Nomad Codes

the true world with illusory time and space. Part of the authorial fragmentation that pervades Dick’s work arises because, though he clearly identified with his flailing characters and their metaphysical morality plays, he remained the trickster demiurge of his own narratives.
    In Valis , Dick made the provocative statement that “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” While the fragments of schizo vision scattered through Dick’s work may not have been holy, he certainly got the trash part right. By almost every conventional standard of literary quality, Philip K. Dick was a hack. Most of his work is clunky, uneven, and occasionally awful. Having first published sci-fi in 1951, he never lost touch with the gaudy mechanics of earlier pulpsters like A.E. van Vogt. Though one develops an affection for his characters, their dialogue is sometimes forced and obvious. Both the science and the plots strain credulity. The hasty feel of many of his books is no accident. Driven by poverty, obsession, and frequently by amphetamines, he wrote like the madman he probably was. In 1965, he published four novels; two a year, plus numerous short stories, was his standard rate.
    Dick’s schizophrenic quality turns him into many authors: a poor man’s Pynchon, an oracular postmodern, a rich product of the changing counterculture, a lunatic. As Thomas Disch said, he was a “science fiction writer’s science fiction writer,” respected in the sci-fi community even though his U.S. sales were mostly mediocre (he was much more popular in Britain and France). He’s a particular favorite among scuzzy underground rock bands like Sonic Youth and the Reverb Motherfuckers, as well as scuzzy underground rock critics like Byron Coley. Diehards chronicle and compare his every word and deed, blurring the distinction between literary love and cult. And some academics of the leftist post-structuralist bent, most notably Fredric Jameson, love his political metafictions, his gaudy feel for the process of reification, his hack Kafka humor. On the other hand, Harold Bloom—an eternal advocate of imagination over reality—finds Dick vastly overrated; but that may be because, as anyone who’s tried to make their way through Bloom’s Flight to Lucifer knows, Dick can write Gnostic science fiction and Bloom can’t.
    Part of the appeal of Dick’s oeuvre is that, despite its futuristic setting and outlandish events, it functions as autobiography. Most of the recent reissues of his novels feature his bearded visage on the cover, in part because his fans recognize that the real subject of his texts was his own frail, intense, and fragmented self. Because he didn’t distance himself from his novels, they read as both Freudian confessions and Jungian dream journals. Dick himself had numerous wives and young girlfriends, and the relationships he described are invariably screwed up, sad affairs of misunderstandings, adulteries, and recriminations. But Dick’s psychological obsessions go beyond the erotic and personal into the archetypal. Patterns and motifs reappear throughout his novels with the archaic and gaudy power of symbols: broken pots, the Black Iron Prison, policemen, toys, jewelry, books that are read randomly (based on the I Ching ), miniature figures, simulacra. These two confessional aspects of Dick are well represented in The Dark Haired Girl , a collection of letters and dreams about the teenage girls he was obsessed with. One letter will sound depressingly naïve and pathetically sentimental; the next will describe some fascinating overloaded dream, followed by an equally strange interpretation of the symbolism involved.
    Dick’s most overblown reading of an event occurred in 1974, when the sight of a delivery woman’s Christian fish necklace triggered his psychic contact with the “divine intelligence” he sometimes called VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Among other things, he communicated with a persecuted Christian living in ancient Rome, who warned him through a Beatles song that his son Christopher would die unless he was taken to a hospital. Dick also became convinced that the universe was a hologram and that VALIS was a camouflaged parasite that entered human beings through subliminal messages. The information lurked everywhere, especially in trashy artifacts of pop culture, so that in the end Dick must have believed himself to be less a writer than a pulp