Review: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Blurb:
A Nebula Award–nominee from the Hugo Award–winning author of The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch explores the desolation of the minds, souls, and hearts of colonists on Mars in “a psychedelic odyssey of hallucinations-within-hallucinations from which no reader emerges unscathed” (Boston Globe).
On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn to drugs to escape a dead-end existence. Especially when the drug is Can-D, which translates its users into the idyllic world of a Barbie-esque character named Perky Pat. When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch arrives with a new drug called Chew-Z, he offers a more addictive experience, one that might bring the user closer to God. But in a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of Philip K. Dick’s enduring classics, at once a deep character study, a dark mystery, and a tightrope walk along the edge of reality and illusion.
Review:
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Philip K. Dick, 1978
Philip K. Dick is an author for whom I have a great appreciation despite having broadly mixed opinions on his body of work. To be clear, I have not yet read everything he’s ever written, but I have read a lot of it; and I think it’s safe to say I’m split about 50/50 on works of his I’ve enjoyed vs. works of his I haven’t. But even amongst those works of his about which I’ve been mostly apathetic, I’ve always found the ideas contained within them to be fascinating. And I believe that’s where PKD’s strength always was: in his ideas; whilst the execution of those ideas might sometimes miss the mark (for me personally).
One of the ideas about which a great deal of PKD’s works are concerned is that of our perceptions of reality. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (adapted in 1982 into Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner) concerns itself—amongst other things—with the idea that there are false humans walking amongst us; and how we might go about being able to discern which of our neighbors is real, and which is simply a bundle of wires wrapped in flesh. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (adapted into the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film Total Recall) involves the implantation of false memories (or are they?), which leads the protagonist to begin questioning the truth of his entire world. Adjustment Team (adapted into the 2011 Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau) is about a secret organization capable of freezing in time select pockets of the world so that they can enter into them and alter the details of that frozen chunk of reality; and there are a great many other examples of this kind of thing in PKD’s work. So too is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch concerned with exploring what exactly it means to know “reality”.
This exploration is undertaken in a variety of ways, firstly in the concept of precognition; or more simply: characters who can glimpse the future. PKD had already played with the concept of “precogs” in 1956 with The Minority Report, and uses them here too; though not as predictors of future crime but instead in the more pedestrian role as predictors of future fashion trends. But what happens then when two precogs glimpse two different futures? And what burdens might be placed upon our minds when we glimpse any potential future? The mere knowledge of a possible future all but demands a recontextualization of reality because how could such knowledge of the future not affect how we live in the present? Ignorance is bliss, and so knowledge is a curse. It’s the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. To know the future is to have the world irreversibly altered. To know the future is to have a veil lifted. So too are the main characters of The Three Stigmata—P.P. Layouts Chairman Leo Bulero, Bulero’s New York-based precog Barney Mayerson, and the eponymous Palmer Eldritch—bound in shackles by myriad potential futures, cursed to vie for dominance not just on this plane of existence but in many intangible, perhaps-not-yet-ever-to-occur ones as well. At one point, some six hours into the overnight, Transatlantic flight during which I’d begun reading The Three Stigmata, I had to stop reading The Three Stigmata, because my sleep-deprived mind could no longer grasp the 5D-chess, political maneuvering through time that these characters were undertaking.
The second distortion of reality requires a bit more explanation about the world of The Three Stigmata. In The Three Stigmata, PKD presents a version of Earth in which the climate has irreversibly deteriorated. The globe is so hot that businessmen are required by law to wear specialized cooling units when they walk outside; and all postal deliveries occur at night when the sun is down. Because the Earth’s environment has collapsed in this way, the United Nations has begun a draft to enlist the people of Earth to colonize nearby planets, and work to turn these neighboring, barren worlds into the kind of agricultural powerhouses that Earth can simply no longer be. But like Elton John says, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it’s cold as hell.”
So then are the colonists of places like Mars trapped in a miserable existence, living in self-proclaimed “hovels” (with quaint, happiness-inspiring names like “Chicken Pox Prospects”), where the only escape from the misery of their lives comes from the use of a recreational drug called Can-D. Can-D is a hallucinogenic drug, wherein the user experiences a vivid, often shared hallucination of a pristine, past version of the Earth—somewhat reminiscent of an idyllic 1950s United States. It is, also importantly to the central conflict of the story, manufactured and distributed by an off-the-books department of P.P. Layouts, the company chaired by Leo Bulero. To chew Can-D is to partake of a willful distortion of reality, but one which eventually and stubbornly always reverts back to life in the hovels of Mars. There is never any doubt, once the hallucination concludes, that this dismal life beneath the dusty surface of the Red Planet is, in fact, real life.
But soon a new drug hits the market, derived from powerful lichens imported from beyond the edges of the solar system: a new drug called Chew-Z. This new drug brings with it even more vivid hallucinations, which take place in more personalized worlds. No longer does everyone hallucinate the same thing, they now hallucinate different things; and oftentimes when you’re under the influence of Chew-Z, you forget that you ever took such a thing. There is only the world of the hallucination. What is Chew-Z? Did you ever live on Mars? Wait… are these really hallucinations at all?
Chew-Z, it is revealed, is the brainchild of the Palmer Eldritch, and initially it seems as though the introduction of Chew-Z is merely in service of usurping Leo Bulero’s monopoly over the inter-system drug trade; but it soon becomes clear that Eldritch’s machinations are much grander. Palmer Eldritch is a unique character within the story for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is his appearance. He has a mechanical arm, steel teeth, and a singular mechanical eye and bridges the space between where his two original eyes once sat. It’s relatively early in the tale then that—through such descriptions—we see that the names PKD has chosen here lack subtlety. Can-D is candy, easily consumed for a quick, sugary rush; Chew-Z is choosey, because the user is supposedly able to control the circumstances and appearance of their hallucinated world; and Palmer Eldritch is as the word is defined: strange or unnatural especially in a way that inspires fear (Merriam-Webster). No one else is quite like Palmer Eldritch. He has transcended and become something else entirely.
And so do his unique physical attributes become then like the wounds of Christ, the Stigmata. Palmer’s arm, his teeth, and his singular, wide-lensed eye: these are his titular three stigmata; and as the wounds on Christ’s hands and feet and head have supposedly appeared on the bodies of saints throughout history, so too do ghostly reflections of Eldritch’s arm, teeth, and eye begin to appear on the bodies of our characters. At first these stigmata only appear while the characters are explicitly under the influence of Chew-Z; but then they begin to appear out in the real world, thusly—borrowing a phrase from Annihilation author Jeff VanderMeer—“disturbing the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.” And it is clear from PKD’s characterization of Palmer Eldritch that Eldritch must have anticipated this Messianic connection, as the marketing campaign for Chew-Z boldly proclaims, “God promises eternal life. We can deliver it.”
Eldritch and Chew-Z become then kind of like an inverse of the philosophy of Mercerism that Dick introduces in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Or, we could more correctly say that the philosophy of Mercerism is an inverse of Eldritch, since Androids was published four years after The Three Stigmata. In Androids, the characters are able to—via the use of “empathy boxes”—collectively experience and inhabit the form of Wilbur Mercer as he trudges up a punishing, Sisyphean hill. But in The Three Stigmata, it is Eldritch—through the use of Chew-Z—who is able to inhabit everybody else.
This document has been open in my browser window for almost two weeks now. Everything you’ve read above was fairly well laid out within a day of having first created the document that would become this review, but it’s everything that will follow that has taken me a long time to figure out. I don’t know how I keep stumbling into these headachingly obtuse science-fiction novels. Perhaps I should be reading the back covers more often, instead of just diving in headfirst based solely on my previous knowledge of the author. And since this one was a Philip K. Dick joint, maybe I should’ve known better.
The problem is that I’m not content in these reviews to merely give you an overview of the plot and characters, and what I may or may not have liked about them in the hopes that your interests in fiction align with my interests in fiction. I like knowing how a book made someone feel, or how they experienced it—as, for me personally, those are far better indicators of if I will like that book too. So then in my reviews I like digging into the meat of the thing, to see how the novel was cooked, and to taste all the different flavors that make up the whole dish. But what exactly is the whole dish here?
On the surface, The Three Stigmata presents itself as a very 60s kind of book—What if you could meet God by doing drugs?—but it’s clear that such a reading would be a shallow one.
The mechanisms by which the characters alter their realities are not really the point of the story; but rather what they do with those revelations once they’ve been made aware.
Philip K. Dick spent a great deal of his life pondering what lies beyond the edges of human understanding; and in an attempt to perhaps glean some authorial insight into the motivations behind writing a book like The Three Stigmata, I discovered and subsequently sought out a copy of The Exegesis of Philip K Dick—a collection of journal entries written by Dick towards the end of his life; a collection which begins serendipitously, I happily discovered, with a quote from The Three Stigmata. But I unhappily discovered that the tome of The Exegesis was over 900 pages—which, despite its length and subsequent ability to be used as a bludgeon, the editors’ introduction insists is “noncomprehensive”. According to initial explorations of the work done by Jay Kinney in 1984, Dick’s source documents for The Exegesis span over 8,000 pages and some two million words. So, surely, if ever I was to get a glimpse into the mind of an author, it would be here.
Yet here I am, some days later, wondering if perhaps I should have just opted for a death-of-the-author interpretation. To fully understand the contents of The Exegesis one must attain, as editors Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Letham’s introduction earnestly plead the reader will understand, “a degree of mania and stupefaction we would not wish on another human.” This is not a work on the craft of Dick’s writing, but rather Dick’s attempt to unspool the nature of the specific things he’d written within in the context of a pair of somewhat transcendental experiences he had in 1974.
But that is not to say there wasn’t valuable insight to be gleaned from The Exegesis as it related to The Three Stigmata. Though well outside the family of nonfiction, craft-based works like McKee’s Story, King’s On Writing, or Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing, The Exegesis does spend a good deal of time exploring the connection between Dick’s most metaphysical stories (which, in Dick’s mind, prominently feature The Three Stigmata) and his “2-3-74” experience (which I will not detail here because it will be far too out of left field for even as weird as this review has already become). I should be clear though, I have not yet read the whole of this curated version of The Exegesis, instead opting to use Jackson and Letham’s helpful index to peruse specific passages that mention The Three Stigmata, and then a handful of the passages surrounding those pieces of this puzzle. Here is what I learned:
Firstly, Dick remarks that perhaps the correct way to understand the narrative of The Three Stigmata is to follow its narrative beats in reverse; and much of his thoughts on The Three Stigmata follow this mental thread of reversals. He equates the consumption of Chew-Z, which transports the user to a world in which Palmer Eldritch is essentially god, as a sort of reverse Eucharist (he even calls the novel a “satanic bible” [p. 418]), which he clarifies as “a penetrating, accurate and exhaustive study of the miracle of transubstantiation, simply reversing the bipolarities of good and evil” (p. 274); further clarifying that the nature of the story is that of an “invasion of our world by a deity who can become everyone via… mass theolepsy” (p. 275). He does not mention, at least in the passages I read, the potential connection to an inversion of Android’s Mercerism; but we can see that we were on the right track interpretively—at least in PKD’s mind.
But dovetailing on that idea, Dick cites the basic theme of The Three Stigmata as that of “[a] pleasant illusory skin stretched over a dreadful reality” (p. 218), or “in which another reality is found when the surface [of reality] is peeled back layer by layer, exposing at last the absolute world” (p. 254-255). The trouble then for the characters of The Three Stigmata—and us, the readers, by proxy—is determining which of these layers is the “real” or absolute world. Dick would have us believe that Eldritch’s Chew-Z induced god-kingdom is the “real” world, and that the dismal reality of Mars, the barren Earth, and bureaucratic life in P.P. Layouts is the false world; but it’s important to remember that these are analyses that Dick is bringing to the work after the fact. He’s clear about that in the text. He did not consciously intend for all of these comparisons to be made. Some of them, maybe, but certainly not all. The only thing I can be certain was intended in the original writing, before Dick began to so intently psychoanalyze himself and his works, are the inverse-Messianic connections between Palmer Eldritch and Jesus Christ. One does not idly invoke the use of the term “stigmata”. But even so…
At one point in The Exegesis, Dick compares himself to Dedalus, as—in his attempts to circumvent the twisted corridors of his own novels—he has, like the myth, potentially trapped himself in a maze of his own creation. In an essay from 1975, Solaris author Stanislaw Lem noted similarly, saying that, “Philip Dick does not lead his critics in an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his fantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth” (Lem, Microworlds, p. 124); though Lem also remarks that, “I consider Dick’s own comments to be inessential to the analysis of his works” (Microworlds, p. 133).
Perhaps I have fallen into both of these traps.
I mean, is this even a “review” anymore? I feel like I’ve slipped into that same state I was in when I read Clarke’s Childhood’s End and attempted to review it here. I’ve dug into the story, but in attempting to find its meaning have I lost the thread of the purpose of this review? Have I even told you whether or not I think you should read the book? I don’t think I have. Okay then. I’d recommend this book! I think.
Like I said at the top, the ideas of PKD novels are often more interesting to me than the novels themselves. And that’s kind of where I’ve landed in my final analysis of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. There are a great deal of tantalizing ideas in this thing, but the story that weaves them all together is just a little too muddled for them to coalesce into something truly great (though I think this feeling may change upon re-reads, especially now that I have access to the curated edition of Dick’s Exegesis, despite what Lem says about the inessentiality of Dick’s own analysis). And adding to the trouble one might have parsing through the murky river of ideas in this thing to find the nuggets of gold contained therein is the unfortunate misogynist silt that clouds those very waters—an all too common problem with novels of this era.
So what then? We cannot deny the impact of Dick’s work on the genre, and—with how much of his writing has been adapted into award-winning work in other mediums—storytelling as a whole; but his books, especially those written towards the end of his career, offer quite a challenge to the reader—both to our modern sensibilities and our critical analyses. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch represents then, in my observation, a key moment in Dick’s turn toward explicit explorations of the metaphysical. As a novel on its own merits, I’d say it certainly warrants a read by those interested in the more heady narratives in which it traffics; and as a PKD novel, it certainly warrants explorations by those who are already fans of Dick’s work. But if you’re of the most incredibly curious variety of reader, perhaps you’ll do as I did: read The Three Stigmata, track down The Exegesis, and then begin planning to read through the tangled web of PKD novels that their author charted out amidst the sprawling forest of his journals. I’ve cited the Polish science-fiction author Stanislaw Lem several times already, but I will end with one more quote from his 1975 essay “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans” (which you can find included in the 1984 collection Microworlds, which I’d heartily recommend to any science-fiction enthusiast), in which Lem more eloquently states what I more clumsily voiced at the top of this review:
“Indeed, [Philip K. Dick’s] writings sometimes fumble in their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as often happens at the sight of a lone imagination’s efforts to cope with a shattered superabundance of opportunities—efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory.”
