Original Illustration by Nerillo Art.
Keywords: lyrical, absurd, profane.
I skipped around the literary canon quite a bit as an undergraduate. I swooned over the Romantics, trudged through Greek Classics, and danced through the Harlem Renaissance, but I never read a single Shakespearean play. I did take a class on science fiction, though. It was taught by the legendary Tony Wolk, a guy who once brought his pal, Ursula K. Le Guin, to class with him. He also had more than one anecdote about hanging out with Philip K. Dick. He was, hands down, the coolest professor I ever had. Tony and I bonded when I told him that a book I found in my hometown library changed my life. That book was called Again, Dangerous Visions, and as is typical of my lackadaisical approach to literature, I read it before its predecessor. It wasn’t until a few years later that a friend of mine brought me a copy of the previous anthology compiled by Harlan Ellison. He was frustrated and thrust his copy of Dangerous Visions into my hand. “Take this,” he said, “read the second story and explain to me what it’s about.”
Honestly, I don’t remember exactly where I was in the literary canon at that point. Still, wherever I was, it was surely more treacherous than the unassuming mass market paperback in my hand. And I had always meant to read Ellison’s OG book, so I accepted the challenge. The story my friend was stuck on was “Riders of the Purple Wage“ by Philip Jose Farmer. Since that time, I’ve read a lot more of Farmer’s work, and so has my friend. I’ll probably never read all of it, but I like to think I’ve read all his weirdest stuff. After all this time, though, it’s “Riders of the Purple Wage“ that I keep coming back to.
I think the reason my brain returns to this story is because I’m starting to see echoes of ROTPW in our conversations about AI and universal basic income. In Farmer’s time, the computing age was just dawning and people were already starting to fret that robots with computer brains would take over all the work of civilization. Rereading ROTPW now, I find it to be as prescient as it is absurd.
One of the more hilarious and ironic aspects of the story is that it reads at times like it was written by an AI. The first few pages are especially hard to parse until you realize the word salad you’re wading through is a dream sequence. Turns out this was the section my friend was struggling with so I advised him to skip those pages and come back to them later. I stand by this advice. I also fully understand that this is not a story for everyone. It’s so chockablock with triggers that I don’t think I could sum them up in a warning. Rather than attempt a warning, I’ll offer this pithy summary:
If ROTPW had been written by ChatGPT, the prompt input would have been something like this: Write a story about a future society where everyone receives universal basic income so in place of work people spend their time taking drugs, gambling, and fornicating in every way imaginable. Make the main character a young artist whose 120-year-old grandfather lives in the walls. Oh, and write it in the style of James Joyce, but pepper it with puns and innuendo.
Even with an overly descriptive prompt, I don’t think AI could have come up with the story of a talented young man named Chib Winnegan, who not only makes visionary art, but has also invented an entirely new art form. Although he’s the darling of the art scene, he’s also plagued by family problems and runs with a wild gang of art nerds. His mother’s a slob, a gambler, and a drunkard who also probably sexually assaulted him. He might have gotten his ex-girlfriend pregnant, and his grandfather, the last rich guy alive, is hiding from the IRS in the walls of his own house. Chib desperately wants to win an upcoming art contest so the local government won’t forcibly relocate his family to Egypt, but not at the expense of his artistic integrity.
Just shy of a novella, ROTPW is surreal and shocking both in its subject matter and its style. Imagine if James Joyce took acid and then decided to ponder the future of the world. It’s the kind of wild, unpredictable narrative that AI could never generate. Yet, the way that it manages to capture and even satirize Joyce’s voice leads us tremulously across the uncanny valley. It’s discomforting and difficult just because it can be. It is precisely the kind of batshit strange that can only come from the human mind—in particular, a human named Philip José Farmer.
Phil Farmer was such an interesting character because everything you read about him says that he was a great guy. A dad and grandad who played college football and joined, but ultimately “washed out,” of the Air Force, he was as all-American as you can get. He wrote ROTPW when he was in his late forties, and it first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967. Ellison is effusive in his praise of the author, and one can’t help but go into the story thinking, “He seems like the kind of guy who’d offer you a hard candy while discussing H.G. Wells.” Once you start reading, though, it’s hard to imagine that this futuristic sex fever dream came from the same sweet Midwestern grandad.
I don’t want to sell Ellison’s volumes short by lumping all the stories together, so I will say that some of the dangerous ideas captured are thoughtful and academic like Ursula Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest.” But where Le Guin’s story reads like a field study and a parable, ROTPW is more like a pantomime. It is a grotesque and exaggerated drama of people living in a society that has completely thrown off the shackles of conformity and taboo to let it all hang out, both literally and metaphorically.
I get that many people read ROTPW, look at Mr. Congeniality Phil Farmer, and they imagine that he’s moralizing to them through the story. It’s certainly easy to view it from our current time period where every bigot wants to tell you about how anything other than hetero sex between a married man and a married woman inevitably leads to pedophilia. Still, I believe that those associations were the farthest thing from Farmer’s mind.
Take the main character, Chib, who is young, artistic, and left-leaning in his views and stands in contrast to his Grandpa Winnegan, a man of another generation who serves as a translator to readers who don’t come from a time when nothing is forbidden. We mostly see Chib’s sex life through the eyes of his grandfather, who seems to watch paternally over Chib rather than ogle him in a voyeuristic manner.
Grandpa Winnegan describes Chib as “sexually ambivalent,” which implies that rather than being openly attracted to both sexes, Chib doesn’t seem to have strong feelings one way or the other. Or maybe Grandpa’s being critical by suggesting Chib is just confused. However, later, Grandpa remarks, “He [Chib] and Omar Runic still blow each other occasionally, and why not? They love each other.” Ultimately, Grandpa seems to be primarily concerned with the relationship between love and sex, rather than the genders of the people involved. By the end of the story, he advises Chib to “hold fast to the belief that there are others out there who will love you just as much as I did” and to “love them as much as they love you.” Farmer, through Grandpa Winnegan, reminds the reader that it doesn’t matter who you love, as long as they love you back.
Grandpa Winnegan certainly does wax judgmental at times, for example, when he opines, “Mr. and Mrs. Everyman sit on their asses all day, drink, eat, and watch Fido*, and their brains run to mud and their bodies to sludge.” Yet, he crucially stops short of retro-fetishizing the capitalist past, saying, “Other ages would regard ours as a delirium, yet ours has benefits others lacked.” Those benefits? Small communities, complete freedom, and a lack of want—these things haven’t entirely made a utopia. “A Golden World in some respects; a nightmare in others,” Grandpa tells us, but again, he comes from a different time and is thus able to compare and contrast in a way that Chib is incapable of.
In another passage, Grandpa Winnegan remembers the formation of the Purple Wage. He recalls that everyone believed that, without having to work to survive, the vast majority of people would turn to art and education to fill their time. Philip José Farmer’s imagined reality turns out to be quite different. Although some people pursue art and education for their own sake, the vast majority prefer to be passive consumers of media. We also discover that even those who dedicate their lives to art have taken it in a perversely obsessive direction, searching for meaning and formulating theories about the most minuscule details of any given creation.
The tendency to dig deep and look for meaning in art is personified by my favorite character in the story, Rex Lucus, an art critic who lost an eye in a televised brawl over the merits of Rembrandt. Through Rex, Farmer can explore what it might look like to elevate art and artists above all other pursuits. In a world where we no longer live to work or work to live, is it so hard to believe that ambitious intellectuals would turn metaphorically cannibalistic, feeding off the ideas of others? Farmer portrays Rex Lucus as a raconteur who delights in engaging in linguistic battles with other art critics, savagely cutting them down with his own clever theories.
One section of the story begins with a groan-worthy Rex Lucus theory, “Excretion is the bitter part of valor.” To which another character exclaims, “Are we to understand that everything is a big pile of shit but that art makes a strange sea-change, forms it into something golden and illuminating?” Perhaps the story itself is just this question in long form: In a world where everything has gone to shit, can the arts still save us? I sure hope so. Like Grandpa Winnegan from beyond the grave, I hear the voice of Grandpa Farmer in my head, echoing back, “I hope so too, kid.”
*fido is a bit like telephone and television combined, so a bit like the internet. Once again, not a bad prediction PJF!