A Scanner Darkly: Paranoia and Hope

I've been thinking about all the Philip Dick novels I've read, trying to put together the words to explain the 'feel' that he creates in each one of them. There is a sense --most clearly spelled out in Valis --that something has gone wrong with the world. Something is off: but his characters are not sure what.

Dick has heroes, in a way; but these are not strong heroes (Superman), or all-knowing heroes (Spock), or even well-armed heroes (Batman? Dirty Harry?). A Dickian hero is a man (or, in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, a woman) who has made mistakes, who is basically decent, who has flashes of self-knowledge. This individual pursues the path he believes he should take, and in the end, makes some kind of difference.

A Scanner Darkly (first published in 1977) is, perhaps, bleaker than some of Dick's other novels, but even as his main character--Bob Arctor--becomes terribly damaged from the drugs he's taken, the author never quite gives up on him, or on his world.

What has gone wrong in Arctor's world? Who is the enemy? In A Scanner Darkly, the enemy is eventually spelled out clearly: it is a real group of people, with a real agenda. But it is not the drug users themselves (Dick writes about them with empathy and humor), nor the police, whom the author treats kindly as well. It is another group, unexpected, that preys on the weak and the damaged.

When I finished reading ASD for the first time I felt that it was a profoundly anti-drug statement, but an anti-drug statement of an odd kind. As Dick noted himself, in the afterword:

"There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say that they [the drug users] were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were."

I've often felt that Americans make everything - every story, every movie, every issue, every election - into a morality play. Maybe that's what I've been searching for, the unique 'feel' of Dick's work: whatever his books are, they are not morality plays.