For those of you who read this, you may remember that I sat in on your class twice when Janelle taught Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. MHC (the name I will use to refer to Dick’s text from here on out) asks all sorts of questions without providing any easy answers. I don’t intend to delve into all of the particulars of the text, but I would like to outline a few things that really stand out to me, as well as hopefully open up for discussion a few questions that might be developed more fully in the essays that you have to write for Janelle’s class.
To model my blog, I would like to focus on an idea that I recently came across in an essay that I had to read for my theory class, “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” The author, Paul de Man, focuses part of his essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth century German philosopher and philologist who was conflicted over the paradoxical relation between history and modernity. As de Man writes,
Modernity and history relate to each other in a curiously contradictory way that goes beyond antithesis or opposition. If history is not to become sheer regression or paralysis, it depends on modernity for its duration and renewal; but modernity cannot assert itself without being at once swallowed up and reintegrated into a regressive historical process.
If we conceive of ‘modernity’ as the ‘present’ or the ‘now,’ then what de Man means is quite simple: the life of the past is dependent upon the present, and at the same time, the present will inevitably become part of the past. This is happening right now, even as you read this blog. With each passing sentence, the present moment becomes a past moment and there is nothing that you can do to stop it. It is an immutable condition of life.
With this in mind, it becomes interesting to re-examine MHC. Without even reading a word of the book, we know one thing for certain, as does Dick: MHC will be, in the end, just another historical document, a novel that, with each passing moment, slowly gains more and more history. As de Man’s essay asserts, something that ceases to be modern has to become historical. More important is what Dick asserts in MHC: something that becomes historical, or, as Wyndam-Matson says, gains “historicity,” immediately becomes subject to its interpretation, and it is this interpretation that plays such a huge part in the lives of the novel’s characters as well as our own lives.
For example, in the case of the two lighters that Wyndam-Matson shows to his mistress, one having important historical value (i.e. being in FDR’s pocket when he was assassinated) and one having no important historical value, the interpretation that the FDR lighter is subject to is the document that asserts its historical value. In other words, the lighter itself has no value except for the value that we attach to it.
For the sake of time, I must skip over several examples and move on to the most important one. Consider the pin that Tagomi contemplates in the penultimate chapter of MHC. It’s clear that Tagomi’s experience with the pin leads to an enlightened moment for him: he glimpses an alternate reality, one in which it appears that the Allies in fact (the expression “in fact,” I admit, is a tricky one to use when discussing MHC; however, for all practical purposes, I must ask forgiveness for using it and other expressions resembling statements of factuality) won World War II.
When asked how Tagomi experienced this enlightenment, the typical answer is usually comprised of two words: Inner Truth. However, I don’t feel like this fully solves what Dick was trying to say in his novel. I don’t exactly know myself, but I feel qualified to throw out a few ideas, and perhaps one of you reading this will play with these ideas in your essays.
It would help, at this point, to reintroduce Nietzsche. Nietzsche, as de Man writes, feels that “modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.” We see a similar idea in what Frank Frink is doing in MHC: by creating original, modern American art, Frink is, if not wiping away the Americana-Japanese craze that has persisted for so long, at least engendering something new, creating a present that is so different from the past before it, in the sense that Americans, a secondary race in MHC, are finally acting freely, finally doing something.
So, with all of this in mind, I ask you, the reader, a question of my own: how does one “wipe out whatever came earlier” and create a clean slate for oneself? This is, in my opinion, the question that lies at the center of MHC. The answer to this question seems to me to be the road to Inner Truth. I have several suggestions, but for the purposes of this blog I will be brief and focus on what I think is the best answer.
For me, the best answer is hidden in the adult-child dichotomy. There is so much talk of truth and falsity in this novel that so much of language concerning adults and children is overlooked. For example, I already mentioned in class the fact that Childan’s name closely resembles the word ‘child.’ More importantly, I addressed Childan’s reaction to the Horror of War cards and bottlecaps, as well as the possible significance of the Mickey Mouse watch and why Tagomi insists that he must “graft” it to Baynes.
However, there are several things I did not mention, such as the ballad that Baynes sings at the end of chapter ten. (In fact, I suggest that anyone interested in writing about this book look up information on this ballad and see how it might relate to the adult-child dichotomy, Inner Truth, and the novel as a whole.) Moreover, the fact that, when Tagomi enters the park in chapter fourteen, all he sees is “shabby men” who read the newspapers; however, after he experiences his enlightenment, he is led out of the park by “two Chinese boys [who] came scampering noisily along the path.” Above all else, we must consider Tagomi’s utterance in chapter fourteen, when he says “When I was a child I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.” Tagomi’s utterance is an echo of St. Paul, whose writings seem to play a huge part in MHC overall, and must not be overlooked in an essay about MHC.
In short, the question seems to me to be this: to discover the Inner Truth, do we need to rely on our rationality, an adult quality, or our imagination, a childish quality? I’m not sure that Dick makes this perfectly clear, but perhaps we shouldn’t expect any less: Dick’s books tend to be littered with contradictions that can never be fully reconciled.
However, what happens when we do find an answer to this question, assuming we do? Won’t our experiences and answers, as they lose their modernity and escape the present moment, inevitably fall into the realm of history and escape our grasp, slowly but surely becoming subject to human-crafted interpretations that are, as MHC clearly shows, entirely unreliable? It is, in my opinion, a paradoxical problem surely worth entertaining in a paper.
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