Pathless Land
We are living in a Philip K. Dick novel. It’s so apparent that to hear it disputed would just offer more proof. The constant hum of lies and denial, the monstrous corporations that pit the shadow self against the authentic, fascism everywhere: this Marin mystic saw it all before his early death in 1982. Even people who have only seen Blade Runner and Total Recall can recognize his foresight.
The books themselves remain underread. And despite references to the ominous Now in its translator’s note (which also stresses that no AI was used), a biography has been translated into German 32 years after its initial publication in France: not because Dick is the subject but because his biographer is the writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Carrère tells Dick’s story as that of a Man in Full, uneasy with but not in America. He marries and cheats and fathers children and writes a lot, good sentences and bad, demonstrating prodigious gifts for metaphor and insight, and then in the spring of 1974 he is struck with actual prophecy, wrestling with visions for the rest of his days – or with ministrokes exacerbated by amphetamines.
Obvious Carrèrisms, like heavy projection and memoiristic inserts, are at a minimum. It’s a strangely old-fashioned novelistic biography, almost touching in how plainly it explains (or recaps) the novels using Dick’s own life. Because, the story goes, isn’t that what a real writer does, leaving blood splatters on the page and fucking up his (sic) own life in the process? This central image of Dick as the lonely man (with wives and children) typing away in his garage knowing each keystroke could create a tornado played more innocently before the Internet, before everything.
Carrère wants to write Dick as a Dick protagonist. Hardly any of the words in the book are actually his, although the title I’m The One That’s Alive And You’re All Dead is a misappropriated line from Ubik. For all his selfishness and vengefulness, like calling the FBI on Stanisław Lem, Dick always searched for an authentic “we”. As a motto, the title doesn’t do him justice.
His remains a pathless land of no knowledge. Carrère offers one map of many. Just don’t think following it means you can escape making the trip yourself.
