Dune

SPOILERS. You have been warned.

There are a lot of ways to interpret Dune. It is an expansive and complex work, requiring (what I imagine to be) an honest reader to say “This is what I got out of it”, rather than “Here’s what Dune is about!” Should that consideration be given all books? No. Works of fiction are special in this regard. You may genuinely be your own Pope, even if you are encouraged to change your mind later, although you can say "While I may sometimes not be right, I am never wrong" with a lot less consequences, can't you? And the thing is that unlike Wolfe, who intentionally tells you he's showing you a puzzle and winks and chuckles at your guesses, Herbert is very deliberately not telling you the thing he's showing you is a puzzle. This leads to people attempting to moralize a thing that is not intended to be moralized. Dune leans into the older style, where something simply is, without telling you exactly what it is.

But the fact that Frank Herbert ended Dune thusly:

"... that princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine-never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives."

That really jumped out at me. The last words in the book are always important, and in them I found a cypher to understand one aspect of what Herbert may have been trying to say: what is is far more important than what you call it.

Paul Atreides is a boy turned man by this knowledge. Sent to Arrakis, his father Duke Leto is betrayed by the one man everyone thought would be loyal to him: a doctor who (in theory) has been deemed unturnable. But turned he was. And nobody suspected it, declaring positively it could not be so. Leto's cold corpse and the doctor's written confession disagree. Nobody double-checked and so Duke Leto dies. So one must be in the present.

The problem that Herbert presents is that the present is not static, but a flowing from past to any number of futures. To accept what is means to understand that everything has consequences… and since you can’t track all the present variables you can’t predict what’s coming. Paul can't control what's given to him, he can't control what he has to work with. And, as it turns out, the people who created the situation Paul has to work with are evil fucks. The Bene Gesserit spent hundreds of years cooking a place and time that Paul can't not blow up, just by existing. The popular reception of this book seems to miss that literally nothing Paul does can go well. It is obvious why such a thing is missed: to admit that Paul, no matter what he does, is going to fuck something up is to think that you are similarly fucked.

And, to be clear, that's true of everyone.

We are all but inheritors of a situation previously fucked up by others.

And admitting that would give us empathy for Paul. And it is not fun to admit empathy for Paul.

So Paul recognizing this, realizing that he cannot make decisions that ultimately go right, no matter what he tries, is a realization that most of us cannot handle. So to recognize reality is to realize that you have no control over the circumstances you are in, coz not only do you not control your circumstances, but it is impossible for you to fully ascertain them. Nor do you really control the consequences. At all. 

Paul's realization, his idea, is that if he cannot control the consequences of his actions he will at the very least come out on top. And he does this by recognizing that others do not like to look reality: they prefer nominal power (what everyone else says is power, even when it's not) to real power. So he hatches his plan, taking advantage of everyone else's willing blindness to reality. So therefore he wins.

But is that a good thing? The death of Stilgar's friendship, as he cannot understand what Paul is doing and therefore worships it, throws some serious doubts on what Paul has done. 

I'm going to end this blog post by asking a question that is seemingly unrelated: have you read the more detailed accounts of Christian martyrdom? I have, and they're not what you expect them to be. The people doing the killing are actually shown rather sympathetically. They recognize that the saint is a saint. They recognize the goodness of the person they're about to kill. They know it's wrong.

And in more than a few of the accounts they beg the martyr to apostatize, coz they realize they're in the service of a monstrous regime. But they don't think they can get free. So they beg the martyr to back down on his belief. The martyr usually winds up patiently explaining that they cannot back down on the very belief that makes them so good to begin with. The martyr is what he is, and if others must kill him for it that's on them. Not him. What most people do not get out of these scenes is that the martyr, by dying, wins. But he doesn't win coz of some idiotic "cause" or "belief in a God". He wins because he has called out the system for what it is and is willing to let it kill him. He can't win. He knows it. So he dies in the only way that he has true control: by insisting on his own worth, his own experiences, to a degree that is actually divine. And in so doing he points out the absurdity that is going on around him, forces everyone to acknowledge that they are monsters, and renders all their lies apparent. There is a very good reason why Christianity beat the Roman Empire, and it is in the stories of the martyrs.

Paul fails to fulfill that most powerful of actions in this volume.

Will he in Dune: Messiah?