Andrés Vaccari

I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated from the French by Timothy Bent.
Bloomsbury.

(The Australian, 22-23 October 2005)

Since his death in 1982, the stature and popularity of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick have been growing exponentially. Most of his books (forty-four novels and five volumes of short stories) have never been out of print. He has gathered a large international following, and an intriguing myth has crystallized around his emotionally tragic, unusual life. Film rights to his fiction carry exorbitant price tags; and a string of famous Hollywood directors have brought his work to the screen, with uneven success. Now, on Dick’s behalf, legions of critics, readers and writers are ramming at the doors of literary respectability, demanding Dick’s admittance as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century—perhaps Kafka’s only worthy successor.

Not a bad outcome for someone who spent most of his life broke, paranoid, and under the influence of copious amounts of amphetamines and prescription drugs. Dick’s life of strange visions and religious obsessions culminated in 1974, when he experienced his most powerful mystical visitation. He came to believe the world was a projection of a demonic deity. Someone, perhaps God or an alien intelligence, was beaming information straight into his brain. The final irony of Dick’s life was that it had turned into one of his novels.

This new biography by Emmanuelle Carrère is the latest in a steady flow of books and essays about Dick. It would be hard to improve on Lawrence Sutin’s authoritative biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Scrupulously researched, Sutin’s is likely to endure as the definite portrait of this writer. Carrère is more interested in exploring Dick’s creative process and quest for meaning, weaving a cogent picture from the testimonies of friends and ex-wives (five of them). He places the reader inside Dick’s mind, following its dizzying twists and turns.

Dick’s reputation was forged in a genre often derided as lowbrow and lacking in literary merit. Science fiction dates quickly, and the grand visions of past genre luminaries (such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke) now seem nostalgic, sanitised, and incapable of dealing with the kaleidoscopic complexities of the twenty-first century. One of the keys to Dick’s success is that he used the conventions of the genre (androids, parallel universes, telepathy, post-apocalyptic worlds) with an ironic distance, as symbolic tools. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Dick was first and foremost a comic writer. He was not interested in science and technology, but in religion, philosophy and mysticism. Science fiction is the only genre that could accommodate the vast, cosmological scale of Dick’s ideas.

Much of Dick’s fiction, however, was hastily plotted in sleepless, drug-fuelled typing marathons—he wrote twelve novels between 1963 and 1964. His prose is sloppy, functional at best. His characters are mere ciphers, everymen struggling to deal with a world constantly slipping out of their grasp. His women are either neurotic, scheming castrators (stand-ins for his third wife, Anne) or angelic saviours (projections of Dick’s dead twin sister).

Philip K. Dick’s claim to literary immortality rests on a handful of works that manage to rise above these shortcomings: Eye in the Sky (1957), The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and VALIS: Vast Active Living Intelligent System (1981). These are disorienting metaphysical mind-benders, terrifying parables on reality, madness and death. Dick’s stock themes are manufactured realities, false memories, mass deception and mind control, realities nested within realities, robots pretending to be human, and humans who have become indistinguishable from robots. The rug is constantly tugged away from under the reader’s feet. The narratives are intricate and ambitious, yet entertaining and fast-paced. Dick’s worlds are populated by quarrelsome intelligent toasters, automated taxicabs that double up as psychiatrists, and protoplasmic next-door neighbours from Alpha Centauri who suddenly drop in to check your record collection.

Yet, at the heart of Dick’s almost unbelievable nuttiness, there is a disturbing and prescient lucidity, unique to his work. Dick grapples with profound questions. What is ‘human’ in an age of fakery and soullessness? What is the ultimate nature of ‘reality’ in an age of deception? Whereas for Borges theology is a branch of fantastic literature, for Dick it was the other way around.

Carrère paints a vertiginous, insightful portrait of this contradictory personality. On one hand, Dick was erudite, generous, and undoubtedly brilliant; on the other, he could be schizoid, self-centred and manipulative. He was at once deeply religious and a rational sceptic; these two sides were engaged in a fierce battle until the very end. Carrère quotes mostly from Dick’s fiction, which he takes as a personal record of his struggles in an increasingly deceitful world. He traces Dick’s themes of existential fragmentation, paranoia and totalitarianism to specific historical sources in McCarthyism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and Richard Nixon’s America. Through the looking-glass of Dick’s mind, these cultural and political forces blended with Gnosticism, psychoanalysis and Taoism, to produce visions that seem more relevant each passing day.