Along similar lines, The Man in the High Castle takes place in an alternate present in which Franklin D. Roosevelt has been assassinated, the Axis Powers have won World War II, and North America has been divided between Japan and Germany. In San Francisco, the Japanese occupy the upper rungs of the social ladder, their traditions and industries eclipsing a dying American culture. Everyone is reading a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts a world in which Roosevelt survives the assassination attempt and the Allies win the war. The author, Hawthorne Abendsen, has apparently tapped into an alternate present much like our own in order to construct the world of his novel, and consequently he has become a target for elimination by the Nazis.
The experiences of several other characters suggest that they, too, have caught a glimpse of another present, a not-toodistant parallel universe. The expert forger Frank Frink and his partner Ed McCarthy start a business making handwrought jewelry, a tremendous risk in a world where innovation—movement into the future—is entirely the department of the Japanese and the Germans. The extent to which America is a land of the past is illustrated by the Japanese obsession with vintage collectibles. But Frink’s creations offer a glimmer of hope, for their value is not their historicity; instead, in them “an entire new world is pointed to.”
What no one realizes, but Dick hints, is that this “new world” is an America that was never defeated, an alternate present into which Nobusuke Tagomi, who buys and meditates on one of the pieces of jewelry during a personal crisis, actually slips for a short time. Like the I Ching (The Book of Changes), which is consulted for advice by many characters in the novel, the handmade pieces are oracles. But rather than telling the future, they bring the inhabitants of that world into proximity with our own slightly divergent time sequence. And it is the artist, like the science-fiction author, who has the power to provide this means of resistance to totalitarian domination. With this imaginative variation, Dick explores a mode of temporality less fantastical than that of the precog or the time-tripper, yet nevertheless one that increases the power of those who can tap into other timelines. And like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, this idea of parallel times separates the human from the superhuman—or at least the supertemporal.
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Eternity for Life
Over the years, Dick conjured up numerous theories about time to explain the strange temporalities that he explores in his fiction. His most provocative is the notion that we exist in numerous different worlds, each having its own history or time sequence. These are like the “possible worlds” of philosophers, many of which are distinguished from ours by only minor details. In the essay “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others,” Dick presents the “wicked thought” that these worlds may actually exist, comprising
a plurality of universes arranged along a sort of lateral axis, which is to say at right angles to the linear flow of time . . . ten thousand bodies of God arranged like so many suits hanging in some enormous closet, with God either wearing them all at once or going selectively back and forth among them, saying to himself, ‘I think today I’ll wear the one in which Germany and Japan won World War II.’
This idea of a multiverse of parallel time sequences raises many metaphysical and theological questions. Since we experience all change as happening along a “linear time axis” running through a single past, present, and future, is it possible to perceive lateral changes, “processes occurring sideways in reality”? If so, how would such changes appear to us? Would they be intelligible? Could this be what schizophrenics experience? And does this provide a way to make sense of eternity? For if eternity is, in Dick’s words, “a state in which you are free from and somehow out of and above time,” then it could be a mode of supertemporality, an ability to occupy more than one time sequence at will.
This brings us back to Nietzsche. Dick’s idea of a temporal multiverse is, like eternal recurrence, more of a speculative hypothesis than a theory about the world. The idea is posed as a question: What if your life and every event in it happened over and over again? Would the endless cycle of time and the aimlessness of existence crush you, or would you revel in it? What kind of being could affirm a universe of this kind and will each moment to return rather than to pass away? Such a being would have been cured of the disease called “man,” for there is something superhuman in the ability to celebrate the thought that eternity is not rest, but endless strife.
There are those who could not bear this burden, who would be crushed by it and refuse to believe that there is no higher purpose to existence—namely, humans. But there may be others who would relish the thought—those who, in Dick’s words, “will be free from and somehow out of and above” humanity. Whether eternal recurrence is a fiction or a reality is less important than these two tendencies it illuminates.
Philip K. Dick’s speculations on time follow both tendencies, exploring the relationship between temporality and human existence. In one direction is the powerlessness of those disconnected from reality by temporal acceleration, threatened by a closed time loop arising from reversals of time, or caught up in a degenerative reversion of the physical world. Their ability to function is compromised by the disruption of their sense of time. In the opposite direction is the extraordinary power afforded by precognition, time-tripping, and the ability to tap into parallel time sequences. The latter variations turn out to be modes of supertemporality leading beyond our experience of time and human existence as we know it.
Struggling against a world where ordinary people are dominated by impersonal, inhuman forces, Dick proposes that not only are there many possible futures, but many alternate presents. Those who can imagine or perhaps even perceive them would, like those who affirm the eternal return, be virtually superhuman—not immortal, not omnipotent, but capable of resisting the supposedly inexorable march of time.
26
The Day Roosevelt Was Assassinated
PETER SIMONS
Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined . . . or one great figure . . . or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
—PHILIP K. DICK
15th February 1933. President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt is visiting Miami. From the back of an open car he’s giving an impromptu speech in the Bayfront Park area when shots ring out. Roosevelt is hit in the chest and falls at the feet of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, whose hand he had been shaking. Cermak sobs “I wish it had been me instead of you, Mr. President.” On 6th March, Roosevelt dies of peritonitis, and John Nance Garner is sworn in as thirty-second President of the United States. The assassin, a disaffected Italian immigrant called Giuseppe (“Joe”) Zangara, freely admits murder and is executed on 30th March.
This did not happen. But it easily might have. Zangara’s bullet in fact missed Roosevelt by inches and killed Cermak. We know that Roosevelt went on to re-energize the country’s flagging economy through the New Deal, aid the British Empire in its lone fight against Nazi Germany, and after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, lead the country into and largely through the Second World War. That much is history. But suppose Zangara had hit and killed the President-elect. What would, what could have happened then? How might history then have unfolded?
This counterfactual twist to history is the background to Philip K. Dick’s masterful novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which deservedly won a Hugo Prize the next year. Unlike the majority of Dick’s work, it is not science fiction, but belongs to the genre of alternate history. Alternate histories are an intermittent theme in Dick’s work. In Minority Report the story turns on there being several possible futures that can be precognized, brought about, or prevented, and how we may freely try to realize one rather than others, and so does “Golden Man.” Divine Invasion can be considered to involve alternative histories. Indeed for anyone, like Dick, who’s fascinated by alternate realities, whethe
r future or simply other, the step to an alternate reality which rewrites our own past history is not in principle a big one. All the same, none of Dick’s work so immerses the reader in a single alternate history as The Man in the High Castle.
The Story
Not many writers have tried the alternate-history genre, and fewer still have pulled it off. Dick was influenced by the example of Ward Moore’s 1953 novel Bring the Jubilee, an alternate history which starts with the Confederate States of America winning the Battle of Gettysburg and the American Civil War, the hinge event being the successful Confederate capture of Little Round Top in the battle. A more recent example is Robert Harris’s gripping Fatherland, set in a Germany that has won World War II. But to my mind Dick’s book is the pick of the pack. It succeeds in part because it is chillingly believable. The characters in the story are the usual mix of partly good, partly bad people, acting for the usual sorts of mixed motives. Their freedom of action is limited. It’s the alternate history in which they’re embedded that gives the book its edge.
Dick does not tell the story in a linear way. He plunges us first into the alternate reality, so we get used to it. We learn about Zangara in passing, and the event is not treated by the book’s characters as hugely important, because all the big important things happened to other figures such as the incoming president and his successors, less important in our history of this period, after the world had been shunted into the alternate path by the assassination.
The story is set mainly in San Francisco, around 1960. For lack of strong US leadership, Germany and Japan have won the war. Even the US has been conquered and partitioned: the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards are ruled by puppet regimes answering to Germany and Japan respectively, with a weak buffer state in between. Hitler is alive but paralyzed and senile from syphilis; the German Chancellor Bormann is dying. The two superpowers divide the world but there is cold-war rivalry between them, and some elements aiming for power in Germany want to destroy Japan in a nuclear attack and take over the whole world.
The characters in the story are all linked to this scenario, but the more convincing players are seemingly historically minor ones: a Jewish jewelry maker, his estranged wife, a dealer in fake Americana, a middle-ranking Japanese official. It is through them that we inhabit the other world. Dick goes out of his way to make this world seem normal and believable. His characters accept things as they are. By introducing grammatical mistakes into the internal thoughts of his Japan-influenced characters he make them alien to our familiar English-dominated culture.
The other link between all the characters is a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by a man said to live behind strong security high in the Rockies, the high castle of the title. By a neat reversal, this book describes an alternate history in which the Allies win the war. This angers the Reich authorities enough for them to ban it in the rump USA and to try to have the author assassinated. The doubly alternate history is similar to but intriguingly different from the actual course of events: the war goes on for longer, and Britain remains a superpower.
Enough: if you haven’t read the book yet, I heartily recommend it.
Reality
Dick’s book is “realistic,” and realism is perhaps the major concern in his writings. He once wrote, “My major preoccupation is the question, ‘What is reality?’.” In Time Out of Joint, the cosy 1950s world in which the hero lives is a sham. In reality it is near 2000, a nuclear war is raging, and the hero is uniquely able to predict where the next strike will fall. He does so best when at ease, so the sham world is there just to keep him relaxed and efficient, his guesses being part of a supposed newspaper quiz. In this case, it’s clear that we have a real world and a merely apparent, constructed “world,” through the cracks of which the hero begins to see. A similar mismatch between appearance and reality is present in the brilliant short story “Adjustment Team.”
The reality of Dick’s alternative world in The Man in the High Castle is not meant to be a sham or mere appearance: it is as real as our world. There is no way for its inhabitants to escape into a realer reality, any more than we can. At one point one of Dick’s characters gets what appears to be a tantalizing glimpse, or excursion, into “our” reality, one containing the ugly Embarcadero highway, which really and controversially existed for a while in San Francisco, but was never built in the alternate world. But the episode is brief and its status is not clear.
In “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” Dick wrote “Reality is that which, when you stop thinking about it, doesn’t go away.” This is as good a characterization as anything a professional philosopher could come up with. The first philosophical question that Dick’s book raises is then whether a world described by an alternate history is less real than ours, or just as real. Is our world, the actual world, the only real one? Or are there other worlds, which are just as real as ours? Dick’s story is not the first to raise this issue, but by its brilliance and conviction it raises it is a particularly direct and striking way.
In late twentieth-century philosophy, much discussion has turned on the question of alternative possible worlds. The idea of possible worlds goes back to the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), but possible worlds were put center-stage for contemporary metaphysics and logic by the American philosopher David K. Lewis (1941–2001).
Lewis claims that there really are innumerable such possible worlds; that every consistent way things might have been really exists, in just the same way as our world exists. That we call such alternative worlds “merely possible” and our world “actual” is due only to our being anchored in our own world. We say our world is actual, but any intelligent inhabitants of other worlds say their world is actual. Our world is no more real than theirs; to think our world is the only real one is like a person who has never left New York thinking that only New York really exists, and London, Paris, Rome, and Tokyo are only figments of New Yorkers’ imaginations. That is a sort of chauvinism : world chauvinism. Most philosophers find Lewis’s views incredible, but it is hard to show them inconsistent.
We think that real history is different from alternate history because real historians are trying to get at the facts, at what really happened. Dick’s novel holds up a mirror to this assumption: he describes a world in which the alternate history is taken for granted: people are as ignorant of what happened or happens there as we are about our world, but in his world there are people thinking about worlds alternate to that one, and those worlds can be more like ours than his. We think Dick’s world is unreal; his characters think worlds like ours are unreal. Are we right and they wrong, or is it symmetrical? If it is, then our world has no exclusive title to the label ‘real’.
Determinism
Dick himself toyed quite seriously with the idea that there is no single reality. In a 1976 interview for Science Fiction Review, for example, he said:
I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap-bubble, Silly-Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out they’re living in another century entirely. I often have the feeling—and it does show up in my books—that this is all just a stage.
Lewis’s many real worlds capture this view, except that there are no channels between them: each world is isolated and selfsufficient, just more or less similar to others. This gives them a feature which makes them unlike our world. It is their determinism. Determinism is the view that what happens in the world is completely fixed, or determined, by how it is at any given time. The complete state of the world at a certain time, say midnight GMT 1st January 2000, fixes in complete detail how it will be at any other time, past or future. On this view, most famously associated with the great French mathematician and cosmologist Pierre-Simon Laplace, history runs on rails with no branching or deviation. Each of Lewis’s worlds, because it is complete in all details at all times and places, is deterministic.
There are several rea
sons for thinking our world is not deterministic. One is that we seem to have within ourselves the power to choose and determine how things turn out, usually in fairly small and local matters: what to eat today, whether to give money to a charity, and the like, but sometimes in bigger things too. We call this freedom. Some philosophers have denied freedom, but most people and even most philosophers believe we are free, within limits. This is what makes praise and reward for good actions and blame and punishment for bad ones meaningful. Being free means being able by your actions to determine that the world develops in one way rather than another, where before your decision, it could have gone either way.
A second reason for thinking determinism is false comes from modern science. According to standard views of quantum physics, many events happen spontaneously, without a cause. A radioactive nucleus splits: it might have split earlier or later, and nothing determines that it must split when it actually does: it just happens that way. Modern physics deals with this by using probabilities. While not all physicists accept this standard view, most do.
The third reason for thinking determinism is wrong is the one most closely related to Dick’s novel. It is that many events happen by chance, or coincidence. Zangara might have killed Roosevelt: it was just chance that he did not. No guiding principle or guardian angel kept the President-elect safe: he was lucky. Luck is institutionalized in lotteries and other games of chance, indeed it was in thinking about such games that the science of probability was born. Within the novel, Dick raises the question himself, and that is this chapter’s motto.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 31
