The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick

Kongrosian said, "I sent them away. They made it even more difficult for me. Look--see that desk? I'm not part of it and it's part of me! Watch and I'll show you." He scrutinized the desk intently, his mouth working. And, on the desk, a vase of pale roses lifted, moved through the air toward Kongrosian. The vase, as they now watched, passed into Kongrosian's chest and disappeared. "It's inside me, now," he quavered. "I absorbed it. Now it's me. And--" He gestured at the desk. "I'm it!"

In the spot where the vase had been Nicole saw, forming into density and mass and color, a complicated tangle of mass and color, a complicated tangle of interwoven organic matter, smooth red tubes and what appeared to be portions of an endocrine system. A section, she realized, of Kongrosian's internal anatomy.

What is politics but a mass delusion, a lie on a grand scale that is sometimes perpetrated upon us, but also one in which we collaborate, often quite willingly? Philip K. Dick's novel The Simulacra takes that idea to it extreme, most literal form: the president of the United States of Europe and America (renamed when West Germany was admitted as the 51st state) is nothing but a simulacrum, an android. The sham elections that put the simulacrum in place are ostensibly to vote in a new husband for Nicole Thibodeaux, the beautiful Jackie-esque First Lady, who is the real focal point of the American symbolic order: everyone loves her, and that unity keeps the country together. (It's no coincidence, I think, that The Simulacra was written the year of JFK's assassination.) If the country found out that her husband was a simulacrum--and that she herself only an actress, the fourth to play Nicole over many decades--who's to say what might happen?

The thing about Philip K. Dick novels is that they can never be distilled into a single thread, and trying to find the "main thread" is often a fool's errand. Maybe the novel isn't really about Nicole, but the telekinetic classical pianist Richard Kongrosian, who suffers from a mental disorder in which he believe he's become invisible, reduced to a terrible smell. Kongrosian is an integral part of the White House's "bread and circus"-style entertainments, and his mental dissolution represents a political crisis for Nicole. To make matters worse, psychotherapy has been outlawed, and only one therapist, the incredibly named Egon Superb, is left to take on all the book's major characters as patients. Maybe it's those other patients, like the classical jug band of Al and Ian, who want to make it big at the White House, who are the main characters--or maybe it's the group of musical ethnologists who take a trip into the jungles of northern California, looking for Kongrosian, and finding only a group of atavistic Neanderthals. I haven't even found a way to mention the fascist rabble-rouser Bertold Goltz, or the fact that Nicole and her counselors are scheming to bring Hermann Goering back to life.

The Simulacra is a book about falsehoods and persuasions. Where is the line between susceptibility to propaganda and mental illness? Al sells "jalopies," shambling one-way vehicles for immigration to Mars, with the help of a "papoola," a bug-like Martian creature capable of subliminal suggestion. (That the papoola itself is a simulacrum is a classic Dick move--a lie within a lie.) Society in The Simulacra is split into low-class "Bes" and upper-clas"Ges," the latter standing for Geheimnis, the German word for "secret," meaning those who are initiated into certain government secrets, like a kind of Gnostic knowledge. And yet being Geheimnis doesn't make one immune to the propaganda; if anything, it makes one's commitment to believing in the propaganda--in the beauty and goodness of Nicole--even stronger.

Kongrosian's madness is brought on by a "commercial," a pesky gnat-like robot that sneaks into your house or car to convince you about how badly you need deodorant. Is this what happens when you take commercials too seriously? And what if you take political propaganda seriously? At the end of the novel, as the Nicole regime begins to fall apart, Kongrosian begins to pick away at the boundaries between himself and the world. He absorbs the bad guy's gun, and leaves in its place a gun-shaped hunk of quivering Kongrosian-flesh. It's the best scene in a good book, and it's strangely reminiscent of Willie Mink at the end of DeLillo's White Noise, who ducks when Jack Gladney says "hail of bullets." Dick goes a step farther, perhaps, than DeLillo: the madness, the inability to tell the simulacrum from the real, infects not only the psyche but the world at large.

I'm continually amazed by how many masterpieces there are in the deep stacks of Dick's library. The Simulacra is not a book that people read much anymore, not like they do Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Perhaps it's not quite on the level of masterworks like VALIS and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, but it's a book of incredible ingenuity, constructed from innumerable layers, frightening and funny and bizarre. I'm amazed, too, by how much of Dick's greatest books are made up of the same materials: telekinetic "psis," the jalopies, the world governments. These element give the impression of a shared "cinematic universe," but in true PKD fashion, they are more like parallel universes, slight but exclusive variations. And so the unique images stand out: what I will remember about The Simulacra, I think, besides the image of Kongrosian's spleen in the shape of a vase, is the group of Neanderthals gathered in the California jungle, watching the government collapse on television and smiling to one another--knowing that their time is at hand again.