Last week’s New Yorker featured a review by Adam Gopnik of the Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s 60s novels; I read it with much fascination– say what you will about Gopnik’s longer, personal essays, there’s little doubt that he stands (and has stood for some while) as one of the most insightful working critics of books and literary matters. Amongst his many insights is an another attempt to wrestle with what has been one of the overarching concern and bugbears of Dickean studies: yes, there’s something brilliant here, but what is it and is it Literature?
Gopnik’s answer is a tacit yes, with reservations, and done in the best style: he suggests that if any of Dick’s work is to be counted as Literature, then first we must count VALIS. This is the only time I’ve seen, in print, an analysis of VALIS identifying it as a work of profoundly wounded emotion. Yes, there’s a lot of weirdness about pop stars and David Bowie surrogates, but an honest and engaged read turns up the terrible pain of the Horselover Fat/Phil Dick split, with an attempt to wrestle with the consequences of death and sex in a mature, if mad, style.
In a word, Literature.
I’d add A Scanner Darkly (thankfully I’ve not seen the movie) and the dark horse candidate of We Can Build You. (We might also throw in “Faith of Our Fathers,” a novella which first appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by uh… Harlan Ellison.) The former is pretty self-explanatory; the latter I have found consistently more human and aware than almost all of Dick’s other work. I am probably alone in this: I recall an essay by Jonathan Letham in which he dismisses the novel as not doing Dick’s reputation any favors.
Que sera sera, pal.
Whenever questions of Literature or Good Writing arise, I think back to the American 19th Century. By this late date, there’s hardly any argument that its four greatest writers were Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. (”What about Hawthorne!” cries Arafat Kazi.) Yet at the end of the 19th century, only Twain had been anything like a success– Melville would not be rediscovered until the 1920s, Dickinson’s body of work was effectively a trunk full of papers, and as demonstrated in David S. Reynolds’s excellent book, Whitman was known but had few readers.
This suggests that the only real judge of Literature is time, and that Good Writing and Literature are furthermore hugely expansive ideals. Despite the four being a product of the social ferment of the 1850s and its consequences in the 60s, these writers are so dissimilar it’s hard to figure out how any concept could be wide enough to encompass them.
I think about this a lot– especially in relationship to Phil Dick– because if I were to give an assessment of my favorite 20th Century American writers, at least three would come from the pulp/pop world. These are: Dick, Dashiell Hammett, and the long and dread spectre of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Hammett’s status as a Great Writer was decided almost as soon as he started publishing– the similarity of his hard boiled writing served as a presumedly unintellectual and effortless shadow to the muscularities (so-called) of Hemingway and the modernists. On the other hand, Lovecraft, like Dick, has been subject to a large number of inquiries and weighed many times on the scales of Literature, and most times found lacking.
While it’s pretty egotistical to suggest that My Favorites from the pulp world will end up enshrined in some imaginary Canon of the future, I do think it’s likely to happen– and I think it will happen on their own terms. Every writer creates not only his or her predecessors, but also his or her heirs. There will be a time, say 50 years from now, when the mad world of Philip K Dick is so culturally ingrained that what we now find to be his excesses are going to be common tongue.
And the common tongue is merely a way of describing a universality. And that, kids, is how you end up as Literature.
August 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I can’t believe you would call Lovecraft one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but give an “undisputed” list of the greatest of the 19th that leaves off Poe. Anything bad you can hurl at Poe that would dock him off the list is 10 times as true of HP, and he was undoubtely more influentual in that inescapably broad power-of-ideas way.
Please reconsider Poe (I’ll let someone else like David Fiore defend Hawthorne).