"The Man in the High Castle" and its impact on Pynchon's work

[Mark Kohut]

Pretty right on, I'd say, having read that Dick novel last year.......and Mother 
Night
years before...must read Mother Night again.

Thanks.


----- Original Message ----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, November 8, 2010 10:49:41 AM
Subject: "The Man in the High Castle" and its impact on Pynchon's work


When we consider the US-American literary field and look for predecessors of 
Pynchon's
project, namely his opus magnum "Gravity's Rainbow", there are two famous novels 
that seem
to be especially relevant.

Both of them were written by men with a profound knowledge of German culture.

From Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night" (see my p-mail 'WvB in Vonnegut's Mother 
Night'), our
author got the idea to use the realmetonymia Operation Paperclip to picture the 
neo-Fascist
aspects of postwar American culture.

Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" seems to have an even stronger 
influence. There you
have all the crucial items of TECHNOGNOSTICISM, a project which started on a 
large-scale-level
with Nazi Germany. Unfortunately it didn't vanish with the Nazis' downfall. So 
what are the basic
characteristics of TECHNOGNOSTICISM?

a) Imperialistic hightech wars (including genocide).

b) Space travel ("grumpy Germans walking around on Mars").

c) The flooding of the world with synthetics.

What these three issues - Hey, you V-readers out there! - respond to, is "the 
longing of the
inanimate" (chapter 3). Now you may say: Come on, it's an alternate history 
novel and things did
not really run this way. True, but PKD is quite a tricky writer, and at the 
novel's end the nature of
reality itself gets questioned. The different characters in the novel, apart 
from the personal relations
some of them have, are connected by two things. One is the I Ching (which Dick 
himself made use
of all his life). The other thing connecting the book's characters and making 
their life a little more bearable is the knowledge of (or at least: about) the 
novel 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' by Hawthorn Abendsen, in which the Allies won 
WWII. Ontological stability gets heavily shaken in the end when I Ching and 
alternate-history-novel-in-alternate-history-novel do work hand in hand to bring 
on some truly disturbing outcome.  Juliana Frink, the Judo instructor and female 
protagonist, has finally managed to find Abendsen and discusses his novel plus 
its 'spiritual' implications. In the last chapter we read:

"'It's Chung Fu,' Juliana said. 'INNER TRUTH' [my emphasis.kfl]. 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.'
With anger he said, 'Germany and Japan lost the war?'
'Yes.'
Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing.
'Even you don't face it,' Juliana said.
For a time he considered. His gaze had become empty, Juliana saw. Turned inward, 
she realized.
Preoccupied, by himself ... and then his eyes became clear again; he grunted, 
started.
'I'm not sure of anything,' he said.
'Believe,' Juliana said.
He shook his head no."

The real trick here is played on the reader. Up to that last chapter one can 
simply enjoy the show,
being glad one does not have to live in a world where Nazi Germany did fuck up 
the planet. But this
last chapter (Hawthorne to/about Julia: "Do you know what you are? ... a daemon. 
A little chthonic
spirit") installs a gloomy ontological pluralism. As readers of PKD's alternate 
history novel we are
structurally connected to Juliana's reading of Abendsen's (counter!) alternate 
history novel. So if Abendsen's 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' reveals the 
(novel-related!) "inner truth" (s.a.) that Japan
and Germany lost the war, then PKD's "The Man in the High Castle" reveals to us 
readers the
(reality-related!) inner truth that deadly TECHNOGNOSTICISM has survived Nazi 
Germany and
keeps on rocking especially inside the USA. The flooding of the world with 
plastic materials, space travel, imperialistic wars and more. And so an at first 
glance harmlessly looking sentence like "They bought him a nice tailored suit of 
one of DuPont's new synthetic fibres, Dacron" (chapter 13) is perhaps not 
harmless at all. Interesting for Pynchon readers it should be in any case.

Kai

PS: For a great new alternate history novel (which also includes the I Ching) do 
see - - -
Christian Kracht: Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (Köln 
2008).