PHILIP K. DICK – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
– 1962
This book is an old book, in fact
a classic, rather confidential at the time of its publication and even recently
for a classic because of its theme, but it has been brought to new awareness in
the public because Amazon has just decided to produce an adaptation of it for
video streaming. Is it a good decision to bring it back to fame, because it
will be fame this time? We’ll see right now why it should not have been kept
more or less confidential for more than fifty years.
The genre is difficult because it
is retrospective
science fiction. Science fiction is supposed to imagine what the
future will be or may be according to one or two parameters that are changed in
our present. Of course you can cheat the way “Back to the Future” did at least
three times and we regret it does not go on at least one more time, but things
are what they are and life is a truck full of manure as we all know. Here the
author imagine in 1961-62 what the world would have been if in 1945 Germany and Japan had won the war. It is the
basic hypothesis so many people work in their minds or in bar and saloon
discussions: what the world would be if… And there is no limit to these IF’s.
As they say in Paris the Eiffel
Tower could be put in a bottle if… and
the same for the Empire State Building
or the Chrysler Building
in New York
if … And after every presidential election in the world people imagine what it
would be or have been if the loser had won.
But what is the main and basic
interest of this book?
First the world is cut in two
with Japan on one side and Germany on the
other side. The Communists have disappeared due to a strict eradication of all
Slavs by Germany.
The racial problem has also disappeared by the elimination of all black people
in the world and first of all in Africa by Germany. In the same way the
holocaust of Jews was continued though here the Japanese refused to cooperate.
Imagine the world without Black people even in Africa,
with maybe a few survivors surviving since it would be their only function as
absolute slaves to be used, and abused, by any one of a paler complexion
including children and even babies. I regret the book does not expand on this
subject as much as it does on Jews and the few Jews who managed to get out of
the influence of Germany
and be de facto protected by the Japanese.
But the most frightening part is
that Germany is in the hands
of the few people who were leading Germany in the war. In spite of the
fact that Hitler is dead in 1961, it is his direct lieutenants and underlings
that have taken over and are fighting for dominance, Goebbels first of all. The
book is quite explicit on what happens in such a totalitarian state that is
like a pot with a dozen spiders locked up in it who can only manipulate the
crowds of people through the glass wall that protects them (the leaders only)
and of course they have their legions outside that can eliminate all those who
have to be eliminated for the dominating underling(s) to remain dominant, and
at the same time these legions can go on some blood baths of their own for the
fun of shedding and drinking the red stuff we call blood and they call a
delicatessen though the Jews would consider it to be the soul of man, the
divine part of man.
And yet the book is fascinating
for other reasons. It explores the very contemplative and oracular culture of
the Japanese who have some kind of portable oracle in two volumes they consult
regularly to know the meaning of the present and try to cope with the future.
It provides the believers with Hexagrams that are both sibylline and
enlightening in the shape of Haikus of six or about six lines. But the inner
psychology of these Japanese is explored in depth: contemplative, extremely
civil and polite, courteous and maybe even servile, but never revealing their
true feelings and avoiding expressing any emotion and sensation. Cold for sure
and yet tremendously empathetic, but unexpressed and unaired empathy. It is
this very quality that makes them resist the German Nazis because they are able
to communicate with the deepest forces in the universe, what every geological
element carries, atomic forces and the power of any design be it natural, the
design of molecules, or human-created and there we have a tremendous surprise. Two
people launch a jewelry production unit in San Francisco and the main worker of the two
is a Jew running incognito under a false name and under the de facto protection
of the Japanese, a little bit more at the end of the book. And it is this Jew
who is the creative jeweler, the creative artist, the craftsman who is
producing with his hands the world of tomorrow as the Japanese main character
tells us over and over again.
That would symbolically tells us
the German Nazis tried to eradicate the Jews because they represented the
future and the Nazis represent the past. Simple, symbolical but is it really
cathartic? There I cannot answer because anti-Semitism is slightly more complex than just a simile
or a metaphor. It has to do with the fear that developed somewhere in the Middle
East some 10,000 years ago in the vast confrontation of three cultures emerging
from the ice age and trying to invent the future of the planet: the Turkic
peoples, the Semitic peoples and the indo-European (Sumerian) peoples. We are still
living on that heritage, the heritage of an anthropological rivalry that became
the differentiation of three linguistic families, and of three cultures with
three religions, and what’s more the Semitic community got split in two along a
social differentiation (exploiter and exploited) and a religious antagonism
(Judaism and Islam).
Of course in this book the Arabs
and beyond them the Muslims are totally ignored and unconsidered, being
replaced by the fourth human group that never had any role to play in the
previous triad, the Buddhist and Confucian human family who are also from
another linguistic family, the isolating family, here represented by the
Japanese. That’s the main element that is absent from this book. Northern
Africa, Egypt
was essential at the end of the war but then the Arabs and Muslims are just not
considered at all. That’s the shortcoming of the book in our modern times
because since 1960-62 it is the community that has emerged most strongly from
the initial triad and today the Asian isolating family is no longer represented
by Japan but China. But of
course this book did not aim at telling us its future which is our present, but
only the present in 1961 if…
The last element I would like to
show is that the book has no end, precisely because of what I have just said.
It does not open on the future in 1961 so it cannot have any end. It is coming
to several open-ended dead ends, open-ended because we can imagine what we
like, but dead ends since it does not tell us anything about what may happen
after 1961. That’s the doom of retrospective science fiction. It is dramatic,
frightening but at the same time it leads to no vision of the future. It is
some kind of castrated science fiction that cannot tell us anything about our
real world, the world of the real readers of the book, particularly those who
read it a long time after the writing time. And that’s where the video
adaptation will be fascinating since it will have to be adapted for today’s and
tomorrow’s publics. But we’ll have to wait for it to be available in the whole
world to add a paragraph to this review.
Let the few who can access the
video adaptation celebrate! God less the Child!
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:28 AM