Reading the Static: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Semi-spoilers ahead. Consider yourself warned.

The Man in the High Castle was an odd duck. Can you describe Philip K. Dick as ‘high concept’? It always seemed like he was trying to communicate some larger concept, or reaching for some idea that he wasn’t really sure how to fit into a coherent form. Perhaps the stories were exercises in unpacking these larger concepts in whatever passed as a method for him. Does that imply that the publishing of these novels as some confirmation that he had sufficiently explained or explored a given idea – at least to his own satisfaction, if not the audience’s?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep took some broad swings on the theme of humanity. A Scanner Darkly was a meditation on drugs and identity. Man in the High Castle seemed to be exploring history, historical narrative, and social hierarchy. And what do we make of the I Ching angle? The overlaps of that superstition with the brutal analytics of the Cold War might serve as a reflection of the intelligence and paranoia in the latter stages of the Cold War world. On the one hand a wildly unscientific cultural soothsaying ritual that seems to boil down to a series of complicated dice rolls and interpretations meets a Ouija board or magic eight ball. On the other, a ludicrous series of abstractions, calculations and esoteric schemes within schemes that attempted to account for an impressive number of variables without deteriorating into incoherence. The one runs up against the other, compelling and propagating emergent outcomes and entropy.

Which is not to say I’m against all of this stuff. I’ve got at least one finger firmly in the occult pie. Nonetheless, for example if you want to invest, you don’t up a tarot deck. The hard numbers of finance are a fundamentally different entity to the white noise of the mind and the vagaries of largely electrochemically-driven spews of thought and emotion.

What does the combining of the two elements as a driver of geopolitical events suggest? Perhaps merely the fundamental irrationality of the asking humans to do anything at all. The archaic machinery of a vast semi-coherent global apparatus, viewed externally may seem entirely cold, calculating, and inhuman. But from the inside it is an assemblage constructed from the combined interactions of individual interests, selfishness, paranoia, actions, ideologies, idiocies, and any number of mutating influences. The end result resembles nothing of its intended form. These all in turn create knock-on effects to which we can only react, attempting to keep our heads above an increasingly volatile sea. This latter stance perhaps emulated in the mercurial inconsistency of Juliana Frink, sliding from situation to situation on a purely intuitive series of impulses and randomisations. Rational consideration, while apparent, ultimately means little.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a book written entirely from I Ching interpretations, but taken (ironically) as an almost religious truth by some. But as with all divination and symbolic interpretation, any and all output is fundamentally a reflection of the person doing the interpreting. If one knows enough about that interpreter, one might, within reason, deconstruct and predict to some extent, the ways in which the individual in question is likely to make sense of any given symbolic material. If I remember accurately, though it’s been some years, ‘The Contortionist’s Handbook’ delves into this idea somewhat.

And so The Man in the High Castle renders itself into a strange absurdism? A reflection of incomprehensible gears grinding a delirious world along a scrambled path to some indeterminate destination.

Metastasising mechanisation interpreted as quasi-supernatural intelligent design.