Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/5219
74 winter 2009 suspect Dick had little to offer in the way of a "lesson" for aspirants, except in the senses that were relevant while he was coming of age as a writer — that's to say, when the breaking news in the framing of such matters involved names like Freud, Kinsey, Norbert Weiner and, well, A.E. van vogt. Dick's concerns were ultimately both epistemological and deeply moral — in the sense that a philosopher would use the world moral, not in the sense that, say, Joseph l. Breen would. You know, love, empathy, "what is human?" and so forth. For contemporary voyagers, these matters remain as Dick delineated them: exquisitely local, negotiated on the human-to-human, or human-to-self playing field according to an infinite number of variations and contexts. No sweeping paradigms will do here. We're all walking down the street conducting our self- Turing exams every time we pass a homeless person, or greet our spouse at the breakfast table. eD: For proponents of the Singularity, we are on the verge of massive technological transformations that involve some version of artificial or machine intelligence. Dick had a very particular take on intelligent machines, like Joe chip's conapt or suitcase psychiatrists. While these devices are clearly fantastic and absurd, they also express some real insight and concerns about the cultural consequences of machine intelligence. Does Dick's take seem relevant now, thirty years later? What would he say to our contemporary gadget fetishism and addiction to information machines? Jl: My best guess about such matters is that each technological transformation, up to and perhaps including the Singularity, is going to work itself out vis-à-vis "the human" according to the deep principles of all media. Defined in its largest sense, as including things like cinema, theory, drugs, computing, moving type, music, etcetera, media is utterly consciousness-transforming in ways we can no longer competently examine, given how deeply they've pervaded and altered the collective and individual consciousness that would be the only possible method for making that judgment. And yet -— we still feel so utterly human to ourselves, and the proof is in the anthropomorphic homeliness that pervades the ostensibly exalted "media" in return. We humanize them, shame them, colonize and debunk them with our persistent modes of sex and neurosis and community and commerce. We turn them into advertisements for ourselves, rather than opportunities for shedding ourselves. At least so far. eD: you're pointing toward the psychological dimension of Dick's writing. even when you are looking at the futuristic aspect, what's really being extrapolated is a certain kind of dreamlike, subjective response to changing technological conditions. and all that is intensified by Dick's own psychological sensitivity. Jl: Dick was supremely labile. He has the power to put himself, as a writer, at the mercy of his own inventions. He could construct realities and then immerse himself in them as though helpless. So he conveys the experience of the mind- altering or the reality-transforming better than nearly any writer who ever lived. As a creator of fantastical, preposterous kinds of realities that are nevertheless grounded in a critique or an insight, he was the best at two things: at making these things a kind of a reality; and then, at experiencing that reality as though it were a given. His characters — his proxies within the space of his own fictional world — are totally subsumed in it. There's no mastery exhibited. They're reading it. They're experiencing it. They're surviving it. They're not objective tour guides. His character is a sufferer who moves through these worlds. eD: given Dick's obsessions, it seems inevitable that he would wind up asking religious questions. These came to the head with the so-called "ValIS trilogy" he wrote toward the end of his life: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. In the '70s, when he was read in kind of a proto-Marxist way by some critics, his later works were often dismissed at the works of a crazy man, even though the religious elements and visionary questions in his writing are evident from the get-go. Today, some people continue to dislike these more explicitly spiritual works and prefer the more socially and critically dynamic ones of the '60s. others see them as a crowning gesture. Did you have a sense of satisfaction in getting these three books included in the library of america series? Jl: One of my goals was to get what I felt was the majority of Dick's masterpieces into the library's three volumes. And for me, VALIS is probably one of his five greatest works. leaving aside context, the voice, the form, the velocity, the humor, the emotion — it's a great novel. It would be a great novel in any writer's career. It had to be canonized if he was going to go into the canon. So the minute I knew we could do more books, I started scheming about how to make VALIS a part of the project. I like all three of the books that have been described as a trilogy, although I'm skeptical about the whole trilogy idea. Besides VALIS, I think Transmigration of Timothy Archer may be among his greatest works. And Divine Invasion is rock solid. eD: With your own new book, Chronic City, I can very much sense the way that Dick has marked you as a reader, as a writer, as a person in the world. Jl: In the process of editing these Dick books, I felt myself recapturing a feeling of intimate kinship that came from the very beginning of wanting to be a novelist — a feeling that I wanted to, in some way, project a relationship to Dick's writing. I wanted to find a way to extend my own feelings about it into fictional space. For me, this is a book that's suffused in his influence. eD: Chronic City is a dark book. What does it mean to embark on a book that, while it's entertaining and there's plenty of nice people in it that you kind of want to spend time with, is also suffused with meditations on dread and the conundrum(s) of contemporary reality? Jl: Well, at the outset, if I started with that as a goal, I'd never do it at all. You have to start in a kind of innocence. You have to think, "I've got this funny idea." You know, "What if there was this character who didn't know he was doing such and such. And that would be fun." You start in a kind of willful naïveté about the breadth of your ambition as a survival trait — it's the only way to get in. But I felt that this was a book, like Fortress of Solitude, where I wanted to disburden myself of a lot of anger. I think it's a response to living in a pretty dreadful moment — a series of dreadful moments in the last ten years. And it's a book about complicity, too — about going along with how wrong it all is because you find it entertaining or good enough or necessary, in various degrees. eD: There is also an extraordinary amount of pot smoking in this book. Why so much? Jl: Confession compulsion? I don't know. One of the main subjects in my work is friendship, the experience of hanging out with people, of what it's like to really adore someone, argue with them, be obsessed with them — you know, compare your life to theirs, day in and day out. Chronic City is very much a book about friendship, and so I was trying to capture a certain vein of deep and silly and exhausted and slightly outlaw time-spending that is typified, for me, by getting high, with a certain personal group of people, again and again and again. Which isn't so much the stuff of my days right now — it can't be, you know — it's an older feeling. But it's one I hadn't ever gotten down the way I wanted to. eD: Part of the experience I have of novels these days is that it seems like the more awake and aware and acute they are, the more they are aware of their own fragility in the face of other kinds of narrative technologies. The most obvious example is simulation — immersive worlds that we can go into and reproduce behaviors that are more or less storylike. The fundamental character of a massive, open-ended, multi-player role-playing game is utterly different at this point than the character in a novel. how will novels stand up? Jl: I'm far too close to one pole to illuminate. But I'll say that — in the face of certain kinds of rival technologies and rival frameworks for experiencing what we might call self-admitting false realities — novels are a class of virtual reality experience that has some very particular and innate bottom lines. And I happen to like those. As I see the rivals emerge, I feel that novel-making and reading becomes one option on a very large menu, and in some ways a rather antique or humble or lumpen example. But I also think some of the things that make it that are also deep strengths that are becoming more and more highlighted. We talked about what makes Dick so compelling and personal — what made us each take him so personally when we discovered his work. And in some