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152 Imitating the Dead In Dr. Bloodmoney the homunculus Bill (another ambulatory Faust II reference or property) saves the world from psychotic destructiveness or omnipotence that goes around and comes back around between the mad scientist, Dr. Bluthgeld, and Hoppy, the birth defective repairman who gets around through his prosthetic fit with technology and exceeds (or throws) every fitting limit when he develops spiritual or psychic prosthetic powers. Bill, who has lived seven years inside his twin sister Edie, with and through whom he made contact with the world, replaces Hoppy in the omnipotence seat. Bill obtains embodiment while adding a sensibility graduated through his awareness of the dead who mutter and moon and just wait around (209). Hoppy thought he saw the afterlife in trance states. But he only saw a future of death wish–fulfilling compensation and revenge, which the mad world outside or inside Bluthgeld’s head happens to meet more than halfway. Hoppy can mimic those he would possess and then dispatch. But Bill, by observing the dead so closely, because he believes it matters, can imitate the recently deceased, his advantage in the struggle with Hoppy, for whom all the dead are like fathers, lots of fathers (277). Bonnie Keller protects her former boss Bruno Bluthgeld against survivor vengeance following a nuclear test that, contrary to Bluthgeld’s calculations , backfired as the toxic layering upon his lie of their land. Though Bonnie assigns the blame to the entirety of scientific institutions backing the miscalculation, Bluthgeld himself assumes the guilty charge, which charges up his sense of omnipotence. Bluthgeld’s guilty assumption is the beginning of his psychotic break. Bonnie sends him to see her psychiatrist, Dr. Stockstill , on what turns out to be the day of the second nuclear conflagration, resulting, apparently yet inexplicably, from self-destructive feedback of the Imitating the Dead 153 system of defense. But it’s the day that, because he is looked at the wrong way, Dr. Bluthgeld must flex the nuclear commands that are his wishes for self-defense. In interview (with Lupoff) Dick comments on certain Jungian revalorizations of projection, which, extending from the reception of psychosis into quantum physics, can be seen to spark Dr. Bluthgeld’s fantasy of danger as fantasy innocent bystanders must share. There is, of course, a contemporary heretical sect of scientists and laymen who, based on Jung’s theory that UFOs were projections from the collective unconscious, that have begun to talk about mental contents as being actually objective. This is the Tulpa theory that they can be projected into the outer world and even be photographed, and are sensible objects. They are objects of our percept system and are projected from the unconscious—which is just one step further from Jung’s idea that an individual will project elements of his unconscious. Now we have the collective unconscious of a number of people being projected and forming Tulpa objects. . . . Now one of the basic psychotic ideas is that you can affect objects by just thinking about them, and yet this has crept into quantum physics. By picking up the Jungian thing we arrive at the conclusion that we can and do project a lot of our outer reality. The research Dick describes here seems to follow the scientific pattern of modern Spiritualism (notably the insertion of photography into the otherwise invisible séance). In Dr. Bloodmoney, Dick projects mass death resulting from convergence between psychosis and modern physics via the figure of Dr. Bluthgeld (while keeping tabs on the dead via the homunculus). On day two of the nuclear calamity, Dr. Stockstill observes the war psychosis in one of his fellow victims as the novel’s first index of internal resources of bombs blasting in the air: “We’ll fight back, we’ll fight back, we’ll fight back,” a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some kind of revenge? Would he reverse the natural forces at work, as if rolling a film-sequence backward? It was a peculiar, nonsensical idea. It was as if the man had been gripped by his unconscious. He was no longer living a rational, ego-directed existence; he had surrendered to some archetype. (74) Since only Edie is visible or audible on the outside, the twins are hidden sports (resented...

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