SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve not read The Man in the High Castle, the fol­low­ing con­tains plot ele­ment spoil­ers.

The Man in the High Castle man­ages to jam three of my favorite things into a sin­gle nov­el. First, it’s by Philip K. Dick, who may not have been the great­est crafter of prose in the world, but imag­ined some of the most endur­ing sci­ence fic­tion tales in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture. Sec­ond, it not only fea­tures the I-Ching, Dick claims that it was actu­al­ly in part writ­ten by the I-Ching. He says he used the book of changes as a cre­ative guide, ced­ing deci­sion mak­ing about many aspects of the nar­ra­tive to the text of the hexa­grams. And third, he may have made that whole thing up in order to cre­ate a mind-bend­ing metafic­tion. Or not.

Now, to break down the cen­tral meta-fic­tion we’re deal­ing with here:

The Man in the High Castle is a book writ­ten by Phillip K. Dick with the help of the I-Ching about an alter­na­tive his­to­ry in which Japan and Ger­many won World War II. Cen­tral to the book is anoth­er book, The Grasshop­per Lies Heavy, which is a nov­el writ­ten with the help of the I-Ching about an alter­na­tive to THAT alter­na­tive his­to­ry in which Japan and Ger­many lost World War II.

In a nice twist, the tele­vi­sion series com­ing out on Ama­zon Prime in Novem­ber 2015 ren­ders The Grasshop­per Lies Heavy as a film instead of a book, neat­ly trans­port­ing the par­al­lel mir­ror effect to the medi­um in which the sto­ry is told.

If that’s not meta enough, there are points in the plot where the I-Ching fea­tures as a door­way between worlds — two char­ac­ters cast paired hexa­grams, in dif­fer­ent places at the same time, linked by a sin­gle chang­ing line. Anoth­er char­ac­ter finds him­self eeri­ly trans­port­ed into a sur­re­al vision of San Fran­cis­co which may be the one in which Dick was actu­al­ly writ­ing the book — or at least one in which Japan had lost WWII — through a piece of jew­el­ry craft­ed by the char­ac­ter who throws the iden­ti­cal hexa­gram. The hexa­grams that are cast in the book all pre­dict the future or shape the behav­iour of char­ac­ters, and (if he’s to be believed) were actu­al­ly cast by Dick in order to deter­mine plot move­ment and char­ac­ter behav­iour.

In the final scene of the book, in the pres­ence of the author of The Grasshop­per Lies Heavy, Juliana Frink asks the ora­cle itself why it wrote the book.

The hexa­gram she casts is Inner Truth, Pigs and Fish­es — the same hexa­gram which Tagomi casts after killing the two SD men, but which we only learn about as he is hav­ing his heart attack in Chap­ter 14, and mak­ing the cru­cial deci­sion to spare Frank Frink’s life. My I-Ching App ren­ders the judg­ment thus:

Inner Truth. Pigs and fish­es.

Good for­tune.

It fur­thers one to cross the great water.

Per­se­ver­ance fur­thers. In deal­ing with oth­er peo­ple, there are invis­i­ble forces which man­i­fest them­selves as vis­i­ble effects. The cats’ paws on a lake are the result of the unseen wind. When one seeks to influ­ence some­one, one must seek the invis­i­ble forces which stir them. By intu­it­ing them, and by plac­ing your goal in the path of those forces, one estab­lish­es a bond which can accom­plish great things.

Juliana inter­prets the hexa­gram to mean that The Grasshop­per Lies Heavy rep­re­sents the truth — that Japan and Ger­many lost the war, and she inhab­its a fic­tion­al con­struct. She does, in fact, occu­py a fic­tion­al con­struct cre­at­ed by Dick — which he con­struct­ed by con­sult­ing the I-Ching. But the fic­tion­al con­struct of the world in The Grasshop­per Lies Heavy is not in fact the world in which we and the author live — it’s sim­i­lar in the out­come of the war, but diverges: FDR’s advis­er Rex­ford Tug­well suc­ceeds him as Pres­i­dent, and the Cold War is between the US and an intact British Empire instead of the Sovi­et Union. But if that alter­nate his­to­ry is real, then the upward impli­ca­tion from book with­in book to read­er is that we our­selves live in a fic­tion­al con­struct — one which might betray its fic­tion­al­i­ty through con­sult­ing the I-Ching for a win­dow on the next lev­el up. This is irre­sistibly deli­cious stuff, clas­sic Philip K. Dick: think of Dekkart not know­ing if he’s a repli­cant or not in Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep or the lay­ers of ambi­gu­i­ty about what’s real in Total Recall/We Can Remem­ber it for you Whole­sale. In this case, how­ev­er, he’s tied his metafic­tion to a 3,000 year old book that exists in our world and imbued it with a pow­er to glimpse beyond the fourth wall.

Some­what obses­sive­ly, I reread The Man in the High Castle recent­ly and not­ed each of the hexa­grams men­tioned in the book. You are wel­come. 😉