1. On what grounds does Mountfort (2018) dispute Williams’ (1990) view that the I Ching does not figure in the novel aside from a few oracle consultations?
As stated within the question itself, Paul Williams’ “The Author and the Oracle” (1990) suggests that the I Ching is a narrative device of limited importance to the overall themes and narrative of the acclaimed alt-history novel The Man in the High Castle. Mountfort on the other hand, claims this oracle is core to constructing thematic complexity throughout the text as a whole as well as enabling an appropriate reading of the text’s ambiguous conclusion. Central to this claim is the presented idea that the I Ching’s role in the text facilitates the exploration of the philosophical notion of Synchronicity and postmodernism as a framework. The I Ching can best be described as a divination text developed in the Western Zhou period of ancient China to both predict the future and suggest appropriate courses of action to the reader. Multiple times throughout The Man in the High Castle, characters seek the guidance of the I Ching, which in turn informs their course of actions and instigates many of the plot points within the novel. The ongoing prescience of the I Ching in the narrative showcases that at least within this literary setting, there is a level of Synchronicity which dictates the future.
Unlike the common conception of that events occur due to the interplay of many different observable systems and earlier events the precede them in time, Synchronicity as a theory suggests that events occur instead due to unfathomable connections between all things in the universe, and are not in fact random, but dictated by a ‘universal unconscious’ (Radford, 2014). By presenting the I Ching as a means to comprehend reality in an alt-history context, Dick explores the postmodern notion that the reality of this fictional world, and by extension our own, is not necessarily determined by western notions of linear causality or the ‘diachronic’. The I Ching is further used to explore this concept via structural parallels between characters in the text, especially in reference to their use of this oracle. Many of the characters use the I Ching in order to seek answers throughout the text, with the oracle repeatedly providing similar answers to those in similar circumstances, leading to an unknowable connection between these actors both in regards to the events of the story as well as through their shared experiences with the I Ching. These narrative parallels further explore the philosophy that events and individuals are connected by irrational mechanisms, almost as if driven by larger unknowable cosmic cycles. Mountfort posits that without the centrality of the I Ching to these obscured connections, the novel would be unable to function as it does, and therefore this device plays an important role in both the stylistic and thematic choices made in the creation of the text.
Dick also seemingly utilizes the I Ching to underline similarities between our world and that of the text. In The Man in the High Castle, the titular character of the text is an alt-reality version of Dick, who has written his own alt-reality novel which depicts a world roughly similar to ours using the I Ching, much like Dick used the I Ching to plan his novel. Mountfort claims that the intentional mirroring between the two, enabled once more by the I Ching, acts to question whether our reality is any more real than the reality depicted within the novel, adding a postmodern, metafictional element to the novel. This metafictional element is the crux of the conclusion, where the I Ching reveals to the protagonists that the reality constructed by Hawthorne Abendsen also exists in some capacity. Here the I Ching is used once more to enhance the postmodern trend of deconstructing the frameworks we use to understand our reality. Dick uses this conclusion to establish an intertextual interplay between the novel, the internal novel, and our reality, at the centre of which is the I Ching and the philosophies carried with it. With Mountfort highlighting the various narrative and thematic explorations provided by the I Ching, it becomes abundantly clear that Williams’ interpretation of the device is limited at best.
Mountfort, P. (2016). The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Science Fiction Studies, 43(2), 287-309. https://doi:10.5621/sciefictstud.43.2.0287
Williams, P. (1990, December). The author and the oracle. PKDS Newsletter, (25), 1-10.
Radford, B. (2014). Synchronicity: Definition & Meaning. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/43105-synchronicity-definition-meaning.html
Pop Genres 2020 