Psychotic Ravings of Legendary Science Fiction Author Philip K. Dick to be Published
Near the end of his life, Philip K. Dick experienced something which, if familiar with how paranoid psychosis is framed in Freudian psychoanalysis, seemed to trigger a prolonged schizophrenic episode which heavily influenced his later writings, specifically the VALIS series of books. For anyone who’s really interested in Philip K. Dick, it’s also fairly well known (at least in the age of the internet) that Dick also composed an 8,000 plus page “book” around this time called the Exegesis. Dick would stay up late into the night, writing whatever came into his mind. Says Jonathan Lethem, who is co-editing the Exegesis for publication, the first volume which will come out later this year
“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it really was was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Mr. Lethem said. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense. It’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano a mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations.”
In 1974, after a number of novels that explored the notions of personal identity and what it means to be human, Mr. Dick had a series of experiences in which he believed he had information transmitted to his mind by a pink beam of light. He wrote about these and similar occurrences in autobiographical novels like “Valis,” but also contemplated their meanings in personal writings that were not published.
“It’s something that he talked about and created a kind of amazing aura around,” Mr. Lethem said, “so that people have an image of it as if it’s some kind of consummated effort. ‘I’m working on my exegesis.’ But what he really meant was he was turning his brain inside out on the page, on a nightly basis, over a period of years of his life.”
On one hand, I’m quite excited by this, as I’m a big fan of Philip K. Dick, especially his later work. But I don’t think that we should think of this as some sort of mystical series of writings which lead us to enlightenment. Lethem, at the end of the New York Times article from whence the above came, claims that the Exegesis is “absolutely stultifying, it’s brilliant, it’s repetitive, it’s contradictory. It just might contain the secret of the universe.” Probably not, unless God really is a telecommunications satellite called VALIS which communicates with a few chosen individuals through a pink light, as it is in VALIS as well as the Exegesis. Of course, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued in their two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the normal condition of the present, due to the operation of capitalism (and, I would include, technology), is one of permanent schizophrenic psychosis. Dick’s work is rapidly being canonized by people like Lethem and people (like myself) who study new media and technology. This is, in part, because his work is the best expression of a generalized experience of psychosis as intrinsic to a hyper-mediated “network” society. Dick, who was writing at the same time as Deleuze and Guattari, I think shows us a world in which paranoid schizophrenia is the norm, which resonates with many of our concerns today. Glenn Beck, for instance, also exhibits a sort of paranoid schizophrenic epistemology on his television show whenever he breaks out his chalkboard. Everything is connected for a paranoid schizophrenic, but nobody can see the connections except for the one labeled as paranoid. In a world where everything is supposed to be “networked” together, then tracing the connections, as a paranoid schizophrenic would, is something we are supposed to do - even though those connections may be completely invisible outside of one’s mind. Finding enlightenment in the Exegesis will be impossible, but the very fact that it is being published shows us how the most paranoid of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid fantasies can tell us something about the world we live in today. Image of the Exegesis via
