Rejecting recent interpretations in the U.S. socialist press as truistic, Jackson Albert Mann makes a case for a particular communistic reading of the first novel in Frank Herbert’s Dune franchise.
Read By: A. Darlymple
Concept art from director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed mid-1970s screen adaptation of Dune.
I. Are Truisms Enough?
In the second section of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction epic Dune, protagonist Paul Atreides and his mother, the Lady Jessica, find themselves lost in the vast desert of Arrakis, fugitives from the planet’s re-installed rulers, the Harkonnens. After braving the sands and barely escaping death at the hands of the desert’s native megafauna, the enormous sandworms, Paul and Jessica reach the relative safety of a rock outcropping. However, as they begin to climb the nearby cliffs they are suddenly confronted by a group of the desert’s indigenous population, the Fremen. The group’s leader, Stilgar, who has been ordered to find and protect Paul by the Fremen’s quasi-sovereign Liet, decides that the group will accept him. However, he hesitates with regards to Jessica. Because she has not been “deep-trained” to withstand the desert climate, he implies that it may be “in the general interest” of the group to kill her and drain the water from her body, as all liquids are precious resources on the arid planet.1 Pleading for her life, Jessica declares that her mental and physical training as a member of the Bene Gesserit sororal religious order has endowed her with skills that “many consider… valuable.”2 Her claim is dismissed by Stilgar: “We make our own judgements on value here.”3
This is apt advice for communists, who almost always have limited time and resources. Dune is beloved by many, but that does not mean we should automatically consider it as useful to our movement. We should ask ourselves: is it really worth the effort to integrate an almost comically Orientalist and misogynistic work written by a “frighteningly homophobic” strike-breaker into our political education curricula, reading groups, and film screenings?4 Are there specific literary articulations of ideas amenable to communism from either the source-material or the screen adaptations that can be integrated into the way we talk about class struggle and socialism? Does Dune provide something specific that we cannot get from other artistic works we may already be mobilizing in our political practice?
The success of Denis Villenueve’s recent screen adaptation, the third since David Lynch’s 1984 box-office flop, has provoked a number of positive assessments of Dune’s value “for leftist organizing and struggle” in the U.S. socialist press.5 But like much contemporary U.S. socialist cultural writing, specifics with regard to what it means for a cultural product to have “uses for left-wing politics today” remain mired in cliché.6 Comrade Joshua Pearson, writing in Jacobin Magazine, claims that Dune provides us with “an extended critique of the hero mystique.”7 For comrade Chris Dite, it is the particular way in which Dune takes the reader on a “frightening ride through the worldview” of its central messianic hero figure, as well as the work’s flirtations with ecology, that make it a valuable cautionary tale against facism and climate change.8 In a recent issue of Partisan, comrade Evan B argues, without a single quotation from the source text, that the structure of Herbert’s novel relies on a form of narrative causality compatible with historical materialist analysis. As a result, according to B, Villenueve’s new film provides communists with “a rare opportunity to use a popular imaginative world as a framework for telling the true stories of class conflict, economic domination, and revolution that we live every day.”9
When, however, one takes into account the fact that a number of prominent contemporary authors of speculative fiction, such as China Miéville and Kim Stanley Robinson, are dedicated communists, truistic denunciations of authoritarianism and an unsubstantiated structural potency for historical materialist analysis seem insufficient to justify the immense effort that would be necessary to meaningfully incorporate Dune into the political education work of our organizations. But that is not to say that Dune should be disregarded. Rather, it is to point out that despite the recent proliferation of think-pieces on Dune written from Left perspectives, there has been no serious attempt to present what specific practical pedagogical value the book could have for communists beyond platitudes. The following argues that Dune does contain this kind of value, but not for the reasons stated by the comrades cited above. Instead, taken as a standalone work, the first Dune novel represents a detailed explication of the socio-cultural life of a ruling class, valuable knowledge for a working class political project.10 However, this value is hidden in the interstices of the novel’s explicit narrative.
II. The Rule of the Good, The Rule of the Bad
On the surface, Dune is plainly a novel for the ruling class. Combining elements of opera seria’s “themes of kingship and good government” with the bildungsroman, the novel explores the nature of rulership, a thematic element that is trans-historically central to much elite artistic expression.11 Through an extensive cast of characters, all of whom revolve around the central plot of primary protagonist Paul Atreides’ transformation from ducal heir to hero-emperor, examples of good and bad rule are diegetically scrutinized and contrasted. The third-person, omniscient perspective and a liberal mobilization of italics allows the novel to develop the inner mental life of each character as they struggle to rule in Dune’s world. Good and bad governance are principally defined by the way in which each ruler mobilizes the characters around them, and the qualitative value of such rule is demonstrated by the personal affects of the rulers themselves.
In the novel’s central section, both Paul and his imperial rival, the young na-Baron, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, face mortal tests of their fitness to rule. While traveling with Stilgar, Paul is challenged to a ritual duel by Jamis, a headstrong member of the Fremen group who, unlike many others on Arrakis, refuses to believe that Paul is the Mahdi, a messianic figure in the Fremen religion. Paul, who has “never before killed a man,” takes Jamis’ life in the fight, but not before pleading with him to yield, and only after Stilgar asserts that the defeated combatant in a Fremen duel must die.12 Paul kills Jamis, not because he wants to, but because he must. He then proceeds to utilize his reluctant victory to carefully “cultivate an air of bravura” among the Fremen when he openly sheds tears at Jamis’ funeral, a deeply meaningful, almost taboo gesture in the Fremen’s water-discipline culture.13
The following chapter details Feyd-Rautha’s parallel experience of a public, gladiatorial battle with a slave-fighter on the Harkonnen home planet of Geidi Prime. However, unlike Paul, if Feyd-Rautha is victorious, it will be his “one-hundredth” kill “in the [Harkonnen] family games.”14 He has also secretly plotted with the captured Atreides administrator, Thufir Hawat, to replace the standard slave-fighter with an imprisoned Atreides officer, hoping that his uncle, the Baron, and the Harkonnen court will misinterpret the event as a spontaneous victory over a planted assassin. After a fight that proves to be slightly more arduous than he planned, Feyd-Rautha emerges victorious, the misinterpreted blood spectacle of a thwarted assassin succeeds, and the murdered Atreides officer becomes one more dead body to add to the hundred or more paving Feyd-Rautha’s road to power.
These parallel experiences are a key moment in the text. Paul’s narrative arc hinges on his ability to navigate the dangers of his necropolitical sovereignty in a way that rejects Feyd-Rautha’s gladiatorial excess. Instead, he must nobly cultivate his skill in the careful use of his subjects’ lives and deaths, while avoiding aristocratic indulgence in “the violence and the slaughter” of such power’s delights, a challenging task that in later novels Paul ultimately fails to fulfill.15
But if Dune’s most transparent, and therefore its principal, pedagogical value is in its function as a novel for educating those who rule to recognize good and bad governance, it is also a work that is deeply concerned with writing about the ruling class as a collective subject. In scene after scene, characters come to mutually recognize each other as fellow rulers, both in their own thoughts and in dialogue with one another. A particularly potent moment of mutual recognition occurs after Lady Jessica has proven her value to the Fremen leader Stilgar by physically incapacitating him. In a private conversation between the two, Stilgar, knowing his followers eavesdrop from the shadows, eloquently articulates his concept of leadership. Jessica is shocked by Stilgar’s noble “stature” and “inner balance,” going so far as to speculate on “his ancestry” and “breeding.”16 In a moment of clarity, Jessica recognizes that she is in the presence of a fellow member of her class, stating “Stilgar, I underestimated you.”17 The Fremen leader agrees and reciprocally acknowledges Jessica’s nobility with “friendship… and trust.”18
In one of the climatic moments of Dune’s first section, even the villainous Baron Vladimir Harkonnen himself is briefly stalled in his plans by his own sense of identity as a part of the collective subject of the ruling class. After having captured the paralyzed Duke Leto Atreides, he suddenly feels an intense “reluctance to have a royal person subject to pain,” an almost instinctual sentiment that he must actively overcome.19 It is only by calming himself that he is able to break the sympathetic recognition he feels for the Duke as a fellow ruler. And so a key part of the elite value of Dune is in its subtle demonstrations of individual characters’ sense and development of ruling class consciousness.
III. Dune’s Ambivalence, Dune’s Hegemony
Yet, beneath Dune’s elite pedagogical exterior lies a deep ambivalence about the ruling class. Subaltern collective subjects, non-human animal life, ecological forces, and economic factors all threaten the rulers in ways that are not necessarily articulated as negative. In fact, it is the ambivalence of Dune that may account for the novel’s initial success, since readers with a wide array of perspectives could each find their own politics in the story’s contradictory sands. Whether this was a result of the author’s own beliefs is of little consequence, though comrade Dite makes a strong case that the book’s ambiguous attitude toward society at large was in keeping with the fact that Herbert, a man who believed that he could “convince Americans to trust government less” by openly supporting reactionary politicians he personally believed would govern poorly, was a deeply-confused political thinker.20 For communists, however, it is the way in which this ambivalence is registered with regard to the sociality of Dune’s ruling class that is of key importance.
While Herbert’s later installments in the Dune franchise, and all screen adaptations, place an emphasis on the explicit representation of the superhuman abilities wielded by the novel’s ruling classes and imperial administrators, the original work presents such heightened, almost magical skills in a far more ambiguous light. As the narrative unfolds, many characters who hold such abilities are introduced; mentats, like Thufir Hawat, are trained to gather and analyze data at a level that rivals the artificial intelligence of Dune’s prehistory; Guild navigators, always unseen, can make complex space-time calculations that allow huge frigates to move across vast interstellar distances; Suk doctors, such as Yueh, are conditioned to have an impervious loyalty to their noble houses; and Bene Gesserit agents, like Lady Jessica, are trained to develop psychic abilities that allow them to control the will of others through the use of their voices alone. Again and again the reader is told of how specialized physical education, deep mental conditioning, and the power of the spice-mélange, a valuable psychoactive drug that supposedly undergirds the novel’s imperial economy, all combine to imbue the rulers and administrators of this world with superhuman capacities. Over and over we are informed of such powers’ real existence. But the narrative demonstration of such abilities in action is always profoundly equivocal. In other words, while later installments and screen adaptations jettison such ambivalence, the original novel seems to hold out the possibility that many of the supposed capabilities of Dune’s ruling classes may, in fact, be hegemonic ideological constructions.
Take, for example, the use of The Voice, the signature, psychic will-bending ability of the Bene Gesserit. In an extended sequence towards the climax of the book’s first section, after Arrakis has been re-conquered by the House Harkonnen, Paul and Jessica use this skill to escape a pair of soldiers who have been ordered to leave them for dead in the desert. All three screen adaptations represent this moment as an unequivocal use of a psychic power by both Paul and Jessica to command the two soldiers, forcing one to murder the other against his will. But in the novel, what actually occurs is not so clear.
Aware of Jessica’s supposed psychic powers, she is gagged before being brought onto the ship. Nearing the drop point for their captives, the soldiers decide to rape Jessica before leaving the pair. As one of the soldiers reaches towards her, a desperate Paul, who has not been gagged, tries to use his minimally trained powers, commanding the soldier to “undo her gag.”21 In her inner monologue, Jessica comments on Paul’s perfect execution of The Voice. However, rather than immediately obeying the command, as in the films, the two soldiers proceed to have a brief argument over whether it would be safe to remove Jessica’s gag before raping her, only after which does the first soldier actually carry out the task. Contrary to what happens in the films, Jessica does not then go on to command the first soldier to kill his comrade using The Voice. Rather, she loudly proclaims that there is “no need to fight over [her],” successfully turning the two against one another by prefiguring the possibility that they may, indeed, need to fight over her.22 That is to say, Jessica uses the power of suggestion.
The Voice is used again in the moments leading up to the duel between Jamis and Paul, when Jessica attempts to strike terror into Jamis so that he will back down from his challenge. Jamis resists by appealing to Stilgar, who forces Jessica into silence by threatening her with the wrath of the Fremen group. As the two prepare to duel, Jessica notes that, even though she has been silenced, her few words have already successfully “planted fear in Jamis’ mind,” which will “slow him some.”23 However, she suddenly doubts the validity of her powers and briefly wonders whether she could ever change the outcome since she does not really have the ability to “truly pray.”24
While other in-text uses of The Voice are not nearly as ambiguous, the theory that this psychic ability may be a hegemonic ideological construction of the Bene Gesserit is bolstered by the fact that, in every instance of its use, the narrative lingers on moments in which those being commanded articulate their own belief in The Voice’s power. A further layer of complexity is added by the fact that narrative descriptions of The Voice read similarly to other descriptions of non-superhuman vocal timbre. In fact, much of the diegetic momentum for the development of ruling class consciousness in Dune’s characters is generated by their mutual recognition of one anothers’ disciplined timbral control, adding weight to the argument that The Voice is merely a particularly reified aspect of the rhetorical inclination of Dune’s ruling class culture.
IV. The Reproduction of the Faufreluches
A key structural element of Dune’s plot hinges entirely on the ruling class’ belief in such superhuman capabilities and the work this belief does for the reproduction of ruling class unity. Quite early in the novel, the reader is made aware of the fact that Yueh, the Atreides’ Suk physician, has betrayed the family to Baron Harkonnen and will eventually serve a key role in allowing an opening for the Harkonnen invasion of Arrakis. However, Yueh, as a Suk doctor, is never suspected by his colleagues and superiors because of his mental conditioning, which supposedly endows him with the ability to resist any temptation to disloyalty.
The Baron, for his part, is increasingly disturbed by the ease with which he was able to break this ostensibly-unbreakable professional, as well as by the possible politico-ideological implications of his discovery. Realizing that the unity and hegemony of the ruling class is predicated on a belief in the superhuman loyalty of administrators such as Yueh, he fears the consequences entailed by his recognition of that belief’s deeply ideological character. Knowing that a number of his collaborators are aware that he was able to break Yueh through ransom, the Baron proceeds to frantically compose a clandestine report to the Emperor, who had secretly aided him in his struggle against House Atreides, claiming that he “luckily discovered a doctor who pretended to the conditioning” and employed the lying physician in his scheme.25 Because “everyone knows you cannot counter the conditioning of a Suk,” his report is believed at court.26 But the knowledge, with all its repercussions for the unity and hegemony of the ruling class, haunts the Baron. He begins to nervously refer to Yueh as the “false doctor,” betraying the terror induced by his recognition of the frail hegemonic foundations of ruling class power.27
The Baron’s terror is justified. If the Suk conditioning is counterable, what else may be less than it appears? Could the ruling class’ own culture be similar to the cynical pseudo-religions spread by the Bene Gesserit to better control the galaxy’s dangerous populations? The novel contains the answer: the mentats regularly fail, the Guild navigators are revealed to be quite human, the reach of Paul’s supposed prescience is constantly qualified, the psychic effects of the spice are repeatedly described but never unambiguously demonstrated.28 All the powers to which Dune’s rulers lay claim may, in fact, be false.
V. We Make Our Own Judgements
Dune is most certainly not a story about the working class. While subaltern and proletarian collective subjects, those invisible masses commanded by the lords, ladies, and administrators of Dune’s world, may linger at the margins of Herbert’s story, this does not alter the reality that it is principally a book for and about rulers. However, the first novel’s general ambivalence toward society at large also opens space for a fruitful exploration of the nature of class consciousness, social reproduction, ideology, and hegemony in the ruling class, a thematic element that was unfortunately abandoned in Herbert’s later installments and then left out of the screen adaptations. Of course, it is this particular aspect of Dune, rather than the novel’s many shallow truisms, that may be of pedagogical interest to communists; the story’s subtle, constructive deconstruction of the ways in which its ruling class both becomes a class for itself and builds hegemony through claims to superhuman power.
Ultimately, though, the book’s utility “to leftist organizing and struggle” today remains an open question.29 This is because its communistic educational value is trapped beneath layers of elite thought. The text’s generalized social ambivalence is a deeply aristocratic perspective in itself, and only allows for the particular pedagogical reading identified here as a result of the novel’s singular focus on Dune’s ruling classes. A story which centered proletarian subjects, while maintaining the same social nihilism, would be of little value to our movement. For comrades engaged in the daily work of political education, however, the question should no longer be whether Dune has a communistic pedagogical value, but whether it is valuable enough to be worth their time and effort.
- Frank Herbert, Dune (New York, NY: Berkley Medallion Books, 1977), 280, 281.
- Ibid, 280.
- Ibid.
- Chris Dite, “What Draws Us to the Reactionary Darkness of Dune?,” Jacobin Magazine, August 27, 2021, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/dune-herbert-science-fiction-conservatism.
- Joshua Pearson, “The Socialist Dune?,” Jacobin Magazine, October 29, 2021, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/dune-frank-herbert-denis-villeneuve-left-right-fascism.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Dite, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/dune-herbert-science-fiction-conservatism.
- Evan B, “On Dune,” Partisan, March 3, 2022, https://partisanmag.com/dune-review/.
- The argument presented herein is predicated on the belief that the extended canon of Dune, as represented by the twenty further installments written by Herbert, his son Brian Herbert, and co-author Kevin J. Anderson, has little immediate value for the communist movement. This has nothing to do with quality, but is rather the result of the fact that important aspects of the first novel, which the following extricates, are discarded as the series progresses.
- Anthony Arblaster, Viva la Libertà!: The Politics of Opera (London, UK: Verso Books, 2000), 11.
- Herbert, 306
- Ibid, 104.
- Ibid, 321.
- Ibid, 320.
- Ibid, 292-293.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid, 182.
- Dite, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/dune-herbert-science-fiction-conservatism.
- Herbert, 168.
- Ibid, 170.
- Ibid, 301.
- Ibid.
- Ibid, 236.
- Ibid.
- Ibid, 327.
- In the original novel there is only one scene in which Paul uses his supposed prescience to state an unambiguous fact. This is when, after an extended near-death experience with the poison hallucinogenic ‘water-of-life,’ he correctly claims that Emperor Shaddam IV and his imperial coterie are currently in orbit above Arrakis. However, in an earlier scene during which Paul converses with his retainer Gurney Halleck, the latter implies that Paul’s successful guerilla war against the elite Sardaukar military forces will eventually force the Emperor to come to the planet. It is also rarely discussed that the Guild Navigators are revealed in the novel’s closing scene, during which they are shown to be normative human males. This clear repudiation of the possibly post-human nature of the Navigators claimed earlier by Duke Leto Atreides is often overlooked as a result of Herbert’s decision to re-introduce the Navigators as definitively post-human icthyoids in the series second installment. All of these elements, however, bolster the argument that later Dune installments departed from the first novel, which was particular in its presentation of ruling class superhuman power as deeply ideological. See: Herbert, Dune, 445-446, 421, 476.; Herbert, Dune Messiah (London, UK: New English Library, 1978), 11.
- Pearson, https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/dune-frank-herbert-denis-villeneuve-left-right-fascism.