Paradox, tragedy, and Philip K Dick

The novel VALIS, by Philip K Dick, contains the single most astonishing sentence I have ever read, in either fiction or non-fiction. It opens by introducing the protagonist, Horselover Fat, and exploring his relationship with a woman named Gloria who commited suicide. Then comes the following:
“I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain some much-needed perspective.”
As a literary device, it is breath-taking in originality and audacity. Before Dick - before VALIS - writers with an autobiographical impulse were either upfront about their intentions, and wrote in the first person, or they wrote thinly coded third-person stories that would be described on the back cover as “semi-autobiographical.” But here, the author starts in the third person, complete with false names to cover his tracks, then confesses. On page three. Page three of a two-hundred page novel. If he had done it in a preamble, perhaps, then it might have seemed solid, but putting it here, just as the action gets going, gives the impression that he wanted to keep it a secret, but he just couldn’t keep up the ruse. He blurts it out like a five year old with a new secret.
It has the effect –or at least it did with me- of giving the impression that the author is somewhat confused about the nature of the book. That is a disturbing revelation for a reader. It creates unease. It was the literary equivalent of getting into the passenger seat of a car, then realizing that the driver is on drugs. You don’t know what’s going to happen next, and you’re wondering if you should get out while you can.
Indeed, much of VALIS has you wondering if you are reading the work of a genius or a madman, or both. But the jury is now in, as it always is after thirty years, and the verdict is, by all accounts, that it’s a work of genius. It’s not fun, but it’s clever. Personally, I preferred Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But academia has esoteric tastes, and I’m not one to argue. VALIS is certainly intriguing, ambitious, and unique. It’s just not an easy read, which of course, only raises its standing.
There’s something else about that sentence that is worth mentioning: it is, at a literal level, a paradox. The act of saying I am writing this in the third person means that you are not, in fact, writing in the third person.
However, if it is taken at face value, then the I referred to in the sentence cannot be the author, but some other, fictitious entity that is claiming to be writing in the third person. But that only removes the problem one step further: if that fictitious identity represented by I is to be taken at face value, then it, too, is not referring to itself, but some other fictitious entity… and so on.
So it either flatly proves itself wrong, or it’s an infinite regress. Take your pick. In that sense, it’s not a pure paradox in the classical, logical sense. It’s better. It’s an entirely new creature.
Oh no, you say, you’re over-analyzing it. That’s way more complicated than Dick’s intended meaning.
But I think Dick knew exactly what he was doing. For one thing, the sheer force of that sentence, its brazen honesty, its incongruity, its disruption of the suspension of disbelief –only to create an even deeper commitment to that suspension- all point to a device constructed by a writer who was at the top of his game. But more than that, if there’s one thing you can definitively say about Philip K Dick, it’s that he was a guy who loved paradoxes.
Dick’s work is a cornucopia of paradoxes, contradictions, and other mind-bending tricks. It overflows with them. Take the 'mood organ' from the opening scene in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The premise is that you can program your mood for the day with a mood organ. You know, brush your teeth, get dressed, put on mood. The main character, Deckard, has decided on “a businesslike professional attitude” to face the working day, but to his horror, he discovers that his wife has scheduled a “six-hour self-accusatory depression.” He trys to talk her out of it, but as they talk, things get worse. His wife finds herself in a mood where she doesn’t want to program the mood organ.
“Dial three,” he advises her. She replies:
“I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.”
And there, again right at the opening of the novel, we have an exquisite paradox, and just like the paradox in VALIS, laden with grief. His wife is in a mood where she doesn’t want to dial the mood organ. In order for her to get out of that mood, she has to dial the mood organ, which of course is impossible, because of her mood. It is a trap to rival anything in Catch 22.
Indeed, Dick can be considered a natural successor to Joseph Heller. Heller’s masterpiece, Catch 22, delighted with absurdities and logical prisons, so much so that its title has entered the lexicon as a particular kind of paradox: one that is designed to lock a decision-maker out of a seemingly accessible decision. The most famous of these is perhaps Yossarian’s attempt to get himself discharged from the army in a time of war. In order to get discharged, you have to be mad. But the very act of trying to get discharged means that Yossarian is sane. Catch twenty-two, as they say. Boom-tish.
Yossarian goes for the paranoia angle. “People are trying to kill me,” he says.
“They are trying to kill you,” the doctor responds. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
Trapped again: Yossarian is a soldier during wartime. Therefore, people really are out to get him. Therefore, paranoia is not evidence of insanity. Therefore, symptoms of insanity are not evidence of insanity. Catch twenty-two.
Of all the authors who have come after Heller, Dick is the one who you could really say took up the idea of paradox in fiction, and carried it further. Even more than Heller, Dick turned paradox into his own personal art form. Sometimes, like the mood organ, or the line from VALIS, they are sprinkled through the narrative, tantalizing diversions from the main thrust. On other occasions, they are the foundation of the narrative itself.
Take, for example, the short story A Little Something for us Tempunauts.
Here, we have H.G. Wells with a twist. Mankind has invented time travel. A team of 'tempunauts' is chosen to travel to the far future and back again (tempunaut is a word invented by Dick). The launch goes wrong, and they end up only a few days in the future. To their horror, they learn that on their return from the future back into the past, they died. So what are they to do? Because they exist only days after their death, they are able to find out what causes their death. Can they use this information to save themselves? Or is their fate sealed? It certainly seems as if they have decision-making capabilities, but perhaps that is an illusion. In addition, Addison Doug, one of the tempunauts, has a feeling that he has been through the current scenario many, many times before, leading him to conclude that they are caught in a closed loop of some kind, possibly arising from their attempt to escape death. Catch twenty two.
Again we have a trap, and again, it resounds with grief.
Dick’s time travel novel Now Wait for Last Year, sometimes seems to have been contrived as a plaything with which Dick can explore a myriad of contradictions and paradoxes arising out of the concept of time travel. While the notion of paradoxes in time travel are now a well-trodden path, it is a path that was mapped out in part by Dick, through classic science fiction stories such as Now wait for Last Year and Tempunauts. Overlaying the narrative of the novel is the relentless deterioration of the health of the protagonist’s wife, a slide toward death that no amount of fancy time-travel footwork can avoid.
I could provide endless more examples, but is the master of what might be called the "tragic paradox." He is a literary equivalent of M.C. Escher, but whereas Escher's work was often an exercise in mind-candy diversion, Dick is burdened with the hopelessness of man. In almost every case, his hapless characters confront their mortality through the elegant cages that Dick has built around them. Take, for example, the impossibility of explaining to a paranoid schizophrenic the fact that he is a paranoid schizophrenic, illustrated in Shell Game. Or the inability of Deckard’s wife to program the mood organ. Or the tempunauts sitting around discussing their impending demise in a malfunctioning time machine.
Over and over again, the structures of multitudes of imagined universes conspire against their mortal inhabitants. The situations change, but the result is the same. It is no coincidence that Dick described himself as a Gnostic. One of the central themes in Gnostic spiritualism is the notion of the universe as a prison. For Dick, there was no greater expression of mankind's imprisonment than a finely crafted paradox with a person locked inside. The logic of his worlds conspire to trap his characters, just as the real universe had trapped him in space and time, hurtling toward death.
But while Dick's characters often find themselves in hopeless situations, he was not an irredeemable pessimist. The universe is information, he declared in VALIS, and through information - through knowledge - we can escape the prison.