André Jute: Kissing the Blarney

On rereading DUNE, part 2: the structural flaw and why it doesn’t matter
by André Jute 

Part 1: The veiling mist of time: the shocking revelation of rereading DUNE by Frank Herbert

I’ve now finished rereading DUNE and enjoyed it immensely. When I next get a chance to read a novel just for pleasure, I shall continue with the other five in the set that Frank Herbert wrote.

There’s a fundamental, overarching flaw in the structure of motivation in Dune , but one tends to overlook it in all the other excitements. We are told two facts that are impossible to reconcile if we stop to consider them.

1. The spice is what the entire Empire revolves around. There is no interplanetary travel without it. It provides the Emperor’s income via his 49% holding in Choam. It is the basis of power not only for the Guild and the Emperor, but the driving element through its prescience induction for the Bene Gesserit’s eugenics program that’s already millennia old. It’s central to everything, period.

2. Yet we are also told that merely for some court intrigues that amount to little more than childish spite the Emperor and the Harkonnen conspired to give up control of this central resource so that they could expose and destroy the Atreides.

This is ipso facto nonsense on any business or motivational aspect. There is no reconciling these two facts. In real life the Landsraad of the other powerful houses, the Bene Gesserit (who, remember, has a Reverend Mother standing at the Emperor’s shouder), or the Guild would instantly depose the Emperor to a sanatorium if he proposed something so stupid.

And it’s an unnecessary complication. If the Duke Leto II felt obliged to accept an Imperial command to move planets (a motivation that is not explained until the appendix where we discover that titles of nobility are tied to governorships; the difference between aristocracy and nobility is that the first is an inherited title and privileges, the second earned; Lenin’s father, for instance, was ennobled by the Tsar for services to Russian education), he could have been sent as governor to Salusa Secundus, the prison planet from which the emperor derives his fearsome Sardaukar, where he could have been dealt with by hard cases already in residence, in a less costly outbreak of chaos than a war in the nerve and knowledge and travel centre of the entire empire, Arrakis.

As I say, in the general rush of Herbert’s excitements, you need your wits about you (and probably extensive business or high level government experience) even to see this structural problem, and, as you can also see, even a critic as unforgiving as I am with lesser talents, just flicks it off as a curiosity of little consequence. In any event, for the general reader, a minor glitch in the overall scheme, which requires considerable experience to grasp, and three long paragraphs to explain even semi-comprehensively, is never going to matter much.

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I’ve read absolutely nothing about Frank Herbert’s history as a writer, or how he worked; I grasp from others that such materials exist. I met him a few times, but can’t remember what we discussed. Professional writers rarely talk about writing unless someone pays them to do it.

But at a guess, I imagine Herbert found his inspiration in a life of Mohammed, and transmuted it in the writing and rewriting of his book into something entirely different.

DUNE is a stunning work that we probably give less credit than we should, because all the imitators have watered down our appreciation of a truly original work.

Generel Gordon is said to have shivered along his whole body when he heard the opposing forces chant “Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi,” at Khartoum. Frank Herbert’s novel explains why Gordon was right to fear them.

Copyright © 2013 André Jute