#Paul Atreides must die for the Kwisatz Haderach to rise | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

saint-severian · 5 years

Text

Dune - Chapter 1

Worldbuilding presents a challenge for fiction-writers whose worlds go beyond the familiar. The problem is this: how to flesh out a fictional universe with realistically deep and realized background and details without constantly dumping information on the reader as if in a textbook. Although it would be hard to say that Herbert totally avoids this kind of long-form description, he does gracefully justify it. We, the readers, learn in the first chapter about the political intricacies of the universe of Dune because those intricacies are directly relevant to our protagonist right from the outset. Paul Atreides, our guy, is an elite. His parents are elites, and everyone he interacts with in the introductory is an elite in their respective field. His existence is centered, with no ambiguity to him or us, around his future career as a political elite. But he is not a politician, and though, as we will see, his father has to take on a role comparable to a politician, this is quietly a distasteful necessity, an offense to what Paul would call his “sense of rightness”. More on that later.

The Atreides family are not elected politicians. They are aristocrats, who, as we learn in the second paragraph of the text, have lived in “Castle Caladan”, which takes its name from the planet itself, for twenty-six generations. Paul’s ancestors have ruled over an entire planet for more than five centuries. He’s old money. And despite the fact that we learn later that his House is not great by the standards of the galactic Imperium to which it belongs, his father, Leto Atreides, is a widely popular man among the other elites. In this one fact much of the plot is derived. First, we realize that Paul is not the hero of a rags-to-riches story. He is not an underdog, not a challenger in the grand scheme of things. Just the opposite- he is a fifteen-year-old boy who is placed and prepped to become an extremely powerful man. As we will learn, it is more than his external environment that puts him in this position. The second implication of the high status or popularity of his family is that, as Herbert says, “a popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful”. The jealousy of the powerful for Paul’s family will put in effect events that determine Paul’s fate and the fate of the human race.

Under the (assumed) pretext of the Duke Leto Atreides’ rising popularity and competence, he is assigned a new charge. The ‘Padishah’ Emperor (a word meaning “lord of kings”) has chosen Duke Leto, his feudal vassal, to govern a poor, provincial planet in his name. The planet, called Arrakis, is known for two things: it is extremely harsh for human life, being a world entirely of desert, and it is the sole source of a precious resource that is required across the Imperium for everything from space travel to life-extension. This important substance, “mélange”, is usually called simply “spice”, and much of Dune will revolve around it. Already the obvious real-world parallel must be observed: the precious resource required universally in the gigantic economy which is found in a poor desert country - it’s a metaphor for oil, of course, and Arrakis, the desert planet, is a stand-in for the Middle East, and its primitive and Islamic-influenced inhabitants, the Fremen, represent the wilder elements of the Arab world. Not to waste any time - yes, this parallel is legitimate and not at all a secret. But Dune is not an allegory for one particular time and place. It is, like all myth and fiction, applicable to many times and many places.

Although we do not yet know exactly why, a strange woman who is regarded highly by Paul’s mother Jessica, has come to visit Paul and administer a brief test. The test lasts only seconds, perhaps more than a few minutes, but Paul’s life is in the balance - if he fails the test, he will die. Knowing this, his mother nonetheless consents. Paul is assured that she passed the same test long ago, and just before she leaves the room, Jessica tells her son to “Remember you’re a duke’s son”. We quickly see the relevance of this reminder when the nature of the test is revealed. The old woman tells Paul that she is testing him for humanity as he is threatened with a weapon that kills only animals, a “gom jabbar”. Paul is disgusted that she would suggest he - the son of a duke, as his mother just reminded him - would be subhuman. I’ve always loved her response to his outrage: “Let us say that I suggest you may be human”.

Upon my first reading, I interpreted the fact that the tiny, needle-like gom jabbar was poisoned with a substance that was lethal only to the subhuman. This is not the case - it’s not the blade itself that is lethal only to animals, but instead the weapon would only be used on an animal, because only an animal would fail the test and receive the punishment of the poisoned blade. And what is the test? Simple: delayed gratification. Put your hand in a box and don’t pull it out, even while the box gives you excruciating pain. If you fail the test and pull out your hand, you will be stabbed and poisoned and immediately die. Control your urges and pass/live, or give in to your instincts and fail/die. Already we’re on a great track: Herbert has, in the first chapter of his book asserted that not all humans are human, that some are just animals, and that the real dividing line between these two is self-control. This judgement does not bode so well for the innately uninhibited members of the sapient population. Herbert declares, through the mouth of the representative of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, that those who are incapable of restraint are subhuman. Let’s take a look at this fascinatingly fascist matriarchy of manipulators.

Old Gaius Helen Mohaim, the old crone in question, tells us after Paul passes his test with flying colors that her sisterhood is a surviving descendant of a series of “schools” that were founded a very long time ago, after an event that left humanity without the use of “thinking machines”, and thus with a lot of responsibility on our hands to make up for the absence of what had become the crutch of computers. Here is another key concept of the Dune universe - the idea that computers (and many other things) are crutches that allow human beings not to think or act for themselves, but instead to rely upon external systems and tools that do their work for them, and as a result leave them vulnerable for “other men with machines” to make slaves out of them.

Although there is another, apparently all-male school that focuses on “pure mathematics” (an autistic and male pursuit), the Bene Gesserits’ focus is politics, as Paul surmises on “remarkably few clues”. He had to guess that the Sisterhood’s business was politics, despite the fact that he is a political elite, his mother is a member of the Sisterhood, and she had been training him in their ways. The strategy of the BG is covert manipulation of political elites (this should conjure up a list of real-world parallels) ... by, for example, assignment of a sister to become the consort of a duke and the mother of his child, for example. They are an all-female sect that engages in a feminine form of politics, a passive form of politics based around manipulation and deceit. The fact that they are a purely feminine organization in their essence and substance justifies their desire for a masculine version of their power, hopefully a masculine element they can control like anyone else. This masculine version of the Bene Gesserit is called the Kwisatz Haderach, the “one who can be in many places at once”. While the Bene Gesserit can access the “feminine avenues” of their ancestry via blood memory, they can only access their feminine ancestors. The males, and by extension the male perspective, is forever closed to them. But not to the Kwisatz Haderach. The real biological link to these concepts are that, while women have an XX chromosome, and are thus entirely female, men have XY, and are really only half ‘pure male’. Males have something females don’t, but not the other way around. Although males have the capacity to be passive, and thus to take on the aspect of the Bene Gesserit, whose existence is passive despite its great importance and power, they are also endowed with the active element, forbidden to the feminine. This pure male essence is not only unknowable to the female/BG, it is terrifying to them.

In this several myths are invoked. First there is the Dionysian image of the male leader surrounded by female sycophants in the Kwisatz Haderach as the male apotheosis of the Bene Gesserit coven. Second there are the various themes of the Great Goddess of the feminine, and the conquering aspect of the masculine, embodied in the myth of Apollo among many others. Notably missing from the story so far is a snake motif- an element central to the Apollo myth and to Great Goddess figures everywhere. But there will be, so look out for it.

However, many are called but few are chosen to become the Kwisatz Haderach. And, although Paul has passed the first test, those who try to fulfill this role and fail are not forgiven.

#dune reading

16 notes · View notes