“The Man in the High Castle” is my second
favourite PKD novel, after “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. I read both
novels in the same year, back in the day, along with “Ubik”, “VALIS” and “The
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”, and most of PKD's short fiction. Without
doubt the most mind-bending year of reading I've ever had, and the one that
hooked me on SF more than any other. The thing I love about his stories more
than anything else is their mastery of chaos and illogicality. Reality in a PKD
story is held together by the desperate hopes of his characters, and it's always
falling apart beneath their feet. Love it!
As
for PKD's prose not keeping up with his ideas and co... I agree... and also
agree it's often part of the fun. Although here, as noted, I found his writing
mainly quite elegant.
I've
been hunting around for speculation as to why PKD called Hawthorne Abendsen's
book “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”. Dick says in the book that the title is a
quote from The Bible, but if so it is not in a common translation. You can find
some speculation elsewhere; being speculative about a Dick novel means we'll be wandering into
some fairly strange territory... I've also asked the question on my own blog, so
there may be enlightening comments there.
I
suppose I've never really considered him as SF and therefore haven't really
considered him as SF. I realise this is rather weak and tautological but it’s
the fact of the matter. I suppose probably because I have quite restricted
notion of what SF actually is. Perhaps I should try more. I make the further
claim because it often seems to me to be too far away from how we experience
the world. I find it often too far removed from reality to effect the way I
perceive it. I've always been away of a porous boundary between what we take as
truth and fiction and the most effective novels seem to me to find a way to
weave the two together questioning both. I'm never sure that SF takes enough of
the former to do that.
It
is part of what SF often does to propose realities different from our own. And
often proposing that our own reality is not even really reality. Metaphysics,
including religions of every ilk, has routinely done the same thing over long
millennia, and convincingly enough for religions to have dominated much of
human history and metaphysics to have dominated, in full or in part, the
thinking of many of the best minds in human history. Science fiction has only
been at it for decades, but PKD managed to bring it to a level still
unsurpassed by any other SF writer, perhaps any other writer at all.
Although, in one way or another, many philosophers have questioned the
phenomenal world and our lives in it, Descartes brought to the table the
"I", the individual identity, and that "I" has more than
held its own for going on 500 years, as a, perhaps THE, preoccupation in
Western thought and feeling, very much including Literature.
Beckett
has put his "I" character into strange wavering limbos where it
manages to unwaveringly 'go on'; PKD's 'I' exists in equally strange bizarre
worlds (that often somehow make too much sense), but they waver and shift in a
constant struggle to adapt to relentless rifts and shifts in the world around
them, and in all that they know. Paul Williams in his 1974 Rolling Stone
interview with PKD says: "Dick's characters
are all ultimately small (that is ordinary, believable) people made big by
their stamina in the face of an uncertain world." This would almost
apply to Beckett's characters too, but where 'uncertain world' in Dick's case
doesn't mean the vicissitudes of an individual's life at the ultimate bottom of
the lowest of the barrels, but a world whose very reality is an uncertainty
that is bottomless, and whose uncertainty is very much in the individual
identity's (the "I"'s) life as a problem and condition of life. This
"I" too "goes on".
I
wouldn't take away Beckett's Nobel in Literature and give it to PKD, and I
don't in the least believe Beckett will not stand the test of time, but I do
believe that PKD's work will keep on being evaluated upwards as Literature as
the years roll on. My PKD’s re-read project shows how very alive and well his
body of work is, which means people still read it and feel it is a relevant
artistic vision. For me, artistic vision is the most important thing a writer
can have. Dick's was a strange and evolving visionary critter, but it was
powerful and still is. Dick brings it to life in his reader's minds. He's a
great writer thereby. Beckett
may have the Nobel and the literary criticism reputation but it's PKD who
continues to have the social influence thanks to his peerless imagination and
paranoia (which grows increasingly justifiable as time goes by).
Since
I think of PKD in terms of Literature I tend to think about him more in the
context of Kafka, Beckett, and Burroughs. I rarely try to put him into a
science fiction genre series of writers, although some may have written better
SF (as genre) than him. What makes him transcend, if you will, the sci fi genre
is that 'science fiction' is now, and increasingly, defining our daily
'mainstream' lives as technological innovation, but mainstream Literature has
not caught up with what is happening, and veers away from it, looking for the
meanings of human experience elsewhere. It's a weird kind of disconnect between
contemporary literature and modern life. But PKD's writing was and is
thoroughly aware of the entanglement of brave new science-fictional realities
with our age old humanity. Even his metaphysics involve supercomputer gods,
temporal interpret rations, and the like. He does it better than anyone and
that's why I don't flinch to think about him being in exalted literary company.
And it's why I think that sooner or later readers and lit critics and academics
are going to reconnect mainstream literature with mainstream daily life. Dick's
fiction will be right there in the forefront.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
