Anti-Divine Devastations: Some Thoughts on Philip K. Dick and Hermeneutics

Philip Kindred Dick (or PKD for short), the preeminent science fiction writer of the twentieth century in my opinion, was a decidedly weird and disturbed man. He was also a brilliant but tormented writer, whose psychedelic style and terribly disturbing novels and short stories make this fact very clear.

Lawrence Sutin is considered the primary biographer of PKD. His book Divine Invasions paints a clear picture of the man's inner struggles, spiritual temptations, destructive sexual relationships (both for himself and the women involved), and his steadily-progressing writing talent over the span of his life. Sutin is rightly held as the best biographer of PKD since his book gives a more than adequate picture of the development of the many streams of PKD's life and how they all fluidly interacted. As a Christian, I was a bit self-conscious whenever Sutin would refer to the various aspects of PKD's life that clearly manifested some sort of spiritual need or destructive behavior and then treat it as normal things every reasonable person would find permissible. But, whatchya gonna do?

One of the aspects of PKD's life that frankly disgusted me was his treatment of women. Perhaps the best way to regard younger PKD is as more of an awkward young man than a pernicious predator, but as he grew older (and went from woman to woman) PKD's behavior turned grossly manipulative. I cringed as I read the many sections of PKD's life that included frivolous adultery; an apathy at the way he would switch to a completely different woman regardless of the many years he had spent as husband to a former woman, before then doing the same thing to the "new" woman not long down the line; and, unfortunately, the physical abuse he showed his last wife Tessa, who, out of all of them, seemed the most prone to emotional and physical manipulation (being of a petite frame and a similar disposition as Phil, i.e., fearful). No excuse can be made for these disgusting abuses; I could see how the acute guilt and fear which death-gripped PKD in the final years of his life could have been a side effect of his continual disregard for the real women around him (never mind the Jungian fem-types he would continually fix his writings on). Although I hate when writers or thinkers fall back on the "Freudian" card and opt to understand a figure solely based on the limited knowledge they may have of the figure, PKD's childhood and general life pattern as a young person makes a lot of sense with how his later life turned out. The fear that existed in PKD from a very early age can make sense (at least) of the subject matter he later decided to address in his writings. I also enjoyed the survey Sutin gave of PKD's writing habits, successes, failures, and money-making streaks.

Something I came away with after completing Sutin's bio, related to Hermeneutics and the reading of texts, is that: although a writer may be the worst person alive, you can still choose to separate the text from the writer whenever the text presents something to be gained. As Roland Barthes (in)famously declared, "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." I would contend a central nugget of truth to be retained from Barthes's point (disregarding the floodgates of relativism that his thoughts would inevitably help spawn), is that the text may be separated from the Author. You are allowed to free yourself from the tight chains of historic-critical interpretive paradigms and enjoy the language of the text as a Good (to bring Greek thought into this). Something almost singularly attributed to the literary critic Susan Sontag is the idea that at some point you have to put down the red pen and just enjoy the text (an enjoying process which undoubtedly can be shackled by the need to "get into the mind of the writer"). The same goes, absolutely, for PKD's science fiction. Look into the dense, rich, and (many times) frought-with-theological-malady texts he produced and enjoy them as a reader.

Here is the Biography: https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Invasions-Life-Philip-Dick/dp/0806512288/ref=sr_1_1?crid=19LYT8DCR592N&keywords=sutin+divine+invasions&qid=1684262428&sprefix=sutin+divine+invasion%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-1.

Here is PKD's Amazon writer's page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00BRTKOEA/allbooks