Watching "The Man in the High Castle". Amazon's take on the Phillip Dick's novel exploring the lives of handful of folks in a world where the Nazis had won the war. So, one of the Nazis in the story, Joe, or Josef, returns home, to Brooklyn (Yep, NYC and Brooklyn are still very much present in this story of the US and North America. Washington DC, however, is gone.) And what is the book Joe returns home with from the Neutral zone? (The Neutral zone being what separates the Nazi and Japanese zones-the Nazis in the east, and the Japanese on the West coast.) Again, what book does he pick up and bring home to his five-year-old boy?
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That is the book he brings home from the illicit bookstore he finds in the Neutral Zone of this tale.
This morning I am talking to my spouse, who is watching this flick with me, and she comments that she read Huckleberry Finn in her high school in Poland. That was in the 80s, in the midst of communism there. An interesting book for a group of high schoolers in the midst of communist Poland in 1981 or that period, roughly.
She goes on to talk of philology. A term that to this day is not in my vocabulary. It is simply not commonly used in English. All I can say of it really is that Nietzsche was a philologist, a student of philology. My wife’s experience in Poland, however, is quite different. There, her class seems to have been intent to study American English, American culture, through a reading of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
In the nineties I pondered education as a career. It did not happen. I ended up studying with or more hanging out with the folks who were doing philosophy of education at the Grad School of Education (GSE). I found it refreshing to discover Pragmatism after doing several years of “Analytic” philosophy in the philosophy department proper down the street. This was all at Rutgers-New Brunswick. At that time, the Philosophy Department was in fact on a different campus, a mile or two away. They have since moved the Philosophy Department to College Ave, a block or two away from the Graduate School of Education.
It was there at the Graduate School of Education that I read Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What I recall of the text is the metaphor of the ‘river’. It was the river that allowed for the whole adventure to happen. Again and again, Huck would get back onto, into the river. That is what I recall Professor Giarelli pointing to.
That class, in retrospect, was an exercise in philology. Giarelli was looking to the books of the day to give us a hint perhaps of where education was going, what was next. He had us reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair, Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Rousseau’s Emile, and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All with the intent of asking, considering the question of what is an education, as per these texts. Looking back, it was very much a philological project.
It is interesting that today, with things like Black Lives Matter and structural racism, granted they point to the same thing, Americans struggle with such concepts. It goes back, perhaps, to the fact that Americans do not use the term ‘philology’. We are lacking that idea that an author is working within the confines of a language that open up and close various worlds. In short, we do not consider that an author functions in a culture. Our literature classes focus upon the world the author creates. It is the author’s creation. We do not go beyond that to consider the language and the culture of which the author is a part.
Going back to my spouse, or my wife, it was obvious to her. It was, it seems, explicitly stated in her class that to understand American English, to understand what America is about, one needed to read of Huck Finn’s adventures. Her class was an exercise in philology. The text was an act of imagination but also a product of culture.
I suspect that the writers of "The Man in the High Tower" had the same intent. There perhaps it was almost like a club-they were practically clubbing us with that book in that context. In my class with Giarelli, it was different again. We were doing something quite different there. One did not at Rutgers read literature to do education, much less philosophy. Perhaps it was Giarelli’s intent, but I failed to grasp it. We just again and again fail to make that connection between the one and the other.
Oh well, you know what I will be ordering on Amazon. To think they began as an online bookstore.
