Mum’s going to be studying “Do Android Dream…” as part of her English course on 20th century literature. I know PKD is revered in science fiction circles and the French seem to like him, but what does his work tell us about 20th century writing? Wikipedia and the PKD homepage don’t really illuminate things either.
What does his work tell us about 20th century writing?
Boy, does that sound like an English class assignment. Good luck. Here’s a New Yorker article on the guy.
Lessee…
He wrote about psychoactive drugs and mental illness reflecting the widespread fascination with those issues in the second half of the 20th century.
He frequently dealt with the concept of illusion versus reality, a common theme that again reflects the high visibility of psychoactive drugs in the middle of the century.
His protagonist were often unextraordinary people who become involved in vast, complex endeavors involving much more powerful players and simple try to muddle through. (You should be able to tie that to the 20th century literature somehow… Kafka if nothing else.)
Dick was part of the “science-fiction ghetto” and a descendant of the pulp magazine writers. Magazine fiction had its heyday in the 20th century, and Dick was a part of that phenomenon. Fiction writers had hundreds of hungry markets that would buy genre stories, but had fairly confining style requirements.
I don’t envy your mom. Sounds painful.
I read her a paragraph at random, it just happened to be a bit about bifuricating (his word) an android’s brain with a laser. It didn’t help 
Dick once ended a novel by having the hero wake up and find that it had been somebody else’s dream.
That sums up Dick’s appeal to the in-crowd. Reality is a construct. It can be shaped by forces beyond your control. There are forces in control, though, rather than randomness and chaos. You’re just a pawn in their game. The same thing can be said of the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon.
Here’s my recommendation. Gather up all the books you have by Dick and throw them out the window. Then go out and retrieve The Man in the High Castle. Read it. Savor it. Reread it. Don’t open the window again.
I can imagine, but maybe I’m typecasting your Mom. Maybe she’ll love PKD.
To me, he was one of the two geniuses of the sf field from 1950-2000. (The other was Lafferty. As Neil Gaiman wrote:* There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable…*)
Well, there were other geniuses (Asimov) but it wasn’t manifest in their fiction.
Smile. I’d say throw out High Castle and keep the rest.
Yeah, I know it won a Hugo, but I could never get past the involvement of I-Ching. It wasn’t just a clever complicating plot device. It seemed like Dick really wanted the reader to take it seriously… as he was doing at the time.
I had the same problem re-reading Salinger recently. His characters were obsessed with Zen Buddhism to the point it was a major annoyance. So I went to Wikipedia, and yes Salinger had really been obsessed with Zen Buddhism at the time.
Obviously I think your characterization of Dick’s themes and their appeal to the “in-crowd” is cartoony and bogus.
OTOH I always like to see someone dissing Pynchon.
This. I was going to say that what PKD shows us about 20th Cent. Lit. is that people will buy anything, and that if you weird it up enough, they will even call it Art. Can’t stand the man’s work. He’s right up there with Delany as being totally unreadable and a waste of trees.
Lafferty was an utterly terrific short story writer. (I once tossed a written review of a great Norman Spinrad collection so that I could write about Lafferty’s first collection, which was even greater.) Unfortunately, to make a living he had to write novels, and they weren’t anywhere near as good. Overall, there were bunches of writers who were better than Lafferty because of this and a number who were better just at short fiction.
But Dick couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag in a novel. Pick up any of his novels and start reading passages at random. The prose is clunky, non-descriptive, and ham-fisted. (Over longer lengths characterization is non-existent. Plots… Well, plots weren’t his strong point.)
Compare that to any novel by Lafferty. Even the random passages contain something interesting and make you want to read on. (Over longer lengths characterization is non-existent. Plots… Well, plots weren’t his strong point.)
People read Dick despite his prose. People read Lafferty for his prose. Writing and reading really is that disparate. But just as some people can’t penetrate Lafferty, making him a cult favorite, some people can’t penetrate Dick, making him a cult favorite. The only difference is that Dick’s cultness is at novel length and that is critical to posterity.
Ah the inevitable “Well I didn’t get it or like it so obviously anyone who says they did is only being a pretentious pseudo-intellectual.” As predictable as sunrise on this board.
I don’t understand the OP’s question. What can PKD tell us about 20th century lit? Nothing really. He was a novelist, not a literary critic.
Dick is only marginally an SF writer. Like Vonnegut he used some SF Tropes, but was basically a humanist who used those tropes to meditate on the human condition. Dick found our humanity in our ability to feel empathy. He used robots and aliens to flesh out this idea. His best book that no one recommends is We Can Build You. Also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Clans of the Alphane Moon, Flow My Tears, the Policeman said and the Valis trilogy. The Man in the High Castle is good but over-rated IMO.
I’ve never read anything by Philip K. Dick, so I can’t speak to his literary merits or lack thereof, but “what does his work tell us about 20th century writing?” seems like a really odd way to phrase the question. His work IS twentieth-century writing; therefore, it doesn’t have to engage in meta-commentary about twentieth-century writing to be fair game for a twentieth-century lit class.
Presumably, you wouldn’t be asking this question about a writer whose works were part of the traditional canon, or even about a contemporary writer whose work is normally classed as “literary fiction.” I’d bet anything that’s part of the professor’s point: those categories are artificial, and it’s certainly possible for popular genre fiction to contain well-crafted prose and provocative ideas. (And even when it doesn’t, it can still be worthy of study because of what it reveals about the interests, ideas, desires, and fears of the culture that produced it. I’d venture to say this is doubly true in the case of science fiction and other speculative genres, which often tell us interesting stuff about a society’s aspirations and anxieties.)
As a lit professor, I can’t resist suggesting a few questions for your mother to keep in mind as she reads:
– Why might this have been popular? Which elements in this novel might have been particularly appealing to an audience at the time it was published, and why?
– How does this work “fit in” with the more canonical works on the syllabus? Do I see any places in which they seem to be in dialogue with each other – in other words, is Dick playing with some of the same ideas as other writers, or doing similar things with narrative structure?
– If I don’t consider this “literature,” why not? What ideas and assumptions do I have about what “counts” as literature? How does this novel either challenge or confirm these assumptions?
Things I remember liking about PKD:
Plot devices aren’t the key to PKD any more than they are to most writers. Two people can write a vampire story with the same plot twist and one story will be worthless while the other might be a classic.
Still… here’s a PKD plot device I remember. I think it was from Clans of the Alphane Moon?
About half a dozen people are trapped in a force field. There’s a religious fanatic, a paranoid, and several other recognizable personality types. They start planning what actions to take, but as they’re executing their plans inexplicable things begin happening. The protagonist notices he has no genitals. None of them do, and naturally that causes serious panic in the group. Hell, they’re drinking water, how are they even going to urinate?
Conflicts pile on conflicts and eventually the world breaks down, dissolves into gray and reforms anew. A similar episode occurs with a new batch of problems arising and eventually reaching critical mass. It becomes obvious that different members of the group are controlling the overall reality experienced by the group. But because of faults in each individual’s thinking the realities are unstable. The religious fanatic couldn’t handle a world with sexual passions and created a world where it wasn’t an issue. Unfortunately that led to internal contradictions, and the world dissolved.
That’s similar to your plot description of someone being in another person’s dream, Mr. Mapcase, but much richer, and with some actual meaning.
In a Dick book there are almost always three of more conflicting parties. There are authors who simple set up hero and a villain, but PKD will always make the issue more complicated than that. (Aside: That’s something I liked about Midnight Run with DeNiro and Charles Grodin, the interaction of DeNiro, the competing bounty hunter, the Mob, and the FBI.)
Another book I recall fondly is Our Friends from Frolix 8. It was a very minor Dick book, short with simple plotting. A revolutionary hero --really the only hope the oppressed plebes have against the ruling elites-- has journeyed into space to try to find some sort of ally. He’s made contact with an almost God-like creature and is returning to Earth in its (biblical) bosom.
The man is one of Earth’s most brilliant people, but totally incapable of understanding the creature he is guiding back to the home planet. The creature blandly assures him that it understands his passions, sympathizes and will help him, but the man can’t even begin to guess it’s actual motives… and that’s most of the plot. Most sf writers would come up with clever twists that move the the story from the heart to the brain. Dick keeps it in the heart, and evokes the elemental emotional power (and danger) of men petitioning gods.
Another Dickian moment I remember is of a boy preparing for a test that will determine his fate. His father emphasizes the importance of the day, how this is the boy’s chance to enter the ruling class, to make something of himself, how the father has pinned his own dreams on his child’s future. The boy is exceptional and has studied hard; will he be able to compete? A page and a half later, two government employees are chatting and make a passing comment that lets the reader know the tests are fixed. It’s a very neat set up that shows hope in an oppressive world and then jerks the rug out. It was more effective than just trying to describe a hopeless situation.
Dick was probably the only writer of his time who would kill God off-stage, make a two sentence reference to it and then move on with the main story line.
I was never a big PKD fan, though I did read some of his stuff. I liked Androids and Valis and short stories like “Second Variety.” (I have not read Man in the High Castle. I do think this critical love for him is a bit overdone.
As for Lafferty, it’s the opposite. If anyone deserves to be considered a major voice of 20th century literature coming out of the SF field, it’s him. His short stories are some of the best ever written.
As I’ve said before on this board, PKD was an excellent storyteller but a terrible writer. He had great ideas for plots, settings, characters, etc., but it seems like he always had trouble putting them to paper.
This is why his short stories are exponentially more enjoyable than his novels – because the short story format allowed him to make his point and leave the reader with it.
And this is why his work makes such great movies – because it allows someone else to write his stories.
What does this say about 20th Century literature? I don’t know. Maybe that in those days we were sometimes too willing to allow writers to sacrifice form for substance.
I suspect that the professor realizes that a class covering “20th century writing” would be incomplete without a mention of genre fiction. Sure, you could just study “literary” fiction for the last 100 years, but that would be ignoring huge swaths of 20th century culture. It would be like studying 19th century music but ignoring operas because they were “popular” entertainment. So Dick is probably on the reading list because he’s a genre author with some intellectual depth.
There’s no telling who’s going to like or dislike an author you’re fond of. It’s similar to how you can have no use for your best friends other friends.
I can understand Exapno’s point that Lafferty’s trouble with novels should compromise his critical standing. I’ve got very little use for his novels, although I’ve never tried “Reefs of Earth” or “Space Chantey”.
It’s tempting to compare him to Bradbury, because Bradbury’s reputation is primarily based on his short stories, “Something Wicked” and “451” notwithstanding. I’ve got little but respect for Bradbury, but I don’t love him the way I love Lafferty. Raphael was his own man, with very little in the way of direct antecedents.
…and that’s how I live Dick as well, but with less love. He seems to have invented himself. I don’t get that impression from Heinlein, Sturgeon, Asimov, Niven, whoever.
Martin: As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library, featuring the overlords of the genre: Asimov, Bester, Clarke!
Kid: What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin: I’m aware of his work.
In other words, since Dick was good he can’t be an SF writer?
Oh, the irony!
Bradbury was the one true genius of early sf. He deserved the admiration he received when people outside the genre found him in the early 50s. The man could write like a dream.
Tangetial, but PKD can tell us something about the 20th C movie industry: if you’re a famous enough writer Hollywood will want to film your books. If you’re PKD they’ll end up as films that share only a title (if that) with their source material. 
That an author could be generally considered great with few of the people who dropped his name at parties having actually read him? No, that’d probably be Faulkner.
Never finished a Dick novel. Always get within 20 pages of the end, say, “I don’t give a shit what happens to any of these people,” and close the book. This is after a couple hundred pages of asking, “Is this going to get interesting at any time? The premise was okay but premise isn’t everything.”
Watch a movie “based” on one of his books and be glad the writer and director threw out most everything from the book.