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‘The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick’ edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem

Book Review

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 30, 2011|By Ethan Gilsdorf

Philip K. Dick. (Frank Ronan )

Whether to publish a writer’s unfinished work is a question literary estates and heirs face, not always honorably.

Scraps and drafts by authors including Dr. Seuss, Robert Heinlein, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Douglas Adams have been released, posthumously, as books, sometimes ignoring the author’s wishes.

Authors generate endless drafts and chuck 90 percent of it, for good reason. Most is chicken scratch.

In the case of hyper-prolific cult writer Philip K. Dick, we now have the strange collection of scribblings called “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.’’ Dick likely did not intend these personal notes to be published - and, in fact, the editors point out that Dick’s children weren’t completely comfortable about the book, fearing that it could harm their father’s reputation.

Dick toiled largely in obscurity. His big break came only after his death, in 1982, when “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’’ was adapted by Ridley Scott as the film “Blade Runner.’’ Since then, his literary star has ascended, along with academic interest in the “Exegesis’’ collection. Several movies, including “Total Recall’’ and “Minority Report,’’ have been based on his work. Prior to “Blade Runner,’’ only sci-fi diehards knew of Dick’s 44 novels and 121 short stories, many infused with paranoia and corporate and governmental oppression, and the flight from that tyranny via transcendent experiences, drugs, and altered states.

Yet the one “real’’ event Dick could not escape became his obsession: what he came to call “2-3-74,’’ his own shorthand for the confounding events of February and March, 1974.

During those two months, Dick was visited by hallucinations and visual psychedelia. He described these visions, variously, as pink light beams; as “hundreds of thousands of absolutely terrific modern art pictures’’; as a “red and gold plasmatic entity’’ ; as “Zebra’’ and “Ubik.’’ For eight years, from 1974 until his death in 1982, the effort to comprehend these visitations consumed him. At night, he’d crank out dozens, sometimes scores, of handwritten or typewritten pages of ideas, theses, lists, letters, drawings, flow charts, all embodying the true meaning of the French word “essay’’: a weighing, a trial, an attempt. These philosophical-spiritual writings have been released as “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.’’