Saturday, November 25, 2006
FICTION AND THE POWER OF COUNTERFACTUALS
I recently had lunch with Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye and Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz, and during the course of the conversation, Dave and Lex spoke animatedly about science fiction author Philip K. Dick and his novel, The Man in the High Castle. Outside of Russian lit, I haven't read much fiction since my teens and early twenties ( my last sojurn was re-reading The Catcher in the Rye and Babbitt in Jamaica last year) and I had not heard of the book that had made such an impression on them.
Lex was kind enough to lend me a copy, which I finished reading the other day. The Man in The High Castle is a fabulous read, and if you like science fiction or counterfactual history and have not read it, you might wish to pick it up.
I won't spoil the plot, but the setting is in a world where the Axis utterly won WWII. America is divided into an East coastal United States occupied by the Third Reich; a Pacific States of America on the West coast under Imperial Japanese hegemony; and a nominally independent, lightly populated Rocky mountains- Great Plains state. The South, with an indulgent nod from Berlin, has reinstituted slavery for African-Americans. As Lex and Dave had suggested, an intriguing aspect of the novel is the depiction of Americans with the mentality of a conquered people, inadvertantly admiring and aping their foreign rulers despite themselves. A psychology that is entirely outside the American historical experience, excepting of course, in the old South.
As I have mentioned previously, counterfactual thinking is useful as well as entertaining. It leads us to give old ideas a second look in a new light. The greater the "realism" of the counterfactual scenario, the more attractive it is to puzzle through. Philip K. Dick did his homework with his novel, obviously having dipped into Hitler's infamous " second book", unpublished in the dictator's lifetime, records of his table talk and perhaps some of the Nazi-Japanese diplomatic exchanges. His scenario follows what Axis leaders speculatively sketched out for " the next war" in the 1930's when they were still planning the "limited "wars that set off WWII and ended their quest for world domination.
I won't give away the specifics of the plot for The Man in The High Castle but the counterfactual aspect is worth your time alone. ¶ 8:25 AM
I recently had lunch with Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye and Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz, and during the course of the conversation, Dave and Lex spoke animatedly about science fiction author Philip K. Dick and his novel, The Man in the High Castle. Outside of Russian lit, I haven't read much fiction since my teens and early twenties ( my last sojurn was re-reading The Catcher in the Rye and Babbitt in Jamaica last year) and I had not heard of the book that had made such an impression on them.
Lex was kind enough to lend me a copy, which I finished reading the other day. The Man in The High Castle is a fabulous read, and if you like science fiction or counterfactual history and have not read it, you might wish to pick it up.
I won't spoil the plot, but the setting is in a world where the Axis utterly won WWII. America is divided into an East coastal United States occupied by the Third Reich; a Pacific States of America on the West coast under Imperial Japanese hegemony; and a nominally independent, lightly populated Rocky mountains- Great Plains state. The South, with an indulgent nod from Berlin, has reinstituted slavery for African-Americans. As Lex and Dave had suggested, an intriguing aspect of the novel is the depiction of Americans with the mentality of a conquered people, inadvertantly admiring and aping their foreign rulers despite themselves. A psychology that is entirely outside the American historical experience, excepting of course, in the old South.
As I have mentioned previously, counterfactual thinking is useful as well as entertaining. It leads us to give old ideas a second look in a new light. The greater the "realism" of the counterfactual scenario, the more attractive it is to puzzle through. Philip K. Dick did his homework with his novel, obviously having dipped into Hitler's infamous " second book", unpublished in the dictator's lifetime, records of his table talk and perhaps some of the Nazi-Japanese diplomatic exchanges. His scenario follows what Axis leaders speculatively sketched out for " the next war" in the 1930's when they were still planning the "limited "wars that set off WWII and ended their quest for world domination.
I won't give away the specifics of the plot for The Man in The High Castle but the counterfactual aspect is worth your time alone. ¶ 8:25 AM
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Glad you liked it. You can keep that copy. It's a trade for the Farwell book on the Boer war.
A good thing about that book is how it is mostly a "bottom up" view of the counterfactual -- not the view from the high command, but literally the man on the street, or sweeping the sidewalk in front of his jewelry shop. And it is not a depiction of a counterfactual at the dramatic moment -- Napoleon winning Waterloo -- but from the quiet period when "nothing is happening" but deep cultural changes are occurring at seemingly tectonic pace, but capable of earthquake rapidity at some point off stage after the events of the novel.
Dick also does a nice job of showing that ideas matter, and that nothing is permanent. The degradation of the conquered wanes as they begin to reassert themselves culturally, and as the war generation gets old and younger people come along who begin a process of amalgamation of cultures. The assertion that a writer can come up with a piece of samizdata, a novel in this case, and that this one book can be a massively subversive event and can move a whole culture is an astute insight from Dick, especially at such an early period -- before Solzhenitsyn, in fact.
The book is a classic for a reason, and a lot of its charm is that it is saturated with the special weirdness
characteristic of PKD, but without the usual sloppiness of execution that plagued his later works.
A good thing about that book is how it is mostly a "bottom up" view of the counterfactual -- not the view from the high command, but literally the man on the street, or sweeping the sidewalk in front of his jewelry shop. And it is not a depiction of a counterfactual at the dramatic moment -- Napoleon winning Waterloo -- but from the quiet period when "nothing is happening" but deep cultural changes are occurring at seemingly tectonic pace, but capable of earthquake rapidity at some point off stage after the events of the novel.
Dick also does a nice job of showing that ideas matter, and that nothing is permanent. The degradation of the conquered wanes as they begin to reassert themselves culturally, and as the war generation gets old and younger people come along who begin a process of amalgamation of cultures. The assertion that a writer can come up with a piece of samizdata, a novel in this case, and that this one book can be a massively subversive event and can move a whole culture is an astute insight from Dick, especially at such an early period -- before Solzhenitsyn, in fact.
The book is a classic for a reason, and a lot of its charm is that it is saturated with the special weirdness
characteristic of PKD, but without the usual sloppiness of execution that plagued his later works.
# posted by 
: Saturday, 25 November, 2006
: Saturday, 25 November, 2006
Hi Lex,
Thank you again for the book.
"...A good thing about that book is how it is mostly a "bottom up" view of the counterfactual -- not the view from the high command, but literally the man on the street, or sweeping the sidewalk in front of his jewelry shop. And it is not a depiction of a counterfactual at the dramatic moment -- Napoleon winning Waterloo -- but from the quiet period when "nothing is happening" but deep cultural changes are occurring at seemingly tectonic pace, but capable of earthquake rapidity at some point off stage after the events of the novel."
That quality appeals. You can see that (to an extent) in Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow as well - though, perhaps I'm prejudging, not having read either of them systematically.
Dick predates _The Gulag Archipelago_ but not _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ or ( I believe) _The First Circle_. Not sure on the second book as Soviet censors sat on most of Solzhenitsyn's works even when he was in high favor. Nonetheless, to perceive that effect *at the time it was happening* since Denisovich would have coincided or immediately preceded _The Man in the High Castle_, was as you said, quite astute.
By contrast, our resident Soviet experts were loath to even formally admit the death of monolithic Communism until Nixon was in office
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Thank you again for the book.
"...A good thing about that book is how it is mostly a "bottom up" view of the counterfactual -- not the view from the high command, but literally the man on the street, or sweeping the sidewalk in front of his jewelry shop. And it is not a depiction of a counterfactual at the dramatic moment -- Napoleon winning Waterloo -- but from the quiet period when "nothing is happening" but deep cultural changes are occurring at seemingly tectonic pace, but capable of earthquake rapidity at some point off stage after the events of the novel."
That quality appeals. You can see that (to an extent) in Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow as well - though, perhaps I'm prejudging, not having read either of them systematically.
Dick predates _The Gulag Archipelago_ but not _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ or ( I believe) _The First Circle_. Not sure on the second book as Soviet censors sat on most of Solzhenitsyn's works even when he was in high favor. Nonetheless, to perceive that effect *at the time it was happening* since Denisovich would have coincided or immediately preceded _The Man in the High Castle_, was as you said, quite astute.
By contrast, our resident Soviet experts were loath to even formally admit the death of monolithic Communism until Nixon was in office
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