Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No need to call in the policeman. Philip K. Dick has his fingerprints all over
this story. Here we find the sudden alterations in the texture of reality, the
haunting sense that our most cherished assumptions are fragile illusions,
the harassed protagonist who struggles in the midst of an authoritarian
society. And, as always, high tech gadgets and mind-altering substances.
In short, it’s another day at the office for Mr. Dick.
At the outset of Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said, we meet Jason Taverner, a famous
television star whose show is watched by an
avid audience of thirty million viewers. But
such happy moments of well-being and acclaim
never last long in a Dick novel. Before the end
of the first chapter, an ex-lover tries to kill
Taverner – by means of a Callisto cuddle sponge,
which digs its fifty feeding tubes into his body.
And by the second chapter, Taverner has
awakened in a low-down, bug-infested skid-row
hotel room, without any recollection of how he
got there. When he tries to phone his friends
and colleagues, none of them recognize him any
more. On October 11, Taverner was a celebrity;
on October 12 he is a nobody.
If Rod Serling were there, he would walk on-stage at this point uttering
those famous words: “You have just entered the Twilight Zone.”
The sudden and unexpected turnabout in Taverner’s fortunes causes many
complications. His birth record has disappeared from the public database.
All of his identification cards have vanished as well. In the police state in
which he lives, this is a serious liability. Taverner needs identification to
make his way through the many police barricades, and to avoid being sent
to a forced labor camp. He has five thousand dollars on hand – perhaps
enough to survive a few weeks or months and purchase phony
identification, if he can navigate his way through the underground economy
without first getting arrested.
This is the grand Dicksian moment, familiar to readers of his stories, when
the protagonist suddenly discovers that things are not quite what they
seem. In some of his works, Dick tries to stay true to his sci-fi heritage, and
offer a quasi-technological explanation for this turn of events. But Dick’s
work were always more fi than sci, and in Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said he prefers to let the scenes and situations stand on their own merits,
without offering explanations or unraveling the underlying causes.
Unfortunately this novel also features many of the characteristic
weaknesses of Dick’s work. The dialogue is hackneyed, rarely rising above
the conventions of pulp fiction. And don’t bother looking for clever
metaphors or interesting turns of phrase – you won’t find them. In short,
you need to enjoy Dick on his own merits too. Let’s put it this way: while
other writers of his generation were worried about language, Dick was
concerned with the conceptual underpinnings of narrative. And while the
authors who experimented with words sometimes leave us cold today –
their avant-garde games not having stood the test of time – Dick’s
conceptual brilliance has not lost any of its luster.
Perhaps it’s heresy to prefer Dick, for all his faults, to Pynchon. But then
count me as a heretic – and I don’t think I’m the only one. Dick’s influence,
while perhaps still falling short of that of the reclusive Cornell alum, seems
constantly on the rise. We see it in the novels of some of the finest authors
of the younger generation, such as Jonathan Lethem, or in motion pictures
as different from one another as The Matrix and The Truman Show.
Indeed, the whole field of emerging media – new innovations in video
games, the Internet and other cyber-realities – are almost like pages torn
out of his playbook.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said does not rank among Dick’s finest
works, despite standing out as the only one of his novels to be nominated
for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and its winning the Joseph W.
Campbell Memorial Award. But even second-tier Dick retains its charm,
and this book will continue to find a ready audience among the master’s
growing number of devotees.
by Philip K. Dick
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No need to call in the policeman. Philip K. Dick has his fingerprints all over
this story. Here we find the sudden alterations in the texture of reality, the
haunting sense that our most cherished assumptions are fragile illusions,
the harassed protagonist who struggles in the midst of an authoritarian
society. And, as always, high tech gadgets and mind-altering substances.
In short, it’s another day at the office for Mr. Dick.
At the outset of Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said, we meet Jason Taverner, a famous
television star whose show is watched by an
avid audience of thirty million viewers. But
such happy moments of well-being and acclaim
never last long in a Dick novel. Before the end
of the first chapter, an ex-lover tries to kill
Taverner – by means of a Callisto cuddle sponge,
which digs its fifty feeding tubes into his body.
And by the second chapter, Taverner has
awakened in a low-down, bug-infested skid-row
hotel room, without any recollection of how he
got there. When he tries to phone his friends
and colleagues, none of them recognize him any
more. On October 11, Taverner was a celebrity;
on October 12 he is a nobody.
If Rod Serling were there, he would walk on-stage at this point uttering
those famous words: “You have just entered the Twilight Zone.”
The sudden and unexpected turnabout in Taverner’s fortunes causes many
complications. His birth record has disappeared from the public database.
All of his identification cards have vanished as well. In the police state in
which he lives, this is a serious liability. Taverner needs identification to
make his way through the many police barricades, and to avoid being sent
to a forced labor camp. He has five thousand dollars on hand – perhaps
enough to survive a few weeks or months and purchase phony
identification, if he can navigate his way through the underground economy
without first getting arrested.
This is the grand Dicksian moment, familiar to readers of his stories, when
the protagonist suddenly discovers that things are not quite what they
seem. In some of his works, Dick tries to stay true to his sci-fi heritage, and
offer a quasi-technological explanation for this turn of events. But Dick’s
work were always more fi than sci, and in Flow My Tears, the Policeman
Said he prefers to let the scenes and situations stand on their own merits,
without offering explanations or unraveling the underlying causes.
Unfortunately this novel also features many of the characteristic
weaknesses of Dick’s work. The dialogue is hackneyed, rarely rising above
the conventions of pulp fiction. And don’t bother looking for clever
metaphors or interesting turns of phrase – you won’t find them. In short,
you need to enjoy Dick on his own merits too. Let’s put it this way: while
other writers of his generation were worried about language, Dick was
concerned with the conceptual underpinnings of narrative. And while the
authors who experimented with words sometimes leave us cold today –
their avant-garde games not having stood the test of time – Dick’s
conceptual brilliance has not lost any of its luster.
Perhaps it’s heresy to prefer Dick, for all his faults, to Pynchon. But then
count me as a heretic – and I don’t think I’m the only one. Dick’s influence,
while perhaps still falling short of that of the reclusive Cornell alum, seems
constantly on the rise. We see it in the novels of some of the finest authors
of the younger generation, such as Jonathan Lethem, or in motion pictures
as different from one another as The Matrix and The Truman Show.
Indeed, the whole field of emerging media – new innovations in video
games, the Internet and other cyber-realities – are almost like pages torn
out of his playbook.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said does not rank among Dick’s finest
works, despite standing out as the only one of his novels to be nominated
for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and its winning the Joseph W.
Campbell Memorial Award. But even second-tier Dick retains its charm,
and this book will continue to find a ready audience among the master’s
growing number of devotees.
| conceptual fiction |
