CHRACTERISATION

I think very often I'm accused of writing my protagonist as an anti-hero .... And I always think, well, the ultimate surrealism [...] is to take somebody that you knew, whose life ambition was to sell the largest television set that the store carried, and put him in a future dystopia, and pit him against this dystopia, or place him in a position of power. Like I like to take employers that I've had who've owned small stores and make them supreme rulers of entire... [g]alaxies [ ]. That to me is very enjoyable, because I still see this person as sitting at his desk, looking at a lot of invoices for purchases that have never been made, saying who authorized this?

(Dick, in a 1977 interview; as cited in Sutin, 54-5)

But the great merit of the human being is that the human being is isomorphic with his malfunctioning universe. I mean, he too is somewhat malfunctioning. [...]. He goes on trying and this, of course, is what Faulkner said in his marvelous Nobel Prize speech, that Man will not merely endure, he will prevail.

(Dick, in the same interview as above; as cited in Sutin, 55)

As a teenager Dick worked in a record shop for a man named Hollis, whose inspiration was to have a lasting effect on Dick:

The values Hollis and his strange crew embodied - craftsmanship, loyalty, independence of spirit, the little guy over the soulless corporate carte - formed the social credo Phil held to through all the otherwise shifting realities in his fiction. (Sutin, 51)

"The little guy" appears in every novel by Dick, and his independence of spirit endows him with a stubborn quality, which makes him stay on the go and defy every opponent, be it Palmer Eldritch or reality itself. Michael Bishop claims Joe Chip (Ubik) is Everyman; that he is "a shaving off the fallen family tree of humanity: a chip off the old but sometimes praiseworthy blockheadedness by which we and our progenitors have sought to insist upon the meaningfulness of our lives" ("In Pursuit of Ubik", 143). But the "little" company-owner, stubbornly producing whatever it is he produces, even when faced with imminent extinction, is also Everyman: for example, Glen Runciter (Ubik) and Leo Bulero (The Three Stigmata).

In the Exegesis, Phil comments on the fact that much of his work is "palpably autobiographical." It is no wonder, therefore, as Sutin points out, that ... characters based on Hollis can be found in several of Phil's mainstream and SF novels: The boss-employee relationships between... Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson, and Glen Runciter and Joe Chip are the most notable portraits of the trust and tension that existed between Hollis and Phil. (Sutin, 53)

Hollis is not the only real life person to be used as a model for characters. To say that Dick does not create his characters but rather gives them life is very close to the truth, because so many of his characters are based on people he knew. In many novels he even uses himself; bases a character on himself and his personal experiences. This is true of countless short stories as well as novels. Among the characters in Valis, for instance, is Phil Dick, a writer of science fiction novels, who narrates the story. Horselover Fat is another character in Valis, whose name, it turns out, is a translation of Dick's own name: "Philip" in Greek means "lover of horses", and "Dick" in German means "fat". In addition, Fat has been through a religious experience identical to Dick's own. A Scanner Darkly includes a number of characters who are based on people with whom Dick socialised during that period in his life when he turned his house in Santa Venetia into a social centre for street junkies. One of them, according to Sutin, is Jerry Fabin in Scanner, whose character is inspired by "Daniel", who, like Fabin, believed aphids to be crawling all over him - a drug induced hallucination.

In his biography of Dick's life, Sutin relates how Dick's first short stories - the earliest surviving stories - are mostly written about people who were close to Dick. "The Father-Thing" (published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954) presents a character called Ted (Dick's father, Edgar, was called Ted). Another story from 1955, "Foster, You're Dead" is about society in near-future America which is threatened by the possibility of atomic war. Private bomb shelters are commercial commodities and, thanks to marketing strategies, everybody has to have one. School children are trained every day in what to do when the bomb drops, and how to survive after the explosion. Foster is a seven year old boy whose parents do not own a private shelter because they cannot afford one, and this leads to an extremely intense feeling of insecurity in the boy. He becomes obsessed with the thought that when the time comes he will not have the 25 cents required to enter a public shelter and so be "fried" in the explosion. Moreover, for a boy this age, it is almost equally threatening to be different form everybody else. Refusing to buy a shelter gives the Fosters a stigma which young Foster finds intolerable. Sutin's view is that the boy's feelings parallel Dick's own at the age of seven. Dick's parents divorced when Dick was five and two years later he moved to Washington D.C. The move took him away from his grandmother, who had been living with the Dick family since the death of Dick's twin sister, Jane. The grandmother had been a special favourite with young Dick. It has even been suggested that around this time Dick may have been sexually molested by his grandfather. ^[6] True or not, young Dick liked playing inside boxes and in other isolated places, a tendency indicating insecurity. When he begins elementary school, he develops difficulties in swallowing, especially when eating in public places like the school cafeteria, which is another indication of a deeply felt insecurity in young Dick. The "eating" phobia would stay with him for the rest of his life.

This is one way of interpreting the story. Another way, and one I favour, is more in line with Dick's social views on life: the individual versus the indifferent system. In the Notes (written 1976) to "Foster, You're Dead," Dick says: "Here I just wanted to show how cruel the authorities can be when it comes to human life, how they can think in terms of dollars, not people" (Collected Stories 3, 476). To Dick, what always matters above anything else, is people. Whether Dick's characters are based on real people or not they all have a very strong life-like quality to them. He is not creating some characters to serve his plot; he is writing about people he likes, and who become his friends, as he tells us in an interview: "... I have built a fantasy world, like little kids do... And my novels are my make-believe world, and they're full of my friends... I would create a race of people... not an ideal, perfect people, but a people that are real to me" (Williams, 67). The life-likeness of Dick's characters are precisely because they possess this quality; they are not perfect.

The typical protagonist in Dick's fiction is a fallible but well-meaning character. His life-likeness is achieved through his "anti-heroic" characteristics: erratic judgement, laziness, selfishness, but also his ability to sympathise with others. He is not our traditional hero who rescues the damsel in distress and slays the dragon. The Dickian hero finds himself in a tough situation he has to try to make better. Usually he is up against an antagonist, whoever or whatever he or it may be, whose strength outdoes by far our heroes. But the Dickian hero never gives up. He tries, he blunders; he tries again, blunders again; then he tries to save what is by now a far worse situation than before and, eventually, he succeeds in making the best of things. By that I do not mean saving the galaxy because Dick's novels rarely portray such unreal heroics. In High Castle, Tagomi is one such hero: he does not save the world from the power-greedy Germans, but he saves two insignificant individuals, and that is what makes him a hero. As Le Guin expressed it: "Nobody ever saves the Galactic Empire from the Tentacled Andromedans. Something has indeed been saved, but only a human soul" ("The Modest One", 178). The hero is "little people". Like ourselves, he is striving to understand a world where he has neither power nor control; a world which he never asked to belong to in the first place. However, despite his having no power or control, he stands up when faced with injustice and refuses to comply. Peder Christiansen, in his article "The Classical Humanism of Philip K. Dick", says: "At the heart of each of Dick's works can be found the individual's struggle to do the right thing, despite opposing circumstances" (72). What makes the protagonist a hero is that he does try, to his utmost but limited capacity, to do his best; that he recognises injustice and oppression and feels a need to act, to do his best to do the right thing. We see this in High Castle, and also in Counter-Clock World, where Sebastian Hermes continually makes the wrong decisions in trying to save his wife, Lotta. Yet, he does not give up, despite the odds.

In Counter-Clock World we also witness Officer Joe Tinbane, Hermes's friend, fighting an internal battle: should he help Hermes to hide the anarch Peak or should he betray his friend in an attempt to win Lotta over as his mistress. He argues with himself whether to fight for the "cause" or whether to cop out and fight for his own selfish interests and needs:

The result is that he follows Lotta, who has been captured by the "enemy", saves her and wins her love by becoming her hero. Instead of being happy, Tinbane feels guilty for having caused Hermes the pain of losing his wife. In Tinbane we see a character who is basically a decent human being, but his weakness blurs his judgement; ergo: he becomes real. he same can be said about Sebastian Hermes. Hermes is a middle-aged man who leads a harmless, quiet life. e loves his wife dearly, which is his weakness, and when she is kidnapped, no rational reasoning will stop him from going after her. He is, however, not the right man for the rescuing job, having no experience in such matters, and so every attempt he makes fails miserably, and only serves to make things so much worse and complicated. His dilemma is one most of us will recognise, the fight between reason and emotion being a battle inseparable from the human race from day one.

Joe Chip in Ubik is another hero who is, unwillingly, thrust into a life-threatening situation where the antagonist appears to be reality itself and unless he can come up with a solution to what is happening, he will die fairly quickly. His surroundings are gradually deteriorating and his colleagues are turning up dead, one after another. Aside from the fact that the circumstances force him to act, he senses the injustice in what is taking place, like someone or something is playing some sort of perverse game with reality and the human lives depending on it. He cannot accept this - he must not accept it for otherwise he will turn up dead too. Even when he has tried - unsuccessfully - to get a grip on the "new" reality, and is himself being attacked by the mysterious force that is killing his friends, he does not give up. Knowing he can do nothing to prevent his horrible death - the other victims have been found shrivelled as if dehydrated - he still feels he must not give up. Bishop says of Joe:

Even when he appears to be defeated, and unfairly so, he refuses to give in. The same can be said about all of Dick's heroes: Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream?, Herb Asher in The Divine Invasion, Bob Arctor in Scanner, and Barney Mayerson in The Three Stigmata. They are all more or less cut from the same cloth and we cannot help but feel sympathetic towards them. For us to be judging them for their weaknesses, or their inability to handle difficult problems without effort, would be hypocrisy on our part: they are not perfect because the average human being is not perfect; we are not perfect.

Dick's female characters, especially in his earlier novels, tend to be type-cast. Of the two types Dick creates, the dark-haired, beautiful, sexy and incredibly dangerous heroine is more prominent. We see Rachel Rosen in Do Androids Dream?, Roni Fugate in The Three Stigmata, and Pat Conley in Ubik. Pat is an almost nightmarish vision of the femme fatale. She possesses an extremely dangerous precognitive talent: she can alter an incident after it has happened, without anybody being aware of the change. She also happens to be an agent from an enemy firm, sent to destroy Joe Chip and his colleagues. She is presented as completely cold-blooded and heartless. The scene where Joe Chip is crawling up the hotel stairs, dying, creates a feeling of utter hatred for the woman:

The evil character of Pat is supposedly based on either Dick's mother, Dorothy, or his third wife Anne, or a combination of both. In Sutin's biography we learn that Dick accused Dorothy of letting his twin sister, Jane, die of malnutrition at the age of one month; Dick himself barely survived. Dick believed that Dorothy's failure to provide adequately for the twins, and to recognise their need for medical treatment, was intentional. He hated her, but at the same time relied on her for financial help and moral encouragement. Dorothy was the only one who supported Dick and constantly believed in his talent for writing. Moreover, from what Sutin tells us about Dick's life and his relationship with Dorothy, it seems that he had inherited his inquisitive mind and artistic talent from her. Whatever else might be said, she always understood his need to write, as Sutin tells us: "Throughout his life Phil turned to her for money, advice, even critical response to his manuscripts, and Dorothy never faltered in her encouragement of Phil the artist" (16). Dick's strong hatred for Dorothy may possibly be due to the ambiguity of his feelings towards her.

Carlo Pagetti, in his article "Dick and Meta-SF," points out a characteristic of Dick's writing: "the presence of couples in a perpetual crisis, unable to live together..." (20). The failure, in the typical Dick novel, to portray successful relationships between men and women can be traced back to Dick's personal inability to relate to women successfully. Every novel included in this discussion presents an instance of the "couple in crisis"; Barney Mayerson (The Three Stigmata) and Frank Frink (High Castle) both continually regret having let their wives go; Joe Tinbane (Counter-Clock World) desires another man's wife; Bob Arctor (Scanner) is in love with Donna, who only wants to be his friend - and nothing more. The resemblance to Dick's own life can hardly be a coincidence. Aside from being married five times, Dick had numerous girlfriends, all of whom he wanted to marry, and when he was not trying to get some girl to marry him, he was falling in love with some other girl he accidentally met in a shop or at the hospital's psychiatric ward, or who happened to be married to one of his best friends. Most of Dick's relationships never quite worked out.

The other type of heroine in Dick's novels is considerably more agreeable, and more in keeping with the male characters: fallible, but good-natured and well-meaning. Although she becomes more prominent in the last novels, in which the malevolent female type has no place, she does appear in earlier ones. The positive heroine may be interpreted as a portrayal of Dick's twin sister, as he imagined her. He often pictured Jane as a brave, energetic, and willful girl. As a boy, Dick had an imaginary playmate called Jane ("cowgirl Jane") who often challenged the frightened Dick into mischief. The pain and loneliness he felt at the absence of his twin sister and the life-long yearning for her, took many forms in both life and fiction. It is a documented fact that the loss of a twin creates a void in the surviving twin's life, which he tries to find ways of filling and which will always prevent him from having a normal, successful relationship; this sense of lacking something has been termed "twinning". ^[7] Sutin says: "Studies of surviving twins point to a sense of incompleteness that can make relationships, particularly with the opposite sex, very difficult" (16). In High Castle, Juliana Frink represents the positive female character who develops even more complex characteristics as Dick's career progresses. She appears again as Emily Hnatt in The Three Stigmata, as Iran, Rick Deckard's wife, in Do Androids Dream?, Donna in Scanner, Rybys Rommey in The Divine Invasion and at last as the superbly portrayed Angel Archer in Transmigration, Dick's greatest achievement in female characterisation.

Dick's finest and most empathetic male character is the Japanese business man, Tagomi, in High Castle. Dick's portrayal of the calm, careful and sympathetic Japanese who, in trying to behave correctly in a society he understands not too well, appears at times mildly comic. Yet the comedy is never cruel because Tagomi, through his compassion and tolerant attitude towards all things, is too lovable. He treats everybody with courtesy and respect and strives to understand them and their actions even when they appear irrational to him. Being Japanese, he has been raised in the Buddhist belief, which explains some of his behaviour. However, Buddhist or not, his view is in essence humanistic, a view that Dick's fiction centres on: a reverence for life, whatever form it may take.

Tagomi is also a decisive and firm man; he is, after all, a successful businessman in a top position at the Imperial Trade Mission. As Japan and Germany have won the Second World War, the two countries have divided the United States between them and as joint rulers of the world, they have to work together. As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the supposed "teamwork" between the two nations is more on the surface than at the core. Japan dislikes Germany's policy of racial clearances - i.e., the wiping out of all non-white races. However, to preserve peace, Japan does not interfere in German politics. Germany, however, although this is never explicitly voiced, seems to be plotting to gain total rule - without Japan's alliance. Germans are depicted as insane übermensch with a superiority complex, while the Japanese are shown as quiet, civilised, and tolerant but also cold, unfeeling with a mentality that is completely incomprehensible to the average American. They are generally admired but just as generally resented, in both cases for being so different from Americans. The Japanese are portrayed as the ultimate compromisers who never say directly what they mean, and who bow to the Germans even when the Germans are pursuing a policy disagreeable to them. After all, systematic actions aimed at eliminating all non-arian people, as the official policy of the Third Reich, is a subtle insult to all Asian people. Yet the Japanese allow it, which generates in Americans an attitude of contempt for the "weak" and cowardly Japanese and an awesome respect for Germans, whose aggressiveness is impressive.

Still, the hero of the book is a Japanese businessman who performs an act which is in direct opposition to his most fundamental belief. As General Tedeki, the old army official, says to Mr. Baynes, whose life Tagomi has just saved by killing two German "thugs", Tagomi's vision is fundamentally Buddhist and to a Buddhist all lives are holy. Tagomi's emotional reaction is despair: "To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality" (192). Still he has to do what he does. He can not stand idly by and watch injustice being done. His action is not planned as such; he simply sees a situation arise which he cannot accept and acts on initiative. This initiative is the quality that Dick likes to call empathy and is what distinguishes humans from machines and will lead to our redemption, each and every time it happens.

It is not in keeping with Dick's style to treat people collectively. Heroism, for Dick, does not happen on a nationwide scale. As I have so often emphasised, it is the individual that matters and no matter how small the individual, his actions matter and affect everybody around him. For the three men involved, Tagomi's actions change their lives forever. This is even more true when it comes to Frank Frink, and how Tagomi saves his life - without Frink knowing it. Frink is a Jew, and he is about to be deported to Germany, where he will no doubt be executed. Since the Japanese are the rulers of that part of the States where Frink lives, Tagomi has to sign the papers legalising the action. By refusing to sign, Tagomi saves the life of a person he has never seen, does not know and will most likely never meet. Moreover, Frink never knows what or who saves him. Dick, in "Now Wait for This Year", says of Tagomi that he

The price Tagomi pays is more than any man should have to pay for a simple humanistic action, but as he is carried out of the Nippon Times Building on a stretcher, he is at peace with the universe, knowing he has done the right thing. Christiansen adds: "Justice and kindness, as correct action, are the key actions in ... The Man in the High Castle" (77). The aftermath is sad, for Tagomi dies of a heart attack. But in the end this extraordinary man's triumph against the evil forces in the world is an example of the little man's victories which in the final analysis make him big.

Ursula Le Guin comes right to the point in her essay "The Modest One" when she says: "[ ] Mr. Tagomi ... when put to the test, sacrifices himself by refusing an act that would harm another man though not himself. He sees evil and, nervously and unhappily, he says no to it" (176). What makes Tagomi a hero is that normally he is not in the business of performing heroisms but his instinctive compassion for another man, and a stranger at that, makes him stand up and protest. The emphasis is on the invisible goodness of people such as Tagomi, a quality that only becomes visible in an hour of need and then reveals itself in all its humble magnificence. I leave it to Le Guin to add the final analysis:

In Christiansen's words, Philip K. Dick is "acclaimed today for his humanistic science fiction" (72), and the largest part of this humanistic aspect is the sympathetic character: the hero. No one will deny that heroism in traditional tales means killing the monster that is destroying the universe. However, there exists another type of heroism and anyone who reads a novel by Dick will become, if not convinced, at least aware that for us everyday creatures, heroism lies in personal victories over little things and above all, in not giving up. Bishop compares Joe Chip to Sisyphus, and Sisyphus to the workman of today, and in doing so, equates Chip with Everyman: "... both Sisyphus and Joe Chip achieve an existential victory over their fates by staying scornfully on the go" (145). Simply keep on trying and never give up and we will overcome, even if it be only in a minor way. Yet, a minor victory is better than no victory, and in a sense, the only victory we can achieve as individuals.

[6]    From Sutin: "Barry Spatz, a psychologist who worked with Phil in the late seventies and early eighties... points out that Phil's life history shows tendencies characteristic of child incest victims, such as difficult relations with family; drug abuse; repeated suicide attempts; significant memory gaps; low self-esteem accompanied by guilt; a chaotic, crisis-oriented lifestyle; and pervasive mistrust, especially toward the opposite sex, alternating with strong attachments. These are certainly descriptive of aspects of Phil's life ... But such tendencies can and do manifest themselves in persons who have not suffered from abuse" (25). Sutin concludes that it is impossible to decide, with any certainty, on the matter.   Back to text

[7]    The constant awareness of not being complete is termed "twinning" by Dr. George Engel in "Death and Reunion: The Loss of a Twin" (Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, June 1981), where he says: "The drive is always to be two, yet unique from all others." Sutin, in Divine Invasions, (15-19), discusses this phenomenon in connection with the recurring motifs in Dick's fiction.   Back to text