"Confessions of A Crap Artist (1975)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

_Confessions_ is "experimental" only in that it was written without regard for novelistic conventions. Dick's value as a writer lies in his unusual and unusually vivid perceptions of the world we live in and the way people behave, especially the way they behave towards each other. These perceptions dictate the form and substance of his novels. In this case, the story is told in the first person by each of three different characters, in different chapters; there are also sections where third person narrative is used. This is unusual, but it works; those few novels of Dick's where he has tried to shoehorn his perceptions into a "novelistic structure" that did not originate within himself do not work half as well. Dick's books are uniquely structured, not out of self-conscious experimentation in the manner of writers who are aware of themselves as part of some "avant-garde" movement, but out of simple necessity.
Dick made some fascinating comments about his attitude towards writing in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff at Harcourt, Brace and Company, written February 1st, 1960, at a time when Dick was most actively engaged in trying to market his "mainstream" novels:


Now, I don't know how deeply to go into this, in
this letter. The intuitive--I might say,
gestalting--method by which I operate has a
tendency to cause me to 'see' the whole thing at
once. . . .Mozart operated this way. The problem
for him was simply to get it down. If he lived
long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In
other words, according to me (but not according
to you people) my work consists of getting down
that which exists in my mind; my method up to
now has been to develop notes of progressively
greater completeness. . . If I believed that the
first jotting-down actually carried the whole
idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I
believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me
to put down my original idea in its absolute
entirety.


Philip K. Dick has three particular talents that have allowed him to not only "put down" his visions but to bring them to life: his ability to create believable, sympathetic characters; his sense of horror; and his sense of humor.
_Confessions of a Crap Artist_ is the story of four people who live in and perceive very different universes but whose lives get hopelessly tangled together through the usual combination of destiny, accident, and their own deliberate actions (stress on the latter--the novel is at its most acute in the scenes where each character assesses his own situation and then deliberately acts in such a manner as to dig himself deeper into the pit). Jack Isidore, the "crap artist" of the title, is a simple-minded lost soul, fascinated by bits of information and incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy--seeing the world through his eyes is a bizarre, unforgettable experience. He is not an idiot in the tradition of Faulkner's and Dostoievski's famous idiots; his idiocy is close enough to our normalcy to scare us.
Fay Hume, Jack's sister, is an intelligent, attractive, hopelessly selfish woman, married to a beer-drinking, inarticulate regular guy named Charley Hume who owns a small factory in Marin County. They live in an absurdly non-functional modern house in Point Reyes, a rural outpost several hours north of San Francisco, with two daughters and some livestock and an incredible electric bill. Charley's purpose in Fay's life seems to have been to build her this dream house; that done, he withers in her eyes and she turns her attention to a young married man named Nathan Anteil. Nathan is a true intellectual, a law student; he spots Fay for what the is immediately, but is drawn to her anyway. Why? He doesn't know; perhaps even the author doesn't know; he only knows that it's true, this is the way people are.
And the story is disturbing, hilarious, and utterly believable because the reader, too, can't help recognizing the truth when he sees it, however crazy it is. Charley attacks his wife because she makes him buy Tampax; it's ridiculous, but who among us can fail to see the sanity underneath Charley's madness? Who can fail to identify with Fay in her moments of self-realization, such as the following soliloquy? It's funny, of course; but it's too accurate not to also be painful.


Almost at once I felt, acutely, that I was a
hysterical nut. They shouldn't trust you with
the phone, I said to myself. Getting up from the
bed I paced around the bedroom. Now it'll get
all over town, I realized. Fay Hume calls up
some people in Point Reyes and raves like a
drunk. That's what they'll say: I was drunk.
Sheriff Chisholm will be by to take me away.
Maybe I ought to phone him myself and eliminate
the middleman.


The reality of Philip Dick's characters stems quite simply from the fact that they are real to him; he hears them talking, in his mind, and records their conversations and thoughts--his dialogue, in almost all of his novels, is excellent. He is especially good at capturing the interactions between people; the authenticity of his work lies not so much in what people say as in how they respond to each other. In a conversation in 1974, Dick told me, "Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand that too well. . . .What I've felt is that problems are multipersonal, they involve us all, there's no such thing as a private problem. . . . .It's only a form of ignorance, when I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I'm broke, and my wife's left me-- It's my ignorance that makes me think I'm an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they're not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something."
The humor in the novel, in everything Dick says and writes, is self-evident ("I stood in the middle of my room doing absolutely nothing except respiring, and, of course, keeping other normal processes going"). Dick writes from the center of some vast despair that is, however, never final; the reverse of cynicism is at work here. No matter how miserable and absurd his characters' actions and thoughts are, Dick's attitude toward his characters is always, finally, sympathetic--he loves and understands them, his books affirm a faith and affection for humanity, in spite of all our idiocies. The result is somehow comic. In _Confessions_ particularly, every little hilarious detail of the awful vanity of our minds is mercilessly exposed. It is possible a woman could drive a man to such a state that he would assassinate his own pet theep? You better believe it.
But the humor in no way dilutes the horror. The horror in all of Dick's novels is that the world around us is cruel and insane, and the more courageously we struggle to remove the blinders from our eyes and see things as they really are, the more we suffer. Awareness is pain; and Dick's characters are cursed with awareness, like the autistic child in _Martian Time-Slip_ who hears the noise of the universe decaying. In _Confessions of a Crap-Artist_, the horror is that human beings torture each other, and fail repeatedly to do what is best both for the people around them and for themselves. We are dimly--sometimes even acutely--aware of the interconnectedness of our lives, but we don't seem to be able to put that awareness to work for us, in fact our efforts to do so only make things worse. The novel is summed up in Jack Isidore's poignant observation: "In fact, the whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down."
Here are Philip K. Dick's thoughts on _Confessions of a Crap Artist_, from a letter dated January 19, 1975:


When I wrote _Confessions_ I had the idea of
creating the most idiotic protagonist, ignorant
and without common sense, a walking symposium of