The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [Paperback]

 

 

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God, Satan, Maya, the Id, Drugs, Evolution, Communism, Religion, Postmodernism, the Future, Reality, Unreality...all of the above, none of the above? What does Eldritch and his precious Chew-Z represent to you?

Dick's masterpiece about a creeping threat(or is it the salvation of man?) that is borderline supernatural feeds off the audience's paranoia of the "Other". This is a common theme in PKD's work, and this may be his best on this topic. We have no control over it, it's coming, to eat us, to savor us, to incorporate us into his mind. I've always felt that PKD was in ways an heir to horror-master H.P. Lovecraft, another writer who wrote about the inevitability of man's annihilation at the hands of the supernatural.

I'm tempted to drop the rating a half star, because this book does tend to get repetitive towards the end, and possibly confusing if you're not paying attention, but that seems to always be PKD's point--the swarming of Palmer Eldritch in the characters' minds. It works well as an idea, but, in execution, you kind of want the story to move along. PKD's strength wasn't in his plotting or characterization (although this book has some of his better character arcs), but in his mind-blowing creativity. Even his weakest books are a joy just because you run into concepts and ideas that you probably never could have thought of yourself. Finding out what little mundane development PKD envisions for the future is as much as a page turner as the plot itself. Evolution treatment, suitcase psychiatrists? The normality of the weird, a PKD trademark.

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH is certainly one of Dick's most important books. It casts a stronger, clearer and more unsettling light on a certain aspect of Dick's vision than perhaps any other of his books. I am referring to Dick's deep interest in the peculiarly post-modern experiential blend of banality and terror. This is one of the most important and least appreciated or correctly understood aspects of Dick's artistic vision and accomplishment. If you take the time to examine it, you will see that banality and terror form the poles between which the content of THE THREE STIGMATA moves and it is important to understand that this banality and terror are inseparable from the high-tech nature of this imagined future world. For Dick, the predominant effect of pervasive technological advancement has been that it intensely magnifies the banality of ordinary consciousness which, confronted then with its excruciatingly boring self, demands to be entertained, amused, ( 'Perky Pat' is only a futuristic extension of ordinary post-modern society) to the point of a sort of addiction and so the chief function of technology becomes to create a world that is a diversion from reality and then to protect that world from any possible threat. Let us note before going any further that for Dick ordinary consciousness is a sort of artificial consciousness in the sense that its main thrust is not toward a connection with the challenging mystery of reality but toward diversionary false 'realities' and this is ultimately why Dick so often blurs the line between ordinary humans and various forms of androids. They are both forms of repeatable, artificial life. The sort of open, genuine exploring of reality that was so important to Dick is alien and even taboo to ordinary consciousness. Dick saw this exploring as absolutely necessary for maintaining sanity, that is, being in touch with reality. This is a sort of law of life and the consequence of violating it is that doing so eventually leads to the manifestation of dominating monsters and terror. In a very real sense, Palmer Eldritch is nothing more than a high-tech fascist monster and the terror that he represents has its roots in the very banality of the lives of most of the people he comes to dominate. If my view of this book seems to neglect its sci-fi nature, please remember that for Dick technological advancement, however expansive, does not in itself entail any advancement in awareness or understanding in human beings, it rather only magnifies what they already are and Dick's entire body of sci-fi work is a radical rebellion against that common sci-fi fantasy. THE THREE STIGMATA is a truly visionary book of a very frightening nature.
Finally, I would like to comment on the fact that one often hears and reads statements on Dick's work claiming that it is unfortunate that he was not more conscientious about the quality of his writing, the implication presumably being that if he had been he might have produced some real literary masterpieces instead of the flawed but interesting works he did create. I believe this attitude reveals a serious lack of understanding of what it is that makes Dick's work so important, far more important than that of the majority of his contemporaries who have a more 'polished' style. It is well known that Dick wrote very rapidly, sometimes entire works gushed out of him in a very short time and it is often stated that he should have taken the time to re-write and produce a more'literary' work. I believe that Dick's gut feeling was totally against this and I also believe that his feeling was absolutely correct. Dick knew that he had a rare and deep connection with and feel for certain crucial characteristics of post-modern civilization and their implications for the future. One of these characteristics was its chronic, unique and deadly type of banality and trashiness which is so rawly present in his work. He saw it for the deeply rooted disease that it is, so deeply rooted that the common reaction to it is to try to make a virtue of it rather than face the seemingly impossible operation of trying to dig it out. He had the same deep feel for the possible fantastic terrors of the future and he sincerely struggled all his adult life to find a reality that could genuinely liberate him from, take him beyond these things. Dick's approach to writing was his way of keeping immediately in touch with his own deepest sense of things and for him to attempt to be more 'artistic' in any conventional sense of that term would only have weakened his work by turning it back toward the past and would not have improved it. Dick's work is inevitably imperfect, but it is a bold and beautiful step forward that none of his contemporaries can match.

One of Dick's masterpieces, first published in 1965. The setting is a future Earth where the environment has heated up intolerably. Because of overpopulation, people are "drafted" to emigrate the even more miserable environments of Mars and other planets. The colonists, to escape the dreary reality of their hovels, take a hallucinogenic drug, Can-D. Like the psychedelic voyagers of the 1960s, they also have something like theological debates about the reality of the Can-D experience. A kind of negative messiah named Palmer Eldritch introduces a new drug called Chew-Z and at first it seems an improvement, producing not a fantasy state but a "genuine new universe." But those who step into it find themselves subject to Eldritch as the evil god of a hallucinated world. The hero Barney Mayerson, after taking the drug, is turned into a phantom in a future world that regards him as only semi-real, and then finds himself turning into Eldritch himself. Thus Chew-Z, promising the fulfillment of all desires, only produces a nightmare from which one perhaps never awakens. But drugs are in a sense a red herring in this novel. Can-D and Chew-Z are, rather, pretexts for revealing the fragility of the fabric of reality woven by our perceptions and conditioning.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Further proof of genius.
This may well be Philip K. Dick's most brain-frying book, and I mean that as a complement. I put it down feeling overstuffed, as if the book were a rich cheese I'd had too much... Read more

Published on Mar 17 2004 by Evan Waters

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 Stars and 2 Planets
Set in a science-fiction genre the story teller (PKD) has developed the uncanny ability here to insert a small but important wedge into the consciouness of the reader which will... Read more

Published on July 12 2003 by Chai

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything I hoped for
This book was great. It has everything that I have come to expect from PKD, and even improved on some of his flaws. Read more

Published on Feb 12 2003 by alchemist42

5.0 out of 5 stars Dick's Best
This is my favorite book by Dick; I couldn't put it down. Besides having more of a plot than many others of his books, this work dives deep into mind-blowing issues like... Read more

Published on Jan 28 2003 by Nathan B. Hyatt

4.0 out of 5 stars Real or Fantasy -- the best and worst of Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch combines what I like most and least about the works of Philip K. Dick.

Dick shows why he is among the best sci-fi writers ever. Read more

Published on Dec 25 2002 by Terence C. Burnham

5.0 out of 5 stars The most scary book ever written?
Once Philip K Dick was walking across a field, when he looked up, and saw "a terrible visage" superimposed on the sky. It was a huge, metal-eyed, metal-jawed face. Read more

Published on Sep 1 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars So much stuff going on in such a short book
This is the first Philip K. Dick book that I have read, but I will certainly read many more. My brain hurts after reading this book in a few sittings. Read more

Published on Jun 27 2002 by Daitokuji31

5.0 out of 5 stars How do we know who God really is? And is he what we think?
This is the question, it appears that Philip K. Dick is trying to share with his readers, as he switches around the history of Christianity with a science fiction story. Read more

Published on Jun 25 2002 by Nick AGER

5.0 out of 5 stars A head trip at times, but worth the effort
Sporting one of the neatest titles in all of literature, SF or otherwise, this novel is considered one of Dick's handful of absolute masterpieces, written during his peak in the... Read more

Published on Dec 10 2001 by Michael Battaglia

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun anarchic romp through the imagination
PKD's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" disappointed me, especially after reading "Do Androids Dream... Read more

Published on Nov 2 2001 by Jay Stevens

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