The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  12.

  Ten years and several personal revolutions later I sat in a sushi restaurant in Brooklyn with Hampton Fancher, the screenwriter of Blade Runner, who wanted to persuade me to let him adapt and direct a version of my Dick-meets-Chandler first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. Hearing Hampton’s description of how deeply he’d responded to the book, tabulating details that had electrified him, I had to laugh: Loads of what he described was Blade Runner’s direct influence on my novel, of course. Hampton and I were trapped in a circular influential mirror, admiring our own distorted reflections. And each of us shadowed by another, a face like Palmer Eldritch’s seeping through.

  Hampton, like Paul Williams, like Jeter and Powers, had enjoyed the opportunity denied me: to know Philip K. Dick personally. But unlike those others, who claimed friendship with my paranoid, prickly hero, Hampton Fancher—who’d appeared out of nowhere as a new crazy friend for me, a patchouli-reeking flamenco-dancing Hollywood hipster, boyfriend of starlets, who’d endear himself to me again and again with his shambolic frankness—stated flatly, “Dick didn’t like me.” The remark, so simple and indisputable, entered my body as a decades-delayed electric shock: Why should I ever have assumed Dick would have liked me? Our kinship, presumed since I was fourteen years old, was a one-way street, an imposition of my desire.

  By this time I’d become a serial ambassador for Dick’s work, defending it to serious readers in essays, introductions, panel discussions, and so forth. More than once I’d joked that Dick’s gentrification was possible only after death had cleared the awkwardness of his personal presence (his defensive vanity about his literary status, his persecution complex at being appropriated for theories or causes) from the landscape. If he’d stuck around, Dick surely would have found a way to dishearten and derail his would-be enshriners. Yet had I bothered to consider that Dick might have loathed me, and renounced my striving on his behalf?

  13.

  When I was ten or eleven I made a friend in school, a kid who’d been saddled with the nickname Aardvark, whether by his family or by other friends, I don’t know. Aardvark had long hair, longer even than mine; an asymmetrical, loping gait; a plan to become a puppeteer like his hero, Jim Henson; and a strange, shy confidence. I fell in love. I brought Aardvark home after school one day, to present to my mother, and in front of her I called him, with open admiration, “really weird.” I don’t remember how Aardvark and I spent that afternoon. There weren’t many like it. Soon Aardvark had grown out of his nickname, and loped on to interests beyond Muppets and me. Under another assumed name Aardvark became one of New York City’s celebrated graffiti writers. For a time, he was King of the A-Train. He shifted into legend, so I went on knowing of him after our brief friendship.

  What I recall about that day was my mother’s reprimand, after Aardvark had gone home. Barely a reprimand, really, just some food for thought: Was I so certain my friend liked being dubbed “weird”? Maybe I should hesitate before making friends self-conscious of their eccentricities, locking them into cute roles. I was shamed but also confused by my mother’s censure. I associated the open celebration of bizarre behaviors specifically with my parents, and my mother was known for awarding baroque nicknames (“Captain Vague,” “Jerry Cheesecake,” etc.), monikers etching this or that personal episode into legend. I thought it was obvious how adoring my use of weird had been. For what it’s worth, I’ve never completely shed my sense that weird or crazy were typical hallmarks of quality, of the characters and artifacts I’d spend my life relishing and collecting and, if I was lucky, originating, crazy books, crazy movies, crazy thoughts. To have a crazy friend was to have waded into the crazy world and given it a soul kiss. For wasn’t it a crazy world?

  14.

  I’ve had so many opportunities to talk to Philip K. Dick without him talking back: Time works that way. I’ve built a few of my palaces on his shambles, and no one can ever tell me I shouldn’t have. There are days, though, when I wonder whether I’m like Gordon Lish to Dick’s Raymond Carver—Lish, so sly and urbane, forcibly enlisting “the natural man” Carver in his editorial schemes, dressing him up like a pet bear. Or (speaking of bears) maybe I’m like Werner Herzog, editing the dead naturalist Timothy Treadwell’s footage into Grizzly Man, then puzzling over the marionette I’ve got up on his feet and dancing—his aspect so remarkable, his private face still and forever hidden from view. But Lish and Herzog, they’re crazy, too, even if they’re better at getting through days, better at talking on a telephone or balancing a checkbook, than Carver and Treadwell. They’re crazy with love, for one thing, even if it is love of a colonizing, acquisitive variety.

  15.

  Sometimes, also, I think I hate Philip K. Dick for not loving Hampton Fancher. How could you be so small?

  16.

  Dick often gave his characters powerful but unsteady father figures who resembled Dick’s boss at Art Music, Herb Hollis: bullying and charismatic, generous and treacherous. The motif is familiar from Orson Welles’s movies, the “big father” often played by Welles himself, as Falstaff, or Kane, or Quinlan. I’ve fooled with this motif myself, in Motherless Brooklyn’s Frank Minna. More often, though, my character pairs are like siblings, or friends, linked by bonds of guilt, yearning, and mutual betrayal. Maybe this is a typical difference between the postwar generation of Dick and his peers—those whose parents were toughened by the Depression and World War II—and my generation, we who got the questing, self-revising boomers as parents. For myself and Jake, at times our parents were less like parents and more like crazy friends. So our friendships involved a measure of mutual parenting or, since mutual parenting was really impossible, the impulse to rescue each other from our parents’ squishy legacies (see: The Fortress of Solitude). And for all my reverence, I never really looked at Philip K. Dick as a literary father, more like a brilliant older brother whose brave and also half-assed forays charted wild paths for me to follow.

  17.

  Dick’s old cadre of readers bristle at hearing him called “crazy,” or at the rehearsals of his human frailties, his drugs and divorces, which tend to accompany the laurels the larger culture lately keeps draping on his tomb. I’ve never understood the problem. Apart from the pointlessness of the question—was Melville crazy? was Malcolm Lowry? Kafka?—I suppose I’m residually inclined to hear the word as a shred of beatnik exultation: “That’s crazy, man!” I’m still looking for the crazy wherever I can find it. It’s hard enough to kick against the plastic Victorianisms of our culture, the social sarcophagus of daily life. Even attempting it can make you crazy, let alone succeeding as well as Dick did. I like helpless braggarts, obsessive fools, angry people. My ears prick up at the word “pretentious”—that’s usually the movie I want to see, the book I want to read, the scene I want to make. Nearly anyone I’ve found worth knowing was difficult enough, vivid enough, to qualify at some point as my crazy friend.

  The Slopie girls are women now. I’m never out of touch with Laurene. I could write a hundred pages about stone-dependable friendship; this isn’t it. Deena, meanwhile, is still out there raging, shaming me with flippant satires of my passionate greenness, wrecking our friendship as often as not, forcing me (it seems to me) to wreck it in return. We’ve gone many months, and once nearly a decade, in the dark, not knowing whether we’ll speak again. I’m furious at her now, but writing this as a valentine, I’d like to think: Come back, crazy friend. I’m big enough for you still. I’ve got what it costs to know you, and though I may seem reluctant to spend it all in one place, I’d hate to die with it in my pocket.

  * Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells.

  What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention

  Through the magic portal, in print and nominated for a Nebula Award, I found a seat waiting for me on a dais in an endlessly resumed panel discussion, in a floating opera that touched down for weekends at Radissons, Hyatt Regencys, Ramadas, to the bewildered amusement of the hotel staff and the permanent obliviousness of anyone e
lse. (There may be one being enacted down the street as you read these words.) I embraced the science-fiction community instinctively, out of my long responsiveness to countercultures that judge themselves sufficient worlds, pocket universes in permanent abreaction to what lies outside their boundary. Like hippies. The situation reworked the confusion of my upbringing (wait, the ’60s failed, and will be treated as a reversible mistake?). Now I wasn’t the fall guy in the story. My eccentrically insatiable reading made me an expert on the lands beyond the science-fiction redoubt. I knew more about contemporary writing than anyone else in the joint. Since the name of the never-ending panel discussion was “Science Fiction and the Mainstream,” my private grail quest took on a recursive quality, my (yearning) trajectory distilled in the field’s: born in pulp shame, then vindicated as relevant to every contemporary experience.

  After Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, DeLillo, and others had made ready use of the technological NOW that had swallowed the future, after Doris Lessing and Stanley Kubrick and Haruki Murakami, after Delany, Ballard, Angela Carter, Thomas Disch, Russell Hoban, James Tiptree Jr., and others had etched their beauties into literary history, what did the quarantine mean to any thinking reader? My idealism, though, turned out to be grit in the gears of a gorgeous antiquated machine that had glanced once in the direction of the ivory tower then chosen instead to trudge across its own moon valley forever. On the other side of the barrier, I’d underestimated the undertow of reaction against opening “literary fiction” to present realities: technology, jargon, vernacular cultural stuff. Or “the fantastic,” even if the gothic imagination was as fundamental to human literature as Shakespeare’s Tempest and so forth; you’d go mad trying to point out something so obvious to a roomful of people who’d begun nodding before you began speaking. (The nervous readers, imperious critics, benighted booksellers, and tut-tutting librarians, all so invested in the quarantine, were nowhere within hearing range.) And so that was what the many brilliant and underestimated writers did when they sat on the never-ending panel titled “Science Fiction and the Mainstream”: go briefly mad. And then they’d move to the hotel bar and, defending against pain, gossip about conventions they’d attended five and ten and fifty years before.

  The irony was, the writers in the bar had vacated a hotel conference room full of what many writers fear can’t really exist: devoted readers who weren’t themselves aspiring writers, and who savored their work, collected their editions, and were conversant in literary-critical context. Of course, this was a paraliterary context, full of names from an alternate twentieth-century canon: Weinbaum, Simak, Effinger. The readers could not only trace a given story’s inner workings but could quote the reaction to it in the letters column of Galaxy from May 1951. The Radisson was a magical arena of sublime reverence for acts of the literary imagination and scrupulous regard for the results. Yet for the writers, with few exceptions, this couldn’t salve their self-perpetuating injuries.

  These were matters of class, hierarchy, caste; things Americans like to deny, or acknowledge only in others, as if observing from some pleasantly egalitarian aerie—the enlightened middle class to which we must certainly belong. I’d write “These were obviously matters of class, etc.,” except that for all my attempts I’ve never made it obvious to anyone besides myself. For me the insight is definitive, which probably makes this a confession of some agonized caste posture I’m not aware I’ve assumed (it feels like I’m walking upright, I swear). The idea that status-anxious guardians of literary culture require a designated underclass to revile: That’s never seemed too exotic a diagnosis. More curious to me was the entrenched and defiant injustice-collecting of those who’d been informed they’d contracted writing cooties. Twenty years later critics like Mark McGurl and Kathleen Fitzpatrick helped me grasp the operations of “identity politics” in the late-twentieth-century literary marketplace: the huge currency of authentic “outsider” roles, and the baroque operations left to those without a simple claim by gender, race, orientation. At that point the tribal sulks and credential inspections within the science-fiction caste began to make a lot more sense. I’d surely been enacting my own inversion of privilege by insisting on my genre scars: I’d be an outer-borough kid who’d taken the subway to the big literary city, and had possibly also hopped the turnstiles on his way.

  Before knowing any of this I’d made lifelong friends in the bar of the Radisson.

  When I published stories in science-fiction magazines I played fly-in-the-cyber-ointment, if anyone cared. I tended to write against the notion of cheap and effective transcendence—to write fantasy stories against fantasy, that is. There was a tremendous oversupply of digital transcendence on the market in that particular time and place, the ’80s Bay Area. Everyone suddenly worked for Wired magazine (at a San Francisco industrial loft which at the time seemed a futurist hive, the Google campus of its time) or was starting up Salon.com or some other site now taken for granted. Others were secret agents for Mondo 2000, or Donna “Manifesto for Cyborgs” Haraway’s grad students, busy espousing (in text) the notion that we were right on the verge of leaving not only text but also our human bodies in the dust, in favor of polymorphic virtual interfaces which wouldn’t so much replace sex and art as combine the two into something much more interesting (never mind that nothing is more interesting). The whole Bay Area was the Radisson now, only it was harder to find the bar where the malcontents hung out, since here it was those who’d drunk the most Kool-Aid, rather than the dissenters, who wore black and talked about the Velvet Underground. At a party for Future Sex magazine I overheard a woman whisper to her friend, “If the future of sex is bald guys with ponytails, I want no part of it.” Jaron Lanier, one of the architects of virtuality, sat alone at the Future Sex party’s bar, unapproachable in a field of awe, hunched like Miles Davis.

  My dour stories worked the “57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)” vein. I specialized in deflation: Digitized boredom was still boredom; pixel kitsch still kitsch; amnesia didn’t actually make the past go away; new stuff gets adapted to the same old impulses, high and low. (Another deflation narrative lay ahead of me: Superheroes don’t solve much.) The abiding human prospect—exalted, tragic, ridiculous, or all of the above—ground on. It was as though no cybernauts had glanced at the rhetorics surrounding the onset of cinema, or radio. Each revolutionary medium changed everything and nothing, killed all known precedents and left them perplexingly alive. I have magazines and radios and a fax machine in my book-lined house. An awful lot of what anyone does with their hours in polymorphic cyberville is read and write, gather in epistolary mobs, gossip about books or about theater they’ve attended, or watch brief movies, like those in Edison’s cinematographic viewing boxes, while petting their obstinately prehistoric genitals.

  In New York in the ’90s, it was as though I’d retreated in time. Nobody had informed the Old World of its due date, or that anyone but pirates wore piercings and tattoos. There was no middle, apparently, between the realms; you chose a team, Cybersexual or Luddite, and the Luddites ran New York. Forget examples like Pynchon or DeLillo: for some of the rearguard critics, it seemed, to put a technology into a piece of fiction, even with an air of skepticism, might be as dubious as advocating for the colonization of Saturn. The Empire City waited a decade or more, for the collapse of somebody’s favorite magazine, maybe Newsweek or Gourmet, for the Bay Area’s memo to land. By the time it did, corporatism had humbled the utopian dreamers and made them billionaires. They couldn’t beat late capitalism, but they could own it. Culturally speaking, all that was left to do was panic, or so dictated the pundits overly impressed by their own crumbling perches. The conversation that ensued had less than nothing to do with the experience—and refused to learn anything from the on-the-ground reports—of actual human artists of any type. This retrenchment, as exasperating and ahistorical as the hype, doomed us to a cycle of Nostalgic Fulminators versus Comments Section Goon-Futurists. Again, the middle was gone. The middle only happened to be
where everyone dwelled. The penitent Jaron Lanier of 2010 wasn’t so different from the transformationalist Lanier of 1986: Both overrated the future. As for novelists, whether you wanted to change the world you were born to or merely to describe it as you found it, shouldn’t you find it first? That started with noticing that the past exists (but not living there, either).

  The mental room tone of the Radisson is Genius Asperger’s (which is not to presume a diagnosis of any of its actual occupants): cognitively astonishing accounts of living in a world to which one does not fully belong, the terms of which one cannot fully discern or trust. This aura prevails in the conversation as much as it defines the contents of the writing. The protagonist in science fiction analogizes not to the writer but to the reader, plunged into a world organized according to hidden operations, full of codes to crack, and of the affective feedback of people taking for granted what you’re puzzling to grasp. This stance feels important for its resemblance to science, philosophy, or what the academics call “theory”; to experience it is to feel consciousness as a never-ending stream of epiphanies—Wait, they use a fork to consume this substance, but this other they lift to their mouths with their bare hands? Fascinating! At its best, unpolluted by too many compensatory power fantasies, it is important, if you grant that examining the invisible systems that organize everyday life might be worthwhile. And science fiction is hardly the only kind of fiction eligible for being polluted by compensatory power fantasies, though in other publishing categories they aren’t usually advertised with helpless blatancy on the dust jackets.

  The peculiarity of the quarantine is that Genius Asperger’s may be the defining artistic room tone of our time, speaking as it does to the bewilderments attaching to the confluence of global corporatism, late-twentieth-century technological revolutions, the information ecology, and so forth. From the works of creators as seminally “postmodern” as Kubrick, John Ashbery, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne and Brian Eno (“This is not my beautiful house”), Antonioni, David Lynch, Lydia Davis, Guided by Voices (“I am a scientist, I seek to understand me”), to the writings of the Pynchon-DeLillo-Wallace continuum and newer works by Shelley Jackson and Tom McCarthy (not to presume a diagnosis of any of the actual creators), you might grasp the outlines of a consensus approach to the matter of negotiating selfhood, these days: embracingly curious while affectively challenged. The emphasis might be on abreaction (the sickness unto death of solipsism, paranoia, finding no way outside the maze of corporate imperatives) or adaptation (becoming an eager termite boring holes through the edifice, or a DJ recombinantly repurposing the stuff piling up), or both. The underlying air of disassociation isn’t so far removed, I think, from the fact that after a day or two at a science-fiction convention it can not only be surprisingly challenging to enact the unspoken protocols for getting in and out of a crowded elevator (a difficulty that’s rampant at the Radisson) but it can seem both fascinating and urgent to consider that such protocols exist in the first place, and then to attempt to describe them, to consider how they formed and were taken unassumingly into our bodies. Please believe me: This can happen to you.