Philip K. Dick, 1962
The organizing principle of my sophomore classes has been that during the first semester, the students learn new ways to interpret and analyze literature, and then during the second semester, they use what they’ve learned to explore a theme of their own (collective) choice. Three years ago our theme was revolution, and we did Animal Farm and Persepolis. The year after that, the class chose utopia and dystopia, and we had just started in on utopia—I’d had the class read excerpts from Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Part IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—when the pandemic hit and brought the school year to a premature end. Then, last year, the students were for some reason very keen on the idea of doing alternate history. Coincidentally, I had written a seminar paper in grad school that surveyed half a century of “What if the Nazis had won World War II” fiction, with a particular focus on contrasting Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle with Robert Harris’s Fatherland. So if you want to know what a basically fetal version of me thought about this book a quarter of a century ago, you can just read that paper, because I’m not going to recapitulate it here. Initially, I thought it might be interesting to have the kids recapitulate it—i.e., to assign them both The Man in the High Castle and Fatherland and see what comparisons and contrasts they found. But the covids had led the district to cut down the school year to the point that I had no room for Fatherland, so teaching The Man in the High Castle on its own, I needed a new angle.
As with Shakespeare, it was tempting to delve into the philosophical musings that pop up along the way in this novel, and I was always delighted when a student did so in one of the writeups. A few particularly perceptive students picked up on the running theme of inauthenticity that runs through the book: a factory turns out fake historical artifacts, multiple characters travel under fake identities, others’ cultural affinities are accused of being fake, and of course the story concludes with [click to reveal spoiler]. But the more important and more accessible takeaway was that The Man in the High Castle is less valuable as a thought experiment about a fictional world than as a commentary on the real one. What we returned to again and again in our discussions were different ways in which the novel gives us a chance to look with fresh eyes at elements of our world that we might take for granted. For instance, these students attended a school that is exactly what the Fox News crowd has in mind when it fulminates about “critical race theory”: the professional development sessions made it explicit that the core of the school’s educational program was to teach students about and fight against the racist underpinnings of society. And yet, even with this kind of extensive exposure to these ideas, quite a few students reported that reading about a version of California in which people of Japanese rather than European ancestry sat at the top of the racial hierarchy made them see the world around them differently. Like, here’s a guy selling rich Japanese clients pieces of “American traditional ethnic art”, which means pre-war pop culture artifacts: a pin-up of Jean Harlow, a Mickey Mouse watch. That puts a whole new spin on Mom and Dad’s collection of Navajo pottery! (Or Frasier Crane’s collection of African statuary, of which I showed the kids a clip.) Here’s a white guy getting nervous about how conspicuous he is in a high-rent Japanese neighborhood to which some clients had invited him, with the neighbors peering at him with suspicion—wow, I hadn’t really thought about how my classmates from the flats of Oakland and Richmond feel when I invite them up to my house in the hills! The Japanese woman who has to go to a little specialty market to get the ingredients for a Middle American dinner of steak and potatoes, and feels very worldly as she does so? Something to think about the next time my family stops at 99 Ranch! Even I found that, this time around, elements of the novel that I had missed when I was a young’un clicked into place. Reading The Man in the High Castle back in the 20th century, I had taken the odd cadences of the dialogue as just an idiosyncracy of Dick’s style; now it seemed obvious that he was commenting on acrolects, depicting characters trying to ingratiate themselves with those at the top of the power structure by adopting their speech patterns. I could go on, but the bottom line is that I was concerned that going with such an unorthodox pick for a high school literature class might backfire on me, but was relieved to find that there actually was a lot more to talk about here than just the history geekery of gaming out the aftermath of an Axis victory.
(season 1)
Philip K. Dick and Frank Spotnitz, 2015
Coincidentally enough, a TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle began streaming in 2015, the year I am currently working through here on the Calendar page. So I thought I would check it out, or at least the 2015 season. It turns out to be one of those Freaky Friday deals: Freaky Friday has been adapted for the screen any number of times, but so far as I know, none of these adaptations has ever used the actual plot of the book. They take the title, the premise, and a few of the character names and launch into their own stories. This TV show is set in a world in which the Axis has won World War II, and most of the main characters from the book are present (along with several new ones), but the plot bears only a loose resemblance to that of the book. For one thing, there’s a lot more of it: while the novel stretched out a handful of secrets from the opening pages right up to the climax, the TV show spills these right in the pilot episode, and then wheels out another nine episodes of who’s-zoomin’-who twists and turns. Unlike the novel, the TV show posits an active underground resistance movement, and the season revolves around who’s really in the resistance and who’s a Nazi and whose feelings are genuine and who’s putting on an act, etc., etc. I feel like I’ve watched way too much of this sort of thing of late. So while I feel like, after teaching the novel, I have enough of an investment in it to be curious about how the subsequent seasons of this adaptation will unfold, I can wait until I reach 2016 to check out season two.
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