This chapter analyses a structure of imagery in Dick's work that is connected with movement and stasis. Building on the observations about disintegration and blockage as a condition of Dick's worlds that were offered in the first chapter, it makes use of Fredric Jameson's notion of the political unconscious, which historicizes the way in which texts are the productions of repression and contradicted desires or impulses. The literary context for Dick's work is the ‘megatext’ that is American SF, and this is where our discussion begins. The relation to this megatext of Dick's oeuvre is a skewed one, and the coherence of Dick's own oeuvre is sometimes hard to discern, though it is clear that his work as an ongoing enterprise and set of tropes in turn serves as a megatext within which any single work by Dick can be set. The notion of a political unconscious implies that Dick's work can be read as a response to historical conditions; but before embarking on that topic it is necessary to examine how the response to history is refracted through textuality. This precaution is only prudent, given our lack of direct access to past history and given the complex, refracted and irreverent relations between a text by Dick and his oeuvre as a whole, and between the latter and the SF megatext. It has an additional advantage: it provides an opportunity to note the playful, freewheeling inventiveness of Dick's fiction. Given that the emphasis later in the discussion is on stagnation and blockage, this is a necessary corrective.

At Play in the Fields of the Megatext

It has been suggested that one characteristic of American popular culture, and one reason for its present global success, is the way in which any single work, or episode, can draw on a whole encyclopedia of immediately recognizable tropes, conventions, stereotypes and bits of common generic or cultural knowledge (see Mattelart, in Nelson and Grossberg 1988).

(An encyclopedia: a multiplex text to which the reader has access, consisting of bits of referential information and literary or generic lore.) This approach is particularly relevant to American SF, which may be said to draw on a shared megatext.