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December 9, 2005
book review: "The Man Who Japed" by Philip K. Dick
Amazon.com: The Man Who Japed (Vintage): Books: Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick has always amazed me. Not just for his imagination, which, if you take a certain point of view, was somewhat limited, but for his prescience and philosophy. Let me explain.
To a certain degree many of PKD's books are the same: disenfranchised man comes across something which trips up his understanding of reality and while he unravels the mystery of a simple "whodunit" discovers that there's an even greater "Whodunit" involving higher powers. There's nothing wrong with these boilerplate plotlines--he was, after all, a pulp writer and had to churn out stories by the truck load if he wanted to pay the electric bill. However, what this does do is raise the question, if he's got such a standard plot outline in so many of his books, why does he continue to have such a following? "The Man Who Japed" is one book which helps answer this question.
As I said, it's primarily his prescience and his philosophy that draw readers in and keep them. Like so many of his protagonists, PKD was looking behind the curtain to find out what made reality reality (or in some cases, what made unreality reality). In so doing he shaped worlds which sometimes reflected his own, sometimes were comically different, and sometimes were darkly, sadly, accurately satiric. The Man Who Japed offers us this last vision. In this book Earth has been ravaged by war, is left with a population which stoically refuses to leave despite better options on other planets, and sits as the centerpiece of a human colonization program which looks back on Earth as a moral compass despite the fact that it offers much less in the way of lifestyle and freedom than any of its colonies. Politics is not so much underlying choices in fundamental connections to reality as it is the surface message and presentation, and morality is controlled through language and media. In short, it's a metaphor for the United States. This is PKD's prescience. Despite this book's age (it was written in 1956) it stands alongside our (the reader's) era, no matter what era it is. I was struck as I was reading by the homage to our current political environment, the use of media to control thought, the un-1984-ishness of this "Big Brother" in looking over your shoulder with a smile on his face. PKD presents a morality which is McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan, or Bush. It's the exporting of our ideals, which leaves us with nothing but empty husks.
This ability to paint a picture which reflects and comments on every age isn't his only ability; PKD also melds his philosophy to his writing in a clear and human way: subversion breeds freedom. PKD's heros all have one thing in common. They swim upstream. Sometimes they swim upstream only to find it was actually downstream. Sometimes it's the opposite. Whichever way they try to go, PKD invariably pulls the rug out from under them (here its the main character "Purcell" creating an alias when he goes to a shrink, only to wake up one day to find that he's in reality the alias) and us. He challenges his characters, and thereby us, to question what is real. To have a reader ask what is "really happening" while their nose is in a book is the mark of a skilled writer. What's "really happening" is that I was on a subway train reading words... or is it? Asking so much of his readers, trusting that they may "get" the message, or they may simply enjoy the adventure, makes him a favorite of many.
Thankfully, it's kept him in print. For us, and for the next generation, who will probably find that he's still, sadly, commenting on their reality.
Posted by sferrell at December 9, 2005 10:07 AM
