The Power of Small Things in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The Power of Small Things in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle John L. Simons The Colorado College "The sage in his attempt to distract the mind of the empire seeks urgently to muddle it. The people all have something to occupy their eyes and ears, and the sage treats them all like children." - Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (no. 49) "The aim of the sage is to keep the people in a childlike state where there is no knowledge and so no desire beyond the immediate objects of the senses." - D. C. Lau (36) "Kids understand; they are wiser than adults — hmmm, I almost wrote, 'wiser than humans.' " - Philip K. Dick, Best of P. K. Dick (448) I In City ofWords, his study ofrecent American fiction, Tony Tanner writes, "Most of the American heroes we have studied so far share one dread of being 'taken over' by some external force, of being assimilated to an alien pattern not of their choosing, of being 'fixed' in someone else's 'realitypicture ' " (109). While Tanner's description refers directly to writers he is concerned with, such as William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut (a more current list would include Don DeLiIIo), it can be equally applied to the works of a lesser known "genre" writer, the predominantly science fictionist, Philip K. Dick, whose power of mind and imagination will, I believe, some day earn him the belated recognition he deserves as an important voice in contemporary American fiction. Although Dick has, like nearly all science fiction writers (reflecting their pulp traditions), probably written too much, his best work embodies an inventiveness ofa high order. Such novels as The^Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, and Dr. Bloodmoney will ensure Dick's place among his peers. In each of these works he explores the theme of being "taken over" in a variety ofways. And in this essay I want to discuss what I think is the central mode of countering control in Dick's fiction. It is what I call the "pursuit of smallness," and it becomes a primary metaphor for the novel on which I wish to concentrate, Dick's most famous and (perhaps) best work, The Man in the High Castle. 261 262Rocky Mountain Review A commonplace in Dick criticism revolves around the notion that he places great value on the "small man," or those whom Darko Suvin describes as the "creative little people" (166), commercially unsuccessful artisans, secondary bureaucrats, repairmen, people who lack political or social control, but who, in their seemingly insignificant lives, act, often unconsciously , to oppose the megalomaniacal impulses of the power-crazed Utopians and wheelerdealers who surround them. While the "small man" is an easily identifiable type in Dick's work, it has less readily been recognized that Dick is, by extension, drawn to "smallness" of all kinds. He shares with both James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon the literary encyclopedist's obsession with the minute individuating particulars of object, place, dress, and speech. And although Dick is fascinated by the process of decay, what Stanislaw Lern, describing the Dickian fictional universe, calls "the inexorably rising floodwaters of Chaos" (59), there is simultaneously in his writing a counter-impulse to take the trash, the clutter and kitsch of our everyday world and play with it, render it imaginatively meaningful, to make the inconsequential rubble artfully bloom with possibilities out of the humanly creative mind, and, finally, to use the seeming triviality of small things in order to resist the impulse toward extraordinary power or absolute control so often found in Dick's fiction. In this essay I want to focus on the figurative might of the small, especially children, to render weak the putatively strong constructions of those who proclaim both the power and the truth of their ossifying idealisms. In addition I want to show how the impulse toward the small reflects two seemingly contrasting religious traditions, the Taoistic and the Christian. II In The Man in the High Castle, there is then nothing "Mickey Mouse" about that 1938 Mickey Mouse watch that Tagomi, the Japanese Trade Mission representative, gives to Baynes, the German envoy masked as a...