According to McKee, what relationship did Dick’s ideas have to (a) Christianity (b) religion and philosophy in general?
Mckee states in the opening paragraph, “Dick’s SF has received a good deal of critical and scholarly attention.” And more often then not it’s negative and Philip k. Dick reacts horribly to it. “If they couldn’t get us to write serious things, they solved the problem by decreeing that what we were writing was serious” Taking a pop form as ‘serious’ is what you do if it won’t go away…they get you to submit your S-F writing to them to criticize.” Dick said in the 1978 Exergesis in response to the scholars ‘attack’ on his work. This sort of reaction and “attack” on Dick’s work doesn’t surprise me in the least. The genre in which he writes wasn’t at the time a credible work of English Literature.
McKee throws around the term “Gnostic” a lot throughout this piece of writing. I can’t agree that Dick’s ideologies can be boiled down to the most basic and religious ceremonies or demonstrations as some other scholars of Dick’s can. I agree whole heartedly with Lorenzo DiTomasso, “So many Dick Scholars take for granted the view that his philosophy is static or entirely coherent. It is not, and sometimes not eve within the context of a single novel.”
REFERENCES
Lorenzo Ditomasso, “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early fiction of Philip K. Dick,” Science Fiction Studies vol. 28 (Spring 2001)
McKee, Gabriel (2004). A Scanner Darkly: Dick as a Christian theologian. In, Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: the science fictional religion of Philip K. Dick. Ny: U press of America
Your second paragraph here would have been a better place to start - and it would have been useful to include a discussion of a primary text to develop your arguments - Dick's work is discussed as being full of religious iconography.
ReplyDelete