David Gill interviews Jonathan Lethem about Philip K. Dick

In the third issue of the online art/lit/culture journal Article, David Gill, author of the Philip K. Dick blog "Total Dick-head" writes about the new "prestigious" Library of America volume anthologizing four PKD novels and interviews the edition's editor, novelist and MacArthur "genius" Jonathan Lethem. From Gill's interview with Lethem:

What will the Library of America volume mean for Dick’s legacy?
It’s a weird thing to leap into this concept of what is a legacy, what is posterity -- those things are so bizarrely subjective. In some quarters Dick is already one of the defining voices of the second half of the twentieth century and in other quarters he is obviously disreputable forever. This volume becomes part of a conversation that’s a cacophony. There’s not one paradigm anymore, if there ever was, of a literary reputation.

With Dick there’s a sense of his always arriving in the culture, always being discovered. There are certain things that no matter how many people love them they retain their dissident quality. If you love something like Philip K. Dick you feel like you’re the only one that gets it. That said, I go back a certain distance with this. I was around in the years just after his death, hanging out with Paul Williams working on the Philip K. Dick society newsletter. Which was this photocopied labor of love, with a circulation in the hundreds. And all the books were pretty well out of print. There’s an unimaginable difference between now and 1991-92 when in order to even read the major works people were circulating imported British mass-market paperbacks.

That’s the way change happens, people declare it and then slowly their declaration is turned into a reality; it’s like the gentrification of a neighborhood. When my parents moved into this part of Brooklyn in 1968, everyone was promising each other it was about to happen here. Fools invested their money in opening boutiques on a street that was mostly boarded up shops and gas stations. But now you know what? There are boutiques there now, thirty years after it looked like a silly idea. You say something is going to happen for a long time and then a lot of people get exasperated and say oh you’re ridiculous; it’s never going to happen. Then one day it sort of happens. I think Dick’s gentrification has that quality too. This is not only the way literary reputations are transformed but the way change generally occurs, especially change in opposition to entrenched class prejudices. And a lot of the biases against genre fiction have not to do with any kind of aesthetic or literary judgment but with class discomfort. That kind of change happens very slowly, but it does occur, it distills as people come of age: people in your generation, people even younger than you, don’t care; they just don’t understand the prejudices of the previous generation. So that’s how it’s happening. It’s a very layered kind of transformation. Yet Dick retains an outré vibe – the work conveys a permanent and intrinsic cult affect.

Link to Article, Link to buy Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s

Previously on BB:
• Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick Link
• Jonathan Lethem: remix my stories! Link
• Library of America to publish Philip K. Dick Link
• Adam Gopnick on Philip K. Dick Link

• [Crunchbird]

  Thanks for the links on this … I’ve been reading Dick since I was far too young to really grasp what was going on in the paperback originals I poached from my dad’s library.

  Just out of curiosity, though, what’s with the scare quotes on “prestigious” and “genius”? Is there some reason you couldn’t have just avoided using those words if you didn’t agree with them?

• [David Pescovitz]

  I inserted the quotation marks around “prestigious” as a reference to Lethem’s discussion of the “gentrification” of PKD and whether an LoA edition somehow makes him more “reputable” in the eyes of his detractors.

  I used quotations around “genius” because the actual award is called a “MacArthur Fellowship” but it is commonly referred to as a “genius” grant or award, and usually with “genius” in quotes.

  “Thank” you. ; )

• [Anonymous]

  Jonathan Lethem To Speak About Philip K. Dick at the Cooper Union in NYC!

  Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
  Lecture and book signing
  Thursday, September 27, 6:30 pm
  The Great Hall
  7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
  Free

  Jonathan Lethem: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s

  Acclaimed writer Jonathan Lethem is the editor of a selection of novels written by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick from the 1960s. Dick left behind more than 160 short stories and novels when he died in 1982. Many of his tales have become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report. Lethem bundled four of Dick’s novels into one book to give a new generation the opportunity to discover Dick’s futuristic visions.

  Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Gun, with Occasional Music; The Fortress of Solitude and You Don’t Love Me Yet. Motherless Brooklyn, his fifth, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• [Anonymous]

  There’s an old episode of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything radio show I heard recently in which he interviews Lethem about Dick. Both Lethem and Walker have “Ubik” tattoos. I’m sure I found the podcast through a Boing Boing article, but I couldn’t find the article just now. Here’s the link to the show:’http://www.toeradio.org/archives/2004/10/program_10.html