NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

Phil's plots didn't require much in the way of fancy space-exploration gear. For the most part he plops his characters on the nearby Martian colonies or a post-nuclear holocaust Earth. His future technology consists largely of flying 'flappels' and other talking homeostatic devices that try futilely to straighten out their hapless human owner's lives. When Phil really wants to shake things up, he introduces psi talents such as telepaths ("teeps") and pre-cognitives ("precogs"), or aliens of sinister and saintly persuasion, or brand-new drug that, regardless of what they promise, always make things ever so much weirder and worse. The characters confronting all this tend to be - as who wouldn't? - frantic, confused, fierce, broken, and sometimes even full of faith in human goodness. Voilą! The Phildickian world.

(Sutin, 129)

In a Dickian universe, there are many realities, most of them equally valid, but none of them an overview of the whole. If his plots sometimes seem contradictory, they are deliberately so. To keep all the loose ends tied up would violate verisimilitude in the service of consistency, for the Dickian universe has ambiguity and indeterminacy at its core.

(Norman Spinrad, as cited in Bishop, 138)

Among Dick's trademarks as a science fiction writer is his novels' lack of closure: his novels are as open-ended as the world itself. Dick provides an argument for this: "As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do - not what he would like them to do" ("Foreword to The Preserving Machine", 16-17). The world they happen to inhabit, no matter how strange or surreal, usually treats them cruelly and, as we will recognise from our own world, it is totally unpredictable. Michael Bishop says in "In Pursuit of Ubik":

[ ] as Spinrad, Stanislaw Lem, and others have pointed out, and as the works themselves so starkly demonstrate, the ambiguity and intentional irreality of Dick's fictional universes imbue them paradoxically, with an off-center life-likeness... (139)

Dick's novels are open-ended because they represent the real world which has no beginning and no end; that they are also strangely confusing in their contradictory, mixture of plots and sub-plots, most often internally unrelated, is because the world on which Dick models his novels is irrational and full of unexplainable coincidences.

Dick never could accept the world, for he could not understand its cruelty; it made him angry. He comments on this in "Now Wait for This Year,":

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards, I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what science fiction is all about... I want to show you, in my writings, what I love (my friends) and what I savagely hate (what happens to them). (218)

So Dick searched for meaning in the universe, and the truth about our existence - the most eternal riddles there are.

His search is a sincere one; it leads him everywhere, and it takes place in his novels. The result is that every novel contains several plots, thrown together seemingly at random, and yet with a purpose. The multitude of plots often tends to bewilder the reader and also tends to make the novel appear utterly chaotic. What may annoy some - and fascinate others - is that Dick throws in incidents which seem to have no significant value in terms of the main storyline. In his endless pursuit for meaning and truth, Dick feels he should not only look in high places but low places as well. The answer may not necessarily be in heaven; it just might happen to lie in the gutter instead. The random piling up of unrelated details is, as Dick has called it himself, his "garbage heap". Consequently, no junk is too much junk to be discarded. So he puts it in.

The garbage heap is where Dick believed he would eventually find God, truth and the meaning of the cosmos. In his quest for answers, he stops to look into the occasional dustbin:

(Dick, as cited in Sutin, 154-55) ^[3]

All the plots muddled together with startling details sticking out - this is Dick's garbage heap. Some readers may, and probably will get lost trying to understand what it all means. Reading a novel by an author like Dick, who does not tie up his loose ends, can be frustrating. Until the reader realises he does not necessarily have to figure out hundred percent what it all means, he is going to remain dissatisfied. As Robert Galbreath says ("Redemption and Doubt in Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy"), when it comes to Dick the writer there is no bullet-proof certainty about anything: "There are no grounds for certainty that are not themselves uncertain" (108). The best way is to simply face the fact that a typical Dick novel has a great number of possible solutions to it and every one will appear equally valid.

Every action and incident happening in the Dickian world, in fact, every Dick novel, is an answer to questions which Dick is asking himself and his readers. These are always the same questions, which, phrased by Galbreath, are along these lines:

What is the nature of the world and its creator, if any? How can I know what reality is? ... How can I distinguish reality from illusion, the genuine from the fake, the original from the simulacrum? (105-106)

Dick searches for answers. Whatever he finds that he thinks may come to shed a light on the puzzle, he includes in his novels, whether it is relevant to the plot or not. Warrick explains what the garbage heap is, which clarifies a little what I have just said: "Over his long writing career, he has remained intrigued with the same subjects, but the answers he gives to the questions he raises on these subjects are never the same. His mind is constantly in motion" (109). Every novel is a theory, or, to be more specific, several theories, on the same subjects. The subjects are always the same, the theories constantly change - no wonder the novels are a trifle confusing.

If "confusing" is the word for Dick's earlier novels, then the word for the Valis trilogy is "bewildering". After years of inquiring into the nature of reality and humanity, he turns to discussing theological arguments, debating more religious texts than is possible to enumerate, and in the process, creates a new personal cosmogony. Turning his attention to religion does not mean Dick has abandoned his old subject-matter. Peter Fitting, in "Reality as Ideological Construct", says: What changes from novel to novel is not the basic pattern, but the explanation which the characters and/or the author use to explain the illusory nature of reality - an explanation which, in Dick's final three novels, is grounded in the mystical Gnosticism of the 2nd-century Alexandrian Valentinus. (105)

Dick's novels are a "vast mixed bag" of information, which he hopes will help him find the truth about the universe and the god who runs it. In Valis and The Divine Invasion Dick uses Gnostic theories about the creation of the world and the nature of the deity to explain why he finds the universe so completely irrational. In addition he has analysed Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Islam texts, and, based on the similarities he finds in all those texts, he forms his own hypothesis, his "Two Source Cosmogony", explained in detail in his Exegesis. ^[4] Parts of the Exegesis are revealed in the two aforementioned novels. By discovering the truth about God, he hopes he will find the answers to his two obsessions, "What is Human?" and "What is Real?"

John Huntington in "Philip K. Dick: Authenticity and Insincerity" makes a comment on Dick's "profound understanding" when he suggests that Dick gives his theories importance, and an appearance of being profound by "simply contradicting himself," and in that he behaves as many SF writers before him: van Vogt, Heinlein and Herbert, for example: "The more clearly one side is affirmed, the more profound it seems later to find its opposite unexpectedly affirmed with equal unambiguousness" (Huntington, 172). However, things are never quite as simple as that in Dick. Huntington refers to Do Androids Dream?, in which the attitude towards androids jumps from being negative to being positive and then to negative again, and adds:

By moving without mediation from one moral perspective to the other, the novel gives the feeling of moral three-dimensionality, of depth. At other times, as in the whirligig of exchanges at the end of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or in the baffling regressions and exhaustions in Ubik, the van Vogtian technique ^[5] generates more perspectives than a reader can absorb, and the effect is not so much of depth as of a suggestive complexity. (172)

This may sound like a negative description, but it is not. Even Dick's "suggestive complexity" has depth. What makes it so confusing is that what is being suggested in such a complex manner, is not easily perceived at first glance. This is, after all, Dick's strong point - the elusiveness of his novels, all the loose ends that in the end connect not with each other but with everything else outside the novel. Another aspect of Dick's "depth" and "suggestive complexity" is his refusal to preach one definite moral. Huntington adds:

In Dick there is no telegraphing of impending change. There is no implication that the alert, understanding reader will see the correct reading and discard the false one. There is no period in which the reader must balance two antithetical possible readings and then choose which is the moral or true one. In this van Vogtian system the reader is simply yanked from understanding to understanding. (172)

Of course it is possible to argue this by saying that Dick refused to preach any moral because he had no moral to preach. Or that he refused it because he could not preach anything definite in such confusing novels. The best way to refute such an argument is to admit that, yes, Dick was contradictory all the time; he creates a theory and then discards it for a newer counter-theory. In Valis, Phil, the narrator, says of his alter-ego, Horselover Fat: "During the years... that he laboured on his Exegesis, Fat must have come up with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more cunning, more exciting and more fucked" (32). The reason is personal: in every novel, Dick is dealing with a problem, every time, more or less, the same problem - that of authenticity and insincerity. Every novel is a theory and every time a new theory about the same old subjects. As soon as he feels he has domesticated the problem and put truth on a leash, he will doubt the validity of the answer and ask "What If?" all over again; flip the coin yet again and let truth loose just so that he can attack it again from the other side. On the one hand, he plays this game ceaselessly; always travelling, always arriving somewhere and always departing again. On the other hand, he always arrives at the same place, and whatever the original goal, he finds something worth offering: a new theory, a new answer, and a new novel, and still the result is always the same. There is truth in what he has to say, each and every time, although it may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth: salvation is based on the individual - if he cares enough.

Philosophising about the nature of God does not sound very appealing, and Valis would be heavy going indeed were it not for Dick's incredible sense of humour. He shows that he can view his own most important and personal thoughts with a detached ironic cynicism. Warrick says about Dick: "... [H]e might not even want his reader to take his personal vision too seriously. As he once said to me with an ironic twinkle in his voice, 'You'd have to be crazy to do that!'" (125). His humour adds to all his theological meanderings a casual and sarcastic aspect, and he has a tendency to drop a punch line in unexpected places. According to people who knew Dick personally, he would never miss an opportunity to "crack" a joke or two. Roger Zelazny, when attending a science fiction conference in Metz, France, had a French student ask him if Dick intended to found his own religion with himself as Pope. When Zelazny answered that Dick was probably joking, the French student was not so sure because, he told Zelazny, Dick had given him "the power to remit sins--and to kill fleas" (Zelazny; Introduction to Rickman's Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words, IX). Dick's humour, so prominent in all his novels, is an important element in making them as readable as they are.

In Valis Dick demonstrates his unique ability to combine irony and colloquialism with profound theological and dialectic one-man debates. Warrick discusses his use of this technique in Valis: "The writing is rescued from heaviness by humor and a sprinkling of street language. These are not scholarly discussions" (116), and she adds: "It is a strange combination - Gnostic theology discussed in California street language" (111). Colloquial language and even street jargon makes it possible for the man on the street not only to follow the argument but perhaps partake in it. It is a way of bringing the most serious and specialised discussions down to the level of not only understanding it but enjoying it as well.

In Valis the setting is that Horselover Fat has been through an encounter with God, and to try to explain it to himself, he writes whatever hypothesis he comes up with in a diary which he refers to as his "Exegesis". Fat and his four best friends have endless discussions and arguments about the experience. First, there is Kevin, the cynical sceptic, who continually makes fun of Fat. Secondly, we have David, the faithful Catholic. Third, we meet Sherri, also a Catholic, who is dying from cancer. Fourth is Phil, the science fiction writer, who narrates the story and who has no definite opinion about anything except he believes Fat is crazy. By presenting a group of four completely different individuals, Dick manages to argue all sides of the matter convincingly. Apart from that, the conversations are great entertainment, in an absurd sort of way:

      We enjoyed baiting Fat into theological disputation... Our friend Kevin always began his attack one way. "What about my dead cat?" Kevin would ask... [He] liked to say, "On judgement day when I'm brought up before the great judge I'm going to say, 'Hold on a second,' and then I'm going to whip out my dead cat from inside my coat. 'How do you explain this?' I'm going to ask." By then, Kevin used to say, the cat would be as stiff as a frying pan; he would hold out the cat by its handle, its tail, and wait for a satisfactory answer.
      Fat said, "No answer would satisfy you."
      "No answer you could give," Kevin sneered. "Okay, so God saved your son's life; why didn't he have my cat run out into the street five seconds later? Three seconds later? Would that have been too much trouble? Of course, I suppose a cat doesn't matter."
      "You know, Kevin," I pointed out one time, "you could have put the cat on a leash."
      "No," Fat said. "He has a point. It's been bothering me. For him the cat is a symbol of everything about the universe he doesn't understand."
      "I understand just fine," Kevin said bitterly. "I just think it's fucked. God is either powerless, stupid or he doesn't give a shit. Or all three. He's evil, dumb and weak. I think I'll start my own exegesis." (26-7)

In absurd fiction, where the craziest things can happen - and usually do - humour provides necessary relief if the reader is not to give up on the work altogether. Dick's novels tend to outdo the most absurd and craziest fiction, and his zany humour saves them the reader from getting lost in the absurdity.

Dick's characters have a way of commenting wittily on a situation. Consider Joe Chip, our hero from Ubik, who is having trouble with the mechanical door on his conapt. In Joe's world all household appliances are money-operated:

      The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
      He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing ....
      From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got out a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.
      "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
      Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it." (23-4)

The absurdity of a talking, money-operated door added to the situation Joe is in - unless someone comes to rescue him he will be locked up in his conapt for the rest of his life - is modestly hilarious.

Dick's quick-witted remarks, uttered by his characters, echo Raymond Chandler's style in novels like The Big Sleep. Chandler's prose is famous for its cynical dialogue where characters, who are products of the Forties, speak hard-boiled slang. Conversations are often metaphoric, always innovative and very funny. Philip Marlowe is answering the police captain's inquiry about what has been going on in The Big Sleep: "'There's been a lot of killings going on around me,' I said. 'I haven't been getting my share of it'" (196). By staying stoic in the face of the gravest of dangers, the character reduces the seriousness of what should by rights be nasty circumstances, and transforms the event into a joke. Moreover, Dick - like Chandler - always lets his protagonist have the last word. The last word is often a remark understating the plight he is in and is his way of outwitting the opposition. The protagonist remains somewhat indifferent and, within the context of what is happening - be it a battle with a money-gulping door or a personal trial conducted by a creature from between dimensions - his indifference is highly comical for it is the protagonist's method of refusing to be defeated - when in fact he is. The following passage from A Scanner Darkly relates the incident of Charles Freck's attempted suicide, which miscarries in such a way that it turns into a hilarious joke. Freck, a junkie, decides to end it all by swallowing an enormous amount of pills with the aid of red wine, bought especially for the occasion; a bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. He prepares himself by laying back on his couch with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead because Freck finds it important that he be found with that particular book in his lap since it "would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn" (186). He also has an unfinished letter to Exxon gas company where he protests the cancellation of his gas credit card. However, Freck discovers, after he has downed the barbiturates that they are in fact psychedelics; he has been burned by his dealer, and now he is "in for some trip."

      The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly...
      "You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.
      The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
      Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a hundred thousand hours."
      Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, "... Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."
      Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.
      A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed... he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.
      "And next -" it was saying.
      Charles Freck thought, At least I got a good wine. (188-89)

Freck, in for the trip of his life, points out that things are not all bad, and the inappropriate comment becomes ironic because of the circumstances.

Dick's narrative talent and humour sparkle in Scanner. The subject-matter itself is not so funny, because it is about people destroying themselves with drugs. Using personal friends as prototypes for his characters inside a tragic theme that meant a great deal to Dick, he manages to carry it off with his irony and humour. The most tragic aspect of it is that Dick writes it in memory of his friends from his Santa Venetia days, friends who are either dead or permanently damaged by drug abuse. Dick adds a list of names as an epilogue to the novel, names of those people that he knew and cared about. Among the names on the list is Philip K. Dick.

Similarities between Dick and Chandler are not limited to dialogue only. Chandler's sparse and dry prose is filled with imaginative descriptions which take the reader by surprise by stating the not obvious - or sometimes the too obvious. Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep) describes a situation: "Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead" (38). Chandler has a tendency to say what his reader least expects him to say, as the example demonstrates. Dick's language has been described by Le Guin as "hasty" and "straightforward", and she has commented on his humour as being "dry and zany" ("The Modest One", 175). In this Dick is analogous to Chandler. In Valis Phil tells us how Horselover Fat escaped death: "The first thing that came along to save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old highschool girl ... and the second was God. Of the two of them the girl did better" (18). As I said, the humour lies in the surprise.

Valis, like Scanner, is also autobiographical; both novels relate incidents that happened to, or around Dick. Horselover Fat's religious experience is Philip K. Dick's actual experience. I have already commented on the fact that Dick wrote Valis in order to try to understand what happened. But there is something else to consider. Sutin includes a comment made by one-time girlfriend, Doris:

In a sense, religion became Phil's business when he started to write theological novels in the seventies. But it also had this quality of being useful - as material for the next book. Imagination was his stock in trade, and he tried out theories to see how people reacted. (Doris, as cited in Sutin, 239)

Dick is, first and foremost, a writer, and anything extraordinary that would happen to him, he made use of in his work.

Dick's use of humour adds to his novels a life-like appearance: the bewildering complexity of his plots, and often far-fetched ideas, are made real - and comic. Comedy is often the best way to get a message across, for emphasising the hilarity of the topics involved makes them stand out too clearly to be missed. Also, it helps in bringing highly intellectual discussions down to earth, as is the case with Valis, and the reader realises that the author is not being patronising by "showing off" his knowledge; he is not way up there, out of reach, but down here with the rest of us. He is somebody the reader can relate to. Religion is a very serious and sensitive topic to write about, and it would all but have destroyed Valis, were it not for witticisms like Kevin's reply to David who states that the only thing that exists is God's Will: "I hope I'm in his will ... I hope he left me more than one dollar" (160). After all, the reader sees that he has something in common with the author: the appreciation of a good joke. It also helps eliminate speculations about Dick's possible madness; after all, anyone able to make this much fun of himself could not possibly be insane, could he?

[3]    This text is taken from Dick's Exegesis and my citation of it is a somewhat shortened version of Sutin's in Divine Invasions. Brackets within the text are as Sutin uses them; my own observations, if any, are italicised. Italicised citations, at the beginning of each section, follow reversed format.    Back to text

[4]    The Exegesis is a "diary" in which Dick wrote every possible explanation and theory he could think of concerning his religious experiences in February-March, 1974 (always referred to as "2-3-74" by Dick). These experiences troubled him deeply: were they authentic messages from God, delusions created by his possibly deranged mind, or results of his excessive use of pills of all sorts? The Exegesis is an attempt to put all this in perspective, and he worked on it almost every night for eight years, from 1974, until he died in March, 1982. By then he had written eight thousand pages of this diary, and in 1980 he sub-titled it Apologia Pro Mia Vita, which indicates its central theme. A selection from the Exegesis has been published as In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Lawrence Sutin, ed. Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller, 1991.    Back to text

[5]    Sutin, in his biography, relates a story about Dick meeting A. E. van Vogt at the 1954 Science Fiction Worldcon, where van Vogt explains how he plots his novels: "Well, I'll tell you a secret. I start out with a plot and then the plot sort of folds up. So then I have to have another plot to finish the rest of the story" (82), i.e., the "van Vogtian technique."    Back to text