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The Man in the High Castle

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The Man in the High Castle
File:TheManInTheHighCastle(1stEd).jpg
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
AuthorPhilip K. Dick
LanguageEnglish
GenreAlternate history
PublisherPutnam
Publication date
1 January, 1962
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages239 pp
OCLC145507009

The Man in the High Castle is a 1962 alternate history novel by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in the former United States in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis Powers defeated the Allies of World War II and after the U.S. surrendered to Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.[1]

While not the first piece of alternate-history fiction, the novel helped define the literary genre. It won the Hugo Award and made Dick well-known in science-fiction circles. Since he spent most of his life writing to pay bills and so wrote quickly, he did not usually enjoy the luxury of writing several drafts. The Man in the High Castle was an exception.

Plot summary

Back story

The Man in the High Castle's point of divergence from our own world occurred when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara. He was succeeded by Vice President John Nance Garner, who was subsequently replaced in 1936 by Republican John W. Bricker. Neither man was able to surmount the Great Depression, and both clung to an isolationist policy regarding the approaching war. This meant that the United States lacked sufficient military capabilities to assist Great Britain and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or itself when the Japanese Empire entered the war in 1941 in this world.

The USSR collapsed in 1941 and was occupied by the Nazis, while most of the Slavic peoples were exterminated. The Slavic survivors of the war were confined to "reservation-like closed regions". The Japanese, on the other hand, entirely destroyed the United States' Pacific fleet in a much more expansive attack on Pearl Harbor. Due to Japan's expanded military capabilities, it was able to invade and occupy Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and the Southwestern Pacific in the early 1940s. Afterwards, the United States fell to the Axis, with many important cities suffering great damage.

By 1948, Allied forces had surrendered to Axis control. The Eastern Seaboard fell under German control, while California, Washington, Oregon, and parts of Nevada were ceded to Japanese rule. The Rocky Mountain States, the Midwest and much of the South West remained as a buffer between the Axis powers. The South was resurrected as a quasi-Nazi puppet state, much like Vichy France. The German Reich and Japanese Empire became the chief superpowers, and entered a Cold War of their own as a result.

After Adolf Hitler was incapacitated by syphilis, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, assumed the leadership of Germany. The Nazis created a colonial empire and continued their mass murder of races they considered inferior, murdering Jews in the puppet United States and other areas they controlled, and also carrying out massive genocide in Africa.

Nazi Germany continued its rocketry programs, so that by 1962, it has a working system of commercial rockets used for intercontinental travel and has also pursued space exploration, by sending rockets to the Moon, Mars and Venus (as mentioned early in the book, the Germans were able to send men to Mars at the end of the fifties). In a remarkable presage of later, real-life NASA concepts, PKD describes the Nazis' "...bustling robotic factories across the solar system". The novel mentions television as a new technology in Germany. The Japanese Empire is portrayed as behind the Third Reich in technological development. However, the novel mentions that there are severe supply shortages in Germany, owing to the sums invested in space exploration, and that the economy is on the brink of collapse.

During the novel, Martin Bormann dies and other Nazis, such as Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich (whose real-life assassination was foiled in the novel), fight to become the Reich Chancellor (German: Reichskanzler). Various factions of the Nazi party are described as either seeking war with Japan or as being more interested in colonizing the solar system.

Characters

Rather than present a linear story, the novel follows each of its characters as they pursue their lives. There are connections among them, some direct, some indirect, and some barely perceptible. Three of the main characters use the I Ching to guide their lives:

  • Nobusuke Tagomi is a representative at the Japanese Trade Mission in San Francisco.
  • Frank Frink (born Fink) initially works at the Wyndham-Matson Corporation, a company specializing in reproduction (i.e., fake) Americana from the quaint old days when it was an independent nation and is fired following an outburst at work. He is Jewish but hides his ethnicity to avoid arrest and death.
  • Juliana Frink, Frank's ex-wife, is a teacher of judo.

Other characters have different belief systems:

  • Robert Childan is the proprietor of "American Artistic Handicrafts", a store that sells antique Americana to collectors, mostly Japanese. Childan obtains some of his stock from Wyndham-Matson Inc. but believes these items to be genuine. Because he deals with Japanese people, Childan has adopted Japanese manners, Anglicized versions of Japanese modes of speech and even thought patterns. Tagomi is one of Childan's best customers, both for himself and for gifts he "grafts" onto visiting businessmen. Childan defers to the Japanese he deals with but looks upon them with contempt, believing white people to be superior to other races, including the Chinese and Africans. He is very conscious of his image and often deliberates on how his actions may appear to others.
  • "Wyndham-Matson", Frank's boss, appears briefly to muse on the difference between a real antique and a reproduction and to introduce, via his girlfriend, the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
  • "Mr. Baynes", actually Captain Rudolf Wegener of Reich Naval Counter-Intelligence, who is posing as a wealthy Swedish industrialist, is traveling to meet Mr. Tagomi, expecting to meet an important Japanese representative through him. He is taken aback when Tagomi greets him and gives him the gift of a "genuine Mickey Mouse watch", purchased from Childan.

Storylines

The Man in the High Castle has no one central plot but rotates between several, somewhat-interconnected storylines:

  • "Mr. Baynes" travels to San Francisco undercover as a Swedish trading merchant. He confers with Mr. Tagomi but must stall in pursuit of his true mission and avoid capture until the mysterious Mr. Yatabe arrives from Japan. Yatabe is actually General Tedeki, formerly of the Imperial General Staff. The real mission is to warn the Japanese that a faction of the Nazis led by Joseph Goebbels has a plan (Operation Löwenzahn/Dandelion) to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese Archipelago (known as the "Home Islands" within the book). Mr. Baynes (actually an agent of the German Abwehr) is to persuade the Japanese to support Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Sicherheitsdienst and the SS, against Goebbels.
  • Frank Frink and his friend Ed McCarthy begin a jewelry business, creating beautiful, original pieces of American art. Their works have a strange effect on the Americans and Japanese who see them. Frink attempts to hide his Jewish ancestry from the local police but is arrested after he attempts to sabotage Wyndham-Matson's business by telling Childan that the items he sells are fakes.
  • Mr. Tagomi, unable to face the unpleasant rumors he has heard, finds solace in action. He fights Nazi agents who attempt to shoot Baynes, using his "authentic" Colt Army revolver which he bought from Childan. Then, he retaliates against the local Nazi authorities by directing that Frank Frink, who is scheduled for deportation, be released. Tagomi never meets Frank, nor does he know that he is the creator of the beautiful artwork that has made such an impression on him. However, as a devout Buddhist, he is tortured by the moral and existential implications of taking human life deliberately and suffers a heart attack.
  • Frink's ex-wife, Juliana, living in Colorado, begins a relationship with Joe, a truck driver who claims to be an Italian veteran of the war. Joe wishes to meet the titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Juliana travels with him but discovers that Joe is actually a Swiss assassin. She attempts to leave but Joe bars her way. Distressed beyond reason and contemplating suicide, Juliana slashes Joe's throat with the razor she had thought to use on herself. She continues the journey alone, meets Abendsen, and induces him to reveal the truth about his novel.
  • Robert Childan tries to hang on to his honor and dignity while catering, sometimes obsequiously, to an occupying force. Although ambivalent in his own feelings towards the war and his occupiers (whom he alternately loathes and respects), Childan eventually discovers a sense of cultural pride. He also investigates widespread forgery within the antiques market amidst the increased Japanese interest in 'genuine' Americana.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy

Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read a popular novel named The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This title is said to be a quote from the bible, perhaps referring to the verse "the grasshopper shall be a burden" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). It is a novel within a novel, wherein the author, Hawthorne Abendsen, describes an alternative narrative in which the Axis Powers lost the war. Although closer to the reality of history, the novel actually offers a third scenario. The novel is banned in areas under Japanese and German occupation (though it's actually widely read throughout the Pacific), but its publication is legal in the neutral countries.

In Abendsen's novel, President Roosevelt survives the assassination attempt but does not run for re-election in 1940 (upholding the two-term tradition established by George Washington). The next president, Rexford Tugwell, removes the U.S. Pacific fleet from Pearl Harbor, saving it from the Japanese attack and ensuring that the U.S. enters the war with greater naval power.

In the novel, the United Kingdom retains much of its military and industrial strength and makes a greater contribution to the Allied cause than it did in historical reality. This alternative Second World War is determined by several, pivotal events. As in reality, one of these is the British victory over Erwin Rommel in Northern Africa. However, in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy's alternative world, the British advance through the Caucasus and, after surviving Soviet troops join them, the British and the post-Soviet forces win at Stalingrad. Italy turns against the Axis Powers; British tanks storm Berlin at the end of the war, much as the Red Army did in reality; Nazi leaders are brought to trial for war crimes, but Hitler does not commit suicide and is, instead, tried and convicted. His last words are "Deutscher hier steh' ich" (I stand here German), an echo of the famous words of Martin Luther, "Here I stand".

After the war, Winston Churchill still leads Britain. Owing to its military and industrial strength, the United Kingdom doesn't lose its empire and the United States has a strong trade relationship with China, as Chiang Kai-shek and Nationalist forces defeat Mao Zedong. The British Empire becomes racist, and Churchill becomes irrational and aggressive with age, while the U.S. solves its racial problems by the 1950s, which causes tension between the two superpowers.

Eventually, as in our own Cold War, two superpowers struggle for global hegemony, but both are capitalist, liberal, democratic societies. Ultimately, the British overcome the United States and become the world's dominant superpower.

Hawthorne Abendsen, author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, is rumoured to live in a highly-guarded fortress; his nickname is "the Man in the High Castle."

Ed Park of the Los Angeles Times found the fact that an author in the world of the novel has imagined what the United States would be like had the Allies been victorious to be one of the most head-spinning high points of the novel.[2]

Use of the I Ching

Dick claims that he wrote The Man in the High Castle, using the ancient Chinese philosophical text the I Ching (or Book of Changes) to decide on plot development. In one interview, he even blamed the I Ching for plot details with which he was unhappy."When it came to close down the novel, the I Ching had no more to say. So there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending."

The I Ching is featured throughout The Man in the High Castle, having spread through the Pacific States after the Japanese began their occupation. Several characters, both Japanese and American, consult it for important decisions. Like Dick in our world, Hawthorne Abendsen used the I Ching while writing The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

At the end of The Man in the High Castle, Juliana Frink, in Hawthorne Abendsen's presence, asks the I Ching why it wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and what people are supposed to learn from it. The I Ching responds with the hexagram Chung Fu - Inner Truth. In other words, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy describes the true state of the world; all of the characters in The Man in the High Castle are experiencing a false reality.

Major themes

The most prominent theme in The Man in the High Castle is the interpenetration and confusion of true and false reality. The theme is explored in several aspects of the novel:

  • Robert Childan discovers that many of his antiques are fakes and becomes paranoid that his entire stock consists of counterfeits. This is a common theme for Dick, one that, for example, involves the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. He sometimes causes counterfeits to become real, but in this case the "counterfeiting" is so good that it calls into question the meaning of "real". For instance, a counterfeit Colt .44 is indistinguishable from a genuine antique by all except an expert. It is also functional, as Mr. Tagomi demonstrates.
  • Frank's former boss, himself a collector, has a Zippo lighter documented to have been in FDR's pocket when he was assassinated. He compares it with an identical lighter for his girlfriend, inviting her to "feel the historicity". Of course, his fortune depends on producing counterfeits.
  • Several characters are spies, traveling under false names and pretenses. Even Frank Frink is using an assumed name, the real one being "Fink", regarded as a Jewish name.
File:PKD-high castle-penguinclassics.jpg
Cover of 2001 Penguin Classics edition of The Man in the High Castle. Cover art by James P. Keenan.
  • Although not describing our own world, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book-within-a-book, does refer to a third alternative world wherein the Axis lost the Second World War and the Allies won, albeit with an alternative sequence of events.
  • The jewelry made by Frink and McCarthy more closely resembles actual '60s American folk art than Japanese or German works. The connection between these pieces and a deeper reality is manifested via the effect the pieces have on several characters.
  • The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is essentially the alternate history counterpart of The Man in the High Castle in that, to the characters inhabiting the fictional world, the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the fiction. This implies the interpenetration of two false realities and suggests that even the idea of merely two realities, one true and one false, is incorrect and that there are multiple realities.
  • The Man in the High Castle of the book's title lives in a normal house. He once lived in a fortified home but realized that it was more of a prison. Even so, he allows the myth of his isolation to persist.
  • At the novel's end, Hawthorne Abendsen and Juliana Frink consult the I Ching and discover that their own world is fictional.
  • Mr. Tagomi seems briefly to become cognizant of our own world. After he meditates on one of Frank Frink's creations, a small pin that contains Wu/Satori, a form of inner truth, he is briefly transported to an unfamiliar San Francisco. This version has an Embarcadero Freeway, and Caucasians do not defer to those of Japanese descent, indicating that he has experienced either our own world or one very much like it. He might also be experiencing the America of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

Dick therefore suggests the questions: who or what is the agent behind this interpenetration of realities? And why does that agent desire that these realities be recognized as artifice? This theme is addressed further in several subsequent Dick novels, including Ubik, VALIS and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.

The Man in the High Castle also deals with themes of justice and injustice (through Frink's fleeing from Nazi persecution); gender and power (through Juliana's relationship with Joe); shame and identity (through Childan's new confidence in American culture via his limited, backwards-looking obsession with nostalgia and antiquities); and the effects of fascism and racism on culture (throughout the novel, especially those sections that deal with the devaluation of life in the wake of the Nazi dominance of the world and the assumptions of ethnic superiority in which several Japanese, American and German characters occasionally indulge).

Sources of inspiration

Dick later explained that he got the idea for this book from reading Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore (1953), which is set in an alternative United States and twentieth century, after the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War in the 1860s. In his "Acknowledgements" section, Dick cites several other influences. In particular, he acknowledges the work of eminent World War II historian William Shirer, and his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Secker and Warburg: 1960). Other useful World War II titles used were Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Pelican Books: 1962), Louis P. Lochner's translation of the Goebbels Diaries (Doubleday, 1948) and Paul Carrell's Foxes of the Desert (MacDonald, 1960). In the case of the I Ching, he refers to Richard Wilhelm's Bollingen translation (1950).

There are two references to traditional Japanese poetic forms in the Acknowledgement. Donald Keene edited the first volume of the Anthology of Japanese Literature (Grove Press, New York: 1955), from which a haiku is cited (p.48), while a waka (page 135) is taken from Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon: 1955). W. Y. Evans-Wentz provided the translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford University Press: 1960).

Sequel

Dick revealed in a 1976 interview that he planned to write a sequel to The Man in the High Castle: "And so there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime." He stated that he "started several times to write a sequel" but never got far because he was too disturbed by his original research for The Man in the High Castle and couldn't stand "to go back and read about Nazis again."[3]

He also suggested that the proposed sequel would be a collaboration with another author: "Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach or the stamina to think along those lines, to get into the head; if you're going to start writing about Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich's face?"

Two chapters of the intended sequel were published in a collection of essays about Dick, called The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (ISBN 0-679-74787-7). In these chapters, it is revealed at a meeting of the highest Nazi officials that the Gestapo has made visits to a parallel world in which their bid for world conquest was defeated. More important, scientific superweapons exist in that world for the taking, including a bomb of awesome capability; but here, the manuscript ends abruptly.

The title of the proposed sequel was at one point said to be Ring of Fire, and would detail the emergence of a hybrid Japanese-American culture that arose as the two distinct groups merged.

On one occasion, Dick said that his novel The Ganymede Takeover originally started out as a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, which simply would not take shape. Specifically, the Ganymedians occupying Earth in the novel started out as Japanese occupying the United States.

Translations

The book has been translated in numerous languages apart from the original English version:

References

Notes

  1. ^ Pringle 1990, p. 193.
  2. ^ Ed Park (11/02/2008). "The glorious, oft-overlooked, short story". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2008-11-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "Hour 25: A Talk With Philip K. Dick". philipKdick.com. Retrieved 2008-07-30.

Bibliography

  • Brown, William Lansing 2006. “Alternate Histories: Power, Politics, and Paranoia in Philip Roth's The Plot against America and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle”, The Image of Power in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers, 2006 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Wright, Will (ed.); Kaplan, Steven (ed.); Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Colorado State University-Pueblo; pp. 107-11.
  • Campbell, Laura E. 1992. "Dickian Time in The Man in the High Castle", Extrapolation, 33: 3, pp. 190-201.
  • Carter, Cassie 1995. "The Metacolonization of Dick's The Man in the High Castle: Mimicry, Parasitism and Americanism in the PSA", Science-Fiction Studies #67, 22:3, pp. 333-342.
  • Clute, John (1995). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 1386. ISBN 0-312134-86-X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Clute, John (1995). The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Danbury, CT: Grolier. pp. CD–ROM. ISBN 0-7172-3999-3. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • DiTommaso, Lorenzo, 1999. "Redemption in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle", Science-Fiction Studies # 77, 26: , pp. 91-119.
  • Hayles, N. Katherine 1983. "Metaphysics and Metafiction in The Man in the High Castle", Philip K. Dick eds. Olander and Greenberg New York, Taplinger, 1983, pp. 53-71.
  • Jakubowski, Maxim (1983). The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists. St Albans, Herts, UK: Granada Publishing Ltd. p. 350. ISBN 0-586-05678-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Malmgren, Carl D. 1980. "Philip Dick's The Man in the High Castle and the Nature of Science Fictional Worlds", Bridges to Science Fiction, eds. George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey and Mark Rose, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 120-30.
  • Nicholls, Peter (1979). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. St Albans, Herts, UK: Granada Publishing Ltd. p. 672. ISBN 0-586-05380-8.
  • Pagetti, Carlo, 2001a. "La svastica americana" [Introduction], Philip K. Dick, L'uomo nell'alto castello, Roma: Fanucci, pp. 7-26.
  • Pringle, David (1990). The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction. London: Grafton Books Ltd. p. 407. ISBN 0-246-13635-9.
  • Rossi, Umberto, 2000. "All Around the High Castle: Narrative Voices and Fictional Visions in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle", Telling the Stories of America - History, Literature and the Arts - Proceedings of the 14th AISNA Biennial conference (Pescara, 1997), eds. Clericuzio, A., Annalisa Goldoni and Andrea Mariani, Roma: Nuova Arnica, pp. 474-83.
  • Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. p. 136. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.

See also

Awards and achievements
Preceded by Hugo Award for Best Novel
1963 		Succeeded by
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