Philip K. Dick is not an author who can be taken lightly. Most readers seem to have a similar reaction to him when they start getting into his novels. A common reaction is to think the stories are easy to follow, but the deeper meanings of them are baffling, opaque, and difficult to grasp. After reading several of his novels, you might begin to notice patterns and recurring themes. Ultimately, though, there still might be some kind of message that is slightly beyond your reach. If you’ve gotten to this point with his works, then it probably is time to read VALIS.
The first thing to come to terms with in this book is the narrative framework. Horselover Fats is the central character although he is actually a literary persona of Philip K. Dick. The writing is in the third person omniscient with a twist; the narrative voice is that of Phil who is also a persona of Philip K. Dick, the author. At times, he breaks out of the third person framing and addresses the reader directly as the narrator and then at other times he writes himself into the story, side by side with Horselover Fats as the two have conversations together. The two characters are the same person but separate.
Horselover Fats is an aging hippie who has admittedly fried his brain with drugs and suffers from mental illness. When he has a mystical experience seeing a color that doesn’t actually exist and having a vision of an army of Roman soldiers and an iron prison, he comes to the conclusion that time is not real and everything throughout history and into the present and future are happening at the same time. We just don’t perceive it that way. His mystical experience also gives him the power to see that his son has a health problem threatening his life. When taken to the doctor, this is confirmed and surgery is performed so that he can live. Then Horselover Fats attempts to save a woman from committing suicide and also tries to help a woman recover from cancer, a disease he believes to be a self-inflicted illness. He fails in both cases. This leads him to an existential crisis because he can’t understand why his religious powers helped him save his son’s life but not the lives of the two women. He winds up in a psychiatric hospital. He begins studying religious and mystical traditions and starts writing an exegesis, a book explaining his theological views.
The exegesis covers a lot of territory, exploring and combining aspects of Taoism, Hinduism, Socratic and pre-Socratic philosophy, hermetic traditions, and esoteric Christianity. He especially gets deeply into Gnosticism, the religious order that was seen as a competitor by early Christians who proceeded to destroy their writings and persecute them out of existence. The Gnostics and Horselover Fats hold the belief that the world is animated by a consciousness that is referred to as God. However, this god is a blind idiot god that is irrational, chaotic, and insane. That is why the world is insane. But there is also another god who is rational, good, and orderly, and he sometimes manifests as religious leaders like Buddha and Jesus Christ, bringing knowledge and sensibility to a world that is out of control. This god he refers to as “Zebra”.
This exegesis takes up a large portion of the novel. This is a weakness in the story. There are times when the plot just disappears into a long-winded fog of mystical thinking, making it look like VALIS is just an excuse to shove unorthodox religion down the readers’ throats. Even worse, none of this exegesis is original, or at least, if you have been previously acquainted with the aforementioned theologies and philosophies, there isn’t anything exciting or new to read about here.
However, if you don’t get bored and give up, the story eventually takes some unpredictable and interesting turns. Horselover Fats and the narrator Phil are taken to a movie called Valis by their skeptical friend Kevin. The movie confirms a lot of what Horselover Fats has written and even presents them with some coincidences that are loaded with meaning. They contact the film’s producer, Eric Lampton, a character loosely based on David Bowie, who invites them to Sonoma to meet his two year old daughter who can talk and claims to be the messiah they are looking for, an incarnation of the rational Gnostic god named Sophia. Sadly, Lampton and his followers turn out to be a bunch of crazies and Sophia is nothing but a hoax. But what about all those coincidences in the movie?
What makes VALIS an intersting story is not just its content, but also the layering of the narrative structure. Horselove Fats and Phil represent two different sides of the author. Horselover Fats is the wild and emotional mystic searching for a messiah and the solution to a mystery that may not even have a solution. Phil, the narrator, is the voice of reason who pokes holes in Horselover Fats’ theories, believes him to be insane, and even accuses him of solipsism, projecting his subjectivity onto the world and proclaiming it to be the truth. Notice how the former person is characterized by insanity and the latter is characterized by rationality. Now take into consideration that Philip K. Dick is the author, the god in the narrative machinery of the novel, the one who arranges the events of the plot and then writes himself into the novel as the man who is writing the novel. At this point, something about Philip K. Dick and all his writings becomes clear. He was a deeply religious man and he was also deeply skeptical of his own religious beliefs and experiences. He was both things simultaneously and with equal intensity. This may account for the recurring themes throughout his works: the illusion of time and space, our inability to firmly grasp objective nature, and our inability to base systems of moral certainty on such an unstable system of epistemology.
Then there is another great thing about the way this novel is written. Horselover Fats at times works himself into a frenzy of intense mental activity, then narrative events or the commentaries of Phil or other characters deflate it all, bringing the writing back down to earth and anchoring the story line in a more sober reality. The technical term for this narrative device is “ironic deflation” and Philip K. Dick does it effectively here.
Whatever flaws this novel may have, and there are many including an over-dependence on dialogue to move the story along and some plot holes here and there, are easily overshadowed by its merits. Such merits are a well-developed theory that interlocks with the narrative events, the contrast between illusion and reality, the inherent sense of exasperation expressed when Horselover Fats’ theories don’t adequately match up with his experiences, and the way it leaves the question of certainty and ultimate truth an open ended question that is impossible to answer.
In the end, VALIS is the book that puts all of Philip K. Dick’s other novels into clear light. It is the skeleton key that unlocks the mysteries of all his other books without actually solving the philosophical problems he presents. That probably is the point of it all. The answers will always be beyond our reach. For this reason, VALIS should not be the first Philip K. Dick novel anybody reads. It should be the one they read after being thoroughly confused by his major works. That uncertainty in his writing should be encountered and experienced on a deep level before reading this. And then once VALIS has been read, it is a good idea to go back and re-read everything that has already been read. May that cycle last forever, taking on deeper meaning with every revolution of that wheel.
Final question lingering after finishing this book: If God is a systematic network of information, as Horselover Fats claims he is, would Philip K. Dick entertain the thought that the internet is a physical manifestation of God? If it is, are we in serious trouble?
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