By the late 1960s, the substance of the counterculture was changing too. Between 1967 and 1970, for instance, thousands of young people began establishing communes in the mountains and forests. It was for them that Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog. For these back-to-the-landers, and for many others who never actually established new communities, the traditional political mechanisms of social change had gone bankrupt. While their contemporaries formed political parties and organized marches against the Vietnam War, these young people—whom I will call the New Communalists—turned away from political action toward technology and changes in consciousness as the principal forces of social transformation. If mainstream American culture was a world of conflict, from riots at home to wars abroad, the world of the commune was one of harmony. If the American government deployed vast weapons systems to destroy innocent lives thousands of miles away, the New Communalists deployed small-scale technologies—from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and let them experience the splendor of their shared humanity. Finally, if corporate and government bureaucracies required men and women to become specialists adept at fragmenting their own psyches, technologically induced experiences of togetherness would restore their self-reliance and wholeness.
The greater the hippies’ optimism had been, the greater the anger we can read in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, written in 1972: the corporation/rehabilitation center is also the largest grower and distributor of drugs; the bureaucracy assaults its citizens’ nerves with pervasive surveillance, concealment, and lies. Caught between them, a generation of young people can only be torn between the two extremes of drug-induced bliss and endless, absurd work.
In that age not yet belonging to computers, global capitalism, or brain science, such “fragmentation of the psyche” is itself, first of all, one of these two extremes: a split between solidarity and solitude, between Buddhism and psychoanalysis—above all, between the death drive and the “nirvana principle.” Nirvana is an impulse toward self-destruction, a desperate choice to annihilate the ego and withdraw from an unbearable madness (today, too, more and more people are turning to Buddhism). The death drive is precisely the opposite: “At this moment, the ‘normal’ functioning of things, the ‘normal’ process trapped helplessly in the dull inertia of material reality, is temporarily suspended; we enter the enchanted domain of suspended animation.” It was Kafka who gave literature its ultimate description of the subject of drive:
In fact, as Ulysses approached, the mighty singers did not sing. Perhaps they believed that silence alone would suffice against this adversary; perhaps the look of joy on Ulysses’ face, as he thought of nothing but his wax and chains, made them forget all their singing. … But they—more beautiful than ever—stretched their limbs and turned, letting their terrible hair stream freely in the wind and spreading their claws wide upon the rocks. They no longer wished to tempt anyone, only to hold for as long as possible the radiance reflected in Ulysses’ great eyes.
The subject of drive marks the beginning of silence, a withdrawal from enjoyment. At this point, the subject finally recognizes itself as the impossible thing within reality, as reality’s surplus—as the Thing I actually am. This allows us to rewrite the ending of A Scanner Darkly. Imagine that the flower Bruce has hidden is discovered. He is tortured and imprisoned, yet insists, again and again, on getting a blue flower. He knows that the order here cannot permit this, but persists, even though he does not know why … If, as Benjamin says, capitalism is ultimately a religion, then the religion of capitalism is founded on the exploitation, control, and shaping of the subject of drive.
We can now provisionally set aside this rift between Buddhism and psychoanalysis (what could express their profound opposition better than 1968? While Allen Ginsberg chose to intervene in the unrest in Chicago with his “Om,” Lacan observed acidly: “You want a new master, and you will get one”). Let us turn to the other side of this divided subject—and of the story: the “scanner,” which sits so uneasily with the corporate conspiracy.
It is easy to construct three stories of A Scanner Darkly on the model of Bentham’s panopticon. First comes the prisoner, Bob Arctor, for whom the center of the prison is a pure fiction: he never knows whether anyone is there. Indeed, certainty that someone was there might dispel some of the terror. Second comes the guard, Fred: a dead, rigid gaze, driven mad by watching without end. Third comes Bruce, who knows that Bob Arctor and Fred are both himself. Here we encounter the most uncanny experience of all: when we watch ourselves, it is not only that I become a substantial object; my gaze itself becomes an object.
Yet this neat triad leaves a fourth figure uninterpreted: Bob Arctor as a happy, fulfilled, white middle-class man. We can hardly resist the temptation to call him Keanu Reeves. This is the truth of the figure on the screen: we must always return, in the end, to the actor himself. He is also the truth of Bob Arctor/Fred. Only when we exclude him can the protagonist glimpse his own division (just as we can accept the story only by “excluding” the actor himself). The story begins:
One day, as he was about to take a tub of popcorn from beneath the sink, Arctor struck his head on the corner of the kitchen cabinet directly above him. It hurt, and his scalp was slightly cut, but this unexpected, trifling injury finally opened his eyes. Thoughts flashed through his mind in quick succession. He did not hate the cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the backyard with its lawnmower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to fall apart—and soon he got his wish, gradually beginning a new and somber life from which everything he resented had been swept away.
This is precisely the logic of a little bit of the Real. Before this, Keanu Reeves had been “like a little plastic boat, sailing smoothly on forever, until it finally sank and everyone secretly felt a little relief.” Once this wholly contingent material element is suddenly discovered, the previously balanced, indifferent symbolic order collapses under its own internal inconsistency. What we have here is precisely psychosis in Lacan’s sense: in rejecting the life of a “happy, fulfilled, bourgeois white man,” he also rejects the “normal state” of things. The master signifier—the “paternal metaphor”—is rejected, excluded from the symbolic order, and returns in the Real in the form of psychotic visions.
We must also attend to the reverse side of this foreclosure. Psychosis—in Arctor’s case, we should narrow the category to paranoia—undoes primal repression, and the gaze as object is reincorporated into reality. He knows perfectly well that a vast surveillance system is operating all around him. Is this not what we experience in auditory hallucinations? Whatever we say, a voice always answers. This is the primordial speech of the big Other, the foundation that makes all dialogue possible: silence.
We—and here I speak for everyone—did not understand ourselves until we studied the instructions from above and suddenly saw the light. We then discovered that, without this leadership, neither our books nor our common sense would suffice for even the smallest task within the concerted undertaking as a whole.
This lets us understand Kafka’s protagonists anew. In contrast to “The Great Wall of China,” when they confront the vast bureaucratic machinery of The Trial or The Castle, they face the fragmented big Other of the law, unable to give people their respective identities, unable even to maintain its own consistency. The profound humiliation K suffers in court thus differs radically from the familiar interpretation that “God is too far away from us.” Quite the contrary: “Our world is merely a bad mood of God’s, one of his bad moods.” As William Cowper put it, “God moves in a mysterious way.” This is a God far too close to the earthly world. No wonder, then, that beneath his parents’ roof:
One morning, Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic beetle.
Returning to A Scanner Darkly, we should stress that the construction of paranoia—having undergone alienation but not separation—is not simply “pathological.” Quite the contrary: faced with an eruption of the Thing–enjoyment, paranoia is a last, desperate attempt—like K in the courtroom, who “raises his hand above his eyes, trying to see what is happening.” As Arctor says (in a monologue: this scene seems closer to theater than to cinema):
What does it really see? Into my brain? My soul? … I hope it can see a clear image, because I am losing the ability to see myself. … Because if even the scanner sees only a blur, then we are cursed, forever, until we die, knowing very little—and getting even that little wrong.
What, then, could wound him more deeply than discovering that this big Other is merely himself: an addict, an utter failure, a creature unable even to work out what he is? When reality sinks into the Real, only the autistic subject remains.
Only now can we bring together the two categories discussed above. For Hegel, the transition from the “animal soul” immersed in nature to “normal” subjectivity always requires a “vanishing mediator”: a withdrawal from reality that opens a space for reconstructing the symbolic order. This mediator is the “night of the world.” (We can understand Lacan’s claim that “normality is only a subspecies of madness” in this light. Far from the vulgar notion that “we are all abnormal to some extent,” it means that our “normality” itself rests on the logic of psychosis.) On the other hand, the experience in which “here a bloody head rises up, there a white, terrifying ghost suddenly appears” is the best illustration of the partial drives. Only when desire breaks the circuit of drive can a wholly new pattern of desire emerge. As Jameson’s analysis of Chevengur shows, it all begins with:
The first moment of world-reduction, in which idols are destroyed and the old world is swept away in violence and pain, is itself the precondition for reconstructing something else. Before entirely new, previously unimagined sensations and feelings can emerge, this first moment of return to absolute immanence is indispensable: an utterly coarse immanence, a blank state of ignorance.
Then comes the second stage, the reconstruction of patterns of dreaming and desire:
This process is easily mistaken for nothing more than reconstruction or utopian construction. In fact, however, it also requires first finding a way to imagine utopia. Perhaps in a more Western psychoanalytic idiom: … we can conceive of this new beginning of the utopian process as a desire to desire, learning how to desire, the invention of the desire called utopia, and an entirely new set of rules for imagining these things—a set of narrative techniques without precedent in earlier literary conventions.
Bruce’s tragedy is that he has been swept through the first stage but cannot begin the second. As he labors like a peasant, all that remains to him is this “utterly coarse immanence” (absolute peasant immanence), the human at degree zero. Reduced to an inhuman production machine, Bruce has also “died” within the symbolic order. This living-dead creature is precisely the “sublime object of ideology”—in Stalin’s own words, a piece of “special material.”
Here we meet the ultimate temptation of a vulgar reading of A Scanner Darkly: the bureaucratic machine uses this pitiful creature, draining his vitality to serve its “cause.” That “cause” is often obscure and, to a large extent, doomed to failure. It is easy to imagine a shady agreement between the police and the vast plantation-corporation to erase the truth and anyone who comes close to it. Everything about Bruce would then become meaningless. The best solution, accordingly, would be to return to “nature” and keep away from “politics,” as the hippies chose to do … The same approach reads Chevengur as Platonov’s indictment of communist utopia. Its depictions of slaughter reminded the censors of an all-too-familiar oppositional voice. Remember: Platonov completed Chevengur in 1929, but it could not be published until 1988, by which time even Bukharin had been rehabilitated—the Soviet Union was already dying.
But what if another interpretation were possible? What if what Chevengur and A Scanner Darkly depict were precisely an expression of the highest fervor? Near the end of Platonov’s immortal work, when the bureaucrat from Moscow comes to “evaluate” the town:
That morning, Serbinov saw a frying pan made of fir wood sitting on a table, and on a rooftop an iron flag hung from a pole—a flag that would not flutter in the wind.
At this moment, we can distinctly feel the “weight” of the words: life itself has congealed into something that can no longer be called “everyday.” This is not the hallucinatory pastoral idyll of the New Communalists. (We can still see the influence of this communalism in today’s internet culture, yet the internet is plainly far removed from the pastoral dream. Once again, it is not that something went wrong: the internet is the truth of that dream.) On the contrary, this is life in its original form, a political category: Kafka’s “fools,” operating tirelessly. Are the “fir-wood frying pan” and the “iron flag that will not flutter in the wind” not precisely bodies of enjoyment?
By Andrei Platonov.
This also explains Platonov’s indifferent perspective on the slaughter. It is not that he wanted to stand apart; he had never cared. In the actually existing utopia of Chevengur, this violence and terror had already been accepted as part of the order. This is what distinguishes Lenin from Stalin: Chevengur unquestionably comes from Lenin, while the censors who try to repress the slaughter belong to Stalin. The return of this repressed material is, of course, the Stalinist purges.
This is also the paradox of A Scanner Darkly. Philip K. Dick presents this blank subject and his stupid enjoyment, but the next interpretive step remains open. Whether the figure of Keanu Reeves–Bob Arctor–Fred–Bruce is a pitiful victim or a hero—even if he “knows not what he does”—depends entirely on the perspective from which we examine him. The film of A Scanner Darkly is therefore also the only successful adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s work. Its medium, poised delicately between cinema in the usual sense and full animation, produces endlessly proliferating appearances: precisely a metaphor for the body as conceived from Foucault to Deleuze, surrounded by forces that oppress, imprison, and even destroy it. At the same time, the body is becoming, escaping, using speech to convey itself to others in the form of cries and appeals …
The one irony is that today, with fluidity becoming the norm, it seems impossible even to distinguish illegal migrants driven by violence and war from the rich, who can freely choose their homes, occupations, and even identities. When Lacan declared in 1975, “I rise up against philosophy” (Je m’insurge contre la philosophie), it was precisely Deleuze and his Anti-Oedipus that he opposed. Embracing the productive power of presymbolic libidinal flux does not subvert existing structures of power. To return once again to the New Communalists and the internet: push Deleuze’s claims to their extreme, and all we pursue is a game of polymorphous perversity, throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into the fantasy (of resistance).
Let us return to the panoptic triad—but this time include the viewer. First, the protagonist on the screen: in questioning the scanner’s gaze, he also tries to pierce the screen directly. His words are ultimately a cry before the enigma of the big Other’s desire: “What do you want?” (Che vuoi?) Second, the viewer: safely distanced from the story, entitled to interpret it—yet, as the film works on him, he discovers that he either sees too little or has seen too much. Third comes the synthesis of these two. Today, as biopolitics penetrates ever more deeply into our lives, everything we do can be quantified. The vast computing power of user activity monitoring (UAM) permits no margin of error:
Some companies have developed devices that not only track employees’ movements but also analyze social dynamics at work: how employees talk, for how long, in what tone, how they sit at lunch, whom they drink coffee with, and so on. In 2015, the Boston-based analytics company Sociometric Solutions supplied twenty companies with employee ID badges fitted with microphones, location sensors, and accelerometers, to investigate how employee interactions affected performance. One of these companies, Bank of America, found that some people in its cafeteria sat with only three others, at four-person tables, while others sat with eleven others, at twelve-person tables. Those who sat at the larger tables increased their productivity by 36 percent within a week. When the company began laying people off, employees who sat at the larger tables had stress levels 30 percent lower than those who sat at smaller tables. More recently, Walmart patented a system called “Listening to the frontend.” Using sound sensors, it records conversations between workers and shoppers and monitors specific noises, such as the beeping of item scanners and the rustling of bags. This has brought an entire industry into being in the United States, with companies specializing in the study of tens of thousands of employees’ behavior. Evolv, for example, has analyzed more than 500 million employee data points worldwide, including how often employees speak with their supervisors or with other people.
Have we not found ourselves in the same predicament as Fred or Bob Arctor? Technological progress also seems to lead directly to progress in control. Only now is the screen’s function as a barrier of fantasy destroyed. This is a purely psychotic mode of viewing: what happens on the screen—its words—has fully real effects. More unbearable still, there is no invisible master. All we get is disorder, confusion, a chaos ruled by capital’s enjoyment–proliferation.
Yet this psychotic mode of viewing is not radical either. Such betrayal is already contained within the logic of cultural capitalism. We must still point to the distance inherent between viewer and story: if the so-called “truth” is discovered only within the story, it can scarcely reach beyond it. We treat such stories as Kieślowski treated his documentaries. Once the limits of viewing have been exceeded, we need not remain imprisoned in the darkness of the cinema; we can simply choose to leave. (If we follow Roland Barthes’s account, we increasingly experience ourselves as complete, active subjects—and this is fundamentally a misrecognition.)
We must therefore insist, again and again, on a “wholly new pattern of desire,” in which our desire and enjoyment are completely overturned, without mediation by the existing order. This is Trotsky’s “improved version” of humanity; it is the indifferent town in Chevengur, persisting only “for its own sake.” And for this, we have never been afraid to sacrifice the victims. What we must finally propose, then, is unquestionably a reading marked by estrangement rather than indifference. This is political, and can only be political. In 1968, this wish was condensed into a simple slogan: “All power to the imagination.”
I have not read Lacan, Žižek, or Hegel, so there must be parts of Fei0’s article that I have failed to understand or have misunderstood. I will try to comment only on what I believe I have not misunderstood, drawing on my own understanding of Dick. This will certainly reveal a degree of author-centered bias, and my love of Dick also inclines me to agree that he stands above theory. But this certainly does not mean rejecting theoretical analysis, especially when Fei0 uses radical theory and psychoanalysis to give such a precise account of A Scanner Darkly. (Indeed, I would say that most writers have little to command respect when confronted with theory, but Dick is a rare exception.) My comments merely offer an understanding grounded more closely in Dick’s own work. They take issue chiefly with two points in Fei0’s analysis.
Fei0 situates A Scanner Darkly within the atmosphere of the postwar counterculture, treating its schizophrenic protagonist as a perfect embodiment of a symptom of the age. This approach undoubtedly accords with the character of the work, both the novel and the animation, as well as with Dick’s personal circumstances. As Dick says in his afterword, the work unquestionably depicts a condition prevailing across the nation. But we should also attend to the second half of his statement: he is more concerned with the circumstances of the people he knew. This gives me a few initial suggestions for Fei0’s analysis. It concentrates entirely on the protagonist’s three identities, somewhat neglecting what the other characters might contribute. For instance, his positioning of psychic fragmentation and the scanner as two poles accurately captures the story’s two central concerns. But psychic fragmentation seems to warrant a little more space. Compared with Bob Arctor’s paranoia on the scanner side of the story, Charles Freck’s symptoms of somatization at the beginning (Jerry Fabin’s in the novel—the animated film combines the two characters) seem to offer a deeper account of “the Thing I actually am.” Perhaps a phenomenology of the body? The passages describing the aphids proliferating within his own body have much to offer. Of course, I cannot say with any certainty what place such figures might occupy in psychoanalysis. But perhaps there is room for Charles in the later discussion of the night of the world and the two stages of the transition to normal subjectivity. He seems to occupy the same position as Bruce, caught between the first and second stages. Yet these characters are plainly not in Bruce’s situation. I will return to this after offering a different account of Bruce.
To focus, as Dick says, on the people who concern him is, in a sense, to read less into A Scanner Darkly. Yet, as I said at the outset, Dick himself may be richer than any theory. I will therefore draw on the internal construction of his work to offer a different view of two of Fei0’s interpretations: his opening account of Bruce picking the blue flower at the end, and the possibility he raises in the final part of a heroic reading of A Scanner Darkly. Before setting out my objections, I need to say something about the novel’s place within Dick’s work and some of its distinctive qualities.
Against the backdrop of kippleization and the Form Destroyer, A Scanner Darkly is Dick’s most personal and tender work. It is like the amusement park each of us has in childhood, a place where errors are allowed. But, as in any trite story, once we leave that playground, those fatal errors are no longer just a matter of children wanting to play. Of course, we can soon dismiss these fatal consequences in the adult world as inconsequential, just as great causes are also futile endeavors. (Sisyphean Mercerism becomes the earnest redemption of Isidore, that beacon of humanity.) A Scanner Darkly thus shares something with almost all of Dick’s novels: the protagonist is always in some predicament. Predicaments naturally call for rescue. I strongly agree with Pelevin’s view that a novel’s protagonists need to save themselves, and this is in fact one of the hardest aspects of Dick’s work to understand. In most of his novels, such rescue is difficult to discern because it always takes such a trivial form. What distinguishes A Scanner Darkly, however, is that there is no rescue. If it cannot be called a confessional memoir—Dick says in his afterword that he does not wish to pass an excessively moral judgment—it is nevertheless a record of real errors.
This is why I disagree both with the reading of Bruce’s picking the blue flower and with the possibility of a heroic interpretation. The former provides an illustration for the latter: we need to establish that Bruce’s action contains some resistance to the order, even if he himself does not know it, before we can find an anchor for an open-ended heroic reading. In analyzing Bruce as the identity to which the protagonist finally returns, Fei0 locates him between the two stages of world-reduction and the reconstruction of desire. This does capture something of Bruce’s situation precisely: after all, his behavior seems to have many of the qualities of a “living corpse.” But productivity is missing—not least from the novel’s depiction of his actual circumstances: he hardly does any work, and is plainly not an efficient worker. More importantly, he has in fact already entered the stage of reconstructing desire, however rudimentary it may be. Like a newborn, he is beginning to acquire friendship, a sense of community, and gratitude; he is like a prisoner returning to society after many years. He has reentered a world in which desire is being shaped, and sincerely regards the blue flower as a Thanksgiving gift for his friends. Charles is different. Caught in the same gap, he not only cannot begin the second stage; even his death is without reason—which means it is not a decision. Facing that peculiar, compound-eyed god of death, Charles does not even know the charges against him. The immense irony is that the book beside him when he dies is none other than The Fountainhead. Yet this is not the retribution through cause and effect for an error that Dick speaks of. It is more likely an acknowledgment of some forgotten ideal in this character, modeled on a close friend of Dick’s—even if that ideal is inconsequential, or indeed unacceptable. (It is precisely the temptation of the middle class, the most unacceptable thing in Dick’s work.)
If Bruce is a newborn who has entered the stage of desire but remains so immature, then picking the blue flower cannot be regarded as a heroic moment, even an unwitting one. On the contrary, if we regard him as a newborn, we should understand this violation of the rules in exactly the opposite way. (The offense is in fact minor; the farm is merely another playground.) It is reduced to an ordinary impulse in a newborn: wanting to play. Here we truly feel why Dick identifies himself with the work itself rather than with any of its characters. These are records of errors, memories that relinquish moral judgment yet remain so sorrowful and so full of tenderness. This is writing about friends who, in the course of an inevitable process, suffered fatal consequences because they wanted to play. And so, eager to play, Bruce picks the blue flower at the end—the source of all this evil and suffering—and takes it to his friends. The beginning of all these errors is written again at the end. This is error; it is retribution through cause and effect, having nothing to do with morality—not the kind of heroic moment we need.
At the opposite extreme lies what I take to be the temptation embodied by Barris. He, by contrast, meets some of the criteria of the heroic moment we are seeking. At one point, for example, this addict is making a silencer out of cheap materials. If the cowardly Bob Arctor is swept toward his recognition of the subject’s surplus by taking Substance D, by the confusion of his identities, and by other factors, Barris seems more like a strong, clearheaded hero. The pistol silencer might be seen as a materialist irony directed at the present situation: after all, it can give you silence and death in a material sense, and costs only a few dozen cents. Here we have just the opportunity to read Barris’s action as an ultimate irony at the expense of the silence of the subject of drive. Of course, Barris is stubborn in his own way. This character, no less substantial than any of the protagonist’s identities, is destined to receive little space for analysis. None of the analyses of the protagonist’s three identities applies to Barris. He is the demon theorists hate. And unlike the usual farcical hero, Barris is not the nihilistic intellectual so often found in postmodern fiction. He does not rely on theory, practice, or even imagination to fight back. This leaves him without a weakness not only within the story—he casually does harm to the protagonist, who is both player and referee, and needs only a smile at the corner of his mouth to make himself invulnerable—but also in theoretical terms. Neither his personal history nor his behavior yields a reading that would let us grasp his symbolic significance. All he presents to us is a crude, shallow, yet absolute malice, one that does not even stem from the madness of “just wanting to watch the world burn.”
Could Barris, then, offer the possibility of rescue? Should he be regarded as the truly overlooked hero? No, because he is a piece of shit. There is no self-examination or chastisement here; instead, we move toward a complete erasure of guilt. Barris is not someone who needs redemption. He belongs to none of the stages. He is not that sort of evil man, but someone to whom we cannot apply moral categories at all. Yet he still offers the protagonist’s triad its ultimate temptation: the erasure of guilt can make those errors truly trivial, make them cease to matter altogether. We would no longer feel, as Dick does, anguish at the severe punishment these characters suffer, because punishment would no longer be punishment. Barris would be in his element anywhere, including on the farm; the final picking of the blue flower would merely be another farcical scheme. But Dick leaves no room for this. We feel a barrier between Bruce and the temptation Barris offers—not only do we think Bruce cannot become him, we do not even want Bruce to become him. The temptation Bruce offers Charles is different. Was this not a temptation shared by Americans of that era? (Think of the overlap between the period when Ayn Rand became a spirit of the age and the counterculture.)
This finally leaves the question in an awkward position. Across Charles–Bruce–Barris, we have found no possible heroic moment anywhere between the latter two. In effect, there is no heroic moment to uncover within the work; we cannot find anything to admire in Bruce’s sacrifice. What here could possibly be set beside the iron flag in Chevengur? Bruce returns to a playground for grown-ups, and the blue flower he picks is the beginning of error. If we treat the blue flower as something comparable to the iron flag, where would a similar fervor lead? Are these not people who played with fire and destroyed themselves? Still, I must say that Fei0’s perception of something like fervor in the blue flower is not wholly an illusion or a theoretical hallucination. The flower does mean something beyond chastisement and self-examination. To begin with, we can feel that it lacks, at least, that severity and sting. It is certainly not the execution of a sentence after judgment; rather, it is all the more full of tenderness and sincere remembrance. Think of the final list: the deaths of these friends, people Dick knew in his own life, already constitute a punishment that could scarcely be harsher. But, as Dick says, this punishment is far too severe. “If there is any sin in this world, it is that people want to be happy forever and are punished for wanting it.” Yes, Dick cannot bear to treat his dead friends harshly once again, because their punishment has already been severe enough, and their errors were so natural. Yet he must still insist that the error was real. Only in this way can he keep all that suffering and punishment from being entirely canceled out. Whether it is simply attributed to some Other, as in Charles’s ending, or rendered inconsequential by a Barris-like pseudoheroic attitude, error remains error. Picking the blue flower is therefore an act of sincere self-examination and, at the same time, an act of remembrance. It remembers the friends who made the same error before. For the wish to be happy forever is not being disparaged; no one is condemned for longing for it.
Only in this double act of self-examination and remembrance does Dick’s statement “I am the novel” become intelligible. Only here does the heroic moment find its place—not with any character in A Scanner Darkly, but with Dick himself. This is his confession. He bravely faces those errors, places their very beginning at the end, and makes the protagonist bear that weight. This is no moral condemnation. He makes them face that decision once more, the decision to play with fire. Yet it also carries another vision: no one should suffer such punishment for wanting to be happy forever. The enemy is the mistaken decision made in play. But wanting to play is not an error, and so they will return to that playground. “Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.”
