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Rating: "A science fiction writer is not allowed to believe in what he tells, otherwise imagine the confusion."
This was asserted by the cult writer Philip Kendred Dick, author of "The Man in the High Castle," "A Scanner Darkly," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (from which the masterpiece film by Ridley Scott, "Blade Runner") and many other titles (a total of forty-four novels and over a hundred stories) that made him a central figure of our time, capable of giving voice to a reality whose sense is perceived as in constant erosion, shifting, and falsification.
We all live through strong deja vu, moments of total disconnection and abstention from reality.
Dick maintained that those moments were "the tangible proof" that our life is actually programmed. As if it were encrypted on a tape that occasionally (that moment of deja vu, indeed) jams and leaves us for a few seconds at the mercy of nothingness.
If you think about it is the central theme of "Matrix".
"Many claim to remember a past life, but I claim to remember another, very different, present life", he said during a speech given in Metz in 1977, (see here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_3P6hzfwhc ) he who, like very few others, managed to turn his own obsessions and neuroses into an absolutely complex but in its own way fascinating literary universe.
The obsession and the persecution phobia were an integral part of Philip Dick's life, as obsessive was his search for the boundaries of consciousness and for that reality in constant disintegration. He was suspicious and had an innate distrust towards everyone and everything ("behind every familiar face may hide a cold monster", he would say), to the point of having watched over (or he himself kept under surveillance), his wives, neighbors, and friends. In the last few years, he continued to live in total paranoia, convinced that his life - like everyone else's - was at the center of a worldwide governmental conspiracy.
As if we all lived in fake environments, recreated ad hoc for purposes unknown (which then was the theme of another of his novels that, if you think about it, later became the central theme of the film "The Truman Show").
Many of the problems are caused by family, and the culprits are often the parents. In his case, it is demonstrated by the life of this misunderstood genius of science fiction, between an absent father, Edgar - a federal employee at the Department of Agriculture - who left him when he was five years old by divorcing his mother, Dorothy, a woman who resembled Garbo, a feminist and a pacifist, great lover of culture and avant-garde ideas, a voracious reader who divided the world "between those who dedicate themselves to a creative activity and those who do not."
"Little Philip's childhood" – writes his biographer-novelist Carrère – “resembled that of Nabokov's Luzhin or that of Glenn Gould, his contemporary and in some ways his spiritual cousin: chubby, sulky children, who had everything it takes to become chess champions or prodigy pianists.” He had a favorite game: hiding among the boxes and staying there for hours in silence, because there he felt safe."
This thesis only accentuates the sense of estrangement and unreality that you already expect from such a book, from such a story, from such a life. In Carrère's analysis, everything revolves on one hand around Dick's mania of not being considered "just" a big name in science fiction but a true mainstream genius, and on the other around his perhaps pathological perhaps prophetic inability to fully adhere to the fabric of reality.
Perhaps Carrère exaggerates here and there in meticulously describing psychological and human paths that he can only imagine or at best reasonably deduce, but it must be said that by doing so he allows us to embark on a fascinating and frightening journey at the same time that otherwise we wouldn't have even dreamed of.
In short.
I don't know if it was clear, but for a few days now I've been reading this autobiography written by Emmanuel Carrère: 'I Am Alive and You Are Dead' (ADELPHI Editions) which precisely talks about all this.
350 pages (I've read about 50 so far) put together after careful and long work of all the material the author left at his death (which occurred in 1982, in Santa Ana, California), among documents, interviews, and writings of all kinds, including tales of his transcendental and visionary experiences, notes, and unpublished diaries. A monumental book this one by Carrère, with one single main protagonist – Philip Dick – one of those biographies written with that typical style of the French author that we have only come to know in recent years.
This book had started a bit quietly, but as I continue reading, I find myself becoming more and more passionate about it.
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