Dune is on a lot of minds right now thanks to the new movie finally releasing in the US,* which is great as there’s a lot to talk about. From marveling at the desert ecology and mighty sandworms to critiques over the book’s racist and classist themes, there’s plenty to keep us occupied until Villeneuve gets his sequel finished.
Unfortunately, critiquing Dune can be something of a headache, as there are a subset of fans who’re convinced that any problem with the book can be explained away as clever commentary or scathing subversion. Did you find it sexist that the Bene Gesserit, a mystical order of all women, exists primarily to breed a super strong magic man? Obviously you don’t realize that the Kwisatz Haderach is a balance of both masculine and feminine, but also a dude who’s very manly. Are you uncomfortable with a white-coded hero becoming the leader of an Arab-coded people? If only you had the clarity to see that by reveling in white savior and chosen one tropes, Paul is somehow doing the opposite of those tropes. For reasons.
I won’t try to change the minds of people who think that way, as any such attempt would be little more than a circular argument of obscure Dune quotations from now until the rains fall on Arrakis. Instead, it’s time to go over the main reasons Dune doesn’t actually work as a subversion, commentary, or critique. That way, the rest of us will know how to avoid similar problems.
The Later Books Aren’t Required
If you post any critique of Dune anywhere online, it is a universal law that you’ll quickly receive a reply that’s some variant of “I guess someone hasn’t read the second book.” The italics are optional, but the dripping smugness is universal.
The idea is that you can’t critique the first book until you’ve read the other books in the series. How far you’re supposed to read will change depending on who you’re arguing with, but it usually stops before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson enter the picture. An especially common variant of this argument is that the first book may appear to be playing its tropes straight, but the second book brilliantly subverts them.
This doesn’t hold up because stories don’t work that way. If a story is released on its own, then it has to stand on its own, even if it’s part of a larger series. The practical reason for this is that there’s no guarantee that readers will pick up a second book that’s published years* later. Indeed, most novel series suffer a sharp decline in readership after the first book. It’s difficult to get exact numbers, but the best estimate I could find is that of Dune’s 20 million copies sold, about 12 million are the first book, and the remaining 8 million are spread across the rest of the franchise. Unless several million readers were all sharing one copy of Dune Messiah, that’s quite a drop-off.
Another practical obstacle is that if readers think you’re genuinely adhering to bad tropes in the first book, why should they read the second one? Most of the time, they’ll just find more of the same, so it’s not realistic to expect them to take a chance on you. Alternatively, they might take the tropes to heart and then reject the sequel’s subversion. I have a sneaking suspicion that Dune’s sequels are generally held in lower esteem for precisely this reason, but that’s not something I can prove unless someone wants to lend me a research team and a Mentat advisor to crunch the numbers.
More philosophically, almost no one actually thinks of stories this way. The third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is great, but that doesn’t retroactively make the first and second seasons less terrible. Trek fans might be more willing to slog through beardless Riker and Dr. “I Hate Androids” Pulaski if they know there’s something better on the other side, but the episodes themselves are still bad.
Likewise, we all know that a sequel being bad doesn’t retroactively make the earlier installments worse. That’s why we can still enjoy the original Star Wars trilogy, despite Jar Jar Binks and “somehow Palpatine returned.” For that matter, it’s why we can still enjoy Dune, despite the absolute mess that later books eventually became.
But easily the most damning evidence is that if you push back on anyone making this claim, you’ll immediately discover that they also think the first book is actually a brilliant subversion as well. The argument about reading later books is only ever deployed in an attempt to silence critics.
Justification Isn’t Commentary
Dune’s most obvious problem is that Paul is a white savior chosen one: a white-coded hero* joining an Arab-coded* culture and saving it from whatever danger it faces, just as the prophecy said he would. This is also Dune’s most hotly contested problem, and it usually comes back to the idea that Paul can’t be a white savior or chosen one, because everything about him is artificially constructed.
If you’re not up on Dune lore, what we’re told is that the Bene Gesserit have a special division called the Missionaria Protectiva, which is sent to worlds all over the galaxy to plant beliefs and legends favorable to the Bene Gesserit. Hundreds of years later, a Bene Gesserit sister can use those beliefs to ensure she’ll be treated well in case of trouble. Jessica decides to take advantage of this after the Harkonnens destroy most of House Atreides, and it works, but the Fremen also think Jessica’s son is their prophesied savior for some reason.* It’s not clear if the Missionaria Protectiva also planted the savior idea, or if the Fremen came up with that part themselves, but it doesn’t really matter. Either way, the Fremen’s beliefs have been influenced by outside forces.
Similarly, Paul’s status as the Kwisatz Haderach is also due to the Bene Gesserit. They’ve spent 10,000 years running a eugenics project to produce a man with special powers who will… do something, presumably. Look, Frank Herbert really didn’t feel like explaining what the Bene Gesserit were trying to accomplish here. The important part is that Paul was deliberately created by humans* rather than an unknown god or mysterious fate.
The problem is that nothing I’ve told you is commentary, it’s justification. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything about Paul, it just explains why he’s like that. In the first book, Paul is still an outsider who saves the Fremen from a problem they couldn’t overcome themselves: Harkonnen oppression. Likewise, Paul has all the special powers a Kwisatz Haderach is supposed to have, and he really is an incredibly capable ruler. He goes against the Bene Gesserit’s plan, but chosen ones do that all the time.
If we’re supposed to take Dune as a subversion of the chosen one trope, then Buffy and Harry Potter are also subversions of that trope. Buffy has her powers because a bunch of weird old dudes decided to create the Slayer line, and Harry is chosen thanks to a self-fulfilling prophecy. While there are hardcore fans who genuinely argue those points, most of us can see that simply introducing an outside force into your chosen one plot doesn’t make it stop being a chosen one plot. We could also say that Jake Sully is subverting the white savior trope in Blue-People Avatar, as he’s deliberately sent by the government to make friends with the Na’vi before he becomes their savior. Heck, we’d have to accept that midi-chlorians are a subversion of the Force rather than a desperately unneeded explanation.
A true subversion is defined by changing what happens in the story, not in how you justify what happens. For example: Madoka Magica is a subversion of several magical girl tropes. When the heroes find out that their entire existence is in service of being mined for energy before they turn into the very monsters they fight, they do something different than what happens in a standard magical anime. If we were following Dune rules, Madoka and the gang would have kept fighting monsters like nothing happened.
Paul’s Jihad Fears Are Racist Angst
Continuing on Paul, by far the most common argument against him being a white savior is that when he becomes leader of the Fremen, it unleashes a “jihad” on the rest of the galaxy. The new movie says “crusade” or “holy war” instead, but I’m gonna stick with the original because if there’s one thing I know about Herbert, it’s that he wouldn’t want anything to blunt his racism.
The jihad doesn’t happen in book one, but there is a lot of talk about how it might happen later. Sometimes, this is in the form of Paul directly seeing the future, and sometimes it’s just the characters speculating. Such speculation tends to come up a lot whenever the Fremen demonstrate their loyalty to Paul. Is this finally the subversion we’ve been waiting for?
No. It’s actually a very common writing tactic: when nothing immediately dangerous is happening, authors try to keep the tension up by talking about something bad that could happen in the future. Dune’s second half in particular is full of long stretches where either nothing happens, or the heroes just steamroll over any opposition they face. This isn’t exactly gripping, so Herbert tries to keep tension up by making the reader worry about a jihad.
The problem is that there’s literally no reason to think a jihad will happen. By the end of the book, Paul has successfully destroyed House Harkonnen, ending foreign power on Arrakis forever,* which is exactly what the Fremen wanted. He’s also just secured a political marriage to make himself emperor of all known space, and he controls spice production, the most valuable commodity in the galaxy. There’s literally no one around to oppose Paul, and Paul explicitly doesn’t want a jihad. Meanwhile, the Fremen are fanatically loyal to Paul, and they have no reason to launch a jihad on their own.
The only leg Herbert’s jihad has to stand on is the implication that the Fremen will jihad anyway because they’re just like that. They’re so Muslim and Arab, isn’t that what they do? This is when we get an ugly mixing of the noble savage and white savior tropes. Yes, the Fremen are the most badass desert boys ever, but they’re also dangerously foreign and inherently violent. That’s still just an implication though; even Herbert can’t bring himself to say it out loud.
Incidentally, this is why Dune Messiah starts 12 years later, after the jihad has already happened. Herbert couldn’t find a credible reason for Paul and the Fremen to go to war with the rest of the galaxy, so he had it happen offscreen and hoped we wouldn’t notice.
Paul Is Still Heroic
Coming in at a close second to the jihad argument is the idea that Paul is actually the villain of Dune, so his actions don’t have authorial endorsement. This is often accompanied by a lot of high-minded talk on how Dune isn’t a “traditional heroic narrative.” We can debate whether that’s true of the series as a whole, but it’s certainly not true in the first book, which is one of the most traditionally heroic narratives ever put to page.
In Dune, we have the cartoonishly evil Harkonnens opposing both the spotlessly noble Atreides and the nobly savage Fremen. After House Atreides is mostly destroyed, Paul rallies the Fremen against their common enemy: House Harkonnen. This has a big logical hole, as the Fremen are easily strong enough to defeat the Harkonnens on their own, but it’s clearly something a hero would do.
From there, Paul conducts his war with the utmost heroism. His battles are fought with honor, always against enemy soldiers or critical infrastructure rather than the civilian population. He uses nuclear weapons in the final battle, but only to destroy a terrain obstacle. He avoids violence when possible and spends a lot of effort finding loopholes in Fremen customs so he doesn’t have to kill people on his own side. He treats his prisoners with dignity, and he only duels the last Harkonnen after being challenged first. Everything about Paul is textbook hero.
The closest we get to deviation from the heroic norm is when Paul and his allies occasionally disagree over what course to take. In particular, Paul sometimes argues with Jessica and Gurney, his two most prominent non-Fremen advisors. But that’s just a bit of drama to keep the good guys’ scenes from being total snoozefests. There’s nothing to indicate Paul is on a downward arc, and often he’s the one arguing for moral behavior when his advisors want to be more pragmatic.
If Paul were meant to be villainous, we might see him manipulate the Fremen into joining a fight that otherwise didn’t involve them. Or we might see the Fremen betrayed by House Atreides once the war is over, to bring Paul more in line with his inspiration, T. E. Lawrence. Nothing like that happens, and we’re left with a book in which Paul is a morally uncomplicated hero doing good deeds for good purposes.
Evil Harkonnens Don’t Critique Authority
Parallel to defenses of Paul, another common argument about Dune is that it’s a cutting critique of feudalism, or possibly of authority in general. Paul can’t be a white savior chosen one if he comes from an inherently unjust power structure, right? Unfortunately, while the first book certainly has a lot of political rambling, none of it amounts to any kind of coherent critique.
In Dune, we see three major examples of the ruling class. We have the Harkonnens, who are evil, ugly, queer-coded, and incompetent. Then we have House Atreides, which is such a shining beacon of competent goodness that it makes the Starks blush. Finally, there’s the Padishah Emperor, who is somewhere in between. He doesn’t twirl his mustache like the Harkonnens, but he is portrayed as somewhat ineffectual. If only there was a chosen one around to replace him!
None of this critiques feudalism, not even the Harkonnens. In fact, their over-the-top evilness actually works against any critique. If you’re trying to show how a system is flawed, then the flaws need to be obvious even when the people involved aren’t especially bad. Otherwise, it’s a problem with the people, not the system.
In a fantasy setting, the book wouldn’t come across as glorifying feudalism either, because most fantasy stories are at least inspired by historical periods when feudalism was the norm. But Dune is in a scifi setting, so it portrays a world where feudalism has been reestablished after falling from favor. That means Dune is held to a higher standard than something like Game of Thrones. Plus, the Bene Gesserit exclusively use aristocratic bloodlines in their breeding program to create the Kwisatz Haderach, and there’s no reason to do that if aristocrats aren’t inherently superior in some way.
There are also a few scenes that get repeatedly cited as evidence that Paul is supposed to come from an unjust system. One is a sequence between Paul and his father, Duke Leto, where the duke explains the importance of propaganda. It’s a short exchange, so let’s take a look:
“You lead well,” Paul protested. “You govern well. Men follow you willingly and love you.”
“My propaganda corps is one of the finest,” the Duke said. Again, he turned to stare out at the basin. “There’s greater possibility for us here on Arrakis than the Imperium could ever suspect. Yet sometimes I think it’d have been better if we’d run for it, gone renegade. Sometimes I wish we could sink back into anonymity among the people, become less exposed to….”
“Father!”
“Yes, I am tired,” the Duke said. “Did you know we’re using spice residue as raw material and already have our own factory to manufacture filmbase?”
“Sir?”
“We mustn’t run short of filmbase,” the Duke said. “Else, how could we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”
A duke using propaganda? That’s gotta be a critique, except that Leto actually is a wise and just ruler. He really does have the people’s best interests at heart, whether they’re his own subjects or his Fremen allies. He’s also a successful ruler, failing only when the odds are hopelessly stacked against him. This isn’t a tinpot dictator being propped up by good PR; it’s a benevolent monarch communicating with those he governs. At best, it’s a bit of realpolitik. At worst, it’s a cautionary tale about how the masses can’t be trusted.
The second most commonly cited passage is when Liet Kynes has a hallucinatory argument with his dead father. Kynes himself is dying in the desert, so we can forgive him for monologuing a bit. His ghostly father even says a few things that could be seen as critical of authority:
“Arrakis is a one-crop planet,” his father said. “One crop. It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings. It’s the masses and the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has ever been suspected.”
[…]“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” his father said.
Perhaps in one of those paragraphs, we can find Dune’s supposed critique of authority. The first certainly sounds promising, like something an anarchist would say while tripping on Spice Melange. Except Dune isn’t an anarchist story. There’s nothing else in the book to suggest that getting rid of the ruling class is possible or desirable, and this comes off as exactly what it is: the delirious internal monologue of a man about to die of exposure. Or you could read it as meaning that Arrakis’s lower classes could be made more productive, which isn’t exactly anti-authority either. The second quote is even less of a critique, as it’s just wrong: the Fremen do great under Paul’s leadership, giving their long-time oppressors the boot in just a few years.
To actually critique feudalism or authority in general, Dune would have to be more like John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire. In that scifi story, the newly minted emperox* discovers a recording about how her entire dynasty started as a business scam and is primarily used to enrich the noble houses in the name of stability. There’s no waffling or unclear language, and more importantly, the protagonist actually sets out to dismantle the current system.
The Author Is Dead
When textual arguments fail, Dune Subversionists* fall back on quoting Herbert in other contexts. Usually, these quotes come from interviews or appendices, and they include some fairly powerful statements. In one famous quote, Herbert says that people should always be wary of charismatic leaders, and in another, he condemns Christian missionaries as agents of imperialism.
Surely that settles it, right? No one who talks like that could ever intend to write anything but a scathing critique of power and bigotry. The only sticking point is that Herbert’s intent doesn’t matter. In fact, no author’s intent matters! What actually matters is what they wrote, not what they say outside the story.
Philosophically, this way of looking at storytelling is known as the death of the author, and it’s really the only one that works. Literary analysis would be impossible if you had to check with an author to see what they meant. What if the author is simply a private person, or what if they actually are dead and none of their recorded thoughts have survived? Any study of the stories older than a few centuries would be impossible.
More viscerally, who died and made authors the boss of us? If they can’t make what they mean clear in the story, it’s not our responsibility to go digging through the historical record for an explanation. We don’t need an author’s permission to have an opinion about their story. Plus, a lot of authors have extremely questionable views on their own work. You might remember a certain transphobe declaring that one of her wizards was secretly gay the whole time, or the way Tolkien insisted there were no allegories in The Lord of the Rings.
The final nail in this argument’s coffin is the way people deploy authorial quotes: as support for an opinion they already hold from the story itself. No one reads Dune and then checks out Herbert’s commentary to decide what they should think. They form opinions based on the text, then look for Herbert quotes to support that opinion as a way of arguing from authority.
The lesson for those of us who also write is that we need to be clear in our stories. We can’t expect readers to check with us before deciding what the story means, nor can we explain mistakes away once they’ve been published. We have to get things right the first time, because that’s what readers will judge us on.
Oh, and one more thing: even if I didn’t firmly believe that the author was dead, Frank Herbert is not a guy I would go to for political commentary. His famous quote about charismatic leaders is part of a longer rant where he complains about “big government,” then slams John F. Kennedy for being dangerously charismatic, but praises Richard Nixon for getting caught doing something bad. That’s actually some revisionist history on Herbert’s part, as Nixon was also very charismatic.
Then there’s the missionary interview, in which Herbert also claims that if T. E. Lawrence had died during the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, he’d have been such a martyr that Arab fighters would have swept European influence out of the Middle East in no time. Given the general apathy toward Lawrence in Arab majority countries, this suggests that Herbert didn’t actually know much about the region or its history.
Honestly, I could keep going. There are as many fan theories about Dune as there are grains of sand on Arrakis. But we’ve covered the big ones, and since I’ve just spent over 3,000 words harshing on Dune, let me make something clear: none of this means you’re a bad person if you like the book. I myself get pretty emotional during the fall of House Atreides.* We all like problematic stuff; the important thing is recognizing those problems for what they are.
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Ok, I’m once again riding to TOLKIEN’S DEFENCE about allegories. What he actually said was that
– Sure, authours lives always influence what they write in some way, but often not in the obvious ways that audiences imagine.
– Sure, one might draw various parallells between the stories and real life, but there’s not One Single Correct Interpretation. People can make different interpretations, which is a good thing.
– It’s NOT the case that the stories are allegories in the sense that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between elements in the story and elements in the real world. Like, it’s NOT the case that ok, Sauron is really Hitler, the ring is really a nuke, it’s not REALLY a fantasy story but as a matter of fact a WWII story or Great War story.
The above isn’t stupid and doesn’t show that Tolkien came from a barbaric time where people had yet to invent proper understanding of literature.
END OF RANTING TOLKIEN DEFENCE. :-D
I think that Tolkien didn’t try to put WWII into LotR, yet the way his characters react because of the hardships they’ve had to endure was probably drawn from his own post-war experiences. PTSD was around then – it just wasn’t recognized for what it was. That Tolkien didn’t try to make the story an equivalent to WWII on purpose doesn’t mean that there aren’t parallels which can be seen.
On the other hand, there is the tendency to interpret too much into a story in general. It’s that ‘blue curtain’ thing – literature professors will go on telling you that the curtain in the room is blue to symbolize the mood of the character whereas the writer might simply have made them blue on a whim or because they happen to like the colour.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the latter case, wouldn’t Death of the Author mean that the professor’s interpretation of the work would be the valid one, and what the author intended not applicable?
If you use death of the author, you can only use what’s in the text – that might make you think the colour of the drapes was on purpose, because the main character is sad in this scene and blue is often associated with sadness.
However, assuming that every detail in the scene has a bearing on the story and there’s no flavour might sometimes be severely over-interpreting the content. The question is how deep you need and want to go with your interpretation, whether you assume the drapes must have a deeper meaning than just ‘there’s drapes, they’re blue.’ If the whole book strikes you as deep and full of symbolism, it’s fair to assume that the colour of the drapes has a deeper meaning, too. If you’re reading a story merely written to entertain that doesn’t even pretend to be deep, thinking the drapes have a deeper meaning might take it a step or two too far.
Ah, okay; thanks for clarifying, that’s really helpful. I’d heard that particular example used before, and it always confused me.
It’s always good to have these reminders of why I don’t actually subscribe to death of the author as a theory.
Yes, there are parallells which can be seen, and as I wrote in my post, he explicitly recognized that there are parallells between the stories and real-world events.
As a fan of history and Tolkien I need to correct you here.
He fought in WW1 not 2, and he did admit to some of his fighting experience influencing how he wrote the battles. You can see it in some scenes how much this idea of two forces facing off wouldn’t fit WW2 nearly as well as WW1.
And I think as history goes on the Death of the Author becomes less true not more. Understanding Tolkien’s experience in that war can give greater appreciation to those scenes. Cultural context and historical cues and who the author were become vital to understanding a piece of literature at all.
Some scenes in Shakespeare or Canterbury Tales don’t make sense without seeking context from how the author viewed things.
I feel “death of the author” is fine when it comes to people from the same culture and mindset, but as years pass it becomes rather obsolete. The author may not be able to answer interviews but knowing who they were and what they may have come from can be incredibly important to understanding a work.
It’s also important to understand that the movement which demanded the death of the author came out of a culture of literary science where a lot more emphasis was put on knowing all about the author than about looking at what was in the text.
As with most things, striking a balance between the extremes is usually helpful. While it’s not good to put your knowledge of the author’s life above all that’s actually in the text, it’s also not always useful to ignore that some things which the author went through in their lives might have influenced their writing and their view of the world – which, ultimately, always influences the writing.
“Death of the Author” is especially suspect nowadays because of the ways the internet has changed the way we interact with media.
Nearly everyone in the anglosphere has at least some internet access, and many have some social media presence. It is not only common, but *expected*, that people will discuss the things they read with each other, and consciously or not, writers are writing with this in mind, pre-release hype and post-release fan-speculation turning basically every book or movie into a pseudo-ARG where the text and the context *cant* be separated. Some people love this- I love a good wiki-crawl or reddit theory-crafting thread more than most!- while others can’t stand it.
Steven Erikson of Malazan fame did a good piece on this a while back.
https://steven-erikson.org/the-author-as-the-living-dead/
It is a little esoteric, going into the nature of criticism and academia in general, though it ends on a heck of a mic drop.
“The shirt was Blue”
“Discuss”
Can’t speak for Cay, but my own reason for mentioning WWII was that when the books came out, that was the most recent world war, and for that reason many commentators tried to interpret the books in terms of WWII even though Tolkien himself had fought in number one.
Also, you make some good points. I just want to defend Tolkien against this mistaken idea that he claimed that there were absolutely no parallells whatsoever between his works and stuff that happened to him or others in the real world, when he never said anything that extreme.
World War 1 and 2 were both wars with high deaths counts, bringing a lot of destruction to the countries where this war raged.
On top of that, we have the same groups of countries being responsible for this war, so it’s hard for people to differentiate these great wars, simply because of how similar they are.
Death of the Author might not be an absolute rule, but no one really needs to understand a work simply by looking what the Author said what scene x and y were about. It can help you expand your view on these events and give you new insight and perspective of these scenes, but they should be taken with grain of salt and it can actually make scenes worse knowing how little the Author understands the topic in question.
I like reading what the Author said in an interview, it gives me some new perspectives I can use for my own critiques and views on a story like with George Lukas, but no one needs to look it up, if they want to understand the work by it’s own merits.
How people want to interpret art is their business after all.
My standard rebuttal to “The curtain’s color doesn’t mean anything!” argument is: if the color doesn’t matter to the story, then why mention the color at all? That’s a choice the author made – probably a deliberate one, since a lot of authors are very intentional with their word choice. If the author doesn’t want readers to get hung up (lol) on the Deep Symbolic Meaning of the curtain’s blueness, why not write about “the curtain,” no color specified?
I’m not even sure what the problem is with this kind of “overanalysis.” As long as the reading is supported by the text, why is that bad? Are the overanalyzers enjoying the text incorrectly? I don’t get it!
As an author, I can tell you that a lot of choices about small details (such as curtain colours) are made on the fly.
Why mention the colour of the drapes? Why mention the drapes at all? Flavour. You want for people to imagine the surroundings and you give them pointers. You have blue drapes in the room your writing in. You simply like the colour blue. Your significant other mentioned buying new drapes in blue at the breakfast table that morning. There are many reasons why the drapes may be blue that have no further significance for the story.
The problem with overanalyzing a text is when the analyzer insistst that their reading ‘the drapes must have a deeper meaning and everyone who says differently is wrong’ is the only right reading. Yes, the drapes might have a deeper meaning and if there’s other instances where colours have a deeper meaning, that’s probably the author’s intent, too. But you can read the same deep meaning into a pulp novel and in those, I can basically guarantee, no deeper meaning was intended. There are ways to interpret books from a psychoanalytical point of view and, believe me, those can put you off fairy tales for life.
It doesn’t always pay to go that deep and you should never force someone else to accept your deep reading of the text as the only possible one. You also might not want to interpret something that was merely written for entertainment (as the aforementioned pulp novel) as something too deep. There is such a thing as winging it when you’re just writing a story you hope people will find entertaining, not all you write is pre-planned.
Funny thing that just crossed my mind. If you want to really analyse a piece of art, the author can’t be dead. You need the context, like you just did with the curtains. To know if the blue curtains really means something, you need to know if the autor is the kind of person who will hide meaning within everything that compose his world; or if will just wing it and never think about it.
You can still read a piece of art anyway you want of course. But if you cut out the author, then you can’t ascribe anything to them. Any meaning you find will be only for you (and others who might think the same). Which is not a bad way to analyse an artwork, but it won’t be the same.
It helps with deep analysis if you know more about the author or, at any rate, about other works they’ve produced. If an author has a tendency to pack deep meaning in one book, chances are high they’ll do so again.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the whole ‘the author is dead’ movement was a reaction to extreme focus on the author and little focus on the text. Doing the opposite and focusing only on the text can be just as bad when it comes to interpretation.
So the real problem is when the symbolist “overanalyzer” privileges their own reading over other interpretations. I don’t think this problem is unique to symbolists. Isn’t the reader who swears up and down that “the curtain’s color doesn’t mean anything!” privileging their interpretation over the symbolist’s?
Yes, they are.
It’s important to understand that other people might see things in another way and what is deep for you might actually mean nothing in their context. It’s actually part of the ‘death of the author’ thing. If we all just read and interpret the text, we’re bound to come up with different interpretations, because we interpret it with our own experiences in mind. If we read the text with the author’s life in mind, certain things seem clearly attached to something which happened to the author.
The problem is not that the ‘overanalyzer’ attaches meaning to every detail in the story, but that they demand everyone else does the same. I think in some cases (not all), that ‘overanalysing’ happens because they want to validate why they love the book. If it’s deep and full of symbols, it must be ‘true literature’ (TM) and thus worth their time. You don’t need to validate your taste, though (although you should be able to accept that there might be problematic things in the books you like).
Yet, they have the right to read a book like that, just as another person has the right to say ‘the curtains are blue and that’s all there is to it.’ As a writer, I know that sometimes such details mean nothing, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s true for all authors and all genres. Some authors do attach meaning to every word in their book.
“Dune”, for instance, is clearly an engaging book which people enjoy reading – otherwise, like so many past sci-fi novels, it would be almost forgotten, not being adapted for a movie again. Yet, quite a bit of the whole discussion about why Dune is not a ‘chosen one’ or a ‘white saviour’ story seems to hinge on people thinking the book would be devaluated if it were. It can’t be a ‘white saviour’ story, because it’s such a great book, so it must be a subversion of the trope (which for many people would boost its worth). Therefore, they push depth into the story by analysing every bit and bringing in the author, so they can say ‘see? those are his views! he would never have used that trope without wanting to subvert it!’ But it’s fine to like “Dune” and enjoy reading it. I’ve re-read “Dracula” every year for quite some time in my life, but I wouldn’t have said it was deep then and I don’t say it’s deep now. It’s a great slow-burn horror story and I wish they’d do it more justice in a movie one day, but deep? “Frankenstein” is certainly deeper, what with the creature discussing philosophy with people.
Thank you so much for this comment, I was really confused as to why Oren would mention Tolkien and was about ask for further clarification.
Sure, LotR WORKS as a WW2 story. But nothing indicates it was MEANT to be one.
But on the main content of the article: Yeah, it bugs me that people get so defensive about Dune. It was a long time now since I read the first four books (and then dropped out, since I liked them less as the series moved on). I really loved the first one, mostly because it was so IMMERSIVE, and I’m a real sucker for that. Like the extreme dryness and heat was so well described that I almost got thirsty and sweaty just from reading it. (I felt similarly with the big glacier crossing in Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.) But I can still see the point of critiquing the White Saviour theme!
It’s like Dune fans in particular, even fans who are feminists and anti-racists and so on and truly have sound views in general, can’t admit that it’s problematic and it’s still okay to like it. In addition to all you say above, I’ve even seen a woman argue that it’s not a white saviour story because the Atreides family’s skin colour is never mentioned and I’m like… if you could insert gifs in these comments, you know which Picard gif I would insert.
The make-it-so one? ;)
I think fans refusing to accept that their favourite stories have problematic parts is not limited to Dune. A lot of people argument against sexism in Wheel of Time or racism in Lovecraft’s stories, despite the fact that both is obvious, too. I think they don’t realize that you can love something which is problematic and at the same time accept that those problems exist.
Dune is definitely the IP with the greatest ratio of “actually it’s being progressive” fanragers. I can’t say for sure why that is, but my suspicion is that Dune’s lack of blockbuster success, at least in comparison to IPs like Star Wars and LotR, has made it attractive to a certain strain of intellectual who assumes everything they like must be complex and deep.
In second place, oddly, is Wheel of Time. That one I can’t explain.
But the first Dune book is indeed very immersive, which I think explains its initial popularity.
Because even though the writing of female characters is, generously, hit-and-miss, there are LOTS of them- I think above 50% of the viewpoint characters in some of the books.
Also, a lot of young men and women discovered the books when they were young and fell in love with them, turned progressive when they got older, and projected their own values backward onto it, being either unwilling or unable (first impressions generally take precedence) to re-evaluate it.
As for why the Wheel of Time fandom itself skews progressive… [Semi-SWAG speculation time] Wheel of Time, though it had it’s moments, was nowhere near as dark as ASOIAF or as edgy as Sword of Truth, it’s main contemporaries (which, fun fact, would probably not have gotten published without WoT shaking up the industry the way it did.) So the fandom comparatively lacks the trolls and edge-lords that much of geek fandom has, and the softer souls who bounced of of the hypr-grimdark fad bubble that followed Game of Thrones drifted towards WOT.
That’s as good an explanation as anything I could come up with for sure.
For anyone interested in other interpretations of the Wheel of Time, there is an ongoing essay/recap series on TOR.com. The author is a trans man, and his reactions are… refreshingly ambivalent, is the best way I can describe it. More positive than the local consensus, but not without criticism, and interpreting it from angles I had never considered before.
https://www.tor.com/series/reading-the-wheel-of-time/
“even though the writing of female characters is, generously, hit-and-miss, there are LOTS of them- I think above 50% of the viewpoint characters in some of the books.”
You’re right about that; there’s an interesting analysis of the Wheel of Time in terms of how the wordcounts and viewpoints across the series come out. (available here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/statistical-analysis-wheel-time/) Here’s how the viewpoints and wordcounts break down by gender:
Viewpoints: according to that article, every book after the fourth (with the possible exception of the seventh and tenth) has more female viewpoints than male ones.
Wordcounts: it’s a slightly different story with these; the chart on the site shows that books 5 and 7-12 (of fourteen; New Spring wasn’t included) all have more words from a female viewpoint than a male one. (Book 6 comes very close to that.)
However, if word count is the only measure of whether a book is progressive, then there are some romance novels that are even more progressive, but have the cringiest values I’ve ever seen. I read WOT and except for Eye of the World which is a more or less traditional Hero’s Journey with almost no subversion, just with more women running around, they get ever more cringe-worthy until Sanderson took over, but I dropped out when the misogyny and misandry got oppressive (about book 5). Maybe they got better when Sanderson took over, but I couldn’t stomach it. I read New Spring and it was tolerable.
(Reply to Deana)
“if word count is the only measure of whether a book is progressive”
That isn’t why I shared those statistics; it was just to support Jarosh’s statement about how many viewpoint across the books were from female characters, as opposed to male ones.
I completely agree with the sentiment that word count is definitely not a measure of how progressive a book is; after all, Atlas Shrugged is around 600k plus-or-minus 50k, and most of us probably know about THAT book already.
(I’m not sure how EotW being a ‘traditional hero’s journey’ plays into this, though. Maybe someone could clear that up for me?)
(Correction to my reply to Deana)
*viewPOINTS, not ‘viewpoint’.
I get how you feel, I only read Dune recently and had trouble due to Paul being a little too perfect to like and all the bad white savior Stuff.
For me , the series that drew me in and then frustrated me to near tears was the Dresden Files. The world is amazing and completely overwhelmed me with how well it was done, but almost no liberal leaning nerds can stand it when I call the books out for sexism or racism. You can enjoy one facet of something and critique another. But people get awkward when it’s their favorite, which I understand but it can be frustrating.
This is a pronoun with the way the internet exaggerates things in general – everything is either perfectly flawless or irredeemable trash. There’s not a lot of in between, nor is there the possibility of liking parts and disliking others. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been critiquing something, had someone say “Why do you read/watch/play it if you hate it so much?” and had to reply “I don’t hate it, I hate one particular aspect of it”.
*problem, not pronoun. -Shakes fist- Autocorreeeeeect!
Yes exactly! I think people prefer thinking of things as 100% good or 100% bad, just because it’s easier than thinking deeply about everything, but then that’s spilled over into every facet of our culture (eg. political polarization). And then with a culture that simplifies everything to 100% good or evil, some people are hesitant to say they have a mixed opinion, because someone might mistake that for justifying the other side’s point of view. But it should be way more acceptable for people to like some aspects of a thing and dislike other aspects!
I have this issue; as a long time reader of HP Lovecraft, it can be hard to enjoy the dark eldritch stories when some of them have problematic elements that taint an otherwise enjoyable tale. Here I’m thinking specifically of ‘Medusa’s Coil’, where the culminating horror is literally the n-word. It’s a good story otherwise, creepy and unexpected! But then there’s this comically racist final line. So I just eat around it.
As a long standing Dune fan, who have read all the original Herbert novels several times over, since I was young back in the 1980`ies :) I actually agree with a lot of the points of criticism of Dune, made by Oren here, and most certainly one can, and should criticize ideas expressed in old Herberts writings. But when that is said and done, I also think that some of that criticism is somewhat superflous and beside the point. Indeed Herberts Dune can be criticized for having a “white savior” trope, for being anti-arab/muslim, for portraying women as inherently manipulative, and even for being somewhat racist. But Dune, like other literary works, has to considered in context. That is it´s historical context.
Frank Herbert, like many other Sci-Fi authors, are rather difficult to pigeonhole, in a present ideological context. Some of his ideas might now seem rather conservative/reactionary, but given that Herbert himself was born in 1920 and Dune was written in the early 1960`ies, an equal case can be made for Dune having rather liberal tropes….in context of its time. J.R.R. Tolkien and his works are the products of a basically very conservative and reactionary mindset (and can certainly be criticized for being that) but LoTR is still in many ways, a great literary work, and this also goes for Herbert´s Dune. Again : that doesn´t mean it should somehow be exempt for criticism, but that criticism should bear in mind the time and place that Dune was written in.
In continuation of that caveat, I would also like to challenge three of Oren´s assumptions made here : 1) That the depiction of the Fremen and especially their Jihad, is an expression of anti-arab and anti-muslim sentiments. Dune was written well before tensions really got bad, between the western world and Islam. 2) That the Harkonnen is “queer coded”. The Baron is not a homosexual as such. In Brian Herbert and Kevin Andersson´s prequels works, there is admittedly a scene in which the Baron is described as being attracted to men, but the Brian Herberts and Kevin Andersson´s novels are not the writtings of old Herbert, and they are in my humble opinion of a low standard, with much emphasis on cheap drama and many factual errors. In Dune the Baron is depicted as a pederast with a sexual appetite for very young/adolescent boys. Not for men. He is a pederast/pedophile and not a gay as such. But okay, admittedly old Herbert´s writtings does smack a bit of homophobia in one of the later works in the Dune series. 3) Paul is a heroic figure…but not as one sided heroic as Oren decribes here. Paul IS deliberately manipulative of both the Fremen and others (he learned that from both his Ducal father and his B.G mother). Paul is not conducting his war against the Harkonnens with utmost heroism. Paul is quite brutal and often outright cruel and merciless (as is both the Harkonnens, the Fremen and the Emporor and his Sardaukar. No really good and nice guys here). It is i.e. mentioned (though admittedly only briefly and in passing) that Paul have a captured Harkonnen officers skinned (perhaps alive or perhaps only after the man has been killed in combat. That is unresolved) and his skin used as drumskin in Fremen wardrums. Plenty of other examples of Paul being both manipulative and being cruel in a cold and calculating way. Otherwise I do agree with a lot of the assements made by Oren here, but I still think that Dune should be regarded in the context of the time and place of its creation.
I feel like the argument “it was fair for its time” is kind of redundant. The point isn’t to “pigeonhole” Herbert into modern political sides, or say that no one should read Dune because it’s ideologically impure or “bad”. The point is to simply evaluate the story as it is.
I also disagree with some of the further points:
1) Saying that the depiction of Fremen couldn’t have been inspired by modern anti-muslim tropes is a bit like saying that medieval antisemitism couldn’t have been inspired by nazism. Orientalism in western culture is a bit younger, but still well established at least since colonial times.
2) The whole point of coding is that stereotypes are used to suggest, without stating the thing outright. It’s not about just the sexual stuff, it’s in conjunction with other tropes, like the baron being portrayed as unmanly, physically weak, and decadent.
And none of it is about Herbert’s intent necessarily (though if we look at that, the findings are not great also), it’s just about the tropes used.
1. What you are doing here is making a false equivalence and a strange one for that matter. How could Nazism possibly have inspire medieval antisemitism? These believes systems are quite apart and most of the antisemitism the Nazis used was based on pseudoscience and it’s influence wasn’t that big in the medieval version of antisemitism, because it died out a long time ago and was replaced by racial pseudoscienctific nonsense. Dune uses a lot of orientalism, but it’s not more orientalistic than many modern stories and actually shows us the danger of a white savior, after all they were betrayed by Paul later on and the cult he built resulted in a lot of bloodshed.
2. The problem here is that Vladimir Harkonnen is the only homosexual character in the story and it’s fair calling him a homophobic stereotype, though his evils is more rooted in his exertion of power than sexual cravings. He is a Pederast and this is a form of homosexuality that speaks not for everyone here and quite frankly is problematic, because pedophilia is not ok.
With this I also take small issues with Oren’s and Elga’s comment.
While the history of the Middle East and North Africa was harsh and much of it shaped the landscape of the two regions with the problems still being felt there, it isn’t as simple. For one, many of the terrorists and movements were backed up by the western powers and the Suez canal had nothing to do with Dune, the story of Lawrence of Arabia and the Madha of Sudan, as well as the lifestyle of the Bedouin Arabs and the San people had a bigger impact on the Fremen than what happened in Egypt. Also treating the Crusade as a precursor to colonialism is also wrong, because it wasn’t based on imperialism, but spirituality and isn’t as simple as invasion, a lot of them were simple pilgrims, with many of them committing murder, but none of it was based on Colonialism.
The West caused a lot of problems in the middle east and north Africa, but we should be careful not treating every historical conflict as precursor of the next one, this isn’t how history works.
Okay, since it came up: antisemitism has a long and awful history in Europe, as in other places. The idea that an entire cultural group was an acceptable target was codified by medieval treatment of the Jews, including scaremongering (blood libel and well-poisoning), isolation from public life (moneylending and shtetls), and systemic violence (pogroms).
At the same time as the First Crusade, which had a number of ideological and political causes, the People’s Crusade was launched in Germany, taking advantage of the religious furor and enthusiasm for violence. This resulted in one of the worst sequences of pogroms in European history, the Rhineland Massacres. Jews targeted both because of bigotry and because of convenience—many members of the People’s Crusade had run out of supplies, and robbed Jews for food to tide them over on the way to Jerusalem. This combination of hate and greed could be seen in the Crusades, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to call them at least proto-colonialist.
Pseudoscience was just a new way in for a hatred that was only ever barely concealed. Logic first used to justify the oppression of Black people was ported onto Jews because it was fashionable, and tied into certain nationalist and Romanticist convictions, which replaced more pious concerns like blaming Jews for the death of Jesus. The underlying hate was the same. It simply got a new label.
I never said that the old antisemitism had no influence to the new one, I was talking about how the reverse isn’t really true.
Yes, medieval treatment towards Jews did normalized hatred towards them as people, however blaming the Jews as collective for the death of Jesus ( personally I would blame the Romans)as well as segregating them from the public has it’s origins in ancient times, though the middle ages had their part of inventing new stuff.
To the Crusades,they had taken the Holy land, but it was mostly motivated by religion and not some geopolitical scheme to colonise the region the way the colonial powers later did it. A lot of modern historians even believe that they were a historical accident, as the papal call for a crusade only asked for a small number of warriors to assist the Byzantines in their struggle against the Seljuk Turks, but you summed up pretty well what happened when the Crusades began. The Crusades make no sense from any colonial viewpoint and very much were they mocked as a big folly of the past like most of the Middle ages by the people after the Renaissance. They took regions without any real strategic value and many of them even left the Holy land shortly after Jerusalem was taken, with a greater portion losing a lot of money and fortune. It was a silly endeavor and I am 100% on David Hume on this one.
Despite the Nazis and the Europeans of the Middle ages being antisemitic, their core believes were very different and while the latter certainly impacted the former, they still differ in their reasoning as to why Jews are evil. Yes, the underlying hatred was based on Xenophobia and pseudoscience merely replaced the old reasoning for antisemitism and yeah, the people had been long influenced by very old antisemitism, but they are not completely the same thing, because the Nazis rejected the middle ages as stupid and valued ancient Rome, which should take more blame for antisemitism than the middle ages. Only Neo-Nazis are really into the Crusades, the old Nazis, not so much. Also the hatred towards black people had not so much impact on the hatred towards jews, because both happened independently.
Antisemitism is ancient, but it evolved into more insidious forms over the centuries and we should look at the many forms as such, because we have to understand the distinction between the various forms in order to understand and combat it and not break the concept of antisemitism, to the point where there is no difference between the Crusades’s many massacres and WW2’s infamous Shoah, because these events were not the same.
Just for historical context, it’s important for people to understand that animosity between the “West” and Muslim-Majority countries is much older than most westerners think. The common idea is that it started on 9/11, with some people understanding that 9/11 was caused by existing animosity. But fewer people realize that European powers were damaging Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries long before that. The history of colonization and imperialism in the region goes back centuries, but as just one example: Dune was published in 1965, nine years after the Suez Crisis, in which France and the UK invaded Egypt to keep control of the Suez Canal. That was the culmination of a decades long struggle to expel French and British influence from Egypt and part of a greater, Pan-Arab movement.
Interestingly, the US actually came down on Egypt’s side in that conflict, to keep the USSR from gaining more traction in the region. But it’s an easy example of how Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism isn’t new at all.
Well, I’d like to remind that wars between Western and Arabic world are much much older and continue over millenium years. Remember Rekonkista and arab invasion to Iberia penninsula that presedes Rekonkista. It’s a very long story…
Wholly exaggerated. People back then held very little grudges over a long period of time and the Reconquista happened when Granada was already at it’s end.
This view of history as this unchanging thing rather than episodes is not good and contributes to modern day conflicts that started around 100 years earlier.
Like any good episodic format, history builds on what’s come before. The Reconquista happened because of centuries of conflict which confirmed in the minds of Moors and Spanish that the other one was an existential threat to their existence.
People back then didn’t hold grudges? Tell that to the Germans and Frenchmen (and many other Europeans) who orchestrated the Rhineland Massacres on the flimsy pretext of “revenge for Jesus”.
You need to reread the original Dune novel. You are missing some of the novel’s points about the Baron. He was most assuredly queer, not just queer-coded. All of his sexual partners are male, with the exception of the reverend mother, and his view of that sexual assault is nearly as repulsed as she is of the brutality he uses.
As to the anti-Muslim bias, that was even more obvious if you realize that the novel pitted the Greek (not white but Greek) Paul Atriedes against the Turkish-inspired (not Arab) Fremen in a rewrite of the Ottoman/Turkish-Greek Wars over Cyprus which were going on during the writing of Dune. If you add in the third party of the Emperor meant to represent the decaying British Empire and Harkonen who is a bad rip off of the Soviets, you have all major parties on the scene.
It’s always a joy when it’s Dunkin’ on Dune day at Mythcreants. :D
I don’t hate the book, I swear. I think it does some really great things. But it’s baffling to me why it’s touted as an universal masterpiece, when even without getting into politics and messages, the basic plot relies on bad and downright silly ideas, that I couldn’t take seriously even with the best intentions of suspending my disbelief.
But the last section of this article had me really confused.
I didn’t expect to see the statement “death of the author is the only way of reading stories that makes sense” on Mythcreants for multiple reasons.
– Authorial endorsement is a term I learned from this blog, and it’s even mentioned in this very article, but if the author is dead how can they endorse anything? It seems like these two ways of reading are incompatible.
– I’ve only ever heard this kind of “death of the author absolutism” in practice deployed to dismiss criticisms of problematic elements of works with “well, if I can explain it all away in my head, then it’s not problematic, and instead the critics are the problem, since they impose those uncharitable interpretations on the story.” It just seems counter to the kind of criticism I thought Mythcreants usually do.
– What I haven’t ever heard is someone saying “we can’t critique that story because we have no record of what the author personally thought about stuff.” It seems way far-fetched.
– And then you don’t even keep to the spirit of the death of the author argument, but go and counter the quotes from Herbert with other quotes from him. So the argument now feels kind of pointless.
Authorial endorsement shows in how certain situations play out. If certain actions of the hero, which one might call bad (murder, torture, sexism, bigotry to name a few) have no consquences for the hero, it is safe to assume that the author was of the opinion that it’s fine for ‘good’ people to do those things if they serve a ‘greater good.’ You see that in the book without looking at anything else. It’s in the text. Therefore, using the rules of ‘death of the author,’ the ‘if good people do bad things, that’s acceptable’ message of the book is there.
If you’ve never heard ‘we can’t interpret or critique that story, because we have no record of the author’s opinion’, you’ve probably never spoken to a professor of literature. I’ve studied literature and, yes, that’s how they work. They look into the life of the author, they try to find connections between the work and the real life, and they use that to interpret the story. That includes, in cases where it’s known (as with most modern authors), the author’s opinions of politics, society, and other topics.
Using ‘death of the author’ in its proper meaning means interpreting what is in the text, not what the author said otherwise or what you guess from drawing connections to their lives – what people did before ‘death of the author’ came up as a principle. The way in which many people use the expression is not what it means. ‘Death of the author’ doesn’t mean ‘the author is dead to me, so I can enjoy their works, even if their creator is racist, sexist, transphobe, or whatever.’
To clarify, Death of the Author and Authorial Endorsement are different concepts even though they both have the word “author” in them.
Death of the Author can get complicated, but at it’s simplest form, it means that the text of a story is what’s important in interpreting it, not what the author said about the story outside the text.
Authorial Endorsement is specifically about whether a text portrays something as positive or negative.
StyxD is right that a lot of people will try to excuse problems through complex mental gymnastics, but that’s a separate issue from either of the concepts we’re talking about. When they say things like “it’s not sexist for no women to have magic if magic is tied to the Y Chromosome,” that’s what we call the Real World Fallacy, as it’s trying to argue a fictional story like it’s something from reality rather than a fiction created by humans. Other people call it the Thermian Argument, based off a cool youtube video that used the Thermians from Galaxy Quest as an example.
StyxD is also right that few people go so far as to say that you can’t critique stuff if you don’t know what the author said. Cay is also right that the number of people who say that is greater than zero. The point of that example is to show an argument’s faulty reasoning by taking the argument to it’s natural conclusion.
The paragraphs about Herbert’s weird views are just some interesting trivia.
As someone who had the privilege of watching the 2 movies of Dune, I can say that despite it’s rather traditional storytelling and problematic elements, Dune is a competently written story with relatable and interesting characters. Paul being a white savior doesn’t erase the fact that he is compelling to watch and the personal story of Dune is pretty good, but should not be viewed as commentary of modern day politics.
But I have to nitpick on one part of the article:
Oren, the episodes I-III are not sequels to the original trilogy, they are prequels, meaning they are the backstory of the original star wars, but they aren’t a continuation like the sequel trilogy. I hope you can edit that.
I’d say episode 1-3, while being prequels in the timeline, are also continuation, as they have to lead up to the situation at the beginning of the original trilogy.
Had they been made first, their story could have been vastly different, because Luke and Leia, for instance, wouldn’t have had to happen and the change from Anakin to Darth Vader would have been a surprise twist at the end, because we wouldn’t know what becomes of Anakin from the first minute of “The Phantom Menace”.
To keep continuity, the prequels have to fit in with the original trilogy in the important plot points. Luke and Leia must be born. Obi-Wan must survive. Anaking Skywalker must end up behind the mask of Darth Vader. The Republic must be weakened, so it can fall at the beginning of “A New Hope”.
That is not what a continuation of a story is. A continuation of a story follows the ending of the previous story and tells a new story after the old one, thus telling a story that is set in the future and continues it with either an old cast, a new cast or a mixture of both. These stories are sequels, because they progress the story from the point the old story left it and thus continue it.
A prequel does not continue the story or keep continuity at all, it does, in fact, the very opposite and goes backwards. Usually, these stories exist to fill in gaps of the previous work to explain why and how events in the original story happened, like how and why Luke and Leia exist, how Anakin became Darth Vader or why the Empire came to be or what the Clone Wars were. But none of this is a continuity of the Original work, it’s a new story that take place before the original one with a different cast or the same, or both. They aren’t necessarily there to come with big surprises, but are there to flesh out the series and explain mysteries left by the original work that need some explaining. They are basically lore that became their own stories, these are what we call prequels.
It expands on the mythos of Star Wars created by the Orignal trilogy, but it not a continuation, the continuation of these 3 works are the sequel trilogy, because they finished what the old trilogy started and did not go back like the middle trilogy, they let the past die. Pun intended and hopefully you liked it :), I put some effort in it and I hope as my namesake it was worth it all.
If I could make a story like that better, I would totally change the premise to make it about a black woman who also happens to be queer fighting back an elitist system. In this system, rich white men are usually the ones doing the oppression of the black folks.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the experience necessary to pull that off myself. However, I would like to see a story like that written by an author of color.
I’m still not sure if this comment is meant to be sarcastic or not… the line “also happens to be queer” makes me think that it probably is, though.
interesting site .. I read DUNE & saw the movie years ago
What you said about the sexism and racism really rang true to me: how the women-only Bene Gesserit exist primarily to breed a male savior, how there’s gender essentialist stuff about who can access what memories, how Paul is a white savior and does *not* subvert the trope, how the Arab-coded Fremen are portrayed as inherently violent. Your article was clear and well reasoned.
One thing I think could be added to your argument (and another reason Dune fails as a subversion of anything) is more of a discussion of how Dune talks about eugenics, which I find very troubling.
The whole Bene-Gesserit-trying-to-breed-the-chosen-one thing is literally eugenics, so even if the author wants us to find the Bene Gesserit creepy or bad, the fact of the matter is that in the Dune universe, eugenics works. They are successfully able to breed a “superman.” That’s SO gross.
Given that eugenics has been used to justify horrible treatment of Jews, racial minorities, and disabled people, I think it’s a pretty big deal for a famous book like Dune to essentially say “yeah, eugenics works.” It doesn’t work: it’s pseudoscience. I don’t even think people should entertain things like “what if eugenics works” in science fiction. It’s just racist, full stop. I don’t know if Herbert was really aware of how gross the whole eugenics undercurrent is in his work, and it may not have been intentional, but the bottom line is it’s *there*.
I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion of the white savior issue (which is good because it should be talked about) but less discussion about the eugenics angle.
Eh. Wasn’t Dune just Lawrence of Arabia in space?
Have you seen the Extra Credit videos on Dune? I think that would help the mutual incomprehension.
Just for starters, it changes the role of Duke Leto Atreides, which you describe as:
“Then we have House Atreides, which is such a shining beacon of competent goodness that it makes the Starks blush.”
That’s what certainly what the Duke aspires to be and he invests in propaganda proclaiming his goodness. But this bluster of good intentions doesn’t change the reality, which is that he’s out of his depth and is going to get everyone killed. And while he’s replaced evil Harkonnen colonial rule with ‘benevolent’ Atreides colonial rule, the resource and other exploitation must continue because the “Spice must flow”. Though he wrings his well-intentioned hands about it and commissions some more propaganda to explain that it’s all good or necessary or something.
So, the ‘white saviour’ trope should be seen in the light of the first, self-proclaimed saviour being hypocritical, incompetent and getting wiped out.
On another angle I think that the ‘chosen one’ stuff in Dune is so ridiculous that it’s hard not to read it as satire. Ten thousand years of the secret breeding programme undermined by one person deciding to keep their male child. Then the wrong chosen one, on the run, only survives because they encounter a group that reveres the family as part of a prophecy that was deliberately seeded hundreds of years before. Unfortunately the prophecy has become a little corrupted with the passage of time. So the wrong chosen one is forced to knowingly embrace a incorrect version of an invented prophecy in order to survive. Once they’ve embraced it, they can’t get off, but have to stay on for the whole death or glory ride.
I could go on, but you’re either interested in looking beyond the trope spotting or not.
Another series I read as a child (about 13-13 years old). Another series I fondly associate with my father instilling in me a love of literature… Another series ruined for me by me becoming aware of its racist undertones. What a shame…
I was actually disappointed upon getting to Dune Messiah that we skipped over the whole jihad thing. I thought a story about a leader’s image, influence, and cult of personality growing far beyond the leader’s actual control was both plausible and potentially interesting – in a universe where the idea of you can travel faster than the speed of light, what happens when you see that idea slipping out of your control? It leaves the dilemma of whether a leader wants to risk completely undermining the foundation of his rule to intervene against such a thing as it’s happening. Of course, there would have to be at least some focus on who would be hurt by the leader making the morally sound decision, so it doesn’t seem like a given that our hero would do it without a second thought.
On that note, I always thought it rather odd that, at Paul’s lowest point, he gets a scary vision of winning too hard. I’m glad it wasn’t just child me that didn’t quite understand the intent of the vision.