WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE: Afterword by Barry Malzberg
写的很好的后记，最独特之处就是他拿PKD的几部小说名作为小节名，而且跟他所说的内容还都很贴切。自己拿着书录入的，需要转载请在我空间上留言告知一声，http://214314.blogbus.com/logs/10152468.html。
WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE: AN AFTERWORD TO DICK’S CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON
Barry Malzberg
EYE IN THE SKY
In his last years, Phil Dick believed that he lived under the benign influence of a cosmic force whose vectors coincided with those of his small apartment. (He would not seek better quarters, for that reason.) The force whispered in his ear, gave him instruction, was largely responsible for Valis, his metaphysical novel. The force assured him that most conventional assumptions of history and religiosity were insane and that humanity had essentially been worshiping the wrong icons for many centuries. (All of this is articulated not only in Valis but in an interview with Charles Platt published in Dream Makers: 1980.) Under the influence of his mentor, Dick’s career flourished. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was bought for film and his works started to slip back into print. For the first time in his career he began to see considerable amounts of money. In 1980, his last full year, he made $200,000 and wrote his final novel, Bishop Timothy Archer, as well as a few short stories which sold to Omni and Playboy. The consensus was that he had never been writing better nor had his work ever been so appreciated. Who was to say, then, that his mentor was wrong? Any science fiction writer who had run the full course of a thirty-year career could use some cosmic guidance; this was a field which was always difficult and intermittently murderous, as Dick himself had occasionally observed. You found your friends where you could.
THE ZAP GUN
One seeks to write an afterword in the style of a Phil Dick novel. Superficially this is easy – many different strands of invention, only marginally related, occurring in what seems to be improvisatory fashion – but actually it is not. Even in the bad Phil Dick novels – and there are quite a few of them – the strands turn out to be more cunningly interrelated than one thought; accrue to a kind of maniacal correctness. Lord Running Clam’s mitosis is, after all, a commentary upon the childless marriage of the Rittersdorfs; the Hebes of the Alphane moon are not only hebephrenics but, perhaps, symbolic Hebrews wondering through their maze of circumstance. Doctoral theses have been and will again be put together on less. Dick makes sense; that is what must be understood. Sometimes the sense is evasive, sometimes (as with the Bunny Hentman scripts) it is literally offstage, but this stuff cannot easily be dismissed if at all.
Of course this is not an insight shared outside this field or even held universally within science fiction. Dick himself reminded us of how absolutely awful, of how impossible, it was to be a science fiction writer in the fifties. Science fiction writers were not even considered writers, let alone figures of consequence. Dick hung out with street people who had never heard of him, accepted an autographed inscription by Herbert Gold as if it were consequential. Nonetheless, like the miotic Running Clam, Dick oozed through and around the doorways and interstices of genre and self. He got to you. He was the kind of writer who years later might make you say, “You know, that was crazy stuff but it’s kind of like what’s going on in this television studio/convention floor/orgy/classroom.” He was scattershot, but my how the pellets flew around the landscape! A zap gun for the terminally repressed (which he thought the straights, the non-sf people, to be).
DR. FUTURITY
So an afterword in the style of a Dick novel is no easy target, not even for that writer who was once found in print admitting that he prided himself on his ability to “imitate the style of any writer living or preferably dead.” As in the derogatory description of the musicologist, one might be accused of getting the notes but missing all of the music. Nonetheless, Clans of the Alphane Moon was a problem. Superficially a jazzy novel with some of the most extravagant and provocative of all the Dick inventions, rearranged in dazzling patterns – slime molds; lunatic colonies and their descendants; reactionary simulacra probing the Communist countries; fictional characters far deeper and more pervasive than their creators like Ziggy Trots, like Hentman - this is a novel which makes the most severe demands upon the reader; to an outsider it might e one of the least penetrable of all the novels: it makes, ultimately, no sense. Of course this was Dick’s grand and grandest theme, that things make no sense whatsoever; but for the literary literary critics this is an insight at which they would prefer to arrive in retrospect (“X shows us, then, a universe ultimately meaningless”) than have to face in the very text of the novel, in a novel that page by page hurls seemingly unrelated extrapolations, characters and premises at the reader, daring the reader to make the connections, forcing the reader to the conclusion that there are no connections – only to flaunt at him the possibility, ultimately, that all of this might somehow tie. Dick was a specialist in this technique, although it was one which would undoubtedly drive a Phillip Rahv or Irving Howe to the wall, assuming that these worthies would even acknowledge a science fiction writer, which is doubtful. On does not know quite what The Partisan Review would make of this novel but one has a very, very good idea.
THE UNTELEPORTED MAN
Of course there are different levels of reality, of extrapolation. Dick noted this. “Your wife might leave you and take the children and then the Martians would come into your living room.” Yes, indeed. Dick did not merely compose alternatives to standard middle-class disasters; he heightened and deepened them. Nonetheless, this most madly inventive and bizarre of contemporary science fiction writers (telepathic slime molds! simulacra with identity problems! lunatic civilizations in which the paranoids would be the elite!) wrote very close to home; this is perhaps the source of the unsettling power of even the weaker novels. Clans of the Alphane Moon is about a failed marriage, an aggrandizing wife, sexual passion, thrall, impotence, financial jeopardy and distress, divorce, blackmail, adultery, guilt, self-loathing. No number of Running Clams nor self-hating simulacra will divert fully from that point. One can peer through the cloudy and difficult glass of this novel and see the author himself, the unteleported, undetached man writing of his own circumstances, dealing with his own horrors. Dick made no secret of his relations with women, his financial and marital woes and his many marriages; his bankruptcies, his searing periods of panic and poverty are very much on the record. The Dick reality invoked no Mageboom simulacra through which he could project himself; it gave him (at least not until the mid-seventies) no telepathic aliens to render him comfort. All of these devices were piled situationally upon the circumstances which the novel recreated, but at the base one can see the simple, throbbing, moral heart of Phil Dick, the unteleported writer dealing as best he could with events which he at least felt insupportable.
CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST
The novels would, for an alert reader (do not look for them, however, in the academies), have been enough; but Dick was perhaps the least shielded of all science fiction writers; he spoke off the text with great forthrightness and no small amount of self-evisceration. The fan magazines, the introductions to the various collections, the interviews all show a man inexhaustibly bent upon explaining himself as if the explanations themselves would find a kind of structure that the disorderly events themselves did not. Similarly, if the writer over explained, the novels overly exposed; not for Phil Dick understatement or inference, but instead the flat delivery of extrapolation. It is not enough to conceive of a moon of lunatics – their hierarchy and interrelationships must be explained. At the same time, on the other hand, there are curious elisions. What is that Ganymedan slime mold doing surviving unsupported in the atmosphere? How did it get there? Who are its companions? What is its support system? How does that girl turn back the clock on the recent dead and why has the Alphpane colony been permitted to reach this point when an influx of staff and medical personnel would have prevented all of this? How is the Mageboom simulacrum controlled? Exactly what do those reactionary simulacra say in the Communist territories and why are they permitted to wander freely? Oh there are profound elisions in this novel, profound elisions indeed; so much is taken for granted, so little is often explained that the possibility might be raised – how absolutely shocking! – that Dick is not writing science fiction at all.
WE CAN BUILD YOU
The assumption from the start (the start being 1926 and Hugo Gernsback or something like that anyway) was that science fiction was a reasonably rigorous medium, that unlike fantasy it was rooted in some kind of extrapolative probability and that it made at least gestures toward credibility. The rules were honored more in the breach than the observance by many writers from the very start, but the obeisance was always there: there was, underneath, a presumption of logic or scientific rigor, and Dick emerged from that tradition. His short stories appeared in all of the genre magazines; his novels were published by the category publishers; he never, unlike Vonnegut, unlike Kuttner, unlike Bradbury, deviated from the conventional markets or audience; and yet Dick was, by Gernsback standard, less of a science fiction writer from the start than any of these figures and became even less than that as he went on. He had all of the apparatus – the novels on the surface look like nothing but science fiction, with their rocket ships, robots, androids, intergalactic public-address systems, talking toasters, life-like mechanical animals, power-crazed solar administrators and this and that and so on and so forth, but one does not have to be far into a Dick novel or long in the ploy of its visions to understand that there is something out of kilter here. Even van Vogt – whom Damon Knight has described as Dick’s one great influence and avatar – would have taken more time and trouble to lay out the history of the Alphane colony, would have codified St. Ignatz the Hebe a little more carefully. Hal Clement would have worked out ten closely reasoned pages as to the survival of Lord Running Clam; but even the Kuttners, who knew a few things about elision, would have tried a little bit of careful, worked-in explanation:
It was the Slime Mold’s remarkable ability to survive in Earth atmosphere which so unsettled Rittersdorf and yet if Chuck had thought about it, had gone to the right sources, he would not have been disconcerted. For there it all was in the first annals of the Ganymedan search committee: the referent is a universal solvent, the physicists had found and through the years, ignored by the populi who found Slime Molds confusing or humorous depending upon their orientation, that solvent had been carefully applied….
But this does not concern Phil Dick, this was not his methodology at all; that slime mold oozed and cruised and bruised and lazed its way around the consciousness of all concerned because that simply was the way that things were and if Lord Running Clam was a metaphor, well that was something that the reader would have to figure out on his won because for Phil Dick, Lord Running Clam was a reality, an integral part of a plot which seemed so loose and sprawling that there seemed to be no order at all. But for Dick there was an obvious order; these plots made sense because they had an appalling reality which gave them absolute power: in the world that he inhabited, comedians were in the employ of intelligence agencies, simulacra were rigged to blow up and kill you, and telepathic slime molds might turn out to be the only dependable friend a man might find. Metaphors come after the fact, Dick might have said, and are only in tranquillity reflected. In the common reality there is only event, and it is the novelist’s responsibility to record that reality. Not necessarily to assemble but simply to represent. The assembly was accomplished by the material itself. We can build you.
TIME OUT OF JOINT
Dick struggled. Most of his novels fell out of print within six months of their issue; until the late seventies he had little reason to hope or believe that any of this work would ever be seen again. So he evolved what in science fiction was an already acknowledged technique but never taken perhaps to the limits that he had: he wrote novels whose style, characters and movement were designed for obsolescence. Knowing that the books would be seen only by a relatively small core audience of genre readers and by only one generation at that, he worked in the broadest and crudest terms, populated the books with characters and circumstances which could be carried over to other novels but which on their own were meant to have quick and stunning effect but which were not meant to last. The novels, like dreams, functioned in terms of their episodism; their various parts might live again, reassembled, in other works at other times but they could be broken down quickly, disassembled almost as rapidly as they were put into place. The out-of-joint genre novelist learns to work synoptically and to keep on the move.
The novel, then, as Potamkin Village. The scenes, when perused, have an enormous power, a frightening implication; seem to tremble (this was Dick’s specialty) upon the verge of some terrific insight but never quite reach it, back off instead. The loathing Rittersdorf feels for Mary; the terrific power and sadistic implication of the one sex scene in which she participates; the drollery of Lord Running Clam; the odd, bleak masks worn by Rittersdorf’s co-workers when they grill him (Dick had obviously already met some FBI agents); the panic mounting in St. Ignatz as it begins to occur to him that he may not be the redeemer…all of these have enormous force, an absolute conviction as they are being read; but they are compartmentalized, do not link into one another; consist, in the time-honored fashion of the novelist of contrivance, of manipulated problems with manipulated and offstage solutions. (The final independence and salvation of the colony is irrelevant to all of the discussions and events before.) Any of these sections, perhaps all of them, can be extracted then, placed in another novel, in another circumstance, to equal effect. Some novelists from the academies are taught to build their novels to last, but genre writers who come from a different school can absorb a different and equally important lesson: novels can be built to self-destruct, to do themselves in, to live in other days in other ways. This is where the necessity of the writer and the needs of the genre audience can also e said to intersect; if the novel is a Potamkin Village, then the reader can return to the landscape knowing that he need be concerned only with that small and synthetic part of it. Perhaps this seems disjointed, the absolute reversal of the standard novelistic process (as the Rahvs and Howes, anyway, would rationalize it) but science fiction is a strange and specialized field, a far-reaching and unconventional genre of opposites as Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell and Harlan Ellison would all hasten to remind us.
SOLAR LOTTERY
But Phil Dick should not be the first or fiftieth science fiction writer to tumble to yet another subtle but destructive fact: the audience in the main wants its Potamkin Villages, wants its novels and authors built for obsolescence, would prefer that its slime molds and simulacra slink along in alien circumstances withour reference to life-support devices or the functioning of civil-liberties issues. The implications and meaning of real science fiction are quite terrifying; a real science fiction that would truly come to terms with the awful possibilities of the machine and of time would be unassimilable or repugnant to the majority of an audience which is seeking titillation and satisfaction of a more reasonable order. So Dick was functioning within the grand tradition of the form when he acted, it could be argued, to trivialize his material, trivialize his visions and his future in order to conform to the needs and requirements of a 60,000-word paperback original format and of an audience which reads to get way rather than to get near. It is possible to see Clans of the Alphane Moon as a work which domesticates, tames, trivializes and disperses implicitly terrifying material.
That material: angst, alienation, anomie, insanity, loss, fury, greed, evil, impotence, various species of human delusion, alien delusion, political apostasy. All of these issues float through and around the haze of the work and yet, rather than closing in upon them, Clans of the Alphane Moon tends to retreat; its characteristic paragraph, paraphrased, comes in again and again:
Hands in his pockets he began to walk aimlessly down the sidewalk runnel. And each time, feeling more and more scared and desperate. Everything was falling apart around him. And he seemed helpless to halt the collapse; he could only witness it, completely impotent, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand.
This is the Phil Dick character; it may not be the science fiction reader. Helpless to halt the collapse, more and more scared and desperate, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand, the science fiction reader looks for answers within the format of the assimilable, the $2.50 or $2.95 (in Dick’s time it was 50¢) paperback original that will give him some illusion of control, that will codify the forces that appear to be squeezing his life away. Sex and death, pain and passion exist in these novels, but they seem to be taking place behind glass, in a dreamlike state, perceived as if at a great distance:
At no time did he truly lose consciousness. Therefore he was aware that much later the activity in which he was caught began by degrees to abate. The artificially induced whirlwind diminished and then at last there was a fitful peace. And then – by an agency which remained obscure to him – he was physically moved from his place on the floor, from Dr. Mary Rittersdorf’s compartment, to some other place entirely…I wish I was dead, he said to himself.
This is Baines after the book’s one explicit sex scene (extraordinarily explicit and even poetic by 1964 science fiction standards, it must be noted), and what emerges from this more than anything else is that not only the prose but the attitudinization of the character put the act at a distance, render it both unspeakably difficult and somehow irrelevant. There is more tenderness, more benignity to Lord Running Clam – more grace if one will – than there is in Mary Rittersdorf or in the sex that she is offering. If one believes that the stereotype science fiction writer is usually male, usually adolescent, usually sexually troubled and ambivalent, usually in flight from sexual feelings that he can neither master nor dismiss; if one believes this (Martin Gardner draws precisely this stereotype in his 1956 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, a very alert book about cultism, but I do not think that it is entirely true or was even rue for its different time), then Clans of the Alphane Moon and the other Phil Dick novels can be seen, ironically enough – despite their iconoclasm, despite their invention, despite their fertility and their political alertness (quite unusual within the form for its time or even now) – as catering precisely to the needs of that audience. Rather than pushing limits, the Dick novels conformed to them; and all of the pizzazz – hebephrenics, CIA men, lunatics, time reversals, simulacra, slime molds - was merely a means of putting the reader off the scent of his own weaknesses, dressing up the evasions to look like daring investigations. Potamkin Villages, in short. But this is not necessarily fair to Dick, who knew from the very beginning (witness his 1953 story “Impostor”, which appeared in Astounding near the outset of his career) that the matter of reality and fantasy, humanity and alienness was so academic, so much a matter of suggestion, that one could not be sure ay any given time what one was or why. This is truly a difficult vision, difficult to sustain, difficult to work through thirty-five or forty anguished novels; and Dick must be credited, surely, for holding consistent to it through the end. If the universe was a lottery, Dick held no pretensions as to knowledge of the payoff.
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
A cerebral hemorrhage or series of them killed Phil Dick in his fifty-fifth year in early March 1982, surely a Phil Dick novelistic ending to his life: on the borders of vast public acceptance; Blade Runner about to open; old novels rushing back into print; new money pouring into the money market accounts; on the brink of the long-sought Payoff Years, the writer’s equivalent of the Million Dollar Wound, Phil Dick copped the strokes and died five days later in the hospital never having regained consciousness and probably having been brain-dead from the moment of occlusion. Chuck Rittersdorf would have understood (or Jason Taverner or Mr. Tagoni or a couple of hundred other guys); probably Dick himself did and his last moments might have been – it is difficult to posit material like this – of awful knowledge, even a kind of grim and terrible satisfaction at seeing things working themselves out so truly. But Dick had seen it coming for many years: the small and large damages of his career, the financial horrors, the political scrapes, the years on the street, the heart attack in 1974 (which put him in oxygen tent so that he could receive papers from one of his wives demanding back-alimony at the cost of putting him in jail). Not only his life but his novels contain that premonition; no one in a Dick novel expects any real good and very few of them find it. There are occasional exceptions – someone, after all, has to hit the solar lottery every game even if it is not you, but this is not the image of the writer or the work that persists. What persists is that image of Rittersdorf assaulted by forces, of the Dick protagonist battered and shrugging, shrugging some more, seeing it through. In the most basic sense Phil Dick did carry it all the way through, no less than his protagonists, but this does not prevent the career from somehow exuding a sense of waste, the same waste that seems to come from most careers in this category: truncated possibilities, wholesale elisions of possibility, small and large failures in the body of the work. Still, what is one to do? One is writing within the perimeters of limitation for an audience which has proven over and again its reluctance to deal with the downside of the future, the true implication of the present. One can go so far but no farther at the cost of losing markets and the audience, and certainly Dick was aware of these limitations from the outset.
Nonetheless, one can see the waste, in the career, in this novel; one must face it no less than the Dick protagonist, if dragged by the neck to some awful possibility, would not hesitate to look at it. Buried in Clans of the Alphane Moon is an entirely different novel, a novel for which this apparatus and invention is merely a paradigm: it is a novel of divorce, alienation, suffering, exploitation; it is a novel (written about the same time as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) which depicts the asylum as both more stratified and more sensible than the outside, a novel which points out that our political leaders are insane and their devices unspeakable; a novel which points out that these unspeakable devices are probably the outcome of their own sexual and emotional crippling and longing. This is the novel-within-the-novel that has not gotten written; but Dick was not Updike nor Cheever, Styron nor Richard Yates; this novel of contemporary suburbia or contemporary politics was beyond him. He was interested in manipulating and reordering the more familiar devices of his category (devices which would have been wholly unfamiliar to these other writers or their audience), and if through them only dimly can be seen the outlines of the novel that might have been written, that is the problem of the reader, not the writer who can claim to have had his own purposes in mind. If Clans of the Alphane Moon trashes its material at almost every turn, if it deserts implication in search of ever-increasing invention, if it seems to have left motivation and even compassion in the lurch in search of ever jazzier and more synthetic effects, this must be understood not only as part of the nature of the category but part of the nature of the characters…their pain is great; their difficulties are real; they, no more than the author, are in shape to confront what is really going on inside.
NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
So ultimately one must reach some assessment of this novel that is also an assessment of the career (because Clans of the Alphane Moon is probably a novel as characteristic of the Dick oeuvre as anything he wrote; it utterly enacts all of his obsessions and most of his continuing devices); and yet this is not so easy, it cannot be rapidly achieved if at all. Dick’s material was profound and his intentions (if not always his devices) were dead serious. If Clans of the Alphane Moon fails – a judgment arrived at with reluctance but deliberately – the failure is not so much of the novel as of the category itself; there is, pace Rahv and Howe, perhaps only so much that can be achieved within category science fiction and then no more: the effects will do you in all the time, to say nothing of the audience. It is easier to deal with slime molds than with the small and terrible corruptions of the heart; easier to see the simulacra raving in the streets of Budapest than the deadly small cracks in the heart; it is easier to counterfeit a CIA or FBI that is flatly crazy than to apprehend the even crazier (because absolutely sane) CIA and FBI which, along with the other institutions, exist. At three cents a word, writing pell-mell, doing what one can for the front money and hoping for the best, one must take one’s effects where one can, one’s small satisfactions where they lie and hope for the best. Clans of the Alphane Moon was written for $1500 ($750 on signature, $750 on delivery) as a paperback original for Ace Books during that last good year of most of our lives, 1963; and for the first ten years of its existence, accumulated to the author (after commissions had been deducted) considerably less than $2000. This was not good money even for the time; and in light of the ambition, the invention, the energy of the book, the question of return is appalling. Now wait for last year: if it were to come again it might have (one thinks of Willy Stark on his deathbed clutching Jack Burden’s hand in All the King’s Men) all been different…maybe so, maybe not, it cannot be said to matter, because the fact is—
The fact is that it will not come again; that this is all we have, that the counter-clock world is unknown to those of us locked in more common time; and that what has been done is what will be known. The great visionaries, the great, cracked dreamers like Phil Dick felt differently; and for a little while, taken into the abscissa of heir intellect, the arc of their dreams, the abyss of their consciousness, we are led to feel differently; but whether this is kind or degree we cannot know. It is the mid-eighties. Phil Dick is dead. Lord Running Clam, metastasized, will be known again, but not – and he warned us of this – in the same way. But as we remember Lord Running Clam, so doth he – as was prophesied by the Elder One – remember us.
New Jersey: December 1983
WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE: AN AFTERWORD TO DICK’S CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON
Barry Malzberg
EYE IN THE SKY
In his last years, Phil Dick believed that he lived under the benign influence of a cosmic force whose vectors coincided with those of his small apartment. (He would not seek better quarters, for that reason.) The force whispered in his ear, gave him instruction, was largely responsible for Valis, his metaphysical novel. The force assured him that most conventional assumptions of history and religiosity were insane and that humanity had essentially been worshiping the wrong icons for many centuries. (All of this is articulated not only in Valis but in an interview with Charles Platt published in Dream Makers: 1980.) Under the influence of his mentor, Dick’s career flourished. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was bought for film and his works started to slip back into print. For the first time in his career he began to see considerable amounts of money. In 1980, his last full year, he made $200,000 and wrote his final novel, Bishop Timothy Archer, as well as a few short stories which sold to Omni and Playboy. The consensus was that he had never been writing better nor had his work ever been so appreciated. Who was to say, then, that his mentor was wrong? Any science fiction writer who had run the full course of a thirty-year career could use some cosmic guidance; this was a field which was always difficult and intermittently murderous, as Dick himself had occasionally observed. You found your friends where you could.
THE ZAP GUN
One seeks to write an afterword in the style of a Phil Dick novel. Superficially this is easy – many different strands of invention, only marginally related, occurring in what seems to be improvisatory fashion – but actually it is not. Even in the bad Phil Dick novels – and there are quite a few of them – the strands turn out to be more cunningly interrelated than one thought; accrue to a kind of maniacal correctness. Lord Running Clam’s mitosis is, after all, a commentary upon the childless marriage of the Rittersdorfs; the Hebes of the Alphane moon are not only hebephrenics but, perhaps, symbolic Hebrews wondering through their maze of circumstance. Doctoral theses have been and will again be put together on less. Dick makes sense; that is what must be understood. Sometimes the sense is evasive, sometimes (as with the Bunny Hentman scripts) it is literally offstage, but this stuff cannot easily be dismissed if at all.
Of course this is not an insight shared outside this field or even held universally within science fiction. Dick himself reminded us of how absolutely awful, of how impossible, it was to be a science fiction writer in the fifties. Science fiction writers were not even considered writers, let alone figures of consequence. Dick hung out with street people who had never heard of him, accepted an autographed inscription by Herbert Gold as if it were consequential. Nonetheless, like the miotic Running Clam, Dick oozed through and around the doorways and interstices of genre and self. He got to you. He was the kind of writer who years later might make you say, “You know, that was crazy stuff but it’s kind of like what’s going on in this television studio/convention floor/orgy/classroom.” He was scattershot, but my how the pellets flew around the landscape! A zap gun for the terminally repressed (which he thought the straights, the non-sf people, to be).
DR. FUTURITY
So an afterword in the style of a Dick novel is no easy target, not even for that writer who was once found in print admitting that he prided himself on his ability to “imitate the style of any writer living or preferably dead.” As in the derogatory description of the musicologist, one might be accused of getting the notes but missing all of the music. Nonetheless, Clans of the Alphane Moon was a problem. Superficially a jazzy novel with some of the most extravagant and provocative of all the Dick inventions, rearranged in dazzling patterns – slime molds; lunatic colonies and their descendants; reactionary simulacra probing the Communist countries; fictional characters far deeper and more pervasive than their creators like Ziggy Trots, like Hentman - this is a novel which makes the most severe demands upon the reader; to an outsider it might e one of the least penetrable of all the novels: it makes, ultimately, no sense. Of course this was Dick’s grand and grandest theme, that things make no sense whatsoever; but for the literary literary critics this is an insight at which they would prefer to arrive in retrospect (“X shows us, then, a universe ultimately meaningless”) than have to face in the very text of the novel, in a novel that page by page hurls seemingly unrelated extrapolations, characters and premises at the reader, daring the reader to make the connections, forcing the reader to the conclusion that there are no connections – only to flaunt at him the possibility, ultimately, that all of this might somehow tie. Dick was a specialist in this technique, although it was one which would undoubtedly drive a Phillip Rahv or Irving Howe to the wall, assuming that these worthies would even acknowledge a science fiction writer, which is doubtful. On does not know quite what The Partisan Review would make of this novel but one has a very, very good idea.
THE UNTELEPORTED MAN
Of course there are different levels of reality, of extrapolation. Dick noted this. “Your wife might leave you and take the children and then the Martians would come into your living room.” Yes, indeed. Dick did not merely compose alternatives to standard middle-class disasters; he heightened and deepened them. Nonetheless, this most madly inventive and bizarre of contemporary science fiction writers (telepathic slime molds! simulacra with identity problems! lunatic civilizations in which the paranoids would be the elite!) wrote very close to home; this is perhaps the source of the unsettling power of even the weaker novels. Clans of the Alphane Moon is about a failed marriage, an aggrandizing wife, sexual passion, thrall, impotence, financial jeopardy and distress, divorce, blackmail, adultery, guilt, self-loathing. No number of Running Clams nor self-hating simulacra will divert fully from that point. One can peer through the cloudy and difficult glass of this novel and see the author himself, the unteleported, undetached man writing of his own circumstances, dealing with his own horrors. Dick made no secret of his relations with women, his financial and marital woes and his many marriages; his bankruptcies, his searing periods of panic and poverty are very much on the record. The Dick reality invoked no Mageboom simulacra through which he could project himself; it gave him (at least not until the mid-seventies) no telepathic aliens to render him comfort. All of these devices were piled situationally upon the circumstances which the novel recreated, but at the base one can see the simple, throbbing, moral heart of Phil Dick, the unteleported writer dealing as best he could with events which he at least felt insupportable.
CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST
The novels would, for an alert reader (do not look for them, however, in the academies), have been enough; but Dick was perhaps the least shielded of all science fiction writers; he spoke off the text with great forthrightness and no small amount of self-evisceration. The fan magazines, the introductions to the various collections, the interviews all show a man inexhaustibly bent upon explaining himself as if the explanations themselves would find a kind of structure that the disorderly events themselves did not. Similarly, if the writer over explained, the novels overly exposed; not for Phil Dick understatement or inference, but instead the flat delivery of extrapolation. It is not enough to conceive of a moon of lunatics – their hierarchy and interrelationships must be explained. At the same time, on the other hand, there are curious elisions. What is that Ganymedan slime mold doing surviving unsupported in the atmosphere? How did it get there? Who are its companions? What is its support system? How does that girl turn back the clock on the recent dead and why has the Alphpane colony been permitted to reach this point when an influx of staff and medical personnel would have prevented all of this? How is the Mageboom simulacrum controlled? Exactly what do those reactionary simulacra say in the Communist territories and why are they permitted to wander freely? Oh there are profound elisions in this novel, profound elisions indeed; so much is taken for granted, so little is often explained that the possibility might be raised – how absolutely shocking! – that Dick is not writing science fiction at all.
WE CAN BUILD YOU
The assumption from the start (the start being 1926 and Hugo Gernsback or something like that anyway) was that science fiction was a reasonably rigorous medium, that unlike fantasy it was rooted in some kind of extrapolative probability and that it made at least gestures toward credibility. The rules were honored more in the breach than the observance by many writers from the very start, but the obeisance was always there: there was, underneath, a presumption of logic or scientific rigor, and Dick emerged from that tradition. His short stories appeared in all of the genre magazines; his novels were published by the category publishers; he never, unlike Vonnegut, unlike Kuttner, unlike Bradbury, deviated from the conventional markets or audience; and yet Dick was, by Gernsback standard, less of a science fiction writer from the start than any of these figures and became even less than that as he went on. He had all of the apparatus – the novels on the surface look like nothing but science fiction, with their rocket ships, robots, androids, intergalactic public-address systems, talking toasters, life-like mechanical animals, power-crazed solar administrators and this and that and so on and so forth, but one does not have to be far into a Dick novel or long in the ploy of its visions to understand that there is something out of kilter here. Even van Vogt – whom Damon Knight has described as Dick’s one great influence and avatar – would have taken more time and trouble to lay out the history of the Alphane colony, would have codified St. Ignatz the Hebe a little more carefully. Hal Clement would have worked out ten closely reasoned pages as to the survival of Lord Running Clam; but even the Kuttners, who knew a few things about elision, would have tried a little bit of careful, worked-in explanation:
It was the Slime Mold’s remarkable ability to survive in Earth atmosphere which so unsettled Rittersdorf and yet if Chuck had thought about it, had gone to the right sources, he would not have been disconcerted. For there it all was in the first annals of the Ganymedan search committee: the referent is a universal solvent, the physicists had found and through the years, ignored by the populi who found Slime Molds confusing or humorous depending upon their orientation, that solvent had been carefully applied….
But this does not concern Phil Dick, this was not his methodology at all; that slime mold oozed and cruised and bruised and lazed its way around the consciousness of all concerned because that simply was the way that things were and if Lord Running Clam was a metaphor, well that was something that the reader would have to figure out on his won because for Phil Dick, Lord Running Clam was a reality, an integral part of a plot which seemed so loose and sprawling that there seemed to be no order at all. But for Dick there was an obvious order; these plots made sense because they had an appalling reality which gave them absolute power: in the world that he inhabited, comedians were in the employ of intelligence agencies, simulacra were rigged to blow up and kill you, and telepathic slime molds might turn out to be the only dependable friend a man might find. Metaphors come after the fact, Dick might have said, and are only in tranquillity reflected. In the common reality there is only event, and it is the novelist’s responsibility to record that reality. Not necessarily to assemble but simply to represent. The assembly was accomplished by the material itself. We can build you.
TIME OUT OF JOINT
Dick struggled. Most of his novels fell out of print within six months of their issue; until the late seventies he had little reason to hope or believe that any of this work would ever be seen again. So he evolved what in science fiction was an already acknowledged technique but never taken perhaps to the limits that he had: he wrote novels whose style, characters and movement were designed for obsolescence. Knowing that the books would be seen only by a relatively small core audience of genre readers and by only one generation at that, he worked in the broadest and crudest terms, populated the books with characters and circumstances which could be carried over to other novels but which on their own were meant to have quick and stunning effect but which were not meant to last. The novels, like dreams, functioned in terms of their episodism; their various parts might live again, reassembled, in other works at other times but they could be broken down quickly, disassembled almost as rapidly as they were put into place. The out-of-joint genre novelist learns to work synoptically and to keep on the move.
The novel, then, as Potamkin Village. The scenes, when perused, have an enormous power, a frightening implication; seem to tremble (this was Dick’s specialty) upon the verge of some terrific insight but never quite reach it, back off instead. The loathing Rittersdorf feels for Mary; the terrific power and sadistic implication of the one sex scene in which she participates; the drollery of Lord Running Clam; the odd, bleak masks worn by Rittersdorf’s co-workers when they grill him (Dick had obviously already met some FBI agents); the panic mounting in St. Ignatz as it begins to occur to him that he may not be the redeemer…all of these have enormous force, an absolute conviction as they are being read; but they are compartmentalized, do not link into one another; consist, in the time-honored fashion of the novelist of contrivance, of manipulated problems with manipulated and offstage solutions. (The final independence and salvation of the colony is irrelevant to all of the discussions and events before.) Any of these sections, perhaps all of them, can be extracted then, placed in another novel, in another circumstance, to equal effect. Some novelists from the academies are taught to build their novels to last, but genre writers who come from a different school can absorb a different and equally important lesson: novels can be built to self-destruct, to do themselves in, to live in other days in other ways. This is where the necessity of the writer and the needs of the genre audience can also e said to intersect; if the novel is a Potamkin Village, then the reader can return to the landscape knowing that he need be concerned only with that small and synthetic part of it. Perhaps this seems disjointed, the absolute reversal of the standard novelistic process (as the Rahvs and Howes, anyway, would rationalize it) but science fiction is a strange and specialized field, a far-reaching and unconventional genre of opposites as Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell and Harlan Ellison would all hasten to remind us.
SOLAR LOTTERY
But Phil Dick should not be the first or fiftieth science fiction writer to tumble to yet another subtle but destructive fact: the audience in the main wants its Potamkin Villages, wants its novels and authors built for obsolescence, would prefer that its slime molds and simulacra slink along in alien circumstances withour reference to life-support devices or the functioning of civil-liberties issues. The implications and meaning of real science fiction are quite terrifying; a real science fiction that would truly come to terms with the awful possibilities of the machine and of time would be unassimilable or repugnant to the majority of an audience which is seeking titillation and satisfaction of a more reasonable order. So Dick was functioning within the grand tradition of the form when he acted, it could be argued, to trivialize his material, trivialize his visions and his future in order to conform to the needs and requirements of a 60,000-word paperback original format and of an audience which reads to get way rather than to get near. It is possible to see Clans of the Alphane Moon as a work which domesticates, tames, trivializes and disperses implicitly terrifying material.
That material: angst, alienation, anomie, insanity, loss, fury, greed, evil, impotence, various species of human delusion, alien delusion, political apostasy. All of these issues float through and around the haze of the work and yet, rather than closing in upon them, Clans of the Alphane Moon tends to retreat; its characteristic paragraph, paraphrased, comes in again and again:
Hands in his pockets he began to walk aimlessly down the sidewalk runnel. And each time, feeling more and more scared and desperate. Everything was falling apart around him. And he seemed helpless to halt the collapse; he could only witness it, completely impotent, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand.
This is the Phil Dick character; it may not be the science fiction reader. Helpless to halt the collapse, more and more scared and desperate, snatched up and gripped by processes too powerful for him to understand, the science fiction reader looks for answers within the format of the assimilable, the $2.50 or $2.95 (in Dick’s time it was 50¢) paperback original that will give him some illusion of control, that will codify the forces that appear to be squeezing his life away. Sex and death, pain and passion exist in these novels, but they seem to be taking place behind glass, in a dreamlike state, perceived as if at a great distance:
At no time did he truly lose consciousness. Therefore he was aware that much later the activity in which he was caught began by degrees to abate. The artificially induced whirlwind diminished and then at last there was a fitful peace. And then – by an agency which remained obscure to him – he was physically moved from his place on the floor, from Dr. Mary Rittersdorf’s compartment, to some other place entirely…I wish I was dead, he said to himself.
This is Baines after the book’s one explicit sex scene (extraordinarily explicit and even poetic by 1964 science fiction standards, it must be noted), and what emerges from this more than anything else is that not only the prose but the attitudinization of the character put the act at a distance, render it both unspeakably difficult and somehow irrelevant. There is more tenderness, more benignity to Lord Running Clam – more grace if one will – than there is in Mary Rittersdorf or in the sex that she is offering. If one believes that the stereotype science fiction writer is usually male, usually adolescent, usually sexually troubled and ambivalent, usually in flight from sexual feelings that he can neither master nor dismiss; if one believes this (Martin Gardner draws precisely this stereotype in his 1956 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, a very alert book about cultism, but I do not think that it is entirely true or was even rue for its different time), then Clans of the Alphane Moon and the other Phil Dick novels can be seen, ironically enough – despite their iconoclasm, despite their invention, despite their fertility and their political alertness (quite unusual within the form for its time or even now) – as catering precisely to the needs of that audience. Rather than pushing limits, the Dick novels conformed to them; and all of the pizzazz – hebephrenics, CIA men, lunatics, time reversals, simulacra, slime molds - was merely a means of putting the reader off the scent of his own weaknesses, dressing up the evasions to look like daring investigations. Potamkin Villages, in short. But this is not necessarily fair to Dick, who knew from the very beginning (witness his 1953 story “Impostor”, which appeared in Astounding near the outset of his career) that the matter of reality and fantasy, humanity and alienness was so academic, so much a matter of suggestion, that one could not be sure ay any given time what one was or why. This is truly a difficult vision, difficult to sustain, difficult to work through thirty-five or forty anguished novels; and Dick must be credited, surely, for holding consistent to it through the end. If the universe was a lottery, Dick held no pretensions as to knowledge of the payoff.
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
A cerebral hemorrhage or series of them killed Phil Dick in his fifty-fifth year in early March 1982, surely a Phil Dick novelistic ending to his life: on the borders of vast public acceptance; Blade Runner about to open; old novels rushing back into print; new money pouring into the money market accounts; on the brink of the long-sought Payoff Years, the writer’s equivalent of the Million Dollar Wound, Phil Dick copped the strokes and died five days later in the hospital never having regained consciousness and probably having been brain-dead from the moment of occlusion. Chuck Rittersdorf would have understood (or Jason Taverner or Mr. Tagoni or a couple of hundred other guys); probably Dick himself did and his last moments might have been – it is difficult to posit material like this – of awful knowledge, even a kind of grim and terrible satisfaction at seeing things working themselves out so truly. But Dick had seen it coming for many years: the small and large damages of his career, the financial horrors, the political scrapes, the years on the street, the heart attack in 1974 (which put him in oxygen tent so that he could receive papers from one of his wives demanding back-alimony at the cost of putting him in jail). Not only his life but his novels contain that premonition; no one in a Dick novel expects any real good and very few of them find it. There are occasional exceptions – someone, after all, has to hit the solar lottery every game even if it is not you, but this is not the image of the writer or the work that persists. What persists is that image of Rittersdorf assaulted by forces, of the Dick protagonist battered and shrugging, shrugging some more, seeing it through. In the most basic sense Phil Dick did carry it all the way through, no less than his protagonists, but this does not prevent the career from somehow exuding a sense of waste, the same waste that seems to come from most careers in this category: truncated possibilities, wholesale elisions of possibility, small and large failures in the body of the work. Still, what is one to do? One is writing within the perimeters of limitation for an audience which has proven over and again its reluctance to deal with the downside of the future, the true implication of the present. One can go so far but no farther at the cost of losing markets and the audience, and certainly Dick was aware of these limitations from the outset.
Nonetheless, one can see the waste, in the career, in this novel; one must face it no less than the Dick protagonist, if dragged by the neck to some awful possibility, would not hesitate to look at it. Buried in Clans of the Alphane Moon is an entirely different novel, a novel for which this apparatus and invention is merely a paradigm: it is a novel of divorce, alienation, suffering, exploitation; it is a novel (written about the same time as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) which depicts the asylum as both more stratified and more sensible than the outside, a novel which points out that our political leaders are insane and their devices unspeakable; a novel which points out that these unspeakable devices are probably the outcome of their own sexual and emotional crippling and longing. This is the novel-within-the-novel that has not gotten written; but Dick was not Updike nor Cheever, Styron nor Richard Yates; this novel of contemporary suburbia or contemporary politics was beyond him. He was interested in manipulating and reordering the more familiar devices of his category (devices which would have been wholly unfamiliar to these other writers or their audience), and if through them only dimly can be seen the outlines of the novel that might have been written, that is the problem of the reader, not the writer who can claim to have had his own purposes in mind. If Clans of the Alphane Moon trashes its material at almost every turn, if it deserts implication in search of ever-increasing invention, if it seems to have left motivation and even compassion in the lurch in search of ever jazzier and more synthetic effects, this must be understood not only as part of the nature of the category but part of the nature of the characters…their pain is great; their difficulties are real; they, no more than the author, are in shape to confront what is really going on inside.
NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
So ultimately one must reach some assessment of this novel that is also an assessment of the career (because Clans of the Alphane Moon is probably a novel as characteristic of the Dick oeuvre as anything he wrote; it utterly enacts all of his obsessions and most of his continuing devices); and yet this is not so easy, it cannot be rapidly achieved if at all. Dick’s material was profound and his intentions (if not always his devices) were dead serious. If Clans of the Alphane Moon fails – a judgment arrived at with reluctance but deliberately – the failure is not so much of the novel as of the category itself; there is, pace Rahv and Howe, perhaps only so much that can be achieved within category science fiction and then no more: the effects will do you in all the time, to say nothing of the audience. It is easier to deal with slime molds than with the small and terrible corruptions of the heart; easier to see the simulacra raving in the streets of Budapest than the deadly small cracks in the heart; it is easier to counterfeit a CIA or FBI that is flatly crazy than to apprehend the even crazier (because absolutely sane) CIA and FBI which, along with the other institutions, exist. At three cents a word, writing pell-mell, doing what one can for the front money and hoping for the best, one must take one’s effects where one can, one’s small satisfactions where they lie and hope for the best. Clans of the Alphane Moon was written for $1500 ($750 on signature, $750 on delivery) as a paperback original for Ace Books during that last good year of most of our lives, 1963; and for the first ten years of its existence, accumulated to the author (after commissions had been deducted) considerably less than $2000. This was not good money even for the time; and in light of the ambition, the invention, the energy of the book, the question of return is appalling. Now wait for last year: if it were to come again it might have (one thinks of Willy Stark on his deathbed clutching Jack Burden’s hand in All the King’s Men) all been different…maybe so, maybe not, it cannot be said to matter, because the fact is—
The fact is that it will not come again; that this is all we have, that the counter-clock world is unknown to those of us locked in more common time; and that what has been done is what will be known. The great visionaries, the great, cracked dreamers like Phil Dick felt differently; and for a little while, taken into the abscissa of heir intellect, the arc of their dreams, the abyss of their consciousness, we are led to feel differently; but whether this is kind or degree we cannot know. It is the mid-eighties. Phil Dick is dead. Lord Running Clam, metastasized, will be known again, but not – and he warned us of this – in the same way. But as we remember Lord Running Clam, so doth he – as was prophesied by the Elder One – remember us.
New Jersey: December 1983
有关键情节透露
- 作者: Dick, Philip K.
- 出版: Vintage
- 定价: CDN$ 15.95
- 装帧: Pap
- 页数: 256
- 时间: 2002-5