randy_byers | Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Reply)

I've read this book once before, probably not that long after it came out in 1982, although I don't remember for sure. I also didn't remember much about it other than the fact that it featured a lot of philosophical talking and a character named Bill who was incapable of abstract thought and who was completely focused on the material and the tangible, especially cars. Funny what makes a lasting impression!

On a second read, I still found Bill a fascinating character, but I found all the characters fascinating. It's a novel of ideas, but it's also very much a novel of character. The first person narrator, Angel Archer (did any of Dick's other novels feature a female protagonist?), is a skeptical, compassionate, conflicted, practical woman -- well-educated and eternally full of self-doubt and the ability to talk herself out of doing what she knows is right. Her best friend, Kirsten, is an older feminist who is acerbic, funny, self-loathing, temperamental, materialistic, and addicted to downers. Timothy Archer, Bishop of California for the Episcopalian Church, is a brilliant, logorrheic, charismatic, patronising, absent-minded intellectual and political activist who is searching for spiritual revelation. He is a heretic who is the head of a church. Kirsten's brother, Bill, is a mentally unstable man with an encyclopedic knowledge of cars and a complete inability to fend for himself. He can see right through Tim Archer's self-serving intellectual bullshit, but only because he's completely unable to follow symbolic logic. The one major character who is a bit of a cipher is Jeff Archer, Tim's son and Angel's husband. He is mostly characterized by his need for his powerful father's approval, but he's another character, like Angel and Tim and to a lesser extent Kirsten, seeking intellectual answers for what are really emotional or spiritual problems.

I had long been under the misapprehension that this was the third volume in the so-called VALIS Trilogy, but it isn't, in fact, a VALIS novel at all. However, reading it right on the heels of three books that were VALIS novels, it's easy to see that it shares the same preoccupation with religious ideas about theophany, revelation, and salvation. The religious ideas discussed in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer are less gnostic than Dick's other religious novels, but they are still often heretical. Early on we learn that Bishop Archer has come to believe that the Holy Spirit does not exist, and in the course of the novel he is tried (but not convicted) of heresy. The other heretical element of the novel is the discovery of scroll fragments that predate the birth of Jesus and contain Christ's wisdom sayings. This seems to prove that Jesus was not Christ. Unlike the lack of evidence for the Holy Spirit, this revelation throws Bishop Archer into a spiritual crisis, although it also ends up giving him hope that he has discovered the pathway to true theophany -- a way to experience the direct Presence of God.

This is a novel about desperate people struggling like mad to find the purpose and meaning of life. It's a story of madness, depression, addiction, spiritual crisis, self-doubt, and suicide. On that level it feels a lot like A Scanner Darkly and the novel VALIS. The emotional terrain is bleak, and Angel tells us right at the beginning, as she goes to a self-help seminar the day that John Lennon is killed, that she has watched everyone she loves die. We then go through this long exploration of religious ideas and relationship failures of various types to learn how Angel has reached the level of despair that introduces the book. In some ways this novel is the ultimate statement of Dick's perspective, and a self-critique as well. Bishop Archer's fantastic ability to endlessly spin ideas and theories about the higher realms and the world beyond is analogous to Dick's ability to tell fantastic tales full of grandiose ideas. Ultimately, the bishop's vast intellectual ability is shown to be a kind of fascinating and absorbing charade, and Angel's epiphany is that what's important in the end is not wisdom but compassion. That could be Dick's philosophy in a nutshell, but his fascination with ideas and knowledge is compulsive. Thus it's impossible for the survivors of this tale, Angel and Bill, to really disengage from Timothy Archer. Like Palmer Eldritch, he seems to have found a way way to invade their lives with his ideas and impractical agenda even after he has died.

This is not a science fiction novel, and it really isn't a novel of the fantastic at all. There are characters who believe that other characters have returned from the dead, but it's entirely possible that they are only imagining it. They may just be nuts, and in fact they probably are. Dick asks us to be compassionate with them. For him, people are always broken and in trouble and in need of help. The search for salvation may be delusional, but we're all looking for it in some form or another. With any luck we'll find a bodhisattva sympathetic to our cause, but in the meantime maybe you could be a bodhisattva too. It might even give you a reason to live.