A Scanner Darkly

Mike: LeGuin?

Phil: Well, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, you said it, not me, Gesagts in Luther's translation, Beis du der juder Konig. And then Jesus answers, Sie sagts, you

Mike: LeGuin?

Phil: Well, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, you said it, not me, Gesagts in Luther's translation, Beis du der juder Konig. And then Jesus answers, Sie sagts, you said it, not me. If that's what you say Pontius that's up to you. You're the emperata.

Mike: I've got to go wash my hands, excuse me.

Phil: That was, you know, he didn't get off the hook by answering that way. Pilate got off the hook by - I can not answer about Ursula's stuff. I really don't understand it. Her whole body of writing seems to me to be like a sermonette. The television station use to sign off with a sermonette, a kind of political sermonette, all hopped up in gussy dove with a kind of literary style. But it's all from the Poli Sci department of the University of California in Berkeley as far as I can make out when you strip the style away.

Mike: Okay. I shan't argue with you. What about your own working habits? How do you work? Or do you, or do you have a pattern indeed?

Phil: Well, I use to just write all the time. I use to just get up at noon and sit down at the typewriter and write until 2 AM. Just write from noon in the morning until 2 AM. You've got to do that when you start out. Or you're going to die on the vine. I mean you've got to just - you're going to live on two thousand dollars a year. You're going to eat rocks and dirt and weeds from the back yard for the first ten years. And then after the first ten years, you get to eat instant breakfast. You work up till you're rich enough to get a phone put in. And you get to buy an old automobile. And you get to drive around in an old automobile, which you crank-start every morning. And then after 25 years, you manage to get a used Dodge. It costs you $795.00, but, the radio doesn't work in it. And there's people that're standing behind grocery counters are making more money. One time I was in Trader-Jones, a grocery store, and I was talking with the clerk and he made more money than I did. And I was really sore. I really took it bad. Because they had just hired him. He didn't even have seniority as a grocery clerk. At least he could have been a senior clerk. I said, how much do you make? And he says, such and such. And I said, jeepers, that's a lot of money.

Mike: So, you do like to write. You said, you use to work non-stop?

Phil: Yes.

Mike: Have you changed that pattern?

Phil: Yes. Now I, here's what happened to me. This novel that I spoke about earlier, Deus Irae, that Roger Zelazny and I wrote, it took us 12 years to write it. That's really true. We figured it out. I signed a contract with Doubleday in 1964. This is 1976, right? Well, that's how long it took the two of us. I couldn't even write it alone. I mean, I got like a third of it done and I discovered I didn't know anything about the subject matter, which is Christianity. I could sing a few hymns and I could cross myself and that was about all. And I had embarked on a theological novel without knowing anything about theology. So I ran across Zelazny in 1968. I had been working four years on the novel. And I said, Zelazny, do you know anything about theology? He says, you better believe it Jack. I said, how'd you like to collaborate with me? I've got one third of this thing done. It's all about Christianity. So he took it. And then like 8 years later - and I didn't hear from Roger. I got a postcard one time from the East Coast. I said, Roger's over his head. He's just like me, he's doing research. Now I've learned. So at the end of 12 years we were able to complete it finally. We each got $400.00 a piece, or something like that. In other words, it was like the greatest disaster of our joint careers, was that novel. We'll never be able to earn back what we put into it in the way of research and work. Now I spend my time doing research before I do the book. I'm not going to get burned like that again. I'm working on another theological novel called To Scare The Dead, but I've done 2 years of research. When I sit down to the typewriter I'm going to know what I'm talking about. Man In The High Castle, I did 7 years of research for Man In The High Castle. Seven years of research. I did other stuff too during that 7 years. But it took me 7 years to amass the material on the Nazis and the Japanese, especially on the Nazis, before I could sit down and write. That's part of the reason why it's a better novel than most of my novels, that I knew what I was talking about. There wasn't anything I didn't know. I had prime source material at the Berkeley Cal Library from the Gestapo that they had seized after WW II. It was marked, for the eyes of the higher police only. The higher police is their term for - I was forced to read Gestapo diaries, the Gestapo men in Warsaw, Gestapo agents. I had to read that stuff. I had to sit there because you couldn't take it out of the library. You had to read it in the stacks. I had to read what those guys wrote in their private journals to write Man In The High Castle. And that's why I've never written a sequel to it. Because it's too horrible. It's too awful. I started several times to write a sequel to it and I would had to go back and read about Nazis again. And I'd just like to off every one of them, it's what I'd like to do. And so I could never do a sequel to it. Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach for the stamina to think along those lines, to get into the head; if you're going to start writing about Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich's face? Now, Condon, Richard Condon, is that his name, he wrote a thing called An Infinity Of Mirrors about Reichfuhrer Himmler. Condon has the guts to do that. I could not do that again. That's why the book, my book The Man In The High Castle is set in the Japanese part, you see, because then I could deal with people. But I have little glimpses of the Nazi part like when Mr. Tagomi hears this printout on personality traits of the Nazi contenders for Reichsfuhrer, Reichs Chancelor, I'm sorry. And he runs out and gets sick and falls down.

I wrote The Man In The High Castle with the I Ching.

Mike: You did?

Phil: Yeah, and I've been sorry ever since because when it came time to resolve the novel at the end, the I Ching didn't know what to do. It got me through most of the book. Everytime they cast a hexagram I actually cast four of them and got something and assigned it to them and they proceeded on the basis of the advice given. Like when Juliana Frink decides to tell Abendsen that he's about to be offed by an agent. I threw the coins and she got warning make known the truth to the court of the King great danger and so on. Someone comes up behind him and hits him with a club. That's what she got. And so she did go warn Abendsen and if she'd got another hexagram I would not have had her go speak to Abendsen. But then when it came time to close down the novel the I Ching had no more to say. And so there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime.

Mike: When you find somebody with the stomach to write one.

Phil: Yeah, or if the I Ching ever gets off its ass.

Mike: Do you go back from time to time and throw it to see if there is an ending to it or --

Phil: No, I don't use the I Ching anymore. I'll tell ya, the I Ching told me more lies than anybody else I've ever known. The I Ching has a personality and it's very devious and very treacherous. And it feeds ya just what you want to hear. And it's really spaced out and burned out more people than I would care to name. Like a friend is somebody who doesn't tell you what you want to hear. A friend tells you what's true. A toady is the old word for somebody who told you what you wanted to hear. The Kings all had their toadies around them who told them what they wanted to hear. The King said, am I the greatest King in the world? Yeah, you're the greatest King in the world, yeah. Well, this is what the I Ching does. It tells you what you want to hear and it's not a true friend. One time I really zapped it. I asked it if it was the devil. And it said yes. And then I asked it if it spoke for God, and it said no. It said I am a complete liar. I mean that was the interpretation. In other words I set it up. I set it up. I asked two questions simultaneously and it said I speak with forked tongue, is what it said. And then it said, oops, I didn't mean to say that. But it had already -

Mike: Then you get a paradox.

Phil: Oh, I watched a girl do this to it once.

Mike: That's the paradox. It's lying when it says it's lying.

Phil: It's just full of, it's a crock is what it is. Sladek, John Sladek said this in his debunking book. He covers everything from Scientology to the Mafia. He says none of them exist. And he says the I Ching - you know Sladek did a parody of my writing. It's as much better than anything I've ever done. Have you read Sladek's parody of my writing?

Phil: It's so much better than anything that I can do. And I walked around and I was really off the ground. Walking on cloud nine, after I read the parody. And I wrote Ed Ferman, who is the editor of F&SF. This appeared originally in F&SF. And I said, I have talent, Sladek has genius. And Ed Ferman wrote back and said, fine, I'm going to buy a lot of stuff from Sladek. And he did. He commissioned eight more parodies. And they're all marvelous; a parody of Asimov. Sladek said I was the hardest person to parody. I have his book in front of me. In England it's called The Steam-Driven Boy and other Strangers. Sladek says the I Ching is a hoax. And Sladek is right. His parody of me is called "Solar Shoe Salesman." And in it somebody consults the tiles and it gives him many small greatnesses deny. It does not further to discover several gifts only. The wise King avoids fried foods. And I says, ah, Sladek, you finished it off man. I can never consult the I Ching again. And all started laughing. I'm looking at this parody and I'm saying if I could write as well as Sladek. That's another thing that brought me back into writing science fiction when I started to talk about being a mainstream writer. We're using science fiction as a crash pad, rather than a legitimate dwelling. And I won't do that. If science fiction is going to go down the tubes, I'll go down the tubes with it, rather than abandon it. I think it's unfair, if you start thinking you're any good, you leave it. It's unfair to the field. And also it's so, like, Hubris. I'm a great writer, therefore, I am not a science fiction writer. Well, what about your first proposition. Maybe you're not such a great writer after all. Maybe you're wrong right there, before you've gotten to the second part of the proposition.

Mike: And Lupoff says, what is this. I've been working in the field for ten years. I'm a competent, good, established writer. He says, that's science fiction. That's not literature, his agent says.

Phil: How do you know? Who told you?

Mike: Lupoff.

Phil: Don't believe anything a writer tells you. I'm a writer, I would know.

In the novel, Fred’s mind and brain are regularly tested by police department psychologists, owing to the stress of both maintaining a dual identity, and taking drugs as part of his undercover life. Dick avoids the off-the-shelf cliché’s of ink-blots and electric shocks, as the author describes realistic test scenarios and recognisable neuropsychological tests. Worryingly for Fred, the results of divided visual field and embedded figures tests suggest that his cortical hemispheres are becoming functionally separate, as they gradually lose the ability to communicate and fail to integrate information.

Here, the author melds science-fiction with science-fact, with an inspired reading of Sperry’s work on split-brain patients. Dick was fascinated by Sperry’s discovery that patients with surgically disconnected cerebral hemispheres (a treatment for otherwise untreatable epilepsy)seemed to show a dual or partitioned consciousness. Where previously it was thought that the right side of the brain was largely ‘silent’ and relied on the dominant left, new research suggested that each hemisphere “appeared to be using its own percepts, mental images, associations and ideas” (Sperry, 1993). In Dick’s novel, ‘Substance D’ induces a similar splitbrain disconnection (directly referencing Sperry in some passages), providing an explanation for the protagonist’s increasingly fractionated and incoherent self-consciousness.

Far from being a fantastical notion of a far-flung plot, the idea that psychosis might result from a disengagement of the hemispheres was subsequently discussed in the scientific literature and is still influential today. Dimond (1979) for example, compared patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and split-brain patients, arguing that in both conditions “there is a fundamental failure of in the transfer of information between the two hemispheres”, suggesting “split-brain symptoms are present in schizophrenia”. Although the resemblances between psychosis and the effects of split-brain operations are no longer regarded so highly, clear evidence for differences in the structure and function of the hemispheres in psychosis remains (Gur and Chin, 1999; Pantelis et al., 2003). Perhaps ironically, ideas that many people might have dismissed as imaginative plot, turned out to be reasonable and well informed scientific speculation.

Non ci sono mezzi termini per parlare di questo romanzo. E' un capolavoro assoluto.
A lungo considerato uno dei migliori romanzi di fantascienza, in seguito ad un processo di rivalutazione dell'autore, "Un oscuro scrutare" è considerato uno dei migliori capolavori della letteratura contemporan

Non ci sono mezzi termini per parlare di questo romanzo. E' un capolavoro assoluto.
A lungo considerato uno dei migliori romanzi di fantascienza, in seguito ad un processo di rivalutazione dell'autore, "Un oscuro scrutare" è considerato uno dei migliori capolavori della letteratura contemporanea.
Sullo sfondo della vicenda, una società futura corrotta e corrosa da un malessere sociale: la droga "M" (come Morte). Ma nei romanzi di Dick c'è molto più di semplici temi fantascientifici: ed ecco che dietro l'apparenza si nasconde una violenta critica della società statunitense degli anni '70, corrosa allo stesso modo dalla droga. Dick non rimane nell'ombra, ma interviene, perché non è solo narrante, ma protagonista che narra e vive una vicenda dolorosa e difficile.

"L'abuso della droga non è una malattia, ma una decisione, come quella di andare incontro ad una macchina che si muove. Questo non si chiama malattia, ma mancanza di giudizio."

Uno dei tanti interventi diretti sulla materia, per esempio.

Che dire della trattazione dei personaggi? Magistrale la caratterizzazione di questi personaggi vuoti a vacui, allo sbando, anime in pena che se per caso si sfiorano sentono dolore. L'amore è così ridotto ad un difficile sfiorarsi: l'incomunicabilità è fisica, è contatto umano che non provoca significato ma solo dolore.
Straordinaria la caratterizzazione del protagonista, sdoppiato e per sempre incastrato nelle maschere che la vicenda gli richiede. In questo sdoppiamento letale c'è molto più di quanto si possa credere: concedetemelo, è quasi un Pirandello traviato, drogato. Perché, come dicevo, l'autore è narratore e protagonista, o meglio, come dice lui stesso:

"Io stesso non sono un personaggio di questo romanzo: io sono il romanzo. "

Un oscuro scrutare nel buio dell'anima.

P.K.Dick ha avuto il coraggio di viverlo e raccontarlo. Avrete voi il coraggio di leggerlo?