The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Paul and I wandered from the hotel, down Ashby Avenue, and we got a soda and talked. I announced my various schemes and intentions and by the end of the day was crowned third-in-command at the Philip K. Dick Society. This effectively meant I could join in and sometimes even host the “mailing parties” for the newsletter. We’d gather in my living room in Berkeley and listen to music and seal envelopes and elicit from Paul tales of time spent in Dick’s company, and about halfway through, when we’d gotten organized—there was a vast complication involving “bulk mail” having to be ordered by Zip Code in order to get a favorable rate from the post office—we’d smoke a big joint and everything would get wonderfully confusing. This was a fair distance from Bernard Malamud. I’d located my margin, oh yeah.

  6.

  My first five or six “published” critical pieces appeared in the pages of the society newsletter. They’re agony, stiff as a freshman term paper, arch as an anonymous notice in the Times Literary Supplement, circa 1954. Label this style “Overcompensating Autodidact.” Here’s the last, published in PKDS Newsletter #24, dated 1990. It’s probably the most revealing, and the least awkward (though I can’t swear I’ll be able to resist massaging some of the clenched syntax as I retype the thing):

  Two Dickian Novels

  What do we mean when we call a work “Dickian”?

  The novels of Philip K. Dick show the influence of science fiction published in the ’40s and ’50s. From Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, Dick borrowed a satirical, dystopian near-future setting. From A. E. van Vogt a predilection for reality disjunctions. From Robert Heinlein a measure of solipsism and paranoia. Yet searching the works of these authors for a reading experience that is essentially Dickian is frustrating. Similarly, many of the newer writers in SF—I’m thinking of K. W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker, and Tim Powers, among others—profess an admiration for Dick’s work, and often employ Dickian elements in their own. But the “Dickian” effect is rarely, if ever, central; these writers are appropriately busy with their own themes and motifs.

  There are, however, instances of fiction that are more fundamentally Dickian; works that, rather than evoking Dick’s milieu, reproduce—in many cases unknowingly—the signature disruptive effects of a novel by Dick.

  Let me describe a novel I’ve just read. The book’s main character is, without his knowledge, murdered in the first chapter. He proceeds to enter a bizarre and shadowy mirror-world, and experiences there a bewildering array of “impossible” events. He spends most of the novel in pursuit of an elusive policeman, who is supposed to possess the ability to enlighten the protagonist in his confusion. Mysterious signs of this policeman are everywhere. In the end, the protagonist learns he is dead, only to have this awareness immediately stripped from him. The novel ends with our character back where we first found him: newly murdered, on the verge of the events of the novel we’ve just finished reading.

  The novel is The Third Policeman, written in 1940 by an Irish journalist who published fiction under the name Flann O’Brien. Though I can’t do it justice in this short space, the book is wildly funny, linguistically brilliant, and highly Dickian. Specifically, a sibling to Ubik and A Maze of Death. It also conveys a strong flavor of Lewis Carroll, a thread I’ll pick up again in a moment.

  The chances of Dick having read The Third Policeman (and not mentioning it anywhere) are slim. It’s almost certainly an instance of parallel development. What’s remarkable is how perfectly distilled the Dick Effect is in O’Brien’s novel. Freed of Dickian trappings (the so-called “junk” elements that Stanislaw Lem identified), The Third Policeman is nonetheless unmistakably Dickian. This is not to say anything against, just for instance, talking robot taxicabs. I’m personally fond of talking robot taxicabs. The crucial point (which Dick himself proves in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is that talking robot taxicabs aren’t strictly necessary.

  Now take Memories of Amnesia, by Lawrence Shainberg, published in 1988 yet showing no direct influence, or even knowledge, of Dick’s work. Again, the futuristic settings and artifacts familiar to Dick’s readers are absent. In the case of Memories of Amnesia even the Dickian plotline, still on view in The Third Policeman, is missing. Nonetheless, the Dickian essence survives. Dick perceived reality as a paradoxical, distorted, and even dysfunctional thing, and he sought, through his writings, a variety of possible explanations; political, religious, philosophical, psychological, even pharmacological. One of the very few he didn’t pursue was a neurological explanation. (Since his death biographers have to some extent explored that possibility for him; indeed, the proposed diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy is a fascinating lens through which to consider his life and work.) Shainberg, the author of Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World, has in Memories of Amnesia relentlessly explored Dickian themes in the fascinating and rich language of neurology.

  His book is the first-person account of a neurosurgeon who begins to experience symptoms of brain damage; in the middle of delicate surgery he bursts out singing “Oh, Susannah.” He experiences these symptoms as an exhilarating taste of freedom from the constraints of rationality. The narrator is simultaneously doctor and patient—recalling A Scanner Darkly’s Bob Arctor, who’s both drug abuser and narc—and the distinctions between illness and health, sanity and madness, illusion and reality, quickly blur. The result is a deliriously unsettling excursion. The introspective, insistently questioning, and highly self-absorbed texture of this narrative resembles Valis and Radio Free Albemuth in particular. Perhaps needless to say, the novel ends on a note of almost unbearably unresolved tension.

  Shainberg, like O’Brien, has been compared to Lewis Carroll. (Shainberg makes the connection explicit, taking an epigraph from Alice in Wonderland.) Borges and Pirandello, two of the great international writers commonly cited as relevant comparisons to Dick, are often compared to Carroll. Baseline adjectives like dreamlike, menacing, and surreal apply equally to Dick and Carroll. Yet in searching the indexes of various critical works on Dick I don’t find reference to Carroll.

  Two questions, then: Might Lewis Carroll be an important and unrecognized common denominator for some of Dick’s themes and motifs? And might an inquiry into what we call the Dick Effect begin not with Dick’s companions in the pulp SF of the ’50s, but instead with an exploration of the history of “strangeness” (or, “cognitive estrangement”) in fiction per se?

  “Two Dickian Novels” is a fledgling effort in my gentrification campaign, that which culminates, twenty years on, with my chaperoning Dick into the Library of America. With a nakedness that’s halfway endearing, the young critic scurries to carpet his hero’s bare floor in quality-lit signifiers: Carroll, Borges, etc. (I planned a follow-up to “Two Dickian Novels,” with more examples from outside SF’s ghastly precincts—Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince was one; others I’ve forgotten.) If you’re feeling generous, say I’m carving out a zone for my own future operation, arrayed with useful precedents, as in Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors.” If you’re feeling less generous, diagnose it as a case of contamination anxiety working itself out in (barely) public view. I wanted to woodshed with Dick and some other writers condemned to an SF ghetto, but I didn’t want to live there. If I could drag Dick out in advance, he’d be my stalking horse, maybe. There’s a line running straight from this effort through my rather discombobulated Village Voice essay “The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction” in 1998; the question is whether incompletely acknowledged personal necessities, projected onto writers besides myself, render these “critical” efforts disingenuous. The same judgment could probably extend to describe the piece you’re reading now. Am I green? No? Maybe? What about now?

  7.

  By mentioning in the essay K. W. Jeter and Tim Powers, two writers who’d as young men had the luck of showing up on Philip K. Dick’s doorstep and gaining his friendship, I might also have been negotiating my disappointment that I couldn’t duplicate their trick. I’d run out of time, so my own jaun
t west could only be to posthumous Dickland. I’d have to make do with Paul and other residual traces. Suggesting Jeter and Powers weren’t especially “Dickian,” I left a possibility open, that another literary heir might arrive soon, one who’d more persuasively step into the great man’s boot prints—never mind if he never got to sit at the great man’s knees.

  8.

  I was so proud I’d written about a contemporary writer that I took the trouble of photocopying the piece and sending it to Lawrence Shainberg, care of his publisher. Years later, Larry and I became friends. He admitted he was baffled by the piece, had never heard of Philip K. Dick, and that when he tried reading Valis, found it impossibly bad.

  9.

  That same Chestnut Street one-bedroom apartment in the Berkeley flats where the society gathered to stuff newsletters into envelopes, and where I wrote my first thirty-odd stories and three novels, happened to be three blocks from the small Francisco Street two-bedroom house where Dick lived from 1950 to ’58, and where he wrote his first fifty-odd stories and six or seven novels. That also put me two or three blocks from the Lucky Dog Pet Shop and a number of other Dick “landmarks.” It was with Paul that I first walked over to gaze at the Francisco Street house, a stroll that became a ritual of my daylight writing hours. Though the house divulged no secrets, there was something eerie and monastic in tracing the path from one negligible address to another on streets where no one ever walked, where barely anyone drove. I also once veered past the Dick house at four in the morning, tripping on Ecstasy, but at that moment I was more enthralled by the live human at my side than with my dead crazy friend Phil, and I gave the place barely a nod.

  I did visit Lucky Dog, too, and try to get the clerk to admit that the shop knew its place in Philip K. Dick’s personal mythos. Did they know a great man once bought horse meat here? Yes, they agreed, someone had mentioned an article like that once, and had promised to bring it in and show it to them. But that person never returned. I promised I’d bring it in and show it to them, and then I, too, never returned. I made another unsatisfying pilgrimage to Tupper & Reed, one of the two music shops where Dick worked before making the perilous leap into life as a full-time freelance short-story writer. Art Music, the other, had closed. But Tupper & Reed divulged no secrets, either. It was Art Music that had been the really important site for Phil, Art Music whose owner had been the model for so many lovable, tyrannical father-boss figures in Dick’s fiction, like Leo Bulero from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. (I bought my then-wife an electric guitar at Tupper & Reed. Imported into our apartment the guitar exuded no Dickian essence, but we each learned three or four chords; I could play Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” while she could play Elvis Costello’s “Two Little Hitlers,” and did, ominously often if you considered the lyrics. Eventually, a photograph of myself beside this guitar would appear on the jacket of my arguably least-Dickian novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet.) Phil Dick’s Berkeley, everywhere I tried to pin it down, evaporated like the locations in Time Out of Joint, to be replaced with thin strips of paper labeled with the names of the missing items: Pet Shop, Music Store, Two-Story House.

  I impetuously went into a tattoo parlor and had the spray-can logo from the first American edition of Ubik tattooed on my left upper arm. Well, half impetuously: The day before, my then-wife and my sister had gotten tattoos at that same parlor, so it was familial peer pressure that made this decision for me. I wasn’t certain I wanted a tattoo, actually, but if I was going to have one I was certain what tattoo I wanted. My then-wife was tattooed with an ampersand (still her trademark), my sister with a plate of green eggs and ham from the Dr. Seuss book of the same name, a tattoo which has become widely photographed because my sister wears sleeveless shirts. I echoed my sister’s choice by selecting a gooey fictional substance that gives title to the book in which it appears—I challenge you to find another example.* I never wear sleeveless shirts, but word of my tattoo has circulated, slightly, a viral rider on my moderate fame, and I’m occasionally called on by sly interlocutors to sheepishly exhibit it while signing at a bookstore. In two decades I’ve watched my spray can swell, shrink, and grow slack with the changing contours of my arm, gain hairs, survive mosquito bites. The simple colors haven’t faded badly, but the blue outline has blurred, victim of the entropy the spray-product Ubik was supposed to combat. Dick ensured Ubik’s immortality; I’ve ensured its mortality.

  Perhaps the tattoo helped, but in any case I quit wandering over to Francisco Street. The action I required, the essence I sought, wasn’t located on the exterior of that building but in the interior of my own—and just as anyone wandering past the Francisco Street house in 1956 would have no notion what was being hatched inside that drab façade, no one passing Chestnut Street could have known what I was up to, typing up on a Selectric typewriter in quiet, ignominious joy draft after draft of novels with working titles like Apes in the Plan, White Lines, Fractal Days, and Satisfying Lack.

  10.

  Also short stories, in many instances more nakedly derivative of Dick’s work even than the novels, though my own material kept leaking through. Most went unpublished; a few slipped into print in science-fiction magazines or poetry journals; all precede “The Happy Man,” the story which I chose to open my first story collection, and so have been essentially excluded as juvenilia from my “collected works” (except for four which were absorbed into Amnesia Moon). I’ll include two here, both circa 1990, not for their lasting quality but for light shed, however mortifying. Here’s “Ad Man,” a pat little fable in which I labor to update Dick’s typical satire of advertising with the then-fashionable motif of nanotechnology.

  Ad Man

  “Look here, man. Closer.”

  The two men bent in together over the magnifying glass, their shoulders hunched, their breath held. The detail of the painting blurred at the edges of the lens. What they examined now was nothing more than a single brushstroke, magnified tremendously.

  As they watched, both trembling, the painted line slowly began to move, to thicken, and change direction. Then the artist’s breath misted over the lens.

  “Crap.” They both stood up, abruptly. The artist put his hand to his forehead, and looked at the other man for reaction.

  The other man pocketed the glass and said: “Advertising. I’m sorry, man. The painting’s definitely infected.”

  “Infected,” said the artist flatly. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  The other man smiled sadly and gestured towards the table in the corner of the artist’s ramshackle house. The artist nodded, and they went together and sat there. But when the man reached out for the Mason jar of water on the table the artist said: “No. That’s for cleaning with. It’s no good for drinking.”

  It was a lie. The water in the mason jar was fine. The artist just wasn’t in the mood to share it with the stranger.

  The man smiled and said: “Never mind. I’ve stopped making the distinction.” He tipped the jar back and took a long drink, then lifted the jar as if for a toast.

  The artist made a sour face. “What’s happening to my painting?” he said.

  “Microprocessors,” said the man, wiping his lips. He put the jar down. “Little invisible robots, with tiny little hands, and tiny little tools in their tiny little hands. They run around rearranging things at a level we can’t see.”

  “What? Like the medical things?”

  “Exactly. Only this is another type, not medical. Commercial. Something the Americans were fooling around with just before the war. We didn’t think it had crossed over here, at first. Now it’s turning up everywhere.”

  “Commercial.” The artist narrowed his eyes. “What does that mean?”

  “Corporations manufactured them. They’re programmed to redesign existing artworks into advertising. The companies got tired of waiting for talent to sell out, I guess. And the costs are lower.”

  The artist couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re saying my painting is being
transformed into an advertisement? For some American product that doesn’t even fucking exist anymore?”

  The man nodded.

  “Well, that’s ridiculous!” blustered the artist. “Advertising—for what?”

  “We’ll have to see how it comes out, won’t we?”

  “Shit!”

  “It takes days to finish,” said the man. “But we’ll be able to tell before that. There’s two main companies involved in the outbreak here. Fazz and White Walnut, two drinks. White Walnut has the classier campaign, a couple of white-suited pimplike guys reclining on a tropical beach. Fazz has this manic clowndonkey thing, with big pinwheel eyes …”

  The artist groaned.

  “Anyway, they’re easy to tell apart. I’ll know in half an hour.”

  “How did this happen?” asked the artist incredulously.

  “Imported records, I think. The first outbreak was a radio station playing American hits. All the songs started to evolve towards the Fazz theme:

  Fazz!

  Nothing as good as

  Fazz!

  “Or else the White Walnut music, this thing with coconuts dropping onto drums, and Hawaiian guitar. Whoever was singing on the record, they’d suddenly be pushing this product. We burnt the station’s whole collection. But the things had already escaped, I guess.” The man smiled to himself. “They got to some films. We had Jay Gatsby drowning his sorrows in Fazz, then so cheered by the stuff that he got up and did a little song and dance.”