Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) takes place in an alternate reality where Germany and Japan have won the Second World War. Germany occupies the former USA’s East Coast, while Japan rules the West Coast, with a neutral buffer state in between them. Both imperial powers are described as war-like, and both are deeply racist: slavery still exists. Frequently mentioned in the narrative is the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which describes an alternate reality where Germany and Japan lost the Second World War; it is therefore banned by the Nazis. The alternate reality in that novel is however not ours: the Soviet Union didn’t survive the war, the British Empire conquered Europe and is in a cold war with the USA.
German Will to Power
While the former USA is divided between the two victorious Axis powers, there is a difference between the two. The Germans have invested heavily in science and technology, and are colonising other planets in the solar system with their newly developed space technology, while the Japanese have fallen ten years behind. There are German rockets for commercial flights from Berlin to San Francisco, which only take 45 minutes. The Germans in short have not merely conquered a large part of the planet, they are also colonising space and overcoming time:
It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. (…)
They want to be the agents, not the victims of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike.1
The Nazis aim to be in control: they want to be the agents of an unchanging eternity. They are driven by a Nietzschean reversal of Platonism: willing the power to establish eternity, i.e. the will to power. Presumably, the Japanese in the novel are also techno-imperialists, so why have they fallen behind? What is the difference between the two?
Americana
One of the main characters in the novel is Robert Childan, the owner of an Americana store. His store caters to Japanese customers who are fascinated by artefacts from the pop culture of the former USA. As any good retailer, he tries to accommodate to the tastes of his clients. Since his clients are the Japanese colonisers of his country, he has developed a sensibility to their customs and aesthetics. When invited to a customer’s home, he doesn’t want to come across as rude or inappropriate, since that might hurt his business. He therefore adopts a deferential manner, but he is still keenly aware of his minor mishaps. At the same time, when dealing with people who are considered inferior to him by the (racist) Japanese, like a black porter, he assumes a dominant attitude by only giving clipped commands in a harsh tone. Similarly, he has developed some sense of their aesthetics and their aesthetic vocabulary, to perfect his sales pitch to them. Although their aesthetic terms remain vague and elusive, he nevertheless has a sense of what will appeal to them. They don’t desire real antiquities, but primarily items from popular culture, like revolvers from the Civil War, US brass buttons, an old comic book, or a Mickey Mouse watch.
The Japanese ‘nostalgia’ for items from the former USA contrasts with German will to power. Although this isn’t mentioned in the novel, we can assume these Germans wouldn’t be interested in old, worthless artefacts from the defeated former USA. They wouldn’t consider a tacky Mickey Mouse watch as an appropriate gift for a business relation, while the Japanese do. The Germans deal with things purely technologically: they evaluate them based on a calculation of their use value for pursuing their goals – and nothing else. The Japanese aesthetics is a different approach to things.
Sense of Wabi: Harmony of the Tao
Childan is invited by a ‘handsome young Japanese couple’ to their home. The home is described as follows:
Tasteful in the extreme. And – so ascetic. Few pieces. A lamp here, table, bookcase, print on the wall. The incredible Japanese sense of wabi. It could not be thought in English. The ability to find in simple objects a beauty beyond that of the elaborate or ornate. Something to do with the arrangement.2
In Western aesthetics, we differentiate between the utilitarian and the decorative (‘ornate’), the ascetic (or today: the minimal) and the opulent (‘elaborate’). However, these don’t map to beauty. A Spartan, utilitarian room or an ascetic, cheerless monk’s cell aren’t necessarily beautiful. An opulently decorated room can be beautiful, but can easily become kitsch.
‘Something to do with arrangement’. In Western interior decoration, the obvious arrangement would be symmetry, but that requires at least two identical pieces, which is more than mentioned here. Childan however senses a different arrangement:
The wabi around him, radiations of harmony… that is it, he decided. The proportion. Balance. They are so close to the Tao, these two young Japanese. That is why I reacted to them before. I sensed the Tao through them. Saw a glimpse of it myself.3
It is not just about the beauty of the standalone objects themselves, but rather the relation to each other. They are in harmony, proportion, balance with each other. This harmony invokes the glimpse of the Tao. The items in the room are arranged in tune with the Tao. Arranged in this way, the items in the room aren’t objects in the sense of modern Western thought: standalone objects posited before the subject and represented by the subject from his perspective. The items are not present in isolation, but arranged in harmony to each other: a harmony which is greater than the individual item.
The wabi of items in the room reflects back on the young couple. “They are so close to the Tao”. Childan ascribes to them a harmony and a serenity that resonates with the interior decoration of their home. The interior decoration of their home reflects the interior of their soul and vice versa. The novel doesn’t describe a Nazi German interior decoration, but we can imagine the pursuit of imperialist technology to dominate the planet Earth and other planets also reflects the interior of the Nazi soul. This interior won’t be in this aesthetic of Taoist harmony, but represent the machinations of their will to power.
Contemplation of Wu
Later in the story, Childan is offered, not American bric-a-brac as usual, but newly made jewellery by Americans, by one of the other main characters actually. He agrees to sell these pieces in his shop on consignment. And he shows a pin from this collection to the man of the young Japanese couple he visited earlier, Paul. Paul says it does not have wabi, but it does have wu.
I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. (…) I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. (…) It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilised. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. (…) It does not have wabi, (…) nor could it ever. But (…) this object has wu.
(…) By contemplating it, we gain more wu ourselves. We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things.4
‘Wu’, Childan recalls, means something like ‘wisdom’ or ‘comprehension’, but otherwise he is at a loss to grasp what Paul means. To his surprise, Paul gives it back and ‘forces’ him to take moral responsibility for it. And, in a twist, suggests contacting a dealer to mass produce the pin as a cheap good-luck charm. Presumably, these charms will be devoid of wu. Since a thing with wu is at rest, at peace with the universe, and balanced, partaking of Tao. In a way it is holy, it invites contemplation, which will give wu to the contemplator. It doesn’t have the subdued beauty of wabi. Nor is it in balance with other items. It doesn’t radiate harmony. Rather than beauty, it contains peace and tranquillity in itself, which is only slowly revealed in contemplation of it. Whereas a thing with wabi radiates out its harmonic beauty, this pin with wu is more closed, at rest.
Bardo Thödol: Revelation of an Alternate World
Tagomi, a high-ranking trade official, returns to Childan’s store with the intention to return a gun that he previously bought there but that is now karmically tainted. Childan however refuses to take it back, and manages to sell one of the ‘authentic’, new jewellery pieces to Tagomi instead. Tagomi sits down on a bench in a park and studies the item, a silver triangle, intensely. He tries to see what Childan told him, but he is interrupted and walks away. He notices an huge unsightly structure on the skyline, which according to a passer-by is the Embarcadero Freeway, but Tagomi has never seen it before. He enters a restaurant, and demands the white people sitting there to free a stool for him, but they refuse. He realises that is seeing a vision of another world, a ‘Bardo Thödol existence’, brought forth by the silver triangle.
Here the contemplation of the item transports Tagomi into an alternate reality, or at least shows him a vision of it, where Japanese aren’t revered as the colonisers, where there is an ugly freeway ruining the view. The item is not merely a shiny trinket, but reveals another world. Art works in general can invoke a world, like Van Gogh’s painting of muddy, worn out shoes invokes the tiring, long walk he made in them, through rain and along muddy paths. This wu piece of jewellery in the novel isn’t a beautiful piece of art in the normal sense. It isn’t wabi, but it does briefly reveal another world.
I Ching
In the novel, the I Ching is used by several of the main characters. They consult it as an oracle: they pose a question to it in order to decide on what to do, to get insight into what will come and whether or not it will be good or bad. Only those that use the I Ching regularly are receptive to the alternate world that is described in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is (spoiler alert) revealed to have been written by consulting the I Ching extensively.
Whereas the Nazi Germans strive for imperialist control, the use of the I Ching by the Japanese and their subjects signals a receptivity to coincidence. There is a prescribed fate, which the oracle elusively reveals, and over which they don’t have any control. It could be said that the oracle is used as a tool to gain access to the future, although nebulous and open to interpretation, and therefore as a tool to gain some control over the future. Nevertheless, the future remains open and uncertain.
Consulting the I Ching as an oracle is different from the scientific-technological way of gaining control over the future, which is about overcoming time, e.g. by building rockets for much faster, and therefore shorter in time, flights. The technological future is also planned along the vision of a linear progression: steady and gradual improvement to a better future. In a way, the future is colonised, just like space: controlled and planned, as defence against changes. For the user of I Ching, ’the book of changes’, the future is not planned by humans, but an enigma. Anything can happen. While the oracle gives answers, these answers are cryptic, they need interpretation. The result gives a sense of tendency, more a mood than a tool for planning and control. Its users submit to coincidence and enigma, rather than trying to overcome it.
Space and Time
The understanding of space and time of the Japanese occupiers and their subjects differs from the Nazis’ scientific-technological understanding. They will power over space and time. For the Japanese it is different. A sense of wabi depends on its surroundings, on the space a item with wabi is in. Wu is the revelation of a sense of rest while contemplating an item that is unremarkable at first sight. It is resting in its place. And it can also reveal another world, where the space is occupied by different things and people. The use of the I Ching oracle signals a different understanding of time, allowing for coincidence and mystery. The Japanese seek to be close to the Tao, which cannot be grasped or controlled. They need to be receptive to it. The Japanese understanding of things, of space and time, is based on the receptivity to the Tao, while the German understanding is based on the will to power of techno-imperialism.
It is all temporary
You may be thinking: using the I Ching as an oracle seems silly: isn’t it just random nonsense and superstition? ‘Sense the Tao’ sounds vague and mystifying: what even is ’the Tao’? These questions show we’re closer to the Germans in this novel than the Japanese. We also strive for control by scientific and technological progress. And as the first citation said: this is a struggle against the inevitable death, against the temporality of life, which in the end cannot be controlled. But we don’t have a choice: we cannot simply switch to being Tibeto-Japanese Taoists; that is also beyond our control. In the novel, it is not by technological power that the main characters get a glimpse of an alternate world, but rather by contemplation of and receptivity to what cannot be controlled.