VALIS (Valis Trilogy)

John C. Woodcock

Valis and Exegesis: The epochal breakdown of Mind

"I think Dick's "Valis" can usefully be approached in conjunction with his "Exegesis" ("The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick") which is a partial collection of Dick's "mad" writings as he tried to come to grips with a revelation he had in 1974: "a sudden, discorporating slippage into vast and total knowledge that he would spend the rest of his life explicating, or exegeting." The posthumous publication of some of these texts highlights Dick's long and arduous attempt to understand what exactly was happening to him, in a similar manner to C. G. Jung's efforts, as recorded in his Red Book. I can choose any page at random to get a feel for sheer movement taking place, on-rushing fervour, a furore, gathering rapids, as punctuation breaks down, or ceases really to matter, as an onrushing life begins to prevail. It's like navigating a maelstrom at times, with little islands emerging only to be swept away again. The structure of that book is described as "a freewheeling voice that ranges through personal confession, esoteric scholarship, dream accounts, and fictional figures... one of the most improbable and mind-altering manuscripts ever brought to light." This kind of writing cannot be categorized because it is expressive of a BREAKDOWN of fundamental categories such as mechanical space and linear past, present, and future, those very categories that constitute the background of our stabilized modern structure of consciousness. I could use categories like "fictive", or "imaginative", but these categories come loaded with a history that has deprived them of any truth or reality. In fact these words currently mean the opposite--not real, fantasy, entertainment only, falsity, etc. But the phenomenology is conclusive. The process Dick underwent is real and, crucially, has no referent outside itself. For example a breakdown of categories does not refer outside itself to a literal break down on a personal level or to the scale of a literal world catastrophe, although many people who are caught up in these background movements often make these misinterpretations. And yet, because this movement is the real background or the "within-ness" of the world, then it follows that madness or world catastrophe are not to be excluded after all. How can we understand the necessity of this contradiction? An example may help us here. C. G. Jung had a series of "world catastrophe" visions just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. In his book "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" he offers two contradictory interpretations. Being an experienced psychiatrist he understood psychosis very well and at first felt he was being menaced by one. But when the war broke out he began wonder instead how his personal inner experiences could have something to do with subsequent events in the real world (the catastrophe of the war). This question of the connection between inner psychic events and outer events in the world became a lifetime's work for Jung, and is no less important and perhaps no more understood today. In fact, for the next several years Jung was caught up in psychic processes that involved a breakdown of categories such as inner and outer, and he went through a very real personal breakdown that simulated psychosis (auditory and visual hallucinations, extreme emotional states, etc.) but, unlike madness, Jung's ego remained intact, as Dick's has. He was able to reflect upon, as well as undergo the breakdown of categories. His written record of this journey is now published as "The Red Book". Jung's understanding of what he went through is complex and beyond the scope of this book, but we can touch on two aspects that are relevant here. On the one hand, after Jung emerged from his immersion in the "breakdown", he returned to the categories of inner and outer and took up the question of how one could have anything to do with the other. For example, his theory of synchronicity is a sustained attempt to find a theoretical connection between inner events, say a dream, and a "coincidental" event in the outer world. On the other hand Jung seemed to accept the breakdown of categories (e. g. spatial and temporal categories that form the structure of modern consciousness) and to change accordingly in his self-definition. He thus became initiated by the experiences themselves into a new reality. This initiation gave Jung the power to form new conceptions appropriate to this reality and thus perceive new aspects of the real world. These new conceptions gave rise, for example, to his unique notion of soul as absolute interiority. Jung's complex and contradictory responses to the "breakdown of categories" have given rise to conflicting theoretical and methodological paths within the Jungian community but may be sympathetically understood as the result of a pioneer's attempt to face the sheer terror of participating in a breakdown of the very categories that support modern consciousness itself. And, if consciousness itself is undergoing a transformation, then personal breakdowns and world convulsions are highly likely, as our history demonstrates so well. One of the other significant category breakdowns relevant to Dick's writing is that of the pair of opposites: doing and reflection. Within our modern structure of consciousness we consider these a pair of opposites. We can do something in life or reflect on something in life but not both at the same time. In the kind of writing that Dick and Jung did, it seems that both happen simultaneously or something else happens that subsumes both within itself. I call this "happening" PARTICIPATION. Dick participates with the mind in its breakdown and writes it as he participates with it! Thus, participation can be sharply distinguished from automatic writing where the writer's consciousness plays no part. It is also different from having an experience and subsequently writing about that experience from memory. The writing that emerges from this participatory process therefore is a form (it's probably too early to call it a genre) that EMBODIES such category breakdowns (inner-outer, past-present-future, action-reflection, etc.) To this extent such writing will appear crazy, as writers of this emerging form are forced to express mind-bending notions that are faithful to the phenomenon yet incoherent when subjected to the requirements of our stable modern form of consciousness. I recently saw an example of such "nonsense" when I was awake, late at night, unable to sleep. I was being besieged by these and other crazy thoughts. I turned on the TV and to my surprise saw a re-run of "Terminator" (1984). The heroine (Sarah) and her rescuer are being chased by the Terminator and are resting in a tunnel where she seeks to understand the logic of what is happening. The machines had sent a Terminator back through time to kill her so that she cannot give birth to the hero and then train him in warfare to save future humanity from the machines. The mere presence of this future machine forces this simple waitress to gain the very skills that the machines fear, and to become pregnant with the future hero. Her rescuer had been arrested and a forensic psychologist listened to his story of travel from the future. He declared the prisoner completely delusional. The heroine, however, is willing to listen as he talked, not of futures, but possible futures. From their point of view, now in the Present, they were confronted with possible futures that were penetrating into the Present. Their actions mattered, although they could not predict the outcome (whether Sarah would be killed or not). It seems from this and other like examples ("Minority"

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June 19, 2013 Verified Purchase

Klaus Stiefel

Feel Bad Book of the Century

"Sometimes a book unsettles you and makes you silently shake your head in fascinated disbelieve while you are reading it; sometimes a book profoundly affects your mood; sometimes is hard to put down from the moment you read the first couple of pages. "VALIS" did all of that to me. The late great Philip K. Dick is more known for his excellent science fiction novels, some of which have been made into movies ("Blade Runner", "Total Recall"). While "VALIS" has no spaceships or robots (only one cryptic "ancient satellite"), it shares a main theme with Dick's SciFi: An uncertainty about the very nature of reality and about the identity of the protagonist, in this case a strange fellow by the name of Horselover Fat. And the fact that the story of the book takes place in California in the 70s and not 200 years in the future or on Mars makes it even more chilling and disturbing; you just don't expect information to be beamed into someone's head in Berkeley in '74 (well, maybe you do?), while you'd expect all kinds of freakish things to happen on a Martian colony in the year 2512. The book appears to be autobiographical to a large degree. Fat (= "Dick" means "Fat" in German; PKD uses some German and Latin in this book, which he mostly gets right) essentially goes trough a lengthy schizophrenic episode, including hearing voices and a botched suicide attempt. He takes the voices he hears as information projected into his head from a large alien rational agent, or VALIS (vast active living intelligent system), and works hard to connect this experience to ancient theology. He, Fat, just as Dick in real life, is very well read in Eastern and Western philosophy and theology and tries to find a place for what is happening to his mind in these modern and ancient bodies of ideas. The most parsimonious explanation he can come up with is that all history between 70 AD and 1974 is pure invention - the (Roman) empire has never ended. But during all this theorizing about Jesus' disciples and information gathered from distant alien sources, Dick (Fat) comes back to his (their?) daily life, which is often quite depressing. One of his friends commits suicide. Another one dies of cancer, and the approach of death turns her into a bitter and nasty woman. Fat gets divorced and thrown in the state mental institution after his suicide attempt, and finds his life in shambles after he gets out. Often the transitions between the astral philosophical musings and the descriptions of a call by his ex to remind him about his child support payments happen in one paragraph. A very unusual book. It made me feel uneasy about the downward spiral Fat's life takes, while at the same time thoroughly thinking trough the outlandish theories he comes up with. It made me purchase the text about the Presocratic Greek thinkers Dick often quotes and I now really want to learn more about psychiatry as well. ["

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August 1, 2009 Verified Purchase

Regis

Confused, Confusing, but Intriguing

"Many readers complain that VALIS is too dense, an intractable book, but honestly, I tend to cordially disagree with them. Yes, this book does not sound like sci-fi and, true, barely can be called a novel because of its truncated narrative and its long sections that resembles much more an essay on philosophy or history of religions (footnotes and quotes allowed) than a story.VALIS is indeed the register of PKD's own flow of ideas, questions and conclusions about the existence of God or more generically our relationship with the divine, almost as a stream of consciousness without any critique or organization, a journal seemingly at the erratic pace as those ideas came to him. So VALIS is a confusing and confused book. But inmho, that is exactly its virtue, what makes it so unique. Granted, I don’t get easily intimidated by difficult texts and when I started reading VALIS I immediately had the impression that it would be like one of Thomas Pynchon’s books, maybe The Crying of Lot 49, not only because of the extensive use of references, from pop songs by Linda Ronstadt to obscurely medieval works by the kinds of Meister Eckhart but also, surprisingly, because of its humor (the kind of irony and dense, intellectual mockery that is so typical of Pynchon’s). But as I moved on into the book, things started to become clearer and even quite transparent. Sigh, no one is more opaque and unreadable than Pynchon… The exegesis(Tractate: Cryptica Scriptura) that character Horselover Fat writes in VALIS is part of PKD’s own exegesis, his interpretation on the Bible and many sacred texts from other religions. From 1974, when this revelation occurred (to which PKD referred to as ‘2-3-74’), and his death in 1982, PKD wrote more than 8000 pages of personal notes in his journal, which was finally published in 2011 as the 900-page The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. PKD was obsessed with connecting all kinds of religious visions into a comprehensive theory that uses, without much rigor, science theories of time-space and microbiology, philosophical and psychological terms, and the history of religions (for example, comparing the double-helix model of the DNA proposed by Crick and Watson, the fish sign that represents Jesus Christ, and the intertwined snakes of the Caduceus, the staff of Hermes—but here apparently PKD took it wrong.) So similarities, analogies, common sources (Akhnaton’s Hymn and Psalm 104), connections between Catholicism and Buddhism, references to the Greek and Latin origins abound in VALIS, quoting Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Edward Hussey, C.S. Lewis, to name a few. Schopenhauer, who also sought relationships between Buddhism and Western Thought, is quoted once or twice, as well as Wagner’s opera Parsifal. It all reminded me of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, especially when PKD went like this: “Sometimes Brahman sleeps, and sometimes Brahman dances.” VALIS is an acronym for “Vast Active Intelligence System”, and is also the name of the intriguing movie made by rock star Mother Goose (Eric Lampton) that the Rhipidon Society watches several times in the book. The ideas that come from the investigation of the movie are Erich von Daniken's The Gods Were Astronauts raised to the n-th power. Still,VALIS is filled with humor and a sense of ridicule, as if PKD managed to sustain his own skepticism all along. "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away,” he says at a certain point of the book. He seems to know that all he writes may be just the result of his own traumatic experiences, lunacy, schizophrenia, or because his brain was wrecked by heavy drugs. And while being critical, PKD also sustain a solemn reverence to the sanctity of the mystical symbols he investigates, as when Phil secretly performs the Catholic sacraments in his son Christopher (with a mug of hot chocolate and a hot dog bun though). It is this continuing ambivalence between rational and irrational, logical and illogical, sane and insane, and all the genuine effort to keep seeking and discovering, that to me makes it, at its core, still a sci-fi book in spirit and a very interesting book. I certainly plan to read the other two books of the Valis trilogy,Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer(while not formally the third episode of the trilogy, PKD himself said that this very last novel could be seen as part of a trilogy constellating around a basic theme.) ["

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September 16, 2021 Verified Purchase

Rockharpered

Intersting ideas, just connected poorly

"Ok, so, Im not familiar with Philip K. Dick outside of seeing, A Scanner Darkly. I picked this book because it was featured on Lost, and I thought, well, why not? So I read it. Its a short book, but for some reason it took me three weeks to plow through it. I was fairly open to the names(Horselover Fat...?)and the concept. I liked some of the ideas and characters which contrasted each other. I loved the beginning, and the entire bit about how when one tries to save someone, theyre really the ones who are in self destructive mode. I loved the concept post Gloria's death, and Sherry's bout with self pity. I loved Kevin the cynic and his theory as to why his cat died, and I loved the ending wrap-up which answers his question and really solidifies his beliefs which is similar to my own. For what its worth, Dick really dives into the meat of religion, and people, and why everything happens and presents a decent argument which is ruined by the in-betweens that sound like the product of a really long acid trip. What I didnt get was the middle part about Mother Goose, the manifest, the pink light, the talk about fictional people tied to century old teories, jumbled with, and awkwardy connected to a pink light which transfers information exclusively to the chosen ones via sattelite, or a little girl who is God, or Krishna, or a program designed to answer questions and whisk away multiple personality disorders via tubes and sattlites, and...What? I dont know. And dont ask me, but when I finished this book, what I got was that this was really one giant acid trip in California shared by out of luck, out of work dudes with too much time and money on their hands. And thats the end of that. ["

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August 11, 2010 Verified Purchase

Steve Roehr

ONE OF HIS BEST BOOKS - Edit of complaint review.

"This is one of my favorite PKD books, so as far as a review of the story itself, it is incredible. A must have for Philip K. Dick fans. It is the first in the closing trilogy of Philip's career. ***"Now, having said that, I bought this edition, and was saddened deeply that it is unreadable. There is a huge portion of the story which is missing altogether, (perhaps 10 - 15 pages?), and in it's place is some modern political essay about the European economy. A publisher's mistake, I'm sure, but I can't have the only one like this. If you can find a different edition or version of this book, then by all means buy it. Then it would be 5 stars rather than 0 stars***". I've had this review in here for a long time now (the part in quotes and asterisks). I've decided to edit it because apparently not one single other buyer of this book got a misprinted copy of this book from Amazon as far as I can tell, unless all other reviewers are just going from their memories of reading the book in other editions. I never heard back from the publisher, so I'm assuming the book being sold here now is fine. I'm still worried about buying a replacement paper copy, (and a little ticked at the publisher for not offering to replace the the one I did buy), but it's certainly not the fault of Amazon. Tney did't publish it. So based on the many many other satisfied buyers of this particular edition, I recommend purchase. I notice that the book is now available in a Kindle format, so I'll likely get that instead. As I"

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March 14, 2007 Verified Purchase