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René Dietrich, "Postmodern Noir Investigations and Disintegrations of Identity," continued

Section 4  Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly

4.1  The Split Investigator in a Society of Unstable Oppositions

The society in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly1 is split in two on various levels. This extends from leading organizations, “various law enforcement apparatuses” (24) versus the drug-producing “S.D. Agency” (33), to social groups, “straights” (24) versus “dopers” (27), down to the personal identity of the protagonist: He is an undercover narcotics agent acting out his profession as a nark in the split between his identity as a doper, Bob Arctor, and his identity as a policeman, Fred. This problematic state of “Arctor-Fred-Whatever-Godknew” (27) complicates the concept of his own identity, as is stated at the very outset of the novel: “What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows. […] What am I actually?” (29, 30). It is impossible to answer this question in a society that is not only split but in which the split is unstable and produces constant indeterminacies, turning everything “murky” (87).

S.D. stands for Substance D., the dominant drug in the novel, which in turn stands for “Slow Death” (27), a destruction of the addict resulting in “Death of the spirit. The identity. The essential nature” (254). Ironically, this substance, which destroys any substance of a person in a “stripping-away process” (48), is the only thing that can be granted any substantial stability in world of unsettling shifts. The competing drug and police apparatuses are infiltrated by each other to a point, as Christopher Palmer observes, that they “feed off and resemble each other” (Palmer 193). This produces not only the usual corruption, but also more noteworthy effects as for example a constant stream of transition in which narks turn into dealers and vice versa (Dick 87). It also leads to confusing of “unmarked police vehicles” (137) that look like dopers’ cars with actual dopers’ cars that possess the same “radio gimmicks” (139) like police cars. In addition, the final twist of the novel reveals the drug rehab centers to be the source of the drug, the “S.D. Agency”, which ‘recruits’ the burnt-out victims of the drug to produce the drug and thereby feeds on itself endlessly. As a result, the logic of paranoia, which for Johnson was the mental response to an experience of discordance, is in fact realized in Dick’s society: everything connects to each other to an extent that it produces a “vicious circle, a closed loop” (Palmer 192).

This resemblance of oppositions is also true of the divided worlds of dopers and straights. The world of the dopers is reduced to the consumption of the drug to an extent that it becomes the only purpose in life: “Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills” (16). It decides any action and finally decides over the ability to perform any action at all: “I’ve got to get my supply or pretty soon […] I won’t be able to do anything” (10). The addiction becomes a matter of life and death while, at the same time, it produces the living dead, “brain damaged retards” (65). This extinction of any matter of substance in favor of the consumption of this one substance is merely a radicalization of the world of the straights equally driven by consumption and mass production:

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought […]. (31)   

This pervading notion of the ‘endless replay’ implies that “the same original burger” is always sold to “the same person” (31) and is produced along with any other product in the same “automatic factory”. Consumer goods become all-pervasive and create sameness and uniformity everywhere. This extends to the perception of time and space. Progress is only illusory since “the same McDonaldburger place” is at every corner of the street that thus turns into “a circular strip” (30). Similarly, time only repeats itself when the burger one buys is “the same they sold you last time”, and the only progress would be a perfect circle of exchange and entrapment when “we’ll sell it [i.e. the burger] back and forth to each other from our living rooms” (31). For the mainstream straights, such an absence of any positive change leads to a life of “bourgeois stability and tedium” (Horsley 241). It is defined by appliances such as “the backyard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system” and is compared to “a little plastic boat” whose sinking “would be a secret relief to all” (Dick 64). Such a life complete with house, wife and two daughters basically consists of the same “appurtenances of successful American living” (Hammett 442) that made up Flitcraft’s life in the tale recounted by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Correspondingly, just as Flitcraft abandons his life after an almost fatal accident that revealed the randomness of the universe to him, Bob Arctor, after “a Flitcraft-like episode” (Horsley 241), abandons his life as a straight and becomes the nark Bob/Fred. He exchanges the dull stasis of a plastic-like life for a “dark world” of “ugly things and surprising things and […] tiny wondrous things” (Dick 64). The counter-culture disgust of the dopers against the complacence and self-righteousness of the mainstream straights is expressed by a thought that occurs to Bob/Fred during an anti-drug speech: “Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none” (26). Whereas the straights are perceived as nothing but an undifferentiated bland mass from the start, the dopers are portrayed as individuals who destroy their individual selves individually. In this radical dehumanization, however, they arrive at a point where there are no single person nor part of a larger group but simply an empty cipher, a zero.

 The emphasis on undifferentiated sameness also creates a kind of emotional indifference in both the dopers and the straights. The straights are only able to feel empathy for people of their kind (94-95), whereas the dopers are presented in attempts of human caring free of such a hypocrisy (95). Due to their drug abuse, however, they are slowly reduced to indifferent machines to whom only the drug consumption makes any difference. This turns the environment of the junkie into a machine designed for the sole purpose of drug supply: “He, a machine, will turn you into his machine” (159). The typical straight is portrayed close to the object world, having a “heart [that] was an empty kitchen” (94) and living a life of “a small plastic boat”. The dopers who continuously kill „the soul, the mind“ and end up burnt-out and completely dehumanized unwillingly radicalize this degree of mechanization desired by society. They become a “reflex machine. Like some insect” (65). In the final state, a junkie turns into “a closed loop of tape” (66). He thus becomes the manifestation of a society which functions itself as a “loop” in various ways. The resemblance of unstable oppositions produces a circle in which the paranoid logic that everything connects is radicalized to a degree that everything also feeds on each other and consumes each other. In addition, the figure of the “loop” suggests that permanence is merely mechanical repetition and progress ultimately turns into regress. For the personal identity of the doper, this means that change and constancy are no longer alternatives to each other that have to be kept in balance by the configuration of a narrative, but consume each other in an increasing entropy until the final collapse.

In the novel, the condition of “radical doubt”, which Giddens ascribes to late modernity, mainly affects the successful interaction of change and permanence. This gives way to more disastrous and destructive consequences, socially and personally, than Johnson’s state of ambivalence and diversity. In such a state, any interpersonal relation is marked by distrust and uncertainty: One can “count on nothing” (64) and nobody. In A Scanner Darkly, the result is a typical noir atmosphere of constant threats in which everyone has to be regarded as an enemy, and sometimes rightly so. The first reaction to an unforeseen encounter on the street is defense against a possible violent assault (12-13), the family does not provide protection but instead is a source of violation and addiction (55), a close friend and even oneself can be suspected to destroy one’s most valuable possessions (65) and threaten one’s life (84). Malevolent intentions, lies, deceit, willful sabotage dominate everyone’s social life and, coupled with the impossibility to rely on a stable self, make it impossible to constitute a narrative identity that is not based on paranoia.

A Scanner Darkly is set in the near future of 1994, but closely resembles the USA in the 1960s to 70s, especially in its depiction of the drug culture. Thus, in contrast to most other Philip K. Dick novels, it offers a more direct portrait of contemporary society and correspondingly contains very few science-fiction elements. The few that are employed, however, are used to great effect. One of them, the “scramble suit” (21), is the most direct expression of the blurry state of society and personal relations in the novel. This suit consists of a “shroudlike membrane” on which are projected “physiognomic fraction-representations of various people” changing randomly and rapidly “at any nanosecond” (23). Thus “the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour” (23). The result is the impression of “a vague blur” (22) whose voice additionally is reduced to an unchanging “metallic monotone” (54). As Christopher Palmer points out, it is “obvious [that] this is a striking image of loss of identity” (191). However, it is noteworthy how this loss is achieved. Extreme forms of fragmentation, multiplicity and succession are combined to destroy any noticeable boundaries that these terms usually imply: the lines at the edges defining each fragment, the lines separating one fragment from the other producing a visible multiplicity of fragments, and the temporal boundary as each fragment is replaced by another. As neither a single fragment, nor a multiplicity of fragments, nor a succession of any kind is noticeable, any definable feature disappears in a “closed loop”. The very extremity of the way each quality manifests itself turns diversity and change into the uniformity of nothingness: a blurry shape dissolving ghostlike into its surroundings while talking in the “metallic monotone” (54) of a robot.

This “scramble suit” is the uniform of Bob Arctor whenever he has to act as Fred the policeman. It is a mandatory outfit due to the invasion of the police forces by “the forces of dope” (24) and is to prevent his being discovered as an undercover agent with a doper-identity by a dealer working undercover in the police. Therefore, he only interacts with police officers that are also in scramble suits, in case he should be a double agent. The scramble suit is the manifestation of a split-up society at war with itself in which the identity of a person has to be hidden so that the person does not become a target. Because no one involved in this war can determine who is on whose side, one’s identity has to be a matter of indeterminacy for the other person in order for oneself to survive. The difficulties of moral integrity and personal integrity overlap, since the scramble suit also represents the trouble the nark Bob Arctor/Fred has in defining himself. His necessary neutrality and objectivity are reduced to emptiness and indifference. Pondering the depersonalizing effect of the scramble suit, Arctor arrives at the conclusion: “It could be somebody other than Fred inside, or another Fred, and they’d never know[…]. It could be anyone in there, it could even be empty” (30). In addition, while reporting the results of his investigations as a nark, Bob/Fred has to emotionally “neutralize himself” (57) and becomes “impassive” (58). It is his duty, then, to discuss any terrible event, even if it has befallen one of the persons he regards as friends in his life as a doper, “without feeling” (58). After such an artificial detachment, “the terrible colors seeped back into him” (58) in the form of “horror [and] shock” (57). The fact that this is also a common experience for doctors, who have to regard personal tragedy with detachment in order to perform well, is explicitly considered in the novel (58). However, for the split investigator in Dick’s postmodern noir, this implies a stronger disruption of his personal identity and, in Ricoeur’s terms, complicates the relationship between his ipse- and idem-identity, since he also has to report on himself as if he were another person. The scramble suit is thus a sign of a society in which moral integrity does not exist and contributes to the disintegration of identity of the split investigator. Since his identity is hidden and cannot be ascertained by anyone, it can easily disappear completely. The split society of unstable oppositions makes dichotomies collapse so that the investigator becomes both hunter and hunted, both subject and object. This collapse of dichotomies anticipates the collapse of any idea of the self.

 

4.2 The Obscure Identity of the Split Investigator

The obscurity of identity behind the scramble suit can be specifically attributed to the work as a police investigator in such a split society. However, the sense that everyone is split in oneself and possesses a hidden identity, an unknowable self that might even be unknown to oneself, extends beyond that. This idea of a “dark, unrecognised inner self” (Horsley 240) is an equally dominating quality in Dick’s characters as the notion of an inner absence is a defining moment for Johnson’s characters.  

Jim Barris, one of Bob Arctor’s housemates, ponders the possibility that he has committed an action, the damage of one of Bob’s possessions without being aware of it: “I mean it’s my theory that I did it.[…] Under posthypnotic suggestion, evidently. With an amnesia block, so I wouldn’t remember” (70). This half-joke takes on a more serious form as a car accident which almost kills Barris, Arctor and Luckman, might have been caused by sabotage committed by Barris, or “logically though insanely” (Palmer 185) by Arctor himself. A clearly psychopathological side is revealed when Barris almost lets Luckman choke to death on a piece of food while sitting next to him (Dick 141). However, it is difficult to determine whether his definite acts of fraud, impersonating Actor (165) and handing false information to the police (222), are only motivated by malevolence or reveal in fact another hidden side of him, as Arctor’s friend who is trying to save Arctor from himself.2

Donna is regarded as a dear friend and a possible lover by Bob Arctor, and his interest in her is raised by the fact that he continuously learns new information about her that reveal a previously hidden side of her. Often, these are stories of her audacity, inventiveness and self-reliance at which he marvels (131-32). At the same time, Donna, whom he admires for her warmth and liveliness, can erupt in sudden bursts of verbal cruelty (“you’re too ugly” (152)) and always maintains a distance to him (157). Bob/Fred ponders the possibility of another, terrible side of Donna that might be revealed by his impassive observation of his own house: “Donna […] slipping in and destroying my possessions and stealing. […] Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals’ dishes” (133). The real “unfathomable and horrid” (133) side of Donna, however, is not one that can be revealed by the scanners, since she, being another nark, is well aware of them. Donna supervises the process leading to Bob/Fred’s brain-death up to his final state as Bruce in the drug rehab center, sacrificing him for the possible good of society and bringing him to an ending from which he meant to save her (see also Palmer 194, 212): “something empty and too much used. Donna translated into a thing” (151).

The idea that one can be hidden from oneself and finally unrecognizable to oneself is most clearly articulated in the relation of the split investigator, Bob/Fred, to himself. Early in the novel he articulates a deep skepticism regarding the possibility of self-knowledge. Being asked about the motives for his job, he muses: “What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives?” (66) The evaluation of his motives reveals an unflattering and negative self-image:

Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. Or a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply […] – to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. (66)

Arctor himself will become that person, and a step on this way to oblivion is his assigned task to spy on himself and to report on himself as the chief suspect. This puts a heavy strain on him and leads him to wonder about possible multiple and incompatible selves whose existence cannot be related to any unity of personal identity:

How many Bob Arctors are there? […] The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? […] I would know, if anyone did, because I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me? (96)

Arctor cannot find confirmation for his statement that both Bob and Fred are the “same person” in a society based on deception and ridden by corruption, and thus he loses the grip on this problem himself. In Ricoeur’s terms, his confusion can be attributed to a confusion of his two senses of identity, sameness and selfhood. Because he repeatedly changes from Bob to Fred, he has trouble identifying himself as a unified person with assistance of the concepts permanence and continuity. He finds himself simultaneously in two opposing roles, a position which disrupts any sense of sameness on which he could base his ipse-identity. This disruption increases until he can only maintain any sense of self by referring his ipse-identity independently to the permanent sameness of Bob, the doper, and Fred, the policeman – each separate and hidden from one another in the respective view of himself. Such an ‘escape’ is of course fatal as it splits himself in two. Thus, self-perception turns into self-deception and self-knowledge into self-delusion. Ironically, Arctor hopes to gain insight into a possible hidden self through the observation of himself: “Bob Arctor, he speculated, may learn more new information about himself than he is ready for” (134). At the same time he considers that any self-observation is prone to distortions due to the ineradicable prejudices of one’s subjective viewpoint:

And when you see yourself […] in a 3-D hologram, you don’t recognize yourself visually either. You imagined you were a tall fat man with black hair, and instead you’re a tiny thin woman with no hair at all” (134).

The comical absurdity of such a thought turns grimly serious once Bob/Fred does not recognize himself on the tapes he is watching due to the brain damage his drug abuse has caused. He is suspecting Arctor and contemplating what schemes he possibly could have in mind – unaware that this is the very same mind with which he is thinking these thoughts. Thus, the notion of an unknowable, hidden self is radicalized and the consequence of such an inner split is no longer a shock of self-recognition after the fact, as it happens at the beginning. Instead, self-recognition becomes impossible and Arctor becomes a stranger and an enemy to himself. He starts to live in the “nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror” (133) which he feared to detect in his observations and is trapped in it beyond all hope of escape. Split into two, this “mirror“ divides him and each side becomes a reversal of the other side. He turns into an other to himself and loses all capability of self-relation. Paradoxically, sameness in any sense is only restored by the collapse of these two selves into one void, now called Bruce. So sameness returns in a bitter parody of itself as the ultimate non-differentiation of the zero, which is the perfect realization of the loop, the dominant image throughout the novel. This collapse of self is a result of Bob/Fred’s obscure identity whose indeterminable status causes the collapse of the dichotomies between hunter and hunted and between subject and object.

The neutralized identity of Fred in the scramble suit is an image of his objectivity that allows him the detachment necessary to maintain narrative control. Since this objectivity does not allow any notion of subjectivity, he is also forced to report on himself as if he were another person. In contrast to the stable investigator, his detachment is not a proof of integrity and independence from a corrupted society. Instead, such detachment is coerced by a society drenched in corruption and creates an artificial split in him that will result in his personal disintegration. As Fred reports his life as Bob to the authorities as if it were the life of another, he proves that, in contrast to the modernist investigator, the position of an observer from the outside is no longer available to him. Everyone is drawn inside in a postmodern society that knows only victims and victimizers, who can also be victimized if society demands. The scramble suit, designed to keep Arctor from becoming a target, thus also makes it possible that Arctor becomes his own target as he is ordered to concentrate his spying activities on himself. This seeming paradox is only the logical extension of the forced neutrality of the split investigator and the reign of deception in a society in which every link is corrupted to a paranoid loop. The result is a collapse of dichotomies to the point of an absolute, even totalitarian concordance. The hunter hunts the hunted who is himself, and the acting subject subjects itself to the objective view of surveillance and objectifies itself in order to observe its own actions: “Bob the Actor who is being hunted; he who is the El Primo huntee” (134). 

The narratives which Bob/Fred constructs with the help of his observations suffer both from a disruption of subjectivity and objectivity. At first, his perception is distorted by the subjective assumption that he has “an enemy” (69) and that through surveillance he would succeed in “nailing whoever was after him” (88). Ironically, Arctor is “being hunted” and there are people out there aiming for his destruction, but finally it is not Barris who poses the greatest danger, but Donna, the person Arctor trusts the most, and his executive Hank, the person on whom Arctor ultimately relies. In constructing the narrative that is to reveal the identity of his enemy, Arctor faces not only the difficulty of his prejudices and latent paranoia, but, due to his drug abuse, more prominently the danger of objectifying himself in his observations to a point that he is no longer able to recognize himself, neither on the screen nor in his thoughts. Just as ordered by the authorities who tell him that Arctor “is phony” (106), Fred begins to suspect Bob Arctor and distrusts his actions and statements: “What was Barris getting Arctor back for? What the hell had Arctor been up to?” (167) At first such a dissociation of a corrupted perception results in a shock of self-recognition: “his mind […] split in half, right down the middle. […] I’m Arctor, he thought. […] What’s Arctor been up to to get Barris on him like that? I’m slushed; my brain is slushed” (168). This self-recognition is later reduced to sympathy for another person: “What the hell am I talking about? I must be nuts. I know Bob Arctor; he’s a good person” (183). Finally, however, nothing is left but dislike and even disgust towards a stranger: “That guy is nuts, he thought. […] I wish I could, for a while, forget him” (190, 199).

The split in himself leads to a construction of incompatible narratives as he desperately tries to interpret what is happening around him. Thus, Barris could either be an unpredictable enemy of Arctor whose impersonations of him aim to set him up “for a fire-bombing” (167) or he could only be a harmless “wired […] dude” who thought he made “a cool gag” (180) or even a concerned friend “trying to cover up for Arctor’s increasing fuck-up’s (181). This would imply that Arctor is not the victim of anyone else but of his own drug abuse leading him to commit actions without even knowing what he is doing. Such a frightening possibility of Bob Arctor’s mental demise is in fact objectively considered as a “new, professional insight” (182) by Fred in a moment when his total dissociation to Bob testifies to the personal disintegration that is no one’s but his own. He realizes that he can no longer trust his own interpretations and memories ( “I still remember –or never will correctly remember – that night” (180)), but quickly separates this problem from anything this might imply for him as a person. Suddenly, the “I”, that has been reflecting on itself, wonders about Arctor as a separate person. Instead of overt identification with someone else, as in Johnson’s novel, the incapacity of self-identification signals the investigator’s disintegration. From Bob, the person concerned about his own state of mind, he turns into Fred, the detached observer. In the logic of this impossible self-interpretation, he is still able to acknowledge that Arctor “works for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, covertly” (183). Finally, however, the false narrative into which he has turned himself also sheds this last connection to reality and Fred only views Bob as a doper, a criminal he has to put away: “We will keep on Bob Arctor until he drops” (200). This delusion does not only apply to Fred the over-objectifying observer, but also to Bob, the acting subject. He no longer feels protected by the observation to which he is being subjected, but instead feels threatened by it. Furthermore, he starts to doubt its existence and explains his fears by paranoia – which thus becomes a strange sort of refuge. At the same time, he relegates the observation to a hostile authority beyond him:

Which may be just my imagination, the ‘they’ watching me, Paranoia. Or rather the ‘it’. The depersonalized it.

Whatever it is that’s watching, it is not a human.

Not by my standards, anyhow. Not what I’d recognize. (185)

Just as Fred does not see the nark in Bob the doper anymore, Bob only sees the machines observing him without recognizing himself as Fred behind them. In fact, in both cases this is an unsettlingly acute observation and points to his final state as Bruce. Fred is depersonalizing himself by having split his personality to a degree that he is no longer able to recognize himself as a person on a screen. This state of extreme detachment results in the machine-like state of Bruce who is nothing but the dead eye of a camera able only to record but no longer to recognize or to understand (266, see also Palmer 196). Fred’s loss of such a generic human quality of visual self-recognition is paralleled by Bob’s experience of “self-cancellation” (Palmer 197): He no longer pretends to be someone else, but pretends to be a person that pretends to be someone else. In one of the aimless doper talks spied on by Fred, Bob surprises everyone, including himself: “‘How could a guy do that?’ Arctor said. ‘Pose as a nark?’” (198). It is true, as Palmer says, that “Bob is now a man posing as a nark rather than a nark posing as a doper” (197). However, Bob/Fred cancels himself out even further since Fred, watching this scene, fails to implicate himself. Thus, Bob only pretends to be the person he is, a nark, an impostor, while Fred pretends not to be the person he is, the doper on the screen whom he is observing. In this case, identification as a result of a subjective viewpoint is always a form of misinterpretation, and finally the entire pretense of Bob/Fred boils down to the fact that he has lost all status of personhood and only pretends to be a person in the sense of an individual self. This pretense collapses along with any sense of self as Bob/Fred winds up in a drug rehab center. His new name, Bruce, signals no fresh start but shows instead how he has been completely stripped off his identity and is now nothing more than an empty reflection, a machine of reflexes, a dead eye. The disintegration of his identity by the destructive forces of false narratives has led him to a state in which narrative identity is not possible any longer. In fact, since narrative, as defined by Ricoeur, is a “temporal totality” that draws a configuration of meaningful action out of a succession of events, narrative identity is unthinkable for Bruce who lives in a place of “dead eyes outside time” in which there is “nothing left to happen” (275).

As Bruce, the empty shell of a self, Bob/Fred has become an object rid of any quality attributed to a subject. His end as “a corpse” (256) is a result of the fact that he was treated as an object all along. At one point towards the end, Hank tells him that they were never after him, Arctor, but after Barris (229). However, this is also another layer of lies since everything was planned in order to destroy him to a point where he would have to be moved to “New-Path” (48), the drug rehab center, so that he could be used to find out whether Substance D. is actually manufactured in its confines (266). In addition to failing as an acting subject in his own narrative that became increasingly more deluded, Arctor was also the object of the narrative his executives designed for him. His death-like state at the end is not only the logical conclusion of his drug abuse but also the desired conclusion of the story planned for him. Bob/Fred turns out to be a victim of himself and, at the same time, is victimized by others. As Donna, the supervisor of this plan, points out guiltily: “there is nothing more terrible than the sacrifice of someone, or something, a living thing, without its ever knowing” (255). The destruction of subjectivity depicted in Bruce is only the logical outcome, and in fact has always already happened, in a society which uses people only as objects to its own end. Arctor has to fail in the construction of a narrative identity because any narrative in which he imagines himself as an actor can only be a result of deception. Instead, he was used from the beginning in order to construct the narrative of his disintegration so that he might reveal the source of the drug that led to his disintegration. Thus, Arctor does not only go “from being an actor to being a reflex arc” (Palmer 197). In addition, in terms of narrative identity, his status as an actor is revealed as a delusion and he is revealed as the narrative arc that is to form a narrative designed by a totalitarian authority.           

 

4.3  Disruption of Perception and Text as Loss of Narrative Control

The collapse of subjectivity and objectivity, which is part of the mental degeneration of Dick’s split investigator, is also noticeable in a general disruption of perception in the world of the novel. At times this disruption extends to the text. Since the narrative is mostly focalized through Bob/Fred, such a disruption is also a sign of the personality split and signals his increasing loss of control over the narrative. But even before Arctor’s appearance, the first chapter of the book presents a disconcerting example of a corrupted perception and its influence on the world around it. A subjective delusion seems to affect objective reality including the reality of the text: “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair” (3). This first sentence of the novel disorients the reader since it seems to state an objective fact which only shortly afterwards is revealed as a subjective deranged vision. Even after its state as such is obvious to the reader, the power of this vision and the weakness of an objective reality governed by rational detachment is proven when Jerry’s imagined bugs are suddenly also noticed and captured by his friend Charles. With little grasp on reality himself, it seems easier for Charles to acknowledge Jerry’s delusions as reality instead of working towards the possibility of a rational reality opposed to such distortions of paranoia. For Arctor himself, the first distortion of vision occurs after the almost lethal accident on the day the scanners are installed in his house. Overpowered by a vision of “dog shit”, in the novel a recurring image of society’s degradation, Arctor loses the grip on reality while knowing “to himself that it was an illusion” (83). In retrospect, this “‘dog-shit day’” (184) becomes Arctor’s first experience of being “split in half, directly down the middle” (168).

Similarly but more disturbingly, Arctor witnesses the inexplicable brief transformation of the “cute little needle-freak” (158) Connie into his unreachable dream girl Donna, as he observes Connie sleeping next to him (159-60). This again points to an inner split in Arctor’s perception, but at the same time hints to the more unsettling notion of such a split in the fabric of the world itself. For in viewing the tapes of this scene, Fred, who cannot recall having perceived this change when being Bob Arctor, also sees the transformation on tape. He cannot relate this to “visual interruption” (174) however, as he wishes, since he notices that Arctor also witnessed the repetition of the transformation which the scanners recorded (175). This makes it, as Palmer states, “an episode that neither a ‘subjective’ nor an ‘objective’ explanation will explain” (194). Instead of making “technical interference” (Dick 174) a suitable explanation, it points to a more distressing idea of “interference” where impossible and incompatible perceptions collide with one another and disrupt each other in a world in which the subject/object dichotomy is destabilized and threatens to collapse. As Arctor can ground his perceptions on no stable referential base, he begins to doubt them and his interpretations of them and thus starts to lose narrative control, the only thing that would allow him to maintain personal integrity in a time of heavy strain.

Also the text itself is subject to such disruptions and can no longer maintain unity in the course of the narrative. Such a disruption occurs for the first time when two medical deputies examining Fred consider the possibility of “a split between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere of the brain” (110) due to the abuse of Substance D. The entire scene of examination is continuously disrupted by excerpts from the article “The Other Side of the Brain: An Appositional Mind” by the neurologist Joseph E. Bogen first published 1969 in the Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society. These passages are set off typologically against the rest of the text and are introduced by an informational paragraph that clearly labels them as part of another “Item” (110) than the rest of the text. In addition, Dick makes a further point at not integrating these passages with the rest of the scene by having the regular text fade out into “…” (110) in mid sentence before each paragraph of the scientific article and afterwards fade in again the same way, completing the interrupted sentence. Whereas the text describing the examination becomes visibly fragmented this way, the ‘intruding’ scientific text is presented in separate paragraphs that appear much more as units. Still, except for a first moment of disturbance on the reader’s part, this text-disruption can be interpreted wholly on a textual level – the play of an author operating with obvious meta-texts and providing some medical background to a psychological phenomenon that is at the heart of the novel. Other occurrences of such a disruption, however, cannot be interpreted so neatly and instead give way to a much more disturbing perspective on the texture of reality and representation.

In the eleventh chapter, original excerpts from Goethe’s Faust, most of them from the beginning scene in Faust’s study at night, keep disrupting Bob/Fred’s thoughts and speech. The text disruption in this case is coupled with a language disruption. Very obviously, these disruptions mark the growing dissociation between Bob and Fred – at one time even the famous passage “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust” appears (quoted in Dick 183, italics in original). As if they were nothing but another meta-textual play, these interferences happen to Bob/Fred’s complete unawareness, and in the cases his direct speech is interrupted, the addressed character shows no signs of awareness either. Yet it becomes very clear that the disruption in the text is now used to reflect, both in content and form, the protagonist’s split state of mind. It is particularly interesting that such a split of the text occurs in the exact moment as Bob/Fred ponders the dangers of a personality split: “A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all” (186). Whereas he pretends to read this out loud while alone with the scanners, he fails to grasp that he is reading it to himself also in another sense, being the person by whom he is watched, since the “depersonalized it” (185) he imagines is no one but himself. This constant disappearance of one “man inside a man” leads to his final self-cancellation. Similarly, the appearance of Faust’s words in Bob/Fred’s thoughts and speech and their instantaneous disappearance into an unspoken unconscious make the Goethe-text, to follow the novel’s phrasing, a text inside the text, which is no text at all. Hence, the disruption of text is emblematic for the disruption of Bob/Fred’s narrative identity. The extent to which Bob/Fred disappears to himself is shown by his loss of control over his narrative and, even more so, by his loss of control over his text – the form his own thoughts and speech need to take in order to make any narrative of decisions and actions possible in the first place.

However, just as the Connie/Donna-transformation, this passage does not yield to a purely subjective interpretation. For Fred, watching the tapes of the scanners, hears it too: Arctor “creakingly recited something mystifying, partly in German obviously to puzzle anyone overhearing him” (189). In Terminal Identity:  The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, Scott Bukatman argues rightly that the “central characteristic of Dick’s protagonists involves their crises of subjectivity; crises which begin when the categories of the real and the rational begin to dissolve their boundaries” (48). In respect to A Scanner Darkly, however, it would even be more accurate to say that the boundaries of the subjective itself are dissolved. Subjective viewpoint and objective representation become interlinked and problematic. The scanners function as the link between these two realms. Their allegedly impassive observation finally reveals a reflection of an inner life that is inaccessible to the observed himself:

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a […] cube-type holo-scanner […] see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. (185)

The Scanner becomes at the same time the only hope that someone, or something, might bear witness to one’s own confusion and degradation (see also 221) and is revealed as an instrument that does not perceive clearly but instead reverses and distorts (see also 212). Christopher Palmer is right to observe that although “bearing witness” is such a central element of the novel, it is made “almost impossible” towards the end of it (200). He fails to point out, however, that this impossibility does not only lie in the gruesomeness of what one has to observe, but also in the fact that in the novel any stand of observation anyone assumes is revealed to be as flawed as what this specific person observes. This can be said for Bob/Fred, who loses any sense of himself in his observations, for Hank and Donna, who observe and further his demise with impassive cruelty, and for the scanners themselves. They, just like anyone and anything else in the novel, have no access to an objective reality without distortions but are instead forced to reproduce the “murk” which reality has become. This dilemma between the need to observe and reflect and the inevitable distortion of all that is observed and reflected has a connotation which goes beyond totalitarian societies and drug abuse. It becomes Dick’s statement about the human condition in general. This is made explicit in the title A Scanner Darkly, which, as Patricia S. Warrick points out, is an allusion to “one of Dick’s favorite passages from Saint Paul’s I Corinthians: ‘We see through a glass, darkly’” (159). In the novel this becomes “not through a glass but as reflected back by a glass” (212). As a consequence, reflection produces reversal, falsification (“I have seen myself backward” (212)), and finally indeterminacies once it becomes impossible for Bob/Fred to decide on a correct vision and therefore on a correct image of himself: “Which is reversed and which is not?” (215) The scanners are the instruments which can make this reversed side visible. Therefore, they become an image for a split society which uses surveillance to prove that everything has a hidden side to it, even reality. This inability to ascertain reality or self-knowledge with any accuracy creates, with Giddens’ words, an atmosphere of “radical doubt” in which any investigation and any concept of self based on observation and reflection has to fail.  Perception does not clarify, but is faulty itself. Its disruptions can be explained (just as the lines from Faust and from Beethoven’s Fidelio are explained by the existence of a “great-uncle, German-born” (219) in Bob/Fred’s past) but can never be righted. Similarly, when Bob/Fred’s world simultaneously splits and collapses on itself, reflection literally turns against itself. Just as the extreme diversity of the scramble suit produces uniformity, Bob/Fred’s extreme self-observation and self-reflection create no clarity, but a blind and empty echo. The constant reversals of self-observing reflection end up producing no fixed results, no conclusion of a narrative, but a loop of time, space and personality where all these properties turn naught and nil. The final chapters in New Path take place without the presence of the scanners and without any further disruption of perception. This, however, is not meant as the liberation from surveillance and as the return of wholeness. Quite to the contrary, there is nothing in Bruce which the scanners could observe and there is no perception of himself left which could be disrupted. Without the ability to control a narrative or even to construct a text of his own, he himself has become the instrument of surveillance which others need to construct their own narrative of investigation.

 

4.4  Disintegration of Identity as Destruction of Difference and Substance

An erasure of difference which contributes to the disintegration of identity is noticeable in the growing resemblance between humans and machines. Christopher Palmer argues that the “novel and the characters in the novel repeatedly image people as machines” (181) so that “a machine is an image or replica of ourselves” (186) and “the brain’s failure is imaged as that of a burnt-out machine” (187). He continues to argue that because of this likelihood the characters have such a great interest in repairing machines, for it poses a defense against “the advance of entropy” (186) which also threatens to engulf their own lives. Correspondingly, Palmer states, “machines are seen in almost human terms” (186). Such a simultaneous shift takes place in the portrayal of the scanners and the development of the split investigator, Bob/Fred, who ends up brain-dead as Bruce. At the beginning of the novel, the scanners are linked to impassive observation and surveillance but then their function changes toward witnessing the disturbed perception and reality as one person experiences it for himself. In one of his last self-conscious scenes, Bob/Fred considers to disengage the scanners from any official context and apply them to personal use only. Their operation thus turns into a helpless act of empathy: “In wretched little lives like that, someone must […] mark their sad comings and goings” (221). As Bob/Fred ponders the humane value of the scanners, he himself is at the last stage before becoming the dead camera eye of Bruce. That does not happen by accident but is the function which he is now meant to perform for the good of society. As Mike, another covert investigator at New-Path, considers: “The dead […] who can still see, even if they can’t understand: they are our camera” (266). Society’s view of Bob/Fred as a machine which can be put to any use is reflected in the general likelihood of machines and humans in the novel. Humans are foremost seen as units that either function or are broken, they are incapable of acting independently and rest in the passive status of victims where anything that is done is being done to them. Just as machines repeatedly become the victims of sabotage, humans become the victims of Substance D., paranoia and a totalitarian system which only regards them as victims. The protagonist’s anxiety of immobility and victimization, characteristic of noir, expresses itself in the novel as the fear of "becoming […] a manufactured object incapable of breaking away from the master script of his society"  (Horsley 241).

As everyone is entrapped in a society which views people as objects that can be treated in any way, a sense of self becomes irrelevant. In Ricoeur’s terms, people are officially only granted an idem- but not an ipse-identity. This erases the difference between objecthood and personhood which makes any story of one’s own possible in the first place. The construction of a narrative identity in such a state is a highly precarious affair, and it is only logical that the narrator of the novel, who is faced with this dilemma, fails and ends up without any sense of self. Interestingly, throughout the novel the narrative was mostly focalized through the covert investigator, Bob/Fred, by a mostly covert narrator. Now, Bruce can no longer be called a covert investigator even though he is supposed to be used as one – in fact, he can hide this because he has forgotten that he ever was a covert investigator. At the same time, the novel is focalized through other characters because Bruce has lost his own point of view. This also means that in scenes when one can detect no point of view of a specific character, the narrator becomes more over in his observations of Bruce. He is able to point out things of which Bruce shows no awareness and also comments on his inner life (251, 269). 

Although Bob/Fred is embedded in this society as a police officer, his status as a covert investigator, which makes him constantly hide his true identity, puts him in a much more marginal and solitary position that is closely associated with the private eye in noir. Accordingly, Horsley writes of Bob/Fred that he is “a hunter character reminiscent of the private eye, but here with a much stronger sense that he is a victim” (241). This victimization of the investigator is a result of a society in which dehumanizing objectification erases any sense of privacy. Thus, there is nothing personal or private about Bruce in the end, as he unwittingly observes himself. In a group session at New-Path that is to break him down into confessing whether he was a nark in the world outside, he finally states: “I am an eye” (251). From the private eye of the investigator he has turned into the dead eye of the camera. This stands in stark contrast to Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. In Denis Johnson’s novel, Leonard English emphasizes towards the end his status as a private eye: “ I’m a private eye and I’m living out a private mystery” (230, italics in original). This exaggeration of the ‘private’ in his investigations distorts his perception and makes him lose his ability to differentiate so that he accepts instead a logic of paranoid holism. In A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, a totalitarian surveillance society destroys privacy and personality to a point that differentiation fails because any substance, which makes differentiation possible in the first place, is erased. These matters of substance include professional and private personality, perception of time, and possession of language.

The close relation between the protagonist’s status as investigator and his status of personal identity is apparent since at the moment Bob/Fred, the split investigator, is reduced to Bruce, the uncomprehending observer, he has also lost his previous identity and in fact any status as a person. Robbed of a world outside the confines of the drug rehab center New-Path, he can only connect to his past by utterly distorted and obscure memories, for example thinking of “owning a rat named Fred that lived under their sink” (267) in his previous household. As he can no longer connect himself to any past self, he loses the grip on time altogether. Time, which has been a problematic category throughout the novel and was continually prone to drug-induced disturbances (see 188, 192, 199), now stops altogether creating a state of complete inertia: “Time ceased as the eyes gazed” (275). Also language, which has been disrupted in the course of his disintegration, becomes part of this vacuum and fails him completely. In the group session of assault, his utterance “I am an eye” immediately reduces him to the functions of this instrument depriving him of all other realms of sense and understanding: “He heard nothing now. And forgot the meaning of the words, and finally, the words themselves” (251). Again, not only the faculty of differentiation fails, which gives meanings to words, but the very substance of language vanishes: The words disappear and the “Vacuum in him grew” (251).

Christopher Palmer argues that this final state of Bruce is a “cruel parody of death” (188) signifying that “dying is not a postmodern act” (198). One can actually make a case for this because death would mean an end to the loop in which everyone is caught in Dick’s postmodern noir. Also, one could argue, in the destruction of difference and substance that marks the closing point of the novel, death would be a much to substantial event. Since actual dying marks the ultimate difference between life and death, it would signal a world of clear-cut boundaries in which the transgression from one realm to the other would in fact change anything. In A Scanner Darkly, the possibility for such a world in which one person, or anything at all, could make a difference, simply does not exist. Which is exactly why the portrayal of Donna towards the end as an almost transcendent spirit of transformation (258, 259) fails to convince (see also Palmer 213). Whereas in Resuscitation death becomes flexible enough to provide a possibility for transformation and rebirth, the transformation of life in A Scanner Darkly is a process of reduction at whose end even death fails to make a difference.

The only time actual death becomes the end is in an imaginary vision of “a totally burned-out society” (268). It is an exaggerated image of society as has been presented throughout the novel. The failure of difference due to the rules of consumption and mass production leads to a state of collapse in which everything becomes the same and hence all meaning breaks down: “the phone book has only one number in it; you call that number for whoever you want. […] And if you forget the number, you couldn’t call anybody” (268). Communication becomes not only impossible in such a society, but irrelevant as there is nothing which can be talked about except the one thing everybody already knows and which nobody cares about because it does not matter anymore. The rule of consumption has led to a state where everything is consumed and used up. Thus the content of anything is emptied to an extent that the split in society disappears because there is nothing anymore that could produce a split or be split in itself. There is only a void that mindlessly reflects itself and produces a totalitarian system of reduction. In this system, death reappears as “the same penalty for any breaking of the law” (268) Being the ultimate difference, it is reintroduced by a society that no longer knows difference and therefore inevitably eliminates itself: “They faded out, one by one, as they broke the law, and sort of died” (268). This “sort of” marks how even as an image death has lost the impact in a world that blurs the difference between the living and the dead. This vision of society is of course only the projection on a grander scale of what has already happened to Bob/Fred/Bruce. Unlike Leonard English, he is not consumed in the ecstatic fire of a vision that burns away all sense of self in the all-presence of humankind, time and space. Instead, difference for Bob/Fred is lost in a burn-out of all inner life which is needed for any grasp on the world and the self. Whereas English has  experienced a delusional epiphany of self-dissolution, Bob/Fred is disconnected from any idea of his own self to the point that he no longer possesses the faculty for an epiphany. This disconnection from the self means disintegration of identity: Unbound from any position of subjectivity, all personal features cancel each other out, and the self is lost to itself in the void. In terms of narrative identity, this utter disconnection erases the narrative that has been constructed up to this point and makes any further narrative impossible. Being the product of life-reduction, Bruce emerges as someone who has never lived and will never live. This is at the same time the perfect realization of the typically noir post-mortem life, also found in Johnson’s novel, and its cancellation since Bruce’s existence can no longer be called post-anything. For anything his life was before, has now never existed for him. Ricoeur argues that ‘nothing’ as an answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ still implies an ‘I’, an ipse-identity that is only without assistance of an idem-identity. In the case of Bruce, however, there is no guarantee that he would comprehend the question. In the last chapter, he is mainly reduced to a mindless echo:

            “Mountains, Bruce, mountains,” the manager said.

            “Mountains, Bruce, mountains,” Bruce said, and gazed.

            “Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,” the manager said.     

                        “Echolalia, Bruce-“ (273)

If Bruce mindlessly threw back the question ‘Who am I?’, or rather ‘Who are you?’, back at the person asking, it would not be an answer that is merely reduced to the “starkness of the question itself”, as Ricoeur has argued for other cases. Instead, more radically, the words of the question would be reduced to empty sound by a mind of empty reflection that has no access to idem- and ipse-identity.

In these final images of burn-out that are either exaggerations of actual states previously considered or realizations of inner fears previously expressed, the novel itself comes to a state of burn-out in its incessant treatment of its central themes and use of imagery. For Palmer, this method of exhausting and presenting everything clearly on the surface is one of the unwittingly “self-reflective” (198) features of the novel dealing with burn-out and loss of difference and depth. One might add that the novel becomes only possible by presenting itself in the manner of the society it describes. It is caught in the same loop of repetition as everything else and has to state the same things over and over again in a slightly different manner simply because there is nothing else to be said in a society which knows only the theme of burn-out and which burns out in the reflection of this theme. “There was nothing he did not know; there was nothing left to happen” (275). This is not only a description of Bruce’s final state, but, on its final page, also an assessment of the place to which the novel has moved and from which it cannot go any further.

Exactly at this moment, however, Philip K. Dick offers “a glimmer of hope” (Horsley 242) that deserves a final examination. First, Bruce briefly realizes that he is working on a field on which Substance D. is grown: “I saw Substance D. growing. I saw death rising from the earth” (275). Despite being someone who has lost nearly all capability for thought, such a brief grasp on his perception might actually be the one, admittedly pathetic, kind of epiphany which is still possible to him and which saves him from being a mere object. Furthermore:

Bruce picked one of the stubbled blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, slipping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving. (275)

At this moment, Bruce is able to give purpose and meaning to his actions because he has not lost his faculty of empathy and relates to some people as “friends”, which is a form of resistance at New-Path where one is “not supposed to make any one-to-one relationships” (272). Of course, the most important of these friends, Mike, is another covert investigator and therefore part of the people who made sure that Bob/Fred would end up as Bruce in New-Path. The action of securing one of the “Mors ontologica” (275, italics in original) is at once a first step to help society, but in its naivety and childlikeness a clear sign that Bruce can no longer be helped. In the last sentence of the novel, Bruce is simultaneously able to ‘look forward inside his mind’ and his mind is described as a place “where no one could see”. This impenetrability of an inner core of self recalls the fear of “a dark, unrecognised inner self” (Horsley 240) articulated earlier in the novel. Now the idea that such a self beyond anyone’s reach exists is the last offering of hope that some self remained in the empty shell of Bruce. However, the hope that he is aware of this and can act according to that knowledge is very dim and is contradicted in the presentation of him as an echo earlier in the same chapter. Instead, Bruce must be regarded as a type of scanner at the end: An instrument that cannot choose to what it has access but can only notice what is in front of it; a machine of observation that cannot tell what it sees but is able to record it and that keeps a piece of information so others will know what it saw. Just like the scanners, Bruce is unable to penetrate the distortions of perception and sees only the surface: Just as they were unable to access an objective reality, Bruce cannot access his inner self. Finally, the flower he secures stands for everything he has lost:  The flowers of death become the “Flowers of spring” which he never bought for Donna; they are also the “god” to whom he sacrificed himself and to whom he was sacrificed (274).

Bruce emerges as the perfect victim who had only to be assisted on his path toward self-destruction and whose identity as a covert investigator could be used to have him cancel himself out. His life is ended in order for him to come to the place where the kind of death is grown which is now his life and which he will simultaneously help to produce and terminate. The novel comes full circle when it presents death of identity as a flower, Bruce, being one of its victims, as someone who is meant to continue to grow the flower, and the extinction of this flower with the help of Bruce as the only hope for those who sacrificed Bob to the flower of death of identity. The novel thus finds its ending in another loop to which no end exists and which is the only way anything can exist in a society which continuously consumes itself.

That this society, which Philip K. Dick has set in the near future, is very much his own, and that he has related in the novel a personally experienced hell, becomes painstakingly clear in the “Author’s Note” (276) which concludes the novel It dedicates the novel to all those “maimed, destroyed” (276) by drug abuse in the sixties, points out that there is no bourgeois moral to be found in the novel and ends with a name list of those ‘maimed and destroyed’ including the author’s (278). It is clear, then, that Dick wants this novel to be read as a direct act of empathy – an act which would have been impossible in the world of the novel itself. The hope of which one can see a glimmer in the last scene, is offered very clearly when he expresses the wish “to let them be happy” (278). However, even the author’s note cannot free itself fully from the failure of difference and the dominance of the loop. The listing of names is not only ambiguous because in the novel “names were reduced to hollow emptiness” (Palmer 214). In addition, it ends with “… and so forth” (278), rightly suggesting that the list could be continued endlessly. In that it comes close to the reading of sins which Charles Freck hallucinates after his failed suicide attempt (188). In its entire form, the name list would become a list which would crush anyone with its sheer force of accumulation but in which finally any single name, and thus any single person, would cease to make a difference. Furthermore, Philip K. Dick maintains that “I myself, I am not a character in this novel. I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time” (277). Thus creator, creation and the tableau to be represented in the creation merge in a single item. This produces a loop in which the author is consumed by the novel and in which the novel presents itself as a literal manifestation of the author, whose presence in turn is erased in favor of representing a grander social condition – which led to the creation of the novel in the first place. This might be nothing more than the stating of the obvious. In the context of A Scanner Darkly, however, such a figure resembles very closely the workings of the society described throughout the novel. Additionally, it can be read as suggesting that in postmodernism even the writer who sees himself as a witness can no longer refer himself to a stable outside position and is caught in the loop into which he has written a part of his own narrative identity.

 

Conclusion: Disintegration of Identity in the Narrative Logic of Postmodern Noir Fiction       

In this study, we set out to examine the investigator’s disintegrating narrative identity in postmodern noir fiction, discussed this development in Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and arrived at two different versions of a disintegrated identity: In the former case, an indifferent self abandons all self-narratives, whereas in the latter the self becomes a hollow shell that is no longer capable of telling a story of its own.

In both novels, we witnessed the protagonist’s identity disintegrate while trying to constitute itself through narrative mediation: Johnson’s lost investigator Leonard English does so by constructing a case story and using Twinbrook as a narrative foil for the interpretation of his own experiences to the point of complete identification. While Twinbrook turns thus into a fictitious character, the story English constructs for him, and the plot of which he sees him as a victim, is nothing but the plot of a fiction. Dick’s split investigator Bob/Fred begins his self-observation with the goal to (re-)construct the narrative which would reveal the plot against him and the people involved in it. However, this enterprise of interpretation fails since in the course of the observations he becomes to himself just another person to be suspected like anyone else. This self-alienation is the beginning of a complete disintegration of his self. His final state as an object-like being is exactly the desired result of the plot against him developed and supervised by the persons he trusts the most. In both cases, the failure of narrative identity leading to the protagonist’s disintegration is the result of a deceptive and (possibly) malicious society in which nothing can be taken for granted or ascertained, everyone is a suspect and guilt is not eradicable or even negotiable. In the collapse of oppositions, the lost and the split investigator become not only perpetrators but, in their failure and disintegration, they are also victims of society and of themselves.

Ricoeur himself has examined cases in fiction where identity becomes problematic and the narrative identity of a character can no longer be maintained. With Musil’s Ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften, he has chosen a hallmark of modernism which has pushed the novel to its utter limit, up to the “disintegration of the narrative form” (“Narrative Identity” 196). In postmodern noir fiction, such a disintegration of narrative identity is no longer restricted to exceptional works that challenge the form of the novel itself. Instead, postmodern noir fiction regularly depicts a condition in which the disintegration of narrative identity is the logical outcome, and is, in fact, inevitable. It offers a vision of postmodernism which is utterly negative. For Johnson, the dangers of a narrative identity lie in the sheer search for what Ricoeur calls a “configuration in a succession”, and thus narrative identity is suspended in favor of a content apathy. Dick, on the other hand, seems in accord with Mark Currie’s assessment “that the fragmentary character of postmodernity [as] no more than a transition from one form of domination to another” may signal “the conquest of cultural schizophrenia over narrative identity” (113).

Is this to suggest that narrative identity is always bound to fail in the postmodern condition, and do these works testify to such a negative assessment? Actually, this might be too bold a statement which furthermore goes too far in equaling the demands to be put on a philosophical concept of identity and the logic according to which a time-specific and genre-specific work of fiction functions. As has been pointed out in the introduction, noir generally expresses the dangers, discontents and anxieties of its specific historical time and place. For Johnson, these fears are expressed in the dissolution of meaning in a totalizing diversity; for Dick, uniformity and fragmentation become equally threatening in a society ruled by mass production and consumption. The extent to which the respective protagonist is affected by these threats is of course meant to point out the problematical nature of self-constitution of any kind in postmodernity. However, the extremely negative outcome in each case is not so much dictated by the need to negate the concept of narrative identity in postmodernism, as it is by the need to find a conclusion according to the narrative logic of postmodern noir fiction.

Noir, as we have established, is characterized by the constant presence of menace, the equally constant possibility of random violence, the dominance of false narratives in all discourse extending to self-deception, and the threat to moral and psychological integrity. The noir narrative is generally depicted as a struggle of the protagonist against these violent forces and threats in which the protagonist is most often fatally bound to fail. As the psychological integrity of the protagonist is very strongly involved in this struggle in postmodern noir, his failure in the struggle inevitably involves his personal disintegration. In contrast to the modernist noir investigator like Spade or Marlowe, the postmodern noir investigator cannot lay claim to narrative control in order to protect his integrity. Thus, he cannot separate himself from the dominance of false narratives and is either lost in deceptions or is put under pressure until his own self-narrative splits apart. In this development, noir’s fatality is emphasized, since the investigator starts to disintegrate under the dominance of false narratives exactly when he tries to constitute his own identity with the help of narrative. The disintegration of the protagonist’s narrative identity is not a challenge to noir but is accepted and even desired in the negative logic of noir which demands a conclusion of fatality and failure.

In contrast to the modernist case presented by Ricoeur, the disintegration of the protagonist’s narrative identity does not lead to the disintegration of the narrative form in postmodernism. Just as the postmodern subject has learned to cope with its loss of subjectivity, the disintegration of the protagonist’s narrative identity is only a narrative to be told among others and can only find its conclusion in the completed disintegration. What in modernism is to Ricoeur a “drama of dissolution” causing “perplexity” (196), loses part of its dramatic and puzzling quality in postmodern thought in which all categories turn so flexible that dissolution is not unthinkable, but quite logical. In Dick’s case, this is brought to the point when the narrative of disintegration has consumed all other narratives and is now forced to be endlessly repeated in a ceaseless loop. Similarly, Ricoeur states in respect to Musil that the “unidentifiable becomes unnamable” (195), which expresses the modernist anxiety about personal decline up to the point at which one can no longer be referred to. In the postmodern noir of Johnson and Dick, on the other hand, the “unidentifiable” is simply given another name: Leonard English arbitrarily names himself “May-June” in his transformation as a transvestite, and the split investigator Bob/Fred becomes Bruce in his final depersonalized state. Of course, especially in the case of Bob/Fred/Bruce, one can say that the loss of the original name points to the fact that also the person bearing this name has ceased to exist. However, the overall flexibility and, hence, emptiness of names also suggest that the ability to refer to someone with a name does not imply that this name refers to a unified and  identifiable self. Just as the name stops to necessarily signify a unified self, the existence of the signified, the self, is called into question. Instead of proving the existence of a self, the name becomes identical with the self only in so far that both are robbed of their defining status in an unmaking process of indeterminacy. Thus, a typically modernist anxiety becomes a defining, and hence inevitable, feature of postmodernism.  

Thus, the inevitability works both ways: Just as the fatality of noir fiction always predetermines the outcome of the struggle, postmodernism focuses on the dissolution of all stable categories and especially on the denial of any stable self. Thus, postmodern noir fiction only allows an outcome that accepts and realizes the principles of noir and postmodernism. Ironically, just when the investigator’s narrative project fails due to threatening indeterminacies and the collapse of dichotomies, the narrative project of postmodern noir successfully arrives at its logical conclusion. The fatal disintegration of the investigator’s narrative identity concludes the narrative logic of postmodern noir fiction.

Sections 1-2      Section 3

1 Published five years prior to his death, A Scanner Darkly is the last novel by Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) before his Valis-trilogy, which was to make up the last phase of his writing. Very subdued in the use of science-fiction elements and deeply autobiographical and personal, it stands out in the great body of Dick’s work. In its treatment of a hidden/double identity and a deceptive society, it comes closest to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said from 1974. The split investigator, Bob/Fred, resembles Philip Deckard, the investigator in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, who has to question his own human identity. Androids is the source for Blade Runner, which is the main reason it became Dick’s novel most often associated with noir.

2 In fact, Barris’ view of Arctor harboring “certain contradictions […] in terms of personality structure and in behavior” is not necessarily the result of paranoia but of observing Arctor “acutely and perceptively” (45) just as he claims. Actually, it is a perception of Arctor which the reader will arrive at very shortly.

 

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Filmography

A Scanner Darkly. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody

Harelson, Robert Downey Jr. WGA, 2005.

Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young. Warner,

1982.

Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston.

Paramount, 1974.

The Maltese Falcon. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladdis George,

Peter Lorre. Warner, 1941.

Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano.

Columbia Tri-Star, 2000.

Minority Report. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. Perf. Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton,

Max von Sydow. Universal, 2002.

Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Robert DeNiro, Cybill Sheperd, Jodie Foster, Harvey

Keitel. Columbia Tri-Star, 1976.