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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Lethem on PKD
Interview with Jonathan Lethem, editor of the Library of America Philip K. Dick volume. I’ll just snip a bit to add to the collection of our earlier thoughts about PDK, the bad stylist [update: this bit is from the interviewer, not Lethem]:
My favorite reaction to the LoA’s Dick volume came from some snobbish blogger who wrote, “Even by the compromised standards of science fiction and other genre fiction, Dick’s books were awful and left me feeling unclean for having tried to read them."
I wouldn’t go that far myself. (Well, actually, I feel unclean after trying to read them. But that’s what’s supposed to happen - not that the author intended it.)
I also like this bit:
What was it like working on the Chronology (a brief timeline for Dick’s life that appears at the back of the LoA volume with biographical and publishing information)?
I lapsed into a kind of depression [working on the timeline]. As much as I know his life story and as much as I’ve dwelled on it, something about assembling the facts it was like falling into a kind of vicarious doom.
Comments
Here be much discussion (look to links at right) of the LoA, Lethem (including an interview), Gopnik’s New Yorker article, PKD.
I think PKD is way overrated, even within the genre, but since I have a complete set of first printing hb’s & paperbacks in mint condition that I am planning to retire on, PKD was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. A genius.
The first quotation isn’t Letham, it’s the author of the piece that includes the interview, David Gill.
I have to say that I feel some satisfaction in the fact that I was an ardent Dick promoter before he became a hoola hoop. And that Three Stigmata is the favorite of both Gill and Letham; I publicly advocated it for a Hugo the year it came out. He was known, but one of many. John Brunner and Terry Carr were early advocates. Nobody but initiates, not including myself, knew about his exotic life and drugs.
But, I can hardly read the stuff anymore. I did reread A Scanner Darkly after the movie came out (I liked the commentary by Letham et al. better than the movie). My impression was that stretches of careful writing (workmanlike; he’s no stylist) alternated with sections veering into sloppiness, which is typical.
It’s adolescent fiction. You’re blown away by the ideas, which are still pretty cool and goshwow. One thing the reviewers, including Gopnik in the New Yorker, tend to neglect is the short stories. These I think forced more control and more focus on the idea, less padding with the same old characters.
I don’t read Beatrice Potter anymore either, but I would pick up any of her books without hesitation and with an anticipation of enjoyment. I would pick up Dick with foreknowledge of distraction by the bad parts. The same way I can’t read Heinlein (another early god) because of the dreadful dialog.
Jonathan Lethem to Speak about PKD at the Cooper Union in NYC!
Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
Lecture and book signing
Thursday, September 27, 6:30 pm
The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
Free
Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
Acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem is the editor of a selection of novels written by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick from the 1960s. Dick left behind more than 160 short stories and novels when he died in 1982. Many of his tales have become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report. Lethem bundled four of Dick’s novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick’s futuristic visions.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Gun, with Occasional Music; The Fortress of Solitude and You Don’t Love Me Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Overrated, hmm. I suppose it depends what one’s rating. There are many ragged patches and evidences of haste, or addled-head-ness (all of those drugs he took), in most of his books; the ‘he was no prose stylist’ line is part of that. But even with all that, or (I find myself wondering, perhaps because of that) there’s a quality that PKD’s books have that few other books, in or out of genre, do have. A feel. A vibe—John H. has it right, I think, when he talks about a sort of fascinating aesthetic uncleanness. More polish would have rubbed that quality away, I’m sure.
We’ve been around this in other threads. But I fundamentally distrust critics who take an author who is widely thought to be great and disparage him without understanding what is thought to be great about his or her work. For instance, I criticized Gene Wolfe a good deal on Acephalous, but I think that I understand why people like him—it was more a matter of claiming that his strengths were also his weaknesses, so that he was maybe in the top 20 SF writers but not the top 10. If someone can’t even understand what is attractive to anyone about a PKD sentence, I don’t find their criticism to be helpful.
Stanislaw Lem described as something like (I don’t feel like finding Microworlds or wherever it was, so I’m paraphrasing from memory) that with most writers, the more slowly you read, the better their prose worked, and with PKD, the faster you read, the better; that PKD had chanced on some sort of technique for building great things out of junk. I’m not sure that I agree with that, but it does give a more interesting line of attack than Delany’s pooh-poohing of PKD not writing with Delany’s professorial polish. The SF genre as a whole in which readers want to read metaphorically faster and faster; the stereotypical readerly emotion is the thrill, not the joy of contemplation. People say that oh, that’s a remnant of SF’s pulp roots; that makes PKD a hack and nothing more. But a genre, when it becomes literary, has to transform its roots, not pull them up. PKD succeeds in keeping that energy and twisting it into a new, worthily literary style.
”...so that he was maybe in the top 20 SF writers but not the top 10.”
Overrated to me means those other 19 are not getting the attention or adulation PKD is. PKD was fine, but so were LeGuin and Delany and many others. I am really not sure which genre writers have made the LoA, and Lovecraft and PKD are representative, but I might have made different choices.
“fascinating aesthetic uncleanness”
Pretty common for an intellectual genre written for little money on short deadlines, especially in the novels. RA Lafferty is one of my favorites from the period, and has similarities to PKD. Too many ideas without supporting structure. One just has to go thru the Nebula nominations for other names.
I don’t quite understand the PKD boom. Driven from outside the genre, I imagine. And they are quick easy reads.
"Overrated to me means those other 19 are not getting the attention or adulation PKD is.”
Well, the concept of making a top list is ridiculously lowbrow and indefensible, but that’s never stopped me before—if I had to pick a list of the top 10 fantasy and SF writers who have written works with some literary quality ever, they’d be (in alphabetical order):
Iain M. Banks
James Branch Cabell
John Crowley
PKD
Lord Dunsany
Ursula K. LeGuin
Stanislaw Lem
Mervyn Peake
Edgar Allen Poe
H.G. Wells
Maybe M. John Harrison should be in there; I haven’t read his full ouevre yet; if not he’s in the next 10. Lovecraft seems to me to be somewhere in the next 10, along with Wolfe, Tolkien, Alasdair Gray, Michael Moorcock (for his later work), Olaf Stapledon, Verne, China Mieville, maybe Delany. Obviously a list that covers this kind of time span and genre variation may strike people as ridiculous, and I’m leaving out well-known mainstream authors who have written SF books (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson, Pynchon).
I don’t know which of them should be getting more adulation—maybe John Crowley. PKD is the one who speaks for the mid-to-late 20th century, a highly contested time in our recent history, and one uniquely suited to his fiction. Maybe, like James Branch Cabell—whose writing seems to me to be stylistically linked with the 1920s—PKD’s star will diminish as his era gets more distant.
Oh yeah, if I extended the list downwards, I think you’d be somewhere in the top 30, Adam.
LeGuin and Delany already had their booms. There was a point where every single science-fiction fan who wanted to defend their genre from the depredations of unsympathetic critics would mention LeGuin.
She’s in one of those really unfortunate, tragic authorial situations now where the more she writes, the more people wonder why they ever thought she was good. But it’s pretty common when evaluating an author to drop their late period.
I was hoping to get more reaction, I guess. It would be a good/stupid argument about why Vance, Lewis, or I don’t know, Bradbury, belong in the next batch of ten.
I’m not sure I want to get involved in good/stupid, but personally I’d find it hard defening Dunsany and Peake as being top ten (Crowley I have a personal block with, though people whose opinions I respect think very highly of him), when Wolfe, Tolkien and Delany are shunted down to second ten. Indeed, I’d suggest that your top ten, Rich, betrays a personal penchant for dark, neo-Gothic, weird-esque stuff. Me, I’d certainly put Vance in the top ten; Chris Priest probably too, or top 20. Sheri Tepper. And both Clarke and Heinlein were better writers than Poe in almost every department.
I’ll defend Peake. He’s in my top 5.
Rich:
“But I fundamentally distrust critics who take an author who is widely thought to be great and disparage him without understanding what is thought to be great about his or her work. … If someone can’t even understand what is attractive to anyone about a PKD sentence, I don’t find their criticism to be helpful.”
Leaving aside whether this is a reliable way of assessing criticism, you’re begging a question here, which is that Dick’s sentences are what people think is great about him. Based on the criticism I’ve read and my conversations with SF fans, I think is untrue. I think that Dick’s concepts and plots are what is most admired about his work; I don’t think Dick’s sentences are “widely thought to be great,” and the evidence for this is that I keep reading critics disparaging them. This matches up with my experience reading Dick—his writing usually isn’t noticeably clunky; it’s just nondescript and flat.
Note that I’m not trying to make a definitive statement about whether Dick’s writing is “actually” good; I’m just saying that claiming a critical consensus in support of Dick’s sentences--even if only among Dick’s admirers--needs some support to be convincing.
Wolfe I’ve said enough about at Acephalous; when your strengths are also your flaws, I don’t think you can really be at the top of anything. Vance is an interesting stylist, but everything he writes is in the same exact style, with all of his universes being populated by endless clones of the same character; I like to read him, but I have difficulty seeing what I think of as a lot of literary interest in his work. I’ve read a couple of books by Chris Priest (Indoctrinaire, Inverted World, The Prestige), but they seem to me to be all fatally muddled in the last third of the book in the same kind of way, annoying in a writer of Priest’s evident talent; The Prestige, for example, seemed to me like a very good book right up to the moment when it became science fiction. Sherri Tepper I think I can’t take seriously because mostly what I’ve read of hers is the True Game series, fairly enjoyable but an extrusion of pure processed fantasy product that I wouldn’t associate with an author who was capable of doing a lot better.
Let’s see, who’s left? Heinlein I can’t stand; I am completely unable to dispassionately evaluate him as a writer. Clarke, well, maybe, but again I tend to think of really good writers as having the self-control and aesthetic sense to not e.g. make endless Rama sequels. Tolkien—well, maybe.
I wouldn’t argue too much with pushing Dunsany down the list, or Poe, though I think it’s problematic to push Poe too far down because he was such a pioneer and has had so much critical response. Delany—well, I guess I should read more of him, I read Dhalgren and just didn’t like his prose style, which seemed to just flow on and on in the same way whether the characters were talking about the weather or having group sex.
I think that it’s sometimes useful to defend these kind of personal preferences, at least trivially, because it makes you think about what your evaluative criteria really would be (at least trivially). It also forces you to widen your tastes a bit, at least in terms of timespan and subgenre; otherwise it’s too easy to only consider recent writers.
""""Lethem bundled four of Dick’s novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick’s futuristic visions."""
We can Bundle Your Reality for you, Wholesale.......
I think you’ve got me there, tomemos. So let me revise and extend my remarks. Retracting the bit about consensus in favor of enjoyment of PKD’s sentences, I’d say that those sentences help to create the effect that makes his work worthwhile. I’ll quote Adam from above:
“There are many ragged patches and evidences of haste, or addled-head-ness (all of those drugs he took), in most of his books; the ‘he was no prose stylist’ line is part of that. But even with all that, or (I find myself wondering, perhaps because of that) there’s a quality that PKD’s books have that few other books, in or out of genre, do have. A feel. A vibe—John H. has it right, I think, when he talks about a sort of fascinating aesthetic uncleanness.”
What I take to be the central part of PKD’s effect is not simply the concepts and plots, but the presence of a recognizeably ordinary person within them. That’s not just a matter of characterization, of the mundane concerns that PKD’s protagonists often have to deal with. It’s also a matter of style; the sentences can’t call attention to themselves for virtuosity, and they have to be ragged, because PKD is so often tracking the thought of a character.
SF fans aren’t very good, in general, at figuring out the literary qualities of a work. (I’m not either.) But when someone says that they admire PKD’s concepts and plots, I think that they are falling back on safe SF talk. Even in his short stories—take Roog, say, as the earliest ur-example—it’s the intrusion of those concepts into the ordinary world that really makes a PKD work, because that’s what allows it to be a stand-in for the societal confusion that people in the U.S. at that time were going through. And in his longer works, that wouldn’t happen without quick characterization, which in some way depends on his sentence style.
Rich, I’ll defer to your opinion here, because I’ve read very little Dick. But to me that sounds like a case of what you talked about earlier--namely, of a writer’s strengths also being his flaws.
I don’t see it that way, tomemos. There is no particular reason why Wolfe’s books really had some internal requirement to be puzzle-boxes, or why the whole fan fascination with e.g. the torture fetishism in The Book of the New Sun doesn’t look like the result of a bit of unfortunate authorial playing to the audience. There is a reason why PKD had to write as he did. And in any case, as you point out his style is not commonly held to be one of the preeminent strengths of his writing.
My theory of what happened to Le Guin is that she met a bunch of grad students who told her she was brillant for certain specific reasons, and she believed them.
The appeal of Jack Vance is that he’s the heir of a certain neglected element of Edgar Rice Burrough’s work: social-science-fiction-as-adventure. Wolfe borrows this element wholesale from Vance, but I can’t think of too many other examples.
Those are both interesting ideas, Walt.
Actually, I think that I’m going to extend my list down to the next batch of ten, because that’s the point at which people may start to suggest authors I’ve never even heard of. (No one can read everything.) Eight of the people in the 21-30 range for all of at least somewhat literary fantasy and SF are, I’d guess (in alphabetic order):
Ray Bradbury
Octavia Butler
C.S. Lewis
Paul Park
Christopher Priest
Adam Roberts
Bruce Sterling
Jack Vance
But I couldn’t really decide who I think the last two are. Classic early fantasists like George MacDonald or William Morris? People who I think of as good storytellers, but who don’t seem to have much literary interest, like Roger Zelazny or Fritz Leiber? Subgenre creators like William Gibson and (I think) Edgar Rice Burroughs? New Wavers Brian Aldiss or J.G. Ballard? Early hard SF people like (gak) Heinlein or Clarke? Or, I suppose, Kim Stanley Robinson or Kurt Vonnegut or Joanna Russ. That really seems to be the point at which I can’t even pretend to myself that I’m constructing something with any reason to it.
Hopefully all this bookchatting hasn’t lowered the tone too much. But I did think it was interesting to look at bob mcmanus’ suggestion and really try to see, OK; if PKD is overrated, then who is underrated.
SF fans aren’t very good, in general, at figuring out the literary qualities of a work. (I’m not either.)
I guess professional literary critics are better at this than SF fans. But we’ve still got a long way to go. A long way. It’s one thing to wax theoretical about the literary. It’s another thing to analyze and describe it in actual texts.