This post comes at the urging of a friend and a stroke of inspiration prompted by a web comic last weekend.
I wanted to write a series of meditations on Frank Herbert's "Dune" earlier this year, but was prevented by illness from following through. As a further bit of background, my wife and I were reading the book together out-loud at the time. It was my third time through the novel and her first.
Since its appearance, "Dune" has been the poster-book for proponents of transhumanism; the belief that science should be employed to help humanity "transcend" unwanted features of current human existence such as sickness and death. In the sixties, this interpretation was linked with the drug culture so that "Dune" became "all about the spice." The drug angle seems to be losing steam the further we get from the sixties, however, and the new take on the book is heavily influenced by environmentalism, cloning and genetics, the oil crisis, and events in the Middle East.
Certainly, all these themes can be found in the work, but I want to offer a little different spin in interpreting "Dune." The place to start, as a professor at the U of R pointed out to me, is with the title. The book (and those that follow it) all have as their title the name of the planet on which the action takes place. With a good writer, the title of a book generally alerts the reader right off to the core theme(s) or character in the novel. "Jane Eyre" is a book about Jane, "Pride and Prejudice" is about, you guessed it, pride and prejudice. In the case of "Dune"this should point right off to the central character of the work: the planet Arrakis.
I find further evidence, right at the start, that Arrakis is the focal character of the book, from the dedication:
"To the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of "real materials"- to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration."
The great workers toward the future, for Herbert, are not geneticists, or historians, or poets; they are ecologists, those who study the forces that make up a planet. Interestingly enough, this seems to presciently predict Jared Diamond's theory of geographical determinism in "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Again, this moves the focus of the work from any human character or characters and puts it on the title planet, Dune.
The purpose of "Dune" according to my read, then, is not to endorse the quest to master human evolution, but to deemphasize the importance humanity places on itself, and picture humans as just another factor of earth's ecology. All the wars, loves, politics, and religion are just tiny little ripples within the greater narrative of the planet's evolution.
Of course, a lot more evidence is needed to substantiate this claim. However, weblogs are ideally unsuited as a medium for handling 120 page academic essays. My hope is that by posting these thoughts, the reader can begin to intuitively grasp the inherent plausibility of this reading and find motivation to reengage the text along a different axis. Subsequent posts on this topic should be understood in light of this read on the text.
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