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

[rich]

Not sure either of those books really have stood the test of time.
High Castle I thought highly overrated. I liked The Iron Dream and
Fatherland alot more. but i was never a fan of alternate history.
History when you dig deep is such a wonderfully strange thing.
to put it bluntly I don't think Dick is a very good writer.

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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).
>
>
>