Reality and Subjectivity in Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, The

Reality and Subjectivity in Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Filip R. Zahariev English Studies – Literary Specialization BA Thesis 15 Credits Spring-2021 Supervisor: Berndt Clavier Zahariev i Abstract This thesis examines the forces that affect subjectivity in two novels by the author Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The close reading of these two novels makes use of postmodernist theory as its theoretical foundation. In these works, stable subjects are fractured through a series of disconcerting incidents originating in a “reality shift,” an event that sees the seemingly solid state of Dick’s speculative future worlds collapse. Split into three sections, this paper first positions Dick within a postmodernist tradition developed mainly by Lyotard, Hutcheon, and Baudrillard, supported by critics such as Sim, Malpas, and Kellner, among others. It then defines the reality shift and its underlying causes, three types of science fictional drugs across the two novels: Can-D, Chew-Z, and KR-3. Finally, this essay examines the full extent of Dick’s inquiry into subjectivity by exploring the metamorphoses the subjects of his novels endure. Zahariev ii Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Postmodernism and Philip K. Dick ..................................................................................................... 3 The Reality Shift and Its Engines ....................................................................................................... 9 Ever fragmentary: Subjectivity in Dick’s Flow My Tears and Palmer Eldritch ............................... 19 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 32 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................................... 34 Zahariev 1 Introduction Is this real? It’s real. —Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said One of the defining features found across Philip K. Dick’s impressive oeuvre is anxiety about the nature of reality and the human being, a deep dread that encapsulates both the external and internal worlds the author engenders. Ontological doubt, epistemological uncertainty, a fragmenting of the self, and the disintegrating effects that come with recreative drug use are some of the most common elements any reader might expect to encounter across Dick’s science fiction. In one novel, a man who has everything wakes up to discover all signs of his existence have been washed away from the world, the totalitarian authorities his privilege has protected him from now eager to consume him. In another, more and more of humanity makes use of a “translation” drug to escape the increasing estrangement born of alien environments; all the meanwhile, a second, more potent drug spreads throughout the solar system, more potent and alienating by far. These novels are Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, both of them establishing a precarious balance between external and internal worlds. In these novels, reality, upon whose constancy both identity and the self are constructed, proves an unstable foundation. There comes a moment in each novel when reality’s framework begins to fray, what will be referred to as a “reality shift”. My interest is in its initial drive, as well as in how it affects those caught within it. Does it lead to Zahariev 2 dissolution of identity and the self, or does it reveal a hard core of morality that offers some defence from the cynical disillusionment postmodernism displays towards fixed values? What of drugs, the triggers of these shifts? Their use has debilitating effects on reality and on the subject; thus, it is necessary to examine these effects closely, map them, and juxtapose them where necessary. Previous research has been done on both The Three Stigmata and Flow My Tears. Most valuable to this paper is Umberto Rossi’s The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick, which offers authoritative interpretations of twenty works by the author, including the two objects of this research. Rossi draws connections between Flow My Tears and The Three Stigmata, and even schematizes several episodes relevant to this paper. Another valuable source is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Novels of Philip K. Dick, which provides an insight on The Three Stigmata worth addressing. The works of Christopher Palmer and Jason P. Vest, both of whom investigate Dick’s relationship with humanism and postmodernism, inform this paper. They do not, however, define it—both novels are scrutinized through a prism of postmodernist theory. Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism is given precedence as the chief source in this endeavour, supported by a number of other scholars; Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra has special relevance to elements of Dick’s work, namely the science fictional drugs Can-D and Chew-Z, which can be mapped onto the former’s concepts of second- and third-order simulation. Zahariev 3 Postmodernism and Philip K. Dick If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don't talk ontology, Barney; don't say is. —Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard offers one of the most cited notions of the postmodernist condition in his essay, “Answering the Questions: What is Postmodernism?”. For Lyotard, who positions himself against conformism in the arts, postmodernism is dismissive of “the unity of the whole” (80), and in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “is characterized by…incredulity towards master or metanarratives” (6). Indeed, in “Postmodernism and Philosophy,” Stuart Sim defines the entirety of the philosopher’s project as aimed towards demolishing the “authority wielded by grand narratives,” in their turn detrimental because they offer a unified vision and value judgements of public and private life that are “repressive of individual creativity” (8). Dick’s works, likewise, scoff at any notion of overarching schemata which might offer a unified vision of life—a feat at least in part accomplished through Dick’s deployment of a writing strategy dubbed by John Huntington as the “van Vogt rule” (153). Proposed by science fiction writer A.E. van Vogt, this rule aims to generate new ideas every 800 words. Though Huntington admits there are no “explicit acknowledgements on Dick’s part” about his use of this technique, he makes a persuasive argument as to that being the case (154); further, Van Vogt was an important influence for Dick. Even if he did not make use of the technique as presented verbatim by van Vogt, its internal logic of contradiction is evident, as we shall see, both in Flow My Tears and in The Three Stigmata. Zahariev 4 This internal logic of contradiction, so constant a trait in Dick, is one of the most significant markers through which we situate the author’s oeuvre in the postmodernist tradition. But to identify other markers, we must step away from philosophy and technique and into literary theory. A Poetics of Postmodernism provides the necessary framework; Hutcheon’s work is one important attempt by a literary theorist to pull together all the differing and conflicting strands of postmodernism. It articulates “both a way of speaking— a discourse—and a cultural process involving the expressions of thought” (14). Unlike other notable scholars of the condition, Hutcheon does not make a value judgement about postmodernism so much as she seeks to synthesise all that comes with both discourse and process—thus offering a cluster of strategies to examine postmodernist works. What problems arise with this choice? The term favoured by her, “historiographic metafiction,” introduces a stumbling block for a genre whose raison d'être is inquiry into the future—we are discussing here science fiction, and examining it in terms of history is difficult, especially when the subjects of this study are not those of Dick’s works which revolve around alternate history (the obvious example being The Man in the High Castle). Despite these issues, how might Dick’s work be considered historiographic metafiction? For one, in the conventions it borrows from prior works of science fiction—not the purported history of our world but the history of a genre. In Palmer Eldritch, for example, Dick takes one of Golden Age science fiction’s fundamental lines of speculation— humanity’s inexorable spirit in colonising outer space—and subverts it through the representation of Martian colonists overtaken by alienation and despair (Rossi, 184). Zahariev 5 Further, historiographic metafiction shares a common purpose with Dick’s works in asking “both epistemological and ontological questions” (Hutcheon, 50). More significant is that the private history of Dick’s characters is interrogated time and again in a doomed attempt to draw meaning from memory in order to navigate a rational present. Here again, touching on postmodern subjectivity, Hutcheon’s text is invaluable: Postmodernism establishes, differentiates, and then disperses stable narrative voices (and bodies) that use memory to try to make sense of the past. It both installs and then subverts traditional concepts of subjectivity; it both asserts and is capable of shattering “the unity of man’s being through

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