Sam wk7

(sorry it's late, wk8's is but 24 hrs away)

Questions answered this week are;

According to Mountfort (2006), what role does the I Ching have as an organisational device in the structure of High Castle? How does the use of this device illuminate the character of the novels protagonists?


What does Dick (1995) himself theorise about the I Ching?

(and scantily)

What elements conform to the wider generic features of SF?

That Dick’s novel is in fact a message from an anciently revered Eastern deity is an intriguing idea, and as suggested by Dick himself begs the question; delusional grandeur or indeed communion with the divine? It is difficult to cast ‘The Man in the High Castle’ off as elaborate ruse or product of an insatiably egotistical self preening intellectual, especially in view of Dick’s own awareness of himself (decidedly self denigrating and tongue in cheek) his own self-confessed knowledge of potentially being perceived for his less than conventional narrative efforts, as ‘hack’.

Dick (1995) refers to (recommends?) the oracle as mental alleviation for schizophrenics everywhere, including himself in the latter group. And in view of this are we still to take High Castle’s divine prose (and Dicks subsequent messianic role) seriously? Is he discrediting himself, or depicting himself in more enigmatic brushstrokes, hoping to befuddle otherwise discerning readers with deliberate ambiguity?

(Having consulted the oracle for various reasons since I was about fourteen, I’m biased, and you’ll have to guess to what opinion).

Mountfort (200) cites the ‘cyber-textual’ function of Dicks oracular narrative structure. By cyber-textual is here meant that the structure is in no way merely a backdrop to an authors prose and populace, rather is “an integral part of the literary exchange”(Mountfort, 2006). What is more, Dick has constructed his own parallel ‘metaphysic’, an external reference to the narrative weaving in and out of the story in points of contact in which characters consult the I Ching, moral dilemmas for the characters acting as check-points for readers with which they might like to pick up their copy of the oracle and tap into Dicks ‘higher meaning of the Moment’ (or rather, the oracles meaning as Dick relinquishes agency and offers himself up to the ‘timeless cosmos’ as a mere instrument; purposes unknown!).

Furthermore, Mountfort (2006) observes character Julia Frink whose frequent consultations with the oracle are notably different from those of Dicks other protagonists. Unlike these, consulting in veins of affirmative action, Julia exclusively refers to the oracle when at a halting loss as to her ‘next move’. Coincidentally, it is Julia whose role eventually carries the most significance as the novel climaxes with her meeting Dicks alter-ego in High Castle, the novelist Abendsen. Together (along with a hovering Dick whose own desperate enquiry is barely concealed behind characters poised aquiver), they ask the oracle why it wanted to write a novel, what its specific aims were in doing so. With a toss of the yarrow stalks, they (and Dick) get ‘Inner Truth’, of ambiguous portent like most every other hexagram, having something to do with the dissemination of genius from the ‘superior man’ all the way to the outer-reaches of the collective. Being the only female consultant, we can conjecture that with Julia Dick is commenting on the correct approach to dealing with the oracle, namely assuming ‘yin’ or ‘receptive’ modes so as not to muffle divine indication with the internal babblings of the individual.

But then again, what with the general ambiguity of the text, who knows.

On a final note, Dicks ending suggests that not only has the oracle channelled the particulars of this world as fiction, but as a chronicle of an existing one selected from a multiplicity of alternate realities, gesturing towards the ‘many worlds’ postulate of quantum mechanics, thus moving High Castle from its speculative ‘what if’ premise to bonafide science fiction in its extrapolation of ‘high sciences’.