Teach Us to Embrace Our Madness
"The Man in the High Castle" on schizophrenia and the totalitarian condition
One of the most common delusions experienced by psychotics is the conviction that the people and things in their everyday life are somehow false. The feeling that your possessions have been replaced by forgeries, that your loved ones are actors working to deceive you, that the whole world is some kind of simulation, game, or figment - these are characteristic symptoms of a psychotic break.
Armchair psychiatrists often suggest that Philip K. Dick was a paranoid schizophrenic, and it is not an implausible hypothesis. Either way, his breakout success, The Man in the High Castle, represents something truly extraordinary: a vigorous defense and vindication of paranoid delusion, properly understood, as the cornerstone of humanity and resistance against a dark, chaotic, unjust world.
From beginning to end, the plot of The Man in the High Castle revolves around counterfeits. It is set in a world where the Axis triumphed, in a San Francisco colonized by a foreign Japanese elite that subjugates its white inhabitants - an echo, perhaps, of the clumsy role-reversal racial allegories in vogue in the 1960s, but complicated by the simultaneous existence of a triumphant Third Reich based on white supremacy, as well as by Dick’s eye for painful ironies. When the novel begins, several of its central characters are involved at one stage or another in the manufacture and sale of counterfeit American antiquities — fake Civil War pistols, counterfeit indian-head nickels, and so forth. These false artifacts are snapped up by wealthy Japanese collectors, who treasure the quaint old-fashionedness of American kitsch.
The idea of a Japanese-ruled society as especially rigid and focused on enigmatic formalities—a perfect breeding ground for paranoia and falsehood—is played with, and some of the characters believe this, but the narrative subtly rejects that racialized premise, as we soon get a chance to see that the German part of the world is even worse: Dick's post-war Reich is a parody of mid-century Soviet politics, with fat plutocrats cutting each other's throats for the chancellorship and miscalculated telegrams sending hapless functionaries straight to the firing squad. The Germans are even falser than the Japanese, because the problem isn’t race — it's politics that makes the world so stifling. The politics of an illiberal order, which by its very nature demands a false face, a false self of everyone who inhabits it.
In a way, all of the novel's characters are counterfeits, some in more ways than one. They are all passing themselves off as good citizens, good subjects, good functionaries, happy and fulfilled — but they are each standing over a void. One is a runaway Jew simply living under an assumed name. To up the ante even more, another is a Jew who not only changed his name but got plastic surgery—or maybe just pretended that this was the case to scare someone—and also on top of that is under another assumed name as a secret agent of a conspiracy within the Reich, to uncover another conspiracy... the mind reels. Such a seemingly infinite regress of counterfeits calls to mind the conspiratorial nightmares of Thomas Pynchon — but for Pynchon, there is no bottom. Nor is this a simple spy thriller which relies on the mortal terror of discovery to drive its tension.
The specific, mortal terror of a runaway Jew in a hostile regime is not the point of the book, after all. Its point is broader: all of these people are paranoid and anxious of their status, because everybody is, all the time, living under a regime of radical precarity which demands they act out a version of themselves that, on some level, they know is inauthentic. Everyone is made to be a counterfeit. And so, as he shows us again and again, oppression makes the psychotic's delusion true. The paranoid person understands something about themselves and others under a condition of repression that an ordinary person is not able to understand, not able to confront.
A telling early passage in The Man in the High Castle, on the nature of the market for counterfeits, is worth quoting at length, because it is a skeleton key to Dick’s understanding of the condition of repression in general:
Using an elaborate variety of tools, materials, and machines, W-M Corporation turned out a constant flow of forgeries of pre-war American artifacts. These forgeries were cautiously but expertly fed into the wholesale art object market, to join the genuine objects collected throughout the continent. As in the stamp and coin business, no one could possibly estimate the percentage of forgeries in circulation. And no one—especially the dealers and collectors themselves—wanted to.
[...]
Yes, he thought, it was good work. An expert could have told the difference . . . but the Japanese collectors weren't authorities in the proper sense, had no standards or tests by which to judge.
In fact, as far as he knew, it had never occurred to them to ask themselves if the so-called historic art objects for sale in West Coast shops were genuine. Perhaps someday they would . . . and then the bubble would burst, the market would collapse even for authentic pieces. A Gresham's Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real. And that no doubt was the motivation for the failure to investigate; after all, everyone was happy. The factories, here and there in the various cities, which turned out the pieces, they made their profits. The wholesalers passed them on, and the dealers displayed and advertised them. The collectors shelled out their money and carried their purchases happily home, to impress their associates, friends, and mistresses.
Like postwar boodle paper money, it was fine until questioned. Nobody was hurt—until the day of reckoning. And then everyone, equally, would be ruined. But meanwhile, nobody talked about it, even the men who earned their living turning out the forgeries; they shut their own minds to what they made, keeping their attention on the mere technical problems.
So what is needed for freedom to exist is a doubter. A paranoid.
But that is not enough, of course. And paranoia can be harmful — when it leads you to despair. One of the launderers of fake antiquities alluded to in that passage is Robert Childan, a frequent viewpoint character whose perspective is key to the novel, because what we at first take to be his direct representations of the conditions under Japanese occupation (stifling, enigmatic, brutally unforgiving of social error) eventually reveal themselves to be an excessively anxious and paranoid delusion: he's constantly convinced that Japanese people are staring at him, judging him and weighing him in complex ways, that he is constantly in mortal peril — and he succumbs to despair, so convinced that he's socially, financially, and personally doomed that when a Japanese client of his tries to reach out and make a human connection, signal that he shares certain subversive views, and—eventually—try to explain to Childan a spiritual fact of overwhelming significance, Childan is unable to hear him. He is blinded by a toxic form of delusion — the delusion that gives way despair.
In order to explain how Childan rescues himself from nihilism, we have to introduce another idea which is key to Dick's conception of his characters' condition: the idea of authenticity; of truth. All this talk of layers of identities, indistinguishable forgeries, and totalitarian confusions might seem to suggest that Dick's project in The Man in the High Castle is epistemologically postmodernist, believing that there is no truth or value underlying all the layers of lies and illusions. But for Dick, again, unlike for Pynchon, there is a bottom. The world of The Man in the High Castle is anything but bereft of an objective truth. In fact, bizarrely, it is shot through with a solid rock of truth that our own world painfully lacks: throughout the book, characters in the Japanese-occupied West Coast are constantly consulting the Book of Changes — the I Ching, an ancient divination text which is read from randomly to tell a fortune, by throwing coins or dice or yarrow sticks to select the passages you read. And in the world of The Man in the High Castle, the I Ching is always right. It always dispenses wise advice, warns correctly of coming danger, and perceives the fundamental nature of confusing situations. It is an invaluable tool and it is never, ever wrong. There, under all the postmodern confusions — the Tao. The absolute. Absolute truth.
But truth—or authenticity—is not, for Dick, only accessible through ancient mysticism. The other source of authentic truth in The Man in the High Castle is art. Real art, that is. Art that comes from the soul. That is what Paul Kasoura confronts Robert Childan about, what Childan is unable to hear over his own bitterness, nihilism, and paranoia. Kasoura is trying to explain to him that the jewelry Childan brought him (made by Frank Frink, the runaway Jew)—the shapeless, formless, modernist-in-a-world-without-modernism water-droplet silver necklace—is possessed of something truly vital, something spiritually pure. He calls it Wu. Kasoura drops all pretense, all politeness, in his desperation to get this point across. It is a shocking moment, one meant to jolt the reader into an understanding of just how significant this insight is to Kasoura. And Childan doesn’t get it. He thinks that Kasoura's just making fun of him, and sarcastically rubbing in his racial superiority, when Kasoura seems to suggest that it would be better not to mass manufacture this jewelry — not to make it into a chain of replicas. Childan actually thinks Kasoura means the opposite, and is about to betray the art — but then, at the last moment, he rejects nihilism. He "stands up to" Kasoura's "condescension". And he keeps the necklace safe. Unique.
You can see in that interaction a politics very of its time, of 1962 — a simple parable of race inversion, in which the oppressed radical is too cynical to be open to the generosity of the oppressor, in which "authenticity", the exclusive domain of the oppressed, is more important than anything else. In which mass manufacture, mass culture, is a betrayal of art — the fear of “selling out”. But you can also see in there a desperate effort to tame the wildness of delusion, to separate madness into the good and salutary, the creative and perceptive, versus the untamed gibberish of total loss. Yin from yang, light out of the chaos of the dark.
By the end of the book, in fact, multiple central characters have suffered some kind of complete mental breakdown. Tagomi, the Japanese functionary caught in the middle of horrific events he cannot control, buys one of the jewelry pieces from Childan—after it's pressed upon him, Childan insisting that it contains the Wu—and Tagomi stares at it hopelessly, praying for transcendence, to be rescued from his own memories, his own terrible history.1 He attacks the earring systematically, biting it, listening to it, staring at its geometric form, desperate to find the transcendence that he's been assured is there. And then he sees it: he hallucinates, for just a moment, a San Francisco not occupied by the Japanese at all. Just a few moments of a different world — our world. Of the truth.
Julianna Frink, meanwhile, is reduced to word salad and jumbled thoughts, abruptly and without any drugs or alcohol — like a person with schizophrenia. But it's in that frenzy that she manages to kill the Gestapo assassin she's been traveling with, saving the subversive author that she's headed to see.2 Bad, chaotic madness? Heroic madness? Insight, randomness? Random like the Tao?
And all of these moments of madness circle around the central true thing, the central destabilizing element in the whole novel. The events of The Man in the High Castle all fundamentally revolve around a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy — a novel banned in the Reich and tolerated at best in Japanese-controlled regions, because it depicts a world in which the Axis lost World War II.
Here is a very, very important point that is easy to gloss over: The world depicted in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not our world. That is so important that I'm going to say it twice. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy does not depict our own reality. It is simply the plausible speculations of someone who has only known one history. Grasshopper depicts a defeated Hitler standing trial in Allied court, and a war between Britain and America, and a twenty-year Churchill premiership, and a bunch of other odd things that would not be crazy guesses if you were working from the knowledge that characters in this book have. But it's just some speculative author's hypothesizing, about on a level with Harry Turtledove — or Philip K. Dick, in The Man in the High Castle. Because that's the obvious implication.
It's a neat little trick, which great writers know, whereby embedding a single meta layer in a work can prompt the reader to explore one layer deeper still — or further. The characters in The Man in the High Castle go about their ordinary lives feeling as if history could not have gone any other way. They read a strange, exciting book where history went very differently, and the book isn't true, exactly, but it's indicating something to them of terrible importance. Have you ever felt like the people around you were counterfeits — living counterfeit lives, swearing counterfeit allegiances, filled with counterfeit objectives and counterfeit ideas? What is the alternative?
A book won't tell you what the true alternative is, to the repression of the world you know - but it's out there, lurking under the fabric of reality. It’s another way of seeing things, where good is refracted into evil, where the inevitable refracts into the impossible, the mighty into the obscure and the obscure into the mighty. That is the revolutionary mindset, the subversive mindset. People loved this kind of stuff in the '60s. Maybe there's still something to it. We just have to lay hands on it — the one truth, as Philip K. Dick believed that it existed. The real.
Maybe the Pynchons of the world are right, and the real is an illusion. Or maybe we just haven't gotten there yet. Maybe we need more schizophrenic paranoia, more anxiety, and more art. Less acquiescence, less false faces, less despair. Maybe there still are glimpses of the inner truth, in this strange, inevitable, counterfeit world.
It's not a crazy idea.
Interestingly, the traumatic event that puts Tagomi in agony was being forced to fire on Nazi agents in his office — with a counterfeit pistol. He is in the habit of keeping a Civil War era Colt .44 on him—unbeknownst to him, a forgery—and in the final confrontation he is forced to use it as a deadly weapon. As he processes his trauma, the narrative focuses on the fact that this pistol is now too laden with history for him to look straight at it — his own history, that is. Dick uses exactly the same language in this passage as he did when describing what the counterfeit pistols by definition lacked — the immaterial weight of an actual past, of contact with history. In short, the fact that the world is somehow deeply false does not desanctify your own experiences — does not on its own deny you access to authentic truth. Real experiences, real history, can exist and have meaning even in a totalitarian context which will seek to erase them in the service of its own fictions.
It is interesting to note, although tangential to this analysis, that Julianna’s journey to Abendsen’s “castle” is a little mirror of World War II and its immediate aftermath — out of the moral chaos, uncertainty, and violence of her quest, the final destination is a quiet suburban home, in the middle of a genteel dinner party. She is shocked — she had been told that she was headed for a fortress. How can this decadent, suburban home protect them, from the nightmare she has just escaped? The Nazis will come again, she tries to tell him. War will come again. But he is content to stay just where he is, whether out of wisdom or foolishness. That’s certainly one anxious perspective on America’s post-war boom — that its casual luxury was a mask, a palliative, for a people resigned to the inevitability of a greater apocalypse.