INTRODUCTION

It has been long recognized that gnostic Christianity and other such dualistic philosophies play highly influential roles in the speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick, and particularly so in his later work. To illustrate, even the casual reader cannot help but notice the degree to which explicit gnostic Christian themes and components pervade such works as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981), and The Divine Invasion (1981). In fact, the categories and vocabulary of the various dualistic cosmologies informed not only Dick's own literary encounters with all sorts of religions and philosophies, but also his life experiences, not least of which was the strange and remarkable series of events that occurred during the early months of 1974. From these events stemmed Dick's dense and monumental work, the so-called “Exegesis,” and any study of Dick's post-1974 fiction must be conducted in the light of this massive and complex manifesto.

The question at hand, however, is to what extent this dualism, gnostic Christian or otherwise, is reflected in Dick's early, pre-Stigmata novels? The best of the lot, and easily one of Dick's finest works, is The Man in the High Castle (hereafter MHC), Dick's ninth published novel and the one that won for him the Hugo award. In a previous article, I suggested that Dick relied on a conflated amalgam of the fundamentals of dualistic philosophies and basic Pauline theology in order to frame and actualize the redemptive journey experienced by each of the novel's five major characters—Robert Childan, Mr. Tagomi, Frank Frink, his ex-wife Juliana, and the Abwehr officer Rudolf Wegener (see “Redemption”). The sojourns of these characters accord structure and meaning to the entire novel and are articulated as a movement from a sensible world to an intelligible one. While there is no evidence to suggest that Dick adhered to a specific dualist theology or cosmology in MHC, it does seem to have been the case that he had a ground-floor appreciation of the common elements of such philosophies, an appreciation most likely garnered via secondary sources rather than primary ones. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that Dick did not publish systematic theology until VALIS, and if in MHC he quoted or engaged explicit passages or themes from a particular tradition, he did so easily and without much thought to resolving every potential contradiction. For its part, then, MHC represents a significant early phase both in the development of Dick's personal cosmology and in his use of dualistic motifs in his speculative fiction.

In a recent provocative and stimulating essay, Umberto Rossi discusses the role of the logos in Dick's 1959 novel, Time Out Of Joint (hereafter TOJ). Among other things, Rossi argues that the principal antecedent of the printed “word” encountered by the protagonist, Ragle Gumm, is the creative and effective aspect of the Hebrew dabar that lies behind the Greek logos of the prologue to the Gospel of John. In response, I have argued that certain clues in TOJ indicate that Dick understood the logos not as the linear descendant of dabar, but more in its sense as the hypostasis of the intelligible world, whose function is primarily akin to a vector through which revelatory information is communicated (see “λόγος”). If this is correct, it would mean that Dick used logos in a way mirrored by a number of early Christian and Jewish dualistic philosophers and theologians. It also means that TOJ is in some ways an immediate precursor to MHC, and so ought to be considered as an early vehicle for the categories that would later find greater development, complexity, and consistency in that novel and in his later works. Despite its rough presentation in TOJ and the complete lack of a supporting philosophy, the “word” of this novel is one of the earliest explicit manifestations of a peculiarly Dickian way of interpreting events, a way that, with respect to his fiction and to his life, would reach its full flowering in the Zebra/VALIS phenomenon.¹

The main purpose of this present [essay] is to continue this line of investigation by examining several of Dick's pre-MHC novels and short stories and to identify and discuss the most primitive instances of the components of dualistic cosmologies therein. The relevant short fiction is culled from the five-volume Citadel Twilight (Carol) collection [The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick], while Dick's first twenty-two novels—of which several are no longer extant and a significant portion are mainstream—are identified on the basis of the list provided in Paul Williams's book, Only Apparently Real (178-84).² When compared to the complexities of MHC, Stigmata, or VALIS, the philosophical discussion in this early fiction is highly unpolished and not always well-integrated. But it is present nonetheless, despite the crudeness of form and the awkwardness of presentation. We will unearth no gnostic treatises among these novels or stories, nor bring to light any careful philosophical expositions or theological monographs. Rather, what emerges are several nascent ideas that have some root in the fundamentals of dualistic cosmologies, not excepting the conflict between the world perceived by the senses and a realm that is apprehended by other means.

My methodology in this essay is very much in line with my articles on MHC and TOJ, in that I refuse to resort to Dick's later writings or comments (most especially those in the published portions of the “Exegesis”) to interpret or clarify material present in his earlier novels, even though many of Dick's reflections on the meaning of his work in fact support wholeheartedly assertions I will make here. In the context of an edifying comment or an interpretation offered regarding a specific text, Dick is just another Dick scholar—his words neither enjoy automatic priority nor assume a preferential perspective. Of course, this is true for any relationship between an author and his or her art, and in most cases the gulf between the artist's art and interpretation is bridged appropriately. Dick, though, appears to have had a penchant to forget, gloss over, or in some cases wildly exaggerate past events, notably those pertaining to his youth.³ This in itself should cause any scholar to pause before using any of Dick's many musings on his early life and work without careful evaluation of their context and content.

Even more relevant to the issue of refusing to use Dick's later writings to interpret his earlier ones are the events of early 1974 and the overwhelming effect they had on Dick's life and on his view of his life to that point, the closest analogy being a religious conversion. As with any conversion, the discrete experience itself rarely stands in vacuo, but rather, as Thomas McGowan has shown, is likely to be the visible culmination of a long process of gathering knowledge and the persistent self-adjusting of one's perspectives and values. Nor does a conversion imply that further change is impossible. As proof of the ongoing nature of his “conversion,” Dick's own theology (there is no better word for it) continued to mature and gain nuances from early 1974 to his death in 1982. Accordingly, it is not enough simply to posit that Dick's thought and opinions can be divided neatly into two components, i.e., “pre-1974” and “post-1974.”

At the same time, however, it must be recognized that Dick's 1974 experience was the sort of personal transformation that usually forces an individual to reinterpret large portions of past events in light of the new revelation. Hypothetically, a 1959 event or text that had a certain significance for Dick in the year 1959 might well have been reconstructed or construed differently by him in the year 1979. Because there are no hard or fast rules governing how to evaluate such occurrences, and each of Dick's comments on all the many aspects of his earlier life needs to be examined on its own merit, there exists the danger that the critic will unconsciously anticipate Dick's own reworking of his earlier life and fiction without subjecting each event or text to careful scrutiny.⁴ Put another way, the closer the substance of any earlier event or text is to his later revelations, the more likely it is that Dick will have reinterpreted it in the “Exegesis,” in his later novels, or in other post-1974 correspondence. And nothing could be closer to the gist of the 1974 experiences than Dick's prior explorations and extrapolations of dualistic cosmologies and gnostic-style philosophies. As a result, I have confined my analysis to the published forms of Dick's pre-MHC fiction (excluding TOJ), searching within the limitations of the texts themselves for the earliest indications of Dick's gnostic fantasies.

A concrete illustration of the danger of retrofitting Dick's post-1974 reflections onto pre-1974 texts is what he says in the “Exegesis” about TOJ. In several places Dick plainly understands TOJ as an integral member of a long sequence of thematically-similar novels and short stories whose relationship to each other is most akin to the manner in which the individual elements in a fugue or any other polyphonic composition express voices in an ongoing dialogue.⁵ While there is every indication that Dick arrives at this conclusion in the full knowledge that it is after the fact, it is difficult for the commentator on Dick's early works to keep this in mind when he or she is confronted with an apparently rational schema that presents his life events and speculative fiction sequentially and comprehensively. We can certainly read TOJ in the light of MHC, A Scanner Darkly, or VALIS, but we cannot interpret it this way, since Dick did not write TOJ as an overture to an opera in three acts. To cite another example, in a 1977 “Exegesis” entry, Dick reads TOJ in the context of his later conviction that time had stopped in 70 AD [sic]⁶ and had only resumed in early 1974. This reading, though, has absolutely no basis in the text and so must be limited to a study of this specific theme as it appears in Dick's subsequent fiction or to a discussion and evaluation of the ways in which Dick himself reinterpreted TOJ and his other novels after the events of early 1974. This last is very much a desideratum, and such a study is greatly needed for a full appreciation of Dick's later novels.⁷

“JON'S WORLD”

This short story [“Jon's World”], published in 1954 but written in 1952,⁸ involves a world decimated by war between humans and robots, wherein two men attempt to travel back in time. They do so to change the past and thereby their present. One of the men, Ryan, has a son named Jon, who sees things in visions. These visions are not precisely of the same sort that the child Manfred Steiner experiences in Dick's 1966 novel, Martian Time-Slip. There Manfred's consciousness is intermittently out-of-step with the normal time-flow and for that reason he sees specific events as they might happen, many decades in the future. In contrast, Jon is subject to visions concerning a general impression of the way the world ought to be, as if the present in which he and his father live is artificial or temporary. And so much is true, as we later discover—having traveled back in time and effected the requisite change, Ryan and his companion return to the present to discover that it now appears exactly as Jon had seen it. Jon, though, is dead, since he had no place in the new world. While it is tempting to see Jon as a Christ-figure in this process, as one who pronounces a world to come and who effects the change by means of his death, there are too many anomalies for even a superficial fit. Rather, Jon's death is a result of the new world rather than the precipitating cause of it, and there is no sense of the redemptive.

What is noteworthy is the nature of Jon's visions and the vocabulary used by Dick to describe them. As noted, there is the sense that Jon's visions describe the real world, the one that is hidden by the present reality, which, as it turns out, is ultimately unreal.

Jon took a deep breath. “They're visions.”

“What?”

“They're visions.” Jon's face was alive with radiance. “I've known it a long time. Grant says they're not, but they are. If you could see them you'd know, too. They're not like anything else. More real than, well, than this.” He thumped the wall. “More real than dust.”

Ryan lit a cigarette slowly. “Go on.”

It all came with a rush. “More real than anything else! Like looking through a window. A window into another world. A real world. Much more real than this. It makes all this just a shadow world. Only dim shadows. Shapes. Images.”

“Shadows of an ultimate reality?”

“Yes! Exactly. The world behind all this.”

(57)

Standard elements of dualistic philosophies abound here: the two worlds, one apparently real but ultimately illusion, the other hidden but perfectly real; the idea of images in one world being mere shadows of their real counterparts in the other; Jon's wish that his father could see (i.e., apprehend) them as well; and an allusion perhaps to the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13.12, “For today we see through a glass darkly, but in the future face to face; for today I know in part, but in the future I shall know fully, just as I have been known fully.”⁹ To be sure, these are mere elements, and no more than that, explainable equally with reference to basic Platonic philosophy or to rudimentary gnostic dualism. But they are here nonetheless.

THE COSMIC PUPPETS

As with much of Dick's later fiction, the plot of The Cosmic Puppets involves the protagonist, in this case Ted Barton, becoming aware that all is not right with his surroundings.¹⁰ But unlike Jack Hamilton of Eye in the Sky or Ragle Gumm of TOJ, who gradually awaken to the knowledge that the reality they perceive is unreal, Barton concludes nearly from the very beginning that his home town, Millgate, is not as it should be (§2:11-17). Bewildered at the unexpectedness of it all, Barton wonders,

Maybe he wasn't Ted Barton.

False memories. Even his name, his identity. The whole contents of his mind—everything. Falsified, by someone or something. His hands gripped the wheel desperately. But if he wasn't Ted Barton—then who was he?

(§2:17; emphasis in original)

The theme of external referents and criteria being able to affect inner states will be employed again in MHC, where the dynamic is far more developed and is taken as a characteristic of the sensible world, or that domain from which the novel's five major players seek redemption. Among its various expressions in that novel is the relationship between one's identity and the documents that either support or disprove it, and the problem of the consanguinity between an artifact and its historical authenticity. Part of the discussion about these issues has root in Dick's use of the apostle Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 13.12 (see above). Sutin informs us that the original title of Cosmic Puppets was A Glass of Darkness (292), and it is noteworthy that Dick quotes explicitly from the biblical passage to explain the nature of the strange happenings in the town (§11:91).

Having discovered that nothing is quite the same in Millgate as he remembers (an adumbration of the slightly skewed realities of MHC and of its novel-within-a-novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy), Barton proceeds to collect more clues to the mystery. He finds that he cannot leave the town, that certain children play prominent roles, and that Millgate is now home to the “Wanderers,” the shadow-persons who have the strange ability to move through solid objects. With the help of an old drunkard named William Christopher, Barton eventually concludes that the former Millgate and all of its objects are not gone but merely obscured. After transforming a wine bottle into a coffee grinder by the power of his mind, Christopher tells Barton: “[The old town] wasn't destroyed. It was buried. It's under the surface. There's a layer over it. A dark fog. Illusion. They came and laid this black cloud over everything. But the real town's underneath. And it can be brought back” (§7:62; emphasis in original).

The classic elements of dualistic cosmologies are present: the implication of two separate spheres of reality and the inference of a light/dark, good/evil dichotomy. But there is more here than straightforward dualism, and it is not merely “Vedantism” (pace Douglas Mackey 16) or the simple elimination of maya (illusion), since the vocabulary of the quotation harkens back specifically to the substance of the passage from 1 Corinthians. What we have here, I believe, is an extremely early, undeveloped, but unmistakably characteristic instance of Dick's conflation of similar elements of different philosophies. This reading is supported by Dick's description of the mechanics of the movement from one realm to another, which sounds at the same time vaguely gnostic Christian and Indian monistic but lacks utterly the sort of scholarly precision that Dick accords—to use an extreme example—his theological positions in VALIS. Barton brings back the old Millgate by remembering it (certainly not a hallmark of Vedanta!), by engaging his intellect to cast aside the veil of illusion and to recall the underlying verities (§8:68). This, watered down as it is, is classic gnostic philosophy. Note also that the Wanderers attempt to restore the old Millgate by mapping the town with their eyes shut, because the illusion reappears the instant that they open their eyes (§11:89). The overall inference is that Dick is describing a distinction between the sensible (temporal) and the intelligible (eternal) worlds, a core tenet of Platonic and many other dualistic philosophies, both Western and Eastern. Knowledge is the key to understanding the quintessential nature of things: when Peter/Ahriman mocks Barton's helplessness, he says, “You don't know anything,” and taunts, “I know who you really are” (§3:26; emphasis in original). Likewise, when Barton attempts to help Dr. Meade realize his divine self, he says to him, “I know who you are. I know who you really are” (§14:114; emphasis in original).

There is an important section in the tenth chapter of The Cosmic Puppets that bears particular scrutiny. Having restored Millgate to its former self, Barton and Christopher encounter Mary, the daughter of Dr. Meade/Ormazd, who asks the pair about what they have been creating. Barton responds by denying that an effective, creative power has been in operation and reasserting that all they had done was to make things “emerge” from behind their unreal distortions (§10:83-85). This is strikingly similar to the function of the “word” of Ragle Gumm in TOJ. But there is an added, cosmological dimension to Barton's actions. Mary inquires, “Is that why you came here? To bring things back?” (§10:84; emphasis in original). All of a sudden the reader recalls that Barton is the anomaly, the only visitor allowed into Millgate in the past dozen or so years. Somehow, he is special. The themes of renewal and restoration, the focus on the efficacy of remembering (i.e., knowledge), on the underlying dualistic reality, and on the figure of Ted Barton together smack of the gnostic redeemer myth,¹¹ albeit in a capsulized presentation more likely to be found in an undergraduate textbook or a popular introduction to world religions than in any gnostic Christian tractate. Furthermore, their efforts notwithstanding, the Wanderers are ultimately unable to restore the former Millgate “[b]ecause they're distorted themselves” (§11:89; emphasis in original). This argument reflects classic Pauline theology, which presents Christ as the external, superior, liberating, redemptive Power who is necessary to free humankind from the Power of Sin, a Power that mere repentance and forgiveness are not enough to overcome. Barton is featured as this external agent, almost salvific in character, who is required to transform and renew the town. It is only later that we find that his role was in a sense predestined, directed from its very beginnings by Mary/Armaiti, the daughter of Ormazd, who also displays redeemer characteristics (§14:119).

All the same, and despite the conflation of several rather interesting Platonic, Pauline, and gnostic Christian ingredients, the chief lens through which Dick projects the dualism of The Cosmic Puppets is Zoroastrianism, the pre-Christian religion that is understood by many scholars to be one of the important contexts from which sprang Jewish and Christian dualism, especially in their apocalyptic or gnostic varieties. The contest is ultimately between Ahriman and Ormazd, and the age-old battle between the evenly-matched forces of light and dark, good and evil. This aspect of the novel has been explored in detail by other commentators, though a few additional points might be made. First, Sutin sees Mary as “a precursor of Sophia in Valis … and Zina in The Divine Invasion—both youthful female incarnations of the divine spirit” (292). The Sophia of VALIS, however, is the sophia (i.e., “wisdom”) of the Greek philosophers, of the Jewish authors of Wisdom literature, and of the gnostic Christian theologians. There is an enormous history of ideas behind this kind of Sophia that is quite distinct from the goddess-figure of the Classical and Ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and this history is one of which Dick is both aware and explores fully in VALIS. But Sutin may be correct in highlighting this “female incarnation” aspect in The Cosmic Puppets, for in Mary's death and rebirth there are hints of the regenerative cycle of Persephone. Also, it is fascinating to find that Mary gives life to little clay golems, thereby mimicking the primal act of creation from dust and clay. Second, the Zoroastrianism of The Cosmic Puppets is one that has been stripped down to its essentials¹² and, as noted, has had non-Zoroastrian elements appended to it. This demonstrates that even at this early stage in his career, Dick was competent and confident enough to absorb a number of different religious and philosophical systems and arrive at a personal synthesis. It is not enough, then, to envision The Cosmic Puppets as being Dick's one-time experimentation with Iranian cosmology. Rather, Dick's amalgamation of certain themes in this novel (not excepting the Zoroastrian ones), comparatively crude as it may be, is the first instance of a process that will reoccur time and again, though never quite in the same fashion as we find in this book.

THE WORLD JONES MADE

Dick's next novel revolves around the mysterious Jones, a “precog” who has the ability to witness events one year into the future. Jones exists in what would very quickly become the stereotypical early-Dickian Sitz-im-Leben: a small slice of a world of the near-future that is shaped largely by a peculiar ideology (in this case, “Relativism”),¹³ whose economic and political institutions are quasi-totalitarian and rather removed from the common people, and whose society labors under the problems of urban and moral decay and collectivization. The protagonist is Cussick, a secret-service agent whose job is to seek out and quell absolutist ideologies. As a precog, Jones is the ultimate absolutist, and most of the novel describes the rise and fall of his power, often in the context of his relationship with Cussick and his superior, Pearson. Cussick, however, is—contra Mackey (21)—more than just a foil or double for Jones. Jones's absolutist understanding of the future (i.e., it is or it is not) cannot change, even though he becomes disillusioned with its eventual inability to save himself or the species from a slow death, the latter as a result of their treatment of the “drifters,” who are later identified as the spores of a highly-evolved interstellar plant species. As Mackey recognizes, there is “no redemption, no transcendence, only entropy. [Jones] is caught up with ‘sin and retribution’ and condemns himself for trying to extend human freedom to the stars but accomplishing the reverse—causing Earth a Fall of major proportions” (21). In contrast, Cussick questions and modifies his interpretation of the world constantly and makes concrete and efficacious decisions about his future. And where Jones and humankind suffer a catastrophic “Fall,” there is a definite redemptive/restorative aspect to the fates of Cussick and the diminutive inhabitants of the Refuge, who are a collection of genetically-engineered mutants, all of whom find new life on the planet Venus.

The figure of Jones represents, I think, a very primitive attempt at expressing the concept of an in-breaking information vector or, in other words, the logos (and its various incarnations) of so many dualistic cosmologies. To be sure, Jones is also a lot more than this, and there is no sense in the book of a division between the sensible and intelligible domains (or a transmission from the latter to the former), even though the clash in the novel is between “relativism” and “absolutism.” But certain aspects of Jones's actions are enunciated in ways that, in a clearer and more developed format, will become those by which Dick expresses aspects of dualism in TOJ and MHC. Jones is called a “prophet” and is compared to John the Baptist, or the one who acts as the informative forerunner (§9:83). Earlier, having witnessed the coming of Jones and of the drifters and the relentless passing of the reality with which he is familiar, Cussick remarks, “Our little cosmos is breaking up. The real world is on its way” (§8:67), and the agent of this break-up and the herald of the “real world” is Jones.

On one hand, it seems almost too easy to interpret this statement by Cussick exclusively in light of the distinction between the idios kosmos (the private, or egoistic, cosmos) and the koinos kosmos (the common, or shared, cosmos), a distinction that is a staple of the scholarly studies on Dick. After all, Dick himself confesses that he has been “very much influenced” by such existential philosophy and that in nearly all of his books “the protagonist is suffering from a breakdown of his idios kosmos.” But Dick wrote this in 1970, and it is noteworthy that both Mackey (22-23) and Kim Stanley Robinson (15) cite this quotation in the context of their discussions of Dick's 1950s novels. My own feeling is that the simple application of this idios kosmos/koinos kosmos dynamic to explain Dick's novels is quite unsatisfactory, since the dynamic itself is so general and its specific permutations are so wildly diverse that the category is meaningless outside its function as a basic introduction to Dick's philosophy. What are we saying when we note that the protagonist's idios kosmos is under stress in a particular Dickian novel? All we have done is call a cat “a cat.” Moreover, the application of the idios/koinos kosmos dynamic cannot be used to explain completely any of Dick's classic works, which contain nuances well beyond the basic erosion of the idioi kosmoi of his characters. Furthermore, the dynamic is not always appropriate; for instance, in The World Jones Made there is a clear collapse of the koinos kosmos (cf. §8:69) in favor of the idios kosmos of Jones. What would be infinitely more helpful, therefore, is an examination of how (and perhaps why) Dick's understanding of the clash between the two kosmoi changed and grew more complex, and (most importantly) how this change is illustrated in his works. And since this understanding is almost always expressed by means of Dick's gnostic/dualistic Weltanschauung, perhaps herein lie fruitful insights regarding the evolution of the dynamic from its earliest beginnings, through its powerful expressions in works like MHC, Martian Time-Slip, Three Stigmata, and Ubik (1969), to the mature and methodical philosophy of the VALIS novels.

To return to the novel, The World Jones Made lacks the distinction between the intelligible and sensible universes that are found in TOJ and MHC. But as Jones operates in a manner vaguely akin to the logos, Cussick resembles somewhat the figure of Ragle Gumm as he watches the gradual death of his world. There are long sections dealing with Fedgov's collapse (§8:67, 69) that parallel the erosion of the Earth government's authority in TOJ, and the desertion of its critical personnel (§11:104) foreshadows the incremental disappearance of the Old Town of Ragle Gumm's experience. One of the intriguing features of MHC is that while they are enmeshed in the process of coming to grips with the self-recognition that they live in a state of Sin, a number of the novel's major characters suffer pronounced mental and physical anguish. In a long episode spanning two full chapters of The World Jones Made (§9-10:74-97) and including a description of drug use and sex-changing hermaphrodites, Cussick's personal life disintegrates before his eyes. The illusion of his marriage to Nina crumbles into dust as masks are dropped and inner selves are revealed, a mirror of the way in which the falsehoods of society as a whole have been shattered and left to rot by Jones. The hermaphrodites that the Cussicks encounter at the nightclub are the ultimate expression of relativism, and full-bore contact with them in the company of an obviously interested and experienced Nina causes Cussick's ongoing struggle with himself and his views of reality to reach a climax. Throughout, Cussick's psyche suffers. The scene ends in a small room; there both Cussick and Nina comprehend that as their marriage has reached its end, so too has the society of which they are a part. There is, however, a tiny ray of hope for the latter, though eventually it will be expressed not in the way the reader expects. Describing this room, Nina confesses: “It's sort of—like in the Middle Ages,” she answered. “Just this little room, just the single bed—like a cot. The dresser and the wash stand. Chastity, poverty, obedience … a sort of spiritual cleansing, for me. For all of us” (§10:97). The idea of a “spiritual cleansing” (an idea that Dick will recycle in MHC in the person of Juliana Frink) not only foreshadows Nina's eventual return to Cussick, but also acts as a harbinger to the unmentioned but anticipated return from exile on Venus of Cussick, Nina, and their son Jackie.

As with the quest for the Flame Disc in Solar Lottery (1955),¹⁴ the sections involving the Refuge mutants and their search for a home are not completely harmonized with the rest of The World Jones Made. The theme of a group of people who live and operate in a world-within-a-world would eventually come to be recognized as classic Dick, but it is left quite undeveloped in this novel. There is little explicit concern with redemption; perhaps “deliverance” might be a better way of explaining the flight of the mutants from the Refuge to their new home on Venus. Typical elements like land and descendants are stressed, but the individual personalities of the Refuge never rise beyond stock. More unusual is the reversal of fortune that causes Cussick and his family to become prisoners of a Venusian Refuge. But this new Refuge is unlike the old one on earth, which was neither created by its occupants nor occupied by them voluntarily. Cussick is there of his own free will (§20:190); if Earth is “The World Jones Made,” the Venusian Refuge is most certainly “The World Cussick Made.” Like a latter-day Noah, Cussick has brought with him to his ark as much as he could of Earth's flora and fauna. And in this situation is implied the redemptive aspect of the book, however stunted it might be when compared to later novels. From their exile, Cussick, Nina, and Jackie wait until the time when they can return to the Earth that has fallen from grace by virtue of Jones's actions. He is Ragle Gumm as Ragle Gumm would have been had he been aware of his situation from the beginning. Cussick exists in an artificial world, but it is of his own making and he lives in the full knowledge that he and his kin will one day return to Earth.

EYE IN THE SKY

Along with TOJ, this work is the best of Dick's pre-MHC novels. In it, a freak particle-accelerator accident renders Jack Hamilton, his wife Marsha, and six other persons unconscious, their individual personalities in thrall to a succession of realities that are determined by the imposition of one personality after another over the group as a whole. In sequence, the group suffers through the religious fanaticism of Arthur Silvester, the censorious banality of Edith Pritchet, the paranoid claustrophobia of Joan Reiss, and finally the secret communist sympathies of Charley McFeyffe, who in the world outside the Bevatron is the force behind the anti-communist attack on Marsha Hamilton. In an essay that remains as fresh today as it was when it first saw print over fifteen years ago, Peter Fitting rightly eschews reference to the idios/koinos kosmos dynamic and instead identifies the two most significant themes in Eye in the Sky: “a critique of the technological optimism inherent in the American Dream” (222) and the exposure of pluralism as an ideology that in some critical ways cannot tolerate consensus any more than can Silvester's toxic Babism or McFeyffe's anti-individualistic communism (223-224). Underpinning both of these themes, though, is the idea that the world of sense perception cannot be trusted, a hallmark of a host of two-world philosophies. The novel is, in a broad fashion, very much concerned with redemption, if not the particular redemption from the state of Sin that characterizes MHC. Eye in the Sky begins and ends with Hamilton, his job, and the allegations of Marsha's communist sympathies that so threaten this job. Accordingly, we can understand how the conception of redemption structures the novel by gauging the difference between Hamilton's internal state at its start and at its end, and by observing the manner in which this change is effected by his experiences while he is unconscious.

Most important, of course, is the clash between the diverse realities that Jack Hamilton apprehends with his senses and the world that he has left behind while trapped on the floor of the Bevatron. Even from the time immediately following the accident and without the knowledge of how or why he has come to exist in this state, Hamilton feels intuitively that “something was wrong,” and, “deep inside him, there was a nagging sense that something basic was out of phase” (§3:27). Later, Jack, Marsha, and Bill Laws, their erstwhile guide, wonder if they have “sunk down to the real reality” (§4:45), a view that, as it turns out, is incorrect, but nevertheless indicates how Dick perceived the relationship between reality and its false shadows as being oriented along the vertical axis, just as he would a few years later in MHC. Each of the superimposed realities is incomplete and lacking something essential, since none of the individual gestalts extends beyond the limitations of the personality that created it. Fitting recognizes that each gestalt is “totalizing” in its lack of consensus, but there is a physical incompleteness as well, as if (to borrow the analogy employed by many dualistic philosophies) each one represented only a shadow-image of reality. There is an element of causality and an internal logic within the confines of each gestalt, but these have been molded by the perceptions of the personality. Reality, therefore, is seen differently by each person, and often not very well at that; still, each person believes his or her reality functions as well as or better than what had come before (cf. Joan Reiss's contention that her creation is perfect [§13:186]). Although not quoted directly in Eye in the Sky, the passage from the apostle Paul about looking through a glass darkly would not be at all out of place in this novel.

The gulf between the reality of the Bevatron floor and the various gestalten is only traversed by those vectors that are not sense-dependent, namely, intuition (see above) and dream-visions, the last functioning in Eye in the Sky as the in-breaking agent (i.e., the logos) of the real world into the false shadow-demesnes. Again, the basic parallel with all sorts of dualistic philosophies is undeniable. Soon after the accident occurs, Marsha Hamilton tells Bill Laws and her husband that she had the strangest dream, wherein she saw all eight persons unconscious on the Bevatron floor. Both Laws and Hamilton confirm that they too have experienced the same dream. Throughout the novel the dream-vision reasserts itself at the times when one gestalt is replaced by another. Marsha also wonders when they are going to wake up (§15:224), another indication that Dick is exploiting the common language of dualistic cosmologies, and one that has no referent in an idios/koinos kosmos dynamic. What is the implication of these themes and language? Fitting is absolutely correct when he notes that because of their rejection of consensus, “the four subjective realities … are portrayed as extremes” (224). But the deeper message of the book that is surely conveyed by Dick's deliberate use of the categories of dualistic cosmologies is that any reality whose antecedent is sense-perception (and thus, each of the gestalten that imposes itself on the collective) is essentially bankrupt as a barometer both by which others may judge an individual and the self may judge itself. In contrast, the vision of the eight on the Bevatron floor is universal; all see it, and it is the same for each person.¹⁵

Therefore, the state about which Hamilton gains knowledge and which he transcends is the one where false opinion and untrustworthy sense-data hold sway. It will come as no surprise to discover that the novel was originally titled With Opened Mind (Rickman 296; Sutin 90).¹⁶ Partly to bring a close to the locomotive plot of the novel, Dick translates this revelation/redemption into Hamilton's critique of McFeyffe's accusations against Martha, but its application is by no means restricted to this one case. Hamilton understands that the criterion of evaluation in the sensible world cannot prove his wife's innocence or McFeyffe's guilt. Like Robert Childan of MHC, Hamilton realizes that personal identity cannot be proved using external data when he observes that it is what goes on inside that counts (§16:247; contrast this with the presentation of the documentation of the evidence against Marsha in §1:10-13). This view is further reinforced when he asserts that he could be hired at another firm, not because its director knew his father, which is mere opinion, but because Hamilton has faith that he is a first-rate electronics man (§16:249). In fact, he and Laws will go on to work together creating hi-fidelity music equipment, and in this decision and in the insistence on faith in oneself, Hamilton prefigures the character of Frank Frink in MHC.¹⁷ In the end, Hamilton recognizes that his experience was one of “awakening conscience,” wherein his perspective has been altered irrevocably (§16:250). Whether Dick here drew on Asian mystery religions or gnostic Christianity is impossible to determine; as mentioned, it is far more likely that Dick at this stage in his career had a deep yet conflated and unrefined appreciation of various philosophies. The point is that the foundations for Dick's later and more developed gnostic explorations were clearly in place well before the events of early 1974 and the novels of the last years of his career, and even before such novels as Stigmata and Ubik.

THE MAN WHO JAPED

This novel is among the very weakest of Dick's efforts. Allen Purcell is the director of the official television network of Moral Reclamation (Morec), the Big Brother that is the backlash against the previous age of conspicuous consumption and the organ that regulates life and lifestyle through propaganda, block meetings, and so on. But Purcell has another side to him of which he is only dimly aware: he is the rebel against the system, a man who has japed (or “made parody of”) a statue of the founder of Morec. The rest of the novel involves Purcell's attempts at discovering and coming to grips with his true self. In this process dreams and hallucinatory visions play a large part, mainly in the service of communicating the fact that the world in which he exists is not exactly real. Not only does Purcell make the break from the enforced puritanism of Morec, he also rejects totally its antithesis—namely, his life as John Coates in a typical, middle-class suburban family.

The easiest explanation for what is occurring here is also the most unsatisfactory: Alan Purcell, like Jack Hamilton or Ted Barton or Ragle Gumm, is simply Dick's “everyman” vehicle for exploring the question of “What Is Real?” But this clearly will not do, since in each of the latter three cases both the question and its answer are clothed in some sort of dualistic dress, even if not yet (at this very early stage) in the full regalia of gnostic Christian raiment that we find in Dick's final works. Mackey observes perceptively that “Purcell's ascendancy to Morec power in his outer life coincides with a breakdown in the control Morec has on his inner life” (25). This struggle between the facade of the external body and the inner self's wanting to do the right thing (an overt theme in TOJ and MHC) is at the core of The Man Who Japed.

At the start of the novel Purcell is engaged in defending one of his ad packets to the Morec people. The packet concerned someone's failed attempt to grow an apple tree on a colony planet; Purcell explains, “The tree symbolizes an Earth product that withers when it's transplanted. His spiritual side died” (§2:15). Later on, while reliving a lost half-hour in Dr. Malparto's office, Purcell recalls meeting a gang of teenagers, who tell him about the various efforts to grow food and raise animals on other planets (§9:57-59). One lad notes that the pigs they breed on Orionus are so real that one cannot tell the difference from the original. The connexion with Purcell's views on the transplanted apple tree is obvious, and in a moment of insight, Purcell realizes “Morec wasn't natural” (§9:59). In this he expresses the essence of what has been happening to him. The secret japing, the growing unease with the block meetings and the propaganda, his disquiet over the system in general—all of this was his inner self rebelling against the external illusion it could no longer bear. The enforced banality of Morec was not natural; it was an external pseudo-reality that had been superimposed forcefully on humankind.

Like Ragle Gumm of TOJ, Purcell finds a horde of books and other printed material whose contents do not appear to fit into the universe in which he currently resides (§9:60-65). These books and articles function in the same way for both men, namely, they contain data about a reality that cannot be understood substantively or contextually within the restrictions of that present world. As Purcell exclaims, such books “tell the truth” (§9:65). They are in-breaking information systems, and so are the most remote and primitive forerunners of Zebra/Valis. Thus, The Man Who Japed essentially revolves around the escalating clash between Purcell's inner self and an external, inimical, and superimposed reality. Once Purcell realizes the source of the clash that has caused him to do all sorts of odd things, he resolves to use the very apparatus of the system to destroy it. As Mackey notes, Purcells's victory “lies in breaking out from being a passive receiver of Morec's reality structure and becoming the active shaper of his own reality” (26).

SUMMARY

There can be little doubt that the complex and systematic gnostic Christian fantasies of Philip K. Dick's later writings find their first manifestation in his early fiction, albeit in extremely simplistic and undeveloped forms. All too often Dick's speculative fiction—his early writings, his masterpieces of the 1960s, or his mature novels—has been narrowly viewed either in the light of the idios/koinos kosmoi distinction or by reference to dualistic philosophies, but rarely by both, at least until one encounters the many scholarly commentaries on VALIS. Perhaps one key in proceeding to a better understanding of Dick's fiction is to accept that this conflict between the kosmoi is most often expressed by means of the grammar and in the vocabulary of dualistic cosmologies. To be sure, in these early works the grammar is undistinguished and the vocabulary extremely limited. But they are present all the same.

Notes

1. Rossi and I continue our scholarly debate in a forthcoming issue of Extrapolation: Rossi's reply offers some fresh insights into the novel and is followed by my essay, “A Response to U. Rossi.” Meanwhile, Kenneth Krabbenhoft's recent SFS essay is a case in point about what I call an “open” approach. Commenting on his method, Krabbenhoft writes, “This essay approaches Dick's achievement by taking Don Quixote as a model—consciously emulated or not—for the creation of characters and themes in Time Out of Joint” (218). No attempt is made to justify the application of the model other than by means of pursuing certain similarities or parallels between both works. Whether Dick used this model in such a way is irrelevant, and Krabbenhoft notes this. To be sure, such an approach is not without merit, and indeed Krabbenhoft's paper is intriguing and enlightening. It sheds no light, however, on Dick's philosophy or theology, since no connection between these things and Krabbenhoft's conclusions is demonstrated.

2. These works are, in chronological order, with the date of first publication in parentheses, and with mainstream titles indicated with an asterisk: Return to Lilliput (not extant; Williams suggests that “there are probably other early novels of which neither manuscript nor name survive” [178]); The Earthshaker (only partially extant); The Cosmic Puppets (1956; expanded into a book 1957); Voices from the Street*; Gather Yourselves Together* (1994); Solar Lottery (1955); The World Jones Made (1956); Eye in the Sky (1957); Mary and the Giant* (1987); The Man Who Japed (1956); A Time for George Stavros* (not extant, but partially recycled in Humpty Dumpty in Oakland [1986]); Pilgrim on the Hill* (not extant); The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt* (published as The Broken Bubble [1988]); Puttering About in a Small Land* (1985); Nicholas and the Higs* (not extant; mainstream with fantasy/science-fiction elements, according to Williams [180]); Time Out of Joint (1959); In Milton Lumky Territory* (1985); Dr. Futurity (1960; rewritten from his 1953 novelette “Time Pawn”); Confessions of a Crap Artist* (1975); Vulcan's Hammer (1960; rewritten from a 1953 or 1954 novelette); The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike* (1984); Humpty Dumpty in Oakland* (1986).

3. See Sutin, chapters 3-5 passim, covering the years 1944-1963.

4. There is also a real danger in interpreting Dick's fiction in light of the motion pictures based on his works. In the late spring of 2000 I attended an interesting lecture given at the University of Guelph on Dick and Blade Runner (1982). While I very much enjoyed the arguments and conclusions regarding the motion picture, I was deeply disturbed that the film was being employed throughout the lecture as evidence of Dick's philosophy. Moreover, reference to Christian elements in the film—again, presented as Dick's own views—were made without even a passing mention accorded to like elements in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).

5. See Dick, In Pursuit 165-203 passim.

6. Dick, In Pursuit 168. By the time of VALIS Tractate 18, Dick adopts the current scholarly fashion and calls the date “70 C.E.” (“Common Era”).

7. Of course, this reluctance to use Dick's later writings to interpret his earlier ones could be used to support the extreme view that gnosticism was completely unimportant to Dick until Three Stigmata (or VALIS). I think that this perspective is readily refuted by this essay and by my previous papers on the subject. Consider also Dick's outline for a novel-length work called “The Earthshaker,” which Rickman (216) guesses was written in 1948-49. Part of the outline deals with a chapter (?) labeled “The Quest,” and in describing this quest, Dick writes that the search occurs “through Books. Faust. the gnosis. [sic] Cabala” (qtd in Rickman 216-17). To be sure, “the gnosis” could on the surface mean a variety of different things, but the object of this quest is explicit: it is the “JWH serpent” that is gnawing on Yiggdrasil [sic], the world-tree. “JWH” is of course, the “YHWH” of the Hebrew Bible, but in classic gnostic theology (or at least a scholarly synthesis of classic gnostic theology, from which Dick likely drew), Yahweh is the name of the mad, bad demiurge-creator, the evil and malicious god of the Old Testament.

8. The story was originally published in the 1954 anthology Time to Come, edited by August Derleth.

9. My translation. In MHC Dick is interested only in the passage's concern with questions of the two worlds, and not with the Christ who is the central subject and object of Paul's theology. Paul's words (and Dick's special interest in them) will again surface in the title and in much of the substance of Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

10. This theme resurfaces in his later novels Ubik and A Maze of Death (1970).

11. There is great debate among scholars as to the origins, antiquity, development, and manifestations of this gnostic redeemer figure. This need not concern us, however, since it seems evident that Dick relied at this time on secondary sources mostly, and the scholarship on the subject in the 1940s and 1950s (from which Dick would have drawn) was more convinced of such a myth than it is today.

12. Mackey suggests that Dick's “theology is more complex than meets the eye,” and argues that there is the implication that the supreme divinity stands above the dualistic struggle and thus that Dick begins here his search “for an absolute principle beyond good and evil” (15-16). But Dick's presentation of Iranian dualism is sophomoric at best; Mackey reads too much into it. The real complexity of the theology resides in the amalgamation of the common elements of several dualistic cosmologies.

13. Other examples of such quirky systematic ideologies include “Minimax” (in Solar Lottery), “Anti-communism” (in Eye in the Sky), and “Morec” (in The Man Who Japed).

14. Solar Lottery is mostly concerned with problems of production and urban society and with the interface between government and business. The only aspect that concerns us here is the Prestonites and their search for the Flame Disc that lies well beyond the orbit of Pluto, a plot-line that is not entirely integrated into the rest of the book. Robinson and Sutin more or less ignore it; Mackey merely calls it “intriguing” and stresses Preston's final speech as one that sums up “Dick's larger philosophy” (19); and Thomas M. Disch opines that its “sequences fail because they haven't been sufficiently transformed from orthodox Christian eschatology” (24). It is unclear to what Disch alludes by this last: “orthodox” presumably is intended to mean “normative” rather than “Eastern Orthodox,” but this does not explain his utilization of “eschatology,” which properly deals with the occurrences of the eschaton, or the end-time. There is nothing eschatological about Solar Lottery or the quest for the Flame Disc, and Disch's bold statement that in the novel “Dick is not about to make a declaration for Christ, though he always seems to be flirting with the possibility” (24) is neither supported nor explained. Nor is there anything particularly redemptive about the search for the Disc, either in an individual sense or a corporate one.

    Even a close reading of the Prestonite sequences in Solar Lottery is of little analytical value. A clue, perhaps, to the nature and purpose of the Flame Disc lies is the name of John Preston, which immediately calls to mind the figure of Prester John, the legendary priest-king of the late middle ages whose wealthy and powerful Christian kingdom was believed to be somewhere in either Africa (usually Abyssinia) or Asia. Many explorers searched for this fabulous kingdom, a quest that seems to find a parallel not only in the Prestonite ship sent to the Outer Void, but also in the book's final quotation, highlighted by Mackey, which speaks of “the need to grow and advance … to find new things … to expand” (§17:200). That Dick knew of the Prester John legend is confirmed by his use of the term in the short story “Souvenir,” originally published in Fantastic Universe in October 1954. Edward Rogers, upon landing upon the surface of the centuries-lost Williamson's world (the world colonized by “the first Terran to develop an outer-space drive”) comments, “We've searched for Williamson's world for three centuries. We've wanted it, dreamed of finding it. It seemed like Prester John's Empire—a fabulous world, cut off from the rest of humanity. Maybe not real at all” (361).

    The Flame Disc itself is intriguing, although there seems to be no direct antecedent for the concept. Noteworthy also is the fact that whereas the struggle in The Cosmic Puppets between Ahriman and Ormazd is one with otherworldly attributes, the trek to the Flame Disc takes places very much in this reality, even though it is in outer space. Overall, we must conclude that Solar Lottery is one of Dick's works that does not present at least some aspect of his fascination with dualistic cosmologies

15. In his short story “Shell Game,” published in Galaxy in September 1954, Dick plays with the question of whether a thing might be evaluated by means of internal criteria only.

16. Rickman notes that “originally it was the Judeo-Christian God whose Eye stares at Hamilton and McFeyffe,” and that editor Donald A. Wollheim at Ace forced Dick to remove these references and to substitute instead a vaguely Arabesque “Babism” (296). But what kind of “Judeo-Christian God” was there in the first place? In Eye in the Sky, the supreme deity is not “Allah” but “Tetragrammaton.” The tetragrammaton is, of course, the ineffable and unspeakable divine name, [original Hebrew characters deleted] (YHWH), composed of four Hebrew consonants. But Christians on the whole do not refer to their god as “YHWH” or “the tetragrammaton.” We have seen that Dick was familiar with the basic gnostic myth, including the view that YHWH was the evil creator-deity of the Old Testament (see note 7 above). The use of the tetragrammaton, especially if it was a holdover from Dick's first draft, may be another clue that Dick is flirting with basic gnostic dualism here.

17. On the value of craftmanship, see also his short story “Pay for the Printer,” originally published in Satellite Science Fiction in October 1956.

In my previous articles (see Works Cited), the title of this present essay was listed as “Reflections on the First Five Novels of Philip K. Dick.” I have since decided to include a few of Dick's pre-Man in the High Castle short stories in my examination, and so the title was altered accordingly.

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. The Cosmic Puppets. New York: Ace, 1957.

———. Eye in the Sky. 1957. New York: Collier, 1989.

———. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, ed. Lawrence Sutin. Novato, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1991.

———. “Jon's World.” 1952. In The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety. Los Angeles, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1987. 53-81.

———. The Man Who Japed. New York: Ace, 1956.

———. “Pay for the Printer.” 1956. In The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Three: The Father-Thing. Los Angeles, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1987. 239-52.

———. “Shell Game.” 1954. In The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Three: The Father-Thing. Los Angeles, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1987. 189-202.

———. “Souvenir.” 1954. In The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety. Los Angeles, CA: Underwood/Miller, 1987. 355-65.

———. Solar Lottery. 1955. New York: Collier, 1992.

———. The World Jones Made. 1956. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Disch, Thomas M. “Toward the Transcendent: An Introduction to Solar Lottery and Other Works.” In Philip K. Dick, eds. Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. New York: Taplinger, 1983. 13-25.

DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “A λόγος or Two Concerning the λόγος of Umberto Rossi and Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint.” Extrapolation 39.4 (Winter 1988): 287-98.

———. “Redemption in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle.” SFS 26.1 (March 1999): 1-30.

———. “A Response to U. Rossi on P.K. Dick's Time Out of Joint: Some Final Words and Thoughts on Future Directions in Dick Scholarship.” Extrapolation, forthcoming.

Fitting, Peter. “Reality as Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels by Philip K. Dick.” SFS 10.2 (July 1983): 219-36.

Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. “Uses of Madness in Cervantes and Philip K. Dick.” SFS 27.2 (July 2000): 216-33.

Mackey, Douglas. Philip K. Dick. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

McGowan, Thomas. “Conversion and Human Development.” In New Religions and Mental Health: Understanding the Issues, ed. Herbert Richardson. New York: Edward Mellon, 1980. 127-73.

Rickman, Gregg. To the High Castle. Philip K. Dick: A Life, 1928-1962. Long Beach, CA: Valentine, 1989.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1981.

Rossi, Umberto. “Just a Bunch of Words: The Image of the Secluded Family and the Problem of λόγος in P.K. Dick's Time Out of Joint.” Extrapolation 37.3 (Fall 1996): 195-211.

Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony, 1989.