The Man in the High Castle

I’ve just finished reading the book a second time. It had been so long since my first read that I’d forgotten about the “book-within-a-book” aspect. Granted, it’s not very central to the book’s plot— maybe it’s a kind of MacGuffin— despite being referenced in the book’s title.

N.B. the title of the book, the actual book, The Man in the High Castle, let’s call that Book A, refers to the author [the man] of a fictional book in the world of Book A, titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which we’ll call Book B.

If you’ve never heard of Book A (or the homonymous TV series, which I haven’t seen yet), it’s an alternate history novel about a world where the Axis powers won the Second World War. What’s funny is that Book B, the fictional book within Book A (a fictional book of fiction, yes) is an alternate history novel about a world where the Allies won the Second World War. It’s unapologetically meta.

Just to rub it in, one of Book A’s characters, in response to hearing about the concept of Book B for the first time, says: “Interesting book. Odd nobody thought of writing it before.”— Philip K. Dick, author of Book A, essentially patting himself on the back (and rightly so).

One thing that caught my attention is PKD’s treatment of what would now be called cultural appropriation. To my knowledge (which I just now acquired through an absent-minded google search), the term wasn’t in wide use at the time of the book’s writing, early 1960s or late 50s; but I’m sure the phenomenon was known and discussed, at least in academic circles. Still, PKD’s treatment of it is top notch and nuanced, and of course it’s done in the book’s parallel world fashion, i.e., the appropriated and the appropriating cultures are skilfully reversed.

There is a nice scene depicting this, in which Robert Childan, a white American antique shop owner, who operates in the West Coast of the United States (which is Japanese-controlled in book A) is showing an “authentic American” hand-crafted item of Jewellery to a rich Japanese client, Paul Kasoura (yeah, I know). Paul praises the item by claiming that it possesses Wu (a Chinese/Buddhist spiritual concept, roughly meaning awareness), which is to say, he appraises it according to his own cultural value system. To this, Robert doesn’t protest. In fact, he’s very pleased, because the white population of the West Coast had already been culturally hegemonized by Eastern spirituality. It’s only when Paul suggests that this item and others like it should be mass produced and sold as cheap good luck charms that Robert gets offended and, in his words, feels humiliated.

PKD showed a good understanding of cultural appropriation in both its psychological and economic dimensions. Forecasting technologies that didn’t exist, for which he gets a lot of credit, is only the surface of how prophetic he was.