Howard Canaan - Time and Gnosis in The Writings of Philip K. Dick PDF

Time and Gnosis in the Writings of Philip K.
Dick
Howard Canaan
"It's
acro
our
- Ph
You Wholesale"
In "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1965), the protagonis

boss, a characteristic Dick authority figure, snorts at what he calls "the most
grandiose fantasy I ever ran across," thus establishing a conflict between
oppressed visionary and a world seeking to stifle the vision - a conflict th
runs through much of Dick's writing. This particular story (the source f
the movie Total Recall) ends with the protagonist's fantasy of an ali
invasion of earth - a fantasy in which he alone can save humanity
promising to come true. The dreamer and his "grandiose fantasy" are abo
to engulf the reality that the Interpol police in the story seek to control. Th
triumph of subjective vision over objective reality is arguably the impelli
force behind Dick's science-fiction and other writings.
The authority figure's comment that Dick wryly inserts in the
story - "And to think we put this man on our payroll" - perfecdy captur
Dick's sense of himself as a science-fiction writer and subversive visionar
Dick expresses this vision forcefully in his 1974 R oiling Stone interview:
How does one fashion a book of resistance, a book of truth in an empire

of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies? How
does one do this right in front of the enemy? . . . how does one do that in
a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and
independence to rise in new ways under new conditions? That is, will new
tyrannies abolish these protests? Or will there be new responses by the
spirit that we can't anticipate? ( Collected Stories 5: preface).
As is well known, the date of this interview, 1974, and Dick's "pink ligh
theophany are central and significant to the core beliefs that Dick carri
with him for the rest of his life, which, as various people have argued,1 can
be traced from the beginning of his science-fiction stories and novels. If, as
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Douglas Mackay believes, "[a]ll science fiction is a metaphor for
transcendence" (112), no science-fiction writer more fully merges satire with
the portrayal of the quest for transcendence than does Philip K. Dick. This
experience of a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful but hidden divinity
that he called VALIS ("Vast, Active, Living Intelligence System") is felt
most in his late VALIS trilogy - 1 VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981),
and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).
The "empire of falsehood," a term that carries considerable weight
for Dick, refers politically to the falsehoods that he sees at the base of the
regimes, which he places in control of the characters in his fiction, perceives
in control of the present world, and sees as a threat to control "the future
technological state" described in his SF. Darko Suvin argues, "Dick's truth
lies in his plot or fabula [boldface in original]" (373), and the Ur-plot of a
Dick story or novel consists of one or more characters' efforts to pierce the
illusions foisted on them by an oppressive world, illusions generated to keep
them in enslaved ignorance. David Golumbia describes "[t]he recurring
fascination with the nature of reality found in Dick's writing" and "the
reality breakdowns - perhaps the signature feature of Dick's SF - that
occur" in it (86). A Dick story generally is not a drama of action, but a
drama of discovery, of gnosis, of enlightenment. For Dick, SF must provide
a conceptual dislocation, "a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the
shock of disrecognition [italics in original]" that disengages readers from their
cognitive bearings ("My Definition of Science Fiction" 99).
And this "shock of disrecognition" leads into the philosophical-
theological implications of what Dick calls "the Empire" - with a capital
"E." The sixth entry in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura (written by Dick and
based on various Presocratic, Gnostic, and Platonist sources and appended
to 1 VALLS) reads: "The Empire never ended." For Dick, the Empire is
more than a politically oppressive system: it is a false and oppressive reality
of cosmic and metaphysical dimensions. As a Platonist and (at least after
1974) as a Christian, Dick's vision directs itself to a reality or dimension of
time outside of our customary experience. The war between the Empire and
VALIS repeats itself in his fiction and in his view of human history as an
ongoing and timeless battle between the forces of Light and the forces of
Darkness that manifests itself in history but ultimately transcends it. The
Empire (originally for Dick the Roman Empire but manifested in other time
periods, such as in the Nazi regime, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union,
and the Nixon presidency) has never ended and will not end until the forces
of Light attain victory. Such is Dick's hope and faith, a hope and faith -
336
providentially he might have argued - expressed in his fictions well before
1974.2
Dick's treatment of time in his short stories and novels connects
with the overarching themes of prophetic vision, alternate realities,
abnormal mental states, and synchronicity, which he expresses in his critical
and philosophical-theological writings. There is, as I shall argue here, a
pattern of consistency in the treatment of time and temporality between his
science-fiction fantasies and his philosophical writings.
Time travel in the fiction of Philip K. Dick

Dick's use of the time travel theme in his fiction may be classified
into categories:
1) Stories that feature some sort of time machine and physical time
travel.
2) Stories that involve reversals in the flow of time.

3) Stories that involve precognition - the ability of characters to see
into the future.
4) Stories that involve displacement into alternate realities or
alternate histories.
Admittedly, this categorization does not work quite as neatly as my
scheme suggests, and features of one category may spill over into another
(especially in the case of categories three and four). Alternate worlds, mental
instability, cognitive claustrophobia, and ontological uncertainty are
pervading Dick themes anyway. But this classificatory scheme will help to
show a development or progression in Dick's use of time travel in his
fiction from the fairly conventional to something more closely aligned with
the concerns that absorbed his attention towards the end of his life.
In two of Dick's more conventional physical time-travel stories,
"Orpheus with Clay Feet" (1963) and "Prominent Author" (1954), the
protagonist travels back in time and affects future history, but Dick's
interests here are satirical without being cosmic. In "Orpheus," Jesse Slade,
a typically Dickian disgruntled employee in a future bureaucracy goes to a
time travel agency to get out of the routine rut he is in and sets out to
inspire a science-fiction writer named Jack Dowland (the pseudonym Dick
used when this story was first published) to produce his great science-fiction
novel. Slade fails in his mission, but it turns out that Dowland told another
SF writer - Philip K. Dick - about his encounter with someone from the
future, and Dick wrote "Orpheus with Clay Feet" - the story we are
presently reading. This delightfully witty and self-reflective story slyly
337
expresses Dick's own frustrations about the low status of his craft as Jack
Dowland explains that he does not want to write SF "[b]ecause there's
going to be a hydrogen war. The future's black. Who wants to write about
it? Keerist . . . And anyhow, who reads that stuff? Adolescents with skin
trouble. Misfits. And it's junk" ( Collected 4: 207). The device of having a
character in a Dick story learn that he is a fictional character is a motif that
returns with more metaphysical trappings in various Dick novels such as
The Man in the High Castle (1964), The Unteleported Man (1966), and the
VAL2S trilogy, but in this playful piece it has no ambitious higher purpose.
"Prominent Author," another story dealing with authorship,
involves a device that transports the protagonist, Henry Ellis, 160 miles
from his home to his work in one minute - the perfect futuristic
mechanism for the harassed commuter. But this gismo, produced by Ellis's
company and provided for his convenience, also turns out to have a time-
travel component. In the gray, womb-like tunnel that whisks him to work,
Ellis discovers two-inch-tall people who gaze at him in awe and fear as he
appears to them. He further discovers that he has not, as he originally
thought, been transported in space to some extra-terrestrial world; he has
been transported in time to that of the ancient Hebrews who are two inches
tall because the universe has been expanding, and that he, the "prominent
author" of the story title has written the Old Testament for them. In
characters, setting, and theme, "Prominent Author" satirically and comically
displays typical Dick features. It depicts a banal middle-class household and
a fatuous business enterprise whose paranoid authoritarian employer
punishes his employee for operating a time machine that neither he nor
anyone else knew existed. The protagonist, like those in many Dick novels
and in other short story satires, such as "We Can Remember It for You
Wholesale" and "Orpheus with Clay Feet," is caught in an uninspiring job
that he seeks to escape from through some means generated by a science-
fiction device. Finally, the exposure or deconstruction of the notion of the
Bible's divine authorship in "Prominent Author" points forward to Dick's
increasingly earnest explorations of theological themes in his later work. But
as with "Orpheus with Clay Feet," this story, in its whimsical tone and
treatment of time travel, has no further metaphysical ambitions.
The Hugo Award-winning novel Dr. Futurity (1 960) provides a clear
example of how Dick's use of conventional time travel corresponds to his
successful use of other conventional SF devices: a sympathetic and highly
competent protagonist, a plausibly described future setting and society,
characters portrayed with some psychological complexity, a satisfyingly
338
happy ending, and - for a writer prone at times to bury the story line in
meandering dialogues - extensive and fast-moving action. The hero Dr. Jim
Parsons finds himself conveyed to a future society where "life and death
have traded places" (back cover). Its people seek the deaths of others (and,
at times, themselves) because of an inculcated impulse to make room for
the computer-generated humans who will replace them. Their values
directly oppose the life-saving ones of the hero, a medical doctor who has
ironically been brought forward in time to restore the life of a tribal leader
so that the tribe can survive. The plot involves extensive journeys into the
past and the future, time paradoxes of people meeting themselves, the
quasi-Oedipal act of one character killing the person whose murder he tries
to prevent, and the redemptive assassination of the story's villain by the
protagonist's children when they travel back from the future. Dick's
traditional use of time-travel motifs fits in well with his effective application
of a traditional science-fiction action plot.
In contrast, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" (1974)
connects time travel and the idea of a closed or unalterable time loop with a
larger theme central to Dick's imagination - that of claustrophobic
entrapment. One of three time travelers, the protagonist Addison Doug
suffers the nightmare of perpetual deja vu - the awareness that the
government's failed effort to project him forward 100 years in time has led
him and those around him to suffer again and again the events that
culminate in their deaths and a funeral parade for him and his companions.
The effort to escape from a debilitating reality, the protagonist's isolation
from the perceptual worlds of those around him, the nightmare of
repetition, and the vision of an oppressive government make this a
prototypical Dick story. Also characteristic of Dick, particularly during this
period of despairing themes in his writing, is the resolution of the story -
the discovery at the end that Doug caused his own death by bringing 100
pounds of rusted Volkswagen parts onto the time machine to make it self-
destruct, killing its passengers. But even this suicidal effort to free himself
from the endlessly repetitive time loop in which he is caught seems
unsuccessful. Not only Doug, but everyone he encounters, appears doomed
to repeat the ritual funeral for the death of the tempunauts.
Dick's own comments on this story shortly before its publication
suggest his sense of its importance him. He argues that "the essence of the
time-travel story is confrontation of some sort" and that the "face-to-face . .
. alienation" in it "where the living Addison Doug meets his own corpse
"could not occur in any other variety of writing" ( Collected 5: 392). He goes
339
on to compare "the weary sadness" (5: 392) of the characters in this story to
his own feelings, both personally and for the world at large. The story
shows "Addison Doug's dismal world [that] suddenly spreads out and
becomes the world of many people" (5: 392); that is, the "dismal world" of
this story spreads beyond individuals to the social and political collectivities
that they share. Doug's desperate wish "[t]o see no more summers" (5: 295)
is a wish to escape the claustrophobic time loop, a death wish, and an
expression of existential alienation and despair - all demons with which
Dick wrestled in his life and in his writing.
Two other Dick time-travel stories, "Breakfast at Twilight" (1954)
and "Jon's World" (1954), manipulate time to reflect Dick's recurring
anxieties of a war-devastated future. But a visionary element beyond simple
time travel enters each one. In "Breakfast at Twilight," a family is projected
from their comfortable suburban home eight years into the future into a
radiation- filled world of total war terrorized by a police state and robot-
operated weapons. The rationale for the family's projection into the
future - the tipping "of some unstable time fault" by destructive weapons
( Collected 2: 214) - is a characteristically flimsy Dick device. But it reveals the
real theme and "fault" in the story, the militaristic police state, and this dark
vision emerges at the end as the family returns to its own time, knowing the
grim future that awaits them in a few years. "Jon's World" foregrounds
prophetic vision even more. Time-machine pilot Caleb Ryan lives on an
earth (again) ravaged by robot killing machines. He travels back in time at
several junctures in order to arrive at the moment when he can kill the
inventor of these machines (called "claws") and save humanity by changing
history - and eventually he succeeds. Set against Ryan is his son Jon, who
experiences visions of another world, an idyllic one in which human
energies have turned from the arts of war to those of peace. By killing the
inventor of the claws, Ryan enters the world foreseen by his son, a world
where his son does not exist. This story juxtaposes Caleb's physical and
Jon's visionary time travel, concluding with Caleb's thoughts about time
travel, visionary experience, and the nature of time, ideas that increasingly
enter Dick's writing:
This opens up whole new lines of speculation The mystical visions of

medieval saints. Perhaps they were of other futures, other time flows. Visions
of hell would be worse time flows. Ours must stand some place in the middle.
And the vision of the eternal unchanging world. Perhaps that's an awareness
of non-time. We'll have to think more about that too. (2: 81)
340
Dick presents a reversal of the direction of time only twice in his
fiction - in "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" (1965) and in the novel
he adapted from it, Counter-Clock World (1967). In both literally
"preposterous" stories where "pre" and "post," "before" and "after"
become reversed, Dick posits something he calls "the Hobart Phase," a
field that makes time move backward. The story version of this time motif
is pure satire. It presents a world in which, along with time, causality and
logic are reversed. The ruler of one political entity is the Anarch ("absence
of rule") Peake; people don't die - they "dwindle" out of existence back
into the womb; the protagonist works in an "erad" facility that eradicates
publications, patents, and inventions to prepare for their going out of
existence; and people remember the future but have no awareness of the
past - characters are uncertain whether 2:30 p.m. is earlier or later than 4:30
p.m. Dick somehow constructs a plot out of this material. Record nullifier
Niehls (as in "nothing') Lehrer is about to make sure that the last copy of a
book describing how to assemble a "swabble" - the device that has made
the time-reversing Hobart Phase possible - is about to disappear. With the
book gone, all memories of how to build a swabble will disappear (or
perhaps "will have disappeared?"), and - by some unexplained twist of
logic - the existence of the Hobart Phase will remain unthreatened. But
another author and inventor comes to Lehrer with a manuscript explaining
how to disassemble a swabble, thus threatening to end the Hobart time
reversal and make time move forward again. As the story ends, Lehrer
concludes: "Due to the crank's deranged thesis, time had once more
returned to normal" (5: 133). (In this world where both time and logic are
reversed, a "crank's deranged thesis" is equivalent to a genuine inventor's
valid idea.) With the Hobart Phase ending, Lehrer wonders when his facial
hair will start to grow again. . . but how soon? In a final logical absurdity he
anticipates, "Probably within the previous half hour" (5: 133).
Counter-Clock World develops this time-reversal motif to include
"specific reference to a platonic realm" (Taylor 22). The protagonist, Jason
Hermes, owns a "vitarium" (the time-reversal equivalent of a moratorium),
which manages the passage of people from death to life. The plot explores
the role of resurrection - the time reversal transition from death to life -
and in particular the effect of the resurrection of a religious leader, the
Anarch Thomas Peake. Of special interest because of its increasing
emergence in Dick's later fiction is the novel's emphasis on a religious
theme, especially the Christ- or Buddha-like depiction of Peake set against
the ruthless cult leader Ray Roberts and his followers. In fact, the Anarch
341
Peake's credo, described near the end of the novel, expresses Dick's own
theosophical beliefs.3
Dick's treatment of temporal anomalies also leads into metaphysical
and theological speculation in his time-travel stories and novels whose
characters have precognitive powers. These include the previously discussed
"Jon's World," "The Minority Report" (1956), and his novels The World
Jones Made (1956), Time Out of Joint (1959), Now Wait For Last Year (1966),
and Ubik (1969). Dick's recurrent reliance on the device of precognition -
or visionary access to the future - reveals a twofold agenda for his use of
time travel: to undercut and question both our linear experience of time and
causality and our commonsense belief in an external reality that exists "out
there," distinct from our perception of it. As Dick explained in a 1980
interview with Frank C. Bertrand, "I came to believe that in a certain sense,
the empirical world was not truly real" (Bertrand 46) .4 Dick's time-travel
stories are at times punctured with metaphysical speculations, including
references to a "Prime Architect" (an echo of Aristotle's Prime Mover) and
of Kant's description of time as a subjective human category - hardly
matters that harassed, pragmatic bureaucrats usually concern themselves
with. This speculative bent is also consistent with Dick's indifference to
technological realism in describing his time-travel devices. For Dick, the
defining feature of a science-fiction story is what he calls "an idea" (Dick's
version of Suvin's novum). As Dick once said when distinguishing science
fiction from space adventure, ". . . space adventure lacks the distinct new
idea that is the essential ingredient [of science fiction]" (Bertrand 99), which
provides the necessary disengagement from surface reality from which the
"idea" develops.
Dick sometimes creates this cognitive estrangement in his precog
time-travel stories informed by the idea of a perspective that transcends the
framework of linear time as is evident in "The Minority Report," a film-noir
type SF-detective story that envisions a future in which precognitive
mutants can foresee when people will commit crimes so that these crimes
may be prevented before they happen. The plot centers on the conflict
between John Anderton, head of the Precrime Bureau, and his designated
successor. As the story develops, it presents "the theory of multiple future /'
( Collected 4: 85), the notion that a potentially unlimited number of alternate
futures exists at different levels of probability (perhaps Dick's analogy to the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle). The final and actual one becomes reality
as the result of a climactic action by the protagonist Anderton that unravels
the tangle of questions about free will and predestination linked to the time
342
paradoxes in the story.
Although in "The Minority Report" one version of history snaps
into being in the story's resolution, Dick extends his speculation about
alternate time threads in other fiction. The Man in the High Castle , for
instance, is an alternate history novel in which one character, Mr. Tagomi,
finds himself for a brief time in our world, leaving open the idea of alternate
universes and the Borgesian idea of time as a garden (or truer to Dick, a
maze) of forking paths.5 In Uhik , the precog Pat Conley has the power to
shift people into alternate pasts or futures. In Martian Time-Slip (1964), the
precog Manfred Steiner changes events at the end of the story to save
himself from permanent imprisonment in a mental asylum.
The presentation of the precogs in "The Minority Report," points to
yet another theme in Dick's time-travel fiction: his association of
precognition (psychic time travel) with visionary experience, alienation, and
altered mental states. The three precogs who prepare the Precrime reports
are babbling, incoherent, in most ways subhuman beings cut off from
ordinary communication with others. Like the Sibylline prophecies, their
incoherencies are somehow translated into decipherable messages. As so
often seen in Dick's fiction, and corresponding perhaps to how he viewed
himself as a writer, the cost of inner vision is isolation and entrapment in
one's own reality. The precogs and others with ESP powers in Ubik are
socially marginalized figures. Manfred in Martian Time-Slip is an autistic
schizophrenic. In Now Wait for Last Year ; the addictive drug JJ-180, which
induces time shifts in Kathy Sweetscent, also induces a terrifying sense of
isolation and assault by the physical world. Similarly, the addictive Chew-Z
drug that Palmer Eldritch exports in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
(1965) isolates characters in separate realities - all controlled or intervened
in by Eldritch - and shifts them into different times and spaces, worlds of
existential fear and uncertainty, which Leo Bolero, the closest to being the
authorial spokesperson, describes as the "Three Stigmata" in the novel's
tide, as "the evil negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality, and despair"
(244).
This analysis suggests a continuum of thought between Dick's use
of time travel, paranormal perception such as precognition, and abnormal
mental states such as schizophrenia or paranoia as well as his awareness of
his own visionary role as a science-fiction writer. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay,
Jr. points out, "[f]or Dick, the connections among religious gnosis, ethical
double-binds, and mental disturbances were drawn ever tighter as his career
progressed" (431). A closer look at Dick's use of time travel in the last third
343
of Now Wait for Last Year provides evidence for this view. At the political
level, the novel describes a state of war among three parties - the non-
humanoid Reegs, the Starmen of the empire of Lilistar, and the inhabitants
of Earth (Terra) - the latter allies but really subjects of Lilistar in its war
with the Reegs. At the personal level, it describes the destructive
relationship between the hero, Eric Sweetscent, and his very
unsympathetically portrayed wife, Kathy. But it is Dick's use of time travel
and its linkage with the use of the drug JJ - 1 80 in the novel that deserves
attention here.
As a time-travel device, JJ-1 80 alters people's consciousness while

projecting, or seeming to project, them into different times or realities. The
way that time travel or reality displacement operates in the novel
corresponds to the subjectivity of specific characters. JJ-1 80 takes Kathy
Sweetscent into the past, reflecting her possessive obsession with the past
and her regressive personality. It takes Gino Molinari, the dictator of Terra,
into alternate present worlds, reflecting his action-oriented political
pragmatism. Finally, it takes the protagonist, Eric Sweetscent, into the
future, reflecting his visionary idealism and his inclination to look beyond
selfish concerns in the interest of higher goals. Left uncertain is whether the
time travel that the ingester of JJ-1 80 experiences is real or hallucinatory. It
has features of both reality and hallucination, it does give the user access to
actual events in other time or reality frames - whether the past, the future,
or alternate present worlds- but no empirical data to corroborate these
experiences can be brought back to the time frame or world that the JJ-1 80
user returns to, and actions taken in the time-traveled past apparently have
no impact on characters encountered then still living in the returned-to
present. This ambiguity creates the characteristically Dickian doubt, the
questioning of the reality of the environment that characters find
themselves in.
At another level, the time-travel experiences of Eric Sweetscent, the
closest surrogate for Dick the author and the debilitating effect of the time-
travel inducing drug JJ-1 80 on him, arguably parallel the imaginative
dynamics of the novel itself. In a sense, the novel as it ends suffers from the
same cognitive disorientation and blurred reality that the drug induces in its
users. Both they and the novel pay for the imaginative kick of their time-
travel experiences with confusion and debilitation. This parallel between
character and novel is particularly true for the protagonist, whose forays
into the future to find an antidote for the fatally addictive JJ-1 80 and to
forge an alliance between Terra and the Reegs leave him, and the novel,
344
uncertain and disoriented at the end. The time-travel and the drug-induced
subjective states inserted in the plot of Now Wait for Last Year are
intertwined with the vagaries of Dick's own imaginative vision.6
Central to this vision is Dick's existential doubt expressed, for
instance, in his statement that "[i]t now is universally accepted that reality,
'in itself as Kant put it, is really unknown to any sentient organism" (qtd. in
Sutin 171). Dick is equally Kantian in his skepticism about causality as an
objective phenomenon, describing how "there came to me the realization . .
. that causality is a perception and not a datum of external reality" (qtd. in
Sutin 45). Combining this idea with Dick's Kantian questioning of "any
sentient organism" having perceptual access to external reality, we can
understand how his time-travel narratives almost inevitably involve
displacement into alternate worlds or alternate histories that decline to
identify any ground "reality" independent of human (or any "sentient
organism ['s]) subjectivity.
Dick's subversion of conventional notions of time becomes
apparent in considering his treatment of time in several novels - Time ou
Joint , Ubik, and VALIS - and their use of the Gnostic conspiratorial
of perceived reality as the mask imposed (for generally sinister purposes
conceal a deeper, latent reality. As critics have argued, Dick's incorpo
of Gnostic beliefs in his fiction, though most evident in combination
the theistic beliefs of his later novels, as suggested earlier, goes back
earlier novels as well. These beliefs include the idea of mundane
history, and human experience as an illusory or fallen distortion of a dee
reality, an idea that Dick hints at or includes in novels as disparate a
Cosmic Puppets (1957), A Ma%e of Death (1970), and The Divine Invasion .
The time when Time out of Joint opens, apparendy, the late 1950s
novel was published in 1959), turns out to be unreal. Protagonist
Gumm and other characters come to discover that they really live
year 1997. Their illusory existence is a politically contrived hallucinat
keep them ignorant of their true state, particularly Gumm, who com
recognize that the newspaper puzzle games he solves are actually war
used by an oppressive government to wage war with inhabitants on
moon. The novel presents a drama of gnosis, of cognitive awakening,
the climax of the narrative the objects of the 1950s' pseudorea
surrounding the characters fade and are replaced by those from 1997
awakening from the illusion of living in a fabricated time is what F
Jameson calls "the perception of the present as history" (231) - for h
false bourgeois ideological construction of the Eisenhower era, a ment
345
triggered by accumulated clues of the not-quite real late 1950s'
environment. But the novel is also a literally false history, not just in its not
quite accurate cultural cues, but in its imposition of a false 1950s setting on
a historical (though fictionalized) substratum of 1997. It is, as Sandor
Klapcsik puts it, "a false universe that certain characters intend to
masquerade as real" (303). So even by 1959, well before the cosmic
questionings of historical reality in 1 XAUS' Dick explores a vision of a false
history.7
The last two-thirds of Ubik posits a realm of being beyond the
entropic time experience of most of the characters in the novel after they
have been killed by a bomb and exist in the "half-life" (cryonic hibernation).
For them, the transcendent, a realm of the living is represented by the story-
tide product, Ubik, that has the power at least temporarily to counteract the
inevitable effects of time - decay and death. In the novel's final chapter, in
words that echo those of the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes (an
acknowledged source of Dick's theological beliefs) and the Gnostic Logos,
Ubik announces itself:
"I am Ubik. Before the Universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the
worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I
put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word
whose name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called
Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be." (201)
The Gnostic awakening in Ubik involves "inertials," employees with

extrasensory powers who have been killed and placed in "half-life." As
messages from their still-living employer Glen Runciter filter through to
them in their illusory half-life state, the plot dramatizes their efforts to reach
him in the face of a destructive force that seeks to kill them. In this passage,
the spray product Ubik imitates the function of a divinity, and the existential
awakening of characters in the half-life world to their own illusory state
assumes the features of the Gnostic quest for a higher reality. The Gnostic
parallel extends further: the death-dealing force opposed to Runciter is Matt
Jory, an adolescent in a half-life casket whose vampiric psychic powers (in
the hallucinatory half-life world he bites someone at one point) devour the
psyches of the other half-lifers. He plays with them and "move[s] them
here" and "put[s] them there," a jeering, sinister litde divinity in the half-life
world that he controls. In its dualistic aspect, Jory's batde with Glen
Runciter parallels the Gnostic batde between the Logos and what Dick in
346
VALJS calls the "the Mind [that] has become deranged" (220)8.
The treatment of time in Ubik reflects the Gnostic or Platonic
concept of a higher reality "that shall always be," a concept that

develops towards the end of the novel. In the context of the half-life s
this higher reality is Glen Runciter's world of the living. His wife El
herself in the half-life, is a force of life and light, fighting to preserve th
novel's hero, Joe Chip, against the death force of Matt Jory. The character
experience two varieties of time devolution as a result of Matt Jo
"eating" of their psychic lives - a temporal drift into the year 1940, a spat
drift towards Des Moines, Kansas, the birthplace of the salvation figu
Glen Runciter, and the devolution of objects, "the procession of form
(122), into earlier forms that Joe Chip speaks of:
Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of

Plato's idea objects, the universals which, in each class, were real. The
form TV set had been a template imposed as a successor to othe
templates, like the procession of frames in a movie sequence. Prior form
he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. T
past is latent, submerged, but still there. . . . History began a long time ag
(122)
This passage posits a latent reality beneath the apparent movement of time
analogous to the nunc stans , the eternal present of Christian or Neoplatonic
speculation about eternity. Runciter's use of the life-restorative Ubik to fight
the wasting away of his employees and the devolution of objects to earlier
forms is a batde between order and entropy, between Form and what Dick
elsewhere calls "the Form-Destroyer." 9
Moving from the half-life "tomb world" of Ubik to the actual world
presented in VAL IS, the Gnostic quest becomes the search by protagonist
Horselover Fat (one of several characters who represent aspects of the
author) for evidence of a higher realm, the "Vast, Active, Living Intelligence
System" buried in the context of ordinary human experience. In VAUS we
step from science fiction into semi-autobiography, as revealed in the shift of
the narrative voice between the third person Horselover Fat and the "I" of
Philip Dick. Nevertheless, the Gnostic speculation and the skepticism about
the reality of linear time and the phenomenal world in VAUS are
consistent with ideas present in Dick's previous fiction. These ideas are
interspersed in the narrative as Fat's journal or exegesis and are compiled in
the appendix in his Tractates Cryptica Scriptura. To cite a few among many,
347
consider the idea that "the nature of things is in the habit of concealing
itself' (Heraclitus, "Fragment 54" qtd. in VAL1S 31), the idea that
movement in time is illusory - "He causes things to look different so it
would appear time has passed" ( VALJ.S 33) - and Dick's recurrent
dramatization of a Manichean life-and-death conflict between a sympathetic
protagonist, a force of Light, and an affectless authoritarian power, Dick's
"dark iron Empire prison." Entry 48 of the Tractates describes this
opposition clearly:
Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from the
hyperuniverse ... is sentient and volitional. The lower realm ... is
mechanical, driven by blind, efficient cause, deterministic and without
intelligence, since it emanates from a dead source. . . . Until astral
determinism is broken, we are not even aware of it [the upper realm], so
occluded are we. "The Empire never ended." (225)
Time in the works of Philip K. Dick

How, finally, do we place Dick's use of time travel and the
conception of time in his fiction, and in his non-fiction essays and
interviews, in the context of his self-understanding as a science-fiction
writer? Obviously, as a science-fiction writer, Dick exercised a kind of
imaginative time travel and identified his work as a description of "a truly
future technological state," and his goal as writing a "book of truth in an
empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitude in an empire of vicious lies," a
visionary (and political) agenda. But the connection we have seen in Dick's
fiction between time travel, abnormal mental states, and precognitive and
other ESP powers is also a running commentary on his own self-image as a
visionary writer. Regardless of how we may judge the matter, Dick at points
in his life questioned his own sanity.10 Though he hardly shared his
neoclassicist sensibility or politics, Dick might have agreed with John
Dryden that "Great wits are sure to madness near allied; / And thin
partitions do their bounds divide" ("Absalom and Achitophel" lines 163-
64). Prophetic, visionary insight for Dick accompanies paranoia,
schizophrenia, and abnormal perceptions of time. As Robert Galbreath
observes of Dick's self-presentation in 1 SAUS, "Phil is the novelist all too
aware of the power of creative imagination, hallucination, and madness"
(119). Dick explains in "Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes ,"
348
What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us
like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is
having it all now, whether he wants it or not, the whole can of film has
descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. (176)
As the schizophrenic experiences time in a different but not necessarily less

valid way than the rest of us, so, too, does the paranoid personality, Dick
claims, arguing that
... we are faced with the clear and evident possibility that at least in the
case of paranoids - or anyway some paranoids - the delusions are not
delusions at all but are, on the contrary, accurate perceptions of an area of
reality that the rest of us cannot (thank the Lord) reach. ("Drugs,
Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality" 171)
According to Dick the schizophrenic inhabits a synchronous perceptual

world like that of The Book of Changes , divorced from linear time flow and
overwhelmed by instantaneous information, and the paranoid inhabits a
perceptual world of excess (and usually very unpleasant) information and
signification. These are central features of the more controlled but clearly
paranoid worlds presented in Dick's SF. His fiction is haunted - and
sometimes rendered incoherent - by time distortions, time twists, faults and
inconsistencies in the fabric and flow of linear time,11 by alternate times and
worlds, and by alternate and inconsistent significations that give rise to
concealed evidence of cosmic or political conspiracies.
Dick took these views beyond the imagined worlds of his fiction.
His statement in VALIS that "I am by profession a science-fiction writer. I
deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy" (3) confirms the continuity between
his life, his beliefs, and his fiction. The subversion of ordinary time in his
fiction is an extrapolation of similar ideas in his essays, such as his notions
in "Man, Android, and Machine" of true time as "orthogonal" to "our
experience of the sequence of events" (215) or of "our world as extensive in
time . . . like an onion, an almost infinite number of successive layers" (217).
He wrote from dreams and visions, a source he called the Noosphere, a
synonym for the living system of information that he identified as I VA1 IS.
It strikes me as reductive to dismiss Dick's metaphysics or his
musings on the relationship between perception and the external world as
"noise" that interferes with the core political signal of his themes. They are,
rather, an essential ingredient.12 In "To Flee from Dionysus," Samuel
349
Umland appropriately states the need for an analysis of Dick "that more
fully accounts for his philosophical and religious obsessions, one that
assumes that these obsessions are not later developments of his life (which
they are not), or marginal in any definition of his fiction (which they are
not), but utterly essential to an understanding of it" (94). As evidence for
this judgment, I will conclude with the description in Now Wait for Last Year
of the sinister alien Minister Frenecksy's gaze and Frenecksy's resemblance to
other Dick characters with sinister metaphysical implications:13
This was not the glittering, restless stare of ordinary suspicion; this was a
motionless gaze, a gathering of the totality of faculties within to comprise a
single psychomotor concentration. Frenecksy did not decide to do this. In fact
he was helpless, compelled to confront his compatriots and adversaries alike
in this fashion, with this unending, ensnaring fixity. It was an attentiveness
which made empathic understanding impossible; the eyes did not reflect any
inner reality. They gave back to the viewer exactly what he himself was. (122)
Frenecksy's eyes are the windows to his soullessness. He is a political

tyrant, but he is far more than that. His gaze is both helpless and mechanistic.
His fixity is an "ensnaring" trap that makes "empathic understanding
impossible." His eyes are void of self-awareness and "inner reality." Stripped
even of the empathetic resonance of a first name, Frenecksy embodies the
deeper perceptual tyrannies and the mechanistic worldview that Dick so firmly
resisted all his life as "the Empire" and its "occluded" (a favorite word in
Dick's later writings) blindness to ultimate reality. The Empire also embodied
for Dick the oppression of another kind of freedom dear to his heart - the
freedom of the subjective imagination. As Robert Galbreath succinctly states,
"'Objectivity' is part of the prison from which liberation is sought" (136).
Dick's twists on time and time travel in his fiction and essays are exercises in
his subjective imagination and its vision - what the no-nonsense Interpol
officer dismisses in "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" as "grandiose
fantasies." Throughout his career, Dick took an adversarial stance against such
figures, which he fictionalized and satirized as the wardens of surface reality, of
the "apparently real," who didn't want "a man like him . . . on our payroll." By
combining satire and metaphysical vision, Dick has, in the words of Darko
Suvin, sent us "[a]n urgent message for salvation, with humour" (395).
Mercy College, New York
350
Notes
1 See Canaan, Di Tommasso, Formenti, and Mackey for examples of Gnosti
motifs in earlier Dick novels.
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire uses the term "empire" to describe
what they argue is the globally encompassing political and economic hegemony that
capitalism is transforming into. But while Dick probably shared many of their political
perspectives, his interest in the metaphysical aspects of the term "empire" takes him in a
very different direction from Hardt and Negri's book.
3 He [the Anarch Peake] says there's no death; it's an illusion. Time is an illusion.
Every instant that comes into being never passes away. ... It doesn't even really
come into being; it was always there. The universe consists of concentric rings of
reality; the greater the ring, the more it partakes of absolute reality. . . . Evil is
simply a lesser reality. . . . Evil is an illusion, like decay. . . . Eidos is form. Like
Plato's category - the absolute reality. There's an anti-eidos too, a form
destroying factor. . . . But the anti-eidos is an eidolon, a delusion: once impressed,
the form is eternal. ( Counter-Clock World 197-98)
This passage resembles the one in Ubik cited above. Noteworthy are other similarities
between Counter-Clock World and Ubik : agencies overseeing the transition to or from
before-birth or after-death experiences, chapter openings citing theological texts (either
directly or disguised as advertisements), and Manichean conflicts between opposing groups
(Joe Chip and the anti-inertials versus the murderous Roy Hollis - a name similar to Ray
Roberts - and the telepaths).
4 Golumbia argues that Dick, from a philosophical point of vew, is not a realist,
either empirically, linguistically, or metaphysically. That is, Dick questions the truth-value of
the empirical world, the referentiality of language to the empirical world, and the existence
of an absolute reality (such as Plato's Forms or Ideas) that can be ascertained beyond
phenomenal existence (86-88). Golumbia convincingly shows how the figure of Palmer
Eldritch - gobbler-up of the ontological worlds of others in Three Stigmata, a novel that
Dick later commented on in tones of fear and discomfort - represents the oppressive
tyranny of the philosophical realist's position that Dick opposed.
5 In "Dickian Time in The Man in the High Castle ," Campbell argues that Dick
provides time cues in the Julia Frink plot that make her actions inconsistent with the time
line of the main plot involving Mr. Tagomi. As a result, she argues, "both linear and
synchronistic times exist and are accepted within the narrative" (192). She concludes that
"Philip Dick not only wrote an alternate history with The Man in the High Castle , but in it he
also describes an alternate view of time" (198).
6 For a more favorable (but very brief) view of the outcome of Now Wait for iMst
Year ; see Eugene Warren's comment that "Eric Sweetscent accepts and prepares to deal
with the pain of his marriage" (186-87). This is true, but Sweetscent's action marks a return
to a destructive relationship and occurs as an isolated event in a larger pessimistic context.
A comparison of Now Wait for I Mst Year and Dr. Futurity - two novels that involve time
travel and have doctors whose healing skills are emphasized - inclines me to my view that
Now Wait is a darker and less resolved novel than Warren seems to suggest. Jim Parsons'
efforts bring about the successful plot ending in Dr. Futurity in a clearheaded way, his forays
351
in time require no chemical assistance and leave no after-effects, and his benevolence is
not, as Eric Sweetscent's is, impeded by any self-doubt, guilt, or despair.
7 False clues in Time out of Joint include the information that Marilyn Monroe is an
unknown actress, that Uncle Tom's Cabin is an obscure novel by the unknown author Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and that Richard Nixon is director of the F.B.I. But more related to Dick's
theosophical interests are the slips of paper with names on them that at selected points
replace objects in the world of Time out of Joint. Umberto Rossi in "The Problem of the
Jjogos " argues that the words on slips of paper in Time out of Joint evoke the dabar of the
Hebrew and the logos of the Greek Bible, and that word is reality here, the underlying reality
obscured in the seeming-1950s setting of the novel (206-07).
8 1 disagree with Rossi's statement that "Dick is not a Gnostic or Gnostic-oriented
writer" (414). While one cannot necessarily call Dick a strict Gnostic, it seems hard to argue
that he is not in some way "Gnostic-oriented" in the plots and themes of his writing.
9 The Form Destroyer is mentioned (and appears) in A Ma%e of Death more than in
any other Dick novel. Its description (5) recalls the cosmology of Anarch Peake in Counter-
Clock World. Also of interest is the reality shift or addition of a dimension of transcendence
at the very end of A Ma^e of Death. After it is revealed that the entire experience on the
Planet Delmark O described in the story, including the theological divinities (the
Manufacturer, the Intercessor, and the Form Destroyer), has been a computer-generated
collective hallucination, the characters awaken to the reality that they are trapped on a
doomed spaceship. But one character, Seth Morley, is privileged with a visit from the
presumably fictional Intercessor and granted an escape from the doomed experience loop
of the other characters. Even in this grim novel, we see Dick's characteristic thrust to
escape causal and temporal logic (here, that of his story itself) in order to hold out the hope
of salvational transcendence. As an example of how Dick carried his ideas about time
travel, alternate histories, and creative inspiration into his own life, see his theory in Sutin
of how, in his view, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said emerged from his imagination as a
precognitive vision of the forced resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 (245-51).
10 For psychological interpretations of Dick's fiction, see Damien Broderick,
Anthony Enns, and Laurence Rickels. I am not sure how much light this approach casts on
Dick's work, but Broderick suggests that temporal lobe disorder helps explain Dick's
sensibility, citing one neurologist's description of such disorders: "as marked by heightened
emotion, a tendency to see cosmic significance in the trivial and to be humorless, full of
self-importance . . . and obsessively occupied with philosophical and theological issues"
(13). There is some validity to this and other observations in his article about Dick's
possible psychopathology as evidenced in his writing, but as Broderick himself quickly
admits, whatever temporal lobe disorders he may have had, humorlessness is clearly not a
part of Dick's authorial personality.
11 In "History, Historicity, Story," George Slusser has also argued that tor Dick
"the shape of narrative emerges from within [Dick's] field of experience; it is not shaped
from without by historical time" (209). And while I do not wish to oversimplify Slusser's
nuanced argument, which places Dick in an Emersonian anti-history-as-monument
tradition, I suspect that his conclusions about Dick's rejection of historical time lines as
references support my conclusions about Dick's treatment of time. Rossi contributes
usefully to this discussion by arguing that one cannot interpret Dick as dismissing history
when reading Dick - as he thinks Slusser does.
352
12 Such is Suvin's approach to Dick's theistic ideas as "signal noise" in "Goodbye
and Hello," and with all due respect to his just eminence as a critic of Dick and SF in
general, I think he, nevertheless, disregards an essential dimension of Dick's writing.
13 Various figures in Dick's fiction are analogous to Frenecksy in seeking to
impose an absolutist but illusory ontological tyranny on their world. They include the
Tetragrammaton in Eye in the Sky , Ahriman in The Cosmic Puppets, Jones in The World Jones
Made , the Nazis in MHCy the android Buster Friendly in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
Palmer Eldritch in Three Stigmata , and Matt Jory in Ubik.
Works Cited
Bertrand, Frank C. "Philip K. Dick on Philosophy: A Brief Intervie

Sutin 44-47.
Broderick, Damien. "Philip K. Dick and Transrealism." The New York Review
of Science Fiction 11.9 (May 1999): 10-18.
Campbell, Laura E. "Dickian Time in The Man in the High Castle ."
Extrapolation 33 (Fall 1992), 190-201.
Canaan, Howard. "Metafiction and the Gnostic Quest in The Man in the High
Castled Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12.4 (2002): 382-405.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. "Gregg Rickman and Others on Philip K.
Dick." Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995): 430-38.
DiTommaso, Lorenzo. "Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of
Philip K. Dick." Science Fiction Studies 28.1 (2001): 29-65.
Dick, Philip K. The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. 5 vols. Los Angeles:
Underwood Miller, 1987.
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Ennis, Anthony. "Media, Drugs, and Schizophren
K. Dick." Science Fiction Studies 33:1 (March 200
Fomenti, Carlo. "La Gnosi in Philip K. Dick."
Umberto Rossi, eds. Transmigra^ioni: I Mo
Florence, Italy: Le Monnier, 2006.
Freedman, Carl. "Towards a Theory of Parano
Philip K. Dick." Science Fiction Studies 11 (Marc
Galbreath, Robert. "Salvation-Knowledge: Ironic
The Flight to Lucifer." Gary Wolfe, ed. Scie
Academy of Chicago P, 1982. 115-32.
Golumbia, David. "Resisting 'The World': Philip
and Metaphysical Realism." Science Fiction Stud
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cam
Jameson, Fredric. "Nostalgia for the Present." A
Lentriccia, eds. Close Reading. Durham, NC: D
Klapcsik, Sandor. "Politics, Multiplicity, and My
of Philip K. Dick." Donald M. Hassler, ed. New
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Mackey, Douglas A. "Science Fiction and Gnostic
7.2 (1984): 112-20.
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<http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/postmodern_culture/vO
18/1 8.1 .rickels.html>.
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or Less Prestigious Novels by Philip K. Di
354
(Winter 2002): 398-419.
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1998): 187-213.
Sutin, Lawrence, ed. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and
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355

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Time and Gnosis in the Writings of Philip K.

In "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1965), the protagonis

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Time travel in the fiction of Philip K. Dick

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concept of a higher reality "that shall always be," a concept that

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Time in the works of Philip K. Dick

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According to Dick the schizophrenic inhabits a synchronous perceptual

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Mercy College, New York

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or Less Prestigious Novels by Philip K. Di

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