Dune: Tragic Destiny
Is Paul Atreides an exercise in wish-fulfillment or a tragic hero?
Jude: We kicked off our paired discussion of Dune and Lord of the Rings by thinking about what makes each of them popular. We’re back today to continue our in-depth look at Dune with discussion of its plot. Thomas has suggested we begin by letting him have the floor for a few minutes to describe the plot of Dune. This is clearly a bad idea. You don’t even like Dune.
Thomas: I like it. Sort of. And everyone knows the damn plot already. And if you don’t, but for some reason want to read a huge article about it, then Wikipedia’s got you covered.
Jude: Then let’s just skip the recapitulation of the plot and go straight to the discussion!
Thomas: Nope, I’m going to summarize it. I have studied the possible futures in a prophetic trance and found all your efforts to stop me will be futile.
Jude: Dare I ask what substance you consumed to be able to see these futures?
Thomas: Spicy food, of course. So let’s begin. Ahem.
Dune begins with a boy named Paul Atreides. It rapidly becomes obvious that Paul Atreides is a very special boy. He’s the only son and heir of an important Duke, a powerful noble near the pinnacle of a vast feudal space empire. But that’s not all! He’s having dreams, prescient dreams. After just a few pages it’s obvious that Paul is not just heir to the important Atreides family, he’s heir to an even more important bloodline: the Bene Gesserit eugenics program. In fact, he’s the “Kwisatz Haderach”, an honest-to-God Messiah. Though actually God isn’t involved, this is a totally secular sort of messiah.
Jude: You know, I’m pretty sure the plot actually starts with the Atreides family moving from Caladan to Arrakis. You’re just describing the main character at length.
Thomas: The plot isn’t really about moving to a new planet, it’s about Paul being the special-est boy who ever was. What I just went through makes that clear enough, but I wasn’t even finished! See, after arriving on Arrakis, Paul rapidly becomes identified as the Lisan al-Gaib, an actual religious Messiah to the Fremen. That’s right, he’s two separate Messiahs at once.
Jude: I’m not sure if that should count as two since the Bene Gesserit made him the Kwisatz Haderach and they also planted the Lisan al-Gaib legend, so really—
Thomas: Still not done. Paul is also an unstoppable martial artist.
Jude: That’s pretty common for main characters. In fact you could say this book was far ahead of its time. The martial arts craze in Western culture starts in, what, the 1980s? This is about twenty years before all that.
Thomas: I don’t think the 1980s invented the idea of a badass, that was just when it started getting associated with Asian martial arts. Herbert is probably channeling pulp heroes like John Carter of Mars. Hell, we could go all the way back to Homer’s Achilles.
Jude: Heroes like Achilles, John Carter, and Kal-El are all literally born different, though in three very different ways. Paul achieves his badassness through long study and practice of esoteric disciplines associated with vaguely eastern-sounding lingo (“prana-bindu”).
Thomas: You’re right, that must have been the very leading edge of the martial arts thing. But it’s still worthy of mention here because this is the book where it’s a critical plot point that the extremely harsh environment of Arrakis has made the Fremen into peerless warriors. They’re objectively the baddest dudes in the universe, but when Paul shows up he can beat up any of them without breaking a sweat despite having been raised in incredible privilege.
Jude: All right, all right, he’s pretty special, you’re right. So—
Thomas: Nope, I’m still not done, because in case being a Duke’s heir, what I maintain are two distinct kinds of messiah, and an unstoppable martial artist, we have to also remember that once he gets out into the world he instantly meets a cute girl who immediately signs up to be his girlfriend. Many readers probably finish the book without even noticing that Chani is the daughter of Liet Kynes and so is basically a Fremen princess because, alas, the book is too preoccupied with other matters to spend much time on Chani. But make no mistake, she’s a princess and she’ll be hanging out on backpacks and lunch boxes with Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and the rest if Disney ever manages to get the rights to Dune.
Jude: Okay, so you’re complaining that Paul is a Special Protagonist with a Glorious Destiny. Maybe you think this is a tired trope, but why is it so tired? I think a big reason is stories have been following the template of Luke Skywalker since 1977, another boy who turned out to be quite special. But it’s probable that Paul Atreides was a big influence on the character of Luke Skywalker. Isn’t Tatooine being a desert planet a cultural echo of Arrakis?
Thomas: That seems like too strong a claim to me. Unprovable, too, though I guess you could do a ton of boring research to try buttress it. Off the top of my head, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone was published in 1938 and his Special Protagonist comes straight from the Arthurian tradition.
Jude: Maybe Dune just did it better. It’s true that your list of Paul’s specialness was unusually long. Arthur and Luke Skywalker are comparatively less special, I think.
Thomas: Part of the reason I don’t like Special Protagonists is that, as you said a minute ago, the idea’s been run deeply into the ground by thousands upon thousands of books, movies, television shows, and so on. I also don’t like it because it makes me uncomfortable as a reader to feel flattered by the author. It’s natural to identify with the protagonist of a novel and feel happy when they triumph and a little sad when they have setbacks. When an author gets me to see some of myself in a character and then spends the rest of the book telling the character—and me by extension—how great they are, it seems a little cheap.
Jude: I don’t think I fully agree with your premise. There’s a limit to how Special a protagonist can be before they become a bit too special to be relatable to the reader. Paul starts out as someone quite relatable, I think: he’s young and therefore new to the world. The reader learns alongside him from his father, his mother, and their trusted men about the politics, technology, and challenges of the world. Paul is a little special since he’s a Duke’s heir, but his special-ness is pretty low key. His father is more politically powerful, Idaho and Halleck are better fighters, and his mother is better at wielding the Bene Gesserit powers.
Thomas: That’s true. Dune’s story can usefully be divided into two parts, though not quite where the recent movies divided it. The first runs from the beginning of the book through Paul and his mother being taken captive into the desert by the Baron’s men. Throughout that time, Paul is a lot like the reader: passive and learning the world. His parents and their chief lieutenants, who seem like very impressive people, give him love and respect, so as readers we feel some of it ourselves. When he defeats the assassination device or surprises Kynes with his oracular knowledge of how to put on desert clothes, it’s a fun little victory, but in the larger story he’s still a passenger.
As soon as he and his mother end up in the desert, the second part begins and the Specialness ramps up rapidly. That’s a problem for the narrative because it risks making him less and less relatable. This is an area where I think later work improved on Dune’s formula. Characters like Luke Skywalker are designed to remain as relatable as possible for as long as possible by delaying the full realization of their specialness until the end.
Jude: You say “improved”, but as we discussed last time, Frank Herbert has artistic goals and they prevent him from doing that. He makes sure to show us that many of the impressive people who previously validated Paul as a special young man are worried. His mother fears his increasing detachment, for example, and Gurney Halleck frets that Paul doesn’t care about his men’s lives the way his father did. Those doubts are moments that don’t really pay off until Dune Messiah.
Thomas: I meant “improved” with respect to popular, reader-flattering work. But from a plot perspective, whether or not you share my intellectual dislike of Specialness, one of the chief problems with Special protagonists is they sometimes make it hard for a story to generate dramatic tension. If you stop to think about it, you know someone like Paul is definitely too Special to die and probably too Special to fail at anything important.
Jude: Once again, you’re calling out something true of nearly all protagonists. And surely there’s still dramatic tension in such stories. The trench run in Star Wars is tense and dramatic, even though if you paused the movie back in 1977 and surveyed the audience, probably everyone would admit that Luke won’t be killed and the Death Star will be destroyed somehow.
Thomas: Skilled creators try to surmount this through pacing. If things are moving fast you don’t have time to stop and think. But I mentioned dramatic tension because it’s interesting that Frank Herbert completely eschews most common forms of dramatic tension. For example, the fact that Yueh is the traitor is immediately revealed to the reader, as are the Baron’s secret plans with the Emperor. The Irulan quotes at the beginning of chapters quickly reveal to a somewhat attentive reader that Yueh’s treason will be mostly successful. In the second part of the story, it is even more obvious that Paul triumphs. Paul claims that he sees outcomes of his duel with Jamis where he lies dead, but come on, that’s clearly not going to happen. Paul continues to occasionally think he could die, but mostly even he takes his triumph over the Emperor for granted. What he wants, he tells us, is to find some way to prevent the jihad that will happen afterwards. Yet the Irulan quotes again make that outcome almost entirely clear.
Jude: I think there’s still a lot of tension on a first read since we don’t know the exact form of his victory and the resulting Maud’dib cult.
Thomas: But we know it’s extremely powerful and associated with an Imperial Princess. I think it’s easy to imagine what a Hollywood script doctor would say about all this. “Frank, buddy, I like what ya got here, but let’s tighten some things up!” Tell us there’s a traitor, but hide the identity. Reduce Jessica’s viewpoint in the first part so the possibility she really is the traitor becomes a live issue. Focus more on the adults in the story. Give Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck more to do! Get rid of that Irulan stuff so that the outcome is in doubt. If Paul must be prescient, let him see that nearly every possible future is one where the where the evil Baron Harkonnen is triumphant and laughing with the Emperor over the graves of Paul, Jessica, and Leto.
Jude: Is your point that Hollywood formulas are good? All that would be good advice if Dune was just an adventure story, an update of Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. But Frank Herbert wasn’t trying to write an adventure story. He was writing a tragedy. The principal tragic arc in Dune as published is that of Leto, but Herbert was trying to write a tragedy about Paul. The Irulan chapter headings are not meant to indicate triumph, but forebode failure.
Thomas: I think that’s a pretty accurate assessment of Frank Herbert’s intent, but did he really succeed? I don’t think most readers are paying enough attention to understand these elements. That was my thesis from last time: a majority of Dune’s readers enjoy it as a straightforward story of Paul getting revenge. But whether on those terms or the ones Herbert intends, the second half of the novel isn’t nearly as well-paced or cohesive as the first. Paul works his way through several different coming-of-age ritual episodes (killing a man, mounting a sandworm, awakening his full powers through a drug-induced trance) that don’t have any dramatic tension before his final confrontation with the Emperor.
Meanwhile all sorts of dramatic material is left off-screen, from the process of Paul winning over skeptical Fremen leaders and leading raids against the Harkonnens to, most notably, the death of his first son in a raid and the capture of Alia. A major thread seems to be introduced with the Baron successfully deceiving Thufir Hawat into thinking Jessica was the real traitor, but nothing at all comes of it.
Jude: Yeah, that’s perhaps where Dune shows its age. Had it been written in the last thirty years, I think it’s a no-brainer that the publisher would have wanted the first book expanded into a trilogy so every last ounce of dramatic material could be extracted before Paul’s triumphant defeat of the Emperor. Genre fiction was still grounded primarily in short stories in 1965 and it would be another generation before it became common for novels to have the unified structure and pacing we expect today.
Thomas: But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, because as you said, Frank Herbert wasn’t trying to tell a story of Paul triumphing over the Emperor. He races past the victories and defeats that build up to that moment so he can spend more time lingering on Paul’s brooding about jihad and the rituals that convert him from a political figure (heir to the Atreides) into a religious figure (the Fremen messiah). In the end, the final confrontation with the Emperor is mostly an anticlimax not just because Paul’s victory feels inevitable but so does jihad. Despite the illusion of agency, Paul is just as much a passenger in the second half of the book as the first. He wants to avoid the jihad, but none of his choices make any difference.
Jude: Later, in the sequels, we are told Paul saw a “golden path” leading away from all this but didn’t have the courage to take it.
Thomas: Yeah, but I view that as a retcon Herbert made later as his own interests shifted from the sociological forces that shaped history (with the jihad an obvious allusion to the early Muslim conquests) to those he speculates will shape the future. I see no hints in Dune or Dune Messiah that Paul has turned away from anything. Instead we’re firmly in the mode of ancient Greek tragedy, where nothing the hero does can change his fate (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune have some elements that even more explicitly link Paul to Oedipus). The jihad itself is such a foregone conclusion that Herbert leaves it entirely off-screen between Dune and Dune Messiah.
Jude: I agree that the plot of Dune is structured as a tragedy, or at least the first act of a tragedy. That seems like a good thing to me! There are tons of adventure stories out there that don’t amount to much in the end. Maybe tragedy is a richer vein of story for lasting significance and meaning, one that has helped give Dune its lasting appeal.
Thomas: I think tragedies are bad, actually.
Jude: What? That’s definitely a hot take. So Sophocles and Shakespeare are just hacks who would have written happy endings if they’d been better at their jobs?
Thomas: Shakespeare obviously knew how to write happy endings. I admit this is subjective, both on an individual and a cultural level, but here and now, for most people like us? I’m sure someone has studied this in detail and I admit I’m pontificating without bothering to do any research—
Jude: As is your wont.
Thomas: —but in the modern, English-speaking world that kind of tragedy has been almost completely excised from popular culture. I don’t know why audiences in Athens or Elizabethan London had more of a taste for it, but I know what people today think of tragedy: they don’t like it. It’s relegated to arthouse cinema and capital-L literature. Whereas in popular culture, Luke triumphs over the Emperor and romance novels guarantee happy endings on the back. As we said last time, popular isn’t always good, but if I admit that I prefer stories to end in triumph rather than bleak futility, at least I’m in good company!
Jude: As we said last time, Herbert’s perhaps unintentional genius is you can get a happy ending by reading Dune and an unhappy one by reading Dune and Dune: Messiah, so readers can get the experience they want.
But we’ve been going on long enough for today, time to wrap up.
Thomas: We’ll let the readers who got through all this decide whether it was a Dune or a Dune: Messiah sort of experience for them, then we’ll be back next week to think about destiny and tragedy in Lord of the Rings.