DUNE: Chapter Two Thoughts

And so we continue with the reading of Dune.

The Opening Quote

The opening quote says that the Harkonnens are the necessary opposites to Paul. You can’t have light without darkness, so you can’t have Muad’Dib without the Harkonnens.

If we continue to think of Irulan as untrustworthy, then the implication is that the Harkonnens aren’t really that different from the Atreides. Certainly cautious, curious Paul is very different from bratty and bored Feyd-Rautha. Still Paul does display some of the sense of entitlement I think we see in Feyd in Paul’s conversation with the Reverend Mother.

Maybe Muad’Dib is just the Atreides version of the excesses of the Harkonnens?

Sidebar on Atreides

Atreides is the term for a son of Atreus in ancient greek mythology. The sons of Atreus are Agamemnon and Menelaus. The name Atreus seems to mean “fearless,” which would track with the “fear is the mind- killer” thing.

Revenge is a thing for the family of Atreus, as is the sacrifice of their children and prophecy.

• Agamemnon angers Artemis by killing a sacred deer.

• Artemis demands he sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.

• He does so, which angers his wife Clytemnestra, and then is able to sail for war in Troy.

• He returns from Troy with Cassandra as his concubine.

• Clytemnestra then kills him in revenge for Iphigenia.

• His son, Orestes, swears revenge on his mother, Clytemnestra, because it is the duty of a son to avenge the murder of his father.

• However, a son who kills his mother is abhorrent, so he’s caught between a rock and a hard place.

• Orestes figures out he has to kill his mother to exact vengeance, paying for it with his own ruin.

• Eventually he and Apollo go before Athena and get the curse on the house of Atreus lifted because his acts were more noble than anything his ancestors has done.

While Dune isn’t a direct retelling of the story of Orestes, there are enough similarities that the name Atreides does seem like a reference to the House of Atreus.

Introduction of the Harkonnens

Piter is introduced as having an “effeminate face.” His voice tenor, musical, sweet. I presume we’re supposed to think less of him for this. Maybe? It’s a little confusing since we just got done pointing out that Paul probably has to be a blend of the masculine and feminine to be the Kwisatz Haderach. But, then, being the Kwisatz Haderach is not necessarily a good thing. And it’s not like we’re suposed to think well of Piter in the end.

Vladimir has a very, very expensive globe of a very, very desolate place.

Why does Piter wish to exclude Feyd-Rautha? If he truly thinks Feyd will somehow spoil the plans, then either he or the Baron are wrong. I don’t recall there being a plot point around what Feyd does with the information, so it’s unlikely Feyd’s objection here really about the risk created by giving this information to Feyd-Rautha. He’s probably just using that concern to mask his real concern: being made to perform in front of and show his weaknesses to Feyd-Rautha.

“Kanly,” a type of honor duel, is introduced here. Leto threatens to invoke it against Baron Harkonnen. This prefigures the kanly at the end of the book between Leto’s successor Paul and the Baron’s successor Feyd-Rautha. The baron avoids kanly where Feyd will be the one who issues the challenge.

Piter, and later Thufir Hawat, are described as “Mentat assassins.” Like “geriatric”, this is a strange use of the term “assassin.” It’s possible Piter kills people from time to time, he seems more like a fixer or an executor than an assassin. Still, the word is close enough to a description of what they both do that the strange usage is revealing.

That Piter talks too much is foot stomped heavily here. This may echo at the end, where Paul notes that Feyd-Rautha has to talk. Is this to show Feyd’s inability to learn, and maybe to foreshadow that Piter’s fate, death, will also be Feyd’s?

In narrative, Feyd is clearly here to learn why Mentats are useful and how to control them, despite Feyd’s thoughts that he’s here to be let in on the plan. The planning is done and everything set. If the point was to bring Feyd into the plan, he’d have been included well before this point.

The baron points to the human bodies of Mentats being their weakness. More shades of animal/human?

We are told how the Atreides will fall here, including that it’s Dr. Huey and not Jessica who betrays them. This is an interesting choice. Herbert gives up narrative tension in order to show that:

• The plan is already in place before the Atreides go to Arrakis,

• Piter and the Baron know how things are going to go,

• The Atreides are also aware this is a trap,

• Jessica is not the traitor.

Piter isn’t the only one here who’s portrayed as deviating from 20th century gender and sexual norms. They all are running at Disney villain levels of camp. It’s likely leaning hard on the idea of deviance and decadence leading to societal decline and the Fall. We’ll see if it gets more nuanced than that.

Sidebar on Prescience

We’ve now been told by two people that the Atreides know something is up: Jessica and the baron. We’ll soon get confirmation from the Reverend Mother that these events cannot be avoided. Is this the first glimpse into the problem of prescience?

My understanding of future books in the series is that eventually it’s pointed out that prescience is a problem. The more clearly you know the future, the less ability you have to change events. It sounds a little like you become frozen. And the eventual salvation of humanity comes from those with the ability to be unseen by prescience.

Dune came out more than a decade after The Foundation and its use of the idea of “psychohistory.” Dune’s prescience seems to be an echo of psychohistory, but pitched as a problem rather than a solution. It’s likely this is deliberate.

Warning humanity about the dangers of psychohistory seems a rather quixotic quest on the part of Herbert if that’s what he’s doing. Neither psychohistory nor prescience are likely to be real problems any time soon. So, it’s unlikely that we’re supposed to take prescience so literally.

But if prescience isn’t prescience, what is it?

A possibility here is that it’s a warning against setting false limits on what you can do. Leto is walking into a trap. Everyone knows it. Yet, he still does it because he doesn’t see another option. If he’s wrong, if he has other options that he can’t see because he’s too bound by the limits he’s set on himself, then prescience may be standing in for letting society or expectations govern your actions too much.

If that’s is what we are supposed to take from this, we should see some clear evidence that Leto made the wrong choice. I might be misremembering, but I don’t think we ever get that. We just are told there is no way to avoid the current situation. I’ll be keeping an eye open for it, though, in case I am misremembering.

Sidebar on the Fall of Rome

I don’t buy the narrative than decadence led to the Fall of Rome. Why?

• The date of the Fall of the Roman Empire in such narratives is often given as 432, and the Roman Empire lasts for around a thousand years after that.

• I don’t see Empires as a moral good that must be preserved.

• Decadence is too relative and morally loaded a concept to be a useful way to think about how governmental structures and economies change over time.

Basically, no one who points to decadence as the cause of the Fall of Rome is doing it because they have dispassionately reviewed the facts and come to that conclusion. No, they are angry about some aspect of modern society, define that as decadence, and then point to the Fall of Rome for why decadence is bad.

I have similar views about the glorifying of “barbarians” in Robert E. Howard’s work.

The simplicity that comes after a collapse isn’t a virtue. It’s a consequence of the administrative functions that allowed widespread travel and trade going away.

How this works out in Dune, I don’t know. If it understand the problem with its human/animal distinction, then I think there ba be someting interesting here. Otherwise, I have doubts.

Character First Thoughts

• Baron: I should kill Piter soon.

• Feyd-Rautha: Bored now.

• Piter: (This space left intentionally blank.)

Conclusion

We come back to the question I had at the beginning: what is the difference between the Harkonnens and Paul? Given how they are described here, it seems the author wants us to find them repellant. If they are similar to Paul, then perhaps we’re supposed to find Paul repellant, too. If so, we’ve not yet been shown it.