I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here,

Although the reality problem is thus posed in metaphysical terms, such expectations by the reader are ultimately frustrated, and metaphysics is rejected. The characters are unable to discover any final, comprehensive meaning, and Joe Chip realizes, when he meets Jory, that there is nothing behind that reality: “Well, he thought, that’s one of the two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us—has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing: he is the end” (§15). And again, when he meets Ella, he exclaims “You’re the other one, Jory destroying us, you trying to help us. Behind you there’s no one. I’ve reached the last entities involved” (§16).

Yet Joe Chip’s discovery of the “last entities involved” is not that of a final or first cause. Jory and Ubik, although they may be seen as allegorical representations of God and the Devil, are limited, nonetheless, in several crucial ways which weaken this allegory; or rather, which suggests a criticism of such idealistic concepts as “God” or “the Devil.” In fact, Jory only “speeds up” the “normal cooling off” and death of things which is the “destiny of the universe” (§13). Nor does Jory think of himself as evil: his own half-life, he tells Chip, depends on his ability to prey on weaker half-lifers (§15) a dependance which is very similar to Joe Chip’s “ecological” argument in defence of Runciter Associates and the anti-Psis “neutralising” of Psis: “[anti-Psis] are life forms preying on the Psis, and the Psis are life forms that prey on the Norms… Balance, the full circle, predator and prey. It appears to be an eternal system; and frankly I don’t see how it could be improved” (§3).

In metaphysical terms, the thing Ubik is also an analogue to Christian “grace,” the divine assistance given man to help him through the earthly vale of tears into which he is fallen, towards the afterlife and his heavenly reward. Chip’s quest becomes, in large part, a search for Ubik (as Perceval’s quest was for the Grail, symbol of Christian grace and redemption), which will protect him from the forces of evil and death (Jory). However, Ubik’s significance as a mediating agency or signpost of metaphysical reality is undermined in several critical ways. First, it protects Chip by maintaining him an illusory reality, while covering up the “real” reality of the Moratorium. In similar fashion the established Christian religions have glossed over the human problems and injustices of reality while affirming that this existence is but the shadow of and preparation for an immaterial, ideal reality. Second, Ubik is de-sacralized through the ironic use of epigraphs, which I shall discuss in a moment, and within the narrative itself. For as Chip learns (§16), Ubik is a human invention, an image of humankind’s own struggle against entropy, rather than an image of divine assistance or guidance in that struggle. And the final reference to Ubik in the narrative is an ironical comment on divine intervention: after the attractive young woman who has materialized from the future to bring Joe Chip a spray-can of Ubik disappears, leaving him in the middle of trying to invite her to dinner, he discovers a message on the can: “I THINK HER NAME IS MYRA LANLEY. LOOK ON REVERSE SIDE OF CONTAINER FOR ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER” (§16).

AN EPIGRAPH IN THE FORM of an advertising jingle opens each chapter of Ubik, except that the last chapter has the epigraph quoted above, which can, however, be read as a theological super-ad, confirming the novel’s strange identification of religion and capitalist consumerism. These commercials, which have little or nothing to do with the narrative, sell Ubik as the best beer, the best instant coffee, the best shampoo….

These “commercial messages” provide a restatement of Marx’s description of value, for Ubik is a universal equivalent (the embodiment of exchange value), which can represent or replace any other commodity: under capitalism everything has its price; while the presentation of Ubik through these ads stresses the obligation of capitalism to produce needs (use-values) in the consumer.

Furthermore, the epigraphs, by their non-pertinence to the narrative (where Ubik is a “reality-support” which comes in a spray-can and is not mentioned until chapter 10), may also be seen as a further subversion of the metaphysical concept of representation. An epigraph, like a title, is expected to serve as a comment and/or digest of the contents of a chapter, as if meaning were contained in the writing and could be summed up in the way that labels tell us what is inside a can at the supermarket. Impertinent or facetious epigraphs (or chapter headings, as in Maze of Death) are a deliberate mislabeling which violates the commercial contract at the basis of the traditional novel.

The ironically inappropriate epigraphs to each chapter are thus a prelude to a more complex refutation of teleology and metaphysics in Ubik which depends upon recognizing the metaphysical presuppositions of the novel form itself. The classical bourgeois novel has been described in recent French literary theory as itself a metaphysical construct: traditionally, the novel has been a representative medium, and the concept of representation implies that the text is a restatement of some pre-existent meaning.³ This attitude reduces reading to a looking through the text to the “real” meaning, whether that meaning be empirical reality, the author’s conscious design or his unconscious intentions. Such a transcendental bias valorizes the meaning (the signified) while reducing the signifier to a means; it thereby masks and mystifies the text itself, both in its materiality (its texture) and in its production (the act of writing), in much the same way that—as Marx has shown—exchange value effects a masking and mystification of an object’s use-value as well as of the concrete human labor invested in it.⁴

The traditional “representational novel” functions in this way as an ideological support for capitalism: it reinforces a transcendental conception of reality which mystifies the actual reality of the capitalist mode of production and the resultant repression and alienation. And although SF stories depict an imaginary reality, they have traditionally been concerned with the representation of a “fictional alternative to the author’s empirical environment” which is usually consistent and regulated by knowable laws.⁵ As in other novels, there is a discernible, comprehensible meaning which informs the SF novel. (And this quite apart from any criticism one could make of the “contents” of the traditional SF novel.) But the reader of Ubik is refused any such final, definitive interpretation. At the end of the novel the reader seems to have at last achieved a complete explanation of the events according to which Joe Chip and the others are in half-life while Runciter is alive trying to contact them. The reader’s usual satisfaction in finishing a novel and looking back over how everything fits together derives from the formal confirmation of his conception of reality and, in the case of Ubik, from his relief at having finally resolved the disquieting tension between fictional reality and illusion. But this satisfaction is short-lived, for as Runciter leaves the Moratorium he discovers that the coins and bills in his pocket all bear the likeness of Joe Chip (as, at the beginning of the second part of the novel, Joe Chip and the other inertials’ money bore the likeness of Runciter)—an indication that this reality is also an illusion. And the novel concludes, as Runciter looks disbelievingly at his money: “This was just the beginning”: the beginning of an endless series of illusory realities, but for the careful reader, also the beginning of an end to a number of illusions about both reality and the novel. There is no satisfactory single interpretation of Ubik, my own included; and the reader’s traditional response—the discovery of that interpretation—is frustrated. However, that frustration was planned; this kind of text is no longer a window opening onto a transcendental meaning, but a mirror which reflects the reader’s look, forcing him out of his familiar reading habits while drawing his attention to the functioning of the novel as a form of manipulation.