SF STUDIES:
Special issue on Philip K. Dick 1975
Darko Suvin (Positions & Presuppositions in Science Fiction,
1988, 118) proposes an interesting grouping of the cast of
characters:
The
anti-utopians
The utopians
Bruno Bluthegeld
(also Mr Tree, also Dr Bloodmoney [271]) Dr. Stockstill
Stuart McConchie
Hoppy Harrington Edie & Bill Keller &
Bonny Keller their mother
Walt & Lydia Dangerfield
Others:
Jim Fergesson (employer); Bonny & George Keller (Edie's parents) &
Andrew Gill (Edie's natural father); Eldon Blaine (sells glasses);
Dean & Ela Hardy (he invents the rat-trap)
-
Narrative style &
technique
Dick's handling of
the temporal sequence in his narrative: esp. the jump of 7 years from
chp. 3 to chp. 4 (51)
-
Scenes, situations
and plot
Tree's paranoia sensitiva
(12-3)
Hoppy's trance
(39-45)
-
A few questions to
consider
1. How might one apply some of Freud's
ideas about "the uncanny" [unheimlich]
to aspects of the novel (especially to what is implied in Hoppy's
trances, his special abilities and in Bill's various powers?) (24, 26).
Link: Freud: The
Uncanny
2. Compare Dick's
anticipation of the aftermath on human society of a nuclear war with
what we know actually happened in Japan, and identify those features in
reality that more or less coincide with how Dick imagines them, and also
those features which differ from his vision.
3. Do you think the
measure of optimism with which Dick assesses the human potential for
survival and recovery, both in the novel, and his refraction of it in
the 'Afterword' (1980) is plausible, convincing or justified?
4. Comment on the
several ironies of the role given to Walt Dangerfield in the novel, and
on the significance of his wife's suicide.
5. What do you make
of Dick's representation of Hoppy's and Bill's access to people once
alive and now dead? How does it affect our sense of an answer to a
question posed in the novel: "how in this case could reality be sorted
out from fantasy?" [14]
6. Towards the end
of the novel, Dick play's with the possibility that Dr Bloodmoney does
actually activate the explosions that he says he can. What does that do
to our and the novel's sense of him as paranoid?
7. What is the role of technology in
the novel?
8. How far do you
find the schema devised by Fredric Jameson in his 1975 article plausible
and helpful in dealing with the complexity of the novel?
9.
-
Topics
for seminar discussion
1. Society
&technology: Nuclear war & its
possible aftermaths
2. Individual
psychology: Neurosis,
paranoia (12-3, 15), stigmata (11) and psychosis
3. Psychology and
biology:
mutations caused by radiation
4. Paranormal
phenomena:
reincarnation, metempsychosis, and communicating with entities on ":the
other side" of death
5. Residual racism
in society (as alluded to by the novel) (17, 20)
-
Lines
and phrases for comment
1. Richard Nixon
(14)
2. Thalidomide
babies (22), and the phocomelus (or phoce) (17)
3. "being colored
was a sort of early form of radiation burn" (20)
4. "unconscious
drives and paratactic systematic distortions of the reality
situation" (27)
5. "There was
really no such thing as being cured. There was really no such thing
as being cured; the 'illness' was life itself" (27)
Fredric Jameson
on Philip K. Dick's Dr Bloodmoney:
Link
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