Philip K Dick’s “Ubik”

I just finished reading my latest venture into the novels of Philip K. Dick, Ubik. It was really good. I read it in too sittings. I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that I think the best way to consumer his books is to do it as quickly as possible. It’s sort of like jumping on a grenade. You can’t wait around and ponder if you’re trying to shield the other people in your foxhole from the blast.

Anyway, I’ve read a few of his books now, and I’d say that for the average person, this is probably the best place to start reading his books. It’s the softest landing, I think. There are only maybe one or two passages included where the average reader would be like, “What the fuck is he talking about here?” Otherwise, all the characteristic themes are included here, and done very well. It’s entertaining, though I would say it’s less personal or emotional than either A Scanner Darkly, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Both of those are especially awesome, but I’d say a lot more puzzling than this. I don’t know if puzzling is the right word, but oh well.

That’s not to say that Ubik doesn’t deal with any heavy shit, because it does. Dick just does a better job hiding it here. The whole thing relates very much to Gnosticism, but he cleverly never mentions it at all. That’s maybe one of the things that seems t separate his early and later stuff. Later on, he just comes right out and dishes out all the ancient crazy philosophies that he’s drawing from. He doesn’t pull any punches. So it can be a little overwhelming for the uninitiated, I think.

Anyway, as I understand it, you could tie the book to gnostic thought like this: Jory as the Demiurge, Ella as Sophia, and Ubik as the Logos. Something along those lines. Dick elsewhere talks about a theory in the Middle Ages of Satan (aka, the Demiurge), as being “The Ape of God,” not meaning that he’s a monkey, but meaning that he imitates God. That he creates imitations of God’s true authentic creation, and then tries to pass them off as real. Dick’s novel the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explores this in greater detail. (That book’s interesting, but not as good as this one, I think). Then you have Runciter’s dead wife, Ella, who is the counter-force working against Jory to ensure that authentic reality breaks through. This is more or less what the role of Sophia is in Gnosticism, the Holy Wisdom of God. The tool that she dispenses is the Logos, the Word of God. Christ is supposed to be an incarnation of the Logos principle. In Ubik, it appears as a spray can, among other things.

I’m an especially big fan of this idea that Dick puts forth about God again and again in his books. It has to do with his idea of “fake fakes”. Basically, the idea is that much of reality consists of illusion, of inauthentic fake creations. The role of God is to go around in the world, and replace the irreal with the real. He gives a comparison of what would happen if you went to Disneyland and replaced all the animatronic characters and animals with real people and animals.

Another thing important to this book is this whole story about how the German edition was mistranslated. In the book, this passage reads:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

But in German, the translation of “word,” as referring to the Logos principle, was changed to “brand name”. That passage is a reference to the Biblical John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And Dick talks about what would have happened if this same translator had translated a copy of the Bible, it would have come out like this:

“I am the brand name. When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was. The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him.”

The other thing that I think is especially interesting in PKD’s books, is that he basically envisioned beforehand what his later mystical/psychological-breakdown experience would consist of. In this experience, he ultimately believed that he was contacted by an aspect of the Logos, which beamed information to him about the True Nature of Reality. I mean, its almost exactly out of one of his novels, what he experienced. It’s almost like he wrote his experience into existence. Or that by writing so much and so deeply on topics revolving around this central core, that he ultimately constructed a semantic container which his mind used to contain what spontaneously erupted in him. My biggest question about the whole thing is not whether he had a stroke or a mystical experience. It’s not whether it was real or imagined. My question is, did he bring this experience about through his writing and his thinking? Or, was it inherently latent in him, and he just felt it coming, and sort of created a net for it ahead of time so it wouldn’t destroy him? Also, I wonder if he had not been writing and researching in these areas, what would have happened to him when he had this experience? Would he just have gone completely crazy and been locked away? Seems likely. So maybe his writing also provided him with a mental flexibility and a vantage point from which to ponder it.

In any event, here are some further links to explore subject areas in this post:

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Philip K Dick’s “Ubik”