The novel “Time Out of Joint” by Philip K. Dick was published for the first time in 1959.
Ragle Gumm is a veteran who doesn’t have a regular job but has found a good source of income in a newspaper contest. That’s because he is extremely good at guessing where a Martian might land on the map that gets published daily.
Despite the fame that comes from this success, Ragle Gumm feels like a failure who doesn’t even have a home of his own since he lives with his sister Margo, his brother-in-law Vic, and their son Sammy. The game requires considerable mental effort, and sometimes he hallucinates. Some strange events are shared by other people such as finding a magazine that talks about Marilyn Monroe, an actress who seems to be famous but no one in the family knows.
“Time Out of Joint” is one of the novels published in the early period of Philip K. Dick’s career as a writer and contains various themes that marked his production. For some years, his works were published by publishers specialized in science fiction while this novel was published by a non-specialized publisher.
In the late 1950s, Philip K. Dick was trying to establish himself as a writer tout court, seeing the science fiction environment as a sort of ghetto. The feeling of failure felt by Ragle Gumm in the novel seems to reflect what Dick himself felt.
Even in the themes developed in the novel and in the events that Ragle Gumm is at the center of, his story has points of contact with Philip K. Dick’s. The protagonist explicitly quotes the philosopher George Berkeley, also known as Bishop Berkeley because he was also an Anglican bishop. The philosophical references and some religious references included in the novel concern topics that were developed in later works by the author and became important in his life as well.
Ragle Gumm lives in what seems like a normal American town in 1959 and yet he has moments decidedly out of the ordinary that make him think that at least some things are not what they seem. Occasionally, his nephew Sammy finds objects somewhere such as a part of a phone book with non-existent numbers or a magazine that talks about Marilyn Monroe, an actress no one in the family knows.
Some negative feelings for Ragle Gumm come from the presence of neighbor Bill Black, who seems to find any excuse to visit Ragle’s family with his wife and meddle in their affairs. Philip K. Dick was quite paranoid and in this case, his feeling was not unfounded since he and his second wife Kleo received a visit from FBI agents, in his opinion, because of Kleo’s political ideas.
Philip K. Dick had strange experiences during his life that convinced him that things in his world weren’t what they seemed. They constitute the time out of joint that quotes William Shakespeare in the title. In Dick’s case, however, there’s no objective evidence to support those beliefs, which he developed during a life in which he wasn’t exactly mentally balanced.
Obviously, it’s possible that Philip K. Dick is actually alive and we are dead because after all, what’s reality? The author uses “Time Out of Joint” to start offering some philosophical reflections about this question, the beginning of a personal and literary journey that continued for the rest of his life.
Today, the plot of “Time Out of Joint” may seem almost obvious because it was a source of inspiration for later works but in my opinion, this only increases its importance. I was lucky enough to start reading Philip K. Dick with this novel and I believe it remains crucial to start getting to know this author. In general, I believe it remains a key novel for science fiction readers and not only them because in many ways, it transcends any literary genre. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
