The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Editors’ Note

Your humble scholars have wandered into a land that makes a mockery of scholarship. Dick’s own centrifugal and chaotic methodology was more than infectious; it rewrote our attempts to rewrite it. This volume, then, reflects an enthusiastic foray on the reader’s behalf. The larger purposes of archival scholarship could only have been answered with a completely transcribed and fully cross-referenced Exegesis—a thing not bindable into the pages of a book. In the name not of apology but of transparency, we offer an account of our compromises and the decisions that made them possible.

We chose chronological ordering, yet this is a text that defies chronology. Dates were frequently determined only by internal clues or references and so should be regarded as approximate and open to revision by future scholarship. We kept folders intact, despite recognizing these as an artifact of Paul Williams’s archiving rather than Dick’s own ordering. In places where this led to conflict with chronology, we relocated parts of folders; these are noted. Excerpts are identified by bracketed numbers at the top [folder number: page number in folder]. In folders where Dick’s own page numbering suffices, we retained these; in folders with multiple discontinuous numbering sequences, we have renumbered the pages to create a single pagination for the whole. Note that folder numbers do not reflect chronological order; they represent the order in which Williams picked up the pages. Inventive inconsistency is our hallmark here: we were affixing numbers to chaos. Bracketed ellipses indicate some of our excisions and elisions, providing a glimpse of the scope and nature of our editorial choices. Other excisions go unmarked in favor of readability.

The Exegesis began in 1974, with letters and short pieces, and grew steadily. The early pages form an epistolary detective novel, plunging the reader into the 2-3-74 revelation: Dick began his interpretations even as clues in the form of dreams, voices, and visions poured in. Soon, his letters grew longer and denser, some accompanied by enclosures of further typewritten “notes”; short pieces with recognizable beginnings and ends gave way to the extended theoretical speculations and open-ended meditations that characterize the Exegesis proper. By the end of this period, Dick was typing twenty-plus pages at a go—single-spaced, with minimal margins and paragraphing. We have largely offered the earliest entries in full; as longer, more meandering entries begin, in early 1975, we transition to the method of excerpting used for the remainder of the book: selecting discrete chunks of varying lengths, from a single paragraph to several pages (with or without some internal trimming).

Dick’s text is given interpretive, personal, and unsystematic annotation by the editors and these others: Simon Critchley, Steve Erickson, David Gill, N. Katherine Hayles, Jeff Kripal, and Gabriel Mckee. These annotations are identified by their author’s initials. Following the text and an afterword by Richard Doyle, we offer two aids to a reader’s comprehension: a series of individual notes on nomenclature, translation, sources, and editorial interventions; and a glossary of some of the most frequently seen terms, including Dick’s neologisms. This glossary was prepared by the editors, annotators, and the Zebrapedia Group, under the guidance of Erik Davis, but it includes material developed by Lawrence Sutin for his 1991 volume. A modest index follows the afterword.

Let us be the first to say that the notes, glossary, and index are incomplete: nothing short of a Vast Active Living Intelligence could sort all of Dick’s avenues of reference and citation. For one small example, among many, of the challenges in an annotator’s path: Dick often quoted English sources from memory or altered sources as he hurriedly copied them out; his use of German and Latin is willful and imaginative. In consideration of sanity (our own) and time and space (which are after all the same thing), we have offered the gist of his intentions, as we understood them, rather than unraveling his errors. A few names have been disguised in these pages to ensure the privacy of persons not wishing to be named.