Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University

of Debrecen CAHS

Time and Gnosis in the Writings of Philip K. Dick

Author(s): Howard Canaan
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 14, No. 2 (Fall,
2008), pp. 335-355
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of
Debrecen CAHS
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Time and Gnosis in the Writings of Philip K. Dick

Howard Canaan
W&fl$

"It's the most grandiose fantasyI ever ran

across. . . . And to thinkwe put this man on
our payroll."
-
Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember It for
You Wholesale"

In "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1965), the protagonist's

boss, a characteristicDick authorityfigure,snorts at what he calls "the most
grandiose fantasyI ever ran across," thus establishinga conflictbetween an
-
oppressed visionaryand a world seeking to stiflethe vision a conflictthat
runs through much of Dick's writing.This particular story (the source for
the movie Total Recall) ends with the protagonist's fantasy of an alien
invasion of earth- a fantasy in which he alone can save humanity-
promising to come true.The dreamer and his "grandiose fantasy"are about
to engulfthe realitythat the Interpol police in the storyseek to control. This
triumphof subjective vision over objective realityis arguably the impelling
force behind Dick's science-fictionand other writings.
The authority figure's comment that Dick wryly inserts in the
- "And to thinkwe put this man on our payroll"- perfecdy captures
story
Dick's sense of himselfas a science-fictionwriterand subversive visionary.
Dick expresses this vision forcefullyin his 1974 R oilingStoneinterview:

How does one fashiona book of resistance,a book of truthin an empire

of falsehood,or a book of rectitudein an empireof vicious lies? How
does one do thisrightin frontof the enemy?. . . how does one do thatin
a truly future technological state? Is it possible for freedom and
independenceto risein new waysundernew conditions?That is, willnew
tyranniesabolish these protests?Or will therebe new responses by the
spiritthatwe can'tanticipate?(Collected
Stories
5: preface).

As is well known, the date of this interview,1974, and Dick's "pink light"
theophany are central and significantto the core beliefs that Dick carried
with him for the rest of his life,which, as various people have argued,1can
be traced from the beginning of his science-fictionstories and novels. If, as

Hungarian
JournalofEnglishandAmerican Studies14.2. 2008. Copyright© 2009 by
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HJEAS. All rightsto reproduction

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Douglas Mackay believes, "[a]ll science fiction is a metaphor for
transcendence" (112), no science-fictionwritermore fullymerges satirewith
the portrayalof 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 - 1VALIS
(1981), The Divine Invasion(1981),
and The Transmigration ofTimothy Archer(1982).
The "empire of falsehood," a term that carries considerable weight
for Dick, referspolitically to the falsehoods that he sees at the base of the
regimes,which he places in control of the charactersin 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 storyor novel consists of one or more characters' effortsto 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 entryin the TractatesCrypticaScriptura(writtenby Dick and
based on various Presocratic, Gnostic, and Platonist sources and appended
to 1VALLS) reads: "The Empire never ended." For Dick, the Empire is
more than a politicallyoppressive 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 realityor dimension of
time outside of our customaryexperience. The war between the Empire and
VALIS repeats itself in his fiction and in his view of human historyas an
ongoing and timeless battle between the forces of Light and the forces of
Darkness that manifests itself in history but ultimatelytranscends it. The
Empire (originallyfor Dick the Roman Empire but manifestedin other time
periods, such as in the Nazi regime,the Stalinistregime 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-

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 -
providentiallyhe might have argued expressed in his fictionswell before
1974.2
Dick's treatmentof 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
patternof consistencyin the treatmentof time and temporalitybetween his
science-fictionfantasiesand his philosophical writings.

Time travel in the fiction of Philip K. Dick

Dick's use of the time travel theme in his fictionmay be classified
into categories:
1) Stories that featuresome sort of time machine and physical time
travel.
2) Stories thatinvolve reversalsin the flow of time.
-
3) Stories that involve precognition the abilityof characters to see
into the future.
4) Stories that involve displacement into alternate realities or
alternatehistories.
Admittedly,this categorization does not work quite as neatly as my
scheme suggests, and features of one category may spill over into another
(especiallyin the case of categories three and four). Alternateworlds, mental
instability, cognitive claustrophobia, and ontological uncertainty are
pervading Dick themes anyway. But this classificatoryscheme will help to
show a development or progression in Dick's use of time travel in his
fictionfrom the fairlyconventional to something more closely aligned with
the concerns thatabsorbed his attentiontowards 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
interestshere are satiricalwithout being cosmic. In "Orpheus," Jesse Slade,
a typicallyDickian disgruntledemployee in a futurebureaucracy goes to a
time travel agency to get out of the routine rut he is in and sets out to
inspire a science-fictionwriternamed Jack Dowland (the pseudonym Dick
used when this storywas firstpublished) 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 delightfullywitty and self-reflectivestory slyly

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expresses Dick's own frustrationsabout the low status of his craftas Jack
Dowland explains that he does not want to write SF "[b]ecause there's
going to be a hydrogen war. The future'sblack. Who wants to write about
it? Keerist . . . And anyhow, who reads that stuff?Adolescents with skin
trouble. Misfits. And it's junk" ( Collected4: 207). The device of having a
character in a Dick storylearn that he is a fictionalcharacter is a motif that
returnswith 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 playfulpiece it has no ambitious higherpurpose.
"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-tallpeople who gaze at him in awe and fear as he
appears to them. He furtherdiscovers that he has not, as he originally
thought, been transported in space to some extra-terrestrial world; he has
been transportedin 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" satiricallyand comically
displays typicalDick 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 uninspiringjob
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
increasinglyearnest explorations of theological themes in his later work. But
as with "Orpheus with Clay Feet," this story, in its whimsical tone and
treatmentof time travel,has no furthermetaphysicalambitions.
The Hugo Award-winningnovel 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 sympatheticand highly
competent protagonist, a plausibly described future setting and society,
characters portrayed with some psychological complexity, a satisfyingly

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 -
happy ending, and for a writerprone at times to bury the story line in
-
meanderingdialogues extensive and fast-movingaction. 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
directlyoppose the life-savingones of the hero, a medical doctor who has
ironicallybeen brought forwardin time to restore the life of a triballeader
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 characterkillingthe 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
traditionaluse of time-travelmotifs fitsin well with his effectiveapplication
of a traditionalscience-fictionaction plot.
In contrast, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" (1974)
connects time traveland 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 effortto project him forward 100 years in time has led
him and those around him to suffer again and again the events that
culminate in theirdeaths and a funeralparade for him and his companions.
The effortto escape from a debilitatingreality,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
prototypicalDick story.Also characteristicof Dick, particularlyduring 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,killingits passengers. But even this suicidal effortto 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 ritualfuneralfor the death of the tempunauts.
Dick's own comments on this story shortlybefore its publication
suggest his sense of its importance him. He argues that "the essence of the
time-travelstoryis confrontationof 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 varietyof writing" ( Collected5: 392). He goes

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on to compare "the weary sadness" (5: 392) of the charactersin this storyto
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 storyspreads 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-travelstories, "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 familyis projected
from their comfortable suburban home eight years into the futureinto 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
2: 214) - is a characteristicallyflimsyDick device. But it reveals the
( Collected
real theme and "fault" in the story,the militaristicpolice state, and this dark
vision emerges at the end as the familyreturnsto 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 killingmachines. 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 humanityby 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 killingthe
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 speculationThe mysticalvisions of

othertimeflows.Visions
medievalsaints.Perhapstheywereof otherfutures,
of hellwouldbe worsetimeflows.Ours muststandsome place in themiddle.
And thevisionof theeternalunchangingworld.Perhapsthat'san awareness
We'llhaveto thinkmoreaboutthattoo. (2: 81)
of non-time.

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 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-ClockWorld (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 storyversion 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 entityis 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" facilitythat eradicates
publications, patents, and inventions to prepare for their going out of
existence; and people remember the futurebut have no awareness of the
-
past charactersare uncertainwhether 2:30 p.m. is earlieror 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-reversingHobart 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 threateningto 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
returnedto 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 startto grow again. . . but how soon? In a finallogical absurdityhe
anticipates,"Probably withinthe previous half hour" (5: 133).
Counter-ClockWorld develops this time-reversal motif to include
"specific referenceto a platonic realm" (Taylor 22). The protagonist,Jason
Hermes, owns a "vitarium" (the time-reversalequivalent of a moratorium),
which manages the passage of people from death to life. The plot explores
the role of resurrection - the time reversal transitionfrom 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

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Peake's credo, described near the end of the novel, expresses Dick's own
theosophical beliefs.3
Dick's treatmentof temporal anomalies also leads into metaphysical
and theological speculation in his time-travel stories and novels whose
characters have precognitivepowers. These include the previouslydiscussed
"Jon's World," "The Minority Report" (1956), and his novels The World
JonesMade (1956), Time Out ofJoint(1959), Now Wait For Last Year (1966),
and Ubik (1969). Dick's recurrentreliance 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 realitythat exists "out
there," distinct from our perception of it. As Dick explained in a 1980
interviewwith Frank C. Bertrand,"I came to believe that in a certain sense,
the empirical world was not trulyreal" (Bertrand 46) .4 Dick's time-travel
stories are at times punctured with metaphysical speculations, including
referencesto 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 indifferenceto
technological realism in describing his time-traveldevices. For Dick, the
definingfeatureof a science-fictionstoryis what he calls "an idea" (Dick's
version of Suvin's novum).As Dick once said when distinguishingscience
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 realityfrom which the
"idea" develops.
Dick sometimes creates this cognitive estrangement in his precog
time-travelstories informed by the idea of a perspective that transcends the
frameworkof linear time as is evident in "The MinorityReport," 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
( Collected4: 85), the notion that a potentiallyunlimited number of alternate
futuresexists at differentlevels of probability(perhaps Dick's analogy to the
Heisenberg UncertaintyPrinciple). The finaland actual one becomes reality
as the result of a climactic action by the protagonistAnderton that unravels
the tangle of questions about freewill and predestinationlinked to the time

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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 alternatehistorynovel in which one character,Mr. Tagomi,
findshimselffor a brieftime 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 forkingpaths.5 In Uhik, the precog Pat Conley has the power to
shiftpeople into alternatepasts or futures.In Martian Time-Slip(1964), the
precog Manfred Steiner changes events at the end of the story to save
himselffrompermanentimprisonmentin a mental asylum.
The presentationof the precogs in "The MinorityReport," points to
yet another theme in Dick's time-travel fiction: his association of
precognition (psychic time travel) with visionaryexperience, 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 entrapmentin
one's own reality.The precogs and others with ESP powers in Ubik are
socially marginalized figures. Manfred in Martian Time-Slipis an autistic
schizophrenic. In Now Waitfor Last Year; the addictive drug JJ-180,which
induces time shiftsin Kathy Sweetscent, also induces a terrifyingsense of
isolation and assault by the physical world. Similarly,the addictive Chew-Z
drug that Palmer Eldritch exports in The ThreeStigmataof PalmerEldritch
(1965) isolates characters in separate realities- all controlled or intervened
in by Eldritch- and shiftsthem into differenttimes and spaces, worlds of
existentialfear 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 trinityof 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 visionaryrole as a science-fictionwriter.As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay,
Jr. points out, "[f]or Dick, the connections among religious gnosis, ethical
double-binds, and mental disturbances were drawn ever tighteras his career
progressed" (431). A closer look at Dick's use of time travelin the last third

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of Now Waitfor 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
unsympatheticallyportrayedwife, Kathy. But it is Dick's use of time travel
and its linkage with the use of the drug JJ-180 in the novel that deserves
attentionhere.
As a time-traveldevice, JJ-180 alters people's consciousness while
projecting,or seeming to project, them into differenttimes or realities.The
way that time travel or reality displacement operates in the novel
corresponds to the subjectivityof specific characters. JJ-180 takes Kathy
Sweetscent into the past, reflectingher possessive obsession with the past
and her regressivepersonality.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,reflectinghis visionary idealism and his inclination to look beyond
selfishconcerns in the interestof highergoals. Left uncertainis whether the
time travel that the ingesterof JJ-180 experiences is real or hallucinatory.It
has featuresof both realityand hallucination,it does give the user access to
actual events in other time or realityframes- 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-180
user returnsto, and actions taken in the time-traveledpast apparentlyhave
no impact on characters encountered then still living in the returned-to
present. This ambiguity creates the characteristicallyDickian doubt, the
questioning of the reality of the environment that characters find
themselves in.
At another level, the time-travelexperiences of Eric Sweetscent, the
closest surrogatefor Dick the author and the debilitatingeffectof the time-
travel inducing drug JJ-180 on him, arguably parallel the imaginative
dynamics of the novel itself.In a sense, the novel as it ends suffersfrom the
same cognitive disorientationand blurred realitythat 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 particularlytrue for the protagonist, whose forays
into the future to find an antidote for the fatallyaddictive JJ-180 and to
forge an alliance between Terra and the Reegs leave him, and the novel,

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uncertain and disoriented at the end. The time-traveland the drug-induced
subjective states inserted in the plot of Now Wait for Last Year are
intertwinedwith the vagaries of Dick's own imaginativevision.6
Central to this vision is Dick's existential doubt expressed, for
instance, in his statementthat "[i]t now is universallyaccepted that reality,
'in itself as Kant put it, is reallyunknown to any sentientorganism" (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 treatmentof time in several novels Timeout of
, Ubik, and VALIS - and their use of the Gnostic conspiratorial view
Joint
of perceived realityas the mask imposed (for generallysinisterpurposes) to
conceal a deeper, latent reality.As criticshave argued, Dick's incorporation
of Gnostic beliefs in his fiction,though most evident in combination with
the theisticbeliefs of his later novels, as suggested earlier,goes back to his
earlier novels as well. These beliefs include the idea of mundane time,
history,and human experience as an illusoryor fallen distortionof a deeper
reality,an idea that Dick hints at or includes in novels as disparate as The
CosmicPuppets(1957), A Ma%e ofDeath (1970), and The DivineInvasion .
The time when TimeoutofJointopens, apparendy, the late 1950s (the
novel was published in 1959), turns out to be unreal. Protagonist Ragle
Gumm and other characters come to discover that they really live in the
year 1997. Their illusoryexistence is a politicallycontrived hallucination to
keep them ignorant of their true state, particularlyGumm, who comes to
recognize that the newspaper puzzle games he solves are actuallywar games
used by an oppressive government to wage war with inhabitants on the
moon. The novel presents a drama of gnosis, of cognitive awakening, as at
the climax of the narrative the objects of the 1950s' pseudoreality
surroundingthe characters fade and are replaced by those from 1997. This
awakening from the illusion of living in a fabricated time is what Fredric
Jameson calls "the perception of the present as history" (231) - for him a
false bourgeois ideological construction of the Eisenhower era, a mental act

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triggered by accumulated clues of the not-quite real late 1950s'
environment.But the novel is also a literallyfalse history,not just in its not
quite accurate culturalcues, but in its imposition of a false 1950s settingon
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 historicalrealityin 1XAUS' 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"(cryonichibernation).
For them, the transcendent,a realm of the livingis representedby the story-
tide product, Ubik, that has the power at least temporarilyto counteract the
inevitable effectsof 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 Universewas, I am. I made the suns. I made the
worlds.I createdthelives and theplaces theyinhabit;I move themhere,I
put them there.They go as I say,theydo as I tell them.I am the word
whose name is neverspoken,the name whichno one knows.I am called
Ubik,but thatis not myname. I am. I shallalwaysbe." (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-livingemployer Glen Runciter filterthrough to
them in theirillusoryhalf-lifestate,the plot dramatizes theireffortsto reach
him in the face of a destructiveforce that seeks to kill them. In this passage,
the sprayproduct Ubik imitatesthe functionof a divinity,and the existential
awakening of characters in the half-lifeworld to their own illusory state
assumes the featuresof the Gnostic quest for a higher reality.The Gnostic
parallel extends further:the death-dealing force opposed to Runciteris Matt
Jory,an adolescent in a half-lifecasket whose vampiric psychic powers (in
the hallucinatoryhalf-lifeworld 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,sinisterlitde divinityin 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

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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 Dick
develops towards the end of the novel. In the context of the half-lifestate,
this higher realityis Glen Runciter's world of the living. His wife Ella,
herselfin the half-life,is a force of life and light, fightingto preserve the
novel's hero, Joe Chip, against the death force of Matt Jory.The characters
experience two varieties of time devolution as a result of Matt Jory's
-
"eating" of theirpsychic lives a temporal driftinto the year 1940, a spatial
drifttowards Des Moines, Kansas, the birthplace of the salvation figure
Glen Runciter, and the devolution of objects, "the procession of forms"
(122), into earlierformsthatJoe Chip speaks of:

Perhaps this weirdlyverifieda discarded ancient philosophy,that of

Plato's idea objects, the universalswhich,in each class, were real. The
form TV set had been a templateimposed as a successor to other
templates,likethe processionof framesin a movie sequence. Priorforms,
he reflected,mustcarryon an invisible,residuallifein everyobject. The
past is latent,submerged,but stillthere.. . . Historybegan a long timeago.
(122)

This passage posits a latent realitybeneath the apparent movement of time

analogous to the nuncstans, the eternal present of Christian or Neoplatonic
speculation about eternity.Runciter's use of the life-restorativeUbik to fight
the wasting away of his employees and the devolution of objects to earlier
formsis a batde between order and entropy,between Form and what Dick
9
elsewhere calls "the Form-Destroyer."
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 higherrealm, the "Vast, Active, Living Intelligence
System" buried in the context of ordinaryhuman experience. In VAUS we
step from science fictioninto semi-autobiography,as revealed in the shiftof
the narrativevoice between the thirdperson Horselover Fat and the "I" of
Philip Dick. Nevertheless, the Gnostic speculation and the skepticismabout
the reality of linear time and the phenomenal world in VAUS are
consistent with ideas present in Dick's previous fiction. These ideas are
interspersedin the narrativeas Fat's journal or exegesis and are compiled in
the appendix in his TractatesCrypticaScriptura.To cite a few among many,

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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 differentso it
would appear time has passed" ( VALJ.S 33) - and Dick's recurrent
dramatization of a Manichean life-and-deathconflictbetween a sympathetic
protagonist, a force of Light, and an affectlessauthoritarianpower, Dick's
"dark iron Empire prison." Entry 48 of the Tractatesdescribes this
opposition clearly:

Two realms there are, upper and lower. The upper, derived from the
hyperuniverse... is sentientand volitional.The lower realm ... is
mechanical,driven by blind, efficientcause, deterministicand without
intelligence,since it emanates from a dead source. . . . Until astral
determinism is broken,we are not even aware of it [theupper realm],so
occluded are we. "The Empireneverended." (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-understandingas a science-fiction
writer? Obviously, as a science-fiction writer, Dick exercised a kind of
imaginative time travel and identifiedhis work as a description of "a truly
futuretechnological state," and his goal as writinga "book of truthin an
empire of falsehood, or a book of rectitudein 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 runningcommentaryon his own self-imageas a
visionarywriter.Regardless of how we may judge the matter,Dick at points
in his life questioned his own sanity.10Though 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-presentationin 1SAUS, "Phil is the novelist all too
aware of the power of creative imagination, hallucination, and madness"
(119). Dick explains in "Schizophrenia and The Book ofChanges,"

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 What distinguishes schizophrenicexistencefromthatwhichthe restof us
like to imaginewe enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenicis
havingit all now, whetherhe wants it or not, the whole can of filmhas
descendedon him,whereaswe watchit progressframeby frame. (176)

As the schizophrenic experiences time in a differentbut not necessarilyless

valid way than the rest of us, so, too, does the paranoid personality,Dick
claims, arguingthat

... we are facedwiththe clear and evidentpossibilitythatat least in the

case of paranoids- or anywaysome paranoids- the delusions are not
delusionsat all but are,on the contrary,accurateperceptionsof an area of
realitythat the rest of us cannot (thank the Lord) reach. ("Drugs,
Hallucinations, and theQuest forReality"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,faultsand
inconsistenciesin the fabricand flow of linear time,11by alternatetimes and
worlds, and by alternate and inconsistent significationsthat give rise to
concealed evidence of cosmic or political conspiracies.
Dick took these views beyond the imagined worlds of his fiction.
His statementin VALIS that "I am by profession a science-fictionwriter.I
deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy" (3) confirms the continuitybetween
his life, his beliefs, and his fiction.The subversion of ordinarytime in his
fictionis an extrapolation of similarideas 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 infinitenumber of successive layers" (217).
He wrote from dreams and visions, a source he called the Noosphere, a
synonymfor the livingsystemof informationthat he identifiedas IVA1 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 interfereswith the core political signal of his themes. They are,
rather, an essential ingredient.12In "To Flee from Dionysus," Samuel

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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 utterlyessential to an understanding of it" (94). As evidence for
this judgment,I will conclude with the description in Now WaitforLast Year
of the sinisteralien MinisterFrenecksy'sgaze and Frenecksy'sresemblance to
otherDick characterswith sinistermetaphysicalimplications:13

restlessstareof ordinarysuspicion;thiswas a
This was not the glittering,
motionlessgaze, a gathering of faculties
of the totality withinto comprisea
singlepsychomotor concentration.
Frenecksy did not decide to do this.In fact
he was helpless,compelledto confronthis compatriots and adversaries alike
in thisfashion,withthisunending,ensnaringfixity. It was an attentiveness
whichmade empathicunderstanding impossible;theeyesdid not reflectany
innerreality.
Theygave backto theviewer exactlywhathe himself was. (122)

Frenecksy'seyes are the windows to his soullessness. He is a political

tyrant, he is farmore than that.His gaze is both helpless and mechanistic.
but
His fixityis an "ensnaring" trap that makes "empathic understanding
impossible." His eyes are void of self-awarenessand "inner reality."Stripped
even of the empathetic resonance of a firstname, Frenecksy embodies the
deeper perceptualtyranniesand the mechanisticworldviewthatDick so firmly
resisted all his life as "the Empire" and its "occluded" (a favoriteword in
Dick's laterwritings)blindness to ultimatereality.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 succinctlystates,
"'Objectivity' is part of the prison from which liberation is sought" (136).
Dick's twistson time and time travelin his fictionand essays are exercises in
his subjective imagination and its vision- what the no-nonsense Interpol
officerdismisses in "We Can Remember It forYou Wholesale" as "grandiose
fantasies."Throughout his career,Dick took an adversarialstance againstsuch
figures,which he fictionalizedand satirizedas the wardens of surfacereality,of
the "apparentlyreal,"who didn'twant "a man like him . . . on our payroll."By
combining satire and metaphysicalvision, Dick has, in the words of Darko
Suvin,sent us "[a]n urgentmessage forsalvation,withhumour" (395).

Mercy College, New York

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 Notes
1 See Canaan,Di Tommasso,Formenti, and Mackeyforexamplesof Gnostic
motifsinearlierDick novels.
2MichaelHardtand Antonio uses theterm"empire"to describe
Negri'sEmpire
what theyargueis the globallyencompassing politicaland economichegemonythat
capitalismis transforming into.But whileDick probablysharedmanyof theirpolitical
perspectives,hisinterestin themetaphysical aspectsof theterm"empire"takeshimin a
verydifferentdirection fromHardtandNegri'sbook.
3 He [theAnarchPeake]
saysthere'sno death;it'san illusion. Timeis an illusion.
Every instant thatcomes into being never passesaway. ... It doesn'tevenreally
comeintobeing;itwas alwaysthere.The universe consistsof concentric ringsof
thegreater
reality; thering,themoreit partakesof absolutereality. . . . Evil is
simply a lesserreality. . . . Evil is an illusion, likedecay.. . . Eidos is form.Like
Plato's category - the absolute reality.There's an anti-eidostoo, a form
destroying factor.
. . . Buttheanti-eidos is an eidolon,a delusion:onceimpressed,
theformis eternal.(Counter-Clock World 197-98)

This passageresemblesthe one in Ubikcitedabove. Noteworthy are othersimilarities

betweenCounter-Clock Worldand Ubik: agenciesoverseeingthe transition to or from
before-birth or after-death experiences, chapteropeningscitingtheological texts(either
directly or disguisedas advertisements),andManichean conflictsbetweenopposinggroups
(JoeChip and the anti-inertials
versusthe murderous RoyHollis- a namesimilarto Ray
Roberts - andthetelepaths).
4Golumbia
arguesthatDick,froma philosophical pointof vew,is nota realist,
either empirically, or metaphysically.
linguistically, Thatis,Dick questionsthetruth-value of
theempirical world,thereferentiality of languageto theempirical world,andtheexistence
of an absolutereality (suchas Plato'sFormsor Ideas) thatcan be ascertained beyond
phenomenal existence (86-88).Golumbiaconvincingly showshow the figureof Palmer
Eldritch - gobbler-up of theontological worldsof othersin Three a novelthat
Stigmata,
Dick latercommented on in tonesof fearand discomfort - represents the oppressive
tyranny ofthephilosophical realist's
positionthatDick opposed.
5 In "DickianTime in TheMan in the
HighCastle," CampbellarguesthatDick
providestimecuesin theJuliaFrinkplotthatmakeheractionsinconsistent withthetime
line of the mainplot involving Mr. Tagomi.As a result,she argues,"both linearand
synchronistic timesexistand areacceptedwithinthenarrative" (192). She concludesthat
"PhilipDick notonlywrotean alternate historywith TheMan in theHighCastle, butin ithe
alsodescribes an alternateviewoftime"(198).
6For a morefavorable
(butverybrief)viewof theoutcomeofNowWaitforiMst
Year; see EugeneWarren'scommentthat"Eric Sweetscent acceptsand preparesto deal
withthepainofhismarriage" (186-87).Thisis true,butSweetscent's actionmarksa return
to a destructive relationshipand occurs as an isolated
event in a largerpessimisticcontext.
A comparison of Now WaitforI MstYearand Dr. Futurity - two novelsthatinvolvetime
travelandhavedoctorswhosehealingskillsareemphasized - inclinesme to myviewthat
NowWaitis a darkerand less resolvednovelthanWarrenseemsto suggest. JimParsons'
efforts bringaboutthesuccessful plotendingin Dr.Futurityina clearheaded way,hisforays

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in timerequireno chemicalassistanceand leaveno after-effects, and his benevolence is
not, as Eric Sweetscent's is,impededbyanyself-doubt, or
guilt, despair.
7Falsecluesin TimeoutofJoint includetheinformation thatMarilyn Monroeis an
unknown actress, thatUncle Tom'sCabinis an obscurenovelbytheunknown authorHarriet
BeecherStowe,andthatRichardNixonis director of theF.B.I. Butmorerelatedto Dick's
theosophical interests are theslipsof paperwithnameson themthatat selectedpoints
in theworldof TimeoutofJoint. UmbertoRossi in "The Problemof the
" objects
replace
evokethedabarof the
Jjogosargues that the words on slips paper TimeoutofJoint
of in
Hebrewandthelogos oftheGreekBible,andthatwordisreality here,theunderlying reality
obscuredin theseeming-1950s setting ofthenovel(206-07).
81 disagree withRossi'sstatement that"Dickis nota Gnosticor Gnostic-oriented
writer" (414).Whileone cannotnecessarily callDick a strict Gnostic,itseemshardto argue
thathe is notin someway"Gnostic-oriented" in theplotsandthemesofhiswriting.
9The FormDestroyer is mentioned (andappears)inA Ma%eofDeathmorethanin
any other Dick novel. Its description (5) recallsthecosmology of AnarchPeakein Counter-
ClockWorld. Alsoofinterest is thereality shiftor additionof a dimension of transcendence
at theveryend of A Ma^e ofDeath.Afterit is revealedthattheentireexperience on the
Planet DelmarkO describedin the story,includingthe theologicaldivinities(the
Manufacturer, theIntercessor, and theFormDestroyer), has been a computer-generated
collectivehallucination, the characters awakento the reality thattheyare trappedon a
doomedspaceship.But one character, SethMorley,is privileged witha visitfromthe
presumably fictional Intercessor and an
granted escape from the doomed experience loop
of the othercharacters. Even in thisgrimnovel,we see Dick's characteristic thrustto
escapecausalandtemporal logic(here,thatofhisstoryitself) in orderto holdoutthehope
of salvational transcendence. As an exampleof how Dick carriedhis ideas abouttime
travel, alternate histories, and creative inspiration intohisownlife,see histheory in Sutin
of how,in his view,FlowMy Tears,thePoliceman Said emergedfromhis imagination as a
precognitive vision of the forced resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 (245-51).
10For interpretations of Dick's fiction,see Damien Broderick,
psychological
Anthony Enns,andLaurenceRickels.I am notsurehowmuchlightthisapproachcastson
Dick's work,but Brodericksuggeststhattemporallobe disorderhelps explainDick's
sensibility, citingone neurologist's description of suchdisorders: "as marked byheightened
a
emotion, tendency to see cosmic significance in the trivialand to be humorless, fullof
self-importance . . . and obsessively occupied with philosophical and theological issues"
(13). Thereis some validity to thisand otherobservations in his articleabout Dick's
possiblepsychopathology as evidencedin his writing, but as Broderickhimselfquickly
admits, whatever temporal lobe disorders he mayhavehad,humorlessness is clearlynota
part of Dick's authorial personality.
11In "History, Historicity, Story,"GeorgeSlusserhas also arguedthattorDick
"theshapeof narrative emergesfromwithin[Dick's]fieldof experience; it is not shaped
fromwithout byhistorical time"(209).AndwhileI do notwishto oversimplify Slusser's
nuanced argument, which places Dick in an Emersonian anti-history-as-monument
tradition, I suspectthathis conclusionsaboutDick's rejection of historical timelinesas
references supportmy conclusions about Dick's treatment of time. Rossi contributes
usefully to this discussion by arguing that one cannot interpret Dick as dismissing history
whenreading Dick- as he thinks Slusserdoes.

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 12Suchis Suvin's ideasas "signalnoise"in "Goodbye
approachto Dick'stheistic
and Hello,"and withall due respectto his justeminenceas a criticof Dick and SF in
general,I think
he,nevertheless, an essential
disregards dimension ofDick'swriting.
13Variousfigures in Dick's fictionare analogousto Frenecksy in seekingto
imposean absolutist but illusoryontologicaltyranny on theirworld.Theyincludethe
Tetragrammaton in EyeintheSky, Ahriman in TheCosmic Jonesin TheWorld
Puppets, Jones
Made, theNazisinMHCytheandroidBusterFriendly in Do AndroidsDreamofElectric
Sheep?,
PalmerEldritch in Three , andMattJory
Stigmata in Ubik.

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