"The very idea of place": Form, contingency, and Adornian volition in the man in the high castle

In his essay "Commitment," Theodor W. Adorno elaborates on the paradox of poetry (or any form of literature) after Auschwitz: literature as form must somehow persist despite its barbarity. To this end, he champions "autonomous" art, often understood as abstract or non-representational, against "committed" political art. Another way of conceiving autonomy, however, might be in the form of aleatory occurrences that make possible new realms of perception and thought. In Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, the classical Chinese oracle, the I Ching, plays just such a contingent role by alerting the novel's characters to the fact that their history, in which Japan and Germany have emerged victorious from World War II, is untrue. Reconsidering The Man in the High Castle, an sf novel that Adorno himself would have surely dismissed as unliterary, in light of his paradoxical aesthetics, and reexamining the relationship between history and chance in the novel, we can see how the aleatory becomes autonomous, opening up the formal enclosures of both the novel and history from within.