The Hole is Larger Than
the Sum of Departures
At some point in The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick ironically offers up a glimpse of false hope to a Japanese merchant, who involuntarily becomes involved in the single most important geopolitical plot of his age. In his hands the terribly traumatized Mr. Tagomi holds an invaluable silver artifact, a piece of jewelry crafted by the last remaining Jew on Earth.
Philip K. Dick does not tell us, Frank Fink is the last Jew in the world or even in America. That would have been too crude for a novel that sublimely plays on subtleties and ambiguities as if to stylistically express the main tenet of the story:
The jewelry glitters in the sun, and Mr. Tagomi attempts to speak to it, to wrestle some kind of secret to psychological survival in an intolerable environment out of it.
In this distorted mirror of our world The Allies have lost the war to the Axis Powers. USA is occupied by Germany to the East and Japan to the West. The Third Reich has successfully extended its genocide to Africa and launched manned space vessels to colonize Mars. Now a fringe faction of the Nazi leadership wants their final solution to include their former Japanese allies. Another faction wants to avoid the showdown and sets up a secret meeting with the Japanese, but messages are intercepted and assassins sent out.
Now, Mr. Tagomi intercepts the assassins with a revolver he has bought as an avid collector of Americana. He believes it is a historical weapon, but we know from other developments in the multi-tiered plot that it is a fake. It does not contain historicity, until Mr. Tagomi fires the gun at the assassins and shoot them to pieces, thereby securing a possible détente, providing renewed hope for the survival of mankind.
In the process Mr. Tagomi, a deeply virtuous man and a devoted Buddhist, loses his mind. His historical deed, however significant, is never recorded. As such the gun he uses to stop the Nazi assassins has attained actual historicity, but still never aspires to become a collector’s item with the kind of acknowledged historicity that drives the last remaining thriving business in Western America.
Philip K. Dick does not tell us, Frank Fink is the last Jew in the world or even in America. That would have been too crude for a novel that sublimely plays on subtleties and ambiguities as if to stylistically express the main tenet of the story:
“Nothing is what it appears to be.”
The jewelry glitters in the sun, and Mr. Tagomi attempts to speak to it, to wrestle some kind of secret to psychological survival in an intolerable environment out of it.
In this distorted mirror of our world The Allies have lost the war to the Axis Powers. USA is occupied by Germany to the East and Japan to the West. The Third Reich has successfully extended its genocide to Africa and launched manned space vessels to colonize Mars. Now a fringe faction of the Nazi leadership wants their final solution to include their former Japanese allies. Another faction wants to avoid the showdown and sets up a secret meeting with the Japanese, but messages are intercepted and assassins sent out.
Now, Mr. Tagomi intercepts the assassins with a revolver he has bought as an avid collector of Americana. He believes it is a historical weapon, but we know from other developments in the multi-tiered plot that it is a fake. It does not contain historicity, until Mr. Tagomi fires the gun at the assassins and shoot them to pieces, thereby securing a possible détente, providing renewed hope for the survival of mankind.
In the process Mr. Tagomi, a deeply virtuous man and a devoted Buddhist, loses his mind. His historical deed, however significant, is never recorded. As such the gun he uses to stop the Nazi assassins has attained actual historicity, but still never aspires to become a collector’s item with the kind of acknowledged historicity that drives the last remaining thriving business in Western America.
Concealed narrative structures: Torah and Talmud
That’s one key to understanding The Man in the High Castle: Like one of the tzaddikim, the righteous, in Talmudic literature, Mr. Tagomi is destined to become a saving angel to the world through an act of violence that, to him, jeopardizes his salvation and slings him back into the vicious cycle of death and rebirth. This is what he perceives about his own fate, as his heart gives in. He has taken lives. Even if those lives were not innocent lives, and even if he was required to do so by duty, by ethics, Mr. Tagomi loses his mental equilibrium.
Mr. Tagomi’s actions violate one of the Ten Commandments of the Bible, a work of literature and source of religious inspiration deliberately down-played to the point of obscurity in the novel. The few references to it, however, discretely hint to the depth of moral concerns with which Philip K. Dick has approached his subject. Residual Christianity, in this alternate reality, exists only in curses and in a Japanese radio broadcast hinting to increasing tensions with Germany the speaker quotes a “famous Western saint, J. Christ”, for saying:
Without deserving the label a Christian apologist, Philip K. Dick was one of the most original authors inspired by Christianity. The layer of quasi-religious speculation is sometimes detected by readers and reviewers, but most often neglected. It is, however, an immensely important factor in analyzing the narrative structure of The Man in the High Castle. Every character in the story in some form violates one of the Ten Commandments and find, without ever associating their actions with a transgression, there are consequences.
Mr. Childan, a Caucasian American expressing every characteristic of a racially oppressed second rate citizen, secretly lusts for the wife of a Japanese man and makes a pathetic pass at her. Julia has a casual affair with a rugged Italian veteran, only to discover that behind his brutish surface he hides a far more sinister identity. Frank Fink, a Jewish goldsmith in the Japanese side of America, is, in a sense, a producer of idols. When his story opens, he has recently been fired from a company forging replicas of historical artifacts and selling them as authentic.
That is one connection between the seemingly unconnected individuals in the novel, which defies all basic principles of storytelling by simply refusing to let the main characters have any meaningful contact with each other. Some of them cross paths by accident, but without ever realizing they have become entangled in each other’s lives. For instance, Frank Fink has most likely applied the artificial ageing compounds to the revolver Mr. Tagomi uses. Julia is his ex-wife, travelling across the country without aim, sleeping with truck drives in return for transportation.
Another common link between the characters is that they all read the same book, a novel titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays an alternative reality in which the Allies have won the war. Only the perspective of this fictitious novel is slightly skewed from what we know as reality, for instance with Winston Churchill as lifetime Prime Minister of Great Britain and Americans throwing cheap television sets down over Africa with parachutes in order to broadcast shows to teach African farmers to cultivate the land.
The fourth spoke around which the novel is constructed is the discussion about historicity and, subsequently, the concept of deception. The phrase historical forgery does not appear in itself in the story, and the problem is only tangentially addressed, mostly in some of the confounded inner monologues with which the author describes the perpetual state of anxiety people in this world are subjected to. But we understand it is the main point of the story, the reason for writing it and the actual concern of both the characters, afraid to openly discuss their doubts about the authoritative versions of the truth, and of the author.
Mr. Tagomi’s actions violate one of the Ten Commandments of the Bible, a work of literature and source of religious inspiration deliberately down-played to the point of obscurity in the novel. The few references to it, however, discretely hint to the depth of moral concerns with which Philip K. Dick has approached his subject. Residual Christianity, in this alternate reality, exists only in curses and in a Japanese radio broadcast hinting to increasing tensions with Germany the speaker quotes a “famous Western saint, J. Christ”, for saying:
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he must pay with his soul?”
Without deserving the label a Christian apologist, Philip K. Dick was one of the most original authors inspired by Christianity. The layer of quasi-religious speculation is sometimes detected by readers and reviewers, but most often neglected. It is, however, an immensely important factor in analyzing the narrative structure of The Man in the High Castle. Every character in the story in some form violates one of the Ten Commandments and find, without ever associating their actions with a transgression, there are consequences.
Mr. Childan, a Caucasian American expressing every characteristic of a racially oppressed second rate citizen, secretly lusts for the wife of a Japanese man and makes a pathetic pass at her. Julia has a casual affair with a rugged Italian veteran, only to discover that behind his brutish surface he hides a far more sinister identity. Frank Fink, a Jewish goldsmith in the Japanese side of America, is, in a sense, a producer of idols. When his story opens, he has recently been fired from a company forging replicas of historical artifacts and selling them as authentic.
That is one connection between the seemingly unconnected individuals in the novel, which defies all basic principles of storytelling by simply refusing to let the main characters have any meaningful contact with each other. Some of them cross paths by accident, but without ever realizing they have become entangled in each other’s lives. For instance, Frank Fink has most likely applied the artificial ageing compounds to the revolver Mr. Tagomi uses. Julia is his ex-wife, travelling across the country without aim, sleeping with truck drives in return for transportation.
Another common link between the characters is that they all read the same book, a novel titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays an alternative reality in which the Allies have won the war. Only the perspective of this fictitious novel is slightly skewed from what we know as reality, for instance with Winston Churchill as lifetime Prime Minister of Great Britain and Americans throwing cheap television sets down over Africa with parachutes in order to broadcast shows to teach African farmers to cultivate the land.
The fourth spoke around which the novel is constructed is the discussion about historicity and, subsequently, the concept of deception. The phrase historical forgery does not appear in itself in the story, and the problem is only tangentially addressed, mostly in some of the confounded inner monologues with which the author describes the perpetual state of anxiety people in this world are subjected to. But we understand it is the main point of the story, the reason for writing it and the actual concern of both the characters, afraid to openly discuss their doubts about the authoritative versions of the truth, and of the author.
How to construct a universe to fall apart in two days
The novel also contains a cameo by Philip K. Dick, the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and the person aimed at by the title, The Man in the High Castle. Abendsen portrays himself as living as a recluse in a high security mansion in Canada, practically a fortress, while in reality living a normal bourgeois life in what by some strange twist of fate has remained a sanctuary from Nazi ideology.
This is one of the places, where the universe constructed by Philip K. Dick falls apart, but as he explains in his essay from 1978 he deliberately constructs his universes to fall apart. Philip K. Dick planted a bomb inside each of his universes, just as he wired his stories to explode in the minds of his readers a couple of days after turning the last page.
The irony grows ever deeper, as the plot thickens. For every dramatic development Philip K. Dick adds a new layer of deception, until story takes on so many dimensions its structure approaches the infinite, an Archimedean solid or even a shapeless form, a perfectly self-contained piece of jewelry constructed by intertwining multiple bands of silver and twisting them, until the light falling on the surface will, at any given time, be reflected in a new and surprising way.
The explosive effect of The Man in the High Castle, the novels ability to trigger hyper-contemplation in its readers, can be partly attributed to intellectual fission. Instead of inflating any individual theme Philip K. Dick stacked his work with heavy topics, historical references and layers of intertextuality to a degree, where the centre of the story begins to collapse even while reading it. The impact of a lifetime of philosophical speculation begins to hit the mind, even before the drama has expanded to its climax. By the end of the story so many twists have been introduced, the reader is forced to go back over the story to reinterpret every single turn of events.
Utterly thought-provoking is usually one of the most flattering terms you can use in a book review, but in the case of The Man in The High Castle it would be an understatement. The novel produces the same type of cognitive dissonance often associated with The Book of Revelations and a kind of ecstatic gloom similar to that installed in music enthusiasts, when they are exposed to Jimi Hendrix’s cover version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower.
This is one of the places, where the universe constructed by Philip K. Dick falls apart, but as he explains in his essay from 1978 he deliberately constructs his universes to fall apart. Philip K. Dick planted a bomb inside each of his universes, just as he wired his stories to explode in the minds of his readers a couple of days after turning the last page.
The irony grows ever deeper, as the plot thickens. For every dramatic development Philip K. Dick adds a new layer of deception, until story takes on so many dimensions its structure approaches the infinite, an Archimedean solid or even a shapeless form, a perfectly self-contained piece of jewelry constructed by intertwining multiple bands of silver and twisting them, until the light falling on the surface will, at any given time, be reflected in a new and surprising way.
The explosive effect of The Man in the High Castle, the novels ability to trigger hyper-contemplation in its readers, can be partly attributed to intellectual fission. Instead of inflating any individual theme Philip K. Dick stacked his work with heavy topics, historical references and layers of intertextuality to a degree, where the centre of the story begins to collapse even while reading it. The impact of a lifetime of philosophical speculation begins to hit the mind, even before the drama has expanded to its climax. By the end of the story so many twists have been introduced, the reader is forced to go back over the story to reinterpret every single turn of events.
Utterly thought-provoking is usually one of the most flattering terms you can use in a book review, but in the case of The Man in The High Castle it would be an understatement. The novel produces the same type of cognitive dissonance often associated with The Book of Revelations and a kind of ecstatic gloom similar to that installed in music enthusiasts, when they are exposed to Jimi Hendrix’s cover version of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower.
Extreme understatement as narrative tool
The reference to Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix is less farfetched than it may seem at first glance: Like Hendrix the artistic production of Philip K. Dick was hugely influenced by experiences with mind-altering drugs, and Philip K. Dick’s prose contains the same sleight of hand as Bob Dylan developed a mastery of in his song texts: Bob Dylan will show you one thing, singing for instance about a priest and a thief, but in reality he is commenting on something else, something more profound.
This technique, to sort of speak around or past a topic, until your attention is forced in the direction the artist intended, is much like the pawn in a chess game, when it suddenly achieves the ability to strike en passant. There is a certain meditative elegance to this method, as if the author is not really conscious of his direction and merely shrugs at even the most profound revelations he comes across in the process.
The world does not collapse in Philip K. Dick’s novel, and neither does it fizzle out with a whimper. The world is captured in a state of collapsing, in a series of snapshots of seemingly random individuals too preoccupied with the burden of mere survival to discover the nuances of decay and destruction in the landslide of political events surrounding them, defining their existence against their will and often against their knowledge.
It is on the backdrop of abysmal political powerlessness their streams of consciousness, however mundane, are elevated to the point of Greek tragedy. These grimy characters are bound to struggle to maintain a clueless existence, while at the same time their fates are eventually determined by events far above their heads and way beyond their control.
That’s what it’s like to live in a tyranny, even a relatively benevolent one. That’s what it’s like to be a slave, to quote a character from the Philip K. Dick inspired movie, Blade Runner. Philip K. Dick’s great achievement is the experience he imposes on his reader. When you have visited the alternative universe he has painted with words, you have really been there. It exists in your mind, and the impressions of it are almost tangible like a scar or a fresh wound. The secret to the unanimous accolades and tremendous cultist following of The Man in the High Castle is that the story establishes perfect suspense of disbelief while at the same time composing a virtual reality so intricate it almost becomes more probable than our own reality. To an author like Philip K. Dick, almost obsessed with questioning reality, this has to be a proud achievement.
What keep the experience lingering in the mind, however, are the deep sentiments installed in the process. The fifth unifying factor between the characters in The Man in the High Castle is their deep existential loneliness. Every sub-thread of the story is characterized by a departure of something precious. The effect of these departures grows larger than the total sum, leaving a gaping hole in the heart of the reader, who is gasping for something only present as a potential or an abstract idea… love and friendship, and whatever conditions are required for such delicate flowers to thrive. To some it would be a thirst for spirituality besides the mechanical divinations, when people try to analyze their circumstances using the ancient Chinese oracle, I Ching. To others it would be democracy, co-ownership to contemporary history.
In either case, it is the absence of key elements of life in the narrative is what makes you think about to what extent these elements are missing from your own subjective experience of the wonders of the modern world. The Man in the High Castle produces an indefinable longing by the relentlessness of deprivation, not just in the political conditions it describes, but by the very method of description. It’s like a sigh of despair, while you are gasping for air, not dissimilar to slow choking inside a gas chamber. The transmission of the experience of being executed, without any egregious depictions of genocide, is what makes The Man in The High Castle far more unusual than simply a story about an alternative universe, where human societies are governed by totalitarian regimes.
This technique, to sort of speak around or past a topic, until your attention is forced in the direction the artist intended, is much like the pawn in a chess game, when it suddenly achieves the ability to strike en passant. There is a certain meditative elegance to this method, as if the author is not really conscious of his direction and merely shrugs at even the most profound revelations he comes across in the process.
The world does not collapse in Philip K. Dick’s novel, and neither does it fizzle out with a whimper. The world is captured in a state of collapsing, in a series of snapshots of seemingly random individuals too preoccupied with the burden of mere survival to discover the nuances of decay and destruction in the landslide of political events surrounding them, defining their existence against their will and often against their knowledge.
It is on the backdrop of abysmal political powerlessness their streams of consciousness, however mundane, are elevated to the point of Greek tragedy. These grimy characters are bound to struggle to maintain a clueless existence, while at the same time their fates are eventually determined by events far above their heads and way beyond their control.
That’s what it’s like to live in a tyranny, even a relatively benevolent one. That’s what it’s like to be a slave, to quote a character from the Philip K. Dick inspired movie, Blade Runner. Philip K. Dick’s great achievement is the experience he imposes on his reader. When you have visited the alternative universe he has painted with words, you have really been there. It exists in your mind, and the impressions of it are almost tangible like a scar or a fresh wound. The secret to the unanimous accolades and tremendous cultist following of The Man in the High Castle is that the story establishes perfect suspense of disbelief while at the same time composing a virtual reality so intricate it almost becomes more probable than our own reality. To an author like Philip K. Dick, almost obsessed with questioning reality, this has to be a proud achievement.
What keep the experience lingering in the mind, however, are the deep sentiments installed in the process. The fifth unifying factor between the characters in The Man in the High Castle is their deep existential loneliness. Every sub-thread of the story is characterized by a departure of something precious. The effect of these departures grows larger than the total sum, leaving a gaping hole in the heart of the reader, who is gasping for something only present as a potential or an abstract idea… love and friendship, and whatever conditions are required for such delicate flowers to thrive. To some it would be a thirst for spirituality besides the mechanical divinations, when people try to analyze their circumstances using the ancient Chinese oracle, I Ching. To others it would be democracy, co-ownership to contemporary history.
In either case, it is the absence of key elements of life in the narrative is what makes you think about to what extent these elements are missing from your own subjective experience of the wonders of the modern world. The Man in the High Castle produces an indefinable longing by the relentlessness of deprivation, not just in the political conditions it describes, but by the very method of description. It’s like a sigh of despair, while you are gasping for air, not dissimilar to slow choking inside a gas chamber. The transmission of the experience of being executed, without any egregious depictions of genocide, is what makes The Man in The High Castle far more unusual than simply a story about an alternative universe, where human societies are governed by totalitarian regimes.
© Jon Ayers. All rights reserved. For infomation please contact info@yong.dk