Brain Worms
Frank Herbert, All-American Crank and failed Republican Party operative, was at once a prolific writer and a man of one book, an apparent paradox that can be explained by the fact once he started to write his classic science fiction novel
Dune he never really stopped: his voluminous publications of later material from the
Dune universe amount not so much to sequels as a rare example of an author writing fan-fiction about their own work. As the events of
Dune revolve around the production and distribution of an extremely powerful narcotic, it is hard not to raise a smile at this wicked little irony. Still, it is a disquieting fact and contributed to my long-term decision to never quite get around to actually reading the book, and I suspect that I am not alone on this point. But then over the horizon emerged a new
Dune film and a great wave of discourse in its wake and I thought, all right, why not give the book a shot?
Reader, my eyes did not turn blue. I am not addicted and have no particular interest in reading any further
Dune novels, to the extent that they can be described as such. But as to Dune itself, my overall impression would be that it is a good novel and certainly worth reading. It has a solid narrative, some outstanding flights of imagination, many interesting characters (some of which, Liet-Kynes and Hawat especially, feel much more ‘whole’ than is typical of science fiction) and much very serious thematic work.
1 It is an uneven novel – in particular the end is rushed, which is a grievous shame – but is at no stage less than intriguing. A particular highlight is the brave decision to sacrifice suspense and shock for a claustrophobic sense of creeping dread for a moment in the plot as utterly critical as the betrayal and death of Duke Leto: this pays off handsomely and is extremely effective. The prose is better than often implied: Herbert was no great stylist, but he mostly avoided the overworked pulpy style that dominates ‘classic’ American science fiction novels and which can often distract from their better points. Particularly telling is that while he lacked the ability of a Tolkien or a Lawrence to place a firm picture of a landscape or a room into the reader’s mind with only a handful of words,
2 whenever it came to matters of place and location he doggedly ploughed on and on in order to show the reader what the reader is supposed to see. At certain points this can be a little much, but most of the time it is welcome and contributes to the sense of Arrakis, in particular, having a sense of ‘reality’ to it that most of the other worlds of science fiction lack.
The politics of the book are very right-wing – in fact I would go so far as to say that it is one of the most thoroughly right-wing novels that I have ever finished. I mean this as an observation rather than as a criticism, and I would stress that the politics of
Dune are very right-wing in a peculiar and broadly harmless sense: they are those of the Kubrickesque American reactionary who does not like America very much and dreams of something more organic, rather than than those of a fascist or even of a conventional American conservative of the early Cold War decades. It is the longing, through a glass darkly, of the Old World from the New: of rank, of duty, of an organic sense of order. ‘Organic’ really is the key word here, as there is an undeniable link between the political structures that underpin the
Dune’s narrative (the validity of which Herbert never questions) and of the natural order of the planet Arrakis, a shared sense of a certain order that can be nudged and manipulated, whether via selective breeding to produce the figure who will reinvigorate an increasingly tired and decadent galactic polity or by through Liet-Kynes’s dreams of making the desert bloom, but not supplanted. There are distinct echoes here of post-war American sociology, particularly the ‘Functionalist’ school associated with Talcott Parsons. Then there is the matter of another ‘f’, namely feudalism. The galactic polity of
Dune is a
feudal one, as is (perhaps surprisingly) the more localised polity of the Fremen.
3 Social position and economic privileges are granted by a liege in exchange for military services, or their equivalent. The book frequently shows the bonds of feudal relationship as being of greater value than familial relationship, and it is hard not to notice that the only powerful actors who frequently act outside this system are the villainous Baron Harkonnen and the corrupt Spacing Guild, while it is the dishonest attempt by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV to covertly undermine the power of the planetary feudal lords in order to maintain a vestige of centralised imperial power that leads directly to the central drama of the book. As to the little people, they do not matter particularly to Herbert, his characters or to the plot, except as an aggregate mass. Before the final assault, Paul casually sketches out a plan to use dispossessed refugees as suicide-troops, and presents an argument to support this that is thoroughly endorsed by the book’s narrative as the right and proper thing to do under the circumstances.
4A common criticism of the book, one that gained particular currency after the 1984 film adaptation, is that it is aggressively homophobic. Although not a major theme in the novel, this is not a charge that can be seriously denied. The book is homophobic, at at certain points very strongly so. This should not come as a surprise as a tendency towards intense homophobia is one of the most typical sins of 1950s and 60s American science fiction, but it is worth noting that in
Dune this ugly streak manifests in a strange way. It is gloomily clear that a particular member of the villainous trio we meet near the start of the book will be written as a pederast, every sign points this way and it is hard not to roll one’s eyes a little at the use of ‘effeminate’ as a dog-whistle and at the aggressively camp manner in which this character is written. And yet
that character is not the pederast, the member of the trio written in the most stereotypically ‘masculine’ manner in that scene is instead. Further strangeness is the fact that while Baron Harkonnen is clearly written as homosexual rather than bisexual, he is nevertheless Paul’s grandfather… and a clear explanation for quite what happened is never really given, despite certain possibilities existing in-universe that could be used to explain things.
5 All of which suggests that Herbert was a deeply strange man. It also leads us directly to another important aspect of the book: like much American science fiction of its time it was heavily influenced by Freudianism. Harkonnen – the grandfather of Paul and Alia Atreides – has a particular delight in sodomising a male prostitute who looks like Paul, and is later killed by Alia. While Paul does not kill Duke Leto, he nevertheless finds it impossible to mourn him and begins to act towards his widowed mother more as a substitute husband than as a son – this is reciprocated by Jessica whose inner monologues become increasingly and oddly sexualised whenever their subject is Paul. Wherever Duke Leto goes, he brings with him a painting of his late, hated, father and the mounted head of the bull that killed him, horns still (Herbert reminds us several times) stained with his blood. It is perhaps not the greatest of stretches to suggest that all of this is rather Oedipal.
Finally, there is the matter of Islam. It is not particularly surprising that this aspect of the book has been particularly prone to spark aggressive discourse, given the obsession with Islam (or more accurately: with the idea of Islam) in certain secular Western intellectual circles over the past two decades. On the one hand stands the belief that Islam is an enemy of ‘the West’ and of its universal liberal values; that Islam is an inherently wicked and barbarous faith that must be ‘dealt with’ in some manner, often violently. On the other stands the belief that Islam is a uniquely progressive religion due to the politics of international alignments and that what may look extremely conservative is not and that to think otherwise is to participate in hate-crime. I would like to say that I exaggerate for effect here, but I am not sure if I actually do. How does Herbert’s novel relate to this mess? Critically, it doesn’t. Herbert’s understanding of Islam and Arab culture was more classically ‘orientalist’ and also showed an interesting pre-occupation with the theme of Islam as a religion of constant rejuvenation rather than one of reform, and it is not really possible to engage with it through these particular modern political frameworks. Because once we move beyond the perhaps embarrassing delight that Herbert shows in the
exotic nature of Arabic, of Bedouin cultural practices and of demonstrative nature of Islamic piety (there is, in any case, very little to say here), we find Herbert’s interest in Jihad, which he appears to have understood as a purifying and rejuvenating force in Islamic history. This is the role that the concept takes on in Dune: as a violent and regrettable necessity, as the political equivalent of a forest fire
6 that sweeps out old-growth and allows for the seeding of new trees and the refreshing of the ecosystem. This is, of course, a decidedly romantic view of the historical function of
Jihad in Islamic polities,
7 but then what else would you really expect from an orientalist as conservative as Herbert?
Dune‘s influence on nearly all subsequent Western science fiction has been immense and incalculable. It is the Ying to the Yang of Asimov’s
Foundation novels and there is very little in the genre that does not bear the marks of either or (usually) both of them. The are opposed both morally and politically; they are opposed in their understanding of the nature of technology and its relationship to humanity. But they probe similar questions, worry about similar problems and were the products of author’s whose imaginative talents considerably outstripped their literary ones and yet, and yet, nevertheless a certain basic grasp of the fundamentals of storytelling that many better writers have lacked.
Dune is a deeply strange and flawed book. But it is also a compelling and fascinating one, and actually quite a good read. Just stay off the spice.
1. ‘Serious’ being very much the word: Dune contains, as far as I can tell, not a single intentionally amusing sentence. All things about Frank Herbert considered, this is almost certainly for the best.
2. Isn’t it interesting that everyone who has ever read The Lord of Rings knows exactly what, say, Minas Tirith ‘looks like’, despite relatively few words being expended on physical descriptions of any part of it?
3. For all his primitivist leanings, Herbert was not actually able to capture accurately at all the sort of tribal he society he aimed at with the Fremen and ended up replicating a cruder version of the feudal society of his wider universe. But perhaps, as an American, he struggled to tell the difference?
4. On a purely personal note, I found Dune’s unironic and cheerful endorsement of violence and slaughter without much consideration of the consequences to be in strikingly poor taste. Others will not find this quite as objectionable, I am sure, but this is not a novel in which one will find much reflection on the Pity of War.
5. I gather that some sort of an explanation is provided in one of the later… novels… but as previously noted, no, I’m not interested and will not be reading.
6. We should never forget that Herbert was a man of the Western United States, where fire forms an essential part of the reproductive cycle of many trees. Dune could not have been written by a European. Or a Yale Man.
7. It isn’t as if one of the clearest historical instances of one of these cycles – that seen repeatedly during the history of Islamic Andalusia – was anything other than utterly disastrous for the long-term health of the polity in question.
