Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Accessing our own Beliefs
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy states, "It is not too late. We see your bluff, Adolf Hitler. And we know you for what you are, at last. And the Nazi Party, the dreadful era of murder and megalomaniacal fantasy, for what it is. What it was." (Dick, Man in the High Castle, pg. 127) As I usually do for these blogs, I star the sentences that really impact me and then I use this time to go back and try to process why. My first reaction to this was sadness, or maybe even helplessness. Dick creates such a scary sounding yet probable world where books such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy are banned. Abendsen's quote seems like a plea for help; he must create a fictional world in order to tell the truth. The sad part is it always has to start with that one person, the one who breaks the mold and allows others to realize what they truly believe. In The Man in the High Castle that person is Abendsen. I feel that many times, and this definitely proves true with characters such as Frank Fink, people do not consciously hide their beliefs but rather can't access them because society puts such a skewed perspective in their heads. The next thought that passed through my head was the power of literature to express what we can't (socially or politically) express vocally. Writing is certainly not as anonymous as many people seem to believe it is today (with the internet, and email, and all) but when we write we have the physical distance from others that allows us to reach a deeper state of contemplation, or a more personal truth. Abendsen puts himself at danger by publishing this book; but at the same time he gives himself a lot of power. Freiherr Hugo Reiss tries not to be pulled in by the book but he cannot stop reading and the "alternate history" scares him. If we must create fiction in order to tell the truth than that is a tool we should use with pride. If we have the ability to articulate our own ideas in the midst of a society that believes something very different, then we have the duty to do so so that others can as well.
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I also found this to be a particularly affecting quote, although I viewed it in a slightly different light. Particularly in the scenes concerning The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, I noticed that I tended to focus strongly on parts where there seemed to be some kind of connection to the real world that was trying to be established. As I brought up in class, I found the tension of the reader between the very detailed fantasy that Dick creates and the reality of historical events to be the driving force behind the book. The scene at the end of the novel, where Hawthorne flatly says “' Germany and Japan lost the war.” was similarly striking for me. The way I read that quote was as a kind of reaction of the reader to the fictional version of Adolf Hitler, or the Nazi party as a whole. I am unsure, however, of what purpose this particular reference to the real world serves in the structure of the novel as a whole. Does it resolve that tension between fiction and reality that the reader experiences? Or does it restrengthen it, by drawing direct and obvious attention to it for the first time in the novel?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that literature has the ability to express what often is suppressed or difficult to portray in order means of communication. While reading your post, many of your claims seemed to fit almost perfectly into the The Things They Carried, which enabled me to connect these two novels more easily. In both, the creation of fiction serves a specific purpose and the stories carry a certain power with them while also bringing danger. Although O'Brien uses his stories as a way of healing, he is putting himself at danger of falling back into the mentality of war by bring back the difficult realities of combat. Similarly, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is bringing hope and power to many readers as well as Abendsen, yet with that comes the danger of writing such a provocative novel in the strict society. The two books suggest that writing fiction is risky yet almost essential.
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