This novel denies its fictionality

by rjon on Thu 12 Apr 2007 10:28 AM PDT Permanent Link Science Fiction Studies #55 = Volume 18, Part 3 = November 1991 Christopher Palmer

Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's Valis

Nothing is fixed or centered: that is the point conveyed by the exasperated misapprehension of Maurice (another therapist) that Fat has not read Genesis.5 In fact he has read Genesis all too often. If you feel free to discard Genesis's account of creation, why keep to Christianity at all (as Fat persists in doing)? Fat's version of Christianity is so decentered that Maurice falls into the mistaken belief that he is ignorant of it.

This rhapsodic postmodernist restlessness is about to meet its end, even its nemesis. It was always vulnerable. The adventurous syncretism, ranging through Plato, Parmenides, Ikhnaton, Bruno, Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, Horselover Fat, Eric Lampton, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is an erasure of differences. Each of these colorfully different texts, torn out of historical context, bathed in the warm solvents of esotericism, says the same thing, though, admittedly, what that same thing is changes from speculation to speculation.

And this blurring of differentiation should be connected to an underlying literalism of interpretation: the Early Christians, for instance, are found to have had some material way of attaining immortality. This material (from Jim Pike out of John M. Allegro) is what they literally consumed in the Eucharist. But, paradoxically, this material, literal truth exists only in the texts that are cited and interwoven in the novel. Dick's attempts to give humble objects ``thingness,'' phenomenological substance, are not as successful here as they were in the earlier novels: the scene (§12:193) in which Philip secretly confers the sacraments on his son, using hot chocolate and a hot-dog bun, is (in my opinion) unconvincing...

By this somewhat shocking or embarrassing tactic, the novel defeats our attempt to defend ourselves by saying that it is only a novel. In our world, the boundaries between art and life, fiction and information, have been erased in ironic fulfillment of the ambition of the avant garde, so that (for instance) it is possible to treat the News as fiction or entertainment. Dick circumvents the process by reversing it. This novel denies its fictionality, but without allowing us to recapture it for fiction by labelling the denial as a sign of its realism. The focus is not on reportage and/or ordinariness, as in traditional realist fiction, but on the way the author offers his belief to validate the extraordinary (Valis) that is set amid the Orange County quotidian.

Jouanne proposes that in the late novels Dick does not merely write about simulacra but makes a simulacrum—a fake (the whole fiction) presented as reality (228). But it's the manner in which the novel is presented as a not-fake that is disconcerting. To do what Jouanne describes is indeed to follow the modernist road: in response to the ever-increasing, insidious, and tentacular capture of art by commodity, one makes a progessively more spikily artful and sophisticatedly fake-ish work of art. Dick is doing the reverse: it is the literalism that breaks through the reader's weariness with contemporary hyperreality and with art's attempts to exceed it.