During an interview with Paul Williams in late 1974, which was later incorporated into Williams's book Only Apparently Real, Philip Dick said (163):
The way I feel is that the universe itself is actually alive, and we're in it as part of it. And it is like a breathing creature, which explains the concept of the Atman, you know, the breath, pneuma, the breath of God . . . that the universe sort of breathes . . . everything is moving, changing, growing, developing, and that we move with it. We can never escape this movement. . . . Like Jonah, trying to get away from the whale. "Trying to get away from the whale!" Trying to get away from God. . . . He was swall[ow]ed by God.
At approximately the same time as he made these remarks, in an Exegesis ;entry written circa 1974-1975, Dick was considering as a plot device for a proposed novel an ideograph which was to be called "the Albemuth whale's mouth sign," consisting of a toothed open (whale's) mouth, inside of which was the Christian fish sign (1). Because Dick's notes represent his preliminary sketches for a novel and are not, therefore, fully developed, they tantalize rather more than they satisfy; however, the religious symbolism of the ideograph is significant and perhaps can be ascertained by referring to a bit of whale lore about which Dick himself must have known. That is, "the Albemuth whale's mouth sign" gains a certain resonance when not simply decoded by reference to the story of Jonah and the Whale alone, though that story is certainly intertextually connected.
In the "Extracts (supplied by a sub-sub-librarian)," the section of whale lore which precedes the actual narrative of Melville's Moby-Dick, there is a brief excerpt from Montaigne's "Apology for Raimond Sebond," concerning a rather remarkable relationship of cooperation between the whale and the sea gudgeon. The excerpt is so provocative that Dick may have been compelled to track down the entire passage, which would have been readily available in one of the many editions of Montaigne's Essays. I reproduce the passage here (472):
It is said that the whale never goes abroad without being preceded by a small fish resembling the sea-gudgeon, which is for that reason called the Guide. The whale follows it, allowing itself to be turned and led as easily as a vessel is turned by its rudder; and in return for this service, whilst every other thing, whether animal or vessel, that enters the awful chasm of this monster's mouth is forthwith engulfed and lost, this little fish retires into it in all security, and sleeps there. During its sleep the whale never stirs, but as soon as it issues forth, starts and follows it unceasingly; and if by chance the guide goes astray, the whale will go wandering about hither and thither, often knocking itself against the rocks, like a ship without a rudder. (Montaigne 1927)
The allegorical potential of this phenomenon would not have been lost on Dick's active imagination. As a result of the added significance of Montaigne's parable, we can read the peculiar ideograph of "the Albemuth whale's mouth sign" as containing more meaning than is possible by reference to the story of Jonah and the Whale alone. As a tentative interpretation, I propose that the ideograph allegorically represents God, incarnated as Leviathan, which is not precisely "swallowing," but holding--one is tempted to say protectively harboring--in his mouth the votaries of Christ, the Christians. In this case, the Christians are rather like Dick's imagined Elijah, or John the Baptist, the prophet who precedes the coming of, and announces to the world, God's immanence. The ideograph was conceived in those crucial months following the religious events of "2-3-74," and the plot outlines and story sketches among which it appears became parts of both Radio Free Albemuth (1976; published 1985) and VALIS (1981), books based on Dick's profound religious experiences of 1974 (2). I will have occasion to return to this ideograph later in this chapter.
In the Exegesis entries consisting of interpretations of his own novels, Dick wrote, "VALIS deals with the irreducible primary religious sense: God as terrifying & fascinating simultaneously"(Exegesis 201). What Dick identifies here as "the irreducible primary religious sense" is remarkably similar to what Rudolph Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1923), calls the "numinous" experience, the experiencing of the divine as both "terrifying & fascinating," to use Dick's phrase. Otto identifies the "numinous" experience with the "horror of Pan" (14), and describes its main features as follows (31):
The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The "mystery" is for him not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dionysiac-element in the numen.
In the novel VALIS, Dick (or rather, Horselover Fat) observes that the relationship with the divine "is a kind of terrible game" which "can go either way" (¤11.164), because "the divine and the terrible are so close to each other" (¤11.165). He also claims that "there is a streak of the irrational in the universe, and we, the little hopeful trusting Rhipidon Society, may have been drawn into it, to perish" (¤11.164; see also ¤3.31). The "streak of the irrational" is here conceived of as an ontological metaphor; that is, it imagines a mental state or condition as a container, like a room, into which one can be "drawn"Šlike the mouth of the beast, Leviathan. A Dickian theophany, or manifestation of the numen, contains what Otto characterizes as the "Dionysiac-element," what R. D. Stock, in The Flutes of Dionysus, describes as a "blend of desire and cruelty" (10) (3), and what Northrop Frye calls the dimension "of malice within the divine nature" (quoted in Stock 48). This experience is concretized in the ideograph Dick called "the Albemuth whale's mouth sign," the precarious existence of life inside the awesome mouth of the giant Leviathan;, the mouth of God. The numen contains equal portions of the gentle, loving Redeemer of the New Testament and the wrathful, demonic violence of the Yahweh of the Book of Job (see VALIS, ¤2.17 and ¤3.23).
Dionysus is the God of masks, disguises, and transformations and manifests himself in Dick's writings in both benevolent and malevolent incarnations. Benevolent manifestations are named Valis, Zebra, Tagore, and, of course, Christ; malevolent incarnations Dick names in the Exegesis the "master magician," Pigspurt,4 James-James, Yaldabaoth; and Satan or Belial in The Divine Invasion (1981). The demonic "Dionysus-element" in Dick's fiction emerges again and again and is consistently expressed in various guises, from his earliest work to his last. The demonic is imagined as both mad Gnostic demiurge; and as an invading alien (e.g., Palmer Eldritch;); in this sense, the theological preoccupations, however unorthodox, remained remarkably stable over the three decades marked by his writing.
It is a commonplace of banal proportions that in the modern era the "Dionysiac-element" was relegated to the vast realm of the unconscious in the human psyche and that, as Camille Paglia observes, "selfhood expands to include the unconscious" (Sexual Personae 85). Hence, at the most general level of approximation, Dick tended to follow the line of thought about the Dionysian that derived from Nietzsche. The "Apollonian and the Dionysian" name the dualistic, antagonistic forces within the human unconscious (see VALIS, ¤11.173). If the Apollonian names the firm faith in the principium individuationis, the Dionysian identifies the collapse of this faith. In analogies drawn from music, Nietzsche's description of the Dionysian experience would have especially appealed to Dick:
Transform Beethoven's "Hymn to Joy" into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruckŠthen you will approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or "impudent convention" have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. (Basic Writings of Nietzsche 37)
The Dionysian moment of "mystical selfŠabnegation" (38) dissolves the boundaries separating Self and Other, and in a moment of keen perceptual insight or epiphany, the human being recognizes his true being as a member of a species and that cthonic nature does not care whatsoever for individuals.
Following Jung's reading of Nietzsche, (5) Dick conceived of a person's public personality as a "mask," and he followed Jung in imagining the unconscious as both "hermaphroditic" (Paglia 85) and as the repository of the cthonic archetypes, archetypes understood as autonomous personalities that reside in the unconscious:
An irruption from the collective unconscious, Jung taught, can wipe out the fragile individual ego. In the depths of the collective the archetypes slumber; if aroused, they can heal or they can destroy. This is the danger of the archetypes; the opposite qualities are not yet separated. Bipolarization into paired opposites does not occur until consciousness occurs. (VALIS ¤10.164) (6)
Dick's language in this passage is virtually indistinguishable from that he uses when discussing the numen; I will remind the reader of the passage from VALIS I cited earlier, in which the relationship with the divine is a "terrible game" which "can go either way." Here, "the archetypes," like the numen, are also dualistic, embodying both the benign, Apollonian element and the "Dionysiac-element"; the archetypes, like the numen, can either "heal" or "destroy." We are back in the mouth of Leviathan. Moreover, the passage indicates that as Dick read Jung, there is no prelapsarian state of grace which preceded consciousness; in the words of Lao-Tze of which Jung was so fond, "High rests on low"--in this case, the Dionysian, primordial archetypes that are the inheritance of each individual psyche (in VALIS [¤3.31] Dick refers to Fragment 54 of Heraclitus, "Latent structure is master of obvious structure"). Yet, as the aforementioned passage indicates, Dick imagines a movement from an original ontological duality to a Hegelian; notion of an evolving, teleologically driven order. At the level of personal psychology, this suggests that Dick reads Jungian individuation as the elevation and integration into consciousness of the shadow archetype.
Dick develops this reading early, but it does not yet appear in any coherent form in one of his earliest works, The Cosmic Puppets (completed mid-1953, published in novel form in 1957). Dick abjured the Judeo-Christian duality of God/Satan and chose to depict the Zoroastrian Ormazd/Ahriman duality restored to its proper dynamic tension. The dualistic cosmologies available from Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, and Gnosticism were too static, however, because the conflicts implicit in all of these ancient dualisms are simply resolved by an overcoming of the Dark by the Light, reflecting a comedic narrative structure which is always predetermined in advance and hence tiresomely predictable. Thus this static model was quickly forgone in his early texts, as he proceeded to develop his religious and philosophic thought.
During an interview with Charles Platt, later incorporated into Platt's Dream Makers, Dick said (154),
I forged a concept which is relatively simple and possibly unique in theology, and that is, the irrational is the primordial stratum of the universe, it comes first and is primary in ontology. . . . And it evolves into rationality. The history of the universe is a movement from irrationalityŠchaos, cruelty, blindness, pointlessnessŠto a rational structure which is harmonious, interlinked in a way which is orderly and beautiful.
The "irrational . . . primordial stratum" Dick here identifies I am calling the "Dionysiac-element" in his fiction, and it is shown most clearly in operation in a text written early in his career, the short story "Upon the Dull Earth" (1953). It is not one of Dick's well-known stories and perhaps not one of his best given its nebulous supernaturalism, but I will argue that it is in fact one of the more significant in terms of its rather ominous yoking together of the principle of the "Dionysiac-element" and the Pythagorean notion of transmigration, the migration of the soul.
Completed late in 1953, after The Cosmic Puppets, "Upon the Dull Earth" was first published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction (November, 1954) and included in A Handful of Darkness, the collection consisting mostly of Dick's early, dark fantasies first published in Britain in 1955 (7). The story then remained more or less unavailable for many years until it was reprinted in The Preserving Machine (1969) (8). After that collection went out of print, the story did not appear again until The Collected Stories appeared (1987) (3:203-220). As a story, it uncomfortably straddles the genres of occult fantasy; and ontological horror story, a rather awkward combination of Arthur Machen and Franz Kafka, and it bears a close resemblance to both Poe's "Ligeia" and, more importantly, to Dostoevsky's "The Double."
Characterisically, the story contains Dick's hybrid allusions to both Classical and Judeo-Christian sources, as well as to occult and esoteric religious thought.
The title of the story comes from a line in a song from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona (IV, ii; 39-53), as does the female protagonist's name:
Who is Silvia? What is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admird be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness.
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness
And, being helped, inhabits there.
Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling.
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling.
To her let us garlands bring. (Complete Works 138)
From the title of the story, one can infer that Dick imagined Silvia as a highly idealized love object. In his discussion of this Shakespearian song, Cleanth Brooks observed in his essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure" that Silvia is "something of an angel and something of a goddess" (971) and it is most likely this idealization of the feminine that attracted Dick to its sentiment.
"Upon the Dull Earth" concerns Rick and his fianc Silvia, who Rick accuses of being a "witch" (3:203), a description she vehemently denies. As the story begins, Silvia has led Rick to a secluded spot where she has made a (lamb's) blood offering to the "white-winged giants," angelic incarnations, at least Silvia believes, of her "ancestors" (205), which are lured forth by the blood. Alluding to The Odyssey, Silvia likens her act to Ulysses summoning the shades "from the nether world" (205). There is a hint of danger in the ritual, however, because the shades seem to be desirous of taking Silvia with them. Only Rick's presence of mind prevents her from being seared to ash by the white shades.
Disturbed by her perverse obsession with the shades, Rick plans to destroy the refrigeration equipment which preserves the blood for Silvia's offerings. During his attempt, Silvia confronts him, and during their ensuing argument she accidentally cuts herself. Unable to help themselves, the angels descend on her, blasting her body with their heat and leaving it "a brittle burned-out husk" (209). Following the holocaust, Rick attempts to summon Silvia from beyond the graveŠto resurrect her, as it were. He obtains steer blood "from a New Jersey abbattoir" (209) in order to attract the shades. The offering works, but apparently the shades are reluctant to return Silvia from the other side, because Silvia's body--"the clay part" (211)--has been destroyed. In effect, there is nothing for her to come back to, no body. In order to return, Silvia's spirit would have "to mold something," to usurp "something of clay" (212), a dangerous and unusual procedure. Nonetheless, the obsessed Rick "had to have her back" (212; Dick's emphasis). His demand is followed by a "deafening crack of heat" and he finds himself lifted up and "tossed into a flaming sea of pure energy" (212). Like Orpheus losing Eurydice for the second time, Rick briefly glimpses Silvia, "her hands reaching imploringly towards him" (213) before she slips away. He momentarily loses consciousness.
Rescued by Silvia's father, he regains his senses in Silvia's parents' living room, where he is initially unsure of precisely what happened. He is berated by Silvia's sister, Betty Lou, for his impetuous attempt to bring Silvia back from the post mortem world. In the middle of the argument, however, a startling change abruptly comes over her (214):
The change came without warning. Like a film gone dead, Betty Lou froze, her mouth half open, one arm raised, her words dead on her tongue. She was suspended, an instantly lifeless thing raised off the floor, as if caught between two slides of glass. A vacant insect, without speech or sound, inert and hollow. Not dead, but abruptly thinned back to primordial inanimacy. Into the captured shell filtered new potency and being. It settled over her, a rainbow of life that poured into place eagerlyŠlike hot fluidŠinto every part of her.
Silvia has thus "come across" from "the other side." She has transmigrated; from the land of the dead, from the undiscovered country, and taken over Betty Lou's body, infused or inspired the body with her own spirit. But there is something wrong in this metempsychosis. Silvia warns, " 'they took a living form, didn't they? Not discarded clay. They don't have the power, Rick. They altered His work instead' " (214). In quick succession, the remaining members of Silvia's family grotesquely metamorphosize into Silvia, becoming "identical, pure repetitions" of her (216) (9).
Rick flees from (the) Silvia(s) in a panicked flight; fearing that she is going to "take him over," he runs, he tries to escape, to flee in his automobile, but he cannot: Wherever he turns, wherever he tries to run, she appears before him. Succumbing to the pursuit, realizing that flight is futile, Rick returns home to his apartment.
Already his apartment seems strange and unfamiliar; the bathroom is "a difficult place to find" (220). Standing before the mirror, Rick stands transfixed by the strangeness of his own reflection, in a sort of signe du miroir, and watches himself metamorphosize into Silvia's form, losing his identity and personality. The story concludes with Silvia sitting alone on a living room chair, pleading with the nonexistent Rick to try to help her.
A crucial point about "Upon the Dull Earth" must be understood at the outset for it to make any sense, and this is that it appears to be the story of a transgression of a taboo--though what the taboo might be is not immediately clear. Even if the taboo theory is ultimately unjustifiable, this impression is so strong that the problem must be carefully analyzed.
Another consideration, which eludes the strictures of criticism as such by appealing to biography, is the putative identity of the female protagonist, Silvia, for Dick. According to Patricia S. Warrick in Mind in Motion Silvia is Jane, Dick's twin sister who died in infancy. Dick was "forever tormented by the loss of that twin sister who died in infancy. He first captured the image of this ghost buried in his psyche in a very early story, 'Upon the Dull Earth' (1954)" (131). Within that same discussion, Warrick also observes that there is a "melancholy theme of the loss of a female" which "haunts the pages" of many of his novels (131). In 1982, Dick told Gregg Rickman, "if there can be said to be a tragic theme running through my life, it's the death of my twin sister and the reŠenactment of this again and again. . . . My psychological problems are traceable to the loss of my sister" (The Last Testament 93). Late in his life Dick was still preoccupied with this theme, speculating in the Exegesis about the identity of the Valis mind (246): "It is female. It is on the other sideŠthe post mortem world. It has been with me all my life. It is my twin sister Jane. This was referred to in one dream, & that is enough. 'Specifically, fairies are the dead.' Two clues. . . . The other psyche I carry inside me is that of my dead sister."
According to the definitions imposed by this reading, "Upon the Dull Earth" expresses the felt need of the Self to repair the wound and reunite with its separated female half, its anima, and re-form the divine syzygyŠthough why this attempt should end in the catastrophe depicted in the story is not immediately clear. The problem is that this task of re-formation can only be accomplished in two ways: by passing over into death oneself, perhaps by suicide, or by magically resurrecting the dead loved one.
It is the second possibility, that of resurrection, which suggests an orthodox theological interpretation of the taboo that I referred to earlier. The resurrection of the dead is God's sovereign prerogative as revealed in the books of Daniel and Revelation. When some mere mortal seizes this life-giving power for himself, he must suffer the consequences. The golem runs amok, destroying the village; Frankenstein's monster haunts the countryside, committing mayhem; the Sorcerer's Apprentice forgets how to reverse his master's spellŠthis last, in particular, an obvious (perhaps too obvious) parallel for the situation depicted in "Upon the Dull Earth." Rick wants Silvia back and gets more of her than he'd bargained for: She becomes an invader, an invading nightmare, a metastastizing cancer of the spirit that eventually annihilates all differences, including--most importantly--that of his own consciousness and identity. Rick would appear to have broken the second and third of the Mosaic commandments, which proscribe idolatry and usurpation. He has made an idol of his lost fiance, like the golden calf, and then compounded his sin by taking upon himself God's sovereign authority to restore her to life.
The problem with this interpretation, unfortunately, is that Dick's own text forbids it. (Even if this were not so, our knowledge of all of his other work would forbid it.) The universe in which "Upon the Dull Earth" takes place is not a recognizably Christian one but a Gnostic, perhaps Neoplatonic variant: The Creator of the World has already disappeared from it, following his own quest upward through the rings of emanations of the Pleroma (3:212), and is not around to exact any penalties. So why is Rick made to suffer this nightmare? The best one can offer is that he has broken the psychological equivalents of these religious taboos against usurpation and idolatry; his suffering then becomes an unfolding of psychic fate or necessity. The revenant Silvia would thus roughly correspond to what Jeffrey Burton Russell, in The Devil, calls the "Alastor," a minor Greek spirit which was like an "avenging ghost" that "both tempts us to sin and then punishes us" (143).
But is even this a plausible interpretation of the taboo? The presence of Gnostic elements in the text suggests another possibility. At one point, Silvia asks Rick, "'Do you want me to be chained here? I have to go on--I'm through with this part of the journey. . . . You want to be a worm always. A fuzzy, little creeping caterpillar'" (207). By luring Silvia back to him from death, Rick has seemingly committed the sinŠtransgressed against the Gnostic taboo--of harnessing the higher to the lower, of compelling the descent of the enlightened spirit (nous, pneuma) into gross matter in a false metempsychosis or rein-carnation. For his obsessed presumption Rick is made to suffer.
This interpretation cannot be sustained either, at least not in its theological form. Silvia has been taken, as the text indicates, "too soon" (211); her death is not a return of the pneumatic spirit to the godhead, but a new captivity: "'It was their fault. You don't blame me, do you? They know they did the wrong thing. Those who did it have been punished, but that doesn't help me'" (211). The beings who have taken her are in no sense more evolved spiritually than she or any human being is, though they have deceived Silvia into believing they are. In the beginning they are depicted as bright, white angels, these ghosts of her ancestors, but later they seem more like the Archons of Darkness. The text metaphorically compares them to hungry insects--tellingly to bluebottle flies (206), thus suggesting a connection to Saklas or Beelzebub (Lord of the Flies), whose false-creation would mimic that of the originating Deity yet fail at the imitation. The Fallen Angel cannot create teeming life from clay by breathing into it his own being as God can, but can only blasphemously replicate dibbuks: "'But they took a living form, didn't they? Not discarded clay. They don't have the power, Rick. They altered His work instead'" (214).
There is no doubt that the spirits which take Silvia are fallen ones rather than risen ones. The symbolic action of their drinking of blood implicitly reveals their condition, since Silvia is made to stand to them in the same relationship that Christ stands to fallen humankind. Significantly, the shades first drink the blood of a lamb, and then feast upon hers in Dick's characteristic inversion of the Eucharistic sacrament (I will shortly look at a late variant of this inversion, "Rautavaara's Case"). Indeed, Silvia refers to herself as a "saint" (205) for her blood sacrifice, the imitatio Christi. In this uncanny ritualistic sparagmos (10), the relationship of ancestor to descendant in Silvia's family line is revealed as a relationship of predation: The revenant ancestors feed off the blood of the descendants. (I will examine this relationship of violence shortly.)
The crucial scene of the story is the last one, a catastrophe or cataclysmic apocalypse in which Rick's very consciousness and identity is erased by the invading, or rather transmigrating;, spirit of Silvia. In the broadest sense, it is a Dionysian moment of loss of self, the collapse of the principium individuationis. A Jungian approach, which would read the ending as a kind of infantile regression to the cthonic archetypes so common in early twentieth-century theories of schizophrenia (which Jung, among others, hypothesized, and Dick drew on), fails to account for the story's catastrophe or cataclysm. The onset of Rick's amnesia, and his infantile regression, would be similar to that of Ragle Gumm in Time Out of Joint (1959), in which Gumm's "withdrawal psychosis" (¤14.165) results in his retreat to the world of his infancy. Gumm's "retreat fantasy"(¤14.165), in turn, is similar to John Cupertino's in "Retreat Syndrome" (1963) (5:67-85), in which Cupertino is told that due to stress and guilt he "withdrew psychologically" into a "fantasy world" (5:82). And in We Can Build You, Louis Rosen claims that an attack of schizophrenia is "a weakening of attention" which allows "unconscious processes" to gain mastery over the individual. The attacks capture "very archaic processes, archetypal," that "non-schizophrenics haven't had since the age of five" (¤17.189).
Yet neither explanation, that of the Dionysian loss of the individual self or the schizophrenic regression hypothesis, accounts in any satisfactory way for the way the action moves ineluctably toward the final catastrophe, the endless multiplication of identical Silvias throughout the world, an apocalypse consisting of utter ontological collapse. Moreover, if these interpretive explanations fail to account satisfactorily for the concluding action of "Upon the Dull Earth," then the explanations will surely fail when one recognizes that "Upon the Dull Earth" employs precisely the same catastrophe as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). In that novel's concluding action, Palmer Eldritch begins to duplicate himself in his victims, taking over their consciousness and identity precisely as Silvia does. (Though, to be sure, "Upon the Dull Earth" is about the fear of separation; Three Stigmata about the fear of entrapment.) (11)
The crucial question can be reformulated as follows: Why should the return of the love object from death and the dread object from deep space lead to the same nightmare of an invading spirit that annihilates consciousness and identity? For Dick, the Dionysian loss of Self entails not simply a confusion in the subject as to his identity, but the experience of an infusion of a transmigrating or invading agent or agency that corresponds to what has been known since the Greeks as possession (12), and it is this concept that can account for the similarities between the stories. The phenomenon, as it appears in Dick's writing, demands to be thoroughly explored.
In both "Upon the Dull Earth" and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the subject (Rick, Leo Bulero) falls prey to the psychic disturbance that Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, names "Dionysian vertigo," where the subject has "double vision" or sees double (13). Silvia returns from death both human and nonhuman, while a human being named Palmer Eldritch returns from the wastes between the stars in a similar condition. Moreover, he has the three stigmata consisting of artificial eyes and arm, and stainless steel teeth (the latter hyperbolically suggesting both predation and the Leviathan's mouth). Both Palmer Eldritch and Silvia thus correspond to what Girard names the "monstrous double," a being both human and not human, containing a duality that is always "an attribute of monsters" (162). What the subject perceives in the "monstrous double" is both self and nonself, the familiar and not familiar, something containing both the dja vu and jamais vu.
The phenomenological features of the subject's vertiginous encounter with the "monstrous double" correspond remarkably to what Louis A. Sass, in Madness and Modernism, describes as the representative symptoms of the schizophrenic Stimmung (14), the onset of a schizophrenic episode (15). The structural features of the Stimmung consist of what he names "the Trema [analogous to stage fright] whose three aspects are Unreality, Mere Being, and Fragmentation, and the Apophany," which often occurs slightly later and precedes the psychotic break (52). Sass summarizes the phenomenological features as follows (52):
Once conventional meanings have faded away (Unreality) and new details or aspects of the world have been thrust into awareness (Fragmentation, Mere Being), there often emerges an inchoate sense of the as yet unarticulated significances of these newly emergent phenomena. In this "mood" . . . the reality of everything the patient notices can seem heightened, as if each object were, somehow, being hyperbolically itself; and this in turn can create an air of unavoidable specificity, or a feeling of inevitability that hovers about everything. Alternatively, things may take on an exemplary quality, as if they represented other objects or essences, existing not as themselves but as tokens of types lying elsewhere (in such instances visible objects can appear very precise and very unreal at the same time). (16)
It is this sense of objects stripped of their usual significance, so that they are both, or rather simultaneously, familar and unfamiliar, with the result that the world is both the same and yet not the same, which corresponds so clearly with Girard's description of the "monstrous double." The fashionable Freudian term for this experience is unheimlich, translated as "the uncanny" in Freud's essay (1919) of the same name. What returns to itself must have once become estranged from itself, lost from itself, and the movement is a restoration of a lost order, specifically a re-membering or anamnesis. At this point, we should recall the sparagmos or dis-memberment of Dionysus, who is re-membered in The Bacchae even as his usurper, Pentheus, is sacrificed in his place. As Girard observes, a short time before Pentheus is murdered he sees double, cementing the similarity between the sacrificial victims. (For Dick's comments on Pentheus and The Bacchae, see the Exegesis 42-43; 150-51; 192-93; 218-20.)
Both the action of "Upon the Dull Earth" and that of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch move inexorably towards a catastrophe of Dionysian vertigo or schizophrenic Stimmung, the subject's confrontation with a world being invaded by the monstrous double. Just as Silvia invades, so too does the more overtly sinister Palmer Eldritch, overcoming and possessing (metaphorically, devouring) all those mortals standing in their paths (17). Girard describes the process as follows (165):
The subject watches the monstrosity that takes shape within him and outside him simultaneously. (18) In his efforts to explain what is happening to him, he attributes the origin of the apparition to some exterior cause. Surely, he thinks, this vision is too bizarre to emanate from the familiar country within, too foreign in fact to derive from the world of men. The whole interpretation of the experience is dominated by the sense that the monster is alien to himself. The subject feels that the most intimate regions of his being have been invaded by a supernatural creature who also besieges him without. Horrified, he finds himself the victim of a double assault to which he cannot respond. . . . This extraordinary freedom of movement permits the god--or spirit or demon--to seize souls at will. The condition called "possession" is in fact but one particular interpretation of the monstrous double.
A more precise description of the features of the "Dionysiac-element" within the Dickian numen is now possible. The Dionysian moment in Dick's fiction is not simply the subject's loss of self-integrity or the dissolution of ego boundaries. Rather, it begins with either separation or entrapment, leading to the initial identity confusion and onset of panic (what Sass calls the "Trema"), followed by a (panic-induced) flight or escape which only inexorably leads to its unavoidable catastrophe, an entrapment which consists of a slip into amnesia with the final assault, the infusion of an alien presence, the possession. Identity is subsumed by the monstrous double.
To experience the Dionysian is to experience insanity, Dick claims in VALIS (¤3.31; ¤10.166). The Dionysian experience is that of being "swallowed by God" as Dick hyperbolically states, to be devoured by Leviathan. He called this, in VALIS and elsewhere, enthousiasmos, which, for him, more often that not means to be possessed by the "insane" god Dionysus. (19) I must return once more to VALIS, the text in which Dick describes the experience in its most pristine form (¤10.165-66):
God can be good and terrible--not in succession--but at the same time. . . . The gentle sounds of the choir singing "Amen, amen" are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god. When you know this you have penetrated to the innermost core of religion. And the worst part is that the god can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called "enthousiasmos" in Greek, literally "to be possessed by the god." Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this was Dionysus. And, unfortunately, Dionysus was insane. . . . If you . . . try to run . . . he has you anyhow, for the demigod Pan was the basis of panic which is the uncontrollable urge to flee. . . . So in trying to flee from Dionysus you are taken over anyhow.
Dick never ceased to invoke this experience, even obsessively returning to it in a late story, "Rautavaara's Case" (1980) (5:375-383).
In this story, a young, female technician from Finland, Agneta Rautavaara, is being transported to a planet in suspended animation. The life-support equipment has malfunctioned, and her associates, also in suspended animation, have died. Though she has suffered brain damage, technicians in communication with the ship manage to stabilize her condition. While they ponder her rescue, they decide to allow her to undergo fugue states. In one of the fugues she experiences a vision of a Figure who is apparently Christ, though the Christ figure turns out to be closer to the figure of Palmer Eldritch:
Elms, gazing at the Figure, said in a low voice, "Quite possibly I'm mistaken, but it seems to be changing." She looked, but saw no change. Yet Elms seemed frightened. The Figure, in its white robe, walked slowly toward the seated Travis. The Figure halted close by Travis, stood for a time, and then, bending, bit Travis's face. Agneta screamed. Elms stared, and Travis, locked into his seat, thrashed. The Figure, calmly, ate him. (5:381)
Dick characterisically inverted the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, with the result that rather than our eating the body and blood of Christ, Christ devours us, a trope for possession. In a kind of terrible pun, we become, literally, human hosts. If the Greek term omophagia means "to eat raw flesh" and "to assimilate and internalize one's god," then in Dick's fiction this practice is commonly inverted as the god assimilates (that is to say, swallows) his votaries. The relationship to God (or the numen) is a relationship of predation; it is to exist, precariously, in the mouth of Leviathan. When his mouth shuts, he devours us, to paraphrase Eliot: this is the dreaded Deus Irae. In the Exegesis, Dick observed somewhat incredulously, "My worst book, DEUS IRAE, is my best" (159), and while it may not be his best book, one suspects why he thought it to be so. A relationship of predation exists between Silvia and the "angels" in "Upon the Dull Earth," between Palmer Eldritch and Leo Bulero (and the hosts who consume Chew-Z) in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, between the "carnivorous" Jory and Joe Chip (and the rest in cold-pac) in Ubik, and between the apparent Figure of Christ of "Rautavaara's Case" and the human hosts on which he preys. Of course, predator/prey relationships lead to a kind of doubling or mimetic fusion (or hypnosis): Self identifies with Other, magically "absorbs" it, to keep it from disappearing and abandoning the helpless Self to its own resources. Jung called this form of mimetic fusion "dissimulation" (Collected Works 6:316, 414), and it is, as we have seen, a key concept in Girard's work as well. (20)
Indeed, Dick's fiction, when looked at in terms of possession, is populated with characters possessed by alien antagonists: Spence Olham, the unwitting humanoid bomb in "Imposter" (1953); Keith Pellig, the android assassin controlled by many different personalities in Solar Lottery (1955); Pete Garden, who fears that he has committed murder while in an amnesiac (and hence, possessed) state in The Game-Players of Titan (1963); and even Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), who, in a moment of Dionysian vertigo, fears that he himself may be one of cruel androids he is hunting down to kill. Yet because the numen is ambivalent, Dick's fiction contains benevolent possessions, or "divine invasions," as well: the gentle wub which usurps the body of Captain Franco in the early short story "Beyond Lies the Wub" (1952); the possession of the phocomelus Hoppy Harrington by the metempsychosis of Bill Keller in Dr. Bloodmoney (1965); Bill Lundborg by Timothy Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), and, in the Exegesis, Philip Dick by Thomas, by Jim Pike, by Elijah, and by other agents and agencies.
Just so the point cannot be conveniently neglected, the Exegesis is overtly and virtually entirely concerned with Dick's theories to explain his own possession by various agencies, both those which helped him and those which tormented him. Thomas, the early Christian; his friend Bishop Jim Pike; Elijah, the "plasmate"; "the AI voice"Šall are benevolent agents or agencies which he identifies and examines. At one time, Dick speculates that messages from "the other side" are coming from his friend Jim Pike (4Š5; as well as passim), in the context of which discussion Dick mentions William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist (1971), a novel about possession.21 At other times he writes of "that moment Christ was born in me, & the year that followed was Christ in me, enthusiasmos by Christ: his kingdom or, more correctly, kingship" (197). But the point has been made, and a full examination the Exegesis, perhaps after more of it is published, must await another occasion.
My hope is that this discussion will prompt a literary criticism of Dick's entire corpus that more fully accounts for his philosophical and religious obsessions, one that assumes that these obsessions are not late developments of his life (which they were not), or marginal in any definition of his fiction (they are not), but utterly essential to an understanding of it. It is true that in his early fiction--which emerged while Dick was living in the liberal, skeptical Berkeley of the 1940s and 1950s--the religious preoccupations are less overt, but I have come to the conclusion that Dick cannot be understood fully except by approaching him through the great historiographers and hermeneuticists of esoteric religion and the occult: Hans Jonas, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, and, above all, Carl Jung. I have drawn only on the latter's thought for this chapter, but by using the knowledge provided by Jung and these other scholars, I am convinced that our understanding of Dick's fiction will become vastly richer than it has been found so far.
I acknowledge with appreciation the assistance of Karl Wessel in the shaping of this chapter. I also wish to thank Hazel Pierce for her help and inspiration.