Knight, also spoke about Dick’s distorted pictures of contemporary reality (in
But that was all the praise this author came to hear. Nobody saw that his “unchecked growth” is quite strikingly similar in content and form to what goes on in the Upper Realm. Judged according to the problems he deals with, Dick’s novels belong to that stream of literature that explores the no man’s land between being and nothing — in the double sense.
(a)
We can count Dick’s novels as part of the prose that is today called “Literature of Ideas” or “Literature of Possibilities.” This type of experimental prose tries to probe the neglected, latent, untouched, as-yet-unrealized potentialities of human existence, mainly in the psychological sphere. Probably one can find fountains of such prose in, among others, the works of Musil
(b)
In connection with Dick, we can think of authors like Beckett, because of the “unhealthy curiosity” that both have for death, or, more exactly, for the flow of life as it approaches its end. Beckett “is content” with natural processes that will devour man from the inside, slowly and continually (as when growing old, or becoming a cripple). Dick devotes himself to grander speculations, in the true spirit of the genre he is working in.
We could say many interesting things about his “theory” of half-life (not as a sensible empirical hypothesis, but as a variety of fantastic-ontological speculation) but, once again, I cannot dig too deep into an exegesis of a desacralized eschatology.
We draw these two parallels to show how an area of creation, closed into a ghetto, suffers from the situation of its own isolation. For such parallel courses of evolution are not accidental coincidences. It is the spirit of time that mirrors itself in them, but science fiction knows only short-lived fashions.
The peculiarity of Dick’s work throws a glaring light upon relationships within the science-fiction milieu. All science-fiction works have to give the reader the impression of being easy to read, as has all fiction. Science-fiction works before which two hundred Nobel Prize winners in the department of physics kneel down are worthless for the science-fiction market if, in fact, the precondition of being able to evaluate a work of science fiction is a minimum of knowledge. Therefore it is best for science-fiction books not to contain any deep meaning — either physical or metaphysical. But if the author smuggles any sense into his work, it must not stir the phlegmatic and indolent reader, or else this invaluable man will stop reading because of a headache.[7] The deeper meaning is admitted only if it is “harmless,” if we can neglect it entirely while reading. The following anecdote may explain this problem: If many colored flags are put upon the masts of a ship in the harbor, a child on the shore will think that this is a merry game and perhaps will have a lot of fun watching, although at the same time an adult will recognize the flags as a language of signals, and know that it stands for a report on a plague that has broken out on board the ship. The science-fiction readership equals the child, not the adult, in the story.
Their trashy surface helps Dick’s novels to survive in the milieu of science fiction. I do not maintain that Dick is a Machiavelli of science fiction who, under the cover of science-fiction trash, intentionally carries out a perfidiously thought-out camouflage in order to deceive his readers (i.e., in giving them gold disguised as iron trinkets).
Rather, I believe that Dick works intuitively, without knowing himself that he plays hide-and-seek with his readers. Please note the difference between an artist and an artisan: the artist grows in his environment, deriving from it the elements that serve him as a medium of expression — of those differences of tensions to which his personality is subject. The artisan is a producer of things for which there is a demand and which he has learned to produce — after the models that enjoy the highest popularity. Ninety-eight percent of science fiction is a craft, and its authors are day laborers who must obey to demand payment. Almost any artist can become an artisan when he strangles his inner voice — or he has no such voice at all.
For a long time Philip K. Dick has been only an artisan, and a skillful one, too, since he knew how to produce the things that were bought immediately. Gradually he began — and I must continue to speak in metaphors — to listen to his inner voice, and, though he still made use of those elements that science fiction put at his disposal, he began to put together patterns of his own.
But this is not an infallible explanation. As is always the case, it arises from a land of cross-breeding between what is in the books I read and what I can do with this material as a reader. Therefore I can imagine other explanations for Dick’s novels, explanations that differ from mine, though naturally the role of such an explanation cannot be played by just any idea. There is no doubt about the fact that with trashy elements Dick tries to express a metaphysics of an extremely “black” nature, mirroring authentically the state of his mind. A logical, one-hundred- percent unequivocal reconstruction of the deep semantic structures of a complex work is impossible because there are no discursive series of phrases to which a work of art may be reduced without leaving something remaining.
Thus it must be; for if it were otherwise, this essay would be entirely superfluous. Why should I talk in so complicated and obscure a manner about a theme, if this theme may be put into clear and simple words? That which you can say briefly and intelligibly you need not describe with long and unintelligible words. For this reason, every authentic work of art has its depths, and the possibility that such a work of art carries a message about existence for subsequent generations of readers, although in society, in civilization, and in life there is endless change, bears witness that the transitory things that do not disappear in a masterpiece are buried in its semantic variability. Out of the glaring cliches of trash, behind which yawns a horrible vacuum for every science-fiction artisan, Dick makes for himself a set of messages — i.e., a language — just like somebody who puts together from separate colored flags a language of signals according to his own judgment. Science-fiction criticism could help Dick to collect the colored flags, but not to put together sensible entireties from this crude material, because in practice it denies the existence of semantic depth.
Those science-fiction readers who are keenest of hearing feel that Dick is “different”; however, they are unable to articulate this impression clearly.
Dick has adapted to the science-fiction milieu — with positive as well as negative effects. He invented a method to express, with the aid of trash, that which transcends all trash. But he was unable to withstand to the end the contaminating influence of this quite poisonous material.
The most striking lack is the lack of penetrating, detailed, and objective criticism. The critical books by Blish and Knight are an exception to this rule; the book by Lundwall
Literature has no equality of rights: the day laborers must be dealt with in one sentence, if not with scornful silence, and a maximum of patience and attention is due to the promising author. But science fiction has different customs. I am no enthusiast; I do not believe that shrewd critiques would make author Dick into a Thomas Mann of science fiction. And yet it is a pity that there has been no critical selection among his works (although this state of affairs is consonant with the lack of selection in the whole science-fiction field). Unfortunately, the work of Dick praised above also has its reverse side. One is used to calling such work uneven. The contradictions in
