The Puzzles of Appetite: Why I Started Reading Philip K. Dick Again

For the last few years, I’ve been hiding out in Philip K. Dick’s head. As Orwell said of Wigan Pier: “The path has been a long one, and the reasons for taking it aren’t immediately clear.”

Up to a point I’m kidding, of course. I appreciate what’s valuable about PKD. I just wouldn’t have guessed I’d keep reading him despite how little I often like his writing.

I tore through a bunch of PKD in high school. No surprise there — our “homegrown Borges’s” work is a capsule summary of my adolescent worldview: amateur philosophy, weirdo metaphysics, charismatic paranoia, social critique, the working class, a shaggy, stonerish aesthetic, and so on.

I lost touch with him as I exited my teens, and I hadn’t read much PKD since then (which, for me, somehow now amounts to the better part of two decades).

I started reading him again around 2020 after getting back from China. Since then, I’ve revisited a bunch of PKD I’d read as a kid and read a bunch I hadn’t.

I’m inclined to think our aesthetic tastes, particularly when they’re as obsessive as this, can tell us something about ourselves. They’re not random. The challenge is in decoding what they tell us.

My return to PKD hasn’t always been a warm homecoming. Even his better works have been tough for me to swallow on this go around. I was just barely able to get through the decent-by-PKD-standards Clans of the Alphane Moon. The ones that even PKD devotees admit are bad were truly intolerable — yes, like Vulcan’s Hammer, but also much but not all of the Valis trilogy, A Crack in Space (which seems like such a missed opportunity), and (at least for me) basically anything from before 1955, if not 1958.

What are some of the better ones? Jonathan Lethem seems to be on the mark in “You Don’t Know Dick.” His suggestions: “Castle, Stigmata, Ubik, Valis, Androids, Bloodmoney, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Scanner Darkly, Martian Time-Slip, Confessions of a Crap Artist…Now Wait for Last Year, Time Out of Joint, A Maze of Death, Galactic Pot-Healer… (127).”

I might quibble over Bloodmoney, and The Transmigration didn’t totally resonate with me (though was probably one of his subtler and better written ones). The last four are definitely more central than the first four, though I took particular pleasure in Time out of Joint and A Maze of Death and am happy to see them included. I might suggest substituting The Penultimate Truth and/or Flow my Tears for one or another of the entries, but I’m nitpicking at that point.

I always like Lethem’s writing, but it’s his biography that is illuminating for me here. I feel like his troubled and obsessive relationship with PKD was a version of my own turned inside out. In places like “My Crazy Friend,” Lethem talks about his youthful discomfort with Dick’s status as a mere genre writer. Of course, part of what was behind that, both explicitly and implicitly, is Lethem’s discomfort with his own working-class background, relationship with the art world, etc., and PKD then became a means for him to sort that out.

The similarities are almost eerie. I think in hindsight I used PKD — and continue to use him now, really — as a vehicle to struggle through a somewhat similar constellation of issues.

Our responses seem to have been different. From his essay, it sounds like Lethem set out to rehabilitate PKD by emphasizing his literary merit. He launched his own little PKD gentrification campaign (a proxy for his own).

I feel like I went the other way: rather than emphasize PKD’s importance, I dismissed him. Particularly as I entered college, I had the sense that I’d graduated from PKD to the strong stuff. After cramming myself full of Heidegger et al., to say nothing of the real Borges, it was hard to take PKD seriously in quite the same way.

Needless to say, this had a heavy social class component — I’d followed my interests and unwittingly boarded a bus to the middle class (was it really so unintentional, though?). The results could be baffling.

Lethem launched a private gentrification campaign through Dick; I launched a private gentrification campaign by spurning him.

The reasons for this might seem obvious: the late 90s/00s when I was reading PKD were a different time from when Lethem read him in the pre-Bladerunner 70s. Given PKD’s current ubiquity, it’s safe to say that folks like Lethem won the war on that one. Maybe I just didn’t have a battle to fight.

There’s probably some truth there, but in the time before Total Internet Armageddon, I don’t know to what degree I would have known or cared that PKD was taken seriously. Later, I would get impatient with his trendiness, but this was well before that time (at least in my rural New England bubble).

Before 2020, my road from PKD seemed to only be accelerating. The basis of one of the many symptoms of this comes out in Lethem’s introduction to The Selected Stories (2002), where he refers to Dick’s tendency to find “a spark of life or love arising from unlikely or ruined places.”

That’s definitely an orientation towards the world that defined my youth. I think on some intuitive emotional level this came to seem embarrassing when I decided that “looking low for insight” seemed more about self-justifying mediocrity.

Looking low for insight can take many casts. For me, it often had a political undertone: “You don’t need a weatherman, etc.” If sociologist Paul Willis overtheorized the way that anti-social adolescent behavior can have a socio-political critique marbled into it, I was much more excessive, much less sophisticated, and much more sincere in my thought on that front. Not promising.

Was I overthinking things? These days I’m of two minds about that one, but I wasn’t of two minds during my period of spurning Dick. It seemed embarrassing and childish, and now that we were on the topic, stoner sci fi writers kind of did, too.

My contempt accelerated as the political currents changed along with those of my life. By that point, I rarely went home (literally or figuratively), but when I did, I watched in horror as the vague “damn the man” wink between dissident co-conspirators became the much more grounded tea party, then pizzagate, then lizard people, and finally Trump.

Maybe I’d been wrong — maybe you did need a weatherman — or at least some form of respect for expertise.

Of course, none of this had anything to do with PKD himself. It was more of a reaction to a personal association I had assigned him, and even then it was pretty nebulous — I doubt I had the thought of directly linking any of this with PKD in particular.

Actually, one could make the case his writing provides an excellent diagnosis of a world that arguably seems more Dickian than ever before (cryptofascism and all). I suspect at least on some level part of why I found myself going back to him in 2020 was because I had returned to the US after some time away and had landed in the dystopian reality of Trump’s America (after an all-too-vivid simulation of the Maoist era had by living through China’s Covid lockdowns). PKD was cathartic and possibly illuminating.

Then again, it might not have all been personal association and projection on my part. A troublingly direct demonstration of this is Alex Jones’s appearance in the film version of A Scanner Darkly — one of the more faithful adaptations of a PKD novel in film (and which makes wise edits to the final 20% of the original work).

It wouldn’t require particularly advanced psychoanalytic training to see all of this as my diary of a repetition syndrome: as I teetered closer to middle age, I turned PKD into a stand-in for parts of my adolescent self I hadn’t full digested. I keep returning to him because I haven’t fully integrated my past, and my obsessive review of his work indicates a resurgence of an undigested part of myself that will continue to haunt me until I’ve come to terms with it. The fact that I often dislike PKD’s writing adds an almost-too-obvious layer of psychological weight to the dynamic.

There’s definite truth to that, but the story is not quite that neat. I lost interest in PKD, but I never lost interest in a Dickian aesthetic, and I remember being thrilled to find a collection of his short stories in the lobby of my apartment six or so years ago (in fact, the same one with the Lethem intro cited above). In short, the break wasn’t quite so harsh or so clean, and I think I’d actually settled a lot of my kind-of-quarter-kind-of-midlife crisis before PKD had gotten back on the stage for me.

From another standpoint, as disappointing and irritating as PKD can be, I haven’t found an adequate substitute. I keep going back to him because I want the aesthetic he sets out: the synthesis of Cheever Americana with hallucinatory realities and pulpy tropes is definitely a distinct flavor. I keep exploring ever-more-obscure corners of the master’s bibliography (small “m” for me), trying to get at least a bite of what might have previously been a meal.

Sometimes the band doesn’t have any other songs (possibly because they’re dead), so I listen to the same tired tracks or search out b-sides that even I think kind of suck as a way to at least blow air at the itch if not scratch it.

PKD is particularly fertile territory for that compulsion because you never know when he happened to have had a lucid morning and buried something valuable in one of the eight rushed novels he wrote in some odd, drug-addled year in the 1960s. I guess in its own perverse way, that’ll keep you coming back.

In hindsight, the unevenness of PKD’s writing and thought was one of the reasons he resonated with me in the first place. It telegraphed how I saw (see) myself: a little wobbly, but with occasional flashes of talent if you look from the right angle. (Gee, you don’t say — I wonder if that played some role in my hang up on his work?)

I guess I wanted a PKD without PKD. I definitely wanted a me without me. Maybe I wanted an everything without an everything.

Which reminds me: I still haven’t read The Man Who Japed, and someone was telling me The Zap Gun is good….