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

[Joe Allonby]

Read "High Castle" for the first time last year. The fun thing about
PKD is the way that he plays with identity and the nature of
perception vs reality. Mother Night plays the same game. Then we get
Ms Maas.


On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 4:50 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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).
>
>
>
>