Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Jan Nohovec
Radio Free Dick: The Individual and the State in Works of Philip K. Dick
Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph. D.
2014
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ...... 4
1.1 Elements of Dick‟s Writing ...... 6
2. The Man in the High Castle ...... 9
2.1 Nazi and Japanese Versions of Totality ...... 10
2.2 Totalitarianism in Inter-Personal Relationships ...... 15
2.3 The Little Man in the High Castle ...... 17
2.4 Caritas Is the Key ...... 19
3. The Penultimate Truth ...... 21
3.1 The Twisted Ruling Elite ...... 24
3.2 Mass Media and Propaganda ...... 27
3.3 The Ultimate Truth ...... 31
4. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said ...... 33
4.1 The Dickian Policeman ...... 36
4.2 Drugs, Grief and Love ...... 38
5. Radio Free Albemuth ...... 41
5.1 Dick v. Nixon ...... 43
5.2 Overthrowing the State in Five Easy Steps ...... 45
6. Conclusion ...... 49
Works Cited ...... 52
1. Introduction
For most of his adult life, Philip K. Dick, born in 1928 and based in California, United
States, was a commercial paperback writer who wrote about 250-page-long science fiction novels in order to manage financially. Moreover, Dick was not much of a distinguished person: he used drugs; married and divorced five times in his life (not to mention his multiple love-affairs); made several suicide attempts; had been under supervision of psychiatrists since his early childhood; there was an unsolved break-in into his house; he temporarily emigrated from the United States in fear for his life; spent some time in a Canadian center for drug-addicts… We could continue giving more and more examples of incidents that do not show Dick in a particularly good light. In his lifetime, he and his fiction did not really fit anywhere, not even in the SF genre (i. e., science fiction, or, rather, speculative fiction, as Dick himself preferred to call his writings). In fact, one might argue that Philip K. Dick was in many respects a truly unique person of the world of literature.
At the same time, however, he is also believed to be one of the greatest authors the SF genre ever had. Since the apex of his career in the 1960s, he was labelled in numerous ways, from a “visionary among charlatans” by a well-known Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem (Lem 1992, 49) to “a canonical author of the digital age” by Lejla Kucukalic, an expert on Dick‟s oeuvre (Kucukalic 2009, 24). In addition, Dick is the first of the science fiction authors who was published in the prestigious Library of
America series (“Library of America to issue volume of Philip K. Dick”, 2006).
One of the reasons for the recognition of Philip K. Dick is the fact that, although written as science fiction on the surface level, his novels and short stories are often more profound. The author himself described the nature of his work by the words of a
4 character in one of his novels: “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise” (High Castle, 103). By writing this, Dick wanted to highlight that unlike many science fiction writers of the time, he was not educated in science and, therefore, it was impossible for him to put any real science into his writings (Dick 1985a, 96).
Admittedly, his novels are full of alternate realities in which there are androids, aliens, time travel or interplanetary travel, but he also vividly reflects the problems that
American, especially Californian, society faced between the 1950s and the 1970s. These are the very same problems that are fundamental to postmodern culture. They include the harsh environment of capitalism, the role of media and information, the anti- establishment factions, drug abuse, or the nature of God – topics, many of which have still not been resolved in 2014.
Furthermore, although Dick‟s fiction was written for money, in many of his novels and short stories, the author strived to convey messages originating in his complicated personal philosophy. As many scholars accurately note, it is owing to these that his works stand out from the ranks of pulp science fiction genre (Robinson 1984, ix; Sutin 1995, x). The aforementioned Stanisław Lem explains that, when something happens in Dick‟s novels, it is not because “a nova or a war has erupted”, but because
Dick uses more profound mechanisms to develop the plot, often of philosophical or societal origin (Lem 1992, 52), and we can only agree with that. For Dick, science fiction was merely a tool to convey his personal philosophy to the readers (besides making money). Additionally, this genre was exceptionally suitable for Dick‟s agenda because it was able to bend its conventions so as to allow the author to create bizarre worlds and plots suitable to his mind, as observed by Lawrence Sutin (Sutin 1995, xii).
Finally, Dick‟s novels were easy to read because, however bizarre they were, they had
5 original plots, types of characters seldom used in science fiction, lifelike dialogues and fast-paced action.
1.1 Elements of Dick‟s Writing
Philip K. Dick employed numerous themes in his about 130 short stories and 45 novels, although many of them are often recurring. Patricia S. Warrick, a respected Philip K.
Dick scholar and author of the first book-length study of Dick‟s works, therefore believes that all of his works are set in a collective multiverse (Warrick 1987, 16) – although this suggestion seems somewhat exaggerated. Dick was probably only repeating some of his favorite themes and methods of story-telling. However, Warrick also accurately notes that the fundamental questions Dick‟s fiction is concerned with are
“What is reality?”, “How can we explain evil?”, “What makes us human?” and “Is there a God?” (Warrick 1987, 1). These recur in many variations over the whole 30 years of
Dick‟s literary career and, therefore, shape the body of this thesis.
Furthermore, Aaron Barlow, another scholar of Dick‟s works, identifies three basic categories into which Dick‟s themes and questions can by classified: 1) metaphysics – the perception and nature of the reality; 2) religion – morality and the nature of God; and 3) politics – the nature of interpersonal and state-individual relationships (Barlow 2005, 6). By moving along the lines of these categories, Dick writes about difficult relationships between men and women, authoritarian father or leader figures, entropy, chaos, and, most importantly, masks and fakes. Such fakes can be things, memories, people or dehumanized androids (which was the term which Dick used not only for artificial beings resembling humans, but also for humans who have
6 lost their basic human qualities). Their worst characteristic is that they can deceive people and conceal the real truth, such as it is observed by Barlow (Barlow 2005, 6).
Moreover, Dick repeatedly works with the idea of nuclear wars and worlds destroyed by them because, as mentioned by Patricia S. Warrick, he is afraid that such evils are in our society almost inevitable (Warrick 1983, 35). Yet, despite these profoundly dystopian themes, Dick is also capable of writing humorously, although such humor is, at most times, irony. A perfect example of such bitter humor is a situation from one of Dick‟s last novels: the sole clearly visible event that follows the rebirth of God on Earth is the death of a goat (as stressed by Barlow 2005, 187).
Admittedly, the goat is also the Devil.
Dick‟s typical characters are of an equally disheartening sort. The main protagonist of Dick‟s texts is usually an unfortunate and unimportant businessman, an engineer or a policeman. Dick‟s interest in these little men originated when he worked in a radio store in the late 1940s (Kucukalic 2009, 28). The “small struggling businessman” and “the person who works with his or her hands”, perfectly described as such by Barlow (Barlow 2005, 16), are, in fact, the writer‟s main heroes. These usually have problematic relationships with their unhappy, or even apathetic, wives, who represent another Dickian archetype that is sometimes designated as “the Bitch” (Butler
2007, 20). Because of the unfortunate marriage, the protagonists are drawn towards a
“Dark-Haired Girl”, an attractive but also partially off-putting young woman. Other major characters include the heroes‟ dictatorial antagonistic bosses, fraud political leaders, religious Patriarchs or even Judeo-Christian Gods. Essentially, as accurately observed by Darko Suvin, every one of these characters suffers in some manner, usually because of their dysfunctional relationships with other people (Suvin 1992, 3).
7 Last but not least, one of the most crucial themes for Dick is politics and especially totalitarianism. Aaron Barlow defines it very accurately as “that which denies an individual the possibility of decision-making”, being born out of the need to control
(Barlow 2005, 91-92). The present thesis explores why Philip K. Dick uses mainly totalitarian systems in his fiction, what message he is trying to convey by employing them, and whether this is in any respect related to his typical framework of suffering characters described above.
To find these answers to these questions, the present study analyzes four novels by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962), The Penultimate Truth (1964),
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), and Radio Free Albemuth (1985), in order of their first publication. Additionally, the thesis explores whether this message changed as the author matured and how it is relevant to Dick‟s personal life.
Another aim of the present thesis is to explore further the topic of Dick‟s political views, as they have not been sufficiently explored by literary critics so far, and spur the interest in Dick‟s works in the academic sphere in the 21st century. It is the present author‟s firm belief that Philip K. Dick‟s thoughts and ideas are now no less relevant than they were in the 1950s to 1980s.
8 2. The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick started his literary carrier with a short story “Beyond Lies the Wub” that was published in Planet Stories in 1952. Yet, although thirteen novels and several short stories of Philip K. Dick were printed in the 1950s, the real success of the author came on the verge of the following decade, as mentioned by Lejla Kucukalic (Kucukalic
2009, 33). Dick in fact took a break in writing in 1960 to spend more life with his family and help his third wife, Anne, with her own business. However, he could not live without the craft. In his own words, he knew that “if I went back to writing at all, I would have to rise to a level I had never risen to and no one had ever risen to” (Dick
1985a, 149-50). Hence, in 1961, he started writing a novel that was going to be titled
The Man in the High Castle – a piece that was to become a major breakthrough in his career.
As it is typical for Dick, he did not do much of the outlying of the story of the book: he simply wrote (Dick 1985a, 149-50), but this lack of organization in the process of creating the book was counterbalanced by the fact that he spent seven years of research for the themes that he eventually used in the novel (Dick 1976). Subsequently, the High Castle won a Hugo, one of the most important awards in the science fiction field. Undeniably, as Robinson points out, very few of the mainstream readers (i.e., the ones who do not read science fiction on a frequent basis) noticed the title and recognized its value (Robinson 1984, 50), in spite of the fact that, as Dick himself noted, “it was not purchased as science fiction, it was not advertised as science fiction”
(Dick 1985a, 76). This lack of appreciation on the part of the mainstream audience would only change gradually within the next years and decades as it will be discussed later on in this thesis.
9 From the beginning of his literary career, Dick was a science fiction author who struggled with the fact that the mainstream readership (and society) ignored his works.
Therefore, apart from his short sci-fi stories and novels, he also wrote eight realist novels. As Kim Stanley Robinson, another respected scholar in the field, argues, in The
Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick managed for the first time to merge his ambitions of a realistic writer (meaning elements such as quality characterization of protagonists and mastery of the written word) with a science fiction background and a plot that contained a number of political and societal themes (Robinson 1984, 39). This resulted in a fast-paced story driven by several characters, set in 1962 (the present at the time of the novel‟s first publication) in a dystopian world in which Germany, Japan and
Italy won the Second World War.
2.1 Nazi and Japanese Versions of Totality
In The Man in the High Castle, the United States is divided into three zones: the West
Coast, including California, where most of the story takes place and which is technically run by the government residing in Sacramento, although “the real authorities [are] the
Japanese” (High Castle, 6); the Rocky Mountain states, which act as a buffer zone; and the rest of the contiguous U. S. that makes the German-occupied zone.
In the novel‟s version of the year 1962, the Japanese and Italians are vastly behind in the technological development, thus making Germany the only world super-power.
As Frank Frink, one of the characters of the book, points out, “By the time the Japs got their first spaceship off the ground the Germans would have the entire solar system sewed up tight” (High Castle, 7). Additionally, the whole world economy is run from
10 Germany; to give one example: the publishing business in New York is run by the cartel from Munich (High Castle, 149).
Moreover, the novel shows that the dominance of Germany in the world is truly ultimate, as illustrated by this example: “For years, the Pacific had been trying to get basic assistance in the synthetics field from the Reich” (High Castle, 18). Germans, however, possessing the monopoly in plastics, simply decide not to make them available.
These examples are tell-signs of a totalitarian rule, which Dick clearly ascribes to
Germany in this novel. For him, the Nazis are utmost evil; to use the words of the novel itself, they are “the ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now, ruling the world once more” (High Castle, 9-10). The clearest example of the brutality of the uncivilized Nazi mind is the fact that, in the High Castle, the whole continent of Africa has been wiped and its population killed (High Castle, 9).
Moreover, it is not enough that Germans are portrayed as ruthless animals that lack some of the basic human qualities. Their views have almost cosmic dimensions: they need to rule the world, as expressed early in the novel, “[n]ot of a man here, a child there, but air abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre” (High Castle, 38). When
Mr. Tagomi, a Japanese official, invited to an embassy meeting, listens to the list of possible candidates for the position of the new Reich Chancellor and is confronted with their horrendous deeds, he suffers a “middle-ear malfunction” and is sick to the point that he is unable to listen to the presentation anymore. At this point, the novel conveys its message clearly: “There is evil” which is “actual like cement” because it is “an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself” (High Castle, 91). Thus, the Germans become a metaphysical problem as well, since the evil which they represent transcends them as human beings
11 or a nation and also transcends their political ideology. Furthermore, as accurately pointed out by Patricia S. Warrick, Nazism in the High Castle bears a religious aspect as well (Warrick 1987, 33). This is because, according to the Nazi ideology of the novel,
Hitler is a savior who came to shed the light upon the German people.
In conclusion, the Nazis of High Castle are not only a political, social, and military, but also a metaphysical and religious problem. In the light of this image, there is no wonder that Dick fails to portray any revolt organized by the American citizens.
The closest he gets to this issue is the moment when Frank Frink recounts the events of
Capitulation Day of 1947, when “he had vowed revenge; he had buried his Service weapons ten feet underground, in a basement, well-wrapped and oiled, for the day he and his buddies arose” (High Castle, 7). But the opportunity for him to use it never occurred. For some reason that Dick fails to explain, “[i]t just was not relevant any more” (High Castle, 7).
The only thing that could be seen as a semi-organized revolt against the oppressors is the wide popularity of the fictional book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by
Hawthorne Abendsen, which tells the story of a world in which Germany, Japan and
Italy indeed lost the war. It seems to most of the Americans in the High Castle that, apart from reading a prohibited novel, they cannot do much more. As often pointed out by Philip K. Dick critics, the best and virtually only thing these people can do is to keep the situation in their version of reality from spiraling into even worse possible outcomes, such as the German Nazi mind poisoning the whole world with their ideology (Robinson 1984, 40; Rieder 1992, 230). This possible development is even hinted at when it is revealed in the final stages of the novel that the Germans indeed want to conquer Japan as well (High Castle, 179-80). Luckily, the protagonists manage
12 stop this from happening for a while by convincing German authorities not to execute this plan (High Castle, 182; High Castle, 223).
This kind of totalitarian society that Germans created in the world of The Man in the
High Castle always repelled Dick. He believed that ideologies that force their supporters to be “true believers” and chain them in rigid overly-hierarchical types of society are highly dangerous. Aaron Barlow argues that Dick developed these global opinions on any oppression very early in his life, when he worked in radio and record stores (Barlow 2005, 16). This suggestion seems fitting, considering that in these jobs
Dick felt uncomfortable, facing some of the less polite customers. Eventually, these people were to become models for the fraud authoritarian figures in the author‟s fiction.
After all, in his life, Dick suffered several nervous breakdowns which all happened at the moments when he needed to deal with hierarchies and set types of behavior (Barlow
2005, 15-16).
Nonetheless, even though the author portrays the Germans-Nazis as the ultimate evil, their world-view is, in Dick‟s eyes, still legitimate. He understood the mental process that led Nazis to their ideology, as he was able identify with it, even though he ultimately refused it (Dick 1985a, 152). This mental approach extends to all the things
Dick warned his readers from, to all the ideologies. When assessing such ideologies, an individual should simply apply their free reasoning to them. Then, if the ideologies fail in this scrutiny, one should not act according to them. This is the exact reason for why
Dick felt pity towards Mussolini, a Nazi ally, as he once stated: “I think Mussolini was a very, very great man. But the tragedy for Mussolini was he fell under Hitler‟s spell”
(Dick 1985a, 152). In other words, a great man that made a wrong assessment of the
Nazi philosophy.
13 Following the same course of thought, Dick establishes that there is neither an ultimate evil nor an ultimate good. This idea can be seen, for example, in a discussion between the characters of Joe and Juliana about the events described in the
Grasshopper. While Juliana, who comes from the Japanese-run part of the U. S., defends the Allies, Joe, an incognito German assassin, criticizes the measures Allies took in the Second World War: “fire weapons, phosphorus and oil” are not any better than the measures the Nazis took. Juliana cannot argue with that and, instead, changes the topic of the discussion (High Castle, 76).
In this context, it is important to examine the effect of the Japanese culture on the citizens of Japanese-run part of the former U. S. The Japanese are indeed portrayed as much more benign oppressors than Germans. For instance, to quote a minor character at the beginning of the novel, “No Japs killed Jews, in the war or after. No Japs built ovens” (High Castle, 31). Similarly, Japan in the High Castle would be strongly against any harsh Nazi measures that Germans would want Tokio to apply in their empire. For example, Japanese even refused to outlaw the Grasshopper, which is entirely banned in the German-occupied zones (High Castle, 112). Similarly, towards the end of the novel, a high-ranked Japanese officer clearly states that the Japanese Emperor “regards the
Reich‟s elite corps, wherever the black uniform is worn, the death‟s head, the Castle
System – all, to him, is evil” (High Castle, 181).
This viewpoint of the Japanese benignity is also the essence of the essay “The
Encounter of Taoism and Fascism in The Man in the High Castle” by Patricia S.
Warrick. Yet, Warrick fails to notice that the Japanese regime might be, in a way, seen as worse than the German one. The stereotyped Japanese “mania for the trivial, their legalistic fascination with documents, proclamations, ads” (High Castle, 25) has turned the Japanese-run zone into a state where the resistance is not only impossible, but also
14 unthinkable. The Japanese regime on the East Coast is not an expression of a political hard power, as the one in the Nazi-occupied countries and puppet regimes, but an expression of political soft power.
Put differently, the Japanese regime is not as terrible as the German one, which, along with the propaganda, (“What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?” [High Castle, 10]), makes the Americans in the Japanese-run zone too comfortable to rebel. Admittedly, the regime is not an easy one, as it includes the supremacy of the Asians over the Caucasians – which is described in the scene where Mr. Tagomi expects white people to give up their seats in a restaurant because of him (High Castle, 222) – but it is not a terribly harsh one either, which makes the citizens less prone to organizing a resistance.
2.2 Totalitarianism in Inter-Personal Relationships
As much as the relations between the totalitarian state and the citizens are exposed in
The Man in the High Castle, Dick also puts a very strong emphasis on the relationships between the characters of the novel themselves. Consequently, scholars accurately argue that unlike in Dick‟s previous 1950s novels, there are a smaller number of characters and, therefore, the author can provide a more fully-realized background for their action (Robinson 1984, 39-40). A very peculiar thing about the novel is that, although all its characters are connected in some way, the interaction between them is usually indirect.
This is because of one of the writer‟s key opinions: “I do not hold there is one reality, I hold that each person has their own, somewhat unique reality” (Dick 1985a,
151). Philip K. Dick expressed this in most of his fiction. To quote one of the characters
15 in the High Castle, “We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. […] And meanwhile, the others are busy. They are not sitting helplessly waiting” (High Castle, 143). Instead, they are acting on their own behalf, trying to make themselves happy.
The reason for why multi-character focus works so well in The Man in the High
Castle is the fact that every character is in a way detached from the system. As everybody lives in their own unique reality, all of them are essentially alone. There are several passages in the novel where characters lay their thoughts open in vast inner monologues so as to carefully scrutinize every part of the problem they are facing. The only one with whom they share these thoughts is the reader. For instance, the character of Robert Childan is a lonely owner of an antiques shop who desperately wants to be like the Japanese of the novel. In the first chapter, he wonders: “How easily […] I could fall in love with a girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren‟t bad enough already” (High Castle, 3). Yet, he never expresses these feelings openly.
In fact, these characters are so enveloped in their own realities that they cannot see that they have possible friends waiting just beside them. For instance, Frank Frink is a person who gave up his job to start a small business with his former co-worker Ed
McCarthy. In addition, Frink used to have a wife, Juliana, who became estranged to him. When he says “Juliana, [… are] you as alone as I am?”, he does not realize that he could be friends with Ed McCarthy (High Castle, 130). Similarly, Robert Childan never thinks that he could actually be regular friends with the Kasouras, a Japanese couple that he gets acquainted with in his shop, as it is clear from the unfortunate end of
Childan‟s meeting with the husband in Mr. Kasoura‟s office (High Castle, 172-76).
Furthermore, very often the conversations and relationships between the characters quickly head towards a boiling point such as in the seemingly mutually
16 beneficial business relationship between Frink and McCarthy. While, at first, the events of the novel seem to be a start to a great business, the relationship turns sour very quickly, which leads the two to dissolve the partnership temporarily (High Castle, 185).
By depicting this, Dick declares that a person has no real power over the world they live in, because the circumstances always keep getting things harder.
Nonetheless, some of the characters do not see this truth and try to gain control anyway, which results in a form of totalitarianism – this time, however, on a personal rather than the state level. A prime example of this is the measures the lovers Juliana and Joe take to gain control over each other, such as this utterance by Joe: “Groaning.
Always downcast, aren‟t you? Worry, fear and suspicion, about me and everything else in the world” (High Castle, 131). These verbal attacks are especially hurtful (and, consequently, powerful), because they are mostly true. The last of these exchanges between Joe and Juliana takes place in the scene where she kills him (High Castle, 204-
05). The reason for this act is simple: she is more chaotic, powerful and full of evil than he is, which is confirmed at the end of the book when Abendsen identifies her as a
“little chthonic spirit” which simply plants chaos everywhere it goes (High Castle, 247).
In other words, Juliana is essentially a German-like character. Yet again, Joana is never criticized for her behavior – Abendsen is even “glad that she came” (High Castle, 247)
– for the same above-mentioned reason that the German need for supremacy is understood.
2.3 The Little Man in the High Castle
In contrast to Juliana‟s “Dark-Haired Girl” character is Mr. Tagomi. This bureaucrat with an interest in antique artifacts is a prototype of Dick‟s favorite “little protagonist”.
17 Mr. Tagomi has a mundane job, but suddenly finds himself in a situation that vastly extends him, in a meeting between a Japanese general and a German one that spirals into Tagomi‟s urge to kill the two. Dick explains what goes on in Tagomi‟s head afterwards: “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” (High Castle,
192). But Tagomi, as well as any Dickian “struggling businessman”, has to make peace with the events that transpired. And it is this making peace of his mind that Dick is so interested in because it shows an enormous moral integrity that the little man has to possess. John Rieder suggests that this is the real heroism in Tagomi‟s behavior (Rieder
1992, 231) – an absolutely correct assertion.
Part of this process of coming to terms with one‟s place in the world – which he or she cannot control, as we have established above – is a seemingly insignificant action against the world or the regime that is oppressing the protagonist. As pointed out by
Barlow, the brilliant world leaders might not always succeed – Joe being murdered by
Juliana (High Castle, 204-05), or Goebbels not succeeding in winning the leadership over the Nazi party (High Castle, 143-44) – but the little characters, such as Robert
Childan, Frank Frink or Mr. Tagomi, are able to “muddle through – as long as they remain unwilling to submit to the powers attempting to corrupt them, as long as they retain their concerns for others” (Barlow 2005, 139-40).
This “unwillingness” is for Dick the ultimate action one can take against the world. John Rieder calls this somewhat pompously “anarchistic individualism” (Rieder
1992, 231). Additionally, Dick himself admitted this very clearly: “This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance” (Dick 1995, 278).
18 2.4 Caritas Is the Key
Another point that Dick makes in The Man in the High Castle is that the actions we take will influence others, even though we ourselves might not even know about it. As it has been pointed out above, the characters in the High Castle are fundamentally alone, but they are loosely connected in a web of relations. Frank Frink always ponders about what his estranged wife is doing (for instance at High Castle, 130) and she thinks of him at several points as well (for instance at High Castle, 74). Additionally, the business- related actions that Frank Frink takes influence Robert Childan, to whom Frink sells products; and Childan, in turn, influences his regular customer Mr. Tagomi. Similarly, by killing Joe, Juliana influences Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of the Grasshopper whom Joe was supposed to murder. Consequently, she also influences German plans of ruling the world, because Abendsen‟s murder was a part of them. Barlow suggests that the characters think only about themselves while taking these actions (Barlow 2005,
176), but these actions have wide consequences in the web of relations of the society.
Therefore, one of the morals of the book is that the inter-personal relationships are a thing that one should be deeply invested into. As referenced in Barlow, the world is a
“relational place” to Philip K. Dick (Barlow 2005, 97-98), and thus the truth is only limited to what we know. In a world such as this, it is important to establish relationships with the others, because they help us to perceive the reality and make us better and bigger human beings. Take, for instance, the I Ching, a Chinese oracle book, which is heavily used by the characters in the High Castle. Even though it gives the characters various pieces of advice on how to react to certain circumstances, the basis of these is always to cherish one‟s relationships with other people.
19 Clearly, some people, such as the Nazis, do not understand that empathy (or caritas, as Dick called it) has to be employed in relationships and instead, try to force their way in them. But love, as Eric S. Rabkin marvelously points out, “cannot be manufactured” (Rabkin 1992, 185). Instead, the totalitarian approach in inter-personal relationships makes everybody around, and, most of all, the totalitarianists themselves, miserable. Such as Juliana, to whom this happens in the novel repeatedly.
Of course, the only way to realize this is to make the above-mentioned little revolt against the regime: for Frink, it means leaving the company and then again quitting the business which he set up with his partner; for Abendsen, it is writing the Grasshopper which in essence undermines the Nazis; for Tagomi, it is the events that happened after the meeting with the generals.
The final point that Dick makes in his book is that there is no “High Castle” into which one can run and hide there from totalitarianism and inter-personal relationships.
Hawthorne Abendsen, who is supposed to be the actual “Man in the High Castle”, does not live in a high castle surrounded by weapons simply because he does not feel he needs to (High Castle, 240). This is because he has gone through all the stages of the above-described process and he now understands the world a little better than before.
20 3. The Penultimate Truth
After The Man in the High Castle had turned out to be a big success in 1962, Philip K.
Dick‟s writing carrier took a major turn. He was no longer a writer of obscure stories known to only a handful of people. He was on a way to become famous. Admittedly, he was famous only for the sci-fi enthusiasts who noticed that he had won the Hugo
Award, but famous nonetheless.
For that reason, he was able to write for more money (Dick 1985a, 157) and, perhaps more importantly, he knew that the way in which he had written the High
Castle was the right one: he now knew how to structure a story, how to deal with a multi-character plot and he also knew that readers are interested in what he has to say.
Within a few years after 1962, he wrote an enormous amount of text, including the novels such as Martian Time-Slip, Clans of the Alphane Moon, Now Wait For the Last
Year or Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along after the Bomb.
In many of these novels, Dick goes back to dystopian themes, similar to the Nazi concept from The Man in the High Castle. As Gregg Rickman notices, in addition to the atrociousness of the Nazi mind, Dick is at this point interested in the way in which politics was mishandled in the Cold War era (Rickman 1985, 21), which the author already hinted at in the 1958 novel The Eye in the Sky. Other themes again include alternative realities or a world after a bomb, which is most clearly described in the acclaimed novel Dr. Bloodmoney. As Robinson fittingly points out, “none of these fictional worlds are intended to be taken as rational, plausible, or even possible futures for our society” (Robinson 1984, 66), because this is not the point of Dick‟s writing. In fact, years later, in his famous speech “How to Build a Universe that Doesn‟t Fall Apart
Two Days Later”, Dick admits that he actually likes to build universes that do fall apart
21 (Dick 1995, 262). To his mind, they fall apart because the things which are wrong in them are so wrong that the universes could not possibly hold together. It is often these things that the author wants to warn his readers against.
The Penultimate Truth (written and published in 1964) is in every way a perfect account of the things Dick wanted to convey to his readers in the period immediately following 1962. Unfortunately, the time of the origin of the novel also means that the book is not entirely well-written. Later, Dick admitted that, in this period, he often wrote about 70 pages a day, thus not concerning himself much with loose ends and with the material that he actually put down on paper (Dick 1985a, 157). Some of the text he wrote did not even go through a revision process (Robinson 1984, 76), which made novels such as The Penultimate Truth weak in terms of their plot. For instance, Chapter
13 reveals the outline of many following chapters (the novel has 29 chapters in total), thus rendering the actual reading of those chapters unnecessary. When asked at the beginning of the 1980s what he thought about The Penultimate Truth, Dick only replied: “I don‟t know. It‟s certainly not a major book but it has a couple of good ideas in it” (Dick 1985a, 165). Obviously, this work was simply written to obtain money to survive.
While bearing this in mind, The Penultimate Truth still possesses a tremendous value in terms of an insight into Dick‟s political thinking, because the absence of a coherent plot forces him to expose more of the dystopian world of the novel. Merit
Abrash actually suggests that Dick did this deliberately to show his political views
(Abrash 1995, 157), although this explanation does not seem very probable.
Nonetheless, it is a point of fact that there is virtually no other Philip K. Dick book in which a totalitarian system would be portrayed in so much detail.
22 The Penultimate Truth is set in the year 1982, in a world in which fifteen years ago a nuclear war broke out between the Western and Eastern blocks (called in the novel West-Dem and Pac-Peop). To protect their citizens from the bombs, both sides of the conflict built vast underground complexes called “ant tanks” (in full, “antiseptic tanks”) and cast the world population in them. Only a few people stayed on the surface to handle the war, the matters of the state and the necessary outside administration of the network of tanks. Instead of human soldiers, the war was fought by battle androids called “leadies”, which were being produced by the population in the tanks. The war ended within several years, but the position of the winning party was rendered irrelevant, because both the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. agreed to keep the population of the Earth in the tanks, simply not telling them that the war is over.
Now, fifteen years after the war begun, the population still lives underground and is still being assured – via giant “I-am-larger-than-you” television screens – by the Head of State named Talbot Yancy that the war is still going on (Penultimate Truth, 16). In reality, however, Yancy is a mere “simulacrum” – a term Dick uses to describe an automaton operated by the ruling elite of the novel, which is made to look like a genuine human being. Meanwhile, the ruling elite, who call themselves “the Yance- men”, live in huge castle-like mansions on vast plots of empty land full of healthy grown trees.
The book follows mainly two storylines: one of Nicholas St. James, a “tanker” who is forced by the situation to leave his tank and emerge on the surface; and Joe
Adams, a Yance-man who is drawn into a plot to discredit Glen Runcible, a man uncomfortable for the regime since he helps the tankers who emerged on the surface and realized that the war had actually ended years ago.
23 3.1 The Twisted Ruling Elite
The Penultimate Truth is a study of the political power of the ruling elite over vast masses. Once again, totalitarianism here denies a subordinate person any chance of their voluntary action. Instead, the tankers are simply forced to do the jobs which are assigned to them by the Yance-men in control. This is because the Yance-men do not care about whether tankers want to, or are able to, perform such job. To Dick, this is a horrendous atrocity against which he stood for the whole of his life.
In addition, it is important that both of the governments of The Penultimate Truth
– the American and the Soviet one – are being shown in an equally bad light. In real life, Dick was sometimes accused by the American authorities of being a communist, because he often opposed the government in Washington, D.C. Yet such allegations were false. “My real stance was opposing authority. And I apposed the Communist authorities as much as I opposed the American authorities,” said Dick in one of his comments on such critique against himself (Dick 1985a, 131). “I would say the real enemy, the enemy which to me is the paradigm of evil, is the totalitarian state, […] it can be left wing, it can be right wing,” continued Dick (ibid.).
In his essay “„Man Everywhere in Chains‟: Dick, Rousseau, and The Penultimate
Truth”, Merritt Abrash sees the world of The Penultimate Truth as a reference to the works of the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is clear that
Abrash is correct, as Dick actually quotes the philosopher in connection with one of
Yancy‟s speeches to the tankers (Penultimate Truth, 58). Rousseau‟s metaphorically expressed idea speaks of men who are born free, but are instantly, after birth, being chained to the political will of the ruling (Abrash 1995, 159). Dick made this metaphor semi-real by locking the tankers, who were born free on the surface of the Earth, into
24 the underground so that they could not escape the power of the elite and enjoy the benefits of living a healthier life on the surface.
There is another aspect of Rousseau‟s thinking in The Penultimate Truth present in the form of Lantano, a time-travelling and all-knowing Indian. In spite of the fact that
Rousseau rooted for the society to be as power-homogenous as possible, he identified a
“Legislator”, who is, to quote Abrash‟s explanation, “uniquely powerful, far sighted, and free from self-interest” (Abrash 1995, 163). Because of his ability to travel in time and to enjoy the benefits of longer life – which Dick actually fails ever to explain in the novel – Lantano is Rousseau‟s Legislator, meaning that he does indeed possess the knowledge as to how to rule justly, as Abrash observes (Abrash 1995, 163). Dick even grants this character the power to obtain and keep political influence, but he does this simply to make a point that even such a Legislator can be twisted by the power of the state to do corrupt things. As expressed in one of the final dialogues of the novel, the lies which the politicians tell to maintain their control never stop. Even after Lantano emerges victorious, to quote the character of Nicholas, “the biggest lie is still to come”
(Penultimate Truth, 189).
Dick‟s rationale for such reasoning is that people in general are faulty and fraudulent as they base their behavior on perception systems that are prone to be invalid.
It is not in human power to know everything about all things, which is clearly manifested by the idea of the tankers. They can only know very little; they are like the people in Plato‟s cave, another philosophical concept that is employed by Dick in The
Penultimate Truth, as it is mentioned by Thomas M. Disch in his afterword to the 1964 edition of the novel. Similarly to the ones in Plato‟s theory, tankers only know what they are told by the Yance-men (through Talbot Yancy) – and that is a much distorted version of reality (Disch 2005, 168).
25 Moreover, if people cannot perceive the full shared reality, they can never make entirely correct judgments and consequently, decisions. Most of the decisions politicians make revolve around ensuring the well-being of their state, the state‟s population and their own rule. Dick is afraid of this power, because it can (and usually does) lead to the rulers making decisions that strip their citizens of freedom. Dick himself said that “men skilled in – and trained in – the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented themselves, in such a way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary, or at least desirable, method of bringing some ultimately desired goal” (Dick 1995, 187).
There are two concepts that fit this fear very well, as observed by Aaron Barlow.
First, the “noble lie”. In the first months after the war, the surface was probably very dangerous to live on, which meant that the noble lie the Yance-men were telling the population was justified and genuine. In the early short story “The Defenders” (which was published in 1953 and which was, along with several other stories, rewritten into
The Penultimate Truth), Dick even agrees with the necessity of employing the noble lie
(further explored in Barlow 2005, 218-19). However, that had changed since 1953, as
Dick‟s own philosophy matured.
Another manifestation of this seemingly just politicians‟ call is the scenario in
“The Mold of Yancy”, another short story by Dick (published in 1955) that was subsequently rewritten an incorporated into The Penultimate Truth. Here, the population willingly surrenders part of its freedom so that the ruler of the society could fight against terrorism. According to Dick, this is a very dangerous precedent that can lead to a situation that the ruler will want even more power and will devise a scenario to achieve that. Once any form of rule is institutionalized, it can control the military and, therefore, cause wars; also, it can collaborate with trade corporations and cause
26 economic deprivation. Both of these eventualities are deployed in The Penultimate
Truth, as well as in the previously discussed novel, The Man in the High Castle.
Furthermore, by making semi-just calls such as these, the elite are gradually becoming alien and dangerous to the society. The sole job that they are obliged to do (i. e., to protect the state‟s interests) is making them dehumanized and, consequently, less familiar with the real life of the citizens, which, in turn, makes them to take even worse measures. This topic is further elaborated in Darko Suvin‟s text “The Opus: Artifice as
Refuge and World View” (Suvin 1992, 13).
Thus, what once used to be an empathic free-born person, who wanted to do solely good (such as Lantano or any other Legislator), can become, by being put in chains of civilization and socialization pressures, a dehumanized controlling wreck, such as the Yancy simulacrum – an android, a hollow being. Obviously, this is not
Dick‟s original thought, as this topic had been a commonplace for decades or centuries, but it nicely fits Dick‟s paradigm because, according to this idea, the citizens are never safe from the ill-driven decisions of the ruling elites. Of course, the only people who can sustain the humanity are the creative and authentic little protagonists with whom
Dick‟s oeuvre is replete.
3.2 Mass Media and Propaganda
The major channel through which the state in Dick‟s fiction can influence the citizens is the propaganda, distributed by mass media, such as the enormous television screens in the tanks of The Penultimate Truth. Besides military, economic, religious and other types of power that the state has over its citizens, the media add an ideological one, which is, according to Dick, also the most important one. If an individual cannot be free
27 in his own mind, he or she cannot be free anywhere. As Karl Wessel notices, Dick‟s politicians know this very well and, therefore, are employing propaganda constantly
(Wessel 1995, 43).
In The Penultimate Truth, this begins with choosing the right image of a country‟s kingpin. Yancy has to look like a respectable leader – tanned, healthy, masculine, ex- military, and always calm (Penultimate Truth, 187) – even though this image is thoroughly fake. And, to Dick, this fakeness of political leaders is all natural.
“Especially during the last century. And of course in Roman times,” as Lantano says
(Penultimate Truth, 151).
Of course, this fakeness can serve for both good and evil purposes: when a nation is united under such a respectable leader, it can be lead to greatness. Dick, however, always portrays the other extreme: if the message of the still-raging war is conveyed by a respectable-looking leader, such as the simulacrum of Yancy, people are more prone to believe and accept it. Yancy ensures the tankers that, by staying in the tanks, they are saving themselves from the horrors of the war fought on the surface as well as the fact that, by producing new leadies and keeping up with the quotas, they are making the best for the state and common good (Penultimate Truth, 14-15). This is a concept that Dick loathed.
Thus, ironically, the tankers live in a fake illusion which is based on their patriotism, a human need that, according to Merit Abrash, Rousseau prizes the most
(Abrash 1995, 163). Abrash calls this very conveniently a “perfect propaganda” (Abrash
1995, 164). Dick openly expresses his hatred for this phenomenon in Chapter 8, when the simulacrum delivers a speech written by Lantano. When the simulacrum finishes pronouncing Lantano‟s words, Joe Adams asks him:
28 [H]ow can you openly discuss the fact that those tankers down there are systematically deprived of what they‟re entitled to? You actually said it in your speech. […] [Y]ou‟ve actually called it not merely a necessity that they have to live down there but an unjust, temporary, evil curse. (Penultimate Truth, 58)
By listening to the speech, the tankers have to acknowledge, and approve, that they are being deprived. All of this is possible solely due to the power of the media, which are, therefore, one of the most dangerous factors in modern-day human society. Again, this theme in Dick‟s fiction stems from the atmosphere of the early Cold War. Dick metaphorically asks his reader to consider whether there would be the Cold War, if the ideologies of the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. were presented as hostile towards each other as they were presented in the 1940s and 1950s.
Furthermore, mass media can distort not only the present reality, but also the past.
In a way very similar to the one used in a George Orwell‟s 1984, a classic of the dystopian science fiction, Dick‟s characters in The Penultimate Truth change the past when they need to discredit Runcible: “The articles which [Joe Adams] would write would be printed in the journal, backdated, the issues artificially aged so as to appear authentically prewar”. Due to these documents, Runcible would be ruined (Penultimate
Truth, 41).
Another major example of manipulating the past for the purposes of propaganda are the two pre-war and entirely fake film documentaries that ruthlessly change the nature of history, one tailored for the audience within the U. S., the other for the audience in the U. S. S. R. (Penultimate Truth, 63-73). Additionally, by showing these two 25-hours-long documentaries to the tankers, the government is truly disallowing them to know the correct history and is instead creating fake memories. George Slusser accurately suggests that, according to Dick, ideology and history bear the same narrative (Slusser 1992, 204); in other words, as the popular truism goes, the history is
29 written by the victors. As a point of fact, this theme was again used already in connection with the Nazis in The Man in the High Castle (High Castle, 76).
What is even more striking in Dick‟s personal philosophy is that he thought all media to be dangerous to little men, including his own pieces of writing as it is incontrovertibly pointed out by Aaron Barlow (Barlow 2005, 128). In Dick‟s opinion, all information should be superimposed to create contradictions between the data. And it is these contradictions that the reader can use to get his head around the theme and create his own opinion.
In fact, this is the same way in which Dick built universes in his fiction. They include contradictions and, therefore, they fall apart – as it was established at the beginning of this chapter. However, they also allow the reader to make her own opinion on the questions asked, not simply to accept the views of the author. Moreover, how can one‟s personal philosophy evolve after he or she has made sense of Dick‟s worlds?
Through human interaction, as it was discussed in the previous chapter, and as will be discussed in the one to follow.
30 3.3 The Ultimate Truth
The Penultimate Truth contains many truths, but there is no telling which one of them is supposed to be the penultimate one and, consequently, which one is ultimate. Surely, simply puzzling the reader is one of the reasons why Dick named the book as he did.
We can argue that one of the truths is certainly the faultiness of the humanity. As
Adams in the book realizes, “We are […] a cursed race. Genesis is right; there is a stigma on us, a mark. Because only a cursed, marked, flawed species would use its discoveries as we are using them” (Penultimate Truth, 89). Numerous ideas stem from this notion: humans have faulty perception systems and they can never see the whole, undistorted reality. The ones in power may have obtained this power to do good – after all, both the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. in the novel ultimately fulfill their goal to protect their citizens – but they are doomed to fail, because power corrupts. In other words,
Rousseau‟s general will to survive should not be superseded by egoist wills of individuals, such as the one of the Yance-men – to keep the surface to themselves.
Instead of real faulty people, some might favor other entities, such as the Yancy, who is not a human, but an already dehumanized automaton.
Furthermore, in order to utilize political power, people need to draw up a certain image of themselves to the citizens, certain propaganda, and use mass media to send out this message. These mass media change reality violently. The only ones who are worthy of an appraisal are the little men, the tankers, the ones who know nothing. They are the only ones capable of love, such as Nicholas at the beginning of the novel (Penultimate
Truth, 76).
Aaron Barlow argues that, to Dick, the only acceptable political systems are the ones under which citizens agree with the nature of the system freely and of their own
31 accord (Barlow 2005, 134). That is, however, impossible in real life. Nonetheless, we can get as close to this state of things as possible by employing caritas, that is, empathy, respect and love for our neighbors, which, as Dick stresses, is the only way to preserve our human quality and dignity – as well as the only way in which evil can, ultimately, be defeated.
32 4. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
After the period in which Dick wrote regularly up to about 70 pages a day, his writing speed throughout the second half of the 1960s significantly lowered. He still wrote about two books a year, but he would never return to writing as much as he did immediately after The Man in the High Castle had come out. More importantly, though, the themes of his works started to evolve as he started to employ religious elements in his novels, such as Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (written 1964, published 1965) or
Ubik (written 1966, published 1969). In turn, he gradually used political themes less and less.
However, when Dick did employ political themes in his writing, the realities of these narratives were even dimmer than in The Man in the High Castle or The
Penultimate Truth. The short story “Faith of our Fathers” (published 1967) gives a very depressing image of a 1984-like Maoist totalitarian state, in which the reality is, again, hidden behind an illusion. The characters can never perceive it fully and, moreover, the true reality of “Faith of Our Fathers” is depicted as genuinely frightening. This theme of hidden reality, or, rather, its double perception, can be demonstrated by the leader of the state, who looks like a human being only to those who unknowingly daily ingest hallucinogens in drinking water. When the main character of the story, Tung Chien, takes an anti-hallucinogen, he sees the leader as an outrageously appalling alien creature. Subsequently, however, he learns that when different people take the anti- hallucinogen, they see entirely different versions of this monster. Not only that, in this short story, the totalitarian ruler is completely dehumanized – he also bends the rules of reality.
33 The greatest example of these very dim pieces of Dick‟s writing of this period is the novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which presents possibly the harshest political system in Philip K. Dick‟s writing ever. On the account of its genesis, Dick himself stated: “Flow My Tears was written in ‟70. I wrote that in what was the worst period of my life” (Dick 1985a, 188). One of the reasons for that is that his fourth wife,
Nancy, left Dick, taking their daughter with her (Dick 1985a, 189). Dick wrote some of his despair into the story of the novel, in which, at one point, one of the major female characters is killed (Dick 1985a, 189). Dick claims that his troubled relationships with women have their origin in the fact that his twin sister, Jane, died in infancy. In his adult life, with every lover and wife that ever left him, he was reliving this grief (Dick 1985b,
91). This is the core issue upon which Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is structured.
Furthermore, between 1970 and 1972, Dick, had, in his own words, “gotten deep into the drug subculture, but seeing the fast deterioration of young addicts, especially the girls, [he] had changed [his] whole basic view towards drugs, and [became] strongly anti-dope” (Dick 1975a, 49). This whole experience again found its way into the plot of the book, as it will be shown later on, as well as into another Dick‟s 1970s novel, A
Scanner Darkly (written in 1973, published in 1977).
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is, therefore, a bridge novel, connecting two very different periods of Dick‟s writing. It has many of the themes employed in his previous titles (drugs and the harsh society being the two major ones), as well as many of the themes employed later (for instance, the strong urge for one to be loved, which was already present in many earlier works, but had never been as strong as in the 1970s and
1980s fiction).
34 The story of the novel is set in an alternative future, in which the United States is a harsh police state, which possesses the central database containing all the possible information on every single citizen of the country (Flow My Tears, 687). Moreover, the conception of what is legal and what is not is, in terms of the reader‟s own reality, distorted. For instance, the age of consent is set to thirteen years, which makes a homosexual relationship between an adult male and thirteen-year-old boy legal (Flow
My Tears, 768). In addition, students become the prime enemies of the society. Such individuals had been locked in university campuses (Flow My Tears, 797-99) and there are labor camps for both escaped students and other criminals that bear remarkable resemblance to German concentration camps: firstly, they were also initially built during the war (the one which turned the U. S. into this police state); secondly, they are filled mostly with people of Afro-American descent (Flow My Tears, 797). After the war, the regime stopped putting blacks into camps, but it allowed them to have only one child per family, which means that the Afro-American population halves with every new generation (Flow My Tears, 689).
The plot of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said revolves around Jason Taverner, a wealthy, charming and famous singer who hosts a weekly show on television with 30 million people watching (Flow My Tears, 671). Suddenly, Taverner loses his identity overnight and becomes a fugitive haunted by the police, because nobody – not even his lover, “the Bitch” of this novel – recognizes him, and there is no record of him in the central database (Flow My Tears, 718; Flow My Tears, 686). As some critics have pointed out, Taverner‟s behavior in the novel is, to quote one of them, “panic-stricken if the plot demands it and perfectly calm in similar circumstances a few chapters later – because the plot demands it” (Turner 1974, 98-99), which is not a sign of good writing.
Although this is true, Taverner‟s relatively original story highlights several valuable
35 points of Dick‟s personal philosophy regarding totalitarianism which will be discussed below.
4.1 The Dickian Policeman
In both The Man in the High Castle and The Penultimate Truth, policemen have no major role to play. Yet, to Dick, policemen are also one of the totalitarian archetypes, toward whom he feels antipathy, which is clearly visible in Flow My Tears, the
Policemen Said. On this note, Dick himself said: “It‟s an ambivalence I have toward authority. I would really like to make friends with the police.” But, as far as he is concerned, that is not possible: “I start to write about them because I am just obsessed by cops as images of the dehumanized creature. And then I start to humanize them, really out of motives of fear. I start to create a dangerous cop, and then I think this is scaring me, I‟ll make him real nice” (Dick 1985a, 99-100).
Such process of humanizing the policeman can be seen at multiple points in the novel. Inspector McNulty, who becomes the first important police figure who notices that there are no files on Jason Taverner in the database, first appears to be a manipulative, cold-hearted person, “[b]usily dreaming up plots and remnants of treason” (Flow My Tears, 737). But later, this image of harsh policemen who run the police state starts to change. The police general Felix Buckman, likewise, seems very harsh at first. Later, though, the reader is told the account of how, despite the horrible things which Buckman does in his job, he also helped people in the concentration camps up to the point that “he could shut down the camps” (Flow My Tears, 797-98). In addition, Buckman was helping the malnourished students imprisoned in university campuses: “he saw to it, when he could, that in the kibbutzim the students were bathed,
36 fed, their medical supplies looked after, cots provided” (Flow My Tears, 799). And, of course, there is also Buckman‟s relationship with his sister, who is his incestuous lover and the mother of his son, as well as “the Dark-Haired Girl” of this novel.
Therefore, the policeman, a personification of the totalitarian system, is not the real villain anymore. As Barlow nicely puts it, “[o]nly the individual remains, and he or she proves unable to be judged by abstractions” (Barlow 2005, 102). And, again, the individual cannot be judged in this way, because he is faulty and fraudulent, as it was established in Chapter 3 of this thesis.
One of Dick‟s main political views is that no apparatus can be wholly effective all the time because there are ways to revolt against them. This can be seen in short stories
(the above-mentioned “Faith of Our Fathers” tells a story of a man who manages to defy the tyrannical rule) as well as novels (The Man in the High Castle and The Penultimate
Truth being prime examples). The system can never assure that Tagomis, Nicholases, and Buckmans are not going to arise. Even when they are deeply entangled in the system, these little men have the power to “[mitigate] the tyrannical rule of which they are a spokesman” (Dick 1996). Because of such little men and their actions, the totalitarian Nazi/Yance-men/police states can be “disintegrated”, just as it was managed in the real United States after the Watergate affair in 1974, which is, coincidentally, also the year when Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was finally published.
37 4.2 Drugs, Grief and Love
Surprisingly, Jason Taverner as the hero of the novel is not a little protagonist who has the power to act against the system, because this role has been assigned to Felix
Buckman. Instead, Taverner is a character that gradually evolves with the plot and learns certain truths about how this Dickian world works.
At the beginning, Taverner is a man in his prime, at the top of the show business class; he thinks that it is important “what kind of suits you can wear” (Flow My Tears,
687), not caring about anything or anybody, as he is able to unzip his fly in front of 30 million people without a blink of an eye (Flow My Tears, 671). When Taverner discovers that he has been robbed of everything in his life, his initial panic is only temporary, as he maintains the image of a strong individual. But then the hero learns that the world is much more complicated than he previously thought it was. Not only can now Taverner be picked up by the police at any random ID control on the street
(Flow My Tears, 687), but he finds that the interpersonal relationships are much more complicated than he thought they were. Because in Flow My Tears, the powerful force that changes things is love.
Whereas The Man in the High Castle shows characters that are always alone and have serious troubles finding ways to each other because they often employ totalitarianism in their interpersonal relationships, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said directly shows that people can actually find ways to each other – that love is possible and necessary.
Dick included this notion in his personal philosophy very early on, in his third grade experiment with a beetle, when he found out that he did not want to hurt creatures, no matter whether they were bugs, animals or humans (Dick 1985a, 49-50).
38 As it was already explained in the previous chapter of this thesis, chaos and the need for totalitarianism in interpersonal relationships can be, according to Dick, superseded by love and empathy, which he called caritas. To him, caritas is the underlying principle of the “authentic human being” and, therefore, of the whole society.
Dick had always circled around the role of love in interpersonal relationships (for instance, in The Man in the High Castle), but never really explored the possibilities that stem from this theme. That finally happened in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which is, for this reason, sometimes labeled “a pivotal, even crucial novel in Dick‟s career” (Lord RC 2006, 189). Dick himself agreed with this: “It is really new thing I‟ve done since Eye in the Sky.” He explains that “[t]he change [in my fiction] is due to a change that overtook me from having taken mescalin, a very large dose that completely unhinged me” (qtd. in Lord RC 2006, 189).
In fact, drugs were a substantial part of Dick‟s life – see the episode with the drug culture at the beginning of this chapter – and many of his drug experiences made their appearance on the pages of his books. In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, drugs appear quite often as a means of escaping the harshness of reality and are even crucial for resolving the novel‟s plot. Yet Daniel Fondanѐche argues that, for Dick, drugs have an even more important role as they allow the emotions to be shared (Fondanѐche 1992,
168). This is certainly true: since Dick is heavily invested in empathy, which is defined by the transfer of emotions, there is no wonder that drugs were so important to him and that they are a key motif in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel in which love is the main theme.
Furthermore, love and empathy are for Dick deeply connected with grief and suffering, which originates in Dick‟s own numerous failed relationships with women, as it was explained at the beginning of the present chapter. Dick‟s characters have to
39 accept this grief and suffering in order to survive and reach a deeper understanding of the reality.
The hero of “Faith of Our Fathers” finds himself devastated by the true reality of the leader of the state, but because he surrenders to this grief, he survives, as it is observed by Eugene Warren (Warren 1983, 187). Similarly, Felix Buckman lets his tears flow and grieves over the death of his sister, as well as over the harsh police state machine incapable of empathy of which he is only a tiny part. Thanks to this grief, Felix
Buckman finds an even deeper understanding of empathy, which is manifested by him stopping at a gas station and hugging “the very kind of person who he has systematically persecuted” (Dick 1996), a complete stranger. Even Jason Taverner learns at the end of the novel the importance of caritas, as he understands that his domination over the show business and over his 30 million viewers was totalitarian.
Instead, he now knows that he is a part of humanity and has to act as such.
According to Dick, in totalitarian systems – be it interpersonal or state systems – empathy is the only thing that can save the world because love makes the totality disappear.
40 5. Radio Free Albemuth
In the mid-1970s, Philip K. Dick was in the spotlight. Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said brought him back to attention and he was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, the most important literary science fiction awards in the U. S. Moreover, in 1975,
Confessions of a Crap Artist, the final one of Dick‟s unpublished realist novels of the
1950s, got published, along with a full special issue of Science Fiction Studies devoted to Dick. In other words, the author was finally becoming famous and, as Csicsery-
Ronay argues, was even acknowledged by mainstream readers (Csicsery-Ronay 1992, ix).
Philip K. Dick himself, after giving up on the youth drug culture, as it was described in the previous chapter, returned to the society. He amended the communication between him and two of his previous wives, including their children, as well as with the science fiction community, for instance, via visiting science fiction conventions (as further described in Kucukalic 2009, 40). Both the acclaim for Dick‟s literary work and him communicating with his friends and acquaintances remained for the rest of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. In fact, the turn of the 1980s was the time when the academic sphere started to accept the importance of Dick‟s work, although virtually all of the works critically introducing Dick as a writer and analyzing his works had been written either by Dick‟s friends or science fiction fans. Importantly for Dick, though, this was also the moment when, for the first time in his life, he did not have to worry about his financial situation, as Aawon Barlow emphasizes (Barlow
2005, 25).
Yet, this is not the complete picture of the situation at the time. In February and
March of 1974, Dick suffered a series of mental events which he himself later called “2-
41 3-74”. According to Lejla Kucukalic, these came as disparate visions that struck Dick without warning repeatedly at any time of day or night (Kucukalic 2009, 41). Dick claimed that, in the connection with these visions, he was, via a pink beam of light, contacted by an extraterrestrial “collective unconscious” which he himself called
“VALIS”, i. e., “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” (Dick 1985b, 25).
Apart from many other things, VALIS told him this: “Your eyes are closed to your son‟s birth defect. Your son is in danger. He has a right inguinal hernia, that‟s popped the hydroseal, and gone into the scrotal sac. You must get him to the doctor immediately” (Dick 1985b, 43). After Dick‟s fifth wife, Tessa, the mother of the child, got the boy to the doctors, they did indeed find a right inguinal hernia, despite the fact that the parents were repeatedly told after his previous health examinations that their son was fine (Dick 1985b, 44). In the years following 2-3-74, Dick strived to understand and critically reason what had happened to him. As a result of this, he wrote a several thousand page long diary, entitled The Exegesis (Dick 1985b, 31-32).
As described by Greggg Rickman, after Dick had released the information about these experiences to the public, most of the world attributed this to his long-time drug abuse, some even believing that he had finally gone mad (Rickman 1985a, XVIII). On this account, his wife admitted: “He wasn‟t trying to do this. He was hoping it would stop. He kept asking me, „Am I crazy?‟ And I know what crazy is – he was not crazy”
(Tessa Dick 1985, 64). Whatever the events of 2-3-74 were, they became one of the major inspiration sources for Philip K. Dick‟s opus magnum, VALIS (published in
1981), and its preliminary version from around 1977 that was only published posthumously in 1985 under the title of Radio Free Albemuth (Rickman 1985a, 197).
42 5.1 Dick v. Nixon
Radio Free Albemuth takes place in California of the 1970s. It is a novel about two friends: Phil is a paperback science fiction writer; Nicholas at first attempts to get a university degree at Berkeley, then works in a record store and later becomes an employee of a record company. Even from this brief outline, it is very clear that the novel contains a large number of autobiographic motifs, the major difference being only the fact that there are two characters in the novel where there was only one Philip K.
Dick in reality.
The similarity between the author‟s life and the novel‟s two main characters goes into such detail that, for instance, the literary agent of the Phil of the novel is called
Scott Meredith (Albemuth, 22), which was the name of the literary agent of the real
Philip K. Dick (Dick 1985a, 207). Nicholas, in turn, becomes a character that is being contacted by an extraterrestrial consciousness exactly as it allegedly happened to the real Philip K. Dick during his 2-3-74 experiences. In fact, these religious experiences occupy as much as a half of the novel. It is clear that, along with the Exegesis, Radio
Free Albemuth (and, subsequently, VALIS) were literary pieces in which Dick tried to tackle 2-3-74.
However, in Radio Free Albemuth, this religious part of the plotline is also deeply connected with the political level of the story. Again, like in The Man in the High
Castle, The Penultimate Truth, and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, the novel takes place in an alternate America, only this time the alternate reality is very much like the actual one. One of the main differences is the character of President Ferris F.
Fremont, who is, however, extraordinarily similar to Richard Nixon, President of the
United States between 1969 and 1974, whom Dick openly loathed (Dick 1995, 33). In
43 the novel, Fremont is attributed qualities that make him a typical totalitarian state leader: “unscrupulousness and deathless ambition to rise to power over other humans, lack of any fixed value system, an underlying nihilism” (Albemuth, 191). Last but not least, Fremont‟s initials are an obvious reference to the number of the Devil, 666.
In Radio Free Albemuth, FFF gradually establishes a totalitarian system in which everybody who attracts the regime‟s attention is forced to provide information on themselves and everyone they know. For instance, Phil is at one point visited by two agents of Fremont‟s service FAP (the “Friends of the American People”), who force him to provide information on Nicholas because they believe that Nicholas is in contact with communist figures (Albemuth, 77-78). In addition, when Phil confesses that
Nicholas is in fact in contact with somebody, but truthfully claims this somebody is
God, the agents are unhappy with the statement and continue applying pressure on Phil to confirm their allegations, even though they are not true (Albemuth, 101-02).
As many Philip K. Dick researchers, such as Karl Wessel, mention, Dick was deeply disturbed by the conspirative nature of reality that senator McCarthy created back in the 1950s (Wessel 1995, 44) and, therefore, the author repeatedly portrayed this political climate in many of his books, including Radio Free Albemuth. When President
Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 after the Watergate scandal, Dick‟s fear of secret police and spies was affirmed when the depth of the scandal was revealed (Dick 1995,
33). It was something strangely similar to the kind of world which the author depicted in the previously discussed novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Moreover, it is not irrelevant to mention that Dick‟s house was mysteriously robbed in 1971. It was never found out who did this, although Dick always blamed the FBI and suspected that they wanted to find and destroy the manuscript of Flow My Tears, which was at the
44 time residing safely with Dick‟s lawyer (Sutin 1991, 182). This whole experience, too, is again portrayed in Radio Free Albemuth (Albemuth, 75).
Therefore, spies and conspiracies have always been one of Dick‟s main themes, although, of all Dick‟s stories, they are the strongest in Radio Free Albemuth (perhaps with the exception of A Scanner Darkly, in which the novel‟s hero himself is a secret agent). On this account, Dick himself even admitted: “I have this conviction that there are benign conspiracies going on” (Dick 1985a, 55). He was constantly afraid that society will inevitably turn into totalitarianism and that the important authentic little men will then have the only option, to “[c]heat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in [their] garage that‟ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities” (Dick 1995, 194).
As a matter of fact, this is precisely what happens in Radio Free Albemuth. Later on in the novel, Phil and Nick are contacted by an underground movement called
Aramchek (Albemuth, 198-207), onto which President Fremont has sworn a war
(Albemuth, 28). At this point, the political level of the story meets with the religious one, because it is revealed that the extraterrestrial consciousness (called VALIS) residing near the star Albemuth is operating on the Earth and wants to depose FFF via the Aramchek organization. In addition, the consciousness is operating through a satellite, which is orbiting around the Earth, marking the possible future members of
Aramchek by means of pink beams (Albemuth, 228).
5.2 Overthrowing the State in Five Easy Steps
After the mechanism of Aramchek is revealed, the plot of Radio Free Albemuth turns to searching for a solution to a problem that obsessed Dick for the whole of his literary
45 career and his whole life: How to overthrow the totalitarian state. Once again, love is a part of the puzzle. However, unlike in The Man in the High Castle, The Penultimate
Truth, and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, the novel actually concentrates on the characters‟ organized fight against the regime because, in Albemuth, they are not alone in their struggle. They have Aramcheck and VALIS on their side, they are relatively strong in numbers and they share a common religious belief.
From the way the novel is structured, it is obvious, though, that the protagonists cannot win against Fremont, because his grid of FAPers is much more profound that the
Aramcheck framework. The main characters of the novel are only given information, but no actual power to make any efficient use of it (Albemuth, 163). With this limitation, Dick again shows that, even if one has all the moral aces up their sleeve, they still cannot beat the physically stronger totalitarian. The recipe for how to overthrow the state in five easy steps therefore does not exist, because, as Aaron Barlow argues, the total victory is in terms of the Dickian logic simply impossible (Barlow 2005, 141).
Dick already hinted at this in The Man in the High Castle. Even if one has an outside help, such as the one that characters of Radio Free Albemuth do, such help, even if it comes from God/VALIS, is not absolutely invincible, as the satellite in novel is eventually shot down from the Earth‟s orbit (Albemuth, 237-38). On the contrary, if the total victory were possible, it would put the winners in total control again, which is as dangerous as the previous situation, as it was established in the chapter on The
Penultimate Truth.
To Dick, any totality is evil and so even the Dickian gods cannot be omnipotent, because that would make them totalitarians as well. As Barlow observes, even the gods, along with their chosen saviors of the world, fail. Therefore, they are simply “imperfect guides” who can try to help the protagonist with his ordeal, using their vast knowledge
46 (Barlow 2005, 187; Barlow 2005, 227). Intriguingly, this definition also fits Hawthorne
Abendsen from The Man in the High Castle. In addition, Lawrence Sutin suggests that
Dick himself hoped that his readers would see him the same way (Sutin 1995, xiii), which perfectly fits Dick‟s believes. He wanted to be a guide, faulty and fraudulent, just as his readers, who tells them how the political system exploits them and their freedom.
Just as in the three novels discussed in the previous chapters, the protagonist of
Radio Free Albemuth is thus ultimately left alone. Only now, the little man is Dick himself, “the ultimate suffering protagonist”, as Gregg Rickman once put it (Rickman
1985, 17). What can he do, if he is let down even by God/VALIS in his fight against the totalitarian regime? Love and hope, which is essentially the only message that the guide/author/god can truly convey anyway. To defy the regime in a small, simple and possibly unnoticeable way.
And, ultimately, for that the protagonist will be rewarded. In Radio Free
Albemuth, Phil eventually finds out that the resistance has succeeded with its plan to depose Ferris F. Fremont. It only happened in a way he did not see coming. Their plan served only as a decoy for the authorities, so that a similar, but more effective plan could be executed somewhere else. Additionally, Phil learns that this other plan has much higher chances of succeeding (Albemuth, 285). Of course, he cannot be sure of that, because that would be, once again, a form of totalitarianism.
As for the real Philip K. Dick himself, he, too, did find his reward for behaving along the philosophical lines that he tried to set up for himself and his readers. After publishing VALIS in 1982 (an even more autobiographical, chaotic and gnostic novel than Radio Free Albemuth), he overheard on a radio a sermon by a head of a religious cult that seemed to match the nature of Dick‟s visions much more than anything he has
47 investigated in the eight years since 2-3-74 (Dick 1985b, 115-19). With this resolution,
Philip K. Dick died of a heart failure in March 1982, aged 53.
48 6. Conclusion
Though gradually evolving through all of the stages of his literary career, Philip K.
Dick‟s complex opinions regarding human society were always based on a limited number of key ideas. As Aaron Barlow accurately notices, there were only two courses that humanity could take according to Dick: 1) descend into “totalitarian apocalypse”, or, 2) take moral action, one individual after another (Barlow 2005, 189). Moreover, most of the author‟s novels and short stories are set in alternate realities that were not built to be solid and believable, but were carefully constructed to collapse, so that the readers could see what the wrong courses that society could take might be. All of the things Dick warned against were already present in his own world and he simply let them spiral out of the rational matrix of our reality into the irrational realities of his fictive worlds.
Dick clearly stated the nature of this idea: “Any society in which people meddle in other people‟s business is not a good society […], is a state that must be overthrown”
(Dick 1996). It does not matter if this is a Nazi-Japanese corporate society in which everybody is alone like in The Man in the High Castle, or a state, based on an intention that was once good and which is sustained by means of propaganda, such as in The
Penultimate Truth, or a harsh police state that knows too much about its citizens of
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, or a Nixon-like God-opposing regime based on a communist hunt that can be found in Radio Free Albemuth. Dick opposed all of these, because they are governed by people who employ totalitarianism instead of love and empathy.
What is striking about Dick, is that he made this notion such a fundamental piece of his personal philosophy that, he realized, he should not impose it on his readers
49 because that, too, would be totalitarianism. In fact, this is a prime example of how Dick took responsibility for his actions, like he wanted his readers to do as well. He was convinced that he could not simply denounce other opinions, even if they were different from, or even opposing, his. A little creative and authentic individual, for whom Dick cared the most, should embrace this responsibility and try to act with love and caritas because this is the only way to preserve and develop one‟s personal relationships and protect them from being infected by totalitarianism.
Furthermore, if such empathic human came across a thing that oppressed him, such as a totalitarian person or regime, he or she should “balk” (Dick 1985a, 155). For
Dick, “[t]he authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do” (Dick 1995, 278), because, thanks to empathy, he or she can foresee the bad influences – the totalitarianism – this could have on other people. This small defiance against the system is everything Dick wants from his little men, because, as Aaron
Barlow argues, they themselves are Dick‟s Saviors (Barlow 2005, 209). And, often, the characters of his fiction are rewarded when they realize this: Mr. Tagomi enters an alternative reality which leads him to further conclusions, the tankers of The
Penultimate Truth might eventually emerge on surface, Felix Buckman finds solace in a complete stranger, and Phil of Radio Free Albemuth knows that, one day, Ferris F.
Fremont might be deposed. Thanks to their little, and often unnoticeable, mental revolt against totalitarianism, these characters are now able to maintain a partial freedom in the political (or any other) regime, as well as understand that it is vital to invest themselves deeply in their interpersonal relationships. Due to this, they can comprehend the shared reality around them better than before.
Undoubtedly, these conclusions are not in any way optimistic. Some scholars, such as Karl Wessel, even accuse Dick of not finding a way to resolve the
50 totalitarianism in the world at all and, in fact, only drifting off into “his own strange and solitary gnosis” (Wessel 1995, 54). Yet, Dick, a genius of sorts, worked on the solution of this problem the whole of his life. If his philosophy led him over and over again to the same conclusion, it was the only conclusion possible. At least for Philip K. Dick.
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Melbourne: Nostrilia, 1975. 9-21. Print. Huntington, John. “Philip K. Dick. Authenticity and Insincerity.” On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF- TH, 1992. 170-177. Print. Kucukalic, Lejla. Philip K. Dick: Canonical Author of the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print. Lem, Stanislaw. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans.” Transl. Robert Abernathy. On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF-TH, 1992. 49-62. Print. ---. “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case – With Exceptions.” Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. Ed. Bruce Gillespie. Melbourne: Nostrilia, 1975. 69-93. Print. 54 Malzberg, Barry N. “Introduction: Philip K. Dick.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. 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Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF-TH, 1992. 223-232. Print. Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. UMI Research Press, 1984. Print. Slusser, George. “History, Historicity, Story.” On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF-TH, 1992. 199- 222. Print. Sutin, Lawrence. “Introduction.” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage, 1995. ix-xxix. Print. 55 ---. Divine Invasions: The Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Citadel Twilight 1991. Print. Suvin, Darko. “The Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View.” On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF- TH, 1992. 2-15. Print. Turner, George. “Philip K. Dick by 1975: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.” Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. Ed. Bruce Gillespie. Melbourne: Nostrilia, 1975. 94- 100. Print. Umland, Samuel J. “Introduction.” Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Ed. Samuel J. Umland. London: Greenwood, 1995. 1-6. Print. Warren, Eugene. “The Search for Absolutes.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1983. 161-187. Print. Warrick, Patricia S. “In Memory of Philip K. Dick.” On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Arthur B. Evans, and Veronica Hollinger. Terre Haute and Greencastle: SF-TH, 1992. 90-91. Print. ---. “The Encounter of Taoism and Fascism in The Man in the High Castle.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1983. 27-52. Print. ---. Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print. Wessel, Karl. “Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit: Dick, Lem, and the Preestablished Cacophony.” Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Ed. Samuel J. Umland. London: Greenwood, 1995. 43-59. Print. 56 Williams, Paul. “The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick.” Rolling Stone. 6. November 1975. Accessed 3. April 2014. Web. 57 Summary Philip K. Dick‟s science fiction includes many recurring themes, ranging from philosophy to religion. Yet, perhaps the most appealing is his message regarding totalitarianism, as exemplified, for instance, in his most acclaimed novel The Man in the High Castle (1962). Dick believes that totalitarianism in relationships is ultimately wrong, and it does not matter whether it is in between individuals or between an individual and a state. Furthermore, it is irrelevant to Dick whether this totalitarianism is of Nazi or Communist or any other ideological origin. According to the author, individuals should instead, in this chaotic reality which they can never fully comprehend, employ love and empathy. Only these can help one realize some of the basic truths about the universe and society and, consequently, understand the reality better, as well as to be free in a world full of domineering individuals and regimes. 58 Résumé Ve svých vědeckofantastických dílech se spisovatel Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) opakovaně věnuje mnoha tématům od filozofie po náboženství. Jeho patrně nejdůležitější myšlenky představují jeho názory na totalitní režimy, které vyjádřil například ve svém nejslavnějším románu Muž z vysokého zámku (1962). Dick věří, že totalita v mezilidských vztazích je nepřípustná a v tomto směru nebere v potaz, zda se jedná o totalitu mezi jedinci nebo mezi jedincem a státem, či zda má tato totalita původ v nacismu, komunismu nebo jiných ideologiích. Lidé by podle Dicka měli naopak v této chaotické realitě, kterou nemohou nikdy plně poznat, využívat lásky a empatie. Ty totiž mohou člověku pomoci uvědomit si některé základní pravdy o našem vesmíru a společnosti a v důsledku toho blíže poznat řečenou realitu a zároveň být o něco svobodnější ve světě plném dominantních pánovitých jedinců a režimů. 59