Door County Literature: Authors and After Words

I’ve known about Frank Herbert’s Dune from the time it first appeared in 1965. In those days, I ignored it. I had eyes only for drama.

Several years later, I had a friend who insisted that Dune was an absolute must read. He came from a scientific background and appreciated the traditional hard science of early sci-fi, but he also had an eye for the mythic and the lyric and loved that mixture in Dune. But I kept putting off reading the "masterpiece" until my friend dragged me to a sci-fi conference in Boston to hear Frank Herbert speak about the prospect of having his iconic novel – at long last – translated into a film.

I particularly remember Herbert’s concern over who would play his hero, Paul Atreides. Herbert thought that David Lynch, the director, was right in looking for an unknown actor who would come to the part unburdened with past performances and a known screen personality. Lynch found such an actor in Kyle MacLachian who joined a cast of famous actors like Jose Ferrer and Max von Sydow and actors that were soon to become famous like Patrick Stewart and Linda Hunt. The big coup was getting Sting to play Feyd Rautha. Sting rather camps it up now and then, but who wouldn’t wearing a plastic Speedo that looks like the grill of a 1950s sports car?

Lynch tried to serve the text well but the studio forced him to butcher his four hour vision down to two hours. Even in his abbreviated version, however, Lynch took significant liberties. Herbert was pleased with the longer version of the film, but eventually he became less pleased, especially with some of those liberties. Today, Lynch regards Dune as his only failure and refuses to talk about it.

Fast forward to 2008. Late in the summer when I was thinking about fantasy and science fiction, I discovered that 2005 was the 40th anniversary of the appearance of the completed three-part version of the novel. In all that time, Dune has never been out of print. Thousands of people around the world still read and love this book, but I knew it only from the movie and the mini-series! I was suddenly overtaken by a fit of reader’s guilt for which there is but one antidote. So I read the damned book! My friend was right. Dune is a masterpiece. Now, even at this late date, I am becoming a Duniac!

There has been a great deal of critical commentary about Herbert’s seminal novel. Probably the best account of his major sources, influences and references appears in the "Dune" chapter of Brian Herbert’s biography of his late father entitled Dreamer of Dune. There’s no sense going over that ground in this small space except to emphasize the fact that with Dune, Herbert significantly raised the literary quality of science fiction which surely encouraged many other writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Poul Anderson, Orson Scott Card, to name but a few who continue to expand and enrich the form.

For all of the odd science, the exotic settings, the extra-sensory psychology, the mythic substructure, the archetypal conjuring, in which I certainly take delight, I am most drawn to the sheer mastery of Herbert’s craft. One is naturally captivated by the spectacle of the plot driven as it is by its scale, by the grand conflicts of love, family, betrayal, the search for justice and the transformation of a 15-year-old boy into a mythical hero. But when one steps back from all of that to examine the use of language and voice, one remembers how the spectacle is embellished throughout the text by italicized stream of consciousness writing. Herewith the thoughts and feelings of the principle characters are revealed moment by moment. The inner thoughts of Jessica, the hero’s mother are of particular importance for much of what we see of Paul comes through her eyes. Another point of view is conveyed through the chapter headings supposedly written later on by the Princess Irulan. In her words we see history looking back on these same events which are unfolding in the narration before us. These three levels – the action of the plot, its perception by the participants and its interpretation from the future – create a kind of deep story telling which bundles present and future for the reader in a totally vivid Now.

Dune is an achievement as complex in its simplicity as any other epic. More over, the pertinence of Herbert’s subject matter – the fragility of our planet and our moral structures, our concept of family, our spiritual need to reach out into our universe, our need for heros, their rise and fall, the sacrifices such quests demand and finally the very nature of freedom…all these themes are as important today as they were in 1965.

Frank Herbert lived to produce five more Dune novels. Notes and drafts were discovered for a finale (Dune 7), which was completed in two volumes by Herbert’s son Brian in collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson. These two have also added two trilogies plus several other volumes to the Dune bibliography. For the moment, however, let us savor how the original Dune, like that other great epic of the sixties – The Lord of the Rings – opens our imaginations to experience on a grand scale, the rise and fall, hope and despair, defeat and triumph of being both less and more than merely human.