Reading Dune Messiah, volume 2 in the Dune Chronicles, I am catching nuances I missed before. It always amazes me how that goes: read a book again and again, experiencing the same story, the same voice in the writing, but catching new things every time. Movies are the same way for me. But today’s catch has caught me off-guard, a little embarrassed, a bit appalled at my own obliviousness.
How is it that I never honed in on the out-right possession, the wholesale ownership, of key characters in this book? I noticed it, but somehow never focused on it.
The ghola Hayt is the first example,
Edric rolled in the tank, bringing his attention to bear on the ghola. “This is a man called Hayt,” he said, spelling the name. “According to our investigators, he has a most curious history. He was killed here on Arrakis . . . a grievous head-wound which required many months of regrowth. The body was sold to the Bene Tleilax as that of a master swordsman, an adept of the Ginaz School. It came to our attention that this must be Duncan Idaho, the trusted retainer of your household. We bought him as a gift befitting an Emperor.” Edric peered up at Paul. “Is it not Idaho, Sire?”
(All emphasis is mine)
Slavery, right down to the dehumanizing use of the word “it” to describe Hayt as a Thing, not a person. Humans, even that fictional creation, the ghola, bought and sold. Somehow, in the paragraph, my compassionate mind can accept the selling of a body, a cadaver, but once reawakened, can it be right for him, whether he be Hayt or Idaho, to be bought and sold? It doesn’t feel like slavery, because everything so nice and orderly and well-groomed and polite. But it is slavery. Hayt seems to see no escape, no out – he accepts his role as “gift” without a blink.
However, he at the same time wishes to regain his humanity, and eventually does in the storyline. Where does he shift from being a Thing, a slave offered as a “gift” and hence owned by Paul, to being the consort of Alia, a full human even before he regains his original memories? Hayt is treated as a human, bonded more as a “trusted retainer” in a new guise, rather than a bound slave. He seems to be wandering freely about the palace, and one doesn’t imagine, for example, that after his daily visits with Paul and Alia, after participating in meetings and audiences, that he goes off to slumber in some locked cell in the basement of the Imperial palace. No, one sees him retiring in a sharply appointed bedroom suite, possibly in a wing where only trusted appointees are given living quarters.
The second example, the one that grabbed my attention today, is a more … traditional depiction of an owned person. The catalyst dwarf created, like Hayt, by the Tleilaxu, is clearly a slave, owned outright and traded to Paul in exchange for taking Otheym’s semuta-addicted daughter off her father’s hands:
“My dwarf,” Otheym wheezed. “I bought him on… on… on a world… I forget. He’s a human distrans, a toy discarded by the Tleilaxu. He’s recorded all the names… the traitors…”
Otheym fell silent, trembling.
“You speak of Lichna,” Dhuri said. “When you arrived, we knew she’d reached you safely. If you’re thinking of this new burden Otheym places upon you, Lichna is the sum of that burden. An even exchange, Usul: take the dwarf and go. . . . .
“. . . It’s known . . . how poor we are. We’ve said we’re selling the dwarf. They’ll take you for the buyer.”
Everyone accepts this in the story. No eyebrows are raised as people are traded back and forth as gifts, as Things. Of course, there is little vertical movement in the Emperial Duniverse, which would seem to encourage the situation: you are what you are – soldier, royal, peasant, merchant, slave – and you more or less stay in that sphere. The faufreluches, Herbert named it in the first novel:
FAUFRELUCHES; the rigid rule of class distinction enforced by the Imperium. “A place for every man and every man in his place.”
(from the Terminology section in Dune)
And I had only recently been asking at the SciFi Haven book reader’s forum (see 7/4/06 entry) about this passage in Dune: Duke Leto is contemplating the character of Gurney Halleck, reflects “Here was a man who lived outside the faufreluches while obeying their every precept.” I asked what was meant by this statement. It was proposed in the forum that Gurney “lived outside” the system because he moved up and down, from slave (when he was owned by the Harkonnens), to trusted confident of a Duke, to soldier in desert guerilla forces fighting against an Empire. He could be comfortable and productive, if you will, in just about any sphere, and get respect in most of them as well, but perhaps only because he really didn’t belong to any particular class. A soldier, sure, but even in that regard he was not a traditional military man.
Now, thinking about slavery in the Duniverse being just one aspect of the rigid class system, I think my fellow Havenites were correct in their analysis: Gurney was special because he could mover around in the system. Most could not. It highlights the contrast: that for most in Paul’s universe, you were more or less locked in where you were born (or made, as regards the “Tleilaxu creations). You might be able to improve your lot within your station, but you were unlikely to ever break free from it. Thus, slavery sits against a backdrop of a whole spectrum of rigid class distinctions.
Now, reading the Dune Chronicles, one sort of ends up accepting the rigidity of social position, and again, with that backdrop somehow slavery doesn’t stand out quite so sharply. But it is sharp, and kind of class distinction mixed with a devaluation of humanity so deep that it makes me shudder and sort of shrivel up in my gut. And the real question, purely for myself, is why it took me more than a dozen readings of this book to really notice.
I have my homework cut out for me.
