Vic Perry

Projection and Counter-Projection In and Around Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle

The “alternate history” or “parallel universe” tale, a subgenre of science fiction, could also be regarded as a kind of speculative historical fiction projected from a point of chronological detour.  Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a defining novel of this genre, presenting an alternate 1962 in which the US had been defeated in World War II and partitioned by Japan and Germany.  Yet Dick’s novel functions in stranger ways than the normal “what-if?” scenarios of the genre it helped create.  The “Man” of his title has written his own alternative history novel, one in which the Allies won the war; one character briefly finds himself in what appears to be our world.  Both Dick as author and Dick’s characters throw the I Ching for plotting and life advice respectively.  The much-criticized ending of this much-praised novel thus confounded Dick as much as it did many of the book’s readers, and he later spent great amounts of energy fruitlessly writing a sequel in se arch of conventionally proper fictional resolution.
Instead of viewing The Man in the High Castle as a problematic, self-contained artistic artifact, I regard this novel and Dick’s author-function here as components of a larger sphere of inverse projection and counter-projection between our world and a possible world.  Rather than merely irresolute, the ending of the novel is thus disturbing and oracular, and radically, prophetically rhetorical.

Vic Perry is a candidate for a Masters in Rhetoric and teaches Interpretation and Argument at Carnegie Mellon University.  He received his MFA in Writing at Goddard College (2003) where he specialized in short fiction.