The Man in the High Castle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Published and set in 1962, the novel takes place fifteen years after a different end to World War II, and depicts intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers—primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—as they rule over the Southern and Western United States.
The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Reported inspirations include Ward Moore's alternate Civil War history, Bring the Jubilee (1953), classic World War II histories and the I Ching (referred to in the novel). There is a "novel within the novel", an alternate history within the alternate history where the Allies defeat the Axis (though in a manner distinct from the real-life events of the war).
In 2015, the book was adapted as a multi-season TV series, with Dick's daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, as a producer.
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Synopsis
Background
In the novel's alternate history, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933, leading to the continuation of the Great Depression and US isolationism during the opening of World War II. Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany to conquer most of Europe and the Soviet Union, murdering Jews, Roma, Slavs, Homosexuals and other groups. Meanwhile, Imperial Japan occupied Eastern Asia and Oceania. The Nazis then, with help of their allies, conquered most of Africa. As Japan invaded the US West Coast, Germany invaded the US East Coast. By 1947, the US and the remaining Allies surrendered to the Axis, ending the war. [[File:The Man in the High Castle novel map of former USA.png|thumb|upright|Partition of the former contiguous USA in The Man in the High Castle Template:Legend Template:Legend Template:Legend Template:Legend]] By the 1960s, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are the world's competing superpowers, with Japan establishing the "Pacific States of America" (P.S.A.) from the former West Coast United States and the remaining Mountain States, Great Plains States and Texas being a neutral buffer zone (called the Rocky Mountain States) between the P.S.A. and the Nazi-occupied former Eastern United States. In the East, there are two countries: "The South" is a racist puppet regime which collaborates with the Nazis (consisting of many of the states of the Old Confederacy). The United States of America still exists by name in the Northeast of the former territory and is controlled by a German military governor. For unexplained reasons, Canada remains independent despite being part of the Allies. Nevada is shown to be divided between the Japanese Pacific States and the neutral Rocky Mountain States. Hitler, though still alive, is incapacitated from advanced syphilis, and Martin Bormann has become the acting Chancellor of Germany, with Goebbels, Heydrich, Göring, Seyss-Inquart (who oversees the extermination of the peoples of Africa), and other Nazi leaders soon vying to take his place. The Nazis have drained the Mediterranean to make room for farmland, developed and used the hydrogen bomb, and designed rockets for extremely fast travel across the world as well as space, having sent missions to the Moon, Venus, and Mars. The novel is set mostly in San Francisco. Here, Chinese residents first appear in the novel as second-class citizens and black people are slaves. The secondary setting of the novel is the Rocky Mountains States, namely the cities of Cañon City, Denver and Cheyenne.
Plot summary
In 1962, 15 years after Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany have won World War II, Robert "Bob" Childan owns an Americana antique shop in San Francisco, California (located in the Japanese-occupied Pacific States of America), which is most commonly frequented by the Japanese, who make a fetish of romanticized American cultural artifacts. Childan is contacted by Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking Japanese trade official, who is seeking a gift to impress a visiting Swedish industrialist named Baynes. Childan's store is stocked in part with counterfeit antiques from the Wyndam-Matson Corporation, a metalworking company. Frank Frink (formerly Fink), a secretly Jewish-American veteran of World War II, has just been fired from the Wyndam-Matson factory, when he agrees to join a former co-worker to begin a handcrafted jewellery business. Meanwhile, Frink's ex-wife, Juliana, works as a judo instructor in Canon City, Colorado (in the neutral buffer zone of Mountain States), where she begins a sexual relationship with an Italian truck driver and ex-soldier, Joe Cinnadella. Throughout the book, many of these characters frequently make important decisions using prophetic messages they interpret from the I Ching, a Chinese cultural import. Many characters are also reading a widely banned yet extremely popular new novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts an alternate history in which the Allies won World War II in 1945, a concept that amazes and intrigues its readers.
Frink reveals that the Wyndam-Matson Corporation has been supplying Childan with counterfeit antiques, which works to blackmail Wyndam-Matson for money to finance Frink's new jewelry venture. Tagomi and Baynes meet, but Baynes repeatedly delays any real business as they await an expected third party from Japan. Suddenly, the public receives news of the death of the Chancellor of Germany, Martin Bormann, after a short illness. Childan tentatively, on consignment, takes some of Frink's "authentic" new metalwork and attempts to curry favour with a Japanese client, who surprisingly considers Frink's jewelry immensely spiritually alive. Juliana and Joe take a road trip to Denver, Colorado and Joe impulsively decides they should go on a side-trip to meet the mysterious Hawthorne Abendsen, author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, who supposedly lives in a guarded fortress-like estate called the "High Castle" in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Soon, Joseph Goebbels is announced as the new German Chancellor.
Baynes and Tagomi finally meet their Japanese contact as the Nazi secret police, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), close in to arrest Baynes, who is revealed to be a Nazi defector named Rudolf Wegener. Wegener warns his contact, a famed Japanese general, of Operation Dandelion, an upcoming Goebbels-approved plan for the Nazis to launch a surprise attack on the Japanese Home Islands, to obliterate the whole empire for good. As Frink is exposed as a Jew and arrested by San Francisco police, Wegener and Tagomi are confronted by two SD agents, both of whom Tagomi shoots dead with an antique American pistol. Back in Colorado, Joe abruptly changes his appearance and mannerisms before the trip to the High Castle, leading Juliana to infer that he intends to murder Abendsen. Joe confirms this, revealing himself to be an undercover Swiss Nazi assassin. Juliana mortally wounds Joe and drives off to warn Abendsen of the threat to his life.
Wegener flies back to Germany and learns that Reinhard Heydrich (a member of the anti-Dandelion faction) has launched a coup against Goebbels, possibly installing himself as Chancellor. Tagomi remains shaken by the shootout and goes to Childan to sell back the gun he used in the fight, instead, sensing the energy from one of Frink's jewelry items, Tagomi impulsively buys it from Childan. Tagomi then undergoes a spiritually intense experience during which he momentarily perceives an alternative-history version of San Francisco. Later, Tagomi meets with the German consul in San Francisco and frees the imprisoned Frink, whom Tagomi has never met, by refusing to sign his extradition order to Germany. Juliana soon has her own spiritual experience when she arrives in Cheyenne. She discovers that Abendsen now lives in a normal house with his family, having left behind the High Castle due to a change of outlook; he no longer preoccupies himself with thoughts that he might soon be assassinated. After dodging many of Juliana's questions about his inspiration for his novel, Abendsen finally confesses that he used the I Ching to guide his writing of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Before leaving, Juliana infers then that "Truth" wrote the book to reveal the "Inner Truth" that Japan and Germany really lost World War II.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy
Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read the popular novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen, whose title is assumed or supposed to have come from the Bible verse "The grasshopper shall be a burden" (Template:Sourcetext). Thus, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy constitutes a novel within a novel, wherein Abendsen writes of an alternative universe, where the Axis Powers lost World War II (1939–1945). For this reason, the Germans have banned the novel in The South Regime, but it is widely read in the Pacific States of America, and its publication is legal in the neutral countries.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy postulates that President Roosevelt survives an assassination attempt but forgoes re-election in 1940, honoring George Washington's two-term limit. The next president, Rexford Tugwell, removes the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, saving it from Japanese attack, which ensures that the US enters the conflict a well-equipped naval power. The United Kingdom retains most of its military-industrial strength, contributing more to the Allied war effort, leading to Rommel's defeat in North Africa; the British advance through the Caucasus to fight alongside the Soviets to victory in the Battle of Stalingrad; Italy and Hungary renege on their membership in the Axis Powers and betray them; British tanks and the Red Army jointly conquer Berlin; at the end of the war, the Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, are tried for their war crimes, and the Führer's last words are Deutsche, hier steh' ich ("Germans, here I stand"), in imitation of Martin Luther.
After the war, President Tugwell initiates the New Deal on a worldwide scale. With American assistance, China goes through a decade of rebuilding. People in lesser developed places in Africa and Asia are sent television kits, through which they learn how to read and receive instructions on practical skills such as digging wells and purifying water. In turn, these places become markets for American factories. There is peace and harmony not only with itself but with the rest of the world. The Soviet Union, crippled by the war, was dissolved.
Around ten years after the end of the war, the British Empire, still under the leadership of Winston Churchill, becomes increasingly belligerent and anti-American, establishing "detention preserves" for disloyal Chinese in the Republic of India, and suspecting that the U.S. is undermining its rule in its colonies. This starts up tensions between the US and the UK, leading them to a Cold War for global hegemony between their two vaguely liberal, democratic, capitalist societies. The British Empire eventually defeats the U.S becoming the only world superpower.
Inspirations
Dick said he conceived The Man in the High Castle when reading Bring the Jubilee (1953), by Ward Moore, which occurs mainly in an alternative 20th-century US wherein the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. In the acknowledgments to the book, he mentions other influences: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer; Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), by Alan Bullock; The Goebbels Diaries (1948), Louis P. Lochner, translator; Foxes of the Desert (1960), by Paul Carrell; and the 1950 translation of the I Ching by Richard Wilhelm.
The acknowledgments have three references to traditional Japanese and Tibetan poetic forms; (i) volume one of the Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), edited by Donald Keene, from which is cited the haiku on page 48; (ii) from Zen and Japanese Culture (1955), by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, from which is cited a waka on page 135; and (iii) the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1960), edited by Walter Evans-Wentz.
Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) is also mentioned in the text, written before the Roosevelt assassination divergence separating the world of The Man in the High Castle from ours. In this novella, "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a male newspaper journalist who writes anonymous advice as an agony aunt to forlorn readers during the height of the Great Depression; hence, "Miss Lonelyhearts" tries to find consolation in religion, casual sex, rural vacations, and work, none of which provide him with the sense of authenticity and engagement with the outside world that he needs. West's book is about the elusive quality of relationships and quest for meaning at a time of political turmoil within the United States.
Philip Dick used the I Ching to make decisions crucial to the plot of The Man in the High Castle just as characters within the novel use it to guide decisions.
