"Dick,_Philip_K._The shifting realities of Philip K Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Man in the High Castle, a novel that exemplifies Dick's trademark blending of SF plot structure (as
to which the number one rule is constantly to amaze the reader) and philosophical mazemaking (with
a no-holds-barred skepticism that allowed for all possibilities). Dick was fervent in his view that SF
was the genre par excellence for the exploration of new and challenging concepts.
As Dick himself explained in an epistolatory interview (with critic Frank Bertrand) included herein:
"Central to SF is the idea as dynamism. Events evolve out of an idea impacting on living creatures
and their society. The idea must always be a novelty. . . . There is SF because the human brain
craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before everything else, and the eccentric view provides
unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world."
High Castle contains a horde of stimulating ideas, beginning with the basic plot: a post-World
War II world in which the Axis powers apparently have prevailed and the United States is a
conquered land divided between Japan (the West) and Germany (the East). While the Japanese are
relatively compassionate conquerors, the Nazis have extended their brutal methods throughout their
dominions. Evil has become, under their reign, a palpable daily horror. One of the characters, a
Swiss diplomat who is secretly working against the Nazis, sees them as the products of a collective
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psychic upheaval (described in terms that evidence Dick's indebtedness to C. G. Jung) that has
obliterated the distinction between the human and the divine by reversing the sacrificial pattern of the
Christian eucharist:
They [the Nazis] want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and
believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos
have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is
not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate -- confusion between him who worships and
that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
But beneath this apparent, horrific reality there exists -- for those who can experience it -- an
alternate world in which the Allies are victorious and life has retained its capacity for goodness. To
reach this alternate world is no easy matter; pain and shock may be necessary to open one's eyes, or
the enlightening aid of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the novel-within-the-novel in High Castle that
reveals the true state of affairs for those who read with intelligence, heart, and an open mind.
In 1974, perhaps the most tumultuous year -- for reasons shortly to be discussed -- in his signally
tumultuous life, Dick contemplated writing a novelistic sequel to High Castle, but his inward
repugnance at returning to an extended reimagining of the Nazi mentality prevented him from
completing this project. The two chapters he did complete are published for the first time in this
volume, as is the "Biographical Material on Hawthorne Abendsen" (1974).
Dick himself would come to hope, in the final decade of his writing life, that his own novels and
stories could fulfill a role analogous to that of Abendsen for his readers: to alert them that the
consensual reality that grimly governed their daily lives (the "Black Iron Prison," as Dick would come
to call it in his philosophical journal, the Exegesis) might not be as impregnable as it seemed. This is
not to say that Dick saw himself as a prophet or as one possessing an undeniable Truth of life
(though Dick could sound -- temporarily -- convinced while exploring the possibilities of an idea
that intrigued him.) On the contrary, Dick could be a relentless critic of his own theories and beliefs.
He was also quite willing to satirize himself broadly (as the would-be mystic Horselover Fat) and his
penchant for "wild" speculations in his autobiographical novel Valis (1981): "Fat must have come up
with more theories than there are stars in the universe. Every day he developed a new one, more
cunning, more exciting and more fucked." In his philosophical writings, Dick would don, dwell within,
and then discard one theory after another -- as so many imaginative masks or personae -- in his
quest to unravel the mysteries of his two great themes: What is human? What is real? What makes
Dick such a unique voice, both in his fiction and -- equally -- in the nonfiction writings collected in
this book, was not the answers he reached (for he held to none), but rather the imaginative range and
depth of his questioning, and the joy and brilliance and wild nerve with which he pursued it.