How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

PKD presents us with an interesting narrative. Unlike so much apocalyptic fiction, Dr. Bloodmoney makes very little pretense to why the apocalypse, nuclear or otherwise, occurs. Bombs drop, the ground heaves, and life is forced to move on. I imagine this abrupt holocaust was an interesting take on Cold War paranoia: On one hand, the role the Emergency plays in Dr. Bloodmoney is essential, providing the backdrop and world that the characters struggle through; conversely, the event itself is explained, and each character enjoys a very separate perspective on the initial proceedings.

My last blog post was a rather aggressive reaction to Hull's "Protagonist and Antagonist: Beyond Hero and Villain." I argued that many competent authors, PKD among them, avoid using the cookie-cutter antagonist/protagonist dynamic, allowing more organic characters to develop and interact, providing a strong basis for introducing drama and portraying philosophical interaction. Dr. Bloodmoney seems to support this line of reasoning, with a range of characters residing in and around the San Francisco area; each with their own perspectives, skills, and neuroses.

Of interest to me is the pre-Emergency/post-Emergency characters, Stuart, Bonny, and so on. The characters base personalities or character roles, the coward, the lover, never seem to change. Is this the core of PKD's purpose in Dr. Bloodmoney? Does Dick believe that humanity repeats intrinsic patterns no matter what externalities are occurring?

I have very little to say; I lack the closure of the novel. I think I'll go read the last chapters.

I'm going to copy and paste what I wrote for one of the discussion posts here, I will address it more the coming week:

I believe that the article "Protagonist and Antagonist: Beyond Hero and Villain" is a well-intentioned, but ultimately limited perspective on examining characters and conflicts in a piece of fiction. Mr. Hull presents some useful tips: A protagonist doesn't need to be nice; Center the conflict around a theme; an Author should remove themselves from biased perspective; etc.. However, he seems to have authored the article to support burgeoning authors, attempting to educate dilettantes who lack formal training. In doing so, Hull fails to address some very important aspects in interpreting fiction (especially pod):

Extra-Character Conflict
Any number of forces can create pressure, add conflict, or otherwise interact with characters in a meaningful way. This could be anything from Entropy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Fate in Oedipus the King, Hate & Fear in Huckleberry Finn, to Self in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. These forces have tangible effect on the progression of plot, and can be more of a protagonist or antagonist than any character; indeed, some characters may only be an extension of such an inhuman and un-character-like concept.

At High School, this was presented as “Character vs. Concept”: Man vs. Self, or Man vs. Society, Man vs. Fate, and so forth. In the case of The Simulacra, I would make a case for Civilization or Order being the capital-letter concept, with the resulting equation looking something like “Humanity vs. Order”. We see not so much a single character struggling against or for civilization, rather, each character attempts to define their own version of order a reality: Nicole represents the stagnant police state; Dr. Superb maintaining his practice because he knows nothing else; Duncan idolizes the cult of personality; Goltz and his shadowy Council play puppet-master with all sides. This obsession with order puts these characters, which Hull would call antagonists, in opposition to our modern sensibilities of Freedom, or perhaps more Phildickian, Chaos.

On the side of Chaos, we have the characters that act as proponents of radical individuality or act against the established order, though this rebellion need not be dramatic: The Chuppers working outside the social norm, Loony Luke providing an escape to Mars, and of course Kongrosian. Kongrosian does not fit in any society, cannot interact within a structure other than his unintelligible neuroses, and breaks space-time-continuity by just existing; Kongrosian is the champion of this conflict, Hull might go so far as label him the protagonist, but that feels like a cop-out. The conflict is not as crude as “Kongrosian pursues the destruction of order and considers the value of doing so, while Goltz seeks to stop the destruction of order, and forces us to reconsider the value of doing so” instead, PKD uses a barrage of characters in an equally varied number of situations that illustrate the central conflict. Choosing a single protagonist and antagonist would be an exercise in futility, as well as supremely difficult. Hull's narrow focus is a result, I think, of High School English teachers seeing in each text a "Right Answer" whereinHamlet is about "death", the Mississippi in Huck Finn represents "freedom", and so forth, in an attempt to provide a pattern of perception for the wayward High School student. The reality is, there is no right answer, everything is subjective, blah blah blah.

Resolution is for Quitters
Hall writes, “The Story Goal represents that final step in the resolution process. Complete it and the characters have resolution. Leave it open and the problem persists far beyond the walls of the story.” Maybe taking Dr. Berry’s Post-Modernism class is to fault, but I do not feel like resolution is at all necessary to make a coherent story; PKD seems to agree with me. Take the end of the two novels we have covered: Do Androids leaves a shaken Deckard in debt, and over the internal struggles of killing androids; he’ll keep killing them because he needs the money. No real resolution there, even if the Andy's have been killed, Deckard knows he could run into a group of identical andys the next day. The Simulacra ends with Kongrosian saving Nicole, and a war started; we don’t know if the war will create unrest and destroy the established order, or anything else, all we know is that the Chuppers are excited. What has been resolved? Order has been momentarily broken by Kongrosian, but not for good, as Planck notes it will be traded for the Chuppers version of Order, “We're going to have to get accustomed to them.”

Resolution, as examined through Hall's Story Goals, does not allow for more subtle manipulations of story that result in truly great story telling. McCarthy's The Road ends, but there is no real resolution, life simply limps onward, although I am a little wary of being able to accurately engage McCarthy critically. Point is, a neat-and-tidy resolution is like the dime-a-dozen supernatural romance novels at Barnes & Nobel who feature such an ending: Stagnant, insulting, and predictable.
x

I Am Not A Crook

On the first impression, The Simulacra oozes 60's-era nostalgia and paranoia. PKD paints a political hellscape straight from the fever dreams of Richard Nixon, where fascism and socialism join together to brutally oppress the culture, livelihoods, and very spirit of the people.

Moreover, I can't shake the feeling that PKD writes all of his stories in the same world, or rather, skips the laborious world-building that so many science fiction authors rely upon, and instead pulls from more conceptual inspiration. Always the vague decrepit place where fantastic technology, such as a biological-recorder, pales in comparison to the funk of humanity. The barely-tolerated mutants, the one monolithic government, the ugly and frustrated protagonists with no discernible antagonist, and so on.

I imagined for a very long time that PKD's stories were always about the "Human Condition", an incredibly arbitrary term for being alive that I utilized as a critical crutch. Recently, I read T.S. Eliot's The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism, where Eliot addresses the conceptual slippery slope concerning leveraging poetry as a spiritual aide, or as an attempt to explain what humanity is (also people who italicize random words in their critical work); he enjoy neither. He argues that there is much ado about what it means to be human, but that the idea that poetry, or art in any fashion, can address that question is as infantile as sporadic italicization. This forced me to re-evaluate how I interpret PKD's works, as I agree with Eliot.

This leads me to The Simulacra. Two weeks ago, I would have gushed how it addresses the human condition, but now I feel that the novel is expressing a emotional commodity that is so often regulated to what is perceived to be modern: angst. That is to say, I feel that PKD has numerous bones to pick with a variety of organizations and concepts, but ultimately never comes to a conclusion. Every period in history feels somewhat-superior to the generations before themselves, and whether this is due to historic hindsight or simply because the living party can comment should be decided by someone more intelligent than myself, but the idea that we have "progressed" eats at our very core. This leads, I would argue, to a negative perception of society due to the overwhelming issues that have not been addressed or resolved: the people dying in the streets, the rich getting richer, the hate, bigotry, and otherwise unsavory human expressions. Amateur sociology aside, PKD's works are timeless due to the central themes of self-doubt, grim acceptance, and again, angst.

Of Music and Minds

My post today is spurred by one of the discussion questions raised by Dr. Murphy: "How do you see music figuring into Electric Sheep and any of the PKD short stories assigned this week?"

I responded:

"Music places a crucial role in a number of PDK's works. I believe an essential theme of PDK's works is the human condition; that is, trying to delve to the core of what being human means. It is also important to note, that answering this questions is impossible; T.S. Eliot writes on the task of defining "poetry" for the sake of criticism:

'But there are these two theoretical limits of criticism: at one of which we attempt to answer the question 'what is poetry?' and at the other "is this a good poem?' No theoretic ingenuity will suffice to answer the second question, because no theory can amount to much which is not founded upon a direct experience of good poetry; but on the other hand our direct experience of poetry involves a good deal of generalizing activity.'

As Eliot laboriously explains what poetry is, by strictly defining what it cannot be, PKD seeks to ruminate on the nature of humanity. Do Androids addresses this issue with a hypothetical stand-in for humanity, acting identical to the original construct: That is, what we perceive ourselves to be. Gross oversimplifications aside, PKD utilizes music and artwork in his works as a symptom, side effect, or otherwise external result of humanity; we can not exist without culture, because culture is the only method through which we can identify. Much as Eliot cannot explain what a "good poem" is, PKD cannot explain what a "good human" is; however, he can certainly point out what trapping surround a "human" and attempt to make a connection from existing theory to get a close as reasonably possible.

Music and art allow PKD some semblance of a foundation to base his philosophical meanderings on, and should be watched as closely as a cup of poison in a play written by Shakespeare."

I feel that the most meaningful thing to me in PKD's works is simple: As an author, Dick is not condescending, nor simple; his stories do not cause any great stirring of emotion, and he never claims to usurp other great authors, even though he surpasses many of his compatriots. PDK's work conveys a benign smile, a nod of understanding when you stumble and re-read a passage, and welcomes the reader to the conclusion he knew that they would reach. (I'm reminded of Grandpa from The Princess Bride.) Throughout my undergraduate degree, I've had the pleasure of interacting with authors and poets such as Milton, Nietzsche, Plath, Eliot, and so on, but none convey the simple indulgences of reading so well as PKD. Moreover, he uses the comfortable position in which he places the reader to allow insight and rumination about the most extraordinary of concepts: the human condition.