I guess it was last week or so that the Squuby fellow finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle and he had some questions about it, and since I said that I would and since I recommended the book, I feel like I should present my thoughts on the thing, at any rate. Not that I’m actually certain that those aforementioned thoughts will in any way clarify those questions, but it’s worth a try, eh?
I’m not entirely certain what his question(s) about the book is/are exactly, but here’s the little bit that I latched onto, anyway:
“I don’t think I get it. If it weren’t for that I could unequivocally say I liked it. The writing is great, the surreality of the thing is just up my tree. But the whole fact of it ending up sort of leaving me hanging here saying, ‘err, what? None of it was real? Is that the thing?'”
The Man in the High Castle (MITHC) was one of the first PKD books that I read, about three years ago, and I read it in a single afternoon, so my response here will be colored by the ten or so of his other novels that I’ve read in the mean time. Additionally, I’m not going to go into a plot summary of MITHC either, because, well, I’ve read the book and HE’S read the book. It’s a story about an alternate world where the Nazis and the Japanese won in WWII, where the West coast is a Japanese protectorate and the East coast is run by the Nazis.
MITHC is one of PKD’s earlier books (written in 1962), but it’s themes or ideas are present in most (all?) of his books that I’ve read: basically, what is the nature of the reality that we perceive? Or, to put another way, the reality that we perceive is an illusion and we can only perceive the True Reality obliquely, through flaws in the Illusion.
At its most basic, I think that MITHC is a simple alternate history, What If?, novel, with the added complexity of a book within the story which is a fictional account of what appears to be our ACTUAL history: the US and Allies defeating the Nazis and Japan in the war. This addition raises questions as to the nature of artistic creation: if the author in this fictional work writes an account of our “real” history as an alternate history, what does that mean for us, who are reading a book by a “real” science fiction author about an alternate history?
The fascinating thing, for me, about PKD is that a decade or so after writing MITHC (and many others), he experienced (or reported experiencing) what he perceived to be “real” events which called into question the reality of our reality (or the reality of HIS reality) and which served to reinforce the idea that reality WAS an illusion. He experienced the thing which his science fiction novels and short stories, up to that point, had been exploring.
I find it very very interesting that so many of his short stories and novels have been recently adapted (mostly not well) into movies. An interesting idea that PKD had was that if there was a Truth out there–beneath the Illusion–then it wouldn’t appear in any obvious fashion, but as “a thief in the night”, as trash in a gutter, or commercials on the television or as trashy science fiction novels…
I could go on and on about this, but I think I’ll stop for the moment. Does this help?
Oh, and if you haven’t read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, you should.
Well. Nice little coinkidink there of your posting this response to me while I was posting a response to you about that other thing. Then again, such coinkidinks seem to come fast and furious for us. Or I think that’s the case. Or I just like to consider how random things could be meaning-laden things.
This helped, what you said. It helped in one respect because you didn’t answer my pointed question, exactly, and this leads me to believe that I’m emphasizing too much, in my own interpretation of the thing, the ending. I grew up on a diet of old Twilight Zones, I’m always waiting for that big trick ending, that, “oh, a-HA!” moment. When I read MITHC, I felt like that moment was there but that I didn’t really understand it.
I did get out of it his presentation of the idea that reality isn’t necessarily right here for us to know about. There’s a scene in there in which the Japanese business guy (already i forget his name and exactly what his occupation was,) is trying to force a little piece of jewelry to reveal its secrets to him, and when he stands up from his reverie of arguing with the thing he’s in another reality entirely. It was probably, for me, the most powerful part of the book. It expressed pretty clearly the idea that there were somehow, in this world PKD was presenting, different manifestations of reality that could be phyically moved between. The character crossed over from the fictional world he was living in in the book to our world. Or that’s how I saw it.
Possibly my problem with the book lies in there somewhere, too. The philosophy you’re telling me he presents in his books — it’s not something I think I am willing to place a high degree of trust in. It’s something I very much enjoy the idea of, but I don’t know that I’ve ever thought that that, exactly, is the nature of things. That our sense of reality is shaped by our perception I’ve no doubt. But that there’s a real reality that somehow could be so much at ODDS with the one we think we’re in is a tough thing for me to swallow.
So probably I need to read more of his stuff. I know some of my current desire to read his stuff started with something I read somewhere, probably pointed to by you, about his weird experience. I can’t remember much about it right now, but it’s hard for me not to wonder if that experience weren’t evidence of some mental problem of his, maybe schizophrenia or something. Seeing wholly different realities, or seeing things in our reality which are not being seen by others, are to me things that probably happen when the brain is screwed up.
(I sound a little here like something I don’t want to sound like. I’m not really closed minded about this, or at least I haven’t been. Probably this is more of my agnosticism coming into view — I’d love to believe that schizophrenics were actually seeing things others don’t see because those things are, in some respect, actually THERE. But as far as I know there’s no way to prove something like that to be true, and so there’s no pragmatic reason to function as if it IS true.)
Okay. Thanks, this was a big help.