I’ve been re-reading Dune for a couple of weeks. It’s been a while.
When I taught a class a few years ago on approaches to adapting history for creative work, I worked my way through adaptation theory, a body of scholarship I didn’t know about before planning the course.
Many of the scholars in that subfield feel somewhat marginalized within literary or cultural theory, which some of them attribute to the subfield getting stuck with an unsophisticated idea about “fidelity” in adaptation that judges an adaptation largely in terms of how faithful it is to an original work that is deemed inevitably and permanently superior to any adaptive work.
I completely understood the point, though I think it may come bundled with the basic idea of “adaptation”, which kind of has to imagine some relationship between two cultural works where one comes before the other and exercises some influence or authority over successive work.
It’s also just hard not to think about scenes, characters or themes that work in one version and not in another, or changes that lose something important, even if that leads back into the jaws of “fidelity”.
So while I liked the new film version of it, I felt that the element of intrigue and dark portent that’s important to the first part of the book got lost somewhat, in particular the news that the Atreides have a traitor in their midst and the errors and suspicions that follow from that.
No matter how I work my way around it, on the other hand, the way that court intrigue is set up to contrast with the life of Fremen communities is part and parcel of the novel’s basic problem, which its generalized reference to colonial occupation and its specific referencing of Islam and the Middle East. It’s hard to forget that the film Lawrence of Arabia preceded the publication of Dune by three years, and to forget the ways in which the 1962 film’s version of Lawrence—grandiose, driven, imperial-romantic, sentimental, deceptive—resembles a lot of the story of Paul Atreides/Paul Muad-dib in the first book.
There are readings I can offer to forestall this a bit. Stilgar as a fairly rounded individual has some agency in the story, and he more or less knows the devil’s bargain he’s striking with Paul and Jessica. The Fremen generally have some agency—they’re up to far more than just kicking the Harkonnens and the Emperor off of Arrakis, as we find out in Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. They haven’t been helplessly waiting for Paul. The degree to which the Fremen can fit Paul and Jessica into their own spiritual and political world is revealed very clearly to be the result of a millennia-long scheme by the Bene Gesserit. And most importantly, Paul is not Lawrence or a fully conventionalized white savior because of his prescience—the book does not end with a simple liberation of an oppressed people by an outsider who has gone native.
And yet. And yet. You really can’t shake that out of the novel despite the characters who give it some texture and the science-fiction trappings that give it complexity. I still appreciate a lot of the novel and its sequels up to God Emperor of Dune, but time has made the family tree that leads to it more and more troubled. I love the pace, I love the ideas about the universe beyond Arrakis, which are more interesting. I love some of the key elements: the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, the Ixians. It’s got some of the most compelling military action in any work of 20th Century science fiction. I still find the way it treats prescience and prophecy interesting. I don’t know that I ever loved the book as unreasonably as I still love some others that I read at an early age, but my estimation of it has slipped some over the years.