A Scanner Darkly
- For the 2006 film under this title, see A Scanner Darkly (film)
| File:A-Scanner-Darkly.png | |
| Author | Philip K. Dick |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Bob Pepper |
| Language | English |
| Genre | science fiction, Psychological novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 1977 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 220 p. (1st edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0385016131 (1st edition) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
A Scanner Darkly is a 1977 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The semi-autobiographical story was set in a dystopian Orange County, California in the future of 1994. The book can be considered Dick's master statement on drug abuse, in light of his extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use.
Plot
Template:Spoiler The main character is both Bob Arctor, part of a household of hippie drug-users, and Agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to spy on them. Arctor/Fred shields his true identity both from those in the drug subculture and, ironically, from the police themselves. The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book. While supposedly only posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to Substance D (known simply as Death), a powerful psychoactive drug. An ongoing conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer through whom he intends to find the uppermost source of Substance D. Arctor's persistent use of the drug, which causes the two hemispheres of the brain to function independently, leaves him unable to distinguish between his roles as a drug user and a policeman. Incapable of combining what each persona knows, Fred begins spying on himself, Arctor, more passionately. Through a series of drug and psychological tests, Arctor's superiors at work discover that his addiction has made him incapable of performing his job as a narcotics agent. Donna takes Arctor to "New Path", a rehabilitation clinic, just as Arctor begins to experience the symptoms of SD withdrawal. It is revealed that Donna has been a narcotics agent all along, working as part of a police operation to infiltrate New Path and determine its funding source. Unknowingly, Arctor has been selected to carry out the sting.
As part of the rehab program, Arctor is renamed "Bruce" and forced to participate in cruel group-dynamic games intended to break the will of the inmates. The story ends with Bruce working at a New Path farming commune, where he is suffering from a serious neurocognitive deficit after withdrawing from SD. As he slowly begins to regain cognitive function, Bruce realizes that New Path's funds are from sales of Substance D itself, grown using the labor of the brain damaged former users that populate the communes.
Substance D
Use of SD over an extended period can cause the user's consciousness to separate into two distinct parts. The drug also appears to facilitate the inducement of shared delusions, manifesting as folie à deux. The source of Substance D remains a mystery throughout most of the novel, though various theories are proposed. It is speculated that: SD is imported from the U.S.S.R. as a Communist scheme to destroy American resistance to Communism; that it was sent to Earth by aliens intent on either enlightening mankind or reducing humans to a zombie-like slave race; that it is involved in a government or corporate plot. At the end of the book, we find out that Substance D is an organic substance, derived from little blue flowers that are grown on large plantations, hidden between rows of corn as cover. Ironically, the drug is harvested by the brainwashed inmates of SD drug rehab centers who are suffering from neurocognitive deficits as a result of their drug addiction.
Philip K. Dick also gives the name of the species of the flower, which helps to show the relevant meaning of the story and the nature of both the drug and the character's struggle. The name is Mors ontologica, which could roughly be translated to "the death of existence."
Title
The "scanner" of the title is a holographic recorder/projector on which the main character views clips of his own life but doesn't recognize them. It is also a reference to a Biblical verse in 1 Corinthians 13 that includes "we see as through a mirror darkly", and thus refers to the main character's weak grasp on reality. SD, the initials of Scanner Darkly, are presumably clipped from LSD, and are also the initials of Substance D.
Themes
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Dick twists American society into a very surreal setting, by expanding on several social problems of growing interest in the 1960s, namely:
- police surveillance - in the novel, highly technologically advanced,
- drug abuse - in the novel, involving widespread drug-abuse-induced mental collapse that is treated in numerous and widespread rehab clinics that amount to a nationwide, non-governmental but federal-government-entangled, institution,
- The blue flowers also happen to be a central, reoccurring symbol in German romanticism, closely tied to the associated youth movements.
In addition, Dick's standard themes appear here:
- the construction of reality in consciousness,
- an admirable, fascinating, but unattainable and marginally insane dark-haired woman (Donna),
- humanity in extreme situations.
The character types seen in A Scanner Darkly are nearly universal to his work and tend to follow similar roles: the downtrodden protagonist finds himself at odds with a large and complicated plot, not specifically against him, but in which he becomes inadvertently entangled, who is then alternately aided by, confused by, and maliciously harmed by the dark-haired woman, is helped indirectly by the fatherly old man (whose warnings often go unheeded or come too late), and faces the spokesman of the evil conspiracy, who is mysterious, powerful, well-informed, and more or less undeniable, leaving the downtrodden hero with little or bittersweet success. Generally, multiple explanations for the nature of the events, the outcome of the story, and the nature and identity of the evil spokeman are available, especially if drug use or other psychic complications blur the lines of reality. Generally speaking, the narrator participates in the perspective of the characters, so if what they experience is a drug-induced delusion or a bona fide happening is left vague for the reader. Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder what actually happened in the "real world" of the story and is left with little clues, much like how a person rehabilitated from extended drug use might look back at the recent months of his life and wonder what was real, what was misinterpreted, and what was false.
The theme of construction of reality in consciousness is central to the novel. The most obvious example is the dilemma of the main character who simultaneously assumes two identities and often loses track of reality. Also, many of the characters excessively taunt each other, and rendered paranoid by drug use, understand the world through conspiracy theories. Because of the surreal, almost absurdist style of the novel, readers are left wondering if their own perceptions reflect reality or paranoia.
Dick also uses Fred/Arctor to explore the symbiotic relationship between cop and criminal; how each is defined and reliant upon the existence of the other. The New Path clinic's duality reflects this ambivalent relationship.
Autobiographical nature
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Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid 1972 (when he entered the X-Kalay program; see below) Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenaged drug users at his home in Marin County. During this period, the author ceased writing completely and became fully dependent upon amphetamines, which he had been using intermittently for many years. The character of Donna was inspired by an older teenager who became associated with Dick sometime in 1970; though they never became lovers, the woman was his principal female companion until early 1972, when Dick left for Canada to deliver a speech to a Vancouver science fiction convention. This speech, "The Android and the Human", serves as the basis for many of the recurring themes and motifs in the ensuing novel. Another turning point in this timeframe for Dick, the alleged break-in to his home and papers, is detailed extensively elsewhere.
Because of his firsthand experience, Dick captures the language, conversation, and culture of drug users in the 1960s with a rare clarity. Curious readers can gain considerable insight into the culture by reviewing the extended conversation on "microdots" in this book.
This is further explained in the moving afterword, where Dick dedicates the book to those of his friends—he includes himself—who suffered debilitation or death as a result of their drug use. Mirroring the epilogue are the involuntary goodbyes that occur throughout the story--the constant turnover and burn-out of young people that lived with Dick during those years.
In the afterword, he states that the novel is about “some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did” and that “drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to move out in front of a moving car.”
After delivering "The Android and the Human", Dick became a participant in X-Kalay (a Canadian Synanon-type recovery program), effortlessly convincing program caseworkers that he was nursing a heroin addiction to do so. This is portrayed in his 1988 book The Dark-Haired Girl (a collection of letters and journals from this period, most of an achingly romantic nature). Presumably, this is a source for the vividness and accuracy with which the novelistic clinic is portrayed. It was at X-Kalay, while doing publicity for the facility, that he devised the notion of rehab centers being used to secretly harvest drugs (thus inspiring the book's New Path clinics).
Writing process and publication
A Scanner Darkly was one of the few Dick novels to gestate over a long period of time. By February 1973, in an effort to prove that the effect of his amphetamine usage was merely psychosomatic, the newly clean-and-sober author had already prepared a full outline. (The letter accompanying the mailing of the outline to his agent is available online [1]). A first draft was in development by March [2]. This labor was soon supplanted by a new family and the completion of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (left unfinished in 1970), which was finally released in 1974 and received the prestigious John W. Campbell Award. Additional preoccupations were the alleged mystical experiences of early 1974 that would eventually serve as a basis for VALIS and the unpublished Exegesis journal, a screenplay for an unproduced film adaptation of 1969's Ubik, an occasional lecture, and the Roger Zelazny collaboration Deus Irae.
Because of its semi-autobiographical nature, some of Scanner was torturous to write. Tessa Dick, Philip's wife at the time, once stated that she often found her husband weeping as the sun rose after a night-long writing session. Tessa has given interviews stating that "when he was with me, he wrote A Scanner Darkly [in] under two weeks. But we spent three years rewriting it" and that she was "pretty involved in his writing process [for A Scanner Darkly]." [3]
There was also the challenge of transmuting the events into "science fiction", as Dick felt that he could not sell a mainstream novel. Providing invaluable aide in this field was Judy-Lynn Del Rey, head of Ballantine Books' SF division which had optioned the book. Widely regarded as one of the best editorial minds in the genre, Del Rey suggested the timeline change to 1994 and helped to emphasize the more futuristic elements of the novel, such as the "scramble suit" employed by Arctor (which, incidentially, emerged from one of the mystical experiences). Yet in a sly move on the part of Dick (and much to Del Rey's chagrin) much of the dialogue spoken by the characters used hippie slang, dating the events of the novel to their "true" timeframe of 1970-1972.
Upon its publication in 1977, A Scanner Darkly was hailed by ALA Booklist as "his best yet!". Brian Aldiss lauded it as "the best book of the year", while Robert Silverberg praised the novel's "demonic intensity" and deemed it "a masterpiece of sorts". Sales were typical for the SF genre in America, but hardcover editions were issued in Europe, where all of Dick's works were warmly received. Snubbed at the Nebula and Hugo Awards in the era where Star Wars and escapist space opera reigned supreme, the novel was awarded the French equivalent upon its publication there in 1979.
Film
The animated film, A Scanner Darkly, was authorized by Dick's estate. It is scheduled for release in July 2006 and will star Keanu Reeves as Fred/Bob Arctor and Winona Ryder as Donna. Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, both noted for drug issues, are also cast in the film. Directed by Richard Linklater, the film was produced using the process of rotoscoping; it was first shot in live-action then the footage was painted over — a lengthy undertaking that caused the film to miss its initial September 2005 release date. For A Scanner Darkly, however, artists maintained a consistent animation style. Producers say some 'hip dialogue' was changed to make the movie more comprehensible to viewers, but that most of the original dialogue is intact. The film, like the novel, takes place in a near future setting; the trailer features the line, "Seven years from now everything you do will be recorded".