Emmanuel Carrère
1993
Metropolitan Books
336 pages
Currently Dick is probably best known as an author whose work is frequently mined for film ideas by Hollywood. When Carrère’s 1993 biography was originally published, only two films were based on Dick stories, Blade Runner and Total Recall, both of which altered the titles of the works they were based on. Blade Runner - 1982, was based on the Dick novel Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? and Total Recall 1990 was based on the short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale. Since 1993, a number of other movies have been produced from Dick’s writing, including the 2011 film, The Adjustment Bureau.
Carrère creates the image of Philip K Dick as a working class writer who was prolific because that was the only way to make a living as his work was relegated to the poorly-paid genre-ghetto of science fiction. Dick’s writing has received literary acclaim in North America, and academic recognition, although such accolades were posthumously bestowed upon the author. During his career Dick won the Hugo award (a major award for science fiction literature) for his 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle, but that only marginally raised his status as a writer. Dick did find critical acclaim and acceptance within his own lifetime in Europe, and particularly in France, although the famed Polish sci-fi author Stansislaw Lem was also a proponent. While Carrère’s biography first appeared in France in 1993, where Dick had long been recognized as a great writer, this bio did not appear in English until 2003, after Stephen Spielberg directed The Minority Report (based on a Dick story) and revived Dick’s oeuvre as a mine for film concepts.
Carrère’s biography was an early effort in what is now a crowded field of books about Philip K Dick. As a novelist, Carrère fictionalized aspects of Dick’s life, alluding to states of mind that are impossible to know, and conversations that were never recorded. Carrère focuses on Dick’s relationship with women, and the processes of thought and labour, or the influencing interests on the writing of Dick’s best known works. Dick’s Potboiler works (a slang term for genre novels written primarily to garner income) like Our Friends from Frolix 8 or The Zap-Gun were not mentioned. Rather, Carrère focuses on the now widely known texts such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, and a few others, and suggests indirectly that these novels were the axes around which their author’s life revolved. Carrère constructed a narrative of Dick’s life wherein his actual situation was consistently written into his science-fiction. When Dick was writing one of his major works then it meant the relationship he was in, his current political attitudes, the books and music that most interested him then, and other aspects of daily life were all intimately connected to Dick’s text of the moment.
I Am Alive and You are Dead does have a lot of connective tissue between the parts that describe the events that produce each novel. These in-between bits often focus on the state of Dick’s family life and his constantly shifting relationships with women. Furthermore, his unraveling mental state was a frequent subject for Carrère. Along with Thomas Pynchon, Dick is regarded as one of the great authors of paranoia, and Carrère is sure to find numerous examples of this state of mind in his personal life. Furthermore, Dick was a writer who’s work, mostly focusing on the illusory nature of reality, fit well into the zeitgeist of 1960s northern California. Hippies appreciated Dick’s exposure of a world behind the apparent world, while Dick appreciated the Hippie’s hallucinogenic drugs.
Probably one of the most interesting aspects of Carrère’s biography of the troubled sci-fi writer is his telling of Dick’s conversion of his bungalow home into a hippie commune. Dick allowed runaways and drugged-out kids to stay at his home for a time during the early 1970s. This also was a time when the writer’s paranoia was most acute, and in Carrère’s telling, he occasionally entered paranoid, drug induced, manic phases where he looked for evidence of federal infiltration of his him. Meanwhile, his house had become well known as a crash-pad for runaways to the local police.
Carrère also goes into great detail about Dick’s gnostic experience, in which God came to him in the form of a pink light for short a period of time. This experience succeeded Dick’s life with the runaways, as the first published mention of this mystic encounter by the author was in his 1977 work, A Scanner Darkly; the novel in which Dick describes those years when his home was also a drug commune. The experience of touch with the divine was profoundly transformative for Dick, and when God’s presence withdrew from his life, he attempted suicide as a result of his failure to cope with that loss. Following his failed attempt to take his own life, Dick began to manically make notes on the experience. These notes contributed to Dick’s final works, his spiritually focused VALIS trilogy, wherein Dick attempted to comprehend his contact with the divine through science-fiction.
Carrère’s fictionalization of Dick’s life is interesting because it highlights questions about authenticity that pertain to all biographical writing, but with Dick it also presents his life in a manner that connects to the work of the subject. The representation of the untrue, to supplement the true, as a theme of this biography serves to demonstrate the relevance of Dick’s lifelong project in imagining the unreal in the real (and vice-versa). Dick’s literary ideas have vast implications for contemporary culture, as theorized by figures such as French philosopher of real and simulation, Jean Baudrillard, who made direct reference to Dick in his seminal essay collection, Simulacra and Simulation. By admitting that his biography of Dick is part fiction, Carrère is using a biography of a writer of simulacra to highlight the seemingly realistic yet fictional nature of all biography.
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