Another PKD Book Review: VALIS
- Alex Renner
- Jun 5, 2023
- 3 min read
Last night I finished one of Philip K Dick's final novels, VALIS. One thing reading this book makes clear, for someone who has read some of his earlier work (especially short stories) is how much his literary emphases shifts as he gets into his later years. The early PKD, still the psychedelic, wrote what could be understood to be more in line with what other science fiction writers were writing during that time (at a time when sci fi was really looked down upon). His short stories were still really weird, undoubtedly (read through this anthology to see just how trippy he really was); yet, his fascination with "the real," God, theology, and mythology generally didn't seem to come to the forefront until he started writing novels. Now I realize that assessment is wildly unfounded in another sense, though, since from the beginning many of his short stories subliminally probed into his later themes. Yet, none of his later work resembles what we find in VALIS and its immediate successor, The Divine Invasion.
I went in to VALIS expecting what I found in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: A fictional, psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness narrative which embodied the themes he would explicitly put down in his Exegesis (his theological/spiritual treatise on the nature of the universe). Did I find it? Yes and no. VALIS reads more like a slightly-altered biography for most of its pages. As someone who read Sutin's biography on PKD, I found first-hand accounts of what is explored in the third person in Sutin's survey of Dick's life. For most of it, the thought "This is sloppy, this is obviously talking about the specific details of PKD's life" kept coming to my mind. At about the half way mark, however, the way PKD slowly and slightly turns his own firsthand life experience into a fictional story in itself - and a deeply-felt interpretation of the nature of the universe and the spirituality he constructs in order to understand that universe - made me want to read more. Now, as a Christian who holds to the historic, orthodox understanding of God, Christ, and Man, I found myself uncomfortably relating to the character David, who sheepishly shuffles along with the obviously heretical, insane, and probably possessed main crew. Nonetheless, PKD's meditations on God, Christ, religion, Jungian archetypes, and the like, all gave off the impression that PKD had seriously pondered the nature of these faith expressions and their own particular salvific models. Now, his equation of these models with each other, I confess, rather seems to miss the point, especially concerning the Christian salvific model (the one he references with the most substance and regularity).
PKD clearly understood humanity's spiritual needs, though. I would lump him in with Frank Herbert in this regard: both men perceived the basic makeup of humanity's spiritual construction and subsequent spiritual requirements. For nothing else, this fact in itself should help readers more readily engage PKD's work. I feel like I am going on a campaign to devour as much of his writings as I can, since I feel like (regardless of his straying from the truth of Christian Scripture) I can glean real experiential knowledge from someone who struggled with the claims of faith. His explications of how the contemporary technologically-obsessed-and-overruled world of ours comes into contact with real human minds also gleans wonderful insights I can continually learn from. In my opinion, Philip K. Dick is the most relevant prophet of the contemporary age. He is someone I would place in direct philosophical lineage to figures like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Martin Heidegger, since his obsession with the spiritual and language and reality and the barebones human condition qualify him as a truly "continental" thinker, albeit in the outward garments of a late-twentieth-century science fiction nerd.
Take up and read!
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