Chapter 4 - Dick’s Cosmological Codex

Summary

The fourth chapter traces Philip K. Dick’s adaptations of ancient East Asian cosmology to structure America’s ethnically heterogeneous future in the emergent North Atlantic world order. Dick finds inspiration in I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that arose to combat chaos in an era of warring states. Dick’s references to China in The Man in the High Castle belongs to a career-long hunt for devices that might delay the decay of traditional forms of belonging. The I-Ching must be distinguished, however, from the magic aerosols and hand-cast ceramics that appear elsewhere in the Dick canon, for it offers a means with which to imagine a culturally coherent America. Thanks to the I-Ching, three archetypal forms of totality—American suburbia, European totalitarianism, and Third World primitivism—that remain irreconcilable in Now Wait for Last Year constitute a functioning amalgamation in High Castle. Along the way, I place Dick’s interest in the I-Ching in an intellectual tradition at least as old as Hegel, which posited that the Chinese, putatively never afflicted by Cartesian dualism, retained access to a sense of totality foreclosed to Europeans and North Americans.