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

[Joe Allonby]

I like his concepts. The "Valis Trilogy" reads almost like the work of
another author compared to the rest of his stuff.

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 3:52 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).
>>
>>
>>
>