Herbert's Dune After reading the unfinished six-volume Dune saga written by Frank Herbert, I gave up on tackling the two concluding volumes his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson wrote, following the drafts Herbert Sr. left at the time of his death. The first volume, Dune (1965), broke new ground in science fiction as an ecological reflection on human competition for natural resources, allegorized by the precious spice found in the planet Arrakis. This compound, also known as mélange, structures and supports the geopolitical organization of the universe, which is ruled by a decadent emperor and a corrupt aristocracy. The rest of the series managed to turn the great sci-fi world of Dune into a boring and pseudo-intellectual reflection on power. The second volume Dune Messiah (1969) still could be considered a successful mediation on the necessity to annihilate imperialist power institutions centered on religious messianic figures, such as count Leto Jr. Yet, the next three installments are only a testament to Herbert’s inability to offer a convincing utopian narrative that would overcome to universal messianism. The innovations brought by Dune are well known and have been widely discussed by many critics and commentators. It managed to allegorize efficiently different parts of contemporary culture, politics and history that were missing in sci-fi till that point. Herbert’s novel succeeded in turning a desertic harsh environment into the most fascinating landscape of science fiction of the time. Moreover, through its desertic representation of ecology and geopolitics, Dune managed to announce, with uncanny prescience, the oil crisis of the 1970s prompted by the OPEC and the growing global importance of the Muslim world. The psychotropic culture of the 60s was also allegorized by Herbert through the physical properties of the spice, which, in the story, was also able to give longevity to its users and, in some cases, even time prescience and travel. Herbert appears to have borrowed from Asimov a concern for advancing a utopian solution to the problem of governing the universe ---or, in a smaller scale, our galaxy--- beyond any form of imperial formation, which, in their respective narratives, always leads to civilizational corruption and decadence. Furthermore, the former’s first novel was a refreshing departure from the latter’s non-psychological and affectless narratives where scientific or technological progress still dictated humanity’s future in its expansion throughout the universe. Herbert’s novel is full of intense psychological intrigue and political struggles, which are further enhanced by the effects of the spice. The internal monologues and the descriptions of physical appearance as a means to read the characters’ political and religious agenda reaches almost the status of science (or craft). However, if in the first two novels of the Dune saga, the delicate balance between psychology, power struggles, and war strikes a very nuanced and effective equilibrium, in the last four volumes, any sense of balance disappears and is reduced to endless boring dialogues, reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, whereby long discussions about power and government ensue. Moreover, the resulting dialogic universe is narrowed down to few agents: Leto II the emperor, the Ixians, the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu, the Spacing Guild, and the Honored Mothers. Rather than engaging narratives of universe-size wars and battles for power (psychological and political), the four last novels become static theater: a single stage, with few alterations, allows the characters to engage in long and complicated dialogues wherein affect becomes inflationary and, in turn, history and action are relegated to mere background. The most important historical changes are narrated at the beginning or at the end of the novel as afterthoughts or as settings for dialogic performance among few actors. The monstrous transformation of the emperor into a worm-human hybrid, which can no longer move or act without help, becomes an allegory for the narrative body of the last four installments of the saga. The novels themselves become this monstruous enlarged hybrid of endless dialogue and inaction. In the last two installments of the Dune saga, the narrative focus on the Benet Gesserit religious order and its unnarrated battles with its arch nemesis, the Honored Matres, further increases the theatrical and dialogic structure of the non-action. The reverend mothers monopolize the dialogues and bring action to a halt in what begins to sound a lot like the Jesuit order or a Jesuit baroque drama: similar rhetoric and techniques can be observed in the two novels. It remains to be analyzed why Herbert ended his powerful reflection on universal power ---a universe-size utopia that was meant to surpass Asimov’s technocratic fantasies--- with a Jesuit stage drama. My tentative hypothesis is that fame and recognition allowed Herbert to forsake his original narrative for what was all along his obsession: a religious and political discourse, which, unfortunately, had no intellectual insight or depth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
|