Afterword to Time Out of Joint

Cached Aug. 20, 2007, from
http://members.tripod.com/~ashwood/time_out_joint.html

Afterword to Time Out of Joint

By Lou Stathis

"When cab drivers recognize me, it’s probably not in my mind. But when the heavens open and God speaks to me by name . . . that’s when the psychosis takes over. " --Ragle Gumm

The psychosis took over in earnest for Philip K. Dick some time in March of 1974. That was when, as he later told Charles Patt in Dream Makers, "some transcendent divine power which was not evil, but benign, intervened to restore my mind and heal my body and give me a sense of the beauty, the joy, the sanity of the world." Up till then, Dick’s life had been marked by incidents of the questionably-psychotic variety, but nothing quite so overwhelming as an interior visitation by a super human intelligence. He had, apparently, breached the interzone between sanity and psychosis.

But in what direction? Dick went on, "I experienced and invasion of my mind, as if I had been insane all my life and had suddenly become sane. Now, I have actually thought of that as a possibility, that I had been psychotic from 1928, when I was born, until March of 1974. But I don’t think that’s the case. I may have been somewhat whacked-out and eccentric for years and years, but I know I wasn’t all that crazy."

Pretty tricky stuff, eh? Perhaps...but no shock to anyone patched into the treacherously unpredictable Philip K. Dick universe. Questions probing the distinctions between sane and insane, real and imaginary, good and evil, human and simulacrum, are the very ground beef of the PKD fictional Big Mac, and very often...especially so in Time Out of Joint...the SF trappings seem like irrelevant filler, Hamburger Helper tossed in to see the thing through the marketplace muster.

And Dick’s writing record in the fifties bears this out: between the years 1955 and 1960, while Ace Books was filling the racks with such minor Dick SF potboilers as Solar Lottery (the first and best of the bunch), The World Jones Made, The Man Who Japed, Eye in the Sky, The Cosmic Puppets, Dr. Futurity, and Vulcan’s Hammer, PKD was busily pounding out eleven non-SF novels, all which were bounced by every publisher they were submitted to. (The last two of these, Confessions of a Crap Artist and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, have since appeared in modest editions; the manuscripts for six others still sit amongst PKD’s papers in the Special Collections Library of California State University, Fullerton.) Dick was trying to build two writing careers for himself. Only one-...in science fiction...was working for him.

But just as Dick’s own life seemed to transpire in that shadow-land between sanity and psychosis, his most successful fiction similarly emerges from an interzone...that between fantasy (or science fiction, to use modern generic terminology) and realism. Dick’s work was at its weakest when it tried to fit itself into a single category. Those early SF novels were characterizationally un-involving and texturally superficial, while their mainstream contemporaries lacked the SF’s narrative vigor and conceptual audacity (or at least the two published do...acknowledged by Those Who Know as the best).

Simply put, the man’s vision was too damn big for one small territory...genre...to hold. He needed them all...to strip-mine every square inch for literary resources, and spread his conceptual girth without worrying about the impediments of territorial enclosures. It was his later SF-labeled novels of the sixties, seventies, and eighties...The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, UBIK, A Scanner Darkly, and lastly, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer...that Dick would fuse his grasp of the quirky essence of humanity with the harrowing absurdity of his science-fiction vision, giving birth to a hybrid form of fiction completely unique in American literature. Needles to say, Dick's mutant offspring fit nowhere and confused everyone (especially those most concerned about keeping things in their place). This gangling, unclaimed bastard was forced to scrounge for a living in the literary world's back alleys--too insanely real for the escapist/revisionist SF ghetto, too incisively twisted for the middle-class mainstream, and too tied to pulp-fiction conventions for the snootily over-educated, uptown elite. And it was Time Out of Joint that was the firstborn of this new mutant breed, the unformed progenitor of the novels to follow, the missing link of the PKD literary ascendancy (the Van Vogt resonances here are not accidental).

Written over the winter of 1957-58 (before Crap Artist and Man Whose Teeth, and also before novelizing Dr. Futurity and Vulcan's Hammer from magazine to book versions), Time Out of Joint was bought by the J.B. Lippincott Company in July of 1958 and published as "a novel of menace" in the spring of 1959. Though he was paid only $750 for it (peanuts even then), Dick was nonetheless overjoyed--it marked his entry into non-SF hard-covers and, he thought, redemption from the potboiler purgatory. Everything seemed to be going according to plan--but as we all know, things never go according to plan in the PKD universe.

Dick told me in 1979 that he wrote Time Out of Joint specifically to derail himself from the Skinnerian task-reward treadmill he was caught in, churning out novels for Don Wollheim at Ace. According to Dick, the scenario went like this: broke and hungry, he would sell Wollheim and idea for a novel--either something off the top of his head, or an old story published in a SF magazine that he would propose expanding into Ace Double length, 40-50,000 words. The check would arrive (usually a thousand or fifteen hundred bucks), and Dick would launch himself into batting the thing out (in those days, Dick routinely dosed himself to the eyeballs on amphetamines in order to write). By the time the book was done and sent off to Ace, the money he'd gotten for the thing was long gone (apparently, Dick never got royalties beyond the advance from Ace back then, no matter how well the book seemed to sell), and he'd have to start the cycle all over again. Not only was this knock-'em-out grind debilitating, but Dick found it humiliating as well. Wollheim, always a canny judge of the SF market's junk-food tastes, demanded that all his releases adhere to a fairly rigid bang-bang juvenile-adventure format. Any deviation was surgically corrected--much to the author's impotent dismay, as first knowledge of changes usually came with the arrival of the finished book (The World Jones Made was a book thus ruined, Dick claimed). Thus, World of Chance became Solar Lottery, With Opened Mind became Eye in the Sky, A Glass of Darkness became The Cosmic Puppets, etc. Wollheim knew damn well who bought the bulk of the books he published, and what sort of title they'd reach out for and what they'd ignore. He gave his audience what they wanted and they got what they expected.

But Phil Dick wanted out of this mug's game. He knew that as long as Don Wollheim was calling the shots, he'd never be able to slip any of what he'd been experimenting with in his mainstream novels into his science fiction. So he decided to break the spell by producing a novel that Wollheim would hate, but keep marginally SF enough so it could be published elsewhere. That much of his plan worked. Wollheim got the novel in the spring of 1958 and, according to Dick, "denounced it" in a letter to him, calling it un-publishable and requiring the deep-sixing of the opening 150 pages and expansion of the final Earth-Luna war section into a standard SF novel. Luckily, Dick had already received word of Lippincott's acceptance, and thought happily that he'd spewed out his last bit of sci-fi hackwork. Silly boy.

John Campbell, rejecting everything Dick sent him for publication in Astounding/Analog, called his world-view "neurotic". He was probably right. Dick's perception of the way the universe worked stood in direct contradiction to the rational Campbellian world-view, which held that all things are ultimately knowable and thus controllable. This perceptual strongbox is the product of fearful, rigidly enclosed minds, who crave that ultimate reassurance--the pat on the back from Big Daddy that their chaotic little world can indeed be summed up in a set of physical laws. Dick never clamed to have the answers, and we wasn't too sure about the questions, either.

Campbellian SF was a mask concealing the self, while Dick's was the mirror revealing it--a fictive psychiatrist's couch that gave voice to things dark and terrible. There were only a few heretics from that Campbellian ontological gospel in the fifties (Sturgeon, Farmer, and Kornbluth were about the only others). As the sixties washed over us, with its perceptual polymorphism and startling revelations of conspiratorial duplicity in high places, Dick's vision of the universe out of control began resonating more closely with the world-at-large (or, to use his own preferred Pre-Socratic terminology: his "idios kosmos" or personal reality, became in the phase with the "koinos kosmos" or shared, objective reality). Certainly his books had more in relevance to the sixties as we knew it than the steadfastly tight-assed, reactionary SF published month after month--reassuringly--in Analog.

This idea of personal reality in conflict with objective reality is the very core of Time Out of Joint. He said in Dream Makers, "I was trying to . . . account for the diversity of worlds that people live in. There's a scene where the protagonist goes to the bathroom, reaches in the dark for a pull-cord, and suddenly realized there is no cord, there's a switch on the wall, and he can't remember when he ever had a bathroom where there was a cord hanging down. Now, that actually happened to me, and that was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in The World of Null-A where a person has false memories implanted."

Time Out of Joint was his first really mature handling of this conflicting realities theme, something that would turn up frequently--refined, reworked, redeveloped--in his later work (literalized as The Penultimate Truth and A Maze of Death, complexified in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch, UBIK, and "Faith of Our Fathers"). In a letter written in June of 1969 to the Australian fanzine SF Commentary, Dick said, "In virtually all of my books the protagonist is suffering from a breakdown in idios kosmos--at least we hope that's what's breaking down, not the koinos kosmos. As his idios kosmos breaks down, the objective, shared reality emerges more clearly . . . he is exposed to the archetypal or transcendental forces of the koinos kosmos and if the times comes that he lives only in the koinos kosmos he is exposed to powers too great for him to handle. In other words, we must have out idios kosmos to stay sane."

In the Time Out of Joint metaphor, 1959 is Ragle Gumm's idios kosmos-- the reality he has created to shield himself from the brutal reality of 1996, the koinos kosmos. But on another, more immediate level, the book objectifies Dick's own unease with the suffocating placidity of California in the Eisenhower fifties. In his typically prescient/paranoid fashion, Dick sensed the lurking menance beneath the bleakly soporific surface of this escapist, consumerist paradise (ands if you've ever been to California and experianced its status field of perpetual temporariness, I'm sure you can imagine it melting away in front of you--the way it does to Vic Nelson and Ragle Gumm--leaving nothing but a slip of paper fluttering to the ground). It was One Happy World for real, and Phil Dick--who probably would've been miserable in the garden of Eden--lived right in the middle of it. What the hell could he do?

Time Out of Joint changed nothing in Phil Dick's life. The book didn't get a paperback release for another five years, and he's had to go back to re-treading old stories (Jack Isodore's tire re-grooving?) for Don Wollheim in order to eat. After failing to place his last two mainstream novels, he very nearly gave up writing for good, retreating to a subserviant role in his then-wife's jewlery bussiness. The Man in the High Castle was begun a couple years later as an escape from that enshrouding boredom--and when that clicked, he once again thought he was on his way. But though his grasp of the mutant fiction form had grown surer, people still seemed unwilling to accept it. High Castle might have won the Hugo, but he still had trouble selling Martian Time-Slip. Hello, operator? Get me Don Wollheim.

There were at least a few dozen more similar heart-breaking reversals in Phil Dick's life--enough to drive a man . . . insane? He continued to live in obscure poverty--almost until his untimely death in 1982--dispairing, intermittently suicidal, but still searching, desperate for a peek behind the mirror. He came later to see all things as a unified energy field in which we are miniscule capsules entwined with tiny, eddy-like pockets of wave-form energy manifesting itself as our personal realities. Another guy in a floppy rubber suit? Perhaps. But we all have our personal brands of solace--our cans of Ubik that keep the form-destroyer from unraveling our reality.

"Maybe," Phil Dick told a Vancouver convention in 1972, "all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc. formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothisis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainable warm warm and giving . . ."

Yeah, maybe we should.