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finally: the #Exegesis-scraps that litter #VALIS are almost unreadably dull, but i'm tempted to see their undigested presentation as shrewd #mimesis--they make no sense *in a novel* any more than in a mind, so #PKD presents them as cognitive/narrative intrusions, chewing up precious brain-cycles and readerly saccades alike, posing the same problem for readers that they did for Dick during and after 2-3-74.
he can't go back to being the novelist he was, is part of the point.
Minor disagreement: the Exegesis stuff continues the same themes of empathy and what-is-reality that he writes about throughout his mature work. In a sense he's the same novelist addressing the same issues that he's always been concerned with, it's just that now it's too insistent to be fully fictionalized.
@RichPuchalsky would it be useful to characterize that 'intertextual'(?) fictional strategy as *practicing empathy toward himself*? (reminds me of #metta / #LovingKindness meditation)
i think i did overstress the intrusive/aggressive side yesterday; the 'problem' those Exegesis chunks seem to me to pose is, how can i or anyone live w/this trouble? how do people like my crew (powers/jeter/PKD) handle such intrusions/uncertainty? are we handling it? who'll make it out?
?
@RichPuchalsky i assume (hope?) that PKD in his pathological self-consciousness would've realized how boring the Exegesis stuff was in VALIS context--but yeah he would presumably encounter it as more weird complexity to be 'realistic' about, i.e. to take seriously (also funnily). but it also feels very different to me from e.g. Ubik, where the technique itself doesn't embody delirium/collapse/madness, just the content
It's different: it just seems to me that he was always handling these issues but had an unfortunate mental health event that altered how he had to write about them. It was taking him a while to metabolize the whole thing but there were hints in his last writing that it might have led to a phase of more "literary" character interiority if he hadn't died when he did.
It's not good technique. There are questions about whether his normal technique doesn't embody delirium/collapse/madness, though: look at how the characters are dressed throughout Ubik -- you have to mentally skim over those parts of the text because forming a full mental image would be too ridiculous. Or there's a mini critical controversy over Delany's criticism of PKD's sentences and how they are not well formed classically (a paraphrase) which I think adds to the effect.