Philip K. Dick's Unconventional Dystopias (original) (raw)

Abstract

Since the earliest days of P. K. Dick scholarship the SFnal works of the Californian writer have been repeatedly labelled "dystopian," even though such a categorization sounded more like a critical commonplace than the result of a painstaking and detailed analysis of his oeuvre. This article focuses on one of the most important novels written by Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977), and a less celebrated one, Radio Free Albemuth (1985), as the most interesting examples of his dystopian imagination. While skeptical about the contention that Dick's SF is mostly dystopian (as dystopia theories help us to tell the difference between dystopian and pessimistic narratives), these two novels show that their author reinterpreted the dystopian tradition stemming from Huxley, Orwell, and Zamjatin in a most original way through the figure of the informant, which becomes central both in Scanner and Albemuth, and constitutes one more embodiment of the characteristically Dickian split subjectivity. He couldn't say what grievous chain of circumstances led from the innocuous genetic novelty to another crushing totalitarian regime. (J. Lethem) There is a widespread feeling that Dick is basically a dystopianist, to put it in Lethem's terms. One of the earliest commentators, Darko Suvin, went so far as to declare that "up to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch the novels by Dick that are not primarily dystopian […] are better forgotten" ("The Opus" 7). It is a strong statement, as one can expect of Darko Suvin, but, even though Suvin is one of the top experts when it comes to utopian writings, his remark suffers from a certain vagueness. A more recent and more focused suggestion to read Dick's SF as dystopian is found in David Seed's compact introduction to the genre, where he sees Time Out of Joint (1959) as a novel in which Dick manages to apply his typical and disquieting ontological interrogation (usually summarized by the question "what is real/reality?") to the deconstruction of an already existing regime which, according to Seed, usually structures the plot of dystopian narratives (Seed 88-89). Besides, M. Keith Brooker has argued that the American 1950s, the decade in which Dick's apprenticeship as a professional writer took place, were

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