Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Gollancz (2012), Paperback, 976 pages
Description
"'A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius.'--Jonathan Lethem. Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work."-- "Preserved in typed and hand-written notes and journal entries, letters and story sketches, Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick will make this tantalizing work available to the public for the first time in an annotated two-volume abridgement. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work"--… (more)
Media reviews
The Exegesis is dizzying, bewildering, exhilarating, and more or less as strange as it sounds. But again, should you read it? It doesn't contain the answers to all things; it doesn't even contain the answer to what happened to Dick. Lethem suggests that the reader must simply "surrender" [...] but
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that won't work unless you've read at least 16 of Dick's novels, plus his biography, and love metaphysics. At that point, The Exegesis will bring you extraordinarily close to his unique mind, with its mixture of doubt, wild invention, minuscule detail, grandiose theory and wry humour. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Hold on to your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.
The majority of PKD fans are familiar with the fact that in early 1974, the author received what some consider to be a hallucination or epileptic attack, but he perceived as a vision, or religious revelation. He saw a pink beam of light, which
He spent the majority of the rest of his life chronicling what he had experienced, seen, and heard, in manic chronicling, written at the inhuman speed of his novels. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "I feel like a character in one of my novels, where reality is falling apart..."
The Exegesis we see here is the result of his notes. A team of apparently superhuman editors have taken this enormous mass of material and organized and compacted it into about 900 dense pages. They are wildly different: Some are candid letters to friends, family, and workmates: others are dense philosophical treatises, as he expands his syncretic PreSocratic-Platonic-Gnostic-Buddhist-Spinozan-Gestalt-Heidiggerian framework in a frantic searching for understanding. A descent into a labyrinth.
The collected results are sometimes baffling, almost incoherent. One feels a lingering sense of doubt, that the man really has gone insane, that the amphetamines and paranoia have caught up to him. But that is a disservice. If he is mad, he is aware of it. He jokes about it being God one day, aliens the next, and a Soviet mind probe the third day in one of his letters.
Furthermore, you may often find a profound little aphorism which peers into the nature of reality, or an unusually lucid analysis of his novels, or a chronicling of history. I was astonished to find a little remark by him, buried, about how to make this into a coherent book. But is there a conclusion to it all? Certainly not. The only thing resembling a summary comes near the end, perhaps as PKD felt his end was near.
Is this revelation? Is this a prophecy? Is it madness, but the rare form of madness which blurs or magnifies genius, as William Blake or Nikola Tesla? I am certainly not the one to judge. The sheer mass and density of this work will certainly dissuade the vast majority of his readers, used to swift and lucid parables which he usually produces. It is to his credit that he turned these warped journeys into interesting literature. Those who have the gall to take this work on, and have the time and energy to do so, may yet find some Prophecy of the Information Age.
The majority of PKD fans are familiar with the fact that in early 1974, the author received what some consider to be a hallucination or epileptic attack, but he perceived as a vision, or religious revelation. He saw a pink beam of light, which
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bombarded his mind and senses with a massive stream of information.He spent the majority of the rest of his life chronicling what he had experienced, seen, and heard, in manic chronicling, written at the inhuman speed of his novels. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "I feel like a character in one of my novels, where reality is falling apart..."
The Exegesis we see here is the result of his notes. A team of apparently superhuman editors have taken this enormous mass of material and organized and compacted it into about 900 dense pages. They are wildly different: Some are candid letters to friends, family, and workmates: others are dense philosophical treatises, as he expands his syncretic PreSocratic-Platonic-Gnostic-Buddhist-Spinozan-Gestalt-Heidiggerian framework in a frantic searching for understanding. A descent into a labyrinth.
The collected results are sometimes baffling, almost incoherent. One feels a lingering sense of doubt, that the man really has gone insane, that the amphetamines and paranoia have caught up to him. But that is a disservice. If he is mad, he is aware of it. He jokes about it being God one day, aliens the next, and a Soviet mind probe the third day in one of his letters.
Furthermore, you may often find a profound little aphorism which peers into the nature of reality, or an unusually lucid analysis of his novels, or a chronicling of history. I was astonished to find a little remark by him, buried, about how to make this into a coherent book. But is there a conclusion to it all? Certainly not. The only thing resembling a summary comes near the end, perhaps as PKD felt his end was near.
Is this revelation? Is this a prophecy? Is it madness, but the rare form of madness which blurs or magnifies genius, as William Blake or Nikola Tesla? I am certainly not the one to judge. The sheer mass and density of this work will certainly dissuade the vast majority of his readers, used to swift and lucid parables which he usually produces. It is to his credit that he turned these warped journeys into interesting literature. Those who have the gall to take this work on, and have the time and energy to do so, may yet find some Prophecy of the Information Age.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Arten60
An Amazing ride with the tortured genius that was Philip K. Dick
LibraryThing member drardavis
A trip through the mind of one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors. These nine hundred pages were a mere tenth of the written material Dick created after 1974 to explore his mental breakdown/religious experience; it took me a year to read every page and footnote and glossary explanation. Every line was
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fascinating to me, since I too am an author of science fiction dealing with the nature of reality. In the sections where he writes about developing his stories, or considers their meaning, I can see similarities in our process. The inclusion of his drawings and sketches of his ideas could come right out of my own piles of scrap paper. Unfortunately, the technical secrets to his literary genius are not included. Too bad we can’t correspond with each other ... or maybe we can ... maybe we are? Note: The five stars are MY rating. You have to be a little nuts to read this! Show Less
LibraryThing member JimElkins
A Complex Confusion of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Revelation
I'm studying this as part of my project of reading long, complex texts (see notes on Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Szentkuthy's "Prae," Nabokov's notes on "Eugene Onegin"). Dick's "exegesis" of several irrational, mystical or revelatory
For me the remarkable property of this archive is the way Dick, the fiction writer, came to think of his own texts as sources to help explain his experiences. At various points between 1974 and his death (when he was still at work on the "Exegesis"), novels like "A Scanner Darkly" went from science fiction to documentation, and the way they did so is not clear in the "Exegesis" itself -- it seems to have been tenuous and often invisible to the writer himself.
1. How fiction becomes archive
At one point, Dick says "my writing casts doubt on the fact of... knowing actual reality because our minds have been fucked over." He doesn't mean this as a literary critic: he means it literally, as if his fiction had become science or serious theology. A line later, he says that "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" provides "some evidence" that "the real situation" (of people) is "prison-like," while other novels "point to" a "supernatural salvific interventive power." This is all consistent, but then he says "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" "seems to say" that an "evil magician deity is in control of our worlds and heads." (p. 406). That "seems to say" is uncanny: it might mean the novel's narrative "could be read as implying" such a deity, or it might mean the novel may be evidence of such a deity in the world. A few lines later there's the one-word sentence "Strange," and then then there's this:
"Does this book ['A Scanner Darkly'], then, seem to say, 'Maybe portions of the others are literally real, too?' The author does not now pretend to be writing fiction..." [p. 407]
It's an astounding confrontation and conflation of fiction with documentation, and of the published fiction author with "the author" of the "Exegesis." Much of the book proceeds this way. At one point the indications are that "all five novels are literally true." but maybe they are also, at the same time, more autobiographies than fiction, and in fact even "appeals for help" (p. 412).
The theology, ontology, and eschatology Dick works out is exactly parallel to the commonest elements of his novels: a higher power has descended into creation, disguised itself, and then forgotten its own action and its disguise, but it has left a clue or a sign for itself that will remind it, sometimes imperfectly and with consequences, of its origins. Weirdly -- but what isn't weird here? -- Dick never seems to realize the outlines of this story are the Christian story of the incarnation (for example, p. 413).
One of the folders of the manuscript suddenly presents portions of the novel "VALIS." Pamela Jackson says the surprise cuts "like a knife." "Where did this voice come from?" she asks. "The novel gives us... a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic... imagination," and after some pages Dick regains his voice and continues his exegesis (p. 451). This is doubly strange given that readers of he novel "VALIS" have remarked on the strange entanglement of the implied author (Dick) and the principal character (Fat). On the one hand, fiction intrudes into nonfiction as evidence; on the other hand, autobiography intrudes into fiction as literary device: an amazing mirrored confusion and conflation, exactly the sort of plot device in Dick's other fictions.
2. The commentators' problems
Incidentally, this edition of "Exegesis" is a little like a Talmud, in that it has footnotes by a number of scholars who are identified only by their initials. Simon Critchley keeps Dick a a safe distance, commenting only on his indebtedness to Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others (eg, notes on pp. 496, 547). Kate Hayles contributes a couple of acute footnotes on Dick's manner of reasoning, which reminded me of Ermanno Bencivenga's attempts to reconstruct what counted, for St. Anselm, as logic (see Hayles's notes on pp. 232, 475), but for the most part her notes propose links between Dick's ideas and late 20th century science (pp. 673, 683, 694, 708, 710). The dozen or so scholars who contributed footnotes are all on the horns of the dilemma: how fully is it possible to read the "Exegesis"? Can it be read as anything more than an expressive diary? Can it be read as a theological inquiry? As a revelation about time and space (as Dick experienced it, at least when he wasn't doubting himself)? Literary criticism is especially helpless on this point, as the widely divergent footnotes suggest.
3. A possible parallel
I don't know any other example of this. Dick's persistence in decoding his mystical experiences has precedents, for example in Jacob Boehme (whom Dick only knew in an encyclopedia entry, which he read "by mistake," p. 286). In a very different sense, memoirists have used their own writings as documents; Proust's narrator uses some of his early attempts at prose fiction as evidence of his childhood -- but that's a wholly different matter than re-experiencing one's earlier prose as an "intricate and unconscious precursor" of one's visions. (Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, "Introduction," p. xiii.) To some degree, I think this has to remain unbelievable: to anyone who has read Dick's novels as fiction, they cannot become archives of partial revelation; but in another sense this is entirely comprehensible, because fictions are certainly commonly unconscious or inadvertent articulations of their authors' beliefs.
I wonder if the closest parallel to "Exegesis" is Schreber's "Memoirs of My Mental Illness," in which a very skilled judge argues that even though he is psychotic he deserves to be released from the asylum. But even there, the situation is simpler: Schreber was writing an autobiographical document, and even though he recognized some of the things he said would not be taken as real by any of his readers, he did not present them as fiction; and he was not vexed by indecision over whether or not they might ever be taken as fiction.
I'm studying this as part of my project of reading long, complex texts (see notes on Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Szentkuthy's "Prae," Nabokov's notes on "Eugene Onegin"). Dick's "exegesis" of several irrational, mystical or revelatory
Show More
experiences he had in February and March 1974 occupied him for the remainder of his life; this is a 940-page excerpt from a larger corpus of papers.For me the remarkable property of this archive is the way Dick, the fiction writer, came to think of his own texts as sources to help explain his experiences. At various points between 1974 and his death (when he was still at work on the "Exegesis"), novels like "A Scanner Darkly" went from science fiction to documentation, and the way they did so is not clear in the "Exegesis" itself -- it seems to have been tenuous and often invisible to the writer himself.
1. How fiction becomes archive
At one point, Dick says "my writing casts doubt on the fact of... knowing actual reality because our minds have been fucked over." He doesn't mean this as a literary critic: he means it literally, as if his fiction had become science or serious theology. A line later, he says that "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" provides "some evidence" that "the real situation" (of people) is "prison-like," while other novels "point to" a "supernatural salvific interventive power." This is all consistent, but then he says "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" "seems to say" that an "evil magician deity is in control of our worlds and heads." (p. 406). That "seems to say" is uncanny: it might mean the novel's narrative "could be read as implying" such a deity, or it might mean the novel may be evidence of such a deity in the world. A few lines later there's the one-word sentence "Strange," and then then there's this:
"Does this book ['A Scanner Darkly'], then, seem to say, 'Maybe portions of the others are literally real, too?' The author does not now pretend to be writing fiction..." [p. 407]
It's an astounding confrontation and conflation of fiction with documentation, and of the published fiction author with "the author" of the "Exegesis." Much of the book proceeds this way. At one point the indications are that "all five novels are literally true." but maybe they are also, at the same time, more autobiographies than fiction, and in fact even "appeals for help" (p. 412).
The theology, ontology, and eschatology Dick works out is exactly parallel to the commonest elements of his novels: a higher power has descended into creation, disguised itself, and then forgotten its own action and its disguise, but it has left a clue or a sign for itself that will remind it, sometimes imperfectly and with consequences, of its origins. Weirdly -- but what isn't weird here? -- Dick never seems to realize the outlines of this story are the Christian story of the incarnation (for example, p. 413).
One of the folders of the manuscript suddenly presents portions of the novel "VALIS." Pamela Jackson says the surprise cuts "like a knife." "Where did this voice come from?" she asks. "The novel gives us... a self-reflection by the author on his own hyperbolic... imagination," and after some pages Dick regains his voice and continues his exegesis (p. 451). This is doubly strange given that readers of he novel "VALIS" have remarked on the strange entanglement of the implied author (Dick) and the principal character (Fat). On the one hand, fiction intrudes into nonfiction as evidence; on the other hand, autobiography intrudes into fiction as literary device: an amazing mirrored confusion and conflation, exactly the sort of plot device in Dick's other fictions.
2. The commentators' problems
Incidentally, this edition of "Exegesis" is a little like a Talmud, in that it has footnotes by a number of scholars who are identified only by their initials. Simon Critchley keeps Dick a a safe distance, commenting only on his indebtedness to Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others (eg, notes on pp. 496, 547). Kate Hayles contributes a couple of acute footnotes on Dick's manner of reasoning, which reminded me of Ermanno Bencivenga's attempts to reconstruct what counted, for St. Anselm, as logic (see Hayles's notes on pp. 232, 475), but for the most part her notes propose links between Dick's ideas and late 20th century science (pp. 673, 683, 694, 708, 710). The dozen or so scholars who contributed footnotes are all on the horns of the dilemma: how fully is it possible to read the "Exegesis"? Can it be read as anything more than an expressive diary? Can it be read as a theological inquiry? As a revelation about time and space (as Dick experienced it, at least when he wasn't doubting himself)? Literary criticism is especially helpless on this point, as the widely divergent footnotes suggest.
3. A possible parallel
I don't know any other example of this. Dick's persistence in decoding his mystical experiences has precedents, for example in Jacob Boehme (whom Dick only knew in an encyclopedia entry, which he read "by mistake," p. 286). In a very different sense, memoirists have used their own writings as documents; Proust's narrator uses some of his early attempts at prose fiction as evidence of his childhood -- but that's a wholly different matter than re-experiencing one's earlier prose as an "intricate and unconscious precursor" of one's visions. (Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, "Introduction," p. xiii.) To some degree, I think this has to remain unbelievable: to anyone who has read Dick's novels as fiction, they cannot become archives of partial revelation; but in another sense this is entirely comprehensible, because fictions are certainly commonly unconscious or inadvertent articulations of their authors' beliefs.
I wonder if the closest parallel to "Exegesis" is Schreber's "Memoirs of My Mental Illness," in which a very skilled judge argues that even though he is psychotic he deserves to be released from the asylum. But even there, the situation is simpler: Schreber was writing an autobiographical document, and even though he recognized some of the things he said would not be taken as real by any of his readers, he did not present them as fiction; and he was not vexed by indecision over whether or not they might ever be taken as fiction.
Show Less
LibraryThing member michaeladams1979
Philip K Dick�ês search for the fundamental truth behind a life-changing spiritual event that occurred in his life in February 1974. He explores, or exegetes, this event through the lenses of Christianity, Gnosticism, Brahmanism, Sufism, Taoism, quantum mechanics, recursive time travel, and
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a plethora of other philosophical, theosophical, and science-fictional ideals before concluding that maybe it is the search for meaning that is the real meaning of it all. Along the way we see the modern day become Rome circa 100 AD, a Black Iron Prison world, a simulation run by archonic overseers, and the battle ground for god-like AI moving in opposite directions through time, from the starting point of chaos to order and from order to entropy. The exegesis also serves as a hierarchal structuring of DickÂês oeuvre; he organizes 10 of his novels, stressing the plots of the first five in particular, in such a way as to reveal an overarching meta-novel built along the same framework as the exegesis itself; the world as a lie, a maze, a prison, our only salvation coming from divine inspiration and hidden knowledge. We also see fragments of plots develop for several of his final novels, including the Valis trilogy and at least one unpublished book that explored his fascinating conceptions of multiple souls inhabiting one body, or a sort experience grafting, and how the limits of perception could be obliterated through this psychic exchange of experience. A strange, illuminating, obscure, sometimes frustrating and consistently fascinating exploration of the mind of a prolific and probably visionary SF author. Show Less
LibraryThing member DanielSTJ
An intricate and complex journey into the mind of famed sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. Although the logic in this is disturbed, there is still much to be gleamed in examining Dick's innermost thoughts and contemplations. His journey- his exegesis, is profound and multi-arced, swinging across all
4 stars.
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sorts of different forms of writing, comprehension, and analysis. For those seeking to know more about the writer, this is essential reading.4 stars.
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Language
Original publication date
1974 - 1982 (The Exegesis)
2011
Physical description
976 p.; 6.18 inches
ISBN
0575132442 / 9780575132443