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Philip K. Dick: American Original

by Kathleen Maher on May 21, 2007

What’s this? Philip K. Dick has been admitted to the pantheon. Four of his novels will be re-issued by the Library of America, alongside American masters such as Melville, Hawthorne, Roth, et al.

As a longtime fan who for decades has bent people’s ears about the literary merit of Philip K. Dick, I am as proud today as if a good friend were chosen for this honor. With one major misgiving: The Library ignored three of his very best books.

The Library chose four mainstream Dick novels: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The latter three are excellent choices. (The first, Man in the High Castle is an odd choice, given it was one of Dick’s early novels and not his strongest.) But for some reason, the Library dismissed the trilogy he completed near the end of his life: the so-called VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

The reason why is probably best summarized in a recent New York Times article, in which Charles McGrath dismissed the VALIS trilogy as Dick’s “Finnegan’s Wake—a book that’s more fun to talk about than to read.”

When I read that, I almost spit out my coffee. (I also take issue with McGrath’s description of Blade Runner as the best film adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel.  Perhaps he hadn’t seen the movie since the 1980s. It has not aged well.)

Then I calmed down and wondered: Am I just too much of a fan? Have I become such a PKD nut that I find enjoyment in a science-fiction Finnegan’s Wake?

Actually no. I recently re-read VALIS, and recalled why Dick’s books have always moved me so deeply. It is not the mobius-strip weirdness that Hollywood finds so compelling (wow, what if robots became so human-like that we couldn’t tell the difference?) On the contrary, it is the fact that Dick used these storytelling loops as a springboard to explore the nature of reality, and in particular, the questions of what it means to be human. Philip K. Dick was a spiritual seeker trapped in the science-fiction genre.

In 1974, after years of drug abuse (mostly amphetamines to fuel his writing), he underwent a mystical experience that he described as “an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind.” He quit the drugs that had fueled his hyperactive writing. He wrote a moving elegiac novel dedicated to the friends he had lost to drugs (Through a Scanner Darkly).  And then he wrote three books (The VALIS trilogy) in which he tried to deal directly with the topics he had touched upon all through his career: Is there a divine consciousness, and if so, how does it manifest itself in us, or to us?

Contrary to McGrath, the trilogy is straightforward and pleasurable to read. True, there are narrative quirks such as a character named Philip K. Dick, and a familiar-seeming writer named Horselover Fat. But such old-fashioned meta-fiction tricks hardly equal the linguistic labyrinth that is Finnegan’s Wake. The VALIS trilogy compares better to reading Philip Roth’s Patrimony after having enjoyed the narrative hide-and-seek of the Zuckerman series. For once, the author has dropped his artifices and is telling it to you as straight as he can. The result is stark and deeply moving.

By no means would I suggest Philip K. Dick compares to Philip Roth. A speed freak, he probably never slowed down enough to give structure or style a second thought. But whatever his faults, he was a writer with a stunning imagination, a durable gift for storytelling, and a deep longing for answers to the eternal questions. His VALIS trilogy has the tragic beauty of a lifelong seeker who is finally coming to the end of his search.

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