THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

WHAT WOMEN WILL PART 2

"Anat kills the people living in valleys, in cities and on the seashore and in the land of sunrise, until the cut off heads of soldiers were reaching to her belt and she was wading up to her waist in blood. Violently she smites and gloats, Anat cuts them down and gazes; her liver exhaults in mirth ... for she plunges her knees in the blood of soldiers, her loins in the gore of warriors, till she has had her fill of slaughtering in the house, of cleaving among the tables."-- "The Bloodbath of Anat," Ras Shamra texts, translator not credited.

"The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare."-- Friedrich Nietzsche, HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN, pt. 377.

In Part 1 of WHAT WOMEN WILL I put forth the proposition that even though philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was something less than flattering in his comments upon women, his theory of the will remains useful for valorizing my concept of the "woman-as-willing-subject"-- which takes in, but certainly isn't limited to, the more well-known concept of the "willing woman."  In the essay ON WOMEN, Schopenhauer himself values the "strength" and "reason" of men as against the "dissimulations" of women, so one would expect that his theory of the will would celebrate the masculine principle of *yang,* or what Frank Herbert calls "the ancient force that takes."

Such an expectation turns out not to be the case.  Though Schopenhauer believes that the will is the only thing-in-itself that humankind can know, he also believes that happiness lies in one's being able to transcend or even abolish the will in oneself:

"...we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is - nothing."-- Schopenhauer, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

In Friedrich Nietzsche's early years he might be described as the most prominent disciple of the gloomy philosopher.  In later years, however, Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer's interpretation of the will:

"Granted finally that one succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will—as the will to power, as my theory—; granted that one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment—they are one problem—one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its `intelligible character’—it would be `will to power’ and nothing else."-- Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, part 36.

Where Schopenhauer desired to see the will "turn and deny itself," Nietzsche was more preoccupied in the subject's embrace of chaos.  In this essay I found that the latter philosopher was concerned with a "deeper mental transformation" than anything found in Sade, a writer to whom Camille Paglia unwisely compared Nietzsche.  Yet though my opening Nietzsche quote is one which sounds roughly complimentary toward females, the philosopher's other writings are replete with questionable pronouncements upon the fair sex.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche's position on the nature of femininity is more ambivalent than Schopenhauer's by far.  Whereas Schopenhauer allows women no greater virtue than dissimulation, Nietzsche admires their talent for single-mindedness:

"In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."-- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, part 135. 

Now, this concept of women being more "barbarous" may provide only the most tenuous similitude with the image evoked in my first quote: that of the war-goddess Anath.  I am not stating that Nietzsche had any interest in this particular archetype, but I think his definition of will as "will-to-power" has interesting consequences in relation to the archetype.

I noted above that even though Schopenhauer champions the male sex for "strength and reason," he doesn't give us a vision of the will as being fulfilling because it empowers us.  Rather, he champions a vision of men (implicitly only men, since women are bereft of reason) who abolish will.  It's questionable as to what the philosopher thinks such transformed men will be like, but given the heavy emphasis in his writings upon the virtue of compassion, I would venture that Schopenhauer's subjects will be best aligned with "the ancient force that gives," to quote Frank Herbert once more.

Nietzsche allows for the possibility of compassionate acts in his philosophical universe as well, but for him kindness results from a "superfluity" of power emanating from his noble ubermensch.  Nietzsche is therefore more aligned to "the ancient force that takes," and it is in this light that one may see that he values such *yang* energies in both sexes, even if he might prefer (as BGAE suggests) that women should not *overtly* compete with men.  Thus, even while he would admit that women might be more barbarous, or even more "evil" than men, one can't turn to Nietzsche for a valorization of Anath or similar figures.

In part 3 I will examine more fully the two archetypes I find implicit in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche-- the Compassionate Man and the Barbarous Woman-- and relate them further to the archetypes arising in modern popular fiction.

WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 1

"There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed."-- Paul Atreides describing his own transformation in Frank Herbert's DUNE.

"The more developed Idea resulting from this victory over several lower Ideas or objectifications of will, gains an entirely new character by taking up into itself from every Idea over which it has prevailed a strengthened analogy. The will objectifies itself in a new, more distinct way. It originally appears in generatio aequivoca; afterwards in assimilation to the given germ, organic moisture, plant, animal, man. Thus from the strife of lower phenomena the higher arise, swallowing them all up, but yet realising in the higher grade the tendency of all the lower."-- Schopenhauer, Book 1, part 27, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

The above quotes both deal with concepts of transformation.  Herbert's fictional protagonist describes a mental shift from one set of gender-oriented priorities to another; a shift brought after he imbibes the vision-inducing Water of Life. Schopenhauer's philosophical observation is far more abstract.  He takes Plato's Ideas, which were both essential and eternal by nature, and gives them a post-Kantian spin, in which the Ideas can assume different "grades" of relative perfection, all of which are objectifications of the true "thing-in-itself," the Universal Will. 

It will be noted that the Schopenhauer quote, unlike the Herbert quote, contains no reference to concepts of gender.  However, the "gloomy philosopher" had some definite thoughts on the subject; thoughts that make comicdom's Dave Sim sound like Betty Friedan by comparison.

From the essay "On Women:"

Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice . This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth, and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her defence and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the power which Nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical strength and reason, has been bestowed upon women in this form.

I'm not inherently opposed to the notion that genders may be characterized according to what one observes to be statistically-dominant virtues or vices.  The usual mush-headed responses to such characterizations-- "We're all individuals," "If you label me, you negate me"-- get no hearing in my court.  But I think that even though at times Schopenhauer's characterizations may ring a bell of familiarity, on the whole said characterizations carry less explanatory value than the observations of the 20th-century author of DUNE.  In addition, as presented here Schopenhauer's animadversions on the female sex are something of a betrayal of his post-Kantian project.

As I elaborated here, no post-Kantian project is viable unless it stresses the dual influence of natural and cultural influences.  Schopenhauer, anticipating Freud, chooses to define women in terms of lack: women have "cunning" because they lack "physical strength and reason."  The first is an aspect of demonstrable natural law.  The second lack, if it exists, can only be demonstrated through manifestations within humankind's cultural cosmos, through a rigorous philosophical definiton of what reason is.  Doubtless Schopenhauer felt he defined reason in other writings, but since he does not do so in respect to its purported differences between men and women, the assertion remains baseless.  Most of what Schopenhauer "proves" about woman's natural inferiority is based in his proto-evolutionary meditations on natural law (ON WOMEN was published eight years before ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, incidentally).  I suggest that natural law, both in Schopenhauer's time and our own, is about as much use in understanding culture as a hammer is for turning on a light-switch.  This type of reductionism is unworthy of one of philosophy's paramount thinkers.

Further, by characterizing female nature as something as unchanging as one of Plato's Ideas, Schopenhauer betrays his concept of "grades" of ideation.  Throughout "On Women" there is no sense that any woman's nature can be altered or subsumed by more "perfect" Ideas.  By contrast, both Plato and Dave Sim allowed that some women were capable of raising themselves to a level of masculine competence and insight. One need not agree with those worthies on their definitions of same; it's enough to note that they, unlike Schopenhauer, recognized that such a transformation was possible.  Frank Herbert's fictional meditations support this concept of transformation as well, though one must note that they are philosophical observations that grow out of a fictional structure.

It's just as possible for a mush-head to be insulted by Herbert's gender-characterizations as by Schopenhauer's: to be so obsessed with a purported individuality that one cannot recognize the broad mythic truth of Herbert's yang-like "ancient force that takes" and yin-like "ancient force that gives."  But even without the sort of visionary transformation brought about by the Water of Life, Herbert's narrative tapestry is broad enough to depict any number of cultural transformations.  Thus a male character like Liet-Kynes can function primarily as a nurturant force, attempting to bestow fecundity upon the desert-planet Arrakis.  Similarly, his daughter Chani becomes (unlike the majority of Fremen women) a skilled fighter, and in one chapter she kills one of Paul Atreides' challengers to spare Paul the trouble.

Yet despite all the personal prejudices that tainted Schopenhauer's view of the Fair Sex, his concept of the Will and gradations of ideation remain vital, and can be fruitfully applied to notions of gender transformation even though the philosopher would have certainly disapproved of such applications.  In 2-13-09 I wrote:

What is the cultural significance of action-heroines?

It's not that they make female readers feel more empowered, though there's not anything wrong with that.

It's not that they make male readers either more empathetic or more horny, though there's nothing wrong with either of those.

It's simply this:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

I let this particular field of investigation lie fallow for over two years, partly because I knew that re-reading Schopenhauer would take a fair amount of labor.  It's fortuitous that when the topic came to my attention once more, it was right at a time I'd just finished re-reading DUNE, which glosses certain aspects of Schopenhauer's beliefs just as I found they did for the writings of Paglia in this essay.

In the next installment of WHAT WOMEN WILL, I'll explore a little more as to the archetypal associations that arise when the woman is "Taker" rather than "Giver."

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4

"We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 3.

"A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and the people reverts to a mob."-- Frank Herbert's character Stilgar from DUNE, p. 285.

As far as I can tell, there isn't much "mystery" about "mastery" in the view of Paglia's PERSONAE.  A sentence of two after the above quote, she states that "In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest."  For Paglia, much of literature concerns exposing the elements of sex and aggression that dwell within even the most rarefied works of literature.  I would argue that brute force is *a* law in the natural world, but not precisely the only law.  Further, even if it *were* the only law for nonhuman sentients, one might argue that human beings by virtue of greater complexity have managed to come up with amendments to the original cosmic legality.

Frank Herbert's quote isn't concerned with nonhuman nature, but he does address a mystery about human nature in a more paradoxical fashion.  When one thinks about hierarchical leadership, one does not generally think about a leader doing anything but enforcing his will; certainly not about his "maintaining the level of individuals."  And yet Herbert is correct, and crosses paths with Paglia on this point: individuality is possible only within a hierarchical system that keeps the people from devolving into mob rule.

Drawing on the quasi-Hegelian terminology of Frank Fukuyama, discussed here, one might judge Paglia's view of this hierarchy to be "megalothymotic" and Herbert's to be "isothymotic," as per Fukuyama's definition:

"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).

I extrapolated the following from Fukuyama's terminology re: the subject of "sex 'n' violence:"

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

I've devoted considerable passages to making comparisons and contrasts between these two physical activities and their literary expressions, so I won't repeat any of these here.  But I would refine the passage above by noting how it applies to a phenomenon common to both, explicated here.
The phenomenon of sthenolagnia, of "strength-worship" in both real and literary worlds, could be said to abide in both of Fukuyama's categories.  In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward.  In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

Put the two propositions side by side, and naive critics will almost always give the obligatory jerk of the knee (among other things) to the latter one.  As a quick example, I've noted that such critics automatically laud Alan Moore over Frank Miller not purely in terms of formal qualities, but because Moore is more politically palatable.  The sort of alleged anarchism Moore encodes in his works is automatically superior to any POV expressed in Miller's words, which for lazy critics always come down to the "F" word: "fascism."
Anything that suggests an advocacy of "mastery" in this megalothymic sense is verboten.

And yet, the true "mystery of mastery" is that it frequently shows up, as Paglia sometimes successfully demonstrates, even in forms that are thought to be subtle and refined.  It shows up because "the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people," even if it were sufficient for human beings politically, can never be sufficient in the world of literature.  I noted in Part 3 that in fetish-fantasies the reader may be at once "the slayer and the slain," the hero and the villain.  Less extreme meditations on gender conflict, ranging from JANE EYRE to YOUNG ROMANCE, will of course emphasize the isothymic strength of shared experience, of compromise.  But the essence of conflict remains the same, no matter which pathway a given work may take.

To believe that literature should mirror a desired form of experience, an "ought" rather than an "is," is Werthamism in its most obtuse manifestation.  Whether or not one believes that extreme fantasies of sex and violence have value in themselves, at the very least they continually force readers and critics to avoid becoming entrenched in viewing the world purely through the limited lens of morality and highbrow aesthetics.