Week Eight: PK Dick: More Than Just An Author

According to Brown (2001), Dick's early novels conformed to the genre of science fiction; "he used the popular leitmotifs of SF - alien worlds, precognition, ray-guns, but employed them to his own agenda." However, Brown (2001) cites that Dick used science fiction to "explore his obsession with metaphysics, the nature of perceived reality, good and evil, and the abuse of power.  He was obsessed with the idea that the universe was only apparently real, an illusion behind which the truth might dwell."

A dominant theme of Dick's works is that of changing the reader's perception of reality.  As Brown (2001) identifies, Juliana Frink in The Man in the High Castle, "makes a discovery that changes her perception of reality - always a dominant theme in Dick's work - as she learns how Grasshopper came to be written".   Even in Scanner Darkly the main character Bob Arctor scrambles from one identity to another in his role as undercover cop and friend to a junky.

As Brown (2001) cites "in opposition to Nazi ideology, Dick posits the philosophy of Tao, which offers a means of examining the universe through the principals of interconnectedness - or Jungian Synchronicity - at odds with Western ideas of a universe that functions on the mechanistic basis of cause and effect".  That is to say, that whilst drawing on the themes of Nazism/Facism, Dick was heavily influenced by the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination or fortune telling, and challenged traditional Western thinking in his writing.  According to Mountfort (2006), "Dick regarded the I Ching itself as having in a sense written High Castle".  However, in A Scanner Darkly, Dick "had come to feel that the I Ching had deliberately misled and betrayed him".

The Man in the High Castle was written in the Sixties when World War II was still relatively recent in society's mind.  PK Dick wrote at a time when ideals of culture, religion, anti-semitism, racism, fascism, socialism, capitalism and civil rights were being questioned, and the way society lived was simply out for debate.   According to Brown (2001), Dick was "a visionary whose manic novels of fractured realities presented a future that, like all good science fiction, was less prescriptive of what was to come than descriptive of the present".

Man in the High Castle is so much more than the separate characters the book portrays:  an American, a Jew, an Italian, a woman, a Japanese officer, a Japanese married couple, then a Swede (with an English name, Baynes) who turns out to be a German, each with their own identity or unidentity.  It appears to be almost a collection of short stories each with Dick's own point of view.  All the short stories are tied together by a fictitious alternative history ie: that World War II was won by the Germans and the Japanese, and the world as we know it is mapped out completely differently.  There is a narrative bow around all the characters, and that is the theme of the real history, that Germany and Japan actually lost the war.   This is portrayed in the novel within the novel by the character in the high castle (Abendsen) who writes about our real truth about WWII in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

The information on P K Dick has been swirling around my head for several weeks now.  In retrospect I think that was Dick's intention as a writer.  After viewing the movie,"Scanner Darkly", then reading the book "The Man in the High Castle", my belief is that it was Dick 's intention to make the reader think, really think, about the world we live in and how we live it, our own reality and our own irreality, to find Chung Fu, or Inner Truth.  In essence he wanted us to turn what we find familiar upside down and inside out and rethink what we believe is true to us and our own world.  Both Scanner Darkly and Man in the High Castle warrant viewing/reading more than once to fully understand their intricacies.

References: 

Dick, P.K. (2001; 1962). The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin.

Linklater, R. (Director). (2006). A Scanner Darkly.

Brown, E. (2001). Introduction. In Dick, .K., The Man in the High Castle (p.v-xii). London: Penguin.

Mountfort, P. (2006). Oracle-text/Cybertext in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Conference paper, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual joint conference, Atlanta 2006.