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Chapter 4 - Dick’s Cosmological Codex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

Seo Hee Im
Affiliation:
Hanyang University, Korea
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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.

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The Late Modernist Novel
A Critique of Global Narrative Reason
, pp. 119 - 147
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Dick’s Cosmological Codex
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.005
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  • Dick’s Cosmological Codex
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Dick’s Cosmological Codex
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.005
Available formats
×