Fall 2010 Issue of Zoetrope: All-Story
“Ed rubbed his forehead wearily. ‘I – I got in on something. I saw through. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.’”
– Phillip K. Dick, “Adjustment Team”
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. “
– H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call Of Cthulhu”
Warning: This essay includes spoilers for the Phillip K. Dick novels A Maze Of Death and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
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Last evening I read Phillip K. Dick’s short story “Adjustment Team” (Zoetrope: All Story published it in their most recent issue; a film loosely based on the story is slotted to debut next spring).
I’ve not read a huge amount of Dick’s work yet (besides the story, I’ve only read three of the novels). But I’ve read enough to wonder if there aren’t certain thematic similarities between his fiction and that of another of my favorite authors, H.P. Lovecraft.
Specifically, both Dick and Lovecraft write fiction in which the ignorance is bliss, and knowledge is terror.
In Dick’s work, this is illustrated by Ed Fletcher’s statement “I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see”; but also in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? – in which we encounter Rachel Rosen; the woman who is in fact a machine merely passing for a woman. It’s a theme also evident in A Maze Of Death, in which the entire first 90% of the book turns out to only have been a virtual reality mind game played by a doomed crew to kill time as their crippled ship orbits a dying star. The crew measures the success of each shared mind game by how much time they consumed before awakening to the grim awareness of their true situation.
A Maze Of Death may take place in outer space, but the real setting for it (and, arguably, most of Dick’s work) is the mind.
In Lovecraft’s fiction, a similar theme is played out on a stage no smaller than the cosmos itself. An astronomy buff from an early age, Lovecraft wrote fiction that reflected his understanding of a universe dwarfing all human concerns; a state of affairs that – if known and fully understood – robs humanity of any sense of significance.
The similarity in theme is countered by some distinct dissimilarity in lifestyle. Lovecraft barely married once; PKD married several times. Lovecraft comes across as up-tight, PKD as a bit of an unhinged 60s counterculture libertine. Lovecraft “was” Providence. PKD grew up a Bay Area boy.
Part of me wonders, though, if Lovecraft was just some sort of “PKD without the drugs”. Had Lovecraft been at a time and place to cross paths with someone like Timothy Leary, and had he experimented with LSD and amphetamines, would his fiction have turned out even more similar to PKD’s? Would he have learned to enjoy and get lost in the false-face that hides reality rather than rip it away?
Alas, the world will never know. But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. And, apparently, I’m not the only one to look at the connections between HPL and PKD.
This year, at the first annual Phillip K. Dick Festival, one of the presenters named Erik Davis gave a talk about this very subject. He didn’t touch on the shared theme of blissful ignorance/terrifying knowledge but he did have many other interesting observations to make. I didn’t travel to the PKD festival to hear these remarks, but they are conveniently posted online for your listening pleasure.
Check them out at http://philipkdickfestival.bandcamp.com/track/erik-davis-on-dreaming-pkd-lovecraft
And please do leave me your thoughts on this topic. I’m interesting in hearing if others have sensed a kinship between these two great authors.
