On Færie-Stories—like Frank Herbert's "Dune"—Derived from Agrarian-Age Roots
Dune is a great movie! & “Dune” is a great book! But—highly problematic. Even so, I do not believe we should worry & care—all that much…
Two of my standard liberal-arts college-professor weblogs to read having been talking about “Dune 2”—which, let me say, is an absolute great movie. We have Chad Orzel, and we have Tim Burke.
Let me say that I think Chad Orzel nails it.
He has two major and some minor takes on the books Dune and Dune Messiah and on the two movies Dune I and Dune II. The major takes are the first two, and then the more minor ones:
“Frank Herbert was a really weird dude…”
“People are idiots…”
“I don’t think Villeneuve could make it any more obvious that Paul’s ascension is a Bad Thing, as much as it’s also an awesome spectacle…”
Nevertheless, Paul’s rivals, the Corrino-Harkonnen imperium, “are completely horrible people, so it’s hard not to root for the Atreides/Fremen hegemony…”
“The story is both compelling and politically kind of incoherent: it wants you to feel bad about characters choosing the least bad of a set of appalling options…”
“#discourse around it [is] so frustratingly stupid: people yelling about it seem stuck on the notion that somebody on the creative side of the production must approve of the actions of the characters…”
Speaking for myself, I always viewed Dune and Dune Messiah as a tragedy.
The best thing for humanity, I think the books maintain, would have been if Jessica and Paul had crashed and died as they fled the Sardaukar in the ornithopter, and the genocidal Fremen jihad never come to pass.
The Atreides are cool—“there is no call we will not answer; there is no faith we will betray”. And the Atreides are a much less brutal upper-class domination-and-exploitation gang than the Corrino or the Harkonnen. But the survival and victory of the Atreides is not worth a genocidal jihad. And so the story is one of two people—Jessica and Paul—trying to survive and reëstablish themselves, and finding at the end that it was their survival itself to reach Seitch Tabr that had been the piece of straw that broke the camel’s back, and that it is too late to fix it. Thus their story is one of failure:
The jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist. A sense of failure pervaded him…
But I do agree with Chad that it is “politically kind of incoherent”. You want to feel good about the characters that you identify with. And you want to feel bad about the situation in which all the options are grim. But that the personal options are really, horribly supergrim on a visceral level makes the galaxy-spanning consequences fade into the background.
So I would like to endorse with Sonny Bunch when he writes:
Sonny Bunch: Dune, Part Two: ‘Again, I’m open to the idea that The Space Jihad is bad! But if you don’t SHOW people why it’s bad, I’m not going to take your word for it that it’s worse than letting Feyd Rautha and his harem of cannibals have their way with Zendaya!… <https://letterboxd.com/sonnybunch/film/dune-part-two/1/>
And I do agree with Chad that the #discourse “stuck on the notion that somebody on the creative side of the production must approve of the actions of the characters” is simply stupid.
But while Chad Orzel nails it, with Tim Burke—very sharp, and almost always highly reliable—I am not so sure.
Burke likes the movie a lot, and likes it for much the same reasons that I like it. But Burke dislikes the book Dune—and dislikes it for reasons that make me think he read a very different book than I did.
Burke writes:
Timothy Burke: Reworking Empire: Dune 2: ‘What I don’t find useful or entertaining is a character or story… drawing on the real history of modern imperialism or colonial settlement without the author seeming to know that’s what they’re doing,… actively propagandizing in favor of imperial conquest, racial domination, genocide and so on…. There’s a fairly long list… [that] certainly includes Frank Herbert’s Dune…
Is Frank Herbert “actively propagandizing in favor of imperial conquest, racial domination, genocide and so on”? There are two galactic empires in Dune—the old empire of the Great Houses Corrino, Harkonnen, and so forth; and the new empire of Paul Atreides Maud’Dib and the Fremen jihad he unleashes upon the world. The first of these is and we are shown and told that it is an absolute shitshow. And the second? What does Paul Atreides Maud’Dib think of the conquest empire he is unleashing upon the galaxy? Let us go to the text!:
Surely I cannot choose that way, [Paul] thought. But he saw again in his mind’s eye the shrine of his father’s skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst…
Paul… could still sense the green and black Atreides banner waving… somewhere ahead… still see the jihad’s bloody swords and fanatic legions. It will not be, he told himself. I cannot let it be…
Through it all, the wild jihad still loomed ahead of [Paul], the violence and the slaughter…
Paul sat silently in the darkness, a single stark thought dominating his awareness: My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy…
[Paul] knew what lay in that snare—the wild jihad, the religious war he felt he
should avoid at any cost…
It had been a strange day with these two standing guard over [Paul] because he asked it, keeping away the curious, allowing him the time to nurse his thoughts and prescient memories, to plan a way to prevent the jihad…
Over all loomed the jihad, bloody and wild…
The more [Paul] resisted his terrible purpose and fought against the coming of the jihad,the greater the turmoil that wove through his prescience. His entire future was becoming like a river hurtling toward a chasm—the violent nexus beyond which all was fog and clouds…
I must not die. Then it will be only legend and nothing to stop the jihad…
I will not call him out if it can be helped, [Paul] thought. If there’s another way to prevent the jihad…
Paul could only focus his attention on the inner eye and the gaps visible to him in the time-wall that still lay across his path. Through each gap the jihad raged away down the corridors of the future…
Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it…
They sense that I must take the throne, [Paul] thought. But they cannot know I do it to prevent the jihad…
Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist. A sense of failure pervaded him…
The old Truthsayer, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, had her own view of the hidden meaning in Paul’s words now. She glimpsed the jihad and said: “You cannot loose these people upon the universe!”…
The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. [Paul] had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor…
[Paul] saw again in his mind’s eye the shrine of his father’s skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst…
And again [Paul] remembered the vision of fanatic legions following the green and black banner of the Atreides, pillaging and burning across the universe in the name of their prophet Muad’Dib…
The green and black Atreides banner would become a symbol of terror. Wild legions would charge into battle screaming their war cry: “Muad’Dib!” It must not be, he thought. I cannot let it happen…
Before he fully understands the situation, Paul Atreides—Maud’Dib—finds that his arrival among the Fremen and deeds afterwards have made the galaxy-spanning jihad inevitable. Toward the end of Dune he, as I said, shifts from thinking that he must find a way to stop it, and that he can “take the throne… to prevent the jihad…”, to recognizing that it is too late to stop it—that even Paul’s choosing to die cannot stop it:
Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be. His legions would rage out from Arrakis even without him. They needed only the legend he already had become. He had shown them the way, given them mastery even over the Guild which must have the spice to exist…”. And so: “A sense of failure pervaded him… “.
Burke qualifies his condemnation of Dune-the-book as “actively propagandizing in favor of imperial conquest, racial domination, genocide and so on” with the concessive phrase that Dune-the-book is “not without some mitigating subtextual complexity”. But we are told that the jihad is the worst outcome not in subtext BUT IN TEXT. ON TWENTY SEPARATE PAGES.
Now you could argue with Sonny Bunch that there is a failure of literary execution here: that Herbert tells us about the horrors of the jihad rather than showing us, and that, as a result, since “you don’t SHOW people why it’s bad, I’m not going to take your word for it that it’s worse than letting Feyd Rautha and his harem of cannibals have their way with Zendaya!…” And I would agree with you. But in the version of Dune I read there is a huge gulf between on the one hand (a) Herbert’s failing to execute and so failing to carry the feelings as well as the brain of the reader to the conclusion, and on the other hand (b) what Herbert definitely does not do, for he is not “actively propagandizing in favor of imperial conquest…” etc.
But in the book that Tim Burke read, it clearly is the case that Herbert does propagandize for imperial conquest. And Burke is very upset about that.
I have set out the book I read (the movie I saw), which are both tragedies, and what happened in them.
So what happens in the book that Burke read?
As near as I can see, in that version of Dune:
“Paul and his mother [Jessica]… we are assured… are sincere in their desire to do the right thing…”
“When he sends the Fremen out into the galaxy as his holy warriors, leading to the deaths of many billions of people, this is better than many other outcomes that he can see…”
“Paul… really sees the entire possible future of galactic humanity… is affirmed as possessing omniscience…” and is thus choosing the best path.
“We are given a ringside seat inside his consciousness to be assured that [Paul] is genuinely seeing the best utilitarian pathway through universal suffering…”
“This [assurance by Herbert] is precisely the mindset of modern empire: we have to do these terrible things because in the long run, it’s better than not doing the terrible things…”
And so “the novel can’t help but be aligned as a confirmation of imperial ideology…”
I see Burke’s (1): that is clearly in the text.
I see Burke’s (2) as well: at every stage, Paul is trying to do his best, and is arrogant enough to be confident that he will be able to use his wit and eldritch powers to find a thread through history into the future that will prevent the jihad.
But I do not see Burke’s (3) in the text. Instead I see, even as late in the book as the final battle, that Paul is not omniscient—that he is in blind time, where he does not know what will happen and thus does not know which skein of thread history will follow into the future:
[The Spacing Guild Navigators] are accustomed to seeing the future, Paul thought. In this place and time they’re blind… even as I am…
Paul’s prescient visions are clouded: “blind ground, unseen in any prescient vision…”; “blind time, no future [Paul] had seen…”; “the source of blind time, the source of error in it, with an immediate sensation of fear…”; “Paul… had plunged once more into the abyss… blind time…”
But what if you miss the limited and cloudy nature of Paul’s visions? Suppose you affirm (3), contra the text. Then (4) follows: we do get a ringside sympathetic seat inside Paul’s consciousness. And you could then make the leap—even though it is a big leap—to saying that a powerful protagonist’s semi-tragic choice of the lesser evil is “the mindset of modern empire”. (But is not clear to me what “modern” is doing in there. And it is not clear to me why you leap over the interpretation of Dune as an anti-colonial revolt, and place Dune in the matrix of that WWI-era British-sparked Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, rather than in the matrix of the 600s Islamic conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire—only one country, after all, has ever called its emperor Padishah.) And from (5), you can leap to (6). (Albeit “aligned” is doing an awful lot of work here.)
And then you can easily, as Burke does, (7) dismiss Paul’s attempts to find a skein of thread through time to avoid jihad as:
self-loathing… a super-outsize version of Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’—a man reluctantly performing a violent role that he feels the universe forces him to inhabit…
(I do have a more charitable view of Orwell here, but leave that aside.)
But I cannot go there.
Since I reject (3), I cannot follow Burke into his (4), (5), (6), and (7)—the things that cause him to reject the book Dune with considerable scorn and embrace the movie Dune as a transformation (rather than a realization) of the book.
Now let me be clear here:
I am not saying that I have a right reading of Dune-the-book and Tim Burke has a wrong one. It would be neither fruitful nor productive nor accurate to say that. Readings are not “right” or “wrong”. Readings ARE. A book is not blackish squiggles on a whitish page bound into a codex. A book is a Sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of the author that the reader spins up and then runs on their wetware that then tells the reader a story. Nearly all of reading takes place between the ears. And the furthest you can (or, I think, should) go in critique is to say “people who spinup the Sub-Turing instantiations kinda the way I do will like this and will not like that”. Perhaps you can say “here’s a way to modify how you do the spinup process that will enable you to learn more and think deeper”. Perhaps not.
I do think it is interesting how Tim Burke can read a book that Herbert stuffed chock-full with anti-colonialist-guerrilla-resistance tropes and assess it as an active act of propaganda “aligned as a confirmation of imperial ideology”.
And—finally I get to my point—I think I have something interesting to say here. So let me try out something that might be true of the wellsprings of Tim Burke’s reading a book so different from the one I read:
We are story-loving animals.
We love stories. We think in stories. Indeed, we have a hard time thinking in any other way than in narrative.
And, among the base-level story patterns that we love, one stands out: The story of the acquisition of mastery (in the sense of magister, expertise), and of the then-use of expertise to solve problems—either the problem of resource lack, the problem of chaos, or the problem of disturbed family relationships, which then need to be restored (or perhaps de novo created)
We tell such stories over and over again. Our imaginary friends in those stories are, for many of us, much more real than all except the closest of the real human beings we actually see in our life.
The story-patterns we have built—the templates we use and expect—have accumulated gradually over time, which means the overwhelming bulk of them were composed against a background of Agrarian-Age general poverty, in which between 100% (or more, if you were unlucky) and 40% of your resources had to go to somehow scrounging your 2000-calories-plus essential nutrients each day so that you were not desperately hungry, plus enough clothing and firewood that you were not shivering cold, plus enough shelter that you were not miserably wet; in which maternal mortality took 1 in 7, in which women were so skinny that ovulation was often hit-or-miss, in which the typical mother underwent eight pregnancies and had six live births yet only two children survived to reproduce, in which children were so malnourished that their immune systems were so compromised that 40 out of 100 died before the age of five. In such a world of Agrarian-Age Malthusian poverty, the principal problem you (probably) face is that of being desperately poor. And nearly the only way for you to resolve that problem—the only way to get anything like enough for yourself and your family—is to join the ruling gang: to become a well-trained thug with a spear (or better yet to boss such well-trained thugs) or perhaps one of their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. You then are one of those who tells the other people in society to give you 1/3 of their crop. Or else.
This background has shaped the stories we tell profoundly. Consider Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennet, his wife, and their five daughters live comfortably. The family income is £300 per person per year, and they spend it all. The social system of England takes the product of about 1/3 of the work done by 50 laborers, craftsmen, and farmers, and transfers it to the Bennets. It is very good to be the landlord.
But the (not so) harmonious family relationships built on top of this base of domination-and-exploitation are under threat. The legal custom of male entail means that all of the Bennet family’s power to command the labor of others for their benefit will vanish upon the death of Mr. Bennet and be transferred to the odious Mr. Collins. In order to create new harmonious family relationships, Lizzie Bennet needs to acquire mastery over her short-sighted prejudice that limit her understanding of and ability to manage human social relationships so that she can become the helpmate that Fitzwilliam Darcy cannot recognize he needs until he acquires mastery over his short-sighted pride. At the end they acquire mastery, and are rewarded by solving the problem of how they are going to live in comfort: Lizzie is going to manage the inner workings of the estate of Pemberly, and Darcy is going to be the outward-facing part of the couple collecting the product of 1/3 of the work done by not 50 but by 250 laborers, craftsmen, and farmers.
Mastery in the sense of magister is thus rewarded by leading to mastery in the sense of dominus—that the protagonist winds up the novel not just having acquired expertise and the prestige that flows from that expertise, but has acquired power over others. Because the position—direct or indirect—of power over others is nearly the only way in an economy of Agrarian-Age poverty to solve the problem of getting enough not to be desperately hungry, shivering cold, or miserably wet a not-insignificant part of the time.
Pride and Prejudice does not end with a Jacquerie, a burning of the rent roll, and Lizzie Bennet going to work in the garden dressed in rough homespun as a member of an equal society of free associated producers.
Pride and Prejudice is thus, at one level, profoundly problematic. It is, I would argue, more problematic for shoveling all of the problems of the link between mastery-as-expertise and mastery-as-domination under the rug: they appear only as “£2,000 a year!”, “£5,000 a year!”, “£10,000 a year!”. (Something like Benjamin D’Israeli’s Sybil, or, The Two Nations is from this point of view considerably better.)
But while Pride and Prejudice is problematic, something like Dune cannot help but be much more so. Dune’s mediæval-fantasy tropes take the link between mastery-as-expertise and mastery-as-domination and hammer them together into a single unbreakable whole. Dune is the story of how Paul Atreides grows up and acquires expertise, yes. But Dune is equally the story of how Paul Atreides becomes the BOSS. And those two acquisitions of mastery have to be seen as the same and indeed have to be the same—we cannot celebrate Paul’s acquisition of strength and knowledge and capabilities from Paul’s acquisition of a position of domination. And exploitation.
And that does have to make Dune very problematic.
Now we can tell better stories that do not link expertise and the prestige that flows from it with domination so tightly. I have always been partial to Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstacy—Michelangelo Buonarroti creates like a god and works like a slave, but he does not command like a king. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Gandalf is at least a demigod, but does not command, but advises, and only acts himself in extremis versus the Balrog and the Lord of the Nazgul; Aragorn is the restorer of a lineage that Gandalf prays “may be blessed as long as the thrones of the Valar” endure, yet he does not command, but leads and inspires and, at the end, bows to hobbits.
We can tell better stories. We should tell better stories.
But does that mean that we cannot enjoy the stories we have been told, highly problematic as they are? No! Only—recognize why they are the way they are, read them with charity understanding the marks that our history has left on them, and watch out that long-outdated and, even, evil ways of thinking about other human beings do not leak over from the stories we tell into your own wetware.
References:
Austen, Jane. 1813. Pride and Prejudice. London: T. Egerton, Whitehall. <https://archive.org/details/JaneAusten-PrideandPrejudice-1sted-1813-vol1>
Bunch, Sonny. 2024.. “Dune: Part Two”. Letterboxd. March 8. <https://letterboxd.com/sonnybunch/film/dune-part-two/1/>
Burke, Timothy. 2024. “Reworking Empire: Dune 2”. Eight by Seven. March 9.
D’Israeli, Benjamin. 1845. Sybil, or, The Two Nations. London: Henry Coulborn. <https://archive.org/details/sybilortwonation01disr>.
Herbert, Frank. 1965. Dune. Philadelphia: Chilton Books. <https://archive.org/details/duneherb00herb>.
Lodge, David. 1988. Nice Work. New York: Viking. <https://archive.org/details/nicework00lodg_0>.
Orwell, George. 1936. “Shooting an Elephant”. New Writing. Autumn. <https://www.abebooks.com/New-Writing-II-Autumn-1936-Lehmann/31565633177/bd>
Orzel, Chad. 2024. “2 Dune 2 Messiah”. Counting Atoms. March 10.
Stone, Irving. 1961. The Agony & the Ecstacy: A Novel of Michelangelo. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. <https://archive.org/details/agonyecstasy00ston_0>.
Tolkien, J.R.R. 1954-1955. The Lord of the Rings. London: Allen & Unwin. <https://archive.org/details/lordofrings0000tolk_d6c9>.
