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Thursday, March 06, 2008
High Castle and Inner Truth
I’ve just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle and find it pretty interesting – and sophisticated as well. It seems to be a meditation on the nature of history and of fiction, but without the self-conscious hijinks one finds in, say, John Barth. As you may know, it’s set in an alternative history of the mid-20th century in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The eastern seaboard of the USA becomes German territory while the western seaboard becomes Japanese territory. The central area remains more-or-less independent.
One Hawthorne Abendsen lives in that central area, near Cheyenne. He’s the man in the high castle, though he does not, in fact, live in a high castle. Nor is he a central character in the novel, though he’s quite important. He’s written a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that is quite popular in what remains of the USA, but is banned from the German and Japanese sections. Why? Because it is an alternative history in which the Germans and Japanese have lost the war, that’s why. We see this history only in little bits here and there, as characters in the book either read or discuss Grasshopper. Those fragments are enough, however, to tell us that that history is not of our world, the history known to Dick’s readers. Rather, it is a second alternative alternative history.
Grasshopper is not the only book within the book. We also have the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text often used for divination. One character in each of the book’s loosely linked plots consults the I Ching regularly. Beyond that, Abendsen, whom we meet at the very end of the book, made constant use of the I Ching in plotting Grasshopper. According to the Wikipedia article, Dick himself used the I Ching while plotting The Man in the High Castle.
Most of the story takes place in San Francisco. Much of the action centers on Nobusuke Tagomi, a Japanese trade representative. He’s the focal point of an attempt by a Nazi faction to contact the Japanese government about a secret Nazi plan, Operation Dandelion, that involves the nuclear destruction of the Japanese homeland. Tagomi consults the I Ching and is in the process of reading Grasshopper.
He also buys antiquities from one Robert Childan, who links to another plotline involving one Frank Frink (a Jew, and thereby in mortal danger), who goes into the jewelry business with a colleague. Frink consults the oracle and has read Grasshopper. And then there is Frink’s wife, Juliana, a judo teacher somewhere in Colorado. Like Frank, from whom she is separated, she is a devotee of the I Ching and is in the process of reading Grasshopper, prompted by her paramour, a truck driver named Joe.
She’s the one who, at the end of the book, meets Abendsen. At that meeting she casts an oracle:
“Do you know what hexagram that is?” she said. “Without using the chart?”
“Yes,” Hawthorne said.
“It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.”
Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?”
“Yes,” she said.
With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war.”
“Yes.”
And, more or less, is the end of the book. We don’t know what happened with Operation Dandelion, a plan to destroy the Japanese homeland with nuclear weapons. So much is up in the air.
And yet we are to believe that the Japanese and the Germans lost the war when, in very obvious terms, they won it. By what Inner Truth can we consider them to have lost? That, I suppose, is one of the questions posed by The Man in the High Castle. There are certainly others. As our own Adam Roberts observes:
Readings of The Man in the High Castle have tended to concentrate on the relativist philosophy of History the novels embodies, for what are doubtless obvious reasons. But in fact this is a much more sophisticated, and consciously artistic, tale than this. This is a book about the inter-relations of history, truth, and creativity: indeed, one of Dick’s most brilliant touches is to advance the idea that there is a connection between these three terms, that they need to be understood in relation to one another.
Yes. And yet what most impresses me is that Dick manages this exploration with apparent ease and casualness. This is not a pyrotechnic performance. It does not draw its attention to its artistry. It simply goes about its business.
Comments
High Castle is one of those heavily-written-about books, so it’s difficult to write about casually. But there’s a reason that the standard plotlines of the book are left up in the air. The reality is the that Germany and Japan lost the war—not the Grasshopper reality, which in the world of the book is a sort of dimly seen gnosis, but the real reality of the world we live in. Once this is acknowledged within the fictional world itself, the plotlines of that world can’t help but become unimportant. Does Operation Dandelion come off? Well, it’s been recognized that it is a fictional operation within a fictional world, so it doesn’t really require that an author bring closure to it. The reader can make up their own ending. The true ending is the recognition of fictionality.
The reason that this doesn’t have a self-conscious Barthic quality is because it’s not really metafictional. It’s religious. Metafiction only leads to self-consciousness. Religious fiction attempts to lead to a different consciousness of the entire world, including the self.
The most cruel, or perhaps humbling, moment of the novel is Mr Tagomi’s moment of religious insight. Through a sort of Zen meditation on the fragment of truth—the artistic silver blob made by Frank Frink—Tagomi ascends to a representation of the true world. Which he finds intolerable. Why? Well, there’s a bit about traffic exhaust and so on, but mostly because he goes to a lunch counter and the black people there won’t get up for him. The true world is one in which, for reasons of justice which he doesn’t understand, he has lower status, or at least lower differential status. Gnosis is often presented as a sort of ascension, but not here.
Interesting comment, Rich. Is this religious element widely recognized in Dick commentary, about which I know zilch? BTW, my text explicitly states that the people at the lunch counter are “whites,” all of them. One addresses Tagomi as “Tojo.”
Bill,
The short answer is yes. PKD apparently had an intense religious experience in the early or mid ‘70s, the results of which show up in many of his books. Nearly all of his books deal with breakdowns of subjective reality achieved through a number of various SF devices (or sometimes drug abuse). The Man in the High Castle is a bit unusual for Dick in that there are no overt SF devices—just the I Ching.
PKD may have been clinically nuts, a fact he himself recognizes, but he argues that true insanity makes it difficult or impossible for an individual to cope, whereas his brand fueled his fiction.
Many here like comics, so here’s a link to R. Crumb’s famous bit on PKD’s religious experience:
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo.htm
I had forgotten that the text specifies that everyone at the lunch counter is white, though I had remembered the Tojo remark. The part about the setting for this interaction being a lunch counter, and them not getting up, made the symbolism so foregrounded that I assumed that an inversion had taken place, with Tagomi’s insistence on racial status making him “white”.
But since you’ve pointed it out, it adds an additional layer of grimness to the scene. The real world of America in the fifties and sixties clearly wasn’t as bad as the imaginary world of the book, in which worldwide genocide is going on. But it’s not exactly good either. Tagomi has a vision of reality in which people are no longer being wiped out wholesale by Nazis, but it’s certainly not Heaven.
With regard to Trent’s comment, I don’t really think that PKD’s biography is necessary for criticism of his books, and anyway I think that crazy people are boring. Many of PKD’s books deal with religion at an overt level (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, etc.) or with an invented religion such as the Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. But the overriding religious strand within PKD’s work is, I think, Gnostic. That’s really what connects his personal religiousity to that of other authors of the late 20th century.
There’s a common sort of pseudo-Gnosticism among these authors. It’s why Harold Bloom, say, calls himself a Gnostic. Once you start thinking of yourself as an author, and assimilate the Romantic heritage of the author as creator together with postmodern metatextuality, it’s common to see authors, and therefore yourself, as a stand-in for God, or as identifying in some way with God. Don’t you create worlds, after all? That is fundamentally a sort of Gnostic viewpoint. But as an author you can’t help but be conscious of your shortcomings, so it becomes an unusual Gnosticism in which you really act as the Demiurge, the flawed creator of an imaginary, crippled world. I think that’s a good religious lens to read PKD through.
Actually, I agree with Rich. The works stand by themselves. The biography is interesting, though. Some of his journal entries were compiled in a book called _In the Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis_. You can see how literally PKD took all this. Very gnostic, of course. Dick’s gnosticism, however, wasn’t just that of an imperfect author writing novels; it was closer in spirit to historic gnosticism. The Iron Prison we live in actually is the work of the Demiurge; _The Divine Invasion_ (a later work often grouped with Timothy Archer, Valis, and Radio Free Albemuth)_ actually is about a Divine infestation of this imaginary and flawed world. That’s quite a bit different from the Romantic notion of artistic creators as gods. I think it’s reasonable to read Dick as trying to capture what he thinks is actuality. Of course, many of his novels were written before his religious experience in 1974; I think Dick has said the 1974 experience was a crystallization of insights he had long had in more inchoate form.
But all this is clear from the works themselves, so I agree with Rich that recourse to biography isn’t essential.
Bill, I haven’t read much Dick over the last 20 years, and I haven’t read much criticism of his works since Jameson and Stanislaw Lem decades ago. I do think two Lem essays in particular very intelligently analyze his works—they are collected in his _Microworlds_, which I imagine is available through Amazon or an Amazon affiliate. And I agree with you that much of the appeal of The Man in the High Castle is the ease and grace with which Dick explores his themes. Some of that may be that Dick, in some ways, has been developing his ideas for many, many years. And, as has been pointed out, he’s not playing a metafiction game; there’s a deadly seriousness here. If all this is interesting, I suggest reading Valis and Radio Free Albemuth, two late works which explicitly deal with the issues discussed here.
I’m not sure how much weight to put on “closer in spirit to historic gnosticism” in general. The actual, historic gnostics believed in all sorts of stuff which I don’t think that many contemporaries who claim to be influenced by historic gnosticism really believe.
Here’s my mental model of what really happens. An author is influenced towards Gnosticism by this contemporary combination of Romanticism and postmodern metatextuality. (SF very much encourages this, with its emphasis on “worldbuilding"). Then, being a literate person who is used to doing research, they look up the historical gnostics. Then they proceed to pick over whatever parts of that that they like. If they’re of a more mystical bent, they may even quote the historical texts, or at least name-check them. But that doesn’t mean that they believe anything that a historic gnostic would recognize.
In particular, PKD was fascinated by his rather ordinary religious mental illness episodes, which I rather wish people had just told him to get over rather than make a big deal out of. So, sure, he goes the full yard: Iron Prison, early Christianity, ad nauseum.
But that’s not really what’s interesting about his books. Nowhere does the implied author of the books really appear to believe in a perfect God who we are part of who is hidden by this imperfect world, and who can be perceived through gnosis. Rather, the God-flashes are distinctly imperfect. That’s the real engine driving PKD books, the holy wisdom who tells you that your cat had to die because it was stupid. The vision of Jesus that cannibalizes his worshippers. You can’t really blame all that on the Demiurge, although PKD might like to; I think it’s clear that God in the PKD books can’t help but be the Demiurge, because after all PKD was conscious that he was writing the books. So it becomes less a matter of historic gnosticism and more a matter of sympathy with the Demiurge, of finding ways to get along—PKD’s emphasis on empathy, here, functions as plea from author to reader.
Rich, I largely agree with you. Mental illness isn’t my interest, either, particularly. What’s fascinating about PKD is that he was able to use his visions/hallucinations/paranoia to create some interesting fiction. In addition, he had enough insight into himself to realize that his visions could simply be caused by mental illness. So he speculates and his characters speculate about what lies behind the veil—or if there is even a veil. You’re absolutely on the mark when you say the God-flashes are imperfect; these novels would be much less interesting otherwise.
I’ll have to think about your last two or three sentences.
Fine, fine novel. What’s interesting about it biographically is that it was not marketed as SF and indeed was Dick’s most successful attempt to become “literary”—his SF novels immediately preceding it are potboilers, whereas his non-SF novels from the end of the Fifties (IMO) do some very interesting stuff; taking the advice of his psychiatrist to find his own writing space and spend a full year doing his best work, Dick managed to combine the strengths of his “realist” novels with the imaginative force of his best short SF and create a novel not the least of the strengths of which is its characterization: Le Guin has an essay somewhere praising Mr. Tagomi for being radically different from the usual SFnal hero. Indeed, the novel works wonderfully for me as one of those multiple-pov stories in which each climax is an individual ethical triumph rather than a plot-resolving jump.
There is a lot of interesting critical commentary about what the ending means, Bill; but, like Trent, I haven’t read it in years and thus I can’t point toward the best examples as I’d wish.
Bill, you’re making me regret I didn’t keep this on my SF syllabus this semester. There are costs to my early/late Cold War model, and losing this one is a big one! But then I cut Delany, too. Why can’t semesters be longer?
Trent, to turn back to biography for a moment—it’s hard to avoid with one as colorful as PKD’s—there’s a particular episode that PKD had that illuminates some of the problems with his own reading of his fiction. I’m describing this from memory, not looking at the biographical text that I got it from, so I may be wrong about it, but here goes. He apparently had a vision of a masked creature in the sky, or something, that reached down with a metal claw to grab him. Naturally he was disconcerted. He decided that perhaps it could really be a timid, friendly creature who, for purposes of self-protection, concealed itself under this frightening appearance. But once this possibility of inversion was accepted, he had to accept the even more frightening possibility that the entities that appeared to be friendly were in fact malign. The imagery from this episode apparently was the source for a good deal of Palmer Eldritch.
But neither of these are really very interesting readings. They support the emotional needs of the visionary, who needs to decide at the most immediate level whether something is threatening or not. But entities don’t really fall into an easy division between threatening and not… There are more interesting readings available for people who can get away from PKD’s biographical context.
What strikes me about the episode, for instance, is clumsiness. The metal face is unable to show emotion, the metal claw not able to grip as well as a real hand. In Palmer Eldritch, the artificial eye, jaw, and hand infect everyone; it’s a great metaphor for various things, including the nature of a society based around consumption. But it’s also authorial. The face in the sky is the author / the demiurge, and his clumsiness can’t help but be the clumsiness of everyone he creates.
Here’s an article about time in TMITHC:
http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/article.html
And here’s a diagram that goes with the article:
http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/plotlines.html
What the diagram shows is that the Juliana-to-Abendsen plotline ends well before the Tagomi-Baynes plotline, despite the fact that it’s conclusion is also the conclusion of the book. I certainly hadn’t noticed that.
TC: One’s one and only syllabus for a given course (this time around) is a deeply tricky issue. I had nothing in particular in mind when I decided to read TMITHC beyond:
1) I’d never read any PKD, though I’ve seen movies based on his stuff ("Blade Runner,” “Total Recall’)
2) I’d never read any alternative reality (SF) fiction.
Those two considerations, plus (having read) assertions that TMITHC is one of PKD’s best, made it a natural for me. Now that I’ve read it - and am in the process of re-reading it - I don’t know what I think about it. One issue arises from Rich’s first comment: are “going meta” and “going religious” alternative approaches to the same problem? If so, what is that problem?
Another issue concerns alternative history as a fictional strategy: What’s the point? This particular alternative history is clearly worse that what actually happened. Is that how all alternative histories work? (And then there’s the alternative history gambit as practiced by professional historians.)
And there’s a third issue, which is cross-talk from other things I’ve been thinking about. The Darwinian Crit people seem to think that understanding character motivation etc. is the central problem for the critic. However that works out for TMITHC, it doesn’t even come close to exhausting what this book is about. Why these characters do this or that seems secondary to the framework in which they’re living. That framework is what PKD is interested in. No?
And that takes us back to the world-building aspect of SF. Is not foregrounding the framework a significant cultural act/achievement?
The example of Peter Ackroyd’s metafictional historical novels suggests that going religious—or going metaphysical—isn’t opposed to going metafictional. Other like candidates include: Silko’s *Ceremony*, Morrison’s *Paradise*, and Johnson’s *Middle Passage*.
There are all sorts of senses of “going religious”—at least, more of them than “going metafictional”. In this case I’m interested in a very specific sense of the phrase, the one in which the author uses their relationship to the text to model the relationship between God and man. “Going metafictional” is much more concerned with text as play-object.
Rich, all the novels I listed above mirror the metaphysical relationships in the formal relationships. Silko’s novel is a great example, ‘tho not a favorite novel of mine. Another example would be Paul Auster’s work, where author/reader takes on religious/metaphysical significance.
Metafiction is too often misunderstood as a game, with no serious issues at stake. Linda Hutcheon effectively countered that view in *A Poetics of Postmodernism*. While there is metafiction that’s purely a type of puzzle, I don’t think it’s the norm.
I’m not familiar with Hutcheon’s essay, but I’d think that one serious issue at stake is the “Emma Bovary problem,” that is, mistaking fiction for reality.
Now that the question of book covers is on the table, here’s a bunch of covers for TMITHC:
http://pkdickbooks.com/SFnovels/Man_high_castle.html
Some of them are appropriate, others not so appropriate. I’ve got the 1992 Vintage edition. I can’t see much of any relationship between that cover image and the book.