Wow! I was really taken by this early PKD.
Published in 1956 when the author was age twenty-eight, this post-nuclear devastation tale contains all sorts of ideas and themes as relevant today as back then. There’s so much going on, I’ll jump right to my top seven list a reader can look forward to when cracking the pages of The Man Who Japed. For both avid sf fans and all other readers, this novel is so worth it.
1. Newer York - New York City in the year 2114, decades following a worldwide nuclear holocaust. The only grass growing for hundreds of miles is located in The Park of the Spire (formally Central Park) and Long Island is now Hokkaido, a vast radioactive expanse of rubble forcing its handful of residents to reside in subsurface fallout shelters. Oh, Hokkaido, home of the nonconformist, those rugged souls who refuse to join their fellow Newer Yorkers in living under a totalitarian-like moral system known as Morec.
2. Major Streiter - A genius at orchestrating media from South Africa (spooky likeness to Rupert Murdock), the leader and guiding light in establishing the moral foundation of this futuristic society. A large statue of Major Streiter is located in The Park of the Spire, the moral and spiritual center for Newer Yorkers. Major Jules Streiter also founded the worldwide media conglomerate known as Telemedia (again, spooky likeness to Murdock’s News Corp, owners of FOX and many other worldwide media).
3. Block Wardens - In this highly moral society, each city block has its Block Warden heading a Parent Citizens Committee overseeing and judging the activities of people residing within the city block. Predictably, Block Wardens tend to be prissy older women forever pointing the finger at younger men and women engaged in illicit sexual activity or unacceptable displays of emotion or unaccounted for visits beyond the city block. Sound suffocating? This 2114 society is rigid, unfeeling and nearly 100% numbed out.
4. Juveniles – Technically sophisticated monitoring devices, 18 inches long, that look like thin insects. These mechanical creatures see all and hear all and record the speech and actions of all citizens within society. Juveniles usually operate in packs and can move along the ground or up and down walls at incredible speed. The Block Wardens and Parent Citizens Committees will play back what the juveniles have recorded during one of their sessions. In other words, if anybody does anything outside the moral code (the Morec), their misconduct will be recorded by a juvenile so the committee can dish out the offender's appropriate punishment.
5. Cohorts - A body of bland, humorless men that appear to crawl all over the city. These male decedents of Major Streiter wear drab khaki uniforms and function as both security guards and chauffeurs for the people at the top. I'm quite sure it's no accident PKD has these Cohorts outfitted in light brown uniforms reminiscent of Hitler’s Brownshirts.
6. The Domino Method - In this society the general assumption is that individuals believe what their assigned group believes, no more or no less. An individual who thinks or acts independently upsets the “block domino” and is automatically suspect and probably will be ostracized and sent to join other dissenters on a distant colony planet. Such is the current culture: either be exactly like us or we’ll judge you as mentally unfit or an egghead or oddball and kick you off our planet. And worst of all is to be judged a Noose, that is, one whose thinking is so bizarre, there must be a brain defect - ergo automatic expulsion.
7. Allen Purcell - the novel’s man character and hero. Allen is a man in conflict. He’s interested in working for the greatest good of society and wants to continue his family tradition of owning a premier apartment overlooking the park (picture a prime 5th Ave apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan overlooking Central Park) but, but, but, on some level, Allen is also aware something is terribly wrong with a civilization based on Morec. Indeed, Allen senses the whole moral system developed by Major Streiter and enforced by such as Block Wardens, committees, juveniles and cohorts is not the world he would like to live in.
The story opens when Allen Purcell walks into his apartment in the morning with mud and red paint on his shoes. Turns out, under cover of darkness the previous night, he japed the statue of Major Streiter in the park. As Allen explains to his wife Janet, “jape” is a term used back when he was working on the assembly line: “When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.” And the exact manner in which Allen japed the statue was to smear it with red paint and then take a power saw and slash it, severing its head, placing the head in Major Streiter’s outstretched hand and reposition a leg so it appears the headless major is about to give his very own head a good kick as if a goalie kicking a soccer ball. So the question is: Why would he do such a thing? After all, he has so much to lose.
Coincidentally, when Allen arrives at his office at Allen Purcell, Inc. where he heads up a research agency staffed by artists, historians, dramatists and other creative types attempting to accurately anticipate future trends by thinking out of the box, an executive from the largest media company in the world, Telemedia, which also happens to be his sole client, is waiting to offer him the top position with her company. Wow! Now that’s something! Allen would get the most powerful job on the planet at age twenty-nine.
The next day Allen leaves a message that he’ll need a number of days to think the offer over, after all, he has so much independence where he is. And in his own mind, Allen still has to figure out why he japed the statue of Major Streiter. We as readers are given a clue why Allen did his japing – when he is under the influence of a psychoanalyst’s drug propelling Allen back on that night where he relives the sequence of events.
As we learn, Allen visited a couple of creative intellectuals in Hokkaido where he was given a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He reads a few lines and is deeply affected, much more than he himself realizes at the time. And when he is told that all of James Joyce’s books have been burned and banished from Morec, Allen feels deeply wounded. Shortly thereafter, he makes a beeline for the statue.
You will have to read this early PKD classic for yourself to see how it all plays out. Let me conclude with a bold statement: the scene of Allen Purcell discovering the elegance, beauty and truth in the writing of James Joyce is one of the most moving scenes I’ve encountered in all of literature.
American Science Fiction author Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982
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