Saturday, January 6, 2018

Ph.K.Dick's Transmigration

As I predicted in the recent post
I could not resist to torture myself and read the third-and the last,
thanks to the Skies!-part of the Ph.K. Dick's "VALIS" trilogy:
"The transmigration of Timothy Archer". In fact the trilogy's
final part was supposed to be "The owl in daylight", his unfinished
novel, for which he collected advance money from the publisher. But
he died before he even thought out the plot or defined the
characters. There is a discussion about the "Trilogy", but
PKD himself called "The transmigration..." part of the trilogy,
because of the common theme.

It seems with time of writing the subsequent novels, PKD's amount of
amphetamine or whatever he was using was getting smaller, as the amount
of unreadable religio- pornography decreases somewhat towards the end of writing.

In the first part, his use of ink on VALIS is large. In the 2nd part VALIS
is mentioned only two times, and in "The transmigration...", his final
completed book, it was not mentioned at all. "The transmigration..." was
nominated for the best SF work in the year of his death, 1982, but I think
it must be like a hommage, more than the real value of the book.

Timothy Archer is an Episcopal Bishop, who really transmigrates
into not being bishop any more, but taking a lover. He gets
obsessed with find and translation of Zadokite scrolls, where is
a notion from 200 years before the Christ, which invalidates the
meaning of him as a son of God. Plot is set in 1980, and starts
with the killing of John Lennon.

The book is characterised as postmodernist and philosophical. I would
not call it none of this, but just a product of an ill mind. It might
be philosophical only for someone who learns philosophy from PKD and
history from Dan Brown. Which is not so bad, it would mean (s)he at
least reads something, not just stare in the screen.

So, in 2017 I succeeded in reading the VALIS. Was it worth the effort?

No, it was not.

Except if we follow the Marxist "learn your enemy" advice, where
"enemy" is for me the claim that VALIS would be one of top heights of the
PKD's writing. True, it has valuable moments, as PKD was, definitely,
a good writer. But good writing can not hide the heavily troubled
personality. PKD produced VALIS after a spiritual experience, which he
would not attribute to medication/drugs use. I think that such text could
be brewed only in the USA, and later it is accepted (more or less) elsewhere
based on the placebo effect of ... thinking.

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