Authenticity

In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, Paul describes an authentic object to be when "an entire new world is pointed to, by this.  The name for it is neither art, for it has no form, nor religion. What is it?...It is authentically a new thing on the face of the world" (176). Amongst the countless deviations Dick's alternative world exhibits from our real world today, this idea of authenticity appears to remain the same. To me, something has authenticity when it is one of a kind, unlike any other, and the undisputed original. But despite the definitions being the same, there seems to be a discrepancy in the position of authenticity on the scale of value. In our present day world, an object or person's authenticity is viewed as of the utmost importance and value. In contrast, the people of Dick's alternative reality value something's historicity above all else. These people desire their possessions to have history embedded within them. They don't want the new, they crave the old.

Frank Frink and Robert Children struggle to promote the Edfrank authentic jewelry business within a world that desires the opposite of their mantra. One of a kind, made to order, hand made, original, all of these phrases are ones which attract customers to a product in our world. But in Dick's world, Childan and Frink are met with distaste when they reveal these seemingly positive attributes of their jewelry pieces. Such differences in values aid to Dick's creation of this alternative post WWII world.