhile, with his fingers, drawing the lump into something high. And virtually symmetric. Higher and higher the mound grew, and deeper and deeper his thumbs sank into it, hollowing out the center” (§16; 176). The opposites of higher and deeper reflect the psychoanalytic process of plumbing the depths of the unconscious in order for the self to rise ever higher. The pot is a vessel that can hold and transport other substances. It is therefore a generative object that makes other processes possible. Primary among these is the creation of life. While discussing the connection of vessel and womb, Jung makes reference to two world myths in which children spring from pots (CW 5; 203). But what is critical for Galactic Pot-Healer is that Joe’s own life springs from the pot – a pot he can only make after the difficult journey into the unconscious.

Conclusion

Galactic Pot-Healer is a complicated psychological allegory that uses Jungian mechanisms to tell a story of personal transcendence. As a result of Joe’s journey, he has found a vocation that allows him to exercise the energy of his complete self. After all the difficulties along the way, one character says to Joe: “We did a good job; we did what we came here for. We should rejoice” (§16; 175). The proximity of ‘we did a good job’ to ‘we should rejoice’ suggests the salvational possibilities of a type of labor that allows one to recreate the self. Dick valorizes creativity from a Jungian psychological perspective, exemplifying Jung’s concept of the integrated self:

“[T]he ego cannot help discovering that the afflux of unconscious contents has vitalized the personality, enriched it and created a figure that somehow dwarfs the ego in scope and intensity [….] In this way the will, as disposable energy, gradually subordinates itself to the stronger factor, namely to the new totality-figure I call the self” (CW 8; 224).

This transcendent figure is generated by social needs and has social effects. What began as a blockage caused by an economically demoralizing situation finds release through the archetypes of the collective unconscious, leading to the symbol of transformation: the vessel which represents the self and the creative labor through which the self is made.

Jungian psychology has clear interpretive value in analyzing Galactic Pot-Healer, but the question still remains whether it is more widely applicable. To me it seems likely that texts in which a character develops significantly as a result of difficult challenges may be profitably read through a Jungian lens. As exemplified in Dick’s novel, difficulties often involve a disintegration and reintegration of the protagonist. In the disintegrated position, characters come into contact with aspects of themselves which can be said to be archetypal. Recognizing and activating these internal aspects, especially those which become dammed up, becomes a crucial part of developing the integrated self. Galactic Pot-Healer pays special attention to the symbolism of this process, but it could be argued that other texts which conceal these processes are even more in need of this type of analysis.


Works Cited

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[1] While Dick was politically liberal, he distrusted any form of social organization able to systematically dehumanize individuals.