In the beginning was the Word: the fantasy of Philip K. Dick in "Ubik"

Ubik is a meta novel. Everything in Ubik is verbalism, pure fiction. Ubik is the verb that "exists from the beginning", the verb that creates worlds. Ubik is pure appearance, but it is also the Principle. Platonic quotations emerge here and there in the novel: above all the Myth of the Cave and the curious application of the doctrine of universals: "things" are only masks placed on other masks, which fall as the process of regression or decay breaks down on them.


di Andrew Casella

Β«What we consider an 'accident' - said von Vogelsang - is
still, despite everything, an example of God's direct intervention. In a sense, all of life can be called an 'accident'. "

Philip K. Dick, "Ubik"

Speaking of Philip Kindred Dick, D. Scott Apel [1] said: β€œWhat we don't know about Phil is that he probably he was a philosopher in a world where technology has replaced philosophy". The meaning of all poetics is condensed in this statement (in the Greek sense of the term: poetry) of the great American writer. Dick is unanimously considered one of the fathers of sci-fi, but his work certainly goes beyond the ordinary boundaries of the genre to turn into a strange chimera inhabiting an unexplored limbo. His novels and his stories speak the language of science fiction, the actions, the settings, the characters are typical of science fiction, yet the ultimate meaning, the meaning of all these things, is transcendent, in the most strictly philosophical sense that this word can assume.

Wrapped up in the harsh terms of science, and pseudo-science, there is a centuries-old thought, which can be summed up as: what appears is not what it is. While aware that Dick's endless work moves between very different topics [2], this is the main leitmotiv, the obsession, the constant paranoia. The most emblematic work in this sense is also his best known novel: Ubik.

To understand what it is Ubik, it is better to start from the end. In the epigraph, each of the seventeen chapters into which the novel is divided is presented Ubik. We talk about him, from time to time, as if we were advertising a product for the home. The curious thing is the final warning: completely harmless when used according to the instructions. This strange advertisement changes only in the final chapter, where in the epigraph we read:

Β«I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am.
I created the suns. I created the worlds. I created the
forms of life and the places where they live; I the
I move to the place that suits me best.
They go where I say, they do what I command.
I am the verb and my name is never pronounced.
The name that nobody knows. I am called Ubik,
but that's not my name. I am. I will be forever. Β»

Dick-1966-03-Ubik

In the course of the novel it is revealed that the word Ubik comes from the Latin Locate = Everywhere. In himself, Ubik is a spray capable of reversing the course of time, preserving people and objects from decay or retreat. In simple terms it is a "stabilizer" [3]. What is meant by decay or retreat is easy to say: it is the deterioration or rejuvenation of things, due to the progression or regression of time. The protagonists of the novel, part of the Runciter Associates of New York, experience this temporal fluctuation after having (apparently) escaped an attack on the Moon by a rival organization.

Year 1992, the general alarm is raised for the disappearance from the maps of Runciter Associates of the umpteenth subject with psi powers [4] belonging to the organization of the accident Ray Hollis. Runciter Associates, owned by Glen Runciter, is a service contractor that provides "inertials" where needed. With their powers (precognition, telepathy and the like) psi are potentially dangerous, because they threaten to destabilize the balance of the economy, politics and society in general. The inertial they are subjects capable of counterbalancing and canceling the powers of the psi, restoring balance (stability!) in the cosmos. The missing psi, S. Dole Melipone, is described as one of Hollis' most powerful psi; his disappearance puts the company, and even the boss, in terrible turmoil. If the psi were to get out of control it would be a disaster.

Runciter ran the company, until some time ago, together with his young wife Ella, now hibernating in a condition of half-life in a special sanatorium in Switzerland, the Moratorium Diletti Fratelli in Zurich, directed by the mellifluous Herbert Shoenheit von Vogelsang.Β  It was she who always had the last word on the strategy to follow, and even now, in half life, she is regularly consulted by her husband for advice. It is possible, by means of a particular technology, restarting the brain activity of a human being suspended in half-life, resurrecting him for a short period of time. She, however, now also at the end of her half-life and about to reincarnate, talks for a while with Runciter, but her thoughts are interrupted by the intervention of a third subject, Jory Miller, a boy in half-life placed next to Ella, whose superior residual intellectual strength causes continuous "communication interference".

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Deeply displeased, Runciter leaves the institute and, returning to New York, accepts a mysterious assignment on the Moon, apparently commissioned by Shepard Howard, but actually commissioned by Stanton Mick. Runciter Associates thus believes that the out-of-control PSIs are causing trouble for Stanton Mick. With Moon destination, the Runciter himself, the inertial manager, Joe Chip, and all the most powerful inertials of the Runciter, who has recently joined a certain Pat Conley, endowed with the particular ability to go back to the past and change it, so as to alter the future.

Unfortunately, the assignment turns out to be a trap, perhaps hatched by Hollis with the complicity of Pat herself (this point is never fully clarified): Stanton Mick, who went to receive them, is actually a anthropomorphic bomb. Miraculously, everyone remains unharmed in the explosion, except Glen Runciter. From this moment strange phenomena begin to occur.

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All attempts to keep Runciter at least in half-life fail. His funeral takes place in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. For a while now, however, Joe Chip and other inertials, such as Al Hammond, have begun to notice strange changes in things. The cigarettes just bought have already dried up, the coffee, the milk, go rancid in the blink of an eye, the coins begin to show, strangely, the face of Glen Runciter. Some inertials are found mysteriously semi-mummified. On top of that, Joe Chip gets made the subject of strange messages referring to an elusive Ubik, coming from an unknown entity.

Last to share the horrible fate of mummification Γ¨ Al Hammond, in the bathroom of the New York office of Runciter Associates. This is where the apparent revelation takes place (in this novel everything is apparent): in reality those who died are all of them, and now exist only in the suspension of half-life al moratorium of Zurich. Sole survivor is Glen Runciter, who is trying to connect with Joe Chip in the half-life via Ubik-themed messages.

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Joe Chip isn't sure, however, since contradicting the latest telltale message written on the bathroom mirror is a video tape showing Glen Runciter declaring his own death and subsequent instructions for all of them. Joe Chip suspects this is the truth-telling video, recorded specifically for the event of his demise. Chip therefore needs to see Runciter's corpse with his own eyes. He thus leaves for Des Moines, where the other inertials are already present to attend the funeral of their boss. The journey from New York to Des Moines is a spooky one.

All things begin to take on obsolete connotations. The world, from which it was the year 1992, begins to regress until the year 1939. Joe Chip suspects that all this is somehow due to the power of Pat Conley, but, needless to say, it is not. Having hardly reached Des Moines in a Curtiss-Wright monoplane, with the constant dread of further regression to a pre-aviation era, Joe Chip actually attends the funeral of Glen Runciter. He is convinced (it is a classic "leap of faith") that this is the "real world", even if subjected to the power of Demiurge Pat Conley, cold, sadistic and jealous individual.

But yet another twist, which calls everything into question, takes place in Joe Chip's hotel room in Des Moines. Here, in the dim light of the room, Joe meets Runciter, who sprays the spray on him Ubik, preventing him from sharing the fate of rapid mummification. Runciter's ectoplasm tells him once again that they are all dead and that he is trying to save them in half life. Now resigned to the truth, Joe Chip undertakes an aimless wandering in that fictional world of 1939, whose inhabitants do not even realize the unreality of their pseudo-world and of themselves.

The meeting with Ella Runciter puts Joe Chip in the know that in that world two opposing forces are colliding, one benevolent (She herself) and one malevolent, Jory Miller, the cheeky kid who stands next to Ella in moratorium of the "real world". The pseudo-world of 1939 is not caused by Pat Conley, but by Jory Miller: he is the real one Demiurge of the situation. What is not explained is that Jory Miller originally created a world known to him, from 1992, but nevertheless, for some reason, this is regressing:

β€œThen he suddenly understood why. Jory had told the truth; he had built a world, or rather his fantastic correspondent, which belonged to his time. And the decomposition to those forms was not due to him; it happened despite his best efforts. These are natural atavismsJoe told himself, which manifested automatically as Jory's energies waned. As he says, Joe thought, it's a tremendous effort. This is perhaps the first time he has been forced to create such a diverse world, for so many people at once. It is not normal that so many half-alive are linked together. We imposed an abnormal effort on Jory, he told himself. And we paid for it ".

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Now trapped in his pseudo-world, with Ella now on his way to his reincarnation, Joe Chip is left alone. On the other "side", Glen Runciter now despairs of resolving the matter and has Ella's coffin summoned one last time for questioning. Getting ready to tip the bellboy, however, he notices something strange:

β€œHe glanced at the coins, and frowned. "What kind of money is this?" she said. Runciter eyed fifty-cent pieces very carefully. He immediately saw what he meant the other; clearly, the coins weren't what they should be. Whose profile is this? he wondered. Who is on these three coins? He is not the right person. Yet I know him. He is familiar to me. And suddenly he recognized the profile. Who knows what that means, he wondered. The strangest thing he has ever seen. Many things in life can find an explanation. But… Joe Chip on a fifty cent? Was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He then had the chilling intuition that if he searched in his other pockets, and among the bills in his wallet, he would find more. This was just the beginning Β»

As in the image of the famous Ouroboros, or in the saying of Heraclitus [5], the novel closes as it had opened, with Runciter's visit to Ella. The final revelation suggests that Runciter's "real world" is actually a pseudo-world as well. How many worlds are there? Was Runciter killed too? Did the "accident", the explosion, create two distinct half-life worlds where each believes he is alive with respect to the other? Is everyone true, is everyone false at the same time? What is true and what is false, if life, as von Vogelsang says, is an "accident of God"?

The only certainty seems to be Ubik, the Almighty, the one who is capable of maintaining the "stability" of all these paper worlds. Of paper, precisely, why Ubik it is a meta novel. Everything, in Ubik, is verbalism, pure fiction. Ubik Γ¨ the verb that "exists from the beginning", the verb that creates the worlds. Ubik-novel is not an opportunity for the creation of solid characters, participants in their world (albeit fictitious): Ubik-novel is unreal: but it is unreality that Ubik-spray creates and maintains, which, like Dreamy Vishnu, "Preserves". His characters don't even exist "in it".

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Ubik it is pure appearance, but it is also the Principle: here and there in the novel there are quotations platonic: above all the Myth of the Cave and the curious application of the doctrine of universals: the "things" are only masks lowered on other masks, which fall as the regression or decay process hits them:

β€œThe TV system must have gone back a long way; stood in front of a dark wooden box, a very old Atwater-Kent amplitude modulation radio, complete with antenna and wall connection for grounding. Heavenly God, he told himself dismayed. But why hadn't the television instead reverted to shapeless pieces of plastic and metal? After all, those were its components; it had been built with those, and not with the parts of a previous radio. Perhaps this curiously confirmed an ancient philosophical theory that had fallen into disrepute; that of Plato's idea-objects, the universals which, in every class, were always real. The TV set form had been merely a mask imposed in succession on so many other masks, such as the procession of images in a sequence of films. Former forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible and residual life in every object. The past is latent, submerged, but still here, capable of surfacing when the last mask, unfortunately - and in contrast to ordinary experiences - vanishes into thin air. The man does not contain the boy but the former men, he thought. The story began a long time ago. Wendy's dehydrated remains. The procession of forms that usually takes place ... that succession had ceased. And the last form had worn out, without creating another subsequent one; no new form, no next stage of what we see as growth, to take its place. That must be what we feel in old age, he thought; degeneration and senility derive from this absence. Except in this case it happened all of a sudden… within a few hours. But that ancient theory ... Didn't Plato claim that something survived decay, something internal that was not susceptible to deterioration? The old dualism; the soul separated from the body. The body ended up like Wendy, and the soul… out of the nest, the bird headed somewhere else. Maybe it really is, he thought. She is reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says. Β»

The television cannot go further back than its components, since the β€œidea-television” is inΒ  those components. In this way, only what is born "radio" can regress to "idea-radio", that is to "shapeless pieces of plastic and metal". Everything regresses (or degrades?) Towards its own essence: even (above all) human beings. It is "the old dualism": the body (soma) and the soul (psyche).

With the body extinguished, the soul flies away like a bird (the Egyptians depicted the soul just like that, like a bird hovering around the sarcophagus); Curiously, Herbert Shoenheit von Vogelsang means Herbert "Beauty of the Bird Song". The director of the Moratorium Beloved Brothers, sepulcher of the frozen coffins, is the Lord of Death, the Anubis, the psychopomp. He holds Death, but in what world? In Runciter's, in Chip's, or in a third party who oversees them? Death is not a sure deal either. Where will the soul of Ella Runciter be reborn, who now sees in front of her the red light of the new maternal uterus? It is not possible to give an exhaustive answer to all these questions. We only know that as long as there is Ubik there is hope.

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As a connoisseur of gnosticism which [6], Philip K. Dick is tragically aware of the illusion of the world falling under the dominion of the senses. Behind this world there is something an altro, but of it, which tends to be elusive, one can have only a vague inkling. Unlike what classical Gnosticism teaches, for Dick there is no "tire" that thanks to gnosis (jnana says Hinduism) is able, on its own, to free itself from the cosmic prison. The awakening in Dick is always accidental and caused by macroscopic "errors" of the Demiurge in turn, which lead the Gnostic to a merely external understanding "in spite of himself".

Rlocating a definition found in a novel by Guido Morselli, unacknowledged author of a science fiction book entitled Dissipatio HG (where HG stands for Humani Generis) [7], the Dickian characters "They do not act, but they are acted upon" by preponderant external forces. Their life is in most cases a mere "verbal event", because the world they "speak" is not real, yet suitable, were it not for the sudden external revelation, to last forever in its solid unreality. Just like this world of ours.

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Note:

[1]Β  Scholar of the work of Philip K. Dick and author of PKD: The Dream Connection. He also analyzed the famous cult series of the 60s The Prisoner (The Prisoner), with Patrick McGoohan. Shortly after having resigned, a secret agent with an unknown name is mysteriously kidnapped and taken to a bizarre village (the Village, in fact) populated by characters who, like him, have not well identified "information". Here he is given the name of Number 6, and his life in the Village unfolds in the sign of the tremendous psychological struggle waged against the powerful jailers and their boss on duty, Number 2, who try in every way to steal the reason from him. for which he resigned. Given the asserted importance of the subject, the attempts to induce him to speak do not involve extreme methods, but are structured according to the typical techniques of psychological suggestion, social control, manipulation. To all these techniques, Number 6 manages to heroically resist without giving in until the final episode, when it is finally confronted with the inscrutable Number 1. Famous, in the opening theme, the omnipresent exclamation of Number 6: "I don't I am a number, I am a free man! ”.

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[2]Β  With his vitriolic irony, Dick addresses a ferocious and systematic critique of capitalist society, a circumstance that undoubtedly compares him to postmodern literature (Thomas Pynchon, Don De Lillo). This is, moreover, a key to reading that is also well suited to a Gnostic like Franz Kafka. In the opinion of the writer, Philip K. Dick can easily be called a science fiction Kafka.

[3]Β  The search for stability is another of the Dickian constants. His first story ever, in 1947, was called precisely Stability.

[4]Β  PSI FACULTY: β€œParanormal capacity or property of a particular subject. It should be noted that the term 'psi' is not an abbreviation of the word 'psychic', but the name of the letter of the Greek alphabet, which represents the paranormal in general and related studies. There are also many expressions related to this concept: psi field, psi level, psi energy " (Into the unknown, Selection from Reader's Digest spa, Milan, 1984, p. 337).

[5]Β  β€œCommon is the beginning and the end of the circle”.

[6]Β  This interest clearly shines through, for example, in one of Dick's most notable novels, Time out of sixth (Time out of joint). The title is a quote from the famous verse ofHamlet ("The time is out of joint"), in which Hamlet declares that time is "out of order" or "out of order", and that he was born with the task of straightening it. At a certain point in the novel reference is made to a strange university course, concerning "the Christian heresies of the fifth century", and Ragle Gumm (protagonist of the novel), as well as Hamlet, is theignorant Demiurge designated to maintain thecosmic order. We do not know to what extent Dick had intuited Hamlet's Saturnian nature, but with this extraordinary author nothing can be taken for granted.

It is worth spending a few words on this novel, since, as in Ubik, here too everything takes place under the banner of verbalism: the world of Ragle Gumm (a world of the Happy Days, typical of the American province of the 50s) is only "spoken", not at all real. The protagonist, who lives off the small daily winnings assigned to him by a game proposed by the local newspaper (Guess where our little green man will go today), he begins to suspect that something is wrong when he begins to see that the objects of "his world" dematerialize, leaving only a note with the thing that has disappeared written on it. His family members also begin to live strange experiences: his brother-in-law Victor has the impulse to turn on a light bulb by pulling a string, instead of, as would be normal, pressing the switch, and sees the bus on which he is traveling slowly disappear, leaving him alone. the driver and himself suspended a meter above the ground, with the road running beneath them. After a failed attempt to escape from the city to go in search of the Kantian ding an sich, Thing in itself (she is actually mentioned, in German, in the novel), Gumm discovers that the town of 1959 and the game that, against every elementary law of statistics, every day he manages to solve are bogus. Her life is an invention: her relatives, her neighbors, are not such, but just as many "extras":

"I am the center of the universe" declares Ragle Gumm β€œOr at least that's what I deduced from their way of acting towards me. I don't know anything else, except that they took great pains to build a fake world around me where I could live in peace. Houses, cars, an entire city, seemingly natural, but completely unreal ... Underneath everything is the word ... perhaps the very word of God. The Word - In the beginning was the Word - ".

In reality, the year is 1997 and the "game" is a set of coordinates that indicate the points on the Earth towards which dissidents of the Moon launch their nuclear missiles. In the past, Ragle Gumm had been a senior member of the Earth's government forces and thanks to his preternatural ability to predict the trajectory of missiles he had become the real savior of the Earth. However, he had begun to have doubts about the goodness of the war to moody and he had induced an auto-suggestion that had convinced him he was in the 50s, the time he had lived as a child. For him 1959 took on the connotations of Eden, or the Golden Age, an era of nostalgic balance and "stability". His superiors, in order not to lose his precious ability, had built around him a city and a life of 1959, continuing to provide him with the work that he unconsciously completed by solving a banal prize contest. The ending is purely science fiction, but does not detract from the daring philosophical architecture of the narrative. On top of that, Dick reveals himself to be a keen connoisseur of ancient symbolism when he describes facial tattoos in the "lunatic fan" hangout club on Earth: Athena in the company of the owl and Kore emerging from the earth. Two lunar symbols! On the whole immense question: is the word or the thing that the word indicates truer? Which comes first? According to Dick (but, without disturbing the Gospel of John, Wittgenstein himself said more or less) the world unfolds within the limits of language:

β€œWhat is the word? An arbitrary symbol. But man's life is based on words. Our very reality is made up of more words than things. Things that, in themselves, do not exist. Substance is an illusion and words are more concrete than the objects they represent. Words do not represent reality, they are reality. For the man, at least. Maybe God penetrates into things, but not us ".

[7]Β In Dissipatio HG (lit. "Volatilization of Mankind", title of an imaginary work by Iamblichus) we imagine that mankind has suddenly disappeared without a trace. Only one person, for some reason, remained to wonder about this mysterious event.


Bibliography:

Philip K Dick, Ubik, Fanucci, 1998.

Philip K Dick, The gambling man (Time out of sixth), Mondadori, 1968. The edition considered is part of the science fiction series Urania, directed by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini (no. 491 of 30 June 1968).


A comment on "In the beginning was the Word: the fantasy of Philip K. Dick in "Ubik""

  1. First of all, I offer my heartfelt congratulations to the author for this wonderful article.
    I leave a comment, because I would like to know where the last quote came from (β€œWhat is the word? An arbitrary symbol. But man's life is based on words. Our reality itself is made up of more than words than of things. Things that, in themselves, do not exist. Substance is an illusion and words are more concrete than the objects they represent. Words do not represent reality, they are reality. For man, at least. Maybe God penetrates to things, but not us").

    Thanks and good continuation!

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