Re: Philip K. Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ Will Receive Two-Volume Release

[Thomas Beshear]

In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis was published in 1991 by a 
small press, Underwood-Miller. It sounds as if this will be considerably 
longer. I hope there is some annotation/analysis/commentary to go along with 
it.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Landseadel" <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2010 1:25 PM
Subject: Philip K. Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ Will Receive Two-Volume Release


>From the "Arts Beat" of the NYT:

Philip K. Dick’s ‘Exegesis’ Will Receive Two-Volume Release

By DAVE ITZKOFF

After a lifetime’s worth of literature that explored the future, the
farthest regions of space and the afterlife, a posthumous work by
Philip K. Dick will take readers to a different alien terrain: the
inside of the author’s mind.
Mr. Dick, who died in 1982, was best known for existential science-
fiction novels like “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldritch” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” He also
spent years of his life wrestling with what he considered religious
visions that he began experiencing in the 1970s. He recorded his
reactions to and attempts at deciphering these spiritual visions in a
work he called the “Exegesis,” reputed to be 8,000 pages - or longer.

Though few have read the work and fewer still have fully understood
it, the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt plans to release “The
Exegesis of Philip K. Dick” in two consolidated volumes edited by
Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, a Philip K. Dick scholar, with the
first to be released next year.

Mr. Lethem, the author of novels like “Chronic City” and “The Fortress
of Solitude,” and who has written frequently on Mr. Dick, said
Thursday in a telephone interview that he hesitated to describe
”Exegesis” as a work.

“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it
really was, was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Mr.
Lethem said. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense – it’s an
amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him
taking on the universe, mano-a-mano, with the tools of the English
language and his own paranoiac investigations.”

In 1974, after a number of novels that explored the notions of
personal identity and what it means to be human, Mr. Dick had a series
of experiences in which he believed he had information transmitted to
his mind by a pink beam of light. He wrote about these and similar
occurrences in autobiographical novels like “Valis,” but also
contemplated their meanings in personal writings that were not
published.

“It’s something that he talked about and created a kind of amazing
aura around,” Mr. Lethem said, “so that people have an image of it as
if it’s some kind of consummated effort. ‘I’m working on my exegesis.’
But what he really meant was, he was turning his brain inside-out on
the page, on a nightly basis, over a period of years of his life.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which has also acquired the rights to 39 of
Mr. Dick’s previously published works and will release them next year,
plans to to release Volume 1 of “Exegesis,” which is about 350 pages,
in the fall of 2011, and Volume 2, at the same length, a year later.

Mr. Lethem described the books as a chronicle of the period in which
Mr. Dick “pulled himself together again, as a writer and a human being.”

“He’d been launched into outer space by the visions of the early 70s,”
Mr. Lethem said, “and he was going to try to come back with the truth
– and that, by definition is an impossible task.

He added: “It’s absolutely stultifying, it’s brilliant, it’s
repetitive, it’s contradictory. It just might contain the secret of
the universe.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/philip-k-dicks-exegesis-will-receive-two-volume-release/=