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The Penultimate Truth 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. …………………………………………….. 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
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