A Scanner Darkly
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- For the 2006 film adaptation, see A Scanner Darkly (film).
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| Author | Philip K. Dick |
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| Cover Artist | Bob Pepper |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction, Psychological novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Released | 1977 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 220 pp (1st edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-01613-1 (1st edition) |
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 June 1994. The book includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use.
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[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
The "scanner" is a holographic recorder/projector on which the main character views clips of his own life (as part of his job). It is also a reference to a Biblical verse in 1 Corinthians 13 that includes "we see as through a glass darkly", and thus refers to the main character's weak grasp on reality.[1] Ingmar Bergman's 1961 film, Through a Glass Darkly, lifts its title from the same passage. Furthermore, the initials of Scanner Darkly are also the initials of Substance D, which the characters refer to as Slow Death.
In Chapter Eleven of the novel, the novel's central character, Bob Arctor / Fred, thinks to himself, "Does a passive infrared scanner … see into me — into us — clearly or darkly?"
[edit] Plot summary
The main character is both Bob Arctor and Agent Fred, member of a household of drop-out drug-users, as well as 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 or D), 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 penetrate the secretive organization.
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. Although nearly an automaton, "Bruce" is able to carry out his mission due to suggestions implanted during his psychological tests. He picks one of the flowers which are the source of SD, which he will give to his "friends": undercover police agents posing as recovering addicts at the Los Angeles New-Path facility.
[edit] 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 rehabilitation 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 knowledge of existence," "ontological death," or, "death is being itself." (Or perhaps "death of self knowledge.")
[edit] Major themes
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,
- blurred frontiers between the underworld drug commerce and law enforcement agencies (cf. 2 brain hemispheres),
- 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 are a central, recurring symbol in German romanticism, closely tied to the associated youth movements,
- The cynical destruction of another human being to achieve a greater good
In addition, Dick's common 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 spokesman 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 whether what they experience is a drug-induced delusion or a bona fide event 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 few clues, in much the way 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, are rendered paranoid by drug use, and 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 by and reliant upon the existence of the other. The New-Path clinic's duality reflects this ambivalent relationship.
[edit] Autobiographical nature
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 teenage 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 is the alleged burglary of his home and theft of his papers.
Because of his firsthand experience, Dick captures the language, conversation, and culture of drug users in the 1960s with a rare clarity. 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).
[edit] 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 aid 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, incidentally, 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. It received no Nebula and Hugo Awards but was awarded the French equivalent[citation needed] upon its publication there in 1979.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The animated film A Scanner Darkly was authorized by Dick's estate. It was released in July 2006 and stars 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. The film was directed by Richard Linklater, and the animation was directed by Bob Sabiston. The animation was accomplished via the process of rotoscoping using Bob Sabiston's very own Rotoshop software, a process employed in an earlier movie, Waking Life. First shot in live-action, the footage was then painted over, with attention to stylistic consistency — a lengthy undertaking that, even with warnings from Sabiston, the producers underbid causing the film to miss its initial September 2005 release date by an entire year. 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.”
An audiobook of A Scanner Darkly was released in the summer of 2006. It was read by Paul Giamatti.
[edit] Alternate Covers
- http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner.jpg
- http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/tb-scanner.jpg
- http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner5.jpg
- http://www.philipkdick.com/covers/scanner11.jpg
[edit] Notes
- ^ Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly, Vintage Books, 1991, p. 212.
[edit] References
- Sutin, Lawrence. (2005). Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Carroll & Graf.
- Bell, V. (2006) Through a scanner darkly: Neuropsychology and psychosis in 'A Scanner Darkly'. The Psychologist, 19 (8), 488-489. online version
