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This essay focuses attention on a scene that recurs in the fictions of Dick: the hero’s discovery, that what he had taken to be reality, phenomenal and empiric, was in fact only a simulacrum put in place at his intention or a hallucination which had imposed on him—a scene corresponding to a certain category of dreams that we have all had. This discovery scene, the variable forms and role of which in the Dickian imagination Peter Fitting presently examines, correlates with a kind of novelistic critique of the positivist idea that we can have unmediated knowledge of the objective world. Contemporary theoreticians, on the contrary, concede that that world, together with the knowing subject, is socially constructed as ideology. Yet while acknowledging in theory that reality is not given to us objectively and directly, we inevitably assume in our everyday experience that we do have direct contact with a natural reality. Around such concepts and such givens the Dickian fiction develops. The external world as simulacrous construct can be discovered under the form of the successive “subjective universes” presented in Eye in the Sky, in the induced psychosis of Time Out of Joint, in the massive experiences of hallucinogenic drugs depicted in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in the objectified schizophrenia of the hero of A Scanner Darkly, and finally in the “theophany” of Valis. Those last two texts especially reveal in what measure identity itself is a function of ideology. Dick, who proclaims that “I have never yielded to reality,” has written books which eloquently testify not only to the force and the loneliness inherent in his refusal to accept “reality,” but also to the hope which leads him to dream of the transfonnation of the world. (MA)
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