Reality and Subjectivity in Philip K. Dick's - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Reality and Subjectivity in Philip K. Dick’s

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The

            Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

                                     Filip R. Zahariev

English Studies – Literary Specialization
BA Thesis
15 Credits
Spring-2021
Supervisor: Berndt Clavier

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Abstract
      This thesis examines the forces that affect subjectivity in two novels by the author

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer

Eldritch. The close reading of these two novels makes use of postmodernist theory as its

theoretical foundation. In these works, stable subjects are fractured through a series of

disconcerting incidents originating in a “reality shift,” an event that sees the seemingly

solid state of Dick’s speculative future worlds collapse. Split into three sections, this paper

first positions Dick within a postmodernist tradition developed mainly by Lyotard,

Hutcheon, and Baudrillard, supported by critics such as Sim, Malpas, and Kellner, among

others. It then defines the reality shift and its underlying causes, three types of science

fictional drugs across the two novels: Can-D, Chew-Z, and KR-3. Finally, this essay

examines the full extent of Dick’s inquiry into subjectivity by exploring the metamorphoses

the subjects of his novels endure.

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Table of Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Postmodernism and Philip K. Dick ..................................................................................................... 3
The Reality Shift and Its Engines ....................................................................................................... 9
Ever fragmentary: Subjectivity in Dick’s Flow My Tears and Palmer Eldritch ............................... 19
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 32
Works Cited ...................................................................................................................................... 34

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Introduction

Is this real?

It’s real.

                                        —Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

One of the defining features found across Philip K. Dick’s impressive oeuvre is anxiety

about the nature of reality and the human being, a deep dread that encapsulates both the

external and internal worlds the author engenders. Ontological doubt, epistemological

uncertainty, a fragmenting of the self, and the disintegrating effects that come with

recreative drug use are some of the most common elements any reader might expect to

encounter across Dick’s science fiction. In one novel, a man who has everything wakes up

to discover all signs of his existence have been washed away from the world, the

totalitarian authorities his privilege has protected him from now eager to consume him. In

another, more and more of humanity makes use of a “translation” drug to escape the

increasing estrangement born of alien environments; all the meanwhile, a second, more

potent drug spreads throughout the solar system, more potent and alienating by far. These

novels are Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and The Three Stigmata of Palmer

Eldritch, both of them establishing a precarious balance between external and internal

worlds.

          In these novels, reality, upon whose constancy both identity and the self are

constructed, proves an unstable foundation. There comes a moment in each novel when

reality’s framework begins to fray, what will be referred to as a “reality shift”. My interest

is in its initial drive, as well as in how it affects those caught within it. Does it lead to

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dissolution of identity and the self, or does it reveal a hard core of morality that offers some

defence from the cynical disillusionment postmodernism displays towards fixed values?

What of drugs, the triggers of these shifts? Their use has debilitating effects on reality and

on the subject; thus, it is necessary to examine these effects closely, map them, and

juxtapose them where necessary.

       Previous research has been done on both The Three Stigmata and Flow My Tears.

Most valuable to this paper is Umberto Rossi’s The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick,

which offers authoritative interpretations of twenty works by the author, including the two

objects of this research. Rossi draws connections between Flow My Tears and The Three

Stigmata, and even schematizes several episodes relevant to this paper. Another valuable

source is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Novels of Philip K. Dick, which provides an insight

on The Three Stigmata worth addressing. The works of Christopher Palmer and Jason P.

Vest, both of whom investigate Dick’s relationship with humanism and postmodernism,

inform this paper. They do not, however, define it—both novels are scrutinized through a

prism of postmodernist theory. Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism is given

precedence as the chief source in this endeavour, supported by a number of other scholars;

Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra has special relevance to elements of Dick’s work,

namely the science fictional drugs Can-D and Chew-Z, which can be mapped onto the

former’s concepts of second- and third-order simulation.

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Postmodernism and Philip K. Dick

If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don't talk ontology, Barney; don't

say is.

                                    —Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard offers one of the most cited notions of the

postmodernist condition in his essay, “Answering the Questions: What is

Postmodernism?”. For Lyotard, who positions himself against conformism in the arts,

postmodernism is dismissive of “the unity of the whole” (80), and in Linda Hutcheon’s

words, “is characterized by…incredulity towards master or metanarratives” (6). Indeed, in

“Postmodernism and Philosophy,” Stuart Sim defines the entirety of the philosopher’s

project as aimed towards demolishing the “authority wielded by grand narratives,” in their

turn detrimental because they offer a unified vision and value judgements of public and

private life that are “repressive of individual creativity” (8). Dick’s works, likewise, scoff at

any notion of overarching schemata which might offer a unified vision of life—a feat at

least in part accomplished through Dick’s deployment of a writing strategy dubbed by John

Huntington as the “van Vogt rule” (153). Proposed by science fiction writer A.E. van Vogt,

this rule aims to generate new ideas every 800 words. Though Huntington admits there are

no “explicit acknowledgements on Dick’s part” about his use of this technique, he makes a

persuasive argument as to that being the case (154); further, Van Vogt was an important

influence for Dick. Even if he did not make use of the technique as presented verbatim by

van Vogt, its internal logic of contradiction is evident, as we shall see, both in Flow My

Tears and in The Three Stigmata.

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       This internal logic of contradiction, so constant a trait in Dick, is one of the most

significant markers through which we situate the author’s oeuvre in the postmodernist

tradition. But to identify other markers, we must step away from philosophy and technique

and into literary theory. A Poetics of Postmodernism provides the necessary framework;

Hutcheon’s work is one important attempt by a literary theorist to pull together all the

differing and conflicting strands of postmodernism. It articulates “both a way of speaking—

a discourse—and a cultural process involving the expressions of thought” (14). Unlike

other notable scholars of the condition, Hutcheon does not make a value judgement about

postmodernism so much as she seeks to synthesise all that comes with both discourse and

process—thus offering a cluster of strategies to examine postmodernist works.

       What problems arise with this choice? The term favoured by her, “historiographic

metafiction,” introduces a stumbling block for a genre whose raison d'être is inquiry into

the future—we are discussing here science fiction, and examining it in terms of history is

difficult, especially when the subjects of this study are not those of Dick’s works which

revolve around alternate history (the obvious example being The Man in the High Castle).

Despite these issues, how might Dick’s work be considered historiographic metafiction?

For one, in the conventions it borrows from prior works of science fiction—not the

purported history of our world but the history of a genre. In Palmer Eldritch, for example,

Dick takes one of Golden Age science fiction’s fundamental lines of speculation—

humanity’s inexorable spirit in colonising outer space—and subverts it through the

representation of Martian colonists overtaken by alienation and despair (Rossi, 184).

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Further, historiographic metafiction shares a common purpose with Dick’s works in asking

“both epistemological and ontological questions” (Hutcheon, 50).

       More significant is that the private history of Dick’s characters is interrogated time

and again in a doomed attempt to draw meaning from memory in order to navigate a

rational present. Here again, touching on postmodern subjectivity, Hutcheon’s text is

invaluable:

       Postmodernism establishes, differentiates, and then disperses stable narrative voices

       (and bodies) that use memory to try to make sense of the past. It both installs and

       then subverts traditional concepts of subjectivity; it both asserts and is capable of

       shattering “the unity of man’s being through which it was thought that he could

       extend his sovereignty to the events of the past” (Foucault qtd. in Hutcheon). (117)

This is glimpsed more than once in The Three Stigmata and is best exemplified throughout

Flow My Tears, as will be made evident in the penultimate chapter of this paper. Donald

Hall’s treatment of subjectivity is another valuable source of the ways in which classical

conceptions of the subject are fractured and problematised under the inherent tensions of

postmodernism.

       Some of Dick’s most prevailing obsessions, as noted by Huntington, are

“imitations, fakes, people or things that are not what they seem” (155)—simulacra, in a

word. Jean Baudrillard’s relevant work concerns the retreat of the real in the face of the

hyperreal, which Aylesworth defines so: “In postmodernism, hyperreality is the result of

the technological mediation of experience, where what passes for reality is a network of

images and signs without an external referent, such that what is represented is

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representation itself”. This makes clear that the chief problem Baudrillard analyses is one of

signs and representation, and of the breakdown they suffer in an increasingly postmodern

universe. Representation is turned into simulation through a process the philosopher

describes thus:

        Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the

        real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on

        the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical

        negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of

        every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by

        interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of

        representation itself as a simulacrum. (5)

This is what Kellner refers to as “a carnival of mirrors reflecting images projected from

other mirrors”—it is this cornucopia of self-referential images that is present and

exacerbated by the hallucinogenic terrains deployed by Dick in The Three Stigmata.

Judging by the discussion thus far, it seems safe to examine Dick’s works in this

postmodernist framework; yet some critics such as Christopher Palmer and Jason P. Vest

have placed him astride a fine line between postmodernism and humanism. The latter, Vest

writes, “is not a naïve faith in the individual’s ability to create his or her future no matter

what obstacles may arise, but rather a profound compassion for the individual’s difficult

struggle to overcome these obstacles” (xi). There is an inherent tension between

postmodernism’s dispersal of master narratives, and the “universalizing assumptions” of

humanism that demands further inquiry before we may move on (Hutcheon, 7).

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       Hutcheon warns against the overgeneralized labelling of western modes of thinking

as liberal humanism (8); it is this very overgeneralization that both Palmer and Vest engage

in. Their separate readings place Dick in an unconventional genre that Vest calls

“postmodern humanism” (xii). The defining trait of this genre is its endless negotiating

between a humanist ethic and a postmodernist impulse towards dissolution. Similarly,

Palmer holds that Dick, in his fiction, “affirms a set of values and views of reality that

would seem contrary to all the diverse things the concept of the postmodern stands for” (8).

These views affirm postmodernism’s powers of dispersal while they diminish its ability to

hold and produce meaning. Palmer embroils Dick’s fiction in this conflict between

postmodernist and humanist values, what the former defines at one point as a “contest and

interaction of realism and fantasy” (9). Vest, meanwhile, locates Dick’s writing in the

literary tradition of such authors as Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino,

citing their “prevalent anxieties about progress, industrialization, mass culture, and

technology” (xiv). Vest goes on to examine the connective tissue between each of these

three authors with Dick’s own works—they examine common themes such as “ontological

doubt, epistemological uncertainty … the dehumanizing aspects of technological

proliferation, the ambiguity of human identity, and the inability to distinguish reality from

fiction” (xvi). Vest and Palmer take this position in the vein of the postmodernist

condition’s more critical voices, and so serve to underline postmodernism’s chief

weakness—its ambiguous and elusive nature, inimical to singular definition. Hutcheon

does not hold with the view that postmodernism creates an oppositional paradox so much

as a provisional one: “I see it, instead, as an inscribing and undercutting of both any unitary

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sensibility and any disruptive will to unmake, for these are equally absolutist and totalizing

concepts” (48). The approach adopted in this paper is informed by Hutcheon’s provisional

view; neither Flow My Tears, nor The Three Stigmata “disintegrate and banish the

humanist subject” so much as they “disturb humanist certainties about the nature of the self

and of the role of consciousness” (Hutcheon, 19). One argument that can be advanced

against the view adapted herein is that the reading embraces the very tendency of master

narratives to smooth over contradictions in the name of unity; but then, this position can be

adopted against the condition in its entirety and is something Hutcheon warns against (xiii).

Her hypothesis that “postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon” which both “uses and

abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges” is both key to this

reading and advocates against the criticism outlined above (3). Both novels, as we shall see,

follow a similar approach, with Dick first establishing classically humanist notions of

subjectivity before rendering them inept through a series of ever more puzzling and

alarming transformations. But before doing so, we must ask: What enacts these

transformations?

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The Reality Shift and Its Engines

“The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?”

“It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere

appearance.”

                                    —Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Let us now move on to define what we will refer to as the “reality shift”. At the level of

theory, this phenomenon can be mapped onto Lyotard’s “event,” defined as an “occurrence

that dramatically alters the way we view the world, and casts all our ideological

assumptions into doubt in the process” (Sim, 7). One point of departure from this definition

is that the reality shift throws all assumptions into doubt, not only the ideological ones;

operating in a science-fictional context, it has tangible powers of unmaking over the worlds

Dick renders. The impetus behind the initial shift is connected to drug use in both Flow and

Palmer Eldritch—unlike the stabilizing influence of the eponymous cans of Ubik from

Dick’s 1969 opus, drugs in these two novels have a disruptive effect on reality. The real-

world properties of drugs are widely known—their abuse can cause a sense of alienation in

the user, induce psychosis, warp perception, bring about hallucinogenic episodes, and result

in a break with reality. Dick extends these effects, allows them to bleed outside the

subject’s perception and so trigger the reality shift.

       The direct connection between reality shift and drug use might not be immediately

evident, as is the case in Flow, where the reader discovers late into the second part of the

novel that the circumstances of Jason Taverner’s expulsion from public and private

memory are owed to Alice Buckman’s drug use. In Palmer Eldritch, the connection is

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much more evident—the effects of Can-D and Chew-Z are scrutinized from the novel’s

earliest pages up to its closing lines. Worth noting is, however, that though they drive the

initial change, drugs are not requisite for further shifts. It is as if once reality has been

unmoored from its original, seemingly stable starting point, it is bound to fragment further,

leading to the increasingly perplexing events Dick’s protagonists experience. We shall see

examples of this in both novels across the next two sections.

        Let us turn first to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This novel sketches out a

fertile setting for the fragmentation of the subject. With a superheated Earth whose

atmosphere cannot support life during the day on one side, and poorly realized UN-

sanctioned settlement efforts across the solar system on the other, the accent falls on the

experiential. Both humans on Earth and those coerced to live their lives on the surfaces of

inhospitable planets and moons are disconnected from their natural habitat (8).

Contemporary techno-science, to use Lyotard’s vocabulary (Malpas, 75), has dehumanized

the human even as it has given them the tools necessary to survive their much-changed

environment. The subject is initially forced to submit to the authentic horror of the alien

worlds it inhabits. Barney Mayerson’s experience as a colonist on Mars maps out one likely

route through which this surrender plays out: “Maybe each new colonist had started out this

way, in an agony of effort. And then the torpor, the hopelessness, claimed them” (159). The

possibility of escape presents itself readily enough through the drugs that trigger the novel’s

reality shifts.

        Can-D is the first of the two that demands examination. It is introduced as an illegal

substance produced by a secret division of P.P. Layouts and distributed under the

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leadership of the corporation’s head executive, “evolved human” Leo Bulero (58). Can-D

bears some of the typical traits of a narcotic: it is “habit-forming,” and a “real experience”

(23). But it also possesses atypical properties, ones that allow its users to experience a

fusion of the minds, a coming together into a “new unity” (24). This coming together

comes about through a process called “translation”—the word has special significance to

Dick, is used to denote what Rossi describes as “the very specific transformation taking

place when people use Can-D and are embodied in the two characters/dolls in the layouts,

Perky Pat and Walt” (179). Translation is defined in Palmer Eldritch‘s text as “the near-

sacred moment in which the miniature artifacts of the layout no longer merely represented

Earth but became Earth” (37). The drug holds a special significance for those unwilling

colonists dispersed across inhospitable settlements in the solar system as part of the UN’s

settlement efforts. For them, it is “something else again…an entrée back into the world they

had been born to and still dwelt on,” and because of this, Can-D is characterised by Leo

Bulero as “the religion of the colonists” (37). Combined with Perky Pat’s layouts, it offers a

short, transcendental experience which, just like Baudrillard’s second-order simulation,

“blurs the boundaries between reality and representation” (Lane, 86). While Can-D seems

to offer these “over one million unwilling expatriates” (24) an escape, it is only a temporary

one. No matter the potency of the high, the drug’s users return to reality within fifteen

minutes and their ability to engage with “the structure of their fantasy environment” is, in

Palmer Eldritch’s words, “limited to the artifacts actually installed in their layout; they

can’t operate the automatic dishwasher in the kitchen unless a min[iature] of one was

installed in advance” (89). The transition drug is dependent on the use of the Perky Pat

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layouts—symbols of representation—for the creation of believable shared simulations and

so is rooted in reality. It doesn’t so much offer an escape as the temporary alleviation of a

bleak existence at the cost of an addiction: “they continued to require it. In no way were

they free” (50). Further, Can-D is not made free to the colonists—rather, it is a costly drug,

one that colonists such as Sam Regan use all their pay to acquire: “he was out of skins. He

had used his complete supply in the service of a need which he considered more pressing.

He had, from a pusher, bought a fairly large quantity of Can-D” (37). Through this drug,

Bulero has commodified religion.

       Can-D’s effects are illustrated first-hand in Palmer Eldritch’s third chapter, through

the experiences of the settlers working in the hovel Chicken Pox Prospects (36). For the

settlers, the use of Can-D transcends the feeling of unity; to chew the drug is to come

together “in the most solemn moment of which they were capable” (37). Even with the

seemingly incontestable reminder that “THIS IS AN ILLUSION” (43) through a note

written in the hand of the one who chews Can-D, its users nonetheless engage in

theological debates about the nature of the experience (41-42). This theological debate and

the translation that follows open The Three Stigmata to the deployment of Baudrillard’s

simulations and simulacra. Can-D, we must reiterate, has religious significance to many of

the settlers, and is believed by some to have divine powers: in the words of colonist Fran

Schein, “It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality,

as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you

believe as some do, that it’s outside of time and space, that it’s eternal” (41). This drug-

induced high gains the significance of religious experience for some, with the layouts, these

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small, doll-like objects key to translation, filling in the role of religious icons. To draw

from Baudrillard’s own example from Christianity, the icons cease to be “images, such as

an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their

own fascination” (5). In tandem with Can-D, transitioning is implicitly likened to the death

of Christ: “What you and other sensualists among us don’t realise is that when we chew

Can-D and leave our bodies we die. And by dying we lose the weight of … Sin” (Dick, The

Three Stigmata 42). Even a “sensualist” such as Sam Regan, for whom translation is more a

play on the senses than Christ-like death and rebirth, still identifies himself as a “believer:

he affirmed the miracle of translation” (37). Both characters are shown to have fallen into

the trap Baudrillard describes: after all, “whereas representation attempts to absorb

simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice

of representation itself as a simulacrum” (6). The settlers have subscribed to a false golden

idol—golden not only because of the radiance described by Baudrillard, but also because of

the steep monetary value Can-D and the layout exact from their disciples.

        But there are reasons we can nonetheless place the effects of this drug under

Baudrillard’s second-degree simulation: the communal aspects of the experience, the layout

as signifier for elements of reality, the world portrayed by the translation. For all its faults,

Can-D does not produce a hyperreality—unlike Chew-Z, as we will soon discover. Rather,

the images produced by Bulero’s drug “mask the absence of a profound reality”

(Baudrillard, 6). If we adopt this Baudrillardian position, we may argue that through Can-D

Dick is interrogating ways through which to preserve aspects of the human in the

increasingly technologically complex world.

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       Chew-Z is an altogether more malignant drug, whose myriad effects don’t so much

blur the boundaries between reality and illusion as eschew them entirely. The differing

effects of Can-D and Chew-Z are captured well by Umberto Rossi in The Twisted Worlds.

He dubs the former a “shared artificial world” and the latter a “finite subjective reality”—

useful criteria-drawing labels to distinguish between the effects of these drugs (178).

Unlike Bulero’s Can-D, Eldritch’s Chew-Z is a profoundly isolating product: “You’re alone

in your—[universe],” a condition that makes exception only in the face of Palmer Eldritch,

the malicious alien presence at the heart of the novel (Dick, The Three Stigmata 91). When

the evolved human Leo Bulero is unknowingly put under its effects, he recognizes, at an

intuitive level, that the space he occupies is “a place Eldritch controls,” (77) which is a far

cry from the advertised “eternal unchanging perfect now” promised by the drug’s pushers

(118). This “perfect now” is owed to the drug’s time-diluting properties: “When we return

to our former bodies…you’ll find that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years

and it’d be the same; we’d emerge back and…find everything unchanged…no trance, no

stupor,” a split second the only break, so miniscule as to be imperceptible (87). As Rossi

notes, Chew-Z offers the promise of “perfect worlds of wish-fulfilment, who[sic] are

actually imperfect” (177). These imperfections are obvious and abundant: Foremost among

them is the “consistent appearance of Palmer Eldritch in every one” of the finite subjective

realities created through consumption of Chew-Z. Late in The Three Stigmata, Mayerson’s

experiences under its narcotic influence allow him to reach the realization that Palmer is the

“owner of this world,” in fact of every world shaped by the pill (191).

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        Eldritch outlines the two key effects of Chew-Z: time-dilution and “the other,

perhaps the more vital. That it isn’t a fantasy, that they enter a genuine new universe” (89).

The claim once more recalls Baudrillard—and this time, the notion of postmodern

hyperreality is difficult to escape. The effects of Eldritch’s pill can be classified as a third-

order simulation, which generates “a real without origin or reality” (Lane, 86). The

solipsistic universes given birth by Chew-Z lack even the frail basis in reality that the Can-

D-induced translations have through the Perky Pat layouts. Within these worlds, the

promise of eternal life is inversed—not the spiritual freedom of reincarnation the drug

promises (93-94) but the repetition of a single moment, the present stretched out into

infinity with neither past nor future within reach. After his initial experience with the drug,

Barney Mayerson likens the experience to “the way hell must be: recurring and unyielding”

but at the same time feels “the acute, physical impact of deprivation” (176). Mayerson is

fleeing the “desert of the real” that is Mars “for the ecstasies of hyperreality” even as these

ecstasies trap him, diminish him, and limit his agency (Kellner).

        Juxtaposing the colonists’ theological discussion of Can-D with Mayerson’s first-

hand experience with Chew-Z allows the drawing of direct comparison: By taking Can-D,

one opens up oneself to the commitment of sin, even as the act of transition itself is

cleansing. This can be detected in the following line: “‘I think,’ Fran said, ‘you’re tempting

me to do wrong’” (Dick, The Three Stigmata 42). Can-D offers a choice, provides the

possibility of resisting temptation; in contrast, the very act of consuming Eldritch’s drug

leads to damnation: “Once you’ve taken Chew-Z you’re delivered over. Like sin . . . it’s the

condition of slavery. Like the Fall. And the temptation is similar” (187). Throughout

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Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard writes of the seductive powers of the hyperreal—

and we are made to witness a grand seduction at the scale of an entire society as Dick

would imagine it, by an alien and alienating influence whose effects ultimately transform

the subjects into something wholly different from their initial iteration. But before we

scrutinize this metamorphosis, one more drug demands exploration—KR-3, whose effects

initiate the disturbing reality shift at the heart of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

       The initial shifts in The Three Stigmata have a direct link between drug and user:

characters either take Can-D and Chew-Z of their own behest or are given one of the drugs

by force (as in the case of Leo Bulero). This is one way in which Flow My Tears breaks

with Dick’s earlier novel. The shift affecting Jason Taverner, the novel’s primary

protagonist, originates from outside him:

       Taverner wasn’t the one who took the KR-3. It was Alys. Taverner, like the rest of

       us, became a datum in … [her] percept system and got dragged across when she

       passed into an alternate construct of coordinates … although she did manage to

       accomplish this by taking the drug, he and we at the same time remained in our own

       universe. We occupied two space corridors at the same time, one real, one irreal.

       One is an actuality; one is a latent possibility among many, spatialized temporarily

       by the KR-3. (186-187)

Rather, its source is Alys Buckman, fetishist drug-user and wife to police general Felix

Buckman (also her twin-brother), plays a role similar at least in passing to that of Palmer

Eldritch. Like Eldritch, she is less than human, as noted by General Buckman: “Nothing

scares you … since your brain operation. You systematically, deliberately, had all your

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human centers removed. You’re … a reflex machine that diddles itself endlessly like a rat

in an experiment” (82). And like Eldritch with Chew-Z, she is the ultimate source of the

reality shift experienced by Taverner and others, through the use of the KR-3 drug, whose

effects allow Alys to “perceive [numerous] irreal universes” and to choose between them:

“the person’s percept system chooses one possibility out of all those presented to it. It has

to choose, because if it didn’t, competing universes would overlap, and the concept of

space itself would vanish” (185). Beyond the typically science-fictional technobabble hides

a Dickean anxiety about the issues arising from a world growing infinitely more complex, a

world in which reality is ever more dependent on the subject’s powers of perception. Dick

deploys one description overlaid on another, each complicating the reader’s understanding

of KR-3 until we are left, like the character of Felix Buckman, vacant and

uncomprehending—as if mimicking the very state of perceptual overload the drug

engenders.

       Like Chew-Z, KR-3 also plays with time; while Eldritch’s drug traps its user in an

eternal, solipsistic “now,” an overdose of KR-3 results in a “high and sustained overload,”

which speeds up not only “neurological decay” (187) but ages Alys at the time of her death:

“A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: the eyes

had gone, all flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow” (148). Alys’s

mystifying death possibly ushers in a second reality shift that sees Taverner’s fame returned

to him. The issue at hand is that a number of the elements of the primary world introduced

in the novel’s opening chapter are never again addressed—namely, the life-threatening

attack on Jason Taverner that sees him hospitalized (20-21). Note the use of “possibly”—

Zahariev 18

the text obfuscates a reading in this reality shift, too. While it is made explicit in the text

that Alys’s death is the drive for Taverner’s return to fame, glaring inconsistencies are not

addressed. One possibility is the mescaline drug that Alys feeds Taverner but the possibility

is summarily dismissed by the explanation provided by the chief deputy coroner solicited

by General Buckman to discover Alys’s cause of death: “What actually locked him back

here was nothing he took or didn’t take but her death” (186). Even so, this does not provide

satisfactory rationale on the discrepancies between the events of the novel’s first chapter

and those of chapter twenty-one onwards. Kim Stanley Robinson assigns this to the novel’s

form: “inconsistency is part of the structural fabric” (107). How to respond to Robinson’s

claim that “it is unclear what purpose the inconsistency has, if any” (107)? The argument

could be made that a reader who engages fully with the text is compelled to pick between

the contesting notions presented—it is not just the perceptual overload of KR-3 that is

mimicked but the need to choose, as well.

        Rossi argues that the revelation of KR-3’s effects is delayed until very late in the

novel (a mere nineteen pages before its close) “because Dick wanted to exploit the suspense

generated by the effects of the drug, which creates an absurd and disorienting situation of

uncertainty” (201). This constitutes a reasonable interpretation—and Dick’s effort is a

marked success, as Taverner’s uncertainty and confusion, too, are mirrored by the reader’s

own. The exhaustive explanations Dick offers on the effects of all three drugs serve to

perplex rather than clarify, both to build suspense and to explore deeper philosophical

ideas. We have examined the ways in which they unmoor reality—it is now time to move

onto the question of subjectivity.

Zahariev 19

Ever fragmentary: Subjectivity in Dick’s Flow My Tears and Palmer Eldritch

Everything, including myself, just expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle.

                                      —Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

It is not reality alone that is unmoored—so are Dick’s characters, through whose paranoic,

confused reactions to the bizarre alterations of the worlds they inhabit, we may glimpse the

very breakdown in stable subjectivity that is one of the signature moves of postmodernist

fiction. What we will examine across Dick’s novels is the modern subject refashioned by

the forces of postmodernism. In The Postmodern, Simon Malpas defines the modern

subject thus:

       Through memory, the modern subject is capable of constructing a personal narrative

       of identity, grasping the present and judging how to respond to the future. In

       essence, the modern subject is the product of its ability to recall and synthesise the

       events that make up its life: memory generates identity and allows each of us to

       become an individual and unique human being. (64)

Postmodern subjectivity questions these notions through the fragmenting of the narrative of

identity, the interrogation of memory, and the second-guessing of the subject’s ability to

consolidate the “events that make up its life”. The reality shift is the engine through which

this interrogation is enacted, with modern subjects thrust into malleable realities. Jason

Taverner, the primary protagonist of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is the first

example we will look at.

       Taverner’s sense of self comes from his viewers, described as “the lifeblood of his

public existence” (12). He is indelibly connected to, even defined by, the thirty million-

Zahariev 20

strong audience tuning in to see him every Tuesday evening: “And I am always there. Jason

Taverner has never and will never disappoint his fans” (12). Presented as universal truth by

the subject’s own voice, this cements a “notion of the individual, coherent subject,”

(Hutcheon, 166) summarily ripped away by the world Taverner awakens to after the

novel’s first reality shift. When Jason comes to in a “lousy, bug-infested cheap wino hotel”

room, following the attack he suffers at the hands of a jilted lover, his confusion slowly

gives way to existential dread. The realization that no one knows him functions as a slow

erasure of who Taverner is. And why shouldn’t it? In Jason’s own words, to him, “his

public existence, his role as world-wide entertainer, was existence itself, period” (12). It is

the audience around whose constant presence Taverner has built the foundation of his

reality. Without them, he ceases to be: “I don’t exist, he said to himself. There is no Jason

Taverner. There never was and there never will be” (26). With isolation comes a dissolution

of identity. That he is a Six, a genetically engineered human capable of always prevailing,

“no matter the external circumstances,” (27) rings false, provides a cursory attempt at self-

assurance: “I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is.

Somehow” (25). Within the altered state of the world, it is not simply the awareness of

Jason Taverner that has been erased from anyone and everyone he has known; there is no

trace of his physical existence, either. Not in the “birth-registration control center” of the

totalitarian United States government, and not in his wallet, either, where the identification

cards “that made it possible for him to stay alive … that got him through pol and nat

barricades without being shot or thrown into a forced-labor camp” are supposed to be (25).

Taverner has become part of what Hutcheon dubs the “ex-centric,” his position enabling

Zahariev 21

Dick both to direct criticism at the centre and to capture the allure that its defining features

of unity and belonging hold (60). Nor does Dick leave Jason’s ex-centrism at the “single

concept of otherness” (Hutcheon, 65)—through his changed environment, Jason is allowed

to perceive the different groups that suffer the brunt of the totalitarian state’s oppressive

power: the students and the “blacks” (Dick, Flow My Tears 139). At work here is “a more

plural and deprivileging concept of difference” than that of otherness, even as the focus

remains largely on Jason (Hutcheon, 65).

       One fragment to which Taverner clings to is instinct, the drive for self-preservation:

“The hell with my career; I just want to live. … Aren’t I going to be allowed to exist at all?

Wasn’t I even born?” (26). The anguish present here harkens back to Donald Hall’s

examination of Blade Runner, the classic postmodernist movie adapted from Dick’s “Do

Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. Blade Runner, Hall tells us, “slowly and masterfully

reveals the intense anguish” of its android antagonists, who “simply wish to be allowed to

live” (123). In much the same way in Flow, Taverner, stripped of the instruments through

which the totalitarian state differentiates between society and its enemies, is himself a near-

human desperate for the right to exist: “The bare bones of existence that every man is born

with: I don’t even have that. But I will get it” (27). Jason is not unlike a fractured vessel

emptied out of content from this point hence: “I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s good or

bad, true or not true, any more” (42). What follows are several encounters through which

Taverner is compelled to renegotiate, time and again, a scattered subjective identity due to

his altered circumstances in a reality both familiar and disturbing (Malpas, 79).

Zahariev 22

       No longer exempted by merit of privilege, Jason is forced to reconceptualize the

society he is now outside of:

       We have a betrayal state, he realized. When I was a celebrity I was exempt. Now

       I’m like everyone else: I now have to face what they’ve always faced. And – what I

       faced in the old days, faced and then later on repressed from my memory. Because

       it was too distressing to believe . . . once I had a choice, and could choose not to

       believe. (69)

This paragraph offers several implications. It illustrates just how unreliable the modern

subject’s ability to infer from the past is—wilful blindness makes the construction of any

personal identity suspect. The paragraph has also an ironic weight when viewed along with

a consideration given by the secondary protagonist of Flow, the police general Felix

Buckman: “reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without warning

and make him insane” (118). Wrapped in his privilege, Taverner has turned away from the

state of the world, unwilling to recognize the clear and present danger of the police state.

From here the bearings this paragraph has on notions of ideology are made manifest.

Postmodernist “ideology,” Hutcheon writes, “both constructs and is constructed by the way

in which we live our role in the social totality” (178). Taverner’s role in society has been to

provide the masses with frivolous entertainment—distraction for his audience. Knowingly

ignorant of the brutal machineries of state, Taverner helps promulgate that same ignorance

to the “thirty million people” who tune in once a week (11). The wilful blindness already

established shows the showman has fallen into a temptation, as Hutcheon argues, “to see

ideology as that which only others fall prey to” (178). This temptation is incompatible with

Zahariev 23

postmodern subjectivity, which forces the subject to come to grips with the notion that

“everything is ideological” (Hutcheon, 200). The reality shift allows Dick to situate

Taverner in a position from which to have this blindness dispelled, as well as to

“acknowledge the ideology of the subject and to suggest alternative notions of subjectivity”

(Hutcheon, 159).

       These contesting notions of subjectivity, Jason encounters first with the ID card

forger Kathy and later with Ruth, a former lover who recalls him no more than anyone else.

Taverner comes face to face with the strikingly different ways these women have found to

negotiate the world, is forced to adapt to them in his attempt to survive. In Kathy, Jason

sees a knowing accomplice of the police state, is horrified and repulsed by her: “You are,

he thought, a prostitute of the mind. And it’s your mind that is prostituting itself before and

beyond anyone else’s. Although you yourself would never recognize it. And, if you did,

you’d say you were forced into it. Yes; forced into it, but by whom?” (49). Could not the

same be said of Taverner, however? Unlike Kathy, he is no informant; but his show—for

which he is compensated far better than even a high-ranking official of the police state like

general Felix Buckman (173)—serves ideological functions which must be held suspect as

accessory to a status quo that benefits the totalitarian state portrayed in Flow.

       With Ruth, Taverner is given a lesson first on love and then on grief, both presented

as forces of self-abnegation of the subject. Love is juxtaposed with the driving force behind

Jason’s actions: where “Instincts push us into fighting for survival. … Survival of ourselves

at the expense of others,” the very act of loving is ceasing “to live for yourself; you live for

another person” (103). The two are drawn as incompatible, one going against the internal

Zahariev 24

logic of the other. To extend a previous metaphor: over these episodes, we are made

witness to an attempt akin to refilling the imperfect, shattered vessel that is Jason. This is

one point of contention between the postmodernist impulse evident in Dick and the

framework Hutcheon crafts in her Poetics. Hutcheon holds that “the perceiving subject is

no longer assumed to a coherent, meaning-generating entity” (11), and while Dick has left

coherence truly and well behind, his subjects remain capable of engendering meaning—

even if that meaning further deepens the paranoiac anxiety so characteristic of his works.

       When the KR-3 drug at last burns through Alys and leaves nothing behind but a

skeletal corpse, Jason’s reality begins to “leak back” (Dick, Flow My Tears 159) but the

doubt remains: “‘Again I’m real,’ he said. ‘But if it could happen once, for two days—’ To

come and go like this, to fade in and out—” (160). Taverner is forced even to consider

whether everything he believes himself to be isn’t a product of drug use: “Maybe I am only

one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power, by

means of a capsule. While living actually, meanwhile, in bug-infested ratty old hotel rooms.

On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming” (160).

Taverner has by now recognized his own inadequacy in the sense-making process by which

the subject judges reality. Like the reader, he is met with conflicting accounts and is forced

to consider the nature of his reality—unlike the reader, he doesn’t have the benefit of the

information police general Buckman receives on the effects of the KR-3 drug Alys took.

Even restored to his former status, Jason Taverner cannot escape this state of ontological

uncertainty.

Zahariev 25

        Flow My Tears is one of the few novels at the end of which Dick offers definite

answers, by means of an “Epilog”. Written in an almost documentary style and employing

the voice of an omniscient narrator, it gives a short account of the fate of the novel’s

characters in a classically realistic fashion. It would make for a perfectly undistinguished

close to one of Dick’s more ambitious novels if not for one caveat—one lone coda, the final

scene from the perspective of secondary protagonist Felix Buckman set just before this

epilogue, which sees the police general cross into a world very different from his own. This

reality shift is subtle, easy to miss on a first read-through, the reasons behind it left

undefined. Nonetheless, the textual evidence of this shift is present, casually dropped in one

of Montgomery L. Hopkins’s lines to Buckman: “You must drop over. You’ll like my

house. It’s very mellow. You can meet my wife and our kids. Three in all” (197). The prior

realities inhabited by Taverner and Buckman are identified in part by their state-sponsored

genocide of the black population, enforced through a horrific one-child policy (29), which

would make the existence of three kids to Montgomery impossible.

        Whether Buckman himself realizes he has crossed into another reality is not made

explicit, but his experience is transformative, as the “Epilog” makes clear. The

circumstances that allow this meeting to occur, the reasons behind the reality shift at work

are all secondary to its climatic weight, heavily hinted at since Taverner’s conversation

with Ruth about love and grief. Grief is the logical extension of love: “It’s the cycle of love

completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again” (104). This cycle

can be read as schematic of the journey both Taverner and Felix are faced with. Ruth’s

forewarning that “the instinct for survival loses in the end,” (103) heralds Taverner’s

Zahariev 26

eventual surrender to the police over the drummed-up charges of killing Alys: “I don’t want

to be hunted anymore” (188). The drive for self-preservation ultimately “ends in failure”

(104) and surrender marks a death sentence, as general Buckman promises Jason: “When

you show up here … I’ll kill you with my own gun” (188). The showman nonetheless gives

himself up—confirming Ruth’s portentous words on the limitations of the drive for

survival.

       Where Taverner fails, where he is unwilling to embrace either love or grief for fear

of fading out (104), the police general succeeds: “Within himself Felix Buckman felt

absolute and utter desolate grief” (194). Buckman’s embrace of this grief at last saves

Jason. Ruth’s words arrange this metamorphosis:

       Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And

       you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it – grief is the final outcome of

       love, because it’s love lost. It’s the cycle of love completed . . . grief is awareness

       that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone

       is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is,

       the great loneliness. (104)

Buckman, in the moments leading up to his meeting with Montgomery, grieves—and in so

doing, steps outside himself, embraces and is embraced by another. The final simile at the

close of this coda, describing the general’s transport, might as well depict Felix as he flies

home: “like some wounded, half-dissolved insect” (198). The epilogue, then, offers

definitive proof to the change that has taken root in the police general. Rather than result in

the death of Taverner as Buckman originally intends, the musician’s trial “mysteriously

Zahariev 27

backfired, ending with a verdict of not guilty” (201). This metamorphosis in Buckman is

corroborated by Dick, who uses the General’s figure in his personal reflections: “...I, like

General Buckman, underwent a personality change” (Sutin, 249).

       Such staggering changes in subjectivity are abundant in The Three Stigmata, as

well, though they are denied so elegant a conclusion. If, in Flow, Dick challenges the

driving forces behind the subject and finds love and grief more powerful than the instinct

for self-preservation, such resolution in Palmer Eldritch is never achieved. We have spoken

about Can-D extensively, yet we have not investigated the consequences of its use at the

level of the subject. The Martian colonists who take it choose to embrace a drug-induced

stupor, which allows them temporary refuge through dissolution of subjectivity. Can-D’s

effect is described as a literal “disintegration” of the user’s identity, albeit a temporary one

(146). In the place of Sam Regan and Fran Schein are the dolls, Walt and Pat. With them

comes—at least initially—an utter lack of awareness as to the colonists’ life outside of the

shared world. With the gradual trickle back of Regan and Schein’s memories, the blurring

between reality and this illusory world, between colonist and doll, is displayed in full:

       “But it’s a terrific day—we ought to get outdoors. … ”

       “It’s going to be too hot to go outdoors.”

       “No,” he disagreed, nettled. “That’s later. Hey, we could walk along the beach,

       splash around in the waves. Okay?”

       She wavered, visibly. “But that conversation we had just before—”

       “There was no conversation. I haven’t seen you in a week, not since last Saturday.”

       He made his tone as firm and full of conviction as possible. (44)

Zahariev 28

A proliferation of differing memories in conflict with one another has once more

dismantled the sense-making abilities of the subject; has created, further, a schizophrenic

duality of irreconcilable pasts whose only valid choice is surrender to and embrace of the

short-lived escapist fantasy presented by the drug. The saving grace of Can-D is its uniting

function, the joining together in “two figures comprising the essences of six persons” (48)

which offers asylum from the alienating environment the colonists are forced to inhabit.

But as Can-D’s strength wanes and individual identity is reaffirmed, the very first thoughts

that reassert themselves in Sam Regan’s mind are typical for any drug addict—the fear that

the others who share in this unity are “using up my Can-D. And I bet they are; I don’t care

what they say: I don’t believe them” (48). What should be a transcendental experience is

not left unmarred either by Can-D’s addictive nature or by its commodification.

       If Can-D attempts—and only partially succeeds—in alleviating the subject’s

alienation, Chew-Z amplifies it. The first of the novel’s protagonists, Barney Mayerson,

suffers through a reality shift engendered by Chew-Z at first glance self-affirming, with its

promise to allow Mayerson to make amends with his ex-wife, Emily (118). But changing

the past turns out to be much more difficult than first thought, and as we’ve discussed

already, reveals the true nature of the finite subjective realities—“nightmarish microworlds

of solipsistic isolation” (Rossi, 178). Frozen in the present, reliving his greatest personal

failure, Mayerson discovers the experience is far from “the perfect now” he was promised.

We have spoken already that Mayerson is greatly diminished when trapped in the

solipsistic hellscape generated in his own mind by Chew-Z, but its consequences on

subjectivity go well beyond this point: tormented by the relentless repetition of his failure

Zahariev 29

to win Emily over, Barney asks Eldritch to be turned into a stone—demands, in effect, to be

objectified in order to stop feeling (203). This is the crux of alienation, but not the final

transmutation Mayerson endures. Refusing the opportunity to be “translated into one

homogenous organism” (203) with Eldritch, Barney finally switches places with him in the

moments before the latter’s transport is destroyed by Leo Bulero’s gunship. In a roundabout

way, Barney almost gets what he wants: as Palmer tells him, “Listen, Mayerson; being a

stone isn’t what you really want. What you want is death” (205). It is only at the last

moment that Mayerson returns to his own body on Mars. This transubstantiation has heavy

religious connotations beyond the scope of this paper, as examined at length by Rossi (176-

180), but it nonetheless hints at one of Dick’s primary interests at play in The Three

Stigmata—the dislocation of subjectivity and its eventual effacing, as seen not only with

Mayerson but with Leo Bulero.

       Bulero, initially perplexed by the challenge raised against him by Palmer Eldritch

and Chew-Z, comes to discover a purpose for himself within the drug’s malignant

dreamscape: “I’m going to get him in the real world … for … everyone in the system”

(100). This unity of purpose is a guiding principle for the evolved human for much of the

novel, confused only by its final pages. To begin with, Bulero reiterates a hard, unbending

core resting within, though he casts clear demarcations between himself and it: “it’s

something in me that even that thing Palmer Eldritch can’t reach and consume because

since it’s not me, it’s not mine to lose. I feel it…withstanding the external, nonessential

alterations…the evil, negative trinity of alienation, blurred reality, and despair that Eldritch

brought back with him” (229). Here again Dick is drawing his subject matter partly from