how jeet heer betrayed philip k. dick admirers to marxist literary critics

8/6/2019 How Jeet Heer Betrayed Philip K. Dick Admirers to Marxist Literary Critics

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How Jeet Heer Betrayed Philip K. Dick Admirers

to Marxist Literary Criticsby Frank C. Bertrand[A review of: "Marxist Literary Critics Are Following Me!",

by Jeet Heer,Linguafranca, Vol. 11, No. 4, May/June 2001]

"...my ideas, drawn rather from within than from

reading or from an intimate experience with the

world, will not disown their origin; they would

rather incur any reproach than that of a sectarian

bias, and would prefer to succumb by their

innate feebleness than sustain themselves by

borrowed authority and foreign support."J.C. Friedrich Von Schiller,Letters Upon The Aesthetic

Education of Man, 1794

I have been a long time reader of, and sometime subscriber to,Linguafranca, a smartly

edited and designed literary publication in which one can usually find informative if not

incisive articles about the machinations of "academic life" from academic politics to

games of one-up-mansship to the publish-or-perish syndrome. It was with some surprise

and chagrin, therefore, that I recently read inLinguafranca Jeet Heer's article, "Marxist

Literary Critics Are Following Me!", with it's ominous subtitle, "How Philip K. Dick

betrayed his academic admirers to the FBI".

My initial reactions derived not so much from the loaded connotations of Heer's title as

they did fromLinguafranca having printed this at all, for it's far below their usual

standards. Heer's article reads as nothing less than a blatant apologia for those Marxist

literary critics who wield convoluted esoteric jargon in their attempt to make Philip K.

Dick postmodernism's meek poster-child.

Unfortunately for those Marxist literary critics Heer's apologia is nowhere near the

cogency, clarity and class of Plato'sApology, theApologia of Apuleius or

Newman'sApologia Pro Vita Sua. It does remind me of the apologia for the treatment of

heretics in the Middle Ages presented at Oxford late in the 19th century by the Roman

Catholic Church; this can be gleaned from how Heer early on characterizes PKD as "a

canny prophet of virtual reality" and "these critics have played a key role in

the cannonization of Philiip K. Dick" [emphasis mine].

Now, this could be an astute, albeit debatable, observation if it didn't conveniently

overlook what thousands of PKD readers and fans worldwide did via fanzines and

conventions well before the Marxist literary critics happened upon PKD as Columbus did

a few Caribbean Islands. It also ignores the early work of Bruce Gillespie, in SF

Commentary, and the French critics Marcel Thaon and Gerard Klein.

In fact, rather than playing a "key role" and being "Dick's academic champions," the

Marxist literary critics Heer singles out Fredric Jameson, Peter Fitting, Richard Pinhas,


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Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Darko Suvin have attempted to do their best to obscure

PKD, darkly, with a thin veneer of incestuous erudite verbiage meant for converting other

academic critics who are equally determined to make PKD instead an exemplar of

gnosticism and/or mysticism. The Marxist literary critics very much want for this purpose

to surrealistically paint PKD as the "laureate of radical postmodernism", whatever that is

suppose to mean.It's understandable, then, that Heer (a Ph.D. candidate at York University, and co-editor

of the journal left history, with a BA in English and History from the University of

Toronto, where Peter Fitting is an Associate Professor of French) would seek to claim

that Philip K. Dick denounced these poor, misunderstood Marxist literary critics to the

FBI as "...agents of a KGB conspiracy to take over American science fiction." This is

because PKD didn't "...appreciate the methods and styles of contemporary literary

criticism," and therefore his conspiracy story "...can be read as a paranoid fantasy about

literary criticism, which involves not just finding meanings deeply hidden in the text but

sometimes also inventing meanings."

Heer would have been less misguided if he had read Philip K. Dick's FBI file, wherein

one interview memo, in part, states:

"The information which Dick furnished to FBI

Headquarters by letters was reviewed with him. He

furnished generally the same information as reflected in the

two letters. The information reflected in those letters

was presumption only on his part regarding Neo-Nazism

and Minutemen. He did not have any further basis or

substantiation, names of individuals, or additional

information to which he previously furnished." [emphasis

mine]

Also, Elaine Sauter, who spoke with PKD extensively near the end of his life (see: What

If Our World Is Their Heaven: Final Conversations With Philip K. Dick), has stated she

rejects "...the theory that the whole episode was part of Dick's neurosis." More to the

point, she adds, "There's been a big tendency since Phil's death to minimize his

intelligence and his mental health and how personable and intelligent he was."

(see: "Blade RunnerAuthor Suspected Syphilis Plot,"by Janon Fisher)

Then we have the important observations of PKD's last wife, Tessa Dick, who has said,

"Phil told me he'd only sent the first three or four letters, and he stopped mailing them,

because the FBI had lost interest (or perhaps never had any interest) in the case..." In

addition, Dick's procedure was to "write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, go out

in the back alley, and drop the letter in the trash bin. The authorities will receive the letter

if, and only if, they are spying on him." (see: "The Nature of Dick's Fantasies," by Gregg

Rickman)

As someone who has actually interviewed Philip K. Dick and read his extant letters, I

heartily second Sauter and Tessa's comments. I would also note that in an early letter,

Phil writes about reading Lionel Trilling and Ortega y Gasset. Then there are his

observations about being influenced by Henry Miller, Nathanael West, James T. Farrell,

and "especially Schiller". To this should be added his strong interest in "black humor"


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and admiration for Vonnegut's novel Player Piano, all of which make Heer's allegations

highly suspect.

But what really needs emphasis and remembering by Heer and the Marxist literary

critics is that PKD once wrote a very witty novel titled The Man Who Japed. Until Heer

and his ilk understand this we will continue to see articles like "Marxist Literary Critics

Are Following Me!" that carefully pick and choose only "facts" helpful to promoting theMarxist/Postmodernist cause, and not Philip K. Dick. (FCB, 7/01)

how jeet heer betrayed philip k. dick admirers to marxist literary critics

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