PKD and RAL

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in.

Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How much either of them knew the German debates that later shaped questions of Gnosticism, eschatology, and time is hard to say, though both were serious autodidacts who worked with ideas that fascinated Löwith, Benjamin, Blumenberg, Strauss, Voegelin, Taubes, and so forth.

The divide, as I see it, is this: Dick makes Gnosticism post-Cartesian; Lafferty keeps it pre-Cartesian. Dick’s versions of the problem are trapped inside the cogito, a self sealed in its own consciousness, not sure there’s a criterion that connects private experience to public reality. Lafferty, by contrast, writes as if the cogito isn’t the center of the universe. Because his imagination is sacramental, the question moves from the hermetic self to the status of the shared world: not “am I trapped?” but “are we trapped together in a common, false cosmos?” Dick worries about the prison of the self; Lafferty worries about the prison of consensus reality. One is post-Cartesian; the other, pre-Cartesian. Each writer verges across the epistemic-ontological binary, but it's a thought about how to start contrasting them and to think about centers of narrative gravity.