Why Philip K. Dick's Exegesis is one of the strangest books ever written

In February and March 1974, Dick had several irrational, mystical or revelatory experiences that occupied him for the remainder of his life. The book called Exegesis is a 940-page excerpt from 8,000 pages of notes.

The book has received some simplistic reviews. Charles Platt said it wasn't as important as Dick's writing, that Dick was often drunk when he was writing, and that he had a sense of humor about it—a reckless summary judgment about a project that occupied its author for eight years until he died.¹

But this isn’t a trauma narrative, an autofictional account, or a diary of recovery and healing. Dick doesn’t look back on his brief but transformative experiences from the position he had before those experiences, when he identified as a writer. He looks back at his life before 1974 as partly entirely different than what he had thought it was

Schematically, his subject position could be put this way: the surviving rationalist came to think of his own writing before 1974 as a resource to help him explain his mystical experiences, but the survivor of the revelations came to think of some of his writing before 1974 as prophetic—not as fiction, but as nonfiction accounts of things that Saul himself did not understand.

Robert Crumb

1. Why the book is not a conversion narrative

Despite the several parallalels, this is not a conventional conversion narrative, like Paul of Tarsus’s or Jakob Boehme’s, where the entire world changes after a brief encounter. It’s a common model. In movies even spies change their identities completely: Exegesis is something different, which was hard for Dick himself to understand.

The idea that Exegesis is a conversion narrative has apparently guided the popular reception, as in Terence Mckenna’s “I Understand Philip K. Dick,” which appeared in the book In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. It’s not that Mckenna is wrong to say:

What is trying to be expressed is this: The world is not real. Reality is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose. Time is not what you think it is. Reality is a hologram. Being is a solid state matrix and psychosis is the redemptive process ne plus ultra. The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

It’s that the book is more conflicted, less consistent, and more interesting than the confident broadcast of doctrine.

2. Sources of complexity

Three things make Exegesis extraordinarily complex. First, the unenlightened cobbler (Jakob Boehme) or persecutor of Christians (Saul of Tarsus) did not disappear after the revelation. The Exegesis is inhabited by the thoughts of the unconverted and the converted, and by the perplexity they generate when they see one another.

The second source of complexity is that Dick did not renounce his previous life or writings, or even simply lose interest in them, as Paul or Augustine did. He saw revelatory truth in some of what he had previously written as fiction. His past became unmanageably difficult to understand. Dick’s persistence in decoding his mystical experiences has precedents, for example, in Boehme, who wrote a number of books to interpret visions he had in 1610 and afterward. (Dick only knew Boehme from an encyclopedia entry, which he read “by mistake”; p. 286.) But Boehme knew what his unenlightened state had been, and it did not haunt him with belated revelations of truth.

For me the third third source of complexity is that the “conversion” didn’t happen all at once as it did to Paul of Tarsus. At various points between 1974 and his death (when Dick 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.

The result is a book—never intended to appear in this form, as an account for anyone but Dick himself—that is extremely hard to read. I am interested in this because I have been writing about long, complex novels, and also writing a long, complex novel, so for me Exegesis might be a lesson or even a model. More on that at the end.

3. 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’s being literal, and one consequence is that his ability to understand what counts as fiction has changed. 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 at least a consistent ideation, 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 is 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 conflation of fiction with documentation, and of the published fiction author with “the author” of the Exegesis. Much of the published portions of the manuscript proceeds this way. At one point Dick writes that the indications are that his “novels are literally true,” but at the same time, he thinks, they may be more autobiographies than fiction, and in fact they may even be “appeals for help” (p. 412). Readers of Exegesis have stressed the otherworldly nature of Dick’s experiences in 1974, but if I subtract the phenomenology of those revelatory or dissociative moments, his seriousness about his own output, and his investment in understanding its truths, would be strikingly similar to many other authors, from Freud to Proust.

The theology, ontology, and eschatology Dick works out are closely matched 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 left a clue or sign for itself that will remind it, sometimes imperfectly and with consequences, of its origins. Sometimes that plot is repeated, Russian-doll fashion; occasionally the power is alien, sometimes corporate. But the fundamental strategy that puts the plots in motion is the immersion, or appearance, of the hero in a world where he does not belong, where he is shielded, for a time, from his real nature. 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 odd given that readers of the novel VALIS have remarked on the 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.

4. The commentators’ problems

This edition of Exegesis has commentary by a very eclectic group of scholars who are identified only by their initials. Among them are a philosopher, a scientist turned cultural critic, and three theologians. (Platt, “The Voices in Philip K. Dick's Head.”)

Simon Critchley keeps Dick at 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 on the horns of the dilemma: how fully is it possible to read this book? What professional perspective—psychoanalytic, mystic, philosopher, psychologist, literary critic—can do it justice?

A literary critic might want to draw a parallel between Dick’s ruminations on his earlier writing, and his attempts to incorporate it into his current life, and any number of memoirists and authors of trauma narratives who try to recuperate and reconnect with memories. 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.)

Those who are interested in Exegesis for its revelations have to discount Dick’s verdicts about Scanners and other novels. I think it is impossible for anyone who has read Dick's novels as fiction to re-read them as archives of revelation. Even Mckenna sticks to Exegesis and doesn’t try to read Scanners as prophecy.

A psychoanalytic reading would take Exegesis along with the fiction as archives of Dick’s psyche, but that would betray both his originally intended readings of his fictions, and his later intentions in relation to Exegesis, and—to be thorough about my antipsychoanalytic position here—it would betray them in different ways, which it would not be able to articulate.

The closest parallel to Exegesis that I know is Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Mental Illness, in which a skilled judge argues that even though he is psychotic he deserves to be released from his asylum. But even there, the situation is simpler: Schreber was writing an autobiographical document, not a novel, and even though he recognized some of the things he said would not be taken as real by his readers, he drew clear distinctions between his own ideations and public truths, and he was not vexed by indecision over whether or not they might ever be taken that way.

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I am interested in this as a problem in reading and writing. What counts as genuinely complex fiction? I’m working on that—here’s a brief note on Substack. Much of this is worked out in the novel A Short Introduction to Anneliese. There Anneliese worries about whether she can keep control of her own writing project, and to help herself she reads a number of long books, and also books that are out of control, among them Exegesis. She reviews Dick’s manuscript, in her own demented way, in the novel, and decides that after a certain number of pages, no matter what the subject, all writers lose control—all sufficiently long books, after a fashion, are insane.

1. Platt, “The Voices in Philip K. Dick’s Head,” New York Times, December 16, 2011.