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

Dick uses the I Ching in a multitude of ways in both the construction of the novel, The Man in the High Castle, and in the novel itself. In the novel itself, it is used by the characters – Frank Frink, Nobusuke Tagomi, and Juliana Frink – as a consultation device to receive answers to their pressing questions. This much is abundantly clear upon a surface reading of the novel. The I Ching, however, is also used by Dick to great extent within the the novel’s construction. When posed with pressing questions himself about the direction of the novel – such as the very decisions the characters are making within the novel – so too would Dick consult the I Ching. In this way, the I Ching was what formed and guided the direction of the novel. Dick said of using it to write The Man in the High Castle, ‘I used [the I Ching] in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book’. (Dick, 1974)

However, Dick did not merely use the I Ching to make individual decisions for his characters in singular moments. Dick uses the I Ching in the craft of the novel to create a sense of connection between the characters – a sense that their decisions, the paths they choose to take, are interconnected in some way, running parallel, touching at points. ‘What these twelve readings reveal, when considered as a whole, is a kind of occluded patterning at the core of the novel,’ writes Mountfort, P. in his essay ‘The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle’ (2016), ‘encapsulated in alternating doublets, pairings, and other complementarities between characters, in terms of their questions, the hexagrams they receive, and when they receive them’. (Mountfort, 2018) Alongside this, Dick’s use of the I Ching also inserts key philosophies from the I Ching into the novel – most notably around the passage of time, with the key events or ‘moments’ of the novel flowing in synchronicity, as opposed to in a wholly linear and causal form. This is perhaps most emphasized at the famous – or infamous – conclusion of the novel, where the reader is left with the open-ended question as to what is real and what is fiction – our world, where the Nazis lost World War II, or the world within The Man in The High Castle, where they did not. Jumping off from this, as the I Ching and the synchronous flow of time suggests that any one outcome may be a possibility at any moment, than any number of ‘realities’ could be the ‘real’, as any number of ‘fictionalities’ could be the fiction; as written in Mountfort’s ‘The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle’, Dick’s notion of history is certainly synchronic rather than diachronic… both in his evocation of a web of interrelationships and in his sense that the profusion of possible realities could radically undermine our sense of the real.’ (Mountfort, 2018)

The authenticity of Dick’s use of the I Ching in the writing of The Man in the High Castle, along with how steadfast he held on to his belief in the I Ching’s voice in later years, has come into question, however. There have been questions as to whether Dick truly took the I Ching at it’s word – it’s first word, specifically – and did not instead manipulate or ‘re-interpret’ it’s messages to suit the direction he already had in mind. (Mountfort, 2018) Such implicit human bias is hard, nearly impossible to avoid even in clinical settings, and in the environment of a writer such as Dick could easily influence results. This is suggested by such scholars as Emmanuel Carrere in I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Philip K Dick, ‘“[Phil] didn’t need [the I Ching] to help him come up with the exact structure for his novel, he maintained, but it did lead him to see better the organization he was already struggling to build by helping him understand the importance of structure”’ (Carrere, 1993/2005) and even implied within the novel itself, where the fictional novelist – an implied stand-in for Dick in this fictional world – is implied to have done the same when consulting the I Ching. In later years, Dick himself also questioned and even seemed to outright resent the way the I Ching ‘wrote’ the novel, saying, ‘The I Ching failed me at the end of that book, and didn’t help me resolve the ending. That’s why the ending is so unresolved…the I Ching copped out completely, and left me stranded’. (Dick, An Interview with Phillip K. Dick, 1976)

References

Carrere, E. (1993/2005). I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Inside the Mind of Phillip K Dick. (T. Bent, Trans.) London: Bloomsbury.

Dick, P. K. (1974). Vertex Interview with Phillip K. Dick. (A. B. Cover, Interviewer)

Dick, P. K. (1976). An Interview with Phillip K. Dick. (D. DePerez, Interviewer)

Mountfort, P. (2018). The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle . SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016), 287-309.