Part 10 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview
James Holmes: [laughing] If you had a chance, and let’s say that you’ve got the chance now, to talk to, let’s say, 5 to 10,000 people over a radio, what would you say to them?
Philip K Dick: Radio is obsolete. You all should be watching TV. You are living in the past. That wouldn’t have any effect. If they are already listening to the radio, they are not gonna turn it off. That television set they wouldn’t be watching. I don’t know. I wouldn’t say anything. I would present a dramatic thing. I’d do a script. I’d do it dramatically.
James Holmes: Sort of like Buck Rogers?
Philip K Dick: No. I was thinking more of Goethe’s Faust.
James Holmes: [laughing]
Philip K Dick: I would present it that way. I’d present it as a dramatic thing. No, seriously, I was thinking of the Orson Welles script of The War of the Worlds. Do you– do you remember–
James Holmes: Uh-hmm.
Philip K Dick: –about that? Yeah, I missed that. I was at the kiddies matinee at the Oak’s Theatre– got in for a dime. I got home and my grandmother was hiding behind the couch, you know, with a shotgun and my mother was in the kitchen with a frying pan. I said, “What happened?” She said, “The Martians landed.” I said, “How do you know?” She said, “Franklin Roosevelt just said so over the radio.” I said, “Gosh, it’s worse here than at the kiddies matinee.” I said, “You guys are out of your gourds. It’s ridiculous. They would’ve announced it at the kiddies matinee if that had happen. Everybody knows that. They announce everything at the kiddies matinee.” So, I calmed them down, but they really believed the Martians had landed. They heard it on the radio. They heard his voice, and when I heard the playback years later, it did sound like him. It was really real. I mean, it wasn’t like, you know, a script in the usual sense. They interrupted themselves, they turned off their own theme music, you know, they cut in, they made mistakes, they mis-cued, they pre-empted themselves; it was unbelievable. It was reality. That really got me thinking. That, I think, is what set me in the direction of leaning toward drama in writing rather than discursive, you know, like Nabokov in style, you know, like Virginia Wolf was drama, even if it was melodrama.
James Holmes: You mean a lot of dialogue and interaction? Yeah.
Philip K Dick: Well, whatever– it depends on what you mean by drama. What I mean by drama is a reenactment of an event in such a way that you forget that it’s a reenactment or a ritual or a replica or, you know, somehow synthetic or contrived. It seems like you’re actually there; it’s actually happening. I mean, like this script The War of the Worlds. The people listening really believed it was actual and I think all successful drama causes you to suspend the realization, you know, that it is a shuck. It is not a shuck at certain point; it is real in some sense. I mean this is truly a great novel. As such, and I mean, I tried to do that in my novels and make them dramatic, but what appeals to me is the true dramatic form; the play form, the spoken form, you know? That’s why I rely so much on dialogue. I think everything can be done through dialogue. If it couldn’t, Euripides would not have been the greatest, to me, the greatest writer that I’ve ever read.
James Holmes: Well, what about all the people that panicked in New Jersey and all of those places that, you know– I mean, in other words, he caused a lot of trouble by doing it. Do you think that was good?
Philip K Dick: Yeah, in a way. I mean, drama always causes a lot of trouble. I mean, that’s incidental. That merely proves the effect that drama can have. It proves that the question, again, of reality versus illusion is a very subtle question, like “how do you test if it’s real?” Now, if that caused all those people to fly to the woods, grab guns, do this, do that; then, it was real in a sense because it caused real reactions and set real events into motion. The War of the Worlds script was real. The Martians hadn’t landed in a kind of metaphysical sense. There were no Martians, but for those people, the Martians were real, and what they did was real. And, if they had overthrown the government, you know, out of the belief that it was immanent in the face of the invasion and set up a tyrannical government, you know, an emergency government with extraordinary powers that would’ve been as real as any dictatorship ever was. So, drama is real, and the fact that it causes trouble is just proof of it reality.
James Holmes: Do you think you could ever get an effect like that out of one of your books?
Philip K Dick: You mean, scare people in New Jersey and—
James Holmes: Into reacting in a way that there was a reaction to The War of the Worlds.
Philip K Dick : Well, in a broad sense, yes. You can set things into motion that are literally a part of the set of the tangible world, you know, in which like we’re sitting here in a living room; part of that world. The drama is on the pages of a book or it’s in a script, but the consequences occur in this set, you know, in this world, this reality–
James Holmes: Uh hmm.
Philip K Dick: — and it makes the translation occur through the mind of the person responding to the printed page or, you know, going to a theater. Yeah, I think that in a way I’ve done that to a certain– I mean, all drama does that to a certain extent. It alters the people. I mean, you don’t watch a drama or listen to it or read it; you experience it and it changes you. I mean, I feel like I’m different from having experienced some of the dramas that I’ve read like, for instance, the Wallenstein Trilogy with Schiller, which, to me is a very successful drama. I mean, that made me a different person. I mean, this goes back to Aristotle’s concept of the effect of tragedy, you know, the catharsis. It has an ameliorative effect on man’s passions, that it somehow relates to the drama that he’s a better person. In a way that’s not true and in a way it is. Something happens to him, something real; he does change, but I don’t think that it’s a catharsis, because I don’t think the passions are bad. I think that they’re transformed by being released, but not expelled or excreted, you know, harmlessly by watching. They are somehow molded into a coherent shape so they’re given a direction, and the direction is more towards changing the people intrinsically, than setting them off, you know, running to the hills and grabbing guns. I mean, I would not conceive of the effect of a book of mine that way, of making people go and do a particular thing like going and buying a Cadillac, you know, like that. That is to manipulate people into performing certain acts; even good acts like giving to charity or donating blood, but having an effect in changing them as people, not their values in theoretical senses, like believing, you know, that you should or should not sterilize the blacks, but making them different so their worlds, their subjective worlds are different; their value systems are different. They’re different people. Buy more books, too.
James Holmes: [chuckle]
Philip K Dick: This is, like– This is about mass culture versus the formal elite culture, the old dialectic– You know, in Auerbach’s Mimesis, which is a study of popular culture versus formal culture, he shows that there really is no distinction. That it’s kind of a funky hoax that culture belongs to an elite group and is passed down, you know, as a kind of esoteric thing, and that mass culture is always an inferior thing, merely to pacify the masses, you know, so they don’t revolt, you know bread, circuses. This is not true. The great art has always been a kind of mass art, like Chaucer’s stories. I remember when I first read them; they were in the American Weekly section of the Hearst Newspaper with lurid illustrations, and I was about 11, and we read these and said, “Man, this is really terrible. Look at those dirty words. Oh, my God. How can they print this stuff?” And, somebody said, “You know they teach this in the colleges, and we said, “That’s scandalous. That’s wrong! The stuff is dirty newspaper tabloid, Sunday supplement stuff,” and it was when presented that way, but I mean this is the way it’s always been presented in a sense. I mean, Shakespeare’s plays were shown to much like the audience that sees a drive-in movie now; they really were. You can walk into the Globe Theater right off the street, you know, and throw out a Schilling and sit through Hamlet or [inaudible] and it was for whoever came by. That was true of Chaucer. It was true of all the myths; certainly true of the epics except maybe, possibly the Aeneid which was written maybe for more of an elite audience, but generally speaking, the great art has been sort of a mass art in a way, at least potentially. It is comprehensive. Like, when I read– I tend not to use all polysyllabic euphemisms, sobriquets, and prolix material of that kind, not just in my dialogue, but in general descriptions. Like, I don’t say the effete ineffable prolix response generated within his autonomic system by the stimuli emanating from her gonads– I mean, man, you know, like first of all, as Orwell pointed out, these are all Latin-type words, which are written words to start with–
James Holmes: Uh hmm.
Philip K Dick: — and our language is basically a spoken language. English is a spoken language, and what we write should be based on what we say, like “Man, she was stacked.” Of course, he wouldn’t say that, but he would say, put it this way, “Her breasts were like mounds of whipped cream topped with maraschino cherries,” and so help me God, I saw that in a story once, and the undulated, at which point I sat up with the maraschino cherries souring as a result of the undulation with the cream churning the butter. He says, “You’ll never be a success as a writer if you take that cynical attitude.”
James Holmes: [chuckle]
Philip K Dick: The other one was, “Her gown was fastened at the waist by a single broach.” I read that for years before I figured out what that meant. He meant the rest was not fastened.
James Holmes : [laughing]
Philip K Dick: But, in a way, I mean, you know– This is what pulp, or popular writing, is supposed to consist of – repetitions of stereotyped expressions. Well, those stereotyped expressions go back to the Homeric myths. The Odyssey and Iliad both contained fixed descriptive passages before every subsection. They were always there. There was always rosy-fingered Dawn; it had to be there to work out the meter. There was always far-darting, which I never can say right, far-darting are tenuously or some freaked out goddess. It always had to be the far-darter; it could never be anything else. These were stereotyped as “her breasts were like mounds of whipped cream topped with maraschino cherries,” or “topped with a kosher pickle,” like that, and those stayed in the pulps and provided to the press, but that’s not the whole story about popular writing– much more. There’s a great deal of flexibility possible. I found that out the hard way. I tried those breasts topped with maraschino cherries too late. Auerbach said it’s been done.
James Holmes: Do you think there are gonna be any science fiction pulp magazines in the future? Do you think they are declining?
Continued in:
Part 11 Philip K Dick 1971 Interview
