PART III
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aaron Barlow
In his 1964 novel Clans of the Alphane Moon, Philip K. Dick presents a third way of looking at people whose lives and attitudes move from the norm. For the most part, throughout the history of Europe and America, such people have either been removed from society or society has attempted to bring them into the fold. In both cases, these people, or their differences, become unmentionable in society. Dick presents the possibility of chosen separation—not exclusion—accompanied by acceptance (even celebration) of difference. This embrasure of alterity is at the heart of much of Dick’s work, of course, but it is of even greater significance here.
Since the publication of Clans, cultural possibilities for alterity manifestation have expanded in ways that could not have been predicted—through the internet and the social media that have grown particularly strong over the past decade. One of the peculiar aspects of the novel (and even of the short story that sparked it), however, is that it can be seen as a metaphor for aspects of contemporary social media—especially for the groups that separate themselves from the mainstream centering around belief in specified conspiracy theories, end-of-time convictions, and other fragmented ‘truths’ built from personal needs of all sorts. The communities of otherness that result have striking similarities to the clans of the novel though it was never Dick’s intent to outline any ‘real’ future. Instead, he was looking at the idea of the unknown or unseen other through the lens of definition of mental illness. This chapter is an attempt to make sense of that in a much-changed world.
In Philippe de Broca’s 1966 film Le Roi de cœur, the struggles of World War I allow the overlooked inmates of an insane asylum to spend a day as the residents of the nearby town—the only outsider being a British soldier (Alan Bates) trying to save the town by disarming a German explosive on a timer. At the end of the movie, the former inmates return to their asylum—trailed by Bates.
The movie follows Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by four years. Experience working in a mental hospital tied to his own use of drugs, particularly LSD, had led Kesey to question just who is insane—those society decides to lock away or those with the keys. He makes it even more complicated: many of the inmates in the institution where most of the book takes place have committed themselves voluntarily—they locked themselves up. They prefer the regularized “inside” to what they experience as the chaos without. Is that insane?
That question, raised in both works, is classic and it used to be commonplace: who’s crazy, those inside or their minders? Or, by extension into politics, the people or their leaders? This was a prime focus of American discussion during the 1960s, when it seemed that leaders at all levels had spiraled away from any real connection to reality—or that reality wasn’t really all that it was cracked up to be in the first place, certainly not in terms of sanity. But the discussions are much older: Hamlet or his uncle? Does either reflect sane leadership? Who commands reality in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale”? Today, we continue the concern if not the talk. People’s beliefs—even people seeming sane—in nonsense is often unshakeable … and “people” includes members of the ruling classes everywhere. It is also resurging today, when our leaders seem continually to be other than what they seem. And people, even those leaders, continue to believe in things that are demonstrably false.
The question of normative sanity is resurging in importance today, even though we don’t talk about it as much as we used to—not seriously, at least, and in hushed tones. Ours is a time when our leaders seem continually to be other than what they are and whatever sanity they claim appears to be a function of individuality and, oddly, is often excused as political expediency. This is a time when, also, deviation from the norm is less acceptable than ever. It is a time when people, even American leaders, insist on believing in things that are demonstrably false. And that insistence spreads across political, class, ethnic, and religious spectra.
Maybe it has ever been so.
In his 1953 short story (the precursor to his 1964 novel Clans of the Alphane Moon) “Shell Game,” Philip K. Dick has one of his characters comment, “A myth can be picked up by a whole society, believed and taught to the next generation. Gods, fairies, witches—believing a thing doesn’t make it true. For centuries, Terrans believed the Earth was flat.”1 Donald Trump and millions of Americans insist that Barack Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii. There are still people convinced that the moon landings were a hoax, that the twin towers were brought down by the CIA, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone, that Area 51 contains proof of alien visitation. “False flag” has become a commonplace explanation, no matter the incident. This Gilbert-and-Sullivan (“Things are seldom what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream”2) view of the world even set off a chain of events that led a sociology professor, James Tracy, to lose his job at Florida Atlantic University. In regard to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, he “repeatedly questioned whether the shooting—and other recent mass shootings reported by the media—actually happened.”3 Conspiracies are increasingly seen everywhere and in everything.
Thing is, recognizing that others are being crazy doesn’t make you sane—or your beliefs rational or the conspiracies you see real (or false, for that matter). Nor does deciding you are the crazy one somehow give you a better perspective or the bragging rights of being different. This is the point Dick makes in Clans and in the body of his work as a whole.
Annie Ross wrote in her 1952 lyrics to Wardell Gray’s tune “Twisted”:
My analyst … said I was the type that was most inclined
When out of his sight to be out of my mind.4
These lines are packed with implications, including ones about control, assumptions, self-flattery and relative rationality—all topics Dick would also address. They show, certainly, a willingness to see oneself as the crazy one, reveling in difference in a way that has almost disappeared today, paradoxically in that we now take mental illness more seriously as treatable and mainstreamable than in the past. That is, we see it as a problem we can solve, believing that its “sufferers” are not irredeemable but able (with drugs and counselling) to eventually lead “normal” lives, ones worthy of a lack of notice. Because we don’t any longer completely write off those with psychiatric troubles, however, we tend to lose them as metaphors and as vehicles for satire.
Crazily, this has led us to lose sight of our own fragile sanity and the weaknesses of our own subjective (and even variable) stances, grabbing hard onto our personal visions of our own sanities and truth as truth in a world increasingly—and documentably—crazy. We can’t talk about it.
This has also led us to use diversity as a norming tool, as a means of accommodating difference so that we can then, conveniently, ignore it. It can also make reading a certain kind of book or seeing some movies uncomfortable for some readers and viewers—unless they are shown a path at the end for movement by the different into certain kinds of conformity, generally some sort of acceptance of the particular difference as acceptable as an anomaly—as unworthy of mention. While we claim to celebrate difference, our actions suppress it.
What de Broca, Kesey, and Ross are presenting is something subtly but significantly different from contemporary mainstreaming: their characters are not asking for acceptance from the broader society or a milieu where no one admits to noticing their difference but for the space to live as they see fit. This, for the greater part of society today, is unsettling. Their challenge to conformity, while popular for a time (along with more direct attacks) in the 1960s, is one few of us in the early 21st century are willing to face. More than at any time since World War II, we acquiesce, feeling we have to do things in certain ways.
When someone shows us, by their own actions, that it isn’t really true that difference can be ignored, we either find excuses for their special circumstances (a means of ignoring) or turn away. Nonconformity, to have an impact or simply not to be suppressed, now must center on the trivial. Tattoos, septum rings, and odd hair colors replace the substance of alternatives to the mainstream—and make us forget that, for many, the alternative was not simply a choice of style but a necessity determined by inability to force the vagaries of a particular individuality into the confines of conformity. The people in the de Broca movie and the Kesey novel and the narrator of Ross’s song aren’t trying to be different. They just are.
Attitudes toward the different have changed. Take, for example, the greatest success of mainstreaming of our time, homosexuality. Once it was considered an illness on the level of those depicted in Clans. Today, especially since the legalization of gay marriage, homosexuality is on the verge of becoming part of the unnoticeable, so normal an aspect of being in society has it become. The exuberance of difference, of a distinct gay culture may well disappear as the unique identity—even when openly hidden—of being gay no longer has more significance than, say, having blue eyes. The same, of course, has been happening for centuries in America as minorities and immigrants have assimilated into the broader culture. They change that culture for the better, yes, but something good is often also shed—or becomes mere decoration. It may be that acceptance of homosexuality is a triumph for recognition of the importance of alterity within society, but it might also be the same sort of embrasure by the norm that makes difference disappear or become simply decoration (as it does in Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use”). Or an unmentionable.
Among the deaf, there are those who don’t want operations allowing them to hear, not willing to lose the tight-knit community they now inhabit. Yet the pressure to be normalized into the larger culture is strong and, most of us would argue, ultimately necessary. “Mainstreaming” is the word of the day, and has become so in part because of the belittling nature of the old separations.
Unfortunately, one side effect of mainstreaming is a loss of respect for the substance of difference. Difference, in its manifestations, is to be ignored. Once accommodated, it must no longer exist. Another side effect is the loss of a method for discussing difference in art. Illness, among other things, can no longer be a metaphor for the value of distinction.
As a result of all of this, the sheer joy of being unique degrades. No longer can the Luisas of the world luxuriate in their own being, as Luisa does in The Fantasticks:
Please, God, please!
Don’t—let—me—be—normal!5
Today, it has become: Please go, please, don’t let anyone treat me as anything but normal!
And that may be good—as far as it goes.
But it also can be stultifying. We have become so attuned to the idea of normal being the goal that we have reached the point where any recognition of variance runs the risk of being judged offensive. We hesitate to call anyone fat or old or bald (or any variety of other things) not because these things aren’t clear to everyone but because calling attention to these traits highlights deviation from the norm—and that, we have come to believe, is a slap in the face.
Movies like Le Roi de cœur or Hal Ashby’s 1971 Harold and Maude would be approached gingerly today (if made at all)—and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s—Nest would be criticized for its naïve take on the variances of mental illness (among other things). The song “Twisted,” though still sometimes recorded, might be taken as callous disrespect if it were new.
Clans of the Alphane Moon would be dismissed, were a contemporary Philip Dick to manage to see it published today, as ignorant and insulting. Its basic premise, after all, is based on stereotyping of people suffering from mental illnesses, a doubly heinous crime, for stereotyping is as bad as singling out sufferers of any difference at all from the norm. The novel’s plot, logic, and characters also step outside of the expected, further removing it from today’s constrained acceptable.
Yet it is just these flaws that make it timely, for it becomes a novel that can awake us from the smugness of our narrow preconceptions and the limitations of our own visions.
Dick, through much of his writing, argues for seeking another way (or ways) of looking at the normal, the different and, in fact, anyone struggling to come to terms with their own existence within a milieu of normalization or even massive differentiation. His concern was right in line with the zeitgeist of the 1960s on the heels of the conformist 1950s that he had struggled against in both his personal life and his writing.
Today, in a society with its own conformity every bit as powerful as that of the “fabulous fifties,” though different in compass, we also have need for someone who can present a little of the value of nonconformity while still respecting those needs of individual respect and generalized equality. Dick, if we allow ourselves to look beyond our own norms, can still provide that.
In the 1960s, Dick was relatively unknown outside of the small community surrounding the science fiction genre. His 1962 book, The Man in the High Castle, had won science fiction’s most prestigious award, the Hugo for Best Novel, but that meant little to anyone not already a fan of the genre. He would not break out until after Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner (adapted from Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) had achieved cult status in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Dick died just before the movie’s release.
Though Dick did see himself as a visionary, he never thought of himself as a predictor of the future. He simply tried to reflect his own concerns and those of his milieu. Though he can be seen as having predicted Ronald Reagan (in “The Mold of Yancy” and elsewhere) and had created a character who seems to foreshadow both Obama and Trump (Jim-Jam Brisken, an African-American “news clown” in a trademark red wig who becomes president), seeing into the future was never his purpose nor his goal. Though Clans of the Alphane Moon does present, we discover, 21st-century dilemmas over belief, Dick was concerned not with what might happen in some haphazard future but with what was happening around and within him. The fact remains that this very 1960s novel (in respects beyond even its considerations of mental illness) still manages to speak to very real concerns appearing today—though it does so in tones and voices we might not want to hear.
Dick has left us a body of work that may speak to America more than 30 years after his death as vividly as it did to the small science fiction community he addressed in his lifetime. He has become known far beyond the science fiction community for his visions of dystopia, personal salvation, and more. “Phildickian” has become something of a thing and cultlike adoration now accompanies his name.
Though not one of his better-known novels, Clans of the Alphane Moon fits squarely within the pattern of explorations that has kept his novels vibrant and popular even as times have changed. Yes, the 1960s were a time of questioning not only who was running the asylum but what the asylum was—which was inside, which out? Is there a difference? Yes, since then, Americans have become much more sanguine in their confidence that they know the truth, that they each are the sane one.
Americans also have come to believe, on the other hand, that their truth is common. But, at the same time, visions of “truth” have fragmented even in public perception, something Dick had always explored. The old Quaker joke hits closer today than ever before but Dick (who had Quaker connections anyhow) would have appreciated its truth even more than 50 years ago: Two people in the simple clothes of Quakers of the past are sitting on a bench watching the world go by. One turns to the other, “I think that the whole world is crazy, except for me and thee.” A pause. “And sometimes I am concerned about thee.”
The clans of the title of Dick’s novel are named for contemporary 1960s images of mental disorders, stereotypes that many today would find offensive. They include the Pares (paranoiacs), the Manses (the manic-depressives), the Skitzes (schizophrenics), the Heebs (hebephrenics), the Polys (polymorphic schizophrenics), the Deps (depressives) and the Ob-Coms (obsessive-compulsives). They live in Adophville, Da Vinci Heights, Joan d’Arc, Gandhitown, Hamlet Hamlet, and Cotton Mather Estates—depending on the nature of their “affiliation.” The Ob-Coms don’t seem to have a town of their own and that of the Deps isn’t named. As Charles Dee Mitchell describes the home world of these clans, “Alpha III M2 is a small moon in the Alpha Centauri system used by Earth as a global mental facility. The moon was one giant hospital treating all known forms of mental derangement. The fact that these break down to only a half dozen or so reflects the mid-sixties when the novel was written.”6 Mitchell, like others, goes on to connect the novel to Dick’s own experience as a psychiatric patient, but I would hesitate to push that too far.
It doesn’t really matter that Dick’s categories are capricious and, even for his time, uninformed. His divisions are little more than sly parts of his somewhat comedic frame; never are they meant to be a reflection of professional psychiatric thinking. Behind the satire, Dick is certainly exploring the place of so-called mental illness in relation to healthy society, but he has little interest in exploring the putative diseases of the various groups. Anyway, as Lord Running Clam, a “Ganymedean slime mold” character in the novel, states categorically, “‘Insane’… is, strictly speaking, a legal term.”7
It’s also a choice:
“If you’ll stay here,” Chuck said, “on Alpha III M2 and not return to Terra—”
“I am staying here,” Mary said. “I’ve already worked it out.” She indicated Ignatz Ledebur. “Not with him; this was only for a little while and he knew it. I wouldn’t live in Gandhitown—it’s not the place for me, not by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Where, then?”
Mary said, “I think Da Vinci Heights.”
“Why?” Incredulous, he stared at her.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t even seen it. But I admire the Manses; I even admire the one I killed. He never was afraid, even when he was running for his tank and knowing he wouldn’t make it. Never in my life have I seen anything resembling that, not ever.”
The Manses,” Chuck said, “will never let you in.”
“Oh yes.” She nodded calmly. “They certainly will.”8
This has nothing to do with the reality of mental illness (whatever that may be) but with the realities of structure, perception, and choice. It has to do with the ways a society defines itself, its insiders and its fringe. It has to do with norms and behavioral expectations. Finally, it has to do with the decisions one makes about how one lives one’s life.
It is in this last that Clans of the Alphane Moon relates most significantly to both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Le Roi de cœur. All three posit mental illness—at least for some people—as a choice. Or rather, recognition of personal difference from the norm as a choice: one can either admit what one is or pretend to toe the standard line.
Of course, as anyone who has struggled with psychiatric disorders knows, choice has very little to do with the work to stabilize oneself in the face of out-of-control aspects of … what? Personality? Chemistry? But that doesn’t really matter, for that’s not what any of these works explores. In all three of them, the conventions of mental illness become devices for exploring the idea of sanity itself. They become means for questioning our assumptions about normalcy—not for exploring the reasons some individuals find their roads veering away from the main drag.
If “insanity” is a legal term, “sanity” must be one, too. In terms, it would follow, of the natural world—that is, the one beyond human constructs—both are irrelevant as they are human fictions.
There are two plot strands in Dick’s novel, one concerning the attempt by the residents of the moon to retain independence and the other tracking the deteriorating relationship of Mary and Chuck Rittersdorf back on Earth and, finally, on the moon. Unfortunately, according to Jason Koornick, one of the best and most knowledgeable commentators on Dick’s fiction, “With its over-the-top weirdness and convoluted plot structure, Clans of the Alphane Moon can be best understood by those with an ‘acquired taste’ for PKD’s style.”9 Koornick sees the book as a work of irony and humor—which it most certainly is—but the novel offers a great deal more than that, as Koornick would probably agree. Reviewing the book online, Bob Wright says it deals “with the human situation before (and yes, quite often to the detriment of) the science. Clans of the Alphane Moon is about marriage and divorce, sex and impotence, blackmail, guilt, and self-loathing.”10 Ultimately, though, it is about the meaning of sanity.The importance of the novel today—the reason for reading it—lies in its depiction of the struggle to adapt to a particular mindset while still operating effectively within the broader universe. What makes the novel distinct from the early story of Dick’s is this: the adaptation fails in “Shell Game,” leaving most of the characters dead and the remnants bent on a course that could prove disastrous to the rest of humanity. Dick, when he wrote the short story, had not yet reached the conclusions about beings and being that would color his career from the 1960s on, ones that posit that there is always the possibility of alternative to destruction. He writes of Mary toward the end of the novel, from the perspective of Chuck: “She, as well as he, as well as everyone on Alpha III M2 including the arrogant Mans rep Howard Straw, struggled for balance, for insight; it was a natural tendency for living creatures. Hope always existed, even perhaps—God forbid—for the Heebs.”11 This is also the conclusion shown by de Broca, when the soldier, Plumpick, shows up at the asylum, naked, and by Kesey, when inmate Bromden smashes the window and leaves the institution.
What makes Dick’s novel work is what at first seems simply an amateurish (or rushed) grafting of the Rittersdorf story onto an expanded (from the short story) and much more sophisticated and subtle vision of the society of the moon. On the surface, this book seems simply a cobbling together, a cheap means of reaching the Ace Books word count that Dick had to meet in order to take advantage of that new celebrity (even if only in the science fiction community) resulting from the Hugo award. And that is certainly the case. The parts of the novel can seem uncoordinated and their combination gratuitous. If we don’t know their genesis, they can even seem … crazy, following a logic unavailable to the rest of us.
Part of the genius of Dick is that he does not follow the rules of his art but ones from other sources completely—even imagined ones, making it possible for him to explore deviation in ways that more rule-bound writers cannot. Yet he still manages to make his work (most of the time) accessible and enjoyable. Even if those in the know about literature look down their noses at him for what they see as a lack of craft, Dick valued his unique explorations and the unique aspects of the characters he created—and even his process of creation. The characters may not fit the norm, but they survive despite being different, and there are plenty of readers who appreciate that more than adherence to standards of authorial craft.
The problem, as Dick might see it, in contemporary society is that we feel it necessary to normalize people in order for them to survive. We can’t let anyone be different. Not even novelists.
This novel is different. Even its characters are. From that “Ganymedean slime mold” Lord Running Clam to the TV comic Bunny Hentman (a precursor to that Jim-Jam Brisken of “Top Stand-By Job” and A Crack in Space) to the various inhabitants of the moon, none makes much sense in our standardized terms of character development. Not even the Rittersdorfs do.
Nor should they. Each character exists in a subjective frame that each believes objective—except, of course, for a few of the people on the moon and Lord Running Clam who understand that subjectivity is the norm and objectivity a fiction. The slime mold with the oxymoronic name—the most bizarre of the characters—is the only one who approaches sanity—except for Chuck himself, even though Chuck has been suicidal early in the novel. In fact, when, at the end of the book, Lord Running Clam asks Chuck what his plans are, he says he is going to:
“Go ahead and found my own settlement,” Chuck said. “I’m calling it Thomas Jeffersonburg. Mather was a Dep, Da Vinci was a Mans, Adolf Hitler was a Pare, Gandhi was a Heeb. Jefferson was a—” He hunted for the correct word. “A Norm. That will be Thomas Jeffersonburg: the Norm settlement. So far containing only one person, but with great anticipations for the future.”12
The point, the final one of the novel, is that even normalcy is only another deviation, simply one of a number of possibilities. The difference, for Chuck, is that his Norm community is tiny. It does not have the strength of numbers that allows it to dominate back on Earth or in our own time. The Norms, even if the community grows, will have to negotiate as equals with all of the other clans. The fact of deviation from the norm becomes a commonplace, not an aberration. The pressure to conform disappears.
The pressure to pretend that all one sees is conformity also disappears. That is, overt recognition of difference is not seen as an affront but as a natural part of interaction; alterity itself become part of the norm. Furthermore, even when, in the novel, traits associated with different of the groups are denigrated, the individuals are not put down because of them. If they are criticized (and they are), it is for their particular personalities. There are no games, no pretenses, no imagining that not mentioning something makes it invisible. Or, to follow one of our contemporary bits of mass insanity, that makes it disappear.
Notes
1. Philip K. Dick, “Shell Game,” The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, vol. 3 (Los Angeles: Underwood/Miller, 1987), 196.
2. Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert, “Things Are Seldom What They Seem,” in The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. Ian Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 227.
3. Susan Svrluga, “University Fires Professor Who Says Sandy Hook Was a Hoax,” The Washington Post, January 6, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/01/06/university-fires-professor-who-says-sandy-hook-was-a-hoax/.
4. Annie Ross, “Twisted,” King Pleasure Sings/Annie Ross Sings (New York: Original Jazz Classics, 1992).
5. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, The Fantasticks: 39th Anniversary Edition (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1990), 38–39.
6. Charles Dee Mitchell, “Philip K. Dickathon: Clans of the Alphane Moone,” Worlds Without End blog, http://blog.worldswithoutend.com/2011/12/philip-k-dickathon-clans-of-the-alphane-moon/#.Vzxv5pErJhE.
7. Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), 207.
8. Ibid., 210–211.
9. Jason Koornick, “Review of Clans of the Alphane Moon,” Philip K. Dick Fan Site, http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/reviews/review-by-jason-koornick-clans-of-the-alphane-moon-1964/.
10. Bob Wright, “Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick,” PARSEC, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/roboman/www/sigma/review/alphanemoon.html.
11. Dick, Clans, 221.
12. Ibid., 217.