(by Paul Pope, for DHarbin’s Dune Book Club, which wrapped up this week)
This week was full of mostly quiet character moments and bookended by Paul’s father, the Duke Atreides. We saw him in a moment as a father with Paul, in a hushed moment with Paul’s mother–who we learned is not his wife, though he is also unmarried–and in a moment of leadership with his lieutenants. Paul’s father is interesting, as he is doomed from the start but upholds his nobility and values while focusing on laying the groundwork for his son to ascend.
Through Jessica we learned more about the Bene Gesserit in the form of the Missionaria Protectiva. This is a really brilliant concept, this panoplia propheticus. The idea that there’s a group subtly spreading “prophecies” that will protect its people belies a number of Herbert’s themes pretty early on. The MP is incredibly cynical for something approaching the religious nature of the Bene Gesserit order, though not that different from the legends that pervade the universe in Asimov’s Foundation series concerning the Foundation itself. However, the Foundation is simply a society preserving useful knowledge, while the Bene Gesserit seems to have (at this point) some sort of mystical connections. Herbert tries to make them science-based, with his talk to body language and “hearing the truth,” but there is an almost Jedi-like ability in ladies like Jessica with regards to their bodies and the casually-dropped hints at mind control.
The Fremen were introduced in the form of the Shadout Mapes (future band name, to be sure). The Missionaria Protectiva’s panoplia propheticus definitely holds sway in her, and Jessica is able to feign her way through that interaction (which seems heavy in subtext but is mostly impenetrable) and comes out with a crysknife. How hardcore is it, by the way, that the knife must not be sheathed unbloodied. Eeeesh. (Also, for our D&D metaphor, Jessica HAS ACQUIRED crysknife [properties unknown])
Paul also used some of his Jedi sorry, Bene Gesserit training to dispatch a crazy flying knife, and Jessica discovered an extravagant luxury and grave warning (partially illustrated above by the great Paul Pope, drawn for DHarbin’s Dune Book Club).
This reading has still been pretty heavily forshadowing doom to come. Any thoughts?
This week, read to page 126-ish, to the chapter concerning Kynes, which ends with “Against his own will and all previous judgements…”
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I agree, a lot of doom in this week’s reading. The doom hanging around about the Duke is driving me crazy! How can he make a character so practically dead and yet so very much alive and out of any harm’s way? And for SO LONG!
The Shadout Mapes (and by the way… is that a title or a name? is this some sort of ‘the cheat’ type scenario where it’s kind of both?) is a very ambiguous and shadowy (shadouty?) character. Is she good? Is she evil? Is she sane? Is she a robot? Who knows! There is something fishy about her; i can’t tell if it’s real foreshadowing or if it’s just Mr. Herbert’s way of making us, the readers, feel the same sort of scary unknown-ness that the Atreides household feels.
And speaking of making the reader feel the discomfort of the immigrants, have you noticed Mr. Herbert’s third-person subjective/limited/omniscient narrative voice? He dives us in and out of the characters’ minds and perspectives at will in what seems an unusual way to me.
I must admit there is ALOT of impending doom ahead of us to discover. The Shadout Mapes…definitely ’something fishy’ about her. I personally am enjoy the depth at which we are getting to know these characters, yet it does give the reader an uneasy feeling. I almost feel unsure which character to trust, even with the amount of information we are getting within their thoughts. It only draws more questions than gives answers.
I think part of the reason the Shadout Mapes seems so weird is that we’re seeing her through the eyes of the Atredies group – she is the only native that we’ve come across so far in the story, and really the only contact that we’ve had with the Arakeen that lies outside the castle. So in some ways, I think she’s standing in for the strangeness and perilousness of Arakeen, not just the people, but the planet itself.
It’s interesting what a risky move that Herbert has taken with the narrative. So far, he has signaled the coming of all of the main events of the novel that would ordinarily be surprises. We already knew, for instance, that Paul was going to be faced with an assassination attempt, that the assassination would be coordinated by Yueh, and that it would fail. And yet we are still drawn in. Very difficult to accomplish, and yet Herbert is pulling it off.
I think the idea of seeding the universe with protective legends is a really interesting idea (one of those world-building details that I love so much). I think that it plays along nicely with the ruthless Machiavellian utilitarianism that Herbert has built up around the Bene Gesserit, with their Gom Jabbar test, mind games, epochs long eugenics campaign. It also plays with the classist idea of religion as something used by the powerful to control those who truly believe it, sort of taking this notion to it’s logical conclusion. But I have my suspicious that we’re going to see that notion of religion more and more subverted as we meet the Fremen, especially if the Duke is right when he says that “if anything could buy a future for the Atreides line, the Freman just might do it”.
I think we’re also being set up for class conflict, primarily through the instrument of water. The Atreides household, as it is mentioned often, and finally hammered home in the Secret Garden scene depicted above, uses an abundance of water, indeed, to them, it isn’t as if there’s even a shortage. Meanwhile, those on the outside are in a constant drought, always on the edge of dying of thirst. This idea rings even more true now than when Herbert was writing this book, as the disproportionate strain that the Western world puts on the world’s resources becomes more and more untenable and unsustainable.
But there are two resources that are of utmost importance on Dune – the first is water, the second is spice. Which leads to a curious question that’s been floating in my mind, which I don’t think has been answered yet. The spice is extremely valuable, and ingesting it is an expensive luxury, as the Harkonnen Mentat mentions. One of the properties of eating lots of spice is that it turns people’s eyes entirely blue. But all of the natives of Dune have this characteristic of eating lots of spice. So if it is so easy to get that they have so much of it that their eyes are blue (and indeed, this seems to be the primary characteristic of natives), then why are they so poor and in danger of dying of thirst? Couldn’t the spice be traded for water?