Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Much later in our lives, he and I corresponded for a couple of years, always about writing; he knew how much I admired his work. We talked on the phone two or three times, but never met.

  American male writers of our generation—just too young to fight in the war—often went to considerable trouble to prove their manly credentials, taking jobs as loggers, on freighters, hunting, hitchhiking, living ostentatiously rough, and so on. Phil Dick didn’t. After a very brief try at college he clerked for a couple of years in a music shop on Telegraph Avenue. He married five different women. Otherwise it’s hard to find out anything he did besides write. Writing was his vocation from the start. He worked very hard to make a living from it, with little encouragement from the publishing world. Like many Western authors he lacked personal contacts in the eastern-centered literary establishment and could count only on persistence and luck to find him an editor. The Scott Meredith Literary Agency took on his first novels (written in the fifties to the standards of the realist canon), but they sent all five of them back to him as unsalable in 1963, the year after he published The Man in the High Castle. Only one of those early novels was published during his lifetime, though they are all available now, and have their admirers. My opinion is that his failure to get them published forced him, harshly but fortunately, away from the glum realism of the fifties into broader regions of the imagination where he could find his own way.

  He was born a twin. His sister died when they were six weeks old. He wrote and spoke of this connection and this loss as if they were retrievable memories, sometimes implying that his sister lived on in him. Twins, doubles, simulacra populate his stories. Certainly he was a man who contained disparate and perhaps incompatible elements, to the point of being both uncertain and overassertive of his own identity. He laid himself open to charges of unreliability, of an uncalculating, profitless, but real duplicity. In his writing life, the persona he hoped would dominate—the conventionally respectable, successful literary novelist—became the sterile shadow. The reality appeared to be the author of pulp fiction, the science-fiction writer turning out stuff as fast as he could for money.

  Well-known authors like Hemingway who boast that they write only for money are one thing, obscure writers who do it because it’s their job are another. My respect is reserved for them. Writing fiction for a living is a hard trade, highly skilled work done almost always for low or uncertain gain. For a writer of unconventional gifts it can be slavery. Yet like any craft or art it rewards the serious practitioner with the knowledge of doing something as well as you can do it; and there may be the bonus of an inward conviction that you’re doing something as well as it can be done. A structural element in much of Dick’s best work, including this novel, is his deep respect for the honest, modest craftsman. For a long time that is what he was himself. I don’t know if, in the hard years of the fifties, he was fully aware of the high quality of some of his pulp-magazine fiction. Certainly he struggled with the market’s demand for low standards and incessant production; but he kept on seeking his own vein, finding it, mining it deeper, till he hit the mother lode with The Man in the High Castle.

  The book won the Hugo Award, nominated and voted for by the members of the major annual science-fiction meeting of readers, writers, editors, publishers, and agents in the field. Yet most of the sf community accepted him simply as a workhorse and were slow to recognize him as a star. Perhaps it was because of his lack of clout with publishers and editors; perhaps it was because he wrote so differently from the established, successful writers of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, authors like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, who set the tone and dominated the thinking of the field for years. Unlike them, Dick could be accused of committing literature. The Old Boys and the Young Engineers of science fiction were as bigoted as any English professor; genre prejudice, genre defensiveness, cut both ways.

  But many science-fiction writers of Dick’s generation and younger were busy creating what was called the New Wave. It was in fact one wave after another, gathering at last into a tide that would overflow the artificial limits of the genre, rejoining it inevitably to the “sea of story,” the entirety of literary fiction, from which both critical theory and genre parochialism had kept it segregated for decades. I don’t know to what extent Phil Dick saw himself as a part of this wave-making group. My guess is that he didn’t see himself as belonging to any group or fellowship. His need was to pursue a solitary vision, to surrender himself to an angel who spoke to him alone.

  In the seventies, as the use of “recreational” drugs became commonplace and, for some, socially obligatory, and the mysticisms of the time sought to obviate practical discipline via chemical shortcuts, slightly unstable personalities could be and were seriously unbalanced by indiscriminate self-induced hallucination. My memory of one of our telephone conversations, forty-odd years ago, is of Phil telling me about the discussions he had been having with John the Evangelist in Greek, a language he didn’t know. His earnest pleasure in receiving wisdom directly from the saint and his conviction of its immense importance were disarming.

  After 1969, occult revelations of this kind increasingly dominated Dick’s thinking and his fiction. They have been taken as seriously as he took them, but I have seen no successful attempt—including his own Exegesis—to make a coherent whole of them. To some of his admirers the increasing influence of his mystic insights and visitations on his work is positive, or even transcendent, on the order of Blake’s Prophetic Books. To others his insights appear too disconnected, his visions too disordered to enter successfully into his art. I myself see them as drawing him into a brilliant, manic solipsism, farther and farther away from the extraordinary sensitivity to ordinary people and their ordinary moral anguish that I value most highly in his novels.

  Such sensitivity must have been a very heavy burden to bear. I wonder if the figure of Mr. Tagomi in The Man in the High Castle reflects that element of the author’s complex personality. Mr. Tagomi is a commonplace, conventional, limited, moderately decent middle-aged businessman who is forced to perceive, and tries to face up to, unmitigated human evil. In his terror, his courage, and his humiliation, he is as far from heroes with ray guns in Outer Space as he is from antiheroes with sex problems in Upper Manhattan. Perhaps the word hero, like the word lady, has run its course. We need another word, a deeper, less showy, less performative one, for people like Mr. Tagomi.

  Phil Dick’s prose is transparent, plain, often rather flat. It avoids complex syntax and uses no fancy vocabulary except now and then a heavy slug of Jungian or other specialized lingo. The code of science fiction in the fifties and sixties decreed that style was for snobs. Real sf writers just wrote it like it was (never mind the fact that they were making it all up). This stance may have influenced Dick, but his apparently direct, unmusical, seemingly reportorial language also serves to camouflage a subtle, tricky art. The French got on to Dick long before anglophone critics did, and were writing thoughtful articles about him while, over here, he was still trying to live off what the pulp magazines paid. The French were crazy about Edgar Allan Poe, too; I’ve wondered if this was because a French ear can’t hear that Poe’s poetry is often delivered by sledgehammer. Maybe they can’t hear how clunky Dick’s prose sometimes is. But maybe that leaves them free to feel the risky, effective tension between the manner of his style and its matter.

  In any case, in this one novel, Dick uses a strange, telegraphic mannerism. The novel is told from the point of view of one character at a time (limited third person narration, the mode that has dominated fiction since the time of Henry James): we get the story through what people in the story are thinking. And they frequently think without articles—“a” and “the”—and sometimes without pronouns. Since most of them live on the West Coast of North America under Japanese dominion or are Japanese by birth or ancestry, this could be a rather crude attempt at suggesting the influence of the Japanese language. But when reader finds character from German-
dominated East Coast also thinking same kind of thought, minus articles and pronouns, must pause to wonder.

  A similar but deeper puzzle is why these transplanted Japanese and their North American subjects all run their lives according to the dictates of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, which was never culturally very important in Japan. And the mystery deepens if the report is true that in writing The Man in the High Castle the author left every plot decision, every choice as to where the story should go next, to this ancient oracle.

  The singular indifference to plausibility, the multiplicity of random possibilities, and the growing interpenetration of what appears to be reality with what appears not to be reality bring us to the brink of the Dickian abyss—the disconnect between probability and improbability, between the authentic and the imitation, between history and invention, the no-man’s-lands of what happened, what might have happened, what didn’t happen, what might happen, a place that is no place, where there is no solid footing and nothing can be counted on—a mental vortex with which Dick’s imagination was desperately familiar, and which he could represent to the reader in a straightforward, perfectly plausible way, in an ordinary tone of voice.

  He dismantles the world as we know it as calmly as other novelists describe a walk or a dinner party. He is appallingly subversive.

  The meditations throughout the novel on historicity, on forgery, on what makes a real thing real and a fake thing fake, profoundly motivate the plot and the characters’ thoughts and choices. These thoughts and the acts that follow from them arrive at no final insight or solution, but are left unresolved, vital, active. Mr. Tagomi is given a brief, frightening vision of the San Francisco of “our” reality, the reality in which Germany and Japan lost the war; the agent of his vision is an unpretentious bit of metal jewelry, the work of a Jewish craftsman who previously made his living by forging artifacts for Japanese collectors. The eponymous man in the high castle doesn’t live in a high castle, but in a suburban house in Wyoming. He is the author of a science-fiction novel, an alternate-history novel, in which Germany and Japan lost the war. Its title, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, confidently stated to be from the Bible, vaguely resembles a phrase in Ecclesiastes. Its author appears only very near the end of the novel after a long, suspenseful buildup, clearly leading to a final dramatic scene—but the drama happens almost casually, and the final scene is quietly, masterfully anticlimactic.

  Full of fearful tensions, erupting more than once into unplanned murder, this novel never seeks its justification in thrills or its solution in violence. Fearfully aware of the power of human evil and familiar with various forms of at least incipient insanity, Philip Dick was tempted both by the vertigo of infinite instability and by the possibility of the existence of one solid thing: the goodwill, the goodness, in the most banal sense, of ordinary people. Whether our hard-won good intentions are all we have to trust or only pave our way to hell, his evasive artistry forbade him to say. But I think it legitimate to read his characters’ inadequate, blundering attempts at doing right as the central events of this extraordinary novel.

  Huxley’s Bad Trip

  An introduction to the Folio Society edition of

  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 2013.

  When Brave New World came out in 1931 it wasn’t called science fiction, because the term was scarcely used then; and it has seldom been called science fiction since, because such a description might be taken as implying that it has no literary value. Now that the critics are at last giving up such generic prejudice, we can call the book what it obviously is: a dazzling work of early science fiction.

  Aldous Huxley intended his novel to be a warning about the future, but it did more: it lived into the future itself, remaining immensely influential in literature for decades after its publication. Its success in providing a model of “futuristic” writing for lesser writers may indeed make it seem, to a postmillennial reader, rather over-explanatory and predictable. What was new and daringly original to readers in 1931 has become cliché. Fiction and film have made us more or less familiar with vast laboratories, fetuses ripening in bottles, programmed children, ever-nubile women, hordes of indistinguishable clones, the vision of a materialistic paradise where nothing is lacking except imagination, spontaneity, and freedom. Occasionally we even catch glimpses on the daily TV news of the programmed, uniformed children, the smiling clones exercising in unison.

  Both in reality and in fiction, the rational utopia and the rational dystopia modeled on it run much to the same pattern. And they are quite small places, with remarkably little variety. Huxley was brilliant in his paradoxical depiction of a perfect heaven which is a perfect hell; but neither heaven nor hell, conceived rationally, conceived politically, can offer much to the imagination. Only the poets, a Dante or a Milton, can find the grandeur of heaven and hell, infusing them with passion.

  Does Brave New World ever surpass its rational, dystopic limits and hint at that greater poetic vision? I am not sure it does, not sure it doesn’t.

  The cautionary novel does what many people assume all science fiction does: it predicts the future. However much they may exaggerate dramatically or satirically, predictive writers extrapolate immediately from fact. And, believing that they know what’s going to happen in the future, for good or for evil, they want the reader to believe it too. A great deal of science fiction, however, has nothing to do with the future, but is a playful or serious thought experiment, such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds or Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Thought experimenters use fiction to recombine aspects of reality into forms not meant to be taken literally, only to open the mind to possibility. They don’t deal with belief at all.

  This distinction enforced itself on me when I realised that Huxley himself appears to have believed quite literally in his prediction.

  In 1921, early in the Soviet social experiment, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s great dystopic novel We drew a powerful picture of an over-rationalised society under total governmental control. Far earlier than that, in 1909, E. M. Forster had written the amazing visionary story “The Machine Stops,” which Huxley surely knew. Brave New World, then, had worthy ancestors in a specific tradition of anti-totalitarian dystopias. And by 1931, when most of Asia and much of Europe was being run by or taken over by dictatorships, it was perfectly realistic to see totalitarian government as the most immediate and appalling threat to any kind of freedom.

  But in 1949, Huxley was still speaking of his novel not only as a cautionary tale, but as describing nascent reality. He wrote to George Orwell when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, generously praising it as “fine and profoundly important,” but adding, in defense of his own vision against Orwell’s subtler yet more brutal dystopia, “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

  Evidently he still believed that “hypnopaedia,” the essential technique of the mental programming of the citizens of the World State, was a proven, effective method, only waiting to be used. Psychological theories of the time, such as B. F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning,” could be taken to support this belief, and most of the experiments disproving the effectiveness of “sleep-learning” were yet to come. On the other hand, no experiment had ever been accepted as proving it. Hypnopaedia was to Huxley not so much a fictional invention or scientific hypothesis as an article of faith.

  Why did he invest so much in a shaky theory and call it science? What was his fundamental attitude to science?

  His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” and his brothers Andrew and Julian were all biologists of extraordinary distinction and humanity. Thomas Henry Huxley invented the word “agnostic” to name, and so create, an open space for the spirit equ
ivalent to the open space for the mind offered by science. Ideally, the scientist, while always seeking to know and to know more, forgoes any claim to final knowledge. A sound hypothesis supported and modified by endless testing (such as Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, or Darwin’s theory of evolution) is as far as science goes towards certainty. Scientists don’t deal in belief.

  Aldous Huxley of course knew this. He also knew that few scientists attain the ideal openness of mind of agnosticism, and that many of them talk as if they alone know anything worth knowing. Here in the real world the smug conviction of incontestable rightness displayed by the technicians of the World State is at least as common in laboratories as it is in seminaries.

  Huxley’s novels were mostly cynical, but the hideous scientism of his dystopia reveals something fiercer than cynicism. To some temperaments the open mind, the acceptance of final uncertainty, is not only insufficient but frightening and hateful. He knew enough science to make the inventions of his novel plausible, but whatever made him dislike and distrust it, the role he gives scientific technology in his novel is domineeering and sinister. It appears that, seeing science as heartless, emotionless rationalism, he thought that the pursuit of science could never attain true meaning or do true good, but was inevitably at the service of evil. The scion of a great humanistic scientific tradition portrayed science as the enemy of humanity.

  And the young author of cold, scathing satires of British intellectual and social mores became in middle age a member of the mystical Vedanta Society of Los Angeles and a guru of the drug movement that was gathering strength when he died in 1963, his suffering eased by a hundred-milligram dose of LSD.