A review of 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K. Dick
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 11th. October 2013.
Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R29DH1BXHGBNL5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
In the world of 'The Man In The High Castle', the Allies lost the Second World War. The victorious Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, control vast swathes of the planet. In North America, the stage for this novel, the two major powers - the Germans and Japanese - fight a shadow war of espial intrigue, which the various characters become caught up in one way or another, direct or indirectly, while grappling with the micro-realities of their lives. The author, Phillip K. Dick, invokes the I-Ching as a literary device to represent the mystery and randomness of Fate and perhaps also to reflect the disenfranchisement and debasement of the Western American characters in the face of their Oriental invaders. Dick also uses the classic meta-fictional device of the `novel within a novel', entitled 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy', authored by the fictitious `Hawthorne Abendsen'. This is so as to provide his characters with a vision of an attractive-seeming alternative reality, through what, to them, seems a recursive alternate history.
Most people who read this novel regard it as a work of alternate history, but I am not sure that is quite on the mark. The author seems more concerned here with alternative realities than alternate history. Confusingly, the only actual alternate history in this novel is Abendsen's fictitious book, in which the Allies win the Second World War but Britain rather than the USSR emerges as one of the two superpowers. This diversionary reflects the ahistoricity of Dick's entire perspective. The author's only genuine foray into history, such as it is, appears to be more inadvertent than intentional, and might even be something he came to regret. Whatever, Dick presents the reader with an uncomfortable intellectual dilemma concerning the malleability of history and whether we are being told the truth about our collective past. I suspect this was not the intention and that Dick - or his editor - would have preferred that we think about the malleability of the present instead, and wrap ourselves up in all kinds of Eastern mystical twaddle - here we have an alliance of Taoist Orientals, who, of course, are perfectly in mental harmony, balance and synchronicity, in a cold war against a bunch of Occidental Nazis who are, naturally, cold and mechanistic brutes, etc. ad nauseum. When it comes to the past, the author is an even more conventional thinker and falls into the standard-issue "evil Nazis" literary trope. It is this cleave, between Dick's philosophic analysis of, respectively, the past and the present, that I wish to explore in this review.
In all fairness, the Nazi theme is not the real substance of the novel and only provides a compelling backdrop (it could have been, literally, any thematic period in history), but still, Dick would later excuse his failure to produce a sequel on the absurd pretext that he just couldn't bear to go back and read about the Nazis again. The irony of this novel is that the author is the victim of his own abstruseness. No matter how hard he tries, Dick cannot distract us from the contentiousness of history. He rightly wants us to question the basis of reality and identity, but in doing so he is liable to lead the thoughtful, historically-literate reader to the opposite conclusions of those he might have intended. Were the "Nazis" as evil as they are presented, or at all? Are we being told the truth about our history, and thus do we really understand our present? These ironic discursions reflect the wider methods of intellectual control in our culture. The idea of questioning reality and identity is entirely accepted in a confused society. Thus, race-mixing, drug-taking, gender-bending and other distended meanderings are de rigeur and in keeping with our own contemporary cultural climate. But if you question history, or worse still (in the eyes of the cultural commissars) reaffirm standards of truth - which amount to altogether more concrete mental diversions -you are soon in trouble. I have the feeling that Dick would like us to take his pop history of the 20th. century at face value and not question his take on the "evil Nazis", but the thoughtful and inquisitive reader cannot but help `get into trouble' by doing so.
Too often, published history is treated as law when in fact what we `know' (in the sense of what is accepted interpretation) is nothing more than a filtered version of the truth. There is only one truth. That stark fact is uncomfortable for many people who prefer the fashionable postmodern rejection of all that is objective and absolute in the moral, social and academic senses, but the `post-structuralist' school and similar merely represent still more ways of `seeing' or interpreting truth, not the Truth itself. The notion that the German National Socialists were "evil" and that their victory would have led inevitably to a desertified brutocracy is very much in the realm of interpretation and speculation. Part of the problem is that, unfortunately, truth is often confused with `reality'. Reality is related to the truth, but is not the same. Reality is just our experience of truth and is therefore loaded with perspective. In our reality - and that of the characters in this novel - the Nazis were brutes. Yet the author wishes to remind us, correctly, that reality is personal, a perspective or interpretation.
The author achieves this partly through the viewpoint of the characters and their peradventures, and also through various symbolic devices. For instance, we are lead to believe (perhaps implicitly more than explicitly) that 'Abendsen' - the eponymous `The Man In The High Castle' - must live in some kind of grand, palatial residence. In fact, it turns out that he lives in a modest house and has a modest bearing, and one suspects that has always been the case. In another scene, two characters discuss the `historicity' of certain artefacts and the obsession among their Japanese customers for `genuine' Americana: in this case, a couple of cigarette lighters. One of the lighters was used by FDR, the other wasn't, yet they are both alike. How do we come to regard one with greater value than the other? Surely we can't do so on any rational basis as there is literally no material difference between the two cigarette lighters. It's just that one happened to be in the pocket of FDR at some point. As one of the characters, 'Wyndam-Matson', who is running the whole scam, says:- [quote]"...You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical plasmic presence", no "aura" around it."[unquote] (p.66).
So Dick is trying to convey here the nonsense of placing historical value on artefacts. How is one object more `historic' than another, and more broadly, how can we say what is `real' or `genuine' and what isn't? This is all interesting material, yet at the same time I cannot help but feel that it seems a little facile. The point about the mysticism of historicity is well-made, but Dick seems to be suggesting that history itself is an entirely creative and indeterminate process rather than something `real'. I see this as nothing more than pseud plasticity. The reason people place historic value in objects and like to emphasise genuineness is in order to protect and preserve the past. The fact that an appearance of `genuineness' or `likeness' can be manufactured and faked is immaterial to the point. The characters in the above-mentioned exchange poke fun at the Japanese customers for their naïve fetishism - perhaps rightly so - but if there was no value in historicity, as Dick seems to believe, then we would be one step away from literally inventing the past, which is not actually what happens. It is true that reality is questionable, but the behaviour of the Japanese is, if anything, an example of the opposite pressures, of trying to cling on to the more objective aspects of reality because they know of it. That is, perhaps, a reason for the traditional human totemic affiliation with inanimate objects, and maybe also reflects a kind of fetishism about objects (see, for instance, Marx's `commodity fetishism'), but in the end the explanation of wanting to `hold on to history' and valuing the historicity of the object - "aura" or not - is as simple as acknowledging an important part of history which, if it is to have meaning, should not be permitted to slip into the irrationally extreme relativism that Dick posits.
Dick's heavily relativistic perspective on reality, in which everything is uncertain and entirely personal, has other slippages of logic. It leads to slightly related and equally fashionable, but cringe-worthy notions, such as `the personal is political' and so on. The idea of the `personal is political' I think underlines much of the message in this novel. In Dick's mind, the personal struggles of characters are the political reality and thus reality is whatever is perceived and whatever is the political climate reflects this self-directed reality. These types of self-defining associations of course contain some provisional truths. Nevertheless, they are, at bottom, symptomatic of a certain feeble-mindedness among decadent writers and academics who overlook the mediation between reality and truth. Dick is, to an extent, right: reality is personal - but that is not all there is to reality. Eventually, reality has to have its showdown with the Truth, with the objective world outside of the self, the counterpoise of our inner selves. We all know this intuitively because it is part of a common experience. At some stage, we all have to come to terms with ourselves: to be `true to yourself', a kind of meta-awareness that is characteristic of relative maturity, in which narrow child-like solipsism is abandoned.
Throughout The Man In The High Castle, political issues of identity intrude on characters' private and personal lives and disturb their solipsistic bliss, deciding their respective fates because identity is real - it is `the truth'. In this sense, the social concept of `identity' can be re-conceptualised geologically in terms of a `rock'. Much like individual rock, discrete identities are inchoate and can erode and change in form over time, but the underlying `geologic truth' is unchangeable: human beings organise socially into both imposed and self-directed identities. At different points in this novel, each character has the necessary psychological reckoning as they come up against this rock-like truth. Thus we can see reality as both personal and also as reflecting certain truths about human nature and the way societies work. Identity, then, is the anchor for each character to the more objective realm, a link to reality and the truth of his or her existence. Typically, a character will emerge from a provocative or enlightening dialogue or a period of fugue into a brief few moments of lucidity in which the truth becomes evident.
In the case of `Robert Childan', a white man [but notice the Japanese-type spelling of the surname - in the novel, he speaks and `thinks' `Japanesey' too], and dealer in memorabilia, the revelation comes from interaction with dominant colonising Japanese:-
[quote] "Face facts. I'm trying to pretend that these Japanese and I are alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war, that my nation lost - there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is sharp contrast vis-à-vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise."[unquote] [p.112]. 'Childan', though he is white and mentally Western, speaks and even thinks in a Japanese way, albeit he is clearly resisting this sinister acculturation.
`Frank Fink', a crypto-Jewish dealer in memorabilia, but also a proud cultural American, meets his `rock' in the most brutal fashion. `Tagomi', an industrialist, has a weird moment of fugue in which he confronts the `other reality' and its harsh social facts.
Perhaps the most interesting character is `Mr. Baynes', another crypto-Jew who travels to the United States from Germany and meets certain Japanese, including 'Tagomi', eventually revealing certain important, but hitherto concealed, facts about himself. `Baynes' cannot hide his true identity for long. On his arrival in the United States, he makes an explosive and incriminating admission to a complete stranger at the airport, just for the heck of it. Tagomi also senses the double concealment when they finally meet, feeling that something is not quite `German' about `Baynes'. So the truth cannot be hidden forever, even by `Baynes' - I am who I am, you are who you are, we are who we are, and either we will let spill on our own initiative, or we will be found out. Identity is the rock of humanity.
Most people who read this novel regard it as a work of alternate history, but I am not sure that is quite on the mark. The author seems more concerned here with alternative realities than alternate history. Confusingly, the only actual alternate history in this novel is Abendsen's fictitious book, in which the Allies win the Second World War but Britain rather than the USSR emerges as one of the two superpowers. This diversionary reflects the ahistoricity of Dick's entire perspective. The author's only genuine foray into history, such as it is, appears to be more inadvertent than intentional, and might even be something he came to regret. Whatever, Dick presents the reader with an uncomfortable intellectual dilemma concerning the malleability of history and whether we are being told the truth about our collective past. I suspect this was not the intention and that Dick - or his editor - would have preferred that we think about the malleability of the present instead, and wrap ourselves up in all kinds of Eastern mystical twaddle - here we have an alliance of Taoist Orientals, who, of course, are perfectly in mental harmony, balance and synchronicity, in a cold war against a bunch of Occidental Nazis who are, naturally, cold and mechanistic brutes, etc. ad nauseum. When it comes to the past, the author is an even more conventional thinker and falls into the standard-issue "evil Nazis" literary trope. It is this cleave, between Dick's philosophic analysis of, respectively, the past and the present, that I wish to explore in this review.
In all fairness, the Nazi theme is not the real substance of the novel and only provides a compelling backdrop (it could have been, literally, any thematic period in history), but still, Dick would later excuse his failure to produce a sequel on the absurd pretext that he just couldn't bear to go back and read about the Nazis again. The irony of this novel is that the author is the victim of his own abstruseness. No matter how hard he tries, Dick cannot distract us from the contentiousness of history. He rightly wants us to question the basis of reality and identity, but in doing so he is liable to lead the thoughtful, historically-literate reader to the opposite conclusions of those he might have intended. Were the "Nazis" as evil as they are presented, or at all? Are we being told the truth about our history, and thus do we really understand our present? These ironic discursions reflect the wider methods of intellectual control in our culture. The idea of questioning reality and identity is entirely accepted in a confused society. Thus, race-mixing, drug-taking, gender-bending and other distended meanderings are de rigeur and in keeping with our own contemporary cultural climate. But if you question history, or worse still (in the eyes of the cultural commissars) reaffirm standards of truth - which amount to altogether more concrete mental diversions -you are soon in trouble. I have the feeling that Dick would like us to take his pop history of the 20th. century at face value and not question his take on the "evil Nazis", but the thoughtful and inquisitive reader cannot but help `get into trouble' by doing so.
Too often, published history is treated as law when in fact what we `know' (in the sense of what is accepted interpretation) is nothing more than a filtered version of the truth. There is only one truth. That stark fact is uncomfortable for many people who prefer the fashionable postmodern rejection of all that is objective and absolute in the moral, social and academic senses, but the `post-structuralist' school and similar merely represent still more ways of `seeing' or interpreting truth, not the Truth itself. The notion that the German National Socialists were "evil" and that their victory would have led inevitably to a desertified brutocracy is very much in the realm of interpretation and speculation. Part of the problem is that, unfortunately, truth is often confused with `reality'. Reality is related to the truth, but is not the same. Reality is just our experience of truth and is therefore loaded with perspective. In our reality - and that of the characters in this novel - the Nazis were brutes. Yet the author wishes to remind us, correctly, that reality is personal, a perspective or interpretation.
The author achieves this partly through the viewpoint of the characters and their peradventures, and also through various symbolic devices. For instance, we are lead to believe (perhaps implicitly more than explicitly) that 'Abendsen' - the eponymous `The Man In The High Castle' - must live in some kind of grand, palatial residence. In fact, it turns out that he lives in a modest house and has a modest bearing, and one suspects that has always been the case. In another scene, two characters discuss the `historicity' of certain artefacts and the obsession among their Japanese customers for `genuine' Americana: in this case, a couple of cigarette lighters. One of the lighters was used by FDR, the other wasn't, yet they are both alike. How do we come to regard one with greater value than the other? Surely we can't do so on any rational basis as there is literally no material difference between the two cigarette lighters. It's just that one happened to be in the pocket of FDR at some point. As one of the characters, 'Wyndam-Matson', who is running the whole scam, says:- [quote]"...You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical plasmic presence", no "aura" around it."[unquote] (p.66).
So Dick is trying to convey here the nonsense of placing historical value on artefacts. How is one object more `historic' than another, and more broadly, how can we say what is `real' or `genuine' and what isn't? This is all interesting material, yet at the same time I cannot help but feel that it seems a little facile. The point about the mysticism of historicity is well-made, but Dick seems to be suggesting that history itself is an entirely creative and indeterminate process rather than something `real'. I see this as nothing more than pseud plasticity. The reason people place historic value in objects and like to emphasise genuineness is in order to protect and preserve the past. The fact that an appearance of `genuineness' or `likeness' can be manufactured and faked is immaterial to the point. The characters in the above-mentioned exchange poke fun at the Japanese customers for their naïve fetishism - perhaps rightly so - but if there was no value in historicity, as Dick seems to believe, then we would be one step away from literally inventing the past, which is not actually what happens. It is true that reality is questionable, but the behaviour of the Japanese is, if anything, an example of the opposite pressures, of trying to cling on to the more objective aspects of reality because they know of it. That is, perhaps, a reason for the traditional human totemic affiliation with inanimate objects, and maybe also reflects a kind of fetishism about objects (see, for instance, Marx's `commodity fetishism'), but in the end the explanation of wanting to `hold on to history' and valuing the historicity of the object - "aura" or not - is as simple as acknowledging an important part of history which, if it is to have meaning, should not be permitted to slip into the irrationally extreme relativism that Dick posits.
Dick's heavily relativistic perspective on reality, in which everything is uncertain and entirely personal, has other slippages of logic. It leads to slightly related and equally fashionable, but cringe-worthy notions, such as `the personal is political' and so on. The idea of the `personal is political' I think underlines much of the message in this novel. In Dick's mind, the personal struggles of characters are the political reality and thus reality is whatever is perceived and whatever is the political climate reflects this self-directed reality. These types of self-defining associations of course contain some provisional truths. Nevertheless, they are, at bottom, symptomatic of a certain feeble-mindedness among decadent writers and academics who overlook the mediation between reality and truth. Dick is, to an extent, right: reality is personal - but that is not all there is to reality. Eventually, reality has to have its showdown with the Truth, with the objective world outside of the self, the counterpoise of our inner selves. We all know this intuitively because it is part of a common experience. At some stage, we all have to come to terms with ourselves: to be `true to yourself', a kind of meta-awareness that is characteristic of relative maturity, in which narrow child-like solipsism is abandoned.
Throughout The Man In The High Castle, political issues of identity intrude on characters' private and personal lives and disturb their solipsistic bliss, deciding their respective fates because identity is real - it is `the truth'. In this sense, the social concept of `identity' can be re-conceptualised geologically in terms of a `rock'. Much like individual rock, discrete identities are inchoate and can erode and change in form over time, but the underlying `geologic truth' is unchangeable: human beings organise socially into both imposed and self-directed identities. At different points in this novel, each character has the necessary psychological reckoning as they come up against this rock-like truth. Thus we can see reality as both personal and also as reflecting certain truths about human nature and the way societies work. Identity, then, is the anchor for each character to the more objective realm, a link to reality and the truth of his or her existence. Typically, a character will emerge from a provocative or enlightening dialogue or a period of fugue into a brief few moments of lucidity in which the truth becomes evident.
In the case of `Robert Childan', a white man [but notice the Japanese-type spelling of the surname - in the novel, he speaks and `thinks' `Japanesey' too], and dealer in memorabilia, the revelation comes from interaction with dominant colonising Japanese:-
[quote] "Face facts. I'm trying to pretend that these Japanese and I are alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war, that my nation lost - there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is sharp contrast vis-à-vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise."[unquote] [p.112]. 'Childan', though he is white and mentally Western, speaks and even thinks in a Japanese way, albeit he is clearly resisting this sinister acculturation.
`Frank Fink', a crypto-Jewish dealer in memorabilia, but also a proud cultural American, meets his `rock' in the most brutal fashion. `Tagomi', an industrialist, has a weird moment of fugue in which he confronts the `other reality' and its harsh social facts.
Perhaps the most interesting character is `Mr. Baynes', another crypto-Jew who travels to the United States from Germany and meets certain Japanese, including 'Tagomi', eventually revealing certain important, but hitherto concealed, facts about himself. `Baynes' cannot hide his true identity for long. On his arrival in the United States, he makes an explosive and incriminating admission to a complete stranger at the airport, just for the heck of it. Tagomi also senses the double concealment when they finally meet, feeling that something is not quite `German' about `Baynes'. So the truth cannot be hidden forever, even by `Baynes' - I am who I am, you are who you are, we are who we are, and either we will let spill on our own initiative, or we will be found out. Identity is the rock of humanity.
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