By Aidan O’Sullivan
When a book holds up a mystery as its central premise it is natural to assume that its reveal will resolve the story, satisfy all threads, tying the themes together into one cohesive narrative that finally makes sense.
Any such hopes should be abandoned with Dick’s work. The purpose is not for the story to be resolved but for the ideas to continue long after, to stay with the reader fermenting and toiling away, leaving them wondering about the meaning of the work and what it said about themselves, and their own world as well as that of Dicks.
Time out of Joint takes place in a 50s American suburbia. Ragle Gumm, an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, begins to suspect that his world is an illusion, constructed in order to keep him content and docile.
The book is in part a take on the conflict of the ideal 50s American life which neither Ragle nor Dick seem to match up to. However it also explores existentialism on a more surreal level: the question of ‘How do I know my World is Real?’
It is at once a treaty on human purpose and what the individual owes his society and also a mediation on the central conflicts that would have been stirring American life at the time. Chiefly, the space race and the red scare of Communism. As typical of a book of quality science fiction, Time out of Joint seems weirdly prescient in its take on American life. So many of the trends of cultural and political thought that would emerge in the 60s can be found in the text:
The conspiratorial threat of a Kafkaesque government orchestrating behind the scenes, the obsession of the New Left with the internal alienation of their characters over class exploitation, and increasing use of drugs and existential speculation. Published on the precipice of a period where social conventions would be massively reevaluated Dick writes at an inflection point in American life.
The title of the book ‘Time out of Joint’ is a quote from Hamlet, when the Ghost of the King Old Hamlet reveals to his son that his uncle Claudius has committed fratricide, killing Old Hamlet in order to instate himself on the throne of Denmark. The Supernatural moment fractures Young Hamlet’s reality forever changing him and leading him to question the nature of himself and his world.
‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!’
Act I Scene V: the Ghost reveals the truth to Hamlet
Amidst the events of their otherwise mundane lives, Gumm and some of the other characters begin to question their sanity as their world disappears before their eyes in sudden horrifying hallucinatory moments.
Riding on the bus, one character’s world vanishes. The bus resolves away leaving an ‘empty hollow box,’ the passengers ‘upright featureless shapes like scarecrows….[they] lolled back, forward, back, forward…..Driving a hollow bus’
It is certainly easy to see the book as a portent of the psychosis some fans suspect Dick himself would later suffer but that would be an unfair stance for a book with such thematic depth.
Gumm’s delusions, his fractured reality reflect a crisis of conflict as he struggles for meaning in a society which he feels compelled to be a part of but hopelessly alienated from.
He derides himself for his lack of conformity to what he sees as the ideal American life.
‘I’m a bum’ he says. ‘No gainful legitimate employment. No kids. No wife. No home of his own.’ Yet the book also makes it clear that those who conform to this system are interchangeable, their individuality meaningless when the demands of the state require them to become engendered in a conflict outside of their control.
The Ideal American Life
The late 50s and 60s produced a spiral of conspiracies that ranged from UFOs to complicated assassination plots. In fact, reading Time Out of Joint, one is immediately reminded of this. The book sits in the haze of its character’s discontent and paranoia. Their distrust of the world order extending to the very fabric of their universe.
However unlike any other conspiracy nut Gumm is correct. He is special. He does have a purpose.
Dick rejects the partisan global conflict that is the Cold War of his time in favour of a higher calling.
Whether delusion or reality Gumm is challenged to confront his failure to conform to society and trust in a greater, more human desire. That of a desire for pure freedom– ‘A deep restless yearning under the surface, always there in him, throughout his life, but not articulated. The need to travel. To migrate….An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex.’