Preview of “The Alteration of the Worlds: Versions of Philip K. Dick”, by David Lapoujade

INTRODUCTION: DELIRIUM

I didn't expect that from you. Not really.

You talk like a college student. Solipsism.

Skepticism. Bishop Berkeley and that whole story about

the latest realities

Philip K. Dick

Science fiction [from now on, CF] thinks for worlds. Creating new worlds, with physical laws, living conditions, living forms, different political organizations, creating parallel worlds and inventing passages between them, multiplying the worlds, that is the essential activity of CF. War of the Worlds, Best or Worst of Worlds, End of the World, are the recurring terms. Sometimes these worlds belong to distant galaxies, in others they are parallel worlds that are accessed through secret gates or gaps in our world, sometimes they form after the destruction of the human world. The condition is that these worlds are different, or, when it comes to our world, that it has become unrecognizable enough to become another. So, about CF, it can also be said that it spends its time destroying worlds. There are countless total wars, cataclysms, extraterrestrial invasions, deadly viruses, apocalypses, all the ends of the CF world. The possibilities are manifold, but in all cases it is a matter of thinking in terms of worlds.

The trade-off is that CF finds it difficult to create singular characters such as those produced by classical literature. We didn't find Achilles there, or Lancelot, or Mrs. Dalloway. The characters in CF are usually any individual, stereotypes or weakly individualized prototypes as they are there especially to show how a world works or breaks down. They only have sample value. Ultimately, any character serves as long as it allows us to understand what laws the world he is facing obeys. Characters are never as important as the worlds in which they live. Given the conditions of this or that world, how do the characters adapt to it? Given a group of characters, what strange worlds do they face? These are the two main questions that animate CF's stories. One way or another, characters are always second to the world in which they dive or try to escape.

It will be objected that the true distinguishing feature of CF is the use of “science”, which is why there is just talk of science fiction. But there, too, science — and technology — are only means (rendered inherent to gender) to propel us towards distant worlds or to introduce us to a future, technologically more advanced world. Perhaps the use of “science” is what singularizes CF, but it is not, however, what defines it. To speak like Aristotle, we will say that science and technology are specific to CF, but they do not define it. As important as they are for the genre, they remain subordinate to invention, to the composition of other worlds.

This also explains why CF borrows forms of thought that they too conceive or imagine other worlds, such as metaphysics, mythology or religion. Is there not in the background of every author of CF, rather than a dream of science, a dream of mythology, metaphysics or religion that is expressed through the creation of these other worlds? It is precisely because they conceive new worlds that Cyrano de Bergerac, Fontenelle or Leibniz have been seen as precursors of CF. Undoubtedly, in philosophy, it is Leibniz who went the furthest on this path since everything is thought of in terms of worlds, and the real world is never anything other than a world among an infinite number of other possible worlds.

Likewise, the way in which CF is continually invoked today in connection with technological progress, the devastations of the Earth, utopian or dystopian visions, is proof of thinking by worlds, of the “world effects” caused by information flows. It would be said that, from now on, each information has as its horizon the viability, survival, conditioning, destruction of our world and, within it, the relations between the various human, animal, vegetable, mineral worlds, as they compose or decompose the unity and variety of this world. The news no longer refers to isolated parts of the world without involving the state of the world in general and its insurmountable limits. It is no longer every event that is connected by one or a thousand threads to the destiny of the world, but it is the fate of the world that is suspended in the thread of every information.

That is why news tends to disappear and become alert; the informant becomes a transmitter, a warning vector in a permanent and generalized warning system relating to the political, economic, social and ecological state of the world, taken as a whole; news that is always more alarming, always more frightening, supported by figures, about the destruction of today's world. Is it not inevitable, since the viability of this world — and of the multiple worlds that compose it and give it its consistency — is threatened from all sides? We are no longer informed about a part of the world, but constantly alerted to the general state of the world. The effect is overwhelming. All the scenarios, all the simulations and hypotheses that arise, catastrophic or not, force us to think in terms of the world, to “globalize” the minimum data. And that is why, regardless of even fictional stories, that the confluence between the present world and CF takes place, as if news about the present state of the world were no longer just a succession of anticipatory narratives about its future state.

Undoubtedly, each author has his own way of creating worlds, but if there is one author who was aware of this need, it is Philip K. Dick. “My job is to create, one after another, the worlds that are at the base of the novels. And I must build them in such a way that they don't collapse after two days. At least, that's what my editors expect.” He immediately adds: “But I'm going to reveal a secret to you: I love creating worlds that really fall apart after two days. I like to see how they disintegrate and I like what the characters in the novel do when they are faced with that problem. I have a secret penchant for chaos. There should be more.” Dick responds well to the CF imperative to create worlds, but his worlds in fact have the peculiarity of falling apart very quickly, as if they did not have enough foundations to stand on their own or as if they lacked reality.

Its worlds are unstable, susceptible to alteration, reversed in favor of an event that pierces it and that dissipates its reality. For example, this is what an employee who leaves for work earlier than usual discovers and suddenly sees the world around him being crushed. “A piece of the building broke off and a torrent of particles spread. As if it were sand.” On the spot, he discovers that a technical team, alerted by a local problem of desynchronization, suspended the reality of a part of the world in order to proceed to an adjustment. Or, in the short story “Collector's Piece”, an archives employee, admiring a meticulous reconstruction of the 20th century, is projected into the set to the point that he ends up wondering if, after all, today's world (we are in the twenty-second century) is not also a reconstruction. “For God's sake, doctor! ... do you realize that the whole world may just be an exhibition? , that you and all the individuals who populate you may not be real, but mere replicas?” (NO.1, 1169).

Or even the novel Disarticulated Time, whose main character, a quiet inhabitant of a small town, sees strange alterations in the world around him suffer strange alterations. A bar disappears under his gaze in fine molecules to leave in place a label on which the word “bar” is written precisely. As the phenomenon repeats itself, he decides to conduct an investigation into the reality of that world. What is the point of giving to those labels that look like indications of decoration? Are you trying to fool you? Has he gone mad, or is he at the center of a vast handling company? To find out, he tries to flee the city, but they “know” they want to prevent it. For what reason? “It will be difficult to build a fictional world around me, to leave me alone. Buildings, cars, a whole city. Everything seems true, but it is entirely artificial” (R1, 1094). Would the archivist's hypothesis of the short story be confirmed? Isn't the whole town a model of exhibition on a human scale?

It's a recurring problem in Dick's worlds. We don't know to what extent their worlds are real or not, otherwise they will be as illusory as an amusement park at Disneyland. It would be said that Dick's ambition is not to build worlds, but to show that all worlds, including the “real” world, are artificial worlds, sometimes simple artifact, or collective hallucination, or political manipulation, or psychotic delirium. This converges with the many statements in which Dick says that all his books gravitate around a single and same problem: what is reality? What is real? Many commentators took up this question and made it the guiding thread of their work and gave it an ontological or metaphysical dimension. But that doesn't explain what makes these worlds so fragile and changing. How come their worlds collapse so fast?

It happens that behind this general problem lies a deeper problem, that of delirium. For Dick, delirious is to create, to segregate a world, but also to have the intimate conviction that it is the only real world. No CF author presents so many delusional characters, continually threatened or struck by madness. His universe is populated by psychotics, schizoids, paranoids, neurotics, etc., but also mental health specialists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, paranormal healers. And everyone encounters at one time or another the question of delirium: doctor, am I delusional or is it the world that is going crazy? In fact, the 22nd century archivist decides to consult a psychiatrist: “One of two: either this world is a reconstruction of the R level, or I am a 20th century man in the midst of a psychotic escape from reality” (N1, 1171). This is not only true for crazy people, but also for drug or drug users, for those whose memory was adulterated, those whose brains are controlled by aliens or by a virus. With nuclear wars, radiated nature also becomes delirious; it makes bodies delirious, as evidenced by the aberrant mutations of the surviving species, as evidenced by the “symbiotes” of Dr. Bloodmoney, “several people fused together in their anatomy and sharing their organs”, a pancreas for six (R2, 874-875). Nothing escapes the power of delirium.

If we want to maintain the traditional definition of CF as an exploration of future possibilities, then those possible ones must necessarily be delusional. “The author of science fiction not only perceives possibilities, but delusional possibilities. He never just asks: 'Let's see, what if...? ' , but 'My God! , and if ever... '”. Through this simple description, Dick delivers one of the most profound aspects of his work. Because it is not, for him, a question of showing his imagination, inventing new worlds, with new physical laws, unusual biological means, utopian political functioning. Surely, those aspects are present in Dick, but they are not essential. If the possibilities are “delusional” it is because they refer to an underlying madness, to a real danger that runs the risk at all times of turning us into madness. So it's not so much about freeing yourself from the real world to imagine possible new worlds, but rather about descending into the depths of the real to guess what new delusions are already at work there. Compared to classical authors, Dick is much closer to Cervantes and the delusions of Don Quixote or El Horla's Maupassant, than to Cyrano de Bergerac's Journeys to the Moon or Jules Verne's novels. The powers of delirium are of a much more disturbing nature than the possibilities of imagination, since they make the very notion of reality falter.

Certainly, the rarity of the worlds of CF generally tends to lead characters astray, to confront them with irrational situations, destined to make them lose their reason. CF needs such irrationality as one of its essential components, even if in the end everything is explained or if the hero regains his reason. But in Dick, madness slips everywhere, reaching everyone, produced by aliens and drugs as well as by social order, conjugality or political authorities. Even ordinary objects wander and no longer behave as they should. A coffee machine no longer offers coffees, but cups of soap. A door refuses to open and declares: “The paths of glory lead only to the grave.” Computers become paranoid or perceived as psychotic. “That pile of junk was completely ravaging, we had guessed. We happily intervened in time. She's psychotic. He elaborates a schizophrenic cosmic delirium from archetypes that he considers to be real. It is taken by the instrument of God!” We think we give Dick a lot when we make him the author of an ontological or metaphysical question (“what is reality?”) , but, for him, the question is first and foremost of a clinical nature. The ontological and metaphysical dimensions are not mere games of imagination, but refer to questions related to mental health, the dangers of madness.

It is understood that he has become the author of CF, he, who also wrote classic, “realistic” novels (where, in fact, delusional characters are also found). Perhaps the realism of the classic novel will justly deprive delirium of its strength. If we accept the assumption that there is only one so-called “real” world, then delusions are necessarily treated as second, relative, pathological realities, summing up “subjective”. If we stick, on the other hand, to the classic definition of CF as an exploration of possible worlds, we are no longer obliged to give the least primacy to the “real” world, even if, in fact, most of the authors of CF preserve their own realism. The advantage of CF for Dick is that the real world is only one world among others, and not always the most “real”.

What is the force of delirium? Of course, the delirious can be conceived as separate from common reality, locked in “his” world, with his hallucinations, his misjudgments and his extravagant beliefs. The criterion is not the delusional idea taken in itself—what idea isn't it? —, but the force of conviction that accompanies these ideas and hallucinations. No evidence, no denial, no demonstration can make a dent in that conviction. Conceived in this way, delirium is defined as a creation of the world, but of a private, “subjective”, solipsistic world, to which nothing corresponds in the “real” world, beyond the elements that “sign” in the direction of delirium. The delusional subject is lodged in the heart of a private world whose center it occupies sovereignly.

The psychologist Louis A. Sass is then surprised by the following paradox: how does it happen that delusional subjects admit the reality of certain aspects of the outside world even though they contradict their delirium? “Even the most disturbed schizophrenics can retain, even at the height of their psychotic episodes, a rather refined perception of what is, according to common sense, their objective and true situation. (...) They seem to live in two parallel but separate worlds: shared reality, and the space of their hallucinations and delusions.” How do these two worlds manage to coexist? It refers to another characteristic of delirium: the delusional subject has the “objective” world, real or common as false. It is often stressed that delirium evolves in an unreal, extravagant world, which is cut off from all external reality; but the counterpart is forgotten, that is, when it comes into contact with the outside world — which he sometimes does with the best will in the world — he thinks he faces a false, artificial or illusory. Here is how the paradox would be resolved: the delirious one agrees to interact with the “real” world, but because he does not believe in its reality. It does not submit to the reality of that world, it lends itself to play.

Is there nothing to be seen there more than a paradox, a struggle, the perpetuation of an old struggle between the madman and the psychiatrist? To the delusional, the psychiatrist responds endlessly: you are not in the real, your delusions are completely illusory. To the psychiatrist, the delusional man then responds: you are not true, your reality is completely false. The first poses the problem in terms of reality, the second in terms of truth. The psychiatrist's argument is to say: there is nothing in your world that can be considered real. The argument of the madman is to say: there is nothing in your world that cannot be considered false. One asserts the authority of the principle of reality through his coercions, the other makes the powers of the false play in his delusions.

In some respects, it is a form close to the struggle that Foucault describes in his courses on Psychiatric Power. What the psychiatrist wants is first and foremost to impose on the madman a form of reality by all the means available to him within the asylum, to the point that “asylum discipline is both the form and the force of reality”. But the madman keeps redirecting him to the question of truth through the way he simulates his own madness, “the way in which a true symptom is a way of lying, the way in which a false symptom is a way of being really sick”, but also through the way in which he challenges the “truth” attributed to the real world . Will against will: the inextirpable conviction of the delirious against the unshakable certainty of the psychiatrist.

Dick was certainly not crazy, but he felt personally threatened by madness to the point that he repeatedly asked to be admitted. In addition to periods of depression, he went through violent psychotic episodes accompanied by periods of delirium, proof of this is the feverish wording of the Exegesis. From the seventies onwards, Dick is in fact confronted with delusional episodes and hallucinations of a religious type. He goes through a succession of experiences similar to all the points that he makes his characters suffer: the reality of his world dissipates and he lets another world appear... Instead of being in California in 1974, he has the “absolute certainty of finding [himself] in Rome some time after the advent of Christ, in the time of the Fish Symbol (...). With clandestine baptisms and all that” (E, I, 83-84). There is nothing real about California anymore; it has become a set, perhaps even a hologram of the Roman Empire. Is it that we do nothing but rave reality, subject to deceptive appearances that mask authentic reality, as the Gnostics thought? Do we have false memories that will dissipate when the resurrection of ancient times, the era of the first Christians, comes? Isn't today's United States a resumption, a perpetuation of yesterday's Roman Empire? Is the fall of Nixon, precisely, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit? A strange eschatology that brings an immemorial past back to the present, based on an ever deeper and more delusional anamnesis — like the one that philosophy sometimes knew how to propose with the Greeks. One is not easily freed from the thought of resurrection.

Dick is convinced that he is battling with transcendent powers—extraterrestrial or divine—that possess the power to trick reality, distort appearances and act directly on brains. He is the evil genius of Descartes turned character in CF, the fight of the man of good sense against the master of illusions. It is not surprising when we see that the main character of the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is rightly named Rick Deckard and he lives in a world full of animal-machines.

Perhaps it was necessary for Dick to confront religion, since he was one of the first to create other worlds, to populate them with extraterrestrial creatures (angels, seraphim, demons), to invent unprecedented modes of temporality, body metamorphoses (immaculate conception, transubstantiation). “If I had to reissue the Old and New Testaments, a CF editor would have, in fact, proposed to give it a new title. The first one would have been called The Master of Chaos and the second, The Thing with Three Souls”. The whole question is to know what kind of fiction ultimately prevails in Dick. Does CF put himself at the service of religious delusions or does Dick manage to incorporate them into CF?

This is the situation; on the one hand, a succession of delusional episodes that protect it from a psychotic collapse, but that disturb the “field of reality”; on the other, reality, but “falsified” by all the delusions that go through it, economic, political, bureaucratic, etc. his own madness. It is especially palpable after the series of religious experiences that he goes through in February-March 1974, when in Radio Libre Albemuth and Valis, it is staged through two different characters: one who has just gone through psychotic episodes in the form of delusional religious experiences; the other, author of CF, who becomes restless of the mental health of the former. We find there again the confrontation between the madman and the doctor, although it is not always known what role each one plays. This same battle, between delusional possibilities and dominant reality, is found everywhere in Dick.

Combat is both the war of the worlds and the war of the psychisms. There is no psychism whose coherence is not disturbed by the intrusion of another psychism. Nor is the world whose reality is not altered by the interference of another world; for the plurality of worlds in Dick does not refer to parallel worlds, juxtaposed “as if they were suits hanging in an immense closet”; they do not stop interfering, stumbling upon each other, each world questioning the reality of others. The war of the worlds is at the same time a fight against madness. If there are several worlds, the question inevitably arises of which of them is real. Once again, the question “what is reality?” it is not an abstract question, but it proves the presence of an underlying madness. It is she who makes her way through this war of the worlds; it is she who cracks her characters, alters objects, drives machines crazy and destroys worlds.

You mean that Dick is on the side of madness, who fights for the powers of delirium against all forms of dominant reality? It would be the function of “delusional possibilities”: to discuss the validity of this reality, to denounce its falsity, its arbitrariness, its artifice. In fact, there are many false worlds in Dick's novels. Or does she side with the doctor, when she wants to show to what extent the dominant reality is also enclosed in multiple delusions — bureaucratic, economic, political — that pretend to be the only reality, excluding any alternative (tina)? It's certainly not about being an asylum doctor anymore, but it's always about taking care of mental health — unless, as in The Clans of the Moon Alfana, Earth has become an asylum for madmen.

KEEP READING