Fear, hope and the aesthetic act: metafictional devices in Philip K. Dick's The man in the high castle (original) (raw)
The subject of this paper emerged from a desire to contribute to a growing body of science fiction scholarship and studies of Philip K. Dick. The worlds of his novels are often surreal, strange; fabulous and frightening, often featuring ordinary people encountering something that disturbs their sense of reality, or selfhood. From the androids in 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', to the paranoia inducing Substance D in 'A Scanner Darkly', or the fake historical artefacts and kitsch encountered in 'The Man in the High Castle' and 'Confessions of a Crap Artist', readers of Dick often encounter entities that unsettle concepts thought previously to be stable. The power of these beings renders the reality of his characters strange, yet familiar, or familiarly strange. Often, Dick's characters must navigate what Fredric Jameson has termed a 'nightmarish uncertainty'. For this study, I borrow Umberto Rossi's term 'Ontological Uncertainty' to refer to the phenomena in Dick's fiction that disturbs reality in a number of ways. I feel it is a fitting term, as this effect is utilised in a way that conforms to neither philosophical realism, nor anti-realism. The disturbances of reality that Dick describes are many and varied, sometimes being the product of drugs, mental illness, SF-nal powers or objects, political ideologies, or any number of factors. The multifaceted nature of these disturbances, which characterise Dick's fiction, makes a truly comprehensive definition of ontological uncertainty hard to obtain. For this study, I will follow Rossi's definitions. Ontology in this context is a critical meditation on the nature of being, existence or reality, and the basic conditions of reality as they appear in a piece of fiction. As regards the uncertainty, it defines a condition in which the characters and readers alike do not know what is real and what is not in the text. They must, therefore, search for a fictional reality behind a fictional simulation, or succession of simulations. However, though reality exists for Philip K. Dick, this does not mean it is self-evident. It is often out of reach, shy and retiring, fleeting and often shattering at a personal level. The Real, in Dick's novels, exists in a realm of reversal, similar to the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth; real is fake, and fake is real. As Stanislaw Lem points out, Dick and his literature foresee a future in which philosophy will descend to people in the street and every person will have to make sense of the complex and contradictory positions of 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' (Lem, 1972, 97). Not least as their lives may depend upon the result. This study thus focuses on both 'objective' and 'subjective' forms of uncertainty in four novels. The first section, referred to as 'External Reality', deals with ontological uncertainty that arises from objective reality. The first part examines 'Ubik', Dick's studies of reification and the nature of virtual reality through a quasi-gnostic lens. The second deals with Dick's use of alternate history in 'The Man in the High Castle', as well as his treatment of historical artefacts. In the second part, entitled 'Individual Authenticity', this study examines Dick's treatment of ontology and ethics at a personal level. The first part of this segment deals with his treatment of human and non-human consciousness in the androids of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'. The final segment touches on Dick's examination of how individual agency is disturbed by drugs, mental illness and capitalist ideology, through an analysis of 'A Scanner Darkly'. Science fiction as a literary genre is evocative and personal, exploring new ways of thinking and imagining the world and fewer authors illustrate this better than Philip K. Dick.