Week 10

Rija Faisal

How does Dick use the I Ching and how did his views on the oracle and its role in the novel shift over time?

In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick uses the I Ching or The Book of Changes, as an oracle to aid him in the construction of his novel. (Mountfort 2020) The central plot element of the novel is the use of the I Ching by the main characters. Dick’s obsessive consultation of the oracle provided him with answers which then acted as key elements in the writing of the novel. (Mountfort 2020)

Mountfort writes that this helped to set up a powerful metafictional dynamic between the author and his protagonists of the The Man in the High Castle. While Philip Dick does in fact use the oracle to help him in his writing, it is mentioned by Mountfort that Paul Williams did an analysis of the most important points in the text where the I Ching was used, and Williams concluded that he did not believe the plot of the novel was gained only through the reading of the I Ching, and that the I Ching was not used throughout the book’s development, but rather only when the characters in the novel used it themselves.

Mountfort (2016) argues that the I Ching provided a philosophical base for the story of the novel, in the, quote : “synchronistic notion of simultaneity” or the “meaningful coincidence” which is contrary to classical western views of causality. He argues that the I Ching does not not merely act as a consultation device for certain points in the plot, but rather, it is a device that actually unifies both the stylistic and the philosophical levels of the novel.

In the end, however, as helpful as the I Ching may have proved to have been for philip Dick, it turned out to be quite the opposite. The oracle suddenly transformed from a helpful guide into this bitter version of an antagonist.  

The ending of the novel never truly satisfied Dick, and he wrote that he would have liked to have an ending that was “stronger and better” than the one he had ended up with. He blamed the oracle for it, in fact, believing that it had both misled and betrayed him, giving him an unsatisfying ending to the novel, and that it had done so on purpose.

References

 Mountfort , P. (2016) The I Ching and Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle SF-TH Inc