Dune

by Frank Herbert

Re-read late October, early November 2020 for a workplace bookclub. Used Hodder 50th Anniversary Edition. So many typos! And “Piter de Vries” consistently spelled “Piter de Vried” for some reason.

Questions

• Why was the emperor against House Atreides? Harkonnens just cartoon bad guys, don’t need motive. But what about the emperor?
• The Bene Gesserit are trying to breed the Kwisatz Haderach, male superman. In order to do this planted missionaria protectiva, fake prophecies. Just to help them travel? The prophecies came true on Dune. Even sceptical scientist Kynes starts to believe they are coming true. Even Bene Gesserit Jessica is surprised how well-indoctrinated Arrakis is (p. 59, with Mapes). If these prophecies are just invented, fake things, is it just a coincidence that they came true here? If not, why is Jessica surprised by them coming true? Was it ever intended that any prophecies would come true?
  • Perhaps cf. p. 521, “Here was the unborn jihad, he knew. Here was the race consciousness that he had known once as his own terrible purpose. Here was reason enough for a Kwisatz Haderach or a Lisan al-Gaib or even the halting schemes of the Bene Gesserit. The race of humans had felt its own dormancy, sensed itself grown stale and knew now only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive,” maybe a bit like the New Sun, will clear away the old creation and remake it, renewed?
• The last question in other words, who is really pulling the strings behind the events of Dune? Not emperor. Not Bene Gesserit (Jessica and the Rev. Mother both surprised by Paul when he undergoes the gom jabbar?). Paul himself? He can see the future but he generally doesn’t like any of the futures. Is there only fate that rules the universe, and causes these cycles of slavery and freedom? Is there some person or body of people that is intended by the author to have free will?
  • P. 521, “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.”
• “Tell me about the waters of your homeworld, Usul” (P. 27), Fremen dream of a better tomorrow, desire for paradise
  • In the first (dream) version of this (P. 27) Paul recites for Chani one of Gurney Halleck’s poems for sad times: “I remember salt smoke from a beach fire…”
  • In the second (real-life) version (p. 344), after Jamis’ funeral, after they are shown the water stored in the sietch for terraforming Arrakis, “Tell me about the waters of your birthworld, Paul Muad’Dib.” … “Another time, Chani. I promise.” Paul then sings with Jamis’ baliset Gurney Halleck’s evensong, “This clear time of seeing embers…”
  • Is there some reason why the two aren’t the same?
• What is the meaning of the message from the mysterious Fremen messenger that the Duke reads on returning to his house just before everything kicks off? “A column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night,” I get the reference but not the in-story meaning.
• As far as characters go, I liked Gurney Halleck, warrior-poet, and the poetry that he scatters through the novel (even if it’s not always great, I like that there is poetry scattered); I like that he is always quoting the Bible, I like that he is annoyed by the loss of chivalry (the price paid for Paul’s rise to power).
• Bible quoted throughout. Lots of Lawrence of Arabia flavour, Arabic sounding words, so is the Quran quoted anywhere by anyone?

General thoughts

• Really enjoyed reading it again as an adult. Superficially it’s an adventure story, like a cross between Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia, but with sandworms and stillsuits, and some of the places where I read this book as a 13-year-old came vividly back to me. On the one hand it’s a romantic and exotic world of desert dwellers, noblemen and troubadours with balisets, and on the other hand it’s a world of extreme dangers, deadly poisons, manipulative women, and ruthless slave-lords.
• However, at the same time it’s not an adventure story at all. These are things I didn’t notice as a 13-year-old. Similarity to Gene Wolfe: makes you think you are reading a space adventure story, but really the adventure is just a platform for telling a very different story, getting across some very different ideas, subverts reader expectations
• False adventure story:
  • No character development for Paul, he is Paul is unrelatable since he seems like a fully mature adult at age 15, has no real flaws, he can defeat powerful adults in combat, he knows how to do things before he is taught them, etc.
  • No triumphs, all results are foregone conclusions and victories are bittersweet, such as killing Jamis, where his mother makes him feel ashamed, or defeating the Harkonnens who turned out not to be such a powerful threat, his son is killed in the process and he cannot avoid future violence in his name
  • Normally the hero should grow and make virtuous choices that give you a happy ending, instead Paul just makes ironic exchanges
• Ironic exchanges or compromises, that are concealed by the false adventure story:
  • Irony of Fremen exchanging their oneness with environment for a more comfortable life, it will destroy the sandworms and everything that made them great, nothing comes without a cost
  • P. 294, dying Kynes’ father: “How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover,” exchanging one ecology that supports one kind of life for a very different ecology that supports different life.
  • Analogy to our modern history, sustainable but uncomfortable existence giving way to comfortable but unsustainable existence
  • Guild navigators made a similar choice, they had a chance to boldly take all the spice for themselves, but they stuck to the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation, p. 510
  • Bene Gesserit have achieved their aim, breeding a superman through eugenics, a false religion and political scheming, but he is a monster that they have unleashed and cannot control
  • Paul trades the nobility and chivalry of his father’s way of ruling for the Fremen way of ruling, he has saved his own life and won back Arrakis but it wasn’t for free, all his victories are bittersweet, and the jihad is consequently unescapable
    • After winning the duel with Jamis, Jessica immediately makes Paul feel ashamed for having killed a man for the first time
    • Duke Leto humanitarian, Paul and Fremen more materialistic in certain way
    • Against this see p. 240, in the Imperial Testing Station after escaping from Arrakeen, Paul gains Kynes’ loyalty in an Atreides-like fashion, by offering him his own loyalty
    • P. 507, Paul realizes at the end that Stilgar is no longer a Fremen leader, but his slave, “It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it”, Paul is trading the people’s slavery (under Harkonnens, etc.) for another kind of slavery (under himself, Muad’Dib)
    • Gurney Halleck does not like the change in Paul:
      • e.g. just after he meets Paul again, p. 447 “Your father would’ve been more concerned for the men he couldn’t save” instead of equipment
      • also p. 450–451, he recalls stories of how savage Muad’Dib is
      • also p. 504 Paul says damage from the battle and the storm can be repaired with money, Gurney responds, “Except for the lives, m’Lord. When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake?”
      • Denies Gurney Halleck his duel with Feyd-Rautha
    • Numerous references to the loyalty and reverence of Duke Leto’s men
    • P. 33, Paul tells Hawat in training room about what the Reverend Mother said about ruling: “She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”
  • Paul’s has great powers, e.g. can see the future (often difficult to understand), but he doesn’t like any of the futures, he dies a violent death in many of them, and in the others he is leading a violent jihad, some he even dies but the jihad goes on
    • In the end, Paul has gained not only victory but a kind of wisdom, but at great cost (great violence, and his son’s life), cf. p. 508, says to his mother, “Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach.”
• Author loved ecology, hence dedication to the real ecologists, made one of the characters a scientist, an ecologist that has imbued the Fremen with the desire and technical ability to transform Arrakis
  • P. 293–294, Kynes dying, hears his father talking about terraforming Arrakis, “We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet. We must use man as a constructive ecological force—inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place—to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.”
  • ibid. “Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now. Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.”
  • Bio-spheres, are they possible?
• Not anti-technological, but anti-high-tech? Anti-tech-just-for-the-sake-of-it? Butlerian Jihad something that was for the good of humanity. In favour of middle-tech, technology that is in harmony with both man and nature
  • P. 12 Reverend Mother after gom jabbar: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them” … “The Great Revolt took away a crutch. It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.”
• Fascination with technology and way of life that blends into environment
  • Fremen sietches are invisible from the outside
  • Way of walking across the sand the blends in with the natural drifting and shifting of sand, e.g. p. 283
  • Normal offworlder way of living on Arrakis is only possible in geographical anomalies and spice can only be harvested in brief spans of time, the factories will always attract a sandworm
  • P. 122, Kynes taking the Duke and Paul out to the desert, talks about creatures that can live in the desert, “Some parts of the desert teem with life. But all of it has learned how to survive under these rigors. If you get caught down there, you imitate that life or you die.”
  • Kynes is in many ways a typical scientist (cf. p. 116) but he has gone native and cares more about practical results, ecology as a lived reality, not just theory, cf. p. 150, at the Duke’s dinner party, “Laboratory evidence tends to blind us to a very simple fact. That fact is this: we are dealing here with matters that originated and exist out-of-doors where plants and animals carry on their normal existence.”
• Author is fascinated with religion, looked at from a number of different angles:
  • Biblical quotations throughout, esp. on the lips of Gurney Halleck, but not exclusively
    • Job 24:5, p.88
    • Ex 2:22, p.98, “I have been a stranger in a strange land,” Moses, living in Madian in Arabia has a son by his wife Sephora, whom she names Gershom or Gersam = “a stranger there”
    • Ps 68:6 (KJV), p. 103, “I shall go unto the rebellious that dwell in the dry land”, in Vulgate corresponds to Ps. 67:7 but quite different, the “Let God arise” psalm, see also v. 9 which speaks of “plentiful rain”
    • The weird note, p. 170, that the Duke reads on returning to the Arrakeen house, before everything starts kicking off, “A column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night,” e.g. Ex 13:20 and elsewhere, brought to outer guard by a Fremen messenger who slips off into the night
    • Ap. 13, p. 195, “And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea … and upon his heads the name of blasphemy”
    • Ecclesiastes 3, p. 207, “A time to keep…”
    • Jer 2:6, p. 276
    • 2 Kings 19:2, Gurney reluctantly quotes, “And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son”, where David mourns the death of his son Absalom
  • Jessica is worried about Paul’s fight with Jamis, wishes she could pray, “I’ve planted fear in Jamis’ mind. It’ll slow him some … perhaps. If I could only pray—truly pray,” p. 323
  • The drug, spice, brings on mystical experiences and enhances people’s (esp. Paul’s) powers
  • Piety and ritual of the Fremen, at one with their society and environment
  • Divinization of the sandworm (Stilgar to Jessica: “if the Shai-hulud grant” … you may pass within and become a Reverend Mother = “inshallah”, p. 316)
  • Holiness of water (at odds with the sandworm!)
  • Charlatanry and sorcery of the Bene Gesserit
  • Sceptical Liet-Kynes redirecting the piety of the Fremen to terraform Arrakis, e.g. p. 295, p. 343, (also to the Atreides references to Liet sound like references to a god)
  • Paul, seemingly by accident, fulfilling Fremen/Bene Gesserit prophecies, and seemingly unwillingly leading the Fremen on jihad
  • Paul’s scorn for his legendary status (Sardaukar in the sietch, p. 458: “I didn’t even draw my knife, but it’ll be said of this day that I slew twenty Sardaukar by my own hand.”

The Distributist’s video on Dune

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdHT7KB1gDAXZYpPW71fn0Q

https://youtu.be/ywNnFMUg0gs?t=1380

Odysee channel: https://odysee.com/@distributist:e

https://odysee.com/@distributist:e/why-dune-is-good-but-will-never-be-a:0?r=Dc5UB8bhvRWayHrq1wCGFMFEeMWLwCKJ

“Why Dune is good but will never be a good movie”

• Superficially Dune seems a classic hero story, like Star Wars, but in fact it is a failure as such, Paul is unrelatable since he seems like a fully mature adult at age 15 and has no real flaws, he can defeat powerful adults in combat, he knows how to do things before he is taught them, etc., full of anti-climax, results of conflicts are foregone conclusions, e.g. final duel with Feyd-Rautha
• Instead Dune is more of a satire of the Messianic genre, an anti-adventure, nothing meaningful will result from Paul’s victory and conquest
• or a thinly veiled exploration of three struggle subplots:
  • Bene Gesserit breeding superman in order to control history
  • Fremen attempting to survive and control Arrakis and eventually turn it into a paradise
  • Paul’s internal struggle with his prescience, and his understanding that his role as a prophet has not only been manufactured by his enemies but is detrimental to the survival of humanity
• Superficial main plot romantic, but three subplots tragedies:
  • Bene Gesserit unleash forces beyond their comprehension, have to come to terms with their lack of power to control what they have created
  • Fremen’s culture of water conservation, piety and discipline is fundamentally at odds with their desire to transform their home into a world that is soft and gentle, want to have their cake and eat it
  • The very powers that allow him to overcome his adversaries who want to enslave humanity in body, transform him into the force that will enslave humanity in spirit. Paul’s nobility/chivalry that he’s learned from his father is in conflict with what his prescient powers force him to become
• “Equivalent exchange” plays a part in all these subplots, derived from many Eastern schools of philosophy, there can be no true rewards without true sacrifice, perhaps symbolized by spice and sandworm
  • E.g. duel between Paul and Jamis bittersweet, mother makes Paul feel ashamed afterwards, even though it was necessary, still had a moral dimension
• Revolt against fatalism/inevitability, symbolized by Butlerian Jihad, revolt against thinking machines that were enslaving humanity
  • Humanity in its drive for freedom has selected a different future, instead of “artificial technology” has chosen “human technology”, we could change our path as well
• God, in order to be known, must be pursued; divine wisdom must be paid for
  • Frank Herbert a Buddhist with a Catholic upbringing
  • True divinity or transcendence exists, and it can be approached or touched by humanity if it pays the appropriate price of effort
  • Symbolized by sandworm, divinized by Fremen, both a creator and a terror; only if you can be a peace with that terror can you taste the fruits of divine wisdom
  • Relates to previous question about freedom: mankind enslaved himself to machines out of complacency, but yearning for freedom and transcendence, he cast of these shackles, but through complacency again became subject to feudal slave lords, cycle continues and everyone is subject to a prescient messiah, but no closer to freedom or divinity
  • Mankind does not want to pay the true price, the hardship required, for divine wisdom
  • Idea probably vague in Herbert’s mind, but could analogously be stated in a Christian fashion, that great graces often comes hardship, and a comfortable life leads to complacency

Discussing Dune with The Distributist, Morgoth, And Last Things

Channel: https://odysee.com/@AuronMacIntyre:f

https://odysee.com/@AuronMacIntyre:f/discussing-dune-w-the-distributist%2C:0?r=Dc5UB8bhvRWayHrq1wCGFMFEeMWLwCKJ

• Telling Gurney Halleck quote: “the concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future”
  • Looking back on the ancient past of Dune they can see that liberal progressivism is a cope from the realities of the world
• Suggestion in the novel that the low or minimal-tech universe of Dune is more human than our own high-tech one
  • Hit with this right away from Chapter 1
  • What is being pursued is the cultivation of humanity rather than technology
  • What is playing out is human-ness in history
  • Technological growth beyond human growth can no longer influence history
  • Is the humanity test of the gom jabbar, is this acceptable? This question is put before us straight away, testing whether someone is human or animal.
• Plot of the original Dune books according to Dave:
  • The Bene Gesserit are trying to reinvent the concept of progress after it was destroyed in the Butlerian Jihad
  • They want a series of supermen, but guided and taught by them and their vision of humanity
  • A series of supermen (two, really) halt this plan, and reinvent a new plan, but in the opposite direction
  • 1st Book: the Bene Gesserit are the real antagonists, the intellectual opponents to Paul, but their plan fails brutally; if you are just interested in the adventure story, stop here
  • 2nd Book (Dune Messiah): their plan is taken away from them
  • 3rd Book (Children of Dune) and 4th Book (God Emperor of Dune): their plan is driven in the diametrically opposite direction they had intended
  • If you are interested in getting the point of Dune more clearly, with Paul as the Messiah, read at least to the 3rd book
  • If you want to know where Frank Herbert thinks this messianic journey is going to end (and read a lot of “Herbertisms”), read to the 4th book
  • The God Emperor is the re-infantilization of humans, reversal of the Butlerian Jihad, with one exception: the super-AI is actually human and has human motivations
  • As the Butlerian Jihad liberated man from technology, the God Emperor is an engineered mistake to liberate humanity from the shackles of messianic frauds
  • This spans 10,000 years, and the only organization that is alive on both ends of this period is the Bene Gesserit, who have gone from antagonists to protagonists in the last two, 5th and 6th, books (Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune), trying to pick up the pieces after this cataclysmic redesign of human history
  • The 5th and 6th books seem and were probably intended as a different series; not the same story arc, but happen to take place in the same universe, similar to the different branches of Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle
• The ecological shifts of Arrakis, between being desert-like and being verdant reflects the central messianic conflict:
  • Having a humanity in constant chaos struggling with itself
  • Or having everything ordered and ruled by a God Emperor or an AI
  • Playing out of a cyclical history reflected in the ecology
  • Herbert’s vision of nature is not the hippie, everything-in-harmony-with-itself view but nature in cyclical equilibrium with itself, probably a more accurate, more ecological view of nature, in line with his view of history
  • When Frank Herbert says his book is about ecology, that ecology is history; history has ecology and ecology has history
  • The ecology dwarfs the individual, characters in Dune are adapted to an ecology, the drama of Dune is the characters reacting to an ecological shift
• Last Things is reminded of Chesterton’s (in Orthodoxy) contrast between Buddhist iconography (eyes closed, laughing, big belly) and that of Christian saints (ascetic, with wild, bright eyes, like the Fremen); the Fremen lose their spirituality, become soft, as they gain comforts and abundance