The Blot

By Jonathan Lethem and Laurence A. Rickels

In this supplement to Jonathan Lethem’s novel A GAMBLER'S ANATOMY, the renowned novelist engages in a concerted transatlantic dialogue with cult theorist Laurence A. Rickels, exploring the vicissitudes of popular culture and the profound influence of Philip K. Dick on their respective lines of flight. Foregrounding the introjections between California and Germany, they address a range of ideas, subjects and figures, from B-movies, science fiction, Wile E. Coyote and the Devil to trauma theory, Freud, Hitchcock and German Expressionism. Animating their zone of interrogation is the “blot”—an algorithm of innuendo, an uncanny defamiliarization of reality and “truth” wherein the trajectories of meaning and desire fold into themselves like an origami in flames.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312246676

Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

Book preview

JONATHAN LETHEM

LAURENCE A. RICKELS

The Blot: A Supplement

Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Lethem and Laurence A. Rickels

ISBN 978-1-312-24667-6

First Anti-Oedipal Ebook Edition, September 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher. Published in the United States by Anti-Oedipus Press, an imprint of Raw Dog Screaming Press.

Cover Art © 2016 by Amy Maloof

Cover Design © 2016 by Ashley May

Layout by D. Harlan Wilson

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IG: @antioedipuspress

ANTI-OEDIPUS PRESS

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FICTION BY JONATHAN LETHEM

NOVELS

A Gambler’s Anatomy

Dissident Gardens

Chronic City

You Don’t Love Me Yet

The Fortress of Solitude

This Shape We’re In

Motherless Brooklyn

Girl in Landscape

As She Climbed Across the Table

Amnesia Moon

Gun, with Occasional Music

COLLECTIONS

Lucky Alan and Other Stories

The Disappointment Artist

Men and Cartoons

Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz)

The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

THEORY BY LAURENCE A. RICKELS

The Psycho Records

Germany: A Science Fiction

SPECTRE

I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

The Devil Notebooks

Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2: Crypto-Fetishism

Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 3: Psy-Fi

The Vampire Lectures

The Case of California

Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts

INTRODUCTION

Jonathan Lethem

The cluster of scholars, writers and archivists at- tached to the legacy of Philip K. Dick is a generous, eccentric and humane one, but it can also be defensive, for obvious reasons. (I testify from inside the cluster.) Many of those involved knew Dick personally, or were attached to efforts to legitimate and proslethytize through decades during which his work was largely ignored or dismissed. When Laurence Rickels announced himself out of seemingly nowhere with I Think I Am, there were those who arched an eyebrow: how could his claims not depend on our local knowledge? In truth, an alert student might have spotted the relevancy of his writings on Germany and California and the Cold War to Dick scholarship even before Rickels himself was alert to Dick’s writings; maybe a few did. For me personally, it was a wake-up call. In applying himself to texts with which I was deeply familiar, but substituting for a genre-studies context his own erudition in multiple paradigms, Rickels’ thinking became essential for taking my long fascination with Dick’s writings to the next level. And learning more about Rickels’ mind became crucial, too. I’d found a thinker whose encompassing preoccupations, and his unusual methods of disclosure, brought many of my own murkiest intuitions into the light. Or at least they felt like mine once I’d encountered them.

The novel I began writing in Berlin in 2013, provisionally entitled The Blot, was founded partly on my reading of Rickels, in particular the (then brand-new) SPECTRE, and The Case of California (as the Disney Chair I take these things personally). At the same time, Rickels and I enjoyed a growing friendship, face-to-face in Berlin, and largely in correspondence thereafter. An early portion of this written exchange was developed for inclusion in a catalogue for the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, but it grew beyond those bounds to become a creature of its own; for me, a chance to play real-time self-exegetical backgammon with a critic I was honored had turned his attention to my work. The game we played included a double-blind component: Rickels hadn’t finished reading my book before he began writing about it because I hadn’t finished writing it (hence I couldn’t hope to finish reading what he wrote about it until I did finish—nice motivation). It was Rickels who began referring to our entries as folds, turning this blind operation into a game of Exquisite Corpse. Alfred Hitchcock self-admiringly remarked to Francois Truffaut, speaking of Vertigo, that you could study the design forever; those words have always stuck in my head as a marriage of accomplishment and honesty I aspired to identify with. Rickels, in playing blot with me, allowed me the privilege of studying the design as it emerged. I am a lucky gambler.

— Blue Hill, Maine, July 6, 2016

RICKELS: We met at a conference on Philip K. Dick. Not so long before the San Francisco conference I had written my endopsychic allegory upon Dick’s work. You tested your decision to write by apprenticing yourself to Dick’s oeuvre, even dwelling in his San Francisco haunts. Since our conference meeting, I read Amnesia Moon, which should be counted as the first deep study of Dick’s work. Next, on my sci-fi trail, I read the earlier Gun, With Occasional Music, which inhabits Dick’s Californian science fiction and the Californian Noir genre—a genre arguably made, via the horizontal displacement of exile, in Germany. Then I made a jump cut across your work, again motivated by what makes us kindred, the work of Dick. What makes it possible to read New York in the breakdown of chronicity as Chronic City is the former child-star protagonist, someone as neutral or banal as the media screen, whose overriding perspective is augmented—as underworldly—by his marriage to an astronaut in outer space limbo. These trajectories hoist a kind of allegorical overview of New York as Benjaminian-Baroque, station-by-station procession through the ruins; they are not identified as Californian or German, but, folded back into the staging area of your work, the apprenticeship to Dick, it’s implicit that they might as well be. When I first published The Case of California in ’91 I had not yet read Dick. My overdue, overwrought study of his work had to catch up with my oversight: he is the poster boy of the Californian-German alliance. This may be too symmetrical, but with your new novel on