"God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever."

After many discussions about The Man in the High Castle in class, it was easy to tell that this book, for lack of a better term, really pissed people off. I have heard and read multiple times that its a fine example of why one should not write novels when on acid.
Yet, this book earned its high praise for a reason. As confusing as it was for me personally, I thoroughly enjoyed getting ridiculously frustrated with this story. For a man on acid, Philip K. Dick knew what he was doing. Even though I knew that Nazi Germany and Japan didn't really win World War II in my world, I didn't question it in this novel. In the first chapter when Dick introduces Frank Fink, he writes
"After the Japs had taken Hawaii he had been sent to the West Coast. When the war ended, there he was, on the Japanese side of the settlement line. And here he was today, fifteen years later."
I thought to myself, well... that definitely sucks. However, I didn't question it. None of us did. Philip K. Dick used his literature to convince us of a completely different world that in the end, didn't even exist in a fictional matter. Personally, I think that's brilliant. We were all completely fooled.
The only real issue I had with the novel was all the characters and keeping track of who was who and who was from where. Yet, in the end, all these characters were alike in the fact that they had fallen into the illusion that they're world was of a world of fact and truth, when it turned out to be just the opposite.
I still don't think people should do acid, but I feel as though I had this opinion before Philip K. Dick stumbled into my life. Besides, I am not going to completely credit the acid for Dick's work. I have respect for the man who got me to drop my idea of truth, only to believe a complete lie.

Good Form

Personally I feel that during the act of war humans lose a sense of compassion. “I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces. But I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (180). This book is based off the partial memory of a once-was soldier. Tim O’ Brien even says so himself that there’s story-truth and happening-truth. Parts of stories have to be made up or embellished in order for a war story to survive. It’s always easy to place people and what they were like, but it’s not always easy to tell exactly what happened in a situation. Tim makes due with what he has. I feel that Tim O’ Brien is trying to describe how he felt during the war, and is using fiction Vs. Reality to show it.  His first book, he realized, couldn’t describe how he felt during the war. So in order to make you realize what it’s like he created a fictional book so he could show the readers what was going through his mind. Many people who return from going through such an emotionally bearing task often have mental instability. Tim wants you to understand what he felt, wants you to question yourself and every action you do. That’s a true story that never happened.

The Universal Truth

A memoir, or a biography with some degree of fiction, can sometimes hold more truth than a factual account of actual happenings, as O'Brien proves in The Things They Carried. However, Frank Fink's piece of jewelry serves as a different sort of fictional truth.
Both Childan and Tagomi are deeply affected by the art before them, though they lead completely separate lives and hold completely different positions in the world. Both men deal with the sales of faux-American artifacts, but when they run across the jewelry, they can immediately tell it is something different, something real. Like O'Brien's story-truth, this art is a kind of truth, something universal and honest in a world of falsities. Like O'Brien's story-truth, like Tim trying to save Timmy with a story, "art is long, stretching out endless..." (Dick, 184). You could consider art to be false, because it's not something real, it's (usually) not a photograph or an exact representation of the truth. Because it is seen through human eyes and made from human hands, it is truer than the happening-truth.

Living in a fictitious world.

When I first started reading Man In The High Castle, I had a hard time adjusting to the idea of World War II turning out differently. I guess this based on the actual events. Whatever the reason, I couldn't get caught up in the story, for once in my life. The one thing that did catch my eye was Juliana's acceptance of herself as a fictitious character. It is this part that makes the book even harder to understand. How can a character in the novel realize she is a fictional character? It just doesn't make sense to me. Philip K. Dick has made it almost impossible for me to ever understand this novel by adding this little twist to the story. However, Juliana's acceptance is an admirable quality to have compared to the qualities of the other characters. She can look past the fact that her life is made-up, whereas the others are still convinced their lives are real. Had they picked up Juliana's outlook, their lives would have been different.

All in all, I don't recommend writing books while on acid. The result is often a work of literature that causes mass confusion.

Whose Reality is it Anyway?

The idea for The Man in the High Castle is really great. What would happen if we lost the second world war? Philip K. Dick delves into this realm, and comes out with quite the story. What he came up with was a world where everything is fake. People, artifacts, intentions- none of it can be trusted because it’s fake. Even the whole reality of the characters in the novel becomes fake. We see a similar thing happening in Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried. He tells war stories, but even the stories didn’t happen. He’ll go and say “I killed this one guy” but then turn around and say “no I didn’t everyone else did, and I just watched”. It’s such a trippy concept, and what do you know? Our whole class is based off of that idea. What a wonderful life! I’ll probably come out of this class paranoid and scared.

The Art of Perusasion; or, How to Resent Others' Opinions

Here's an interesting article that ran in Tuesday's _Times Picayune_ (10/13), written by Jarvis Deberry: Is art of persuasion dying a quiet death?

I think it might help us to recognize some of our own resistance to the texts we have been reading. It might also throw out the challenge to re-engage with these texts--and those that follow--in a less stringent, less absolute manner. Perhaps we can unhinge from what the article declares is our suspicion of texts that "don't believe as we do," so as to not become trapped by "the righteousness of our own positions."

I wonder what your response to the article will be? And, further, how you might apply the subject of this article to our course?

I'm listening... well, reading, if truth be written.

The Truthiness of Reality

In “The Man in the High Castle” Phillip K. Dick presents an alternate reality in which that reality is discovered to be fiction. After reading the novel, and discussing it in class, I began to question the so called truthiness of reality. In the book, Juliana discovers, albeit subtly, that she is in a book. Could it be that we too are in a book? For most people, I believe, reality is taken for granted. You must constantly face reality by questioning the truth in it, and then cope with it by whatever means necessary.
Beautifully put in the novel, Juliana thinks “Truth… As terrible as death. But harder to find”. Death is abundant in this world (see The Things They Carried), and naturally people question death, and more often than not, receive answers. Though when truth is questioned, answers become less and less clear (see Truth, Lies and Literature blogspot).
But what’s the difference between truth and reality? Are they one in the same or are they separate entities? I believe they overlap in a sense. The truth is the Allies won the war. The reality is nobody wins a war.

FDR's Lighter

For the other books (and movie) I focused mainly on the truth v. fiction of the story or book itself. This book, however, has more than one type of lie to focus on. Of course we find out at the end that all the characters in the book were living a lie by living in a false governmental situation (for lack of a better term). But there is also an issue of the "historical" objects.

On page 64, Wyndom-Matson and Rita are talking about Franklin Roosevelt's lighter, of which he had two copies. Rita didn't believe either of the lighters was real, so W-M said he'd show her the paper he had to prove it. "That's my point! I'd have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it's all a fake, a mass delusion [This sentence could be actually talking about the whole premise of the story that the characters believe as well as us]. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself."

I liked the last sentence of that quote, because what are books made of? Paper. The papers we read prove the worth of the story, not the true history. It is the story by itself we are a part of. If we are reading a story, then it doesn't matter who won WWII. What matters is the book telling us that Japan and Germany won the war.

When we are reading (especially for this class), we have to become readers, not historians. Anything can happen in a book, and we have to be willing to accept that in order to read it.

In What Universe?

What really caught my attention in "The Man in the High Castle" is when Childan is at the Kasouras for dinner and they start to have a conversation about "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy". In this conversation Childan decides, out loud, that "the world would be much worse" if Japan and Germany would not have won the war. No one could possibly know how things would be if Japan and Germany would have won the war, but who's to say that it wouldn't be better? What if Childan was actually right? As of right now we're fighting a morally bankrupt war, there's poverty everywhere, and we just pulled ourselves out of a recession that is still effecting us. Even genocide is present. I'm just wondering- is it really better that we won?

Wait.....What?

Ok, so I know that I’m not the only person who is confused after reading The Man in the High Castle. But what I don’t know is if there is anyone else who went online looking desperately for help trying to decode the confusion put in front of us by PKD. And after looking through all the searches from google, yahoo, and msn, I think I may have a small idea of what he is trying to say in this book.

Out of all the added details of the book, the one that stuck with me was the I Ching. I think I spent about three days trying to find a way to equate the I Ching to my daily horoscope in the Times Picayune (hey…I though it would be a good blog idea), only to give up. But I don’t think that it was just put into the novel as a minor detail. No, I believe that PKD uses the I Ching to set up one of the themes of the novel – that many times a person determines truth/reality based on a faith (though a weak one) in what h/she sees.

This idea can be seen in the last few pages of the novel when, at Abendsen’s house, Juliana summons the oracle (I Ching) about The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Revealing that Germany and Japan really lost the war, it shows that the alternate world that PKD wrote his novel about is actually another immaterial, false world. He is saying that even though his characters are living in a world where Japan and Germany won WWII, it doesn’t mean that it is the truth/reality. It is just set up as the truth because it is what the characters are seeing in their lives and (therefore) is what they believe to be true.

But what do I know? I could be reading into this book entirely too much, just confusing myself more than what I need to be. In those multiple searches on google, yahoo, and msn, I ran across one PKD fan forum that stated it very simply:

“As with so much of Dick's work, it's the dynamics of the inquiry that is the substance. Don't look for a conclusion. Don't look for a simple twist. Even when there is one, it's ultimately just as deconstructable as the original version you had of events. And that is the PKD lesson.”

Fictional memoirs?

As I embarked on O'Brien's twisted journey in his fictionally challenged war story, the parallels to Tropic Thunder immediately jumped out at me.

If the trailer was not a sufficient enough summary, I'll quickly recap the film. Tropic Thunder is titled after the movie within the movie Tropic Thunder, an idea we aren't entirely new to, courtesy of Vonnegut and Dick. The fictional movie Tropic Thunder is intended to be the film version of John "Four Leaf" Tayback’s memoir on the war in Vietnam, portrayed by the characters of Stiller, Downey, Black, Jackson, and Baruchel. The filming becomes disastrous; only five days into production, the crew is already a month behind schedule. The director cannot handle the actor’s prima donna attitudes. Thus, Tayback and the director hatch up a scheme to drop the actors in the middle of the jungle, shooting them “guerilla-style” with the use of hidden cameras. Conflict arises, however, as the production has unknowingly dropped the actors in the middle of a heroin producing gang’s territory. Naturally, hilarity ensues.

The main parallel to The Things They Carried that I am emphasizing is not the obvious references to ‘Nam. As the movie progresses, it is discovered that Tayback actually was not a war veteran, but a garbage man with an idea. He had fictionalized his whole memoir. In a sense, O’Brien has done the same thing. O’Brien has taken his personal accounts from Vietnam, but has slightly altered them in that he is not the character O'Brien. Though their lives are identical, O'Brien determines that he is not his main character, under the umbrella of fiction. The deceit in The Things They Carried lies within the ambiguity of the narrator's identity. He is O'Brien the narrator, the Vietnam veteran. He is not O'Brien the author, the Vietnam veteran. He has the exact same person in an almost identical name, but not because O'Brien the narrator is fictional. Therefore, The Things They Carried is not factual, though it resembles a memoir. Likewise, Tayback of Tropic Thunder is the author and character of Tropic Thunder the memoir. However, as Tayback has not even ever left the country, Tropic Thunder is not factual, though it resembles a memoir.

Tropic Thunder is a fictional memoir as The Things They Carried is a memoir of fiction.