On Frank Herbert’s ‘Heretics of Dune’
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Rebecca Ferguson as The Lady Jessica in Dune (2021), courtesy of Warner Brothers.
How do we encompass a great span of years in our history? At what point might we loosen or even exit the grip of the past to set our own, free course?
Living amidst a density of historical and ideological forces, one might be forgiven for thinking there is no way out of the closed loop. For Darwi Odrade and the other principal characters of Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune, this concern is entirely ontological.
5,000 years have passed since the centralised tyranny of Leto II Atreides, the God Emperor. Never before and never again will humanity be controlled by a single fulcrum of intelligence; the fall of the God Emperor and the chaos of the Famine Times and the Scattering have marked bloody chapters in the human story. No group, no thought, no person has escaped the sharp lessons conferred by the son of the Kwisatz Hadarach.
So is the new freedom truly free?
Where the great Dune trilogy focuses on the imperial fulcrum of House Atreides, God Emperor and the subsequent two novels are fixed decidedly on those living in the devastating wake of the history makers. Here in Heretics, the Bene Gesserit themselves are divided along competing ideologies with regards to considering the new threat: those returning from the void of space, and the spectre of the Honoured Matres. Herbert’s fine mind diligently considers the quandary of the Sisterhood, victims perhaps of their own specific hubris and the weight of their own meta-Missionaria Protectiva, and places this against the Priests of Rakis, the Tleilaxu, and the terror of the Honoured Matres. Religious institutions are the focal point of this novel, and its sequel Chapterhouse: Dune. And how might one judge an institution? Through the people wedded to it, crushed by it, and irrevocably changed by its gravitational pull.
As with all great literature, the problems of the novel are irretrievably enmeshed with the great problem of human life: how should one be? As Odrade, Miles Teg, a new Duncan Idaho ghola, and the competing factions within and without the Sisterhood manoeuvre against one another, this is the grand consideration looming over all. How can the Sisterhood function if it may still be on the Golden Path set by Leto II? Will a new Duncan Idaho ever recapture the freedom he might not even have had as a human in the days of Paul? Can contact with the deadly Honoured Matres leave the Bene Gesserit unchanged, or will this clash with their dark mirror destroy them entirely? How does a person, or an institution, respond to a world it seeks to change and is at once changed by?
I suspect, given the works’ warning stance on the power of prescience, that Herbet might have been disturbed by his own. The architecture of this novel offers much in the way of comparison with any reader’s world; in the specificity of Herbert’s universe, the pearls of awareness that reflect our own abound. Heretics of Dune, like the novels which precede it and that which follows, offers the challenging, yet ultimately rewarding edifice of honest considerations of the human experience. Part of that experience is our fantastic ability to be inhuman at times. Even the detached brilliance of the Bene Gesserit with their aversion to romantic love must chafe against the self-imposed limits of the desire to fly through the universe with their power operating behind a veil of shadows.
And then there are the Tleilaxu to consider. What Herbert’s magisterial mind was so brilliant at conceiving were visions of the end state of certain patterns of thought and behaviour. Where the Bene Gesserit take their eugenics and religious engineering to the limit of their possibility – a legion of uncountable Victoria Frankensteins, when one considers the errant cost of Muad’dib and the God Emperor to their plans – the Tleilaxu represent instead a different facet of similar historical forces. The matriarchy of the Sisterhood is certainly not without fault, yet the patriarchal, technology-driven Tleilaxu are revealed in Heretics to have a secret heart that beats far closer to the Bene Gesserit than the Ixians, as one may assume. For thousands of years, the genetically puritan, ultra-xenophobic Tleilaxu have been far more than purveyors of Gholas for those who would pay; where the Ixians are the go-to for secret technological advancements, and credited with the invention of the ‘no-room’, the ‘dirty Tleilaxu’ as they are known, have been in a millennia-long peregrination from political disenfranchisement to religious ascendancy. The Bene Gesserit had their Kwisatz Haderach, yet the Tleilaxu sought their apotheosis through no such precarious fulcrum as a messiah figure. Instead, through the proliferation of their Face Dancers, they seek a universe that is only a vision of their own glory. Yet only by allying with the Sisterhood and accepting the changes this brings can they hope to survive the Matres. War and terror make for strange bedfellows, and religious politics absorbs and responds to the shock of these.
What is the great heresy? Is such a question, so broad and impossible to answer, worth posing if it births no definitive answers? Of course. Art’s existence is its own justification, and the unanswerability of this central spine of Heretics of Dune makes the reading experience richly rewarding indeed, whether for a first time reader, or a retracing of the story. One might think of the great heresy as the various factions’ betrayal of the pure chaos of human creation and life, which Leto II’s Scattering was meant to effect. King of kings, the ‘Worm-who-was-God’ devoted his tyranny to the destruction of all singular fulcrums. With the Tleilaxu invention of artificial melange (albeit from their axolotl tanks, a grisly reality indeed; though one that bares much resemblance to the leaps and bounds of real life human invention) the spice is no longer the controlling force by which any one faction may maintain a despotic hold on what humanity can become.
Yet there may also be the heresy of betraying the human not on the universal scale, but the personal. By the existing standards the Bene Gesserit, Darwi Odrade, much like the Lady Jessica of House Atreides before her, betrays in thought and deed the tenets of the Sisterhood. Yet it is Odrade’s evolving understanding of her capacity to and necessity for love that she is best able to serve the Sisterhood in Heretics and its sequel, Chapterhouse. Purveyors of the future, the Bene Gesserit have thus far been terrified of its inherent quantum chaos. Only through the aggressive force of the Matres, and the threat of total extinction, do they face the necessary evolutionary pressure to meet and create the demands of a chaotic future.
And the Honored Matres themselves? The end state of gluttony. The Matres are gluttons for all things, all experience, and are themselves the destroyers of their own power even as they create it. They respond in overwhelming force to even the slightest resistance, and, assured of their own superiority, like all imperial powers, cannot exist under the weight of their own self-image. The men they enslave, the planets they destroy, the Sisterhood as the ultimate Other they fetishise in their quest for destruction, everything that is not under their domain exists to be brought into subjugation. But such a binary and vituperative logic cannot help but devour itself. If everything is frontier, one remains constantly exposed to and changed by the new, and in their flight out of the unknown reaches of space back into the old empire – at the behest of fear of a greater enemy, Herbert hints – their desperation for dominion shows the dissolving paradox at the heart of all imperialist fervour.
In the extremity of the clash with the Matres, the forces of the Scattering, the Bene Gesserit, and the Tleilaxu all evolve into new realms of thought and action – the Idaho ghola, Bashar Miles Teg, and Sheena all proving to be focal points around which these changes manifest. It is in the creative and destructive energies of the heresy that change and the possibilities for the futures it may bring can finally occur. With the death of all but one of the sandworms with Leto II’s consciousness locked within, the Sisterhood are apt to assume they have freed humanity from that tyrannic grip, even as the grip of the Matres closes in…
Eliza Clark’s “Boy Parts” – a nasty piece of work
What is it about pain and destruction through the eyes of the destroyer that is so appealing to us? What does it say about us that we revel in this voyeuristic exploration of selfishness, shame, hurt, and anger? Need it say anything at all to be worthy of acclaim; need it serve as a negative moral lesson of who we should be in order for it to be a valuable story for us? I think the answer is no, and I think Eliza Clark’s novel “Boy Parts” can be read in this way too.
Clark’s delicious debut is the stunning introduction in novelistic form to a powerful new voice. Irina, our not-quite hero, is a disgruntled, gifted, sharp-eyed photographer who pushes the boundaries of social norms and morés through her art. It is as much a relationship in the vein of BDSM as it is of the psychological power imbalance between photographer and subject. Who are her subjects? Men. Ordinary, unusual, average, ugly men. Just as the introduction to “Promising Young Woman” shows us the rolling bodies of men in a bar to the Charli XCX song “Boys” Irina’s art and her mind treats the male subjects as pieces of meat no different or no less discernible from the exacting totalitarianism of the male. These people are not people to her, they are accoutrements of existence, beings to play parts in the psychodrama of her photography, of her guilt, of her shame, of her desire for self destruction and apotheosis – godhood almost. Irina is utterly as she is and it is fascinating and freeing to be inside a mind so able to lie to itself effortlessly, while also constantly being aware of the performative nature of those lies; of the performative nature of gender and sexuality, and the play between subject and object negotiated by all but especially by women in a cultural environment that ingrains them with this social technology of movement. In this way, everything is a part. There is no distinction between the extreme cinema Irina watches, nor the codependent manipulative relationship she maintains with her best friend Flo. Everything is à la cart on the menu of life for Irina; it’s all the same and it’s all different and it’s all just parts to play with.
Near the end of Clark’s fantastic novel – published by the ever interesting Influx Press – Irina muses on the stupidity of one of her conquests, who simply refuses to consider himself a victim of her violence. Why does he do this? Because Irina is a beautiful woman. Knowing this and weaponising the social capital it gives her, she pushes against the tyranny of beauty, exposing its hypocrisy and the ugly devil horns behind the halo effect. Irina can be as terrible and as destructive as she is precisely because the beauty that shields her from critique is the weapon she uses to wield it. The commodity of her beauty is something inherent to her, yet compromised by her mother’s expectations, yet able to be worn and shrugged off at a moment’s notice like any other mask.
Clark’s novel has been compared to “American Psycho” and Irina herself to the clear dead-eyed ironic sarcasm of a Patrick Bateman; this certainly makes sense, but Irina is a woman of her time just as Bateman was a man of his. No comparison is ever one to one but the mirror of “American Psycho” perhaps effaces the modern sensibilities and tricksiness of structure in Clark’s novel. The chapters are categorised by the men – the Boy Parts – who figure as central or tangential to Irina’s journey. There is something of the vampire in her characterisation, and she is absolutely a predator.
Additionally, in the background and flourishing in the world that the novel reflects is a repudiation of the mid-to-late-2010s British culture in which Irina finds herself. This is a culture in which the societal handovers of 2000s lad culture are being re-examined in the wake of newly mobilised progressive social changes. The hypocrisy inherent within people, even though many people are trying to be the best they can, is exposed in scenes where Irina muse upon class and gender, upon the relationship between the North and the South, on the hollowness of the London art scene, and the preponderance of the overprivileged and under talented who swarm the ranks of British artistic milieux. Irina knows just as she must perform her femininity, she must perform her position as a northern woman representing the diversity figure for the flighty, posh London art world.
Vastly different from her main character, Eliza Clark herself has offered comment on how her identity as a northern working-class white woman marks her out as the premier category of diversity in the British literary landscape. The aplomb and wit with which she deconstructs this put-upon pedestal is testament to the vast swathes of work being done and continued to be needing to be done to make the British literary landscape far more reflective of its public and the demographics of readership, a variety of stories that exist at therein. Clark’s second novel will be published soon and she has spoken about collating together a collection of her short fiction and short stories, so we don’t have too long to wait to hear from this fascinating writer. “Boy Parts” is a dark novel, but it wears its darkness not with the cool self-knowing of “dark fiction”. Instead it is in the scenes of extreme violence where the sociological and psychological violence sit next to the mundanity of everyday life. In that aspect, “Boy Parts” is a brilliant piece of work; a nasty piece brilliant for its nastiness.
An atmospheric debut; we’re in Irina’s mind, stapled alongside like passengers to the best and worst impulses of a person. A brilliant mirror to mid-2010s British culture, exposing the hypocrisies and the dryness inherent in modern life.
You can order “Boy Parts” from Influx Press directly here.
Day Zero
Facing the start of a journey, you never quite know where its slides and digressions are going to take you.
Often, you imagine some vision of reaching the end, the terminus all glittering, yourself shining within that moment with nary a physical scratch nor psychic scar. But I know enough to know how comically naive such a thing is as it pertains to writing.
And I am writing a novel.
Writing is often a lonely affair, so I’m going to be coming back to share periodically how the progress is going. Both as a bit of background fun to see how the novel evolves in its construction, and also as an insurance policy to make sure I write it. It’s much harder to skip out on delivering to an audience, even an assumed one.
I hope that you (whoever you may be, even if You are future me) will follow along at your pleasure as I attempt this strange and transformational journey.
“I am that I am”: Curious godhood in God Emperor of Dune
This entry has proven difficult to write. For some time now I have been struggling how to say anything urbane and eloquent about the fourth entry in the Dune Saga. This stems not from lack of trying, nor from insufficiently urbane and eloquent source material, but in fact from the very opposite. God Emperor of Dune, the first evolution of Frank Herbert’s science fiction universe to break utterly with the legend of Paul Muad’dib, is an epic tale.
The structure of epic, most alive in this most self-aware of metafictional narratives, pervades the central intelligence of this work: the 3500-year-old God Emperor Leto II Atreides. Gone are the bone-scouring desserts of Arrakis, replaced instead by lush greenery, save for the preserve he keeps for himself. Remaining are the machinations of the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tleilax, albeit in a diminished capacity. Whereas the previous trilogy in Herbert’s Imperium could be said to deal with the question of myth-making and its inevitable crushes of the individual to historical necessity, God Emperor of Dune advances these critiques to their ultimate plane of consideration: godhood.
It may be strange to think of it thus, but the novel operates as a diary of God, explaining Leto II’s millennia of historical engineering. We are treated with conspiratorial specificity to the full extent of the Bene Gesserit’s fear from Dune; the existence of a force of ultimate authority to which all else must submit. As with Herbert’s previous two novels, God Emperor of Dune moves through its own history, creating through its differences with its own past, space for readers to reflect upon the history they have come to understand. Our awareness of the now mythic events of the Dune days and even the tyranny of Muad’dib’s Jihad are but line items in an endlessly fractal history that moves forever forward.
Is God Emperor of Dune about power, history, selfhood, godhood, manipulation, hydraulic despotism, the strange cantilevers of random contingencies… yes to all. Yes to all these, and more. It seems reductive to distill the experience of this challenging novel to something it is “about” rather than something that it simply (and complicatedly) is. It is what it is.
Equally clever in this tale is the anchor-point of the resuscitated Duncan Idaho gholas, who(m), like us, are thrown from the world we have known of the Atreides imperial reign into this new future. Historical drifts have occurred. The once mighty Fremen have become poor anthropologic shades of their glory. The Bene Gesserit, perhaps without equal as a continuity of power from the time of the Lansraad to the reign of Paul, are now no more than supplicants to an absolute authority. And yet, though Leto II remains a dictator of matchless rank, we feel his loneliness, the very self-aware fundamentalism of his path, which is perhaps not blindly fundementalist as we may conceive such ways of thinking, because it is the Golden Path he chooses.
Most astute and interesting in his characterisation – and his psychoanalysis from the other grasping power-sources of his despotic rule – is the boredom of God. What would be a surprise to a being in whose sight all possibilities arise? He who can see the end point of every decision to defy before it can be made? He to whom all hearts are open and before whom all lies are as wind? While this theophany is the heart of the book, it is, ironically, the part that only began to resolve into its true shape after I finished it. The characters and the mysteries remained as well-drawn as ever, and yet I could not shake the sense that I was reading a text that was unfolding with mechanical repetition. Yet, is this not how all the characters and their desires would play out to the God Emperor?
Though the novel often feels as if it is merely an extended delay to set up subsequent events, I think that this feeling in itself is a sign of the success of Herbert’s project. It is one thing to hint at the paralysing, parasitic nature of an ultimate despot upon the created universe of his works, and quite another indeed to give us that experience. Leto II is the greatest of all of History’s Great Men, and thus, inevitably, the most terrible of all. How else are we, and the Dune Imperium to pass through to the other side of his awareness than by traversing his Golden Path? Repeatedly, Leto II speaks to his confidants and his recording diaries in the mode of a teacher; his life, his times, and his Time, are all exemplars for humanity to follow away from a path of decay and destruction. The 3500-year lesson is a sharp one, though whether of the highest nobility or the lowest hubris (or both), the future of the Dune Saga remains to judge this.
Reading Recommendation: “Such A Fun Age” by Kiley Reid
Every once in a while – more often than you might think – the strange contingencies of the universe conspire to present you with a book that opens itself up to you, revealing a world both distant and comfortingly familiar. I often think that this is the central magic of contemporary fiction, and in Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age, this is exactly the kind of experience you get.
Reid’s novel centres on Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old woman aware that the success she should be on the cusp of seems always that little bit further away than it should. In the opening pages of the book, Emira, called in at the last minute to babysit for her wealthy employer, is accosted in an upscale grocery. In a scene all too familiar to anyone with the slightest awareness of the potential for racism to rear its violent head into any situation, Emria faces off against the store security guard while phones whip out to capture the distress of the moment in infinite clarity.
The moment de-escalates, but from it springs the tragicomic tensions of this comedy of woke, Obama-era manners. Emria’s world – and the internal world of the novel’s other main character, Alix Chamberlain – is sweetly familiar in a way not quite nostalgic. Reading such a recent past perspective on our world both captures the absurdity of the 2015 it depicts, as well as revealing the familiar structures and emotional beats of a world both a few years behind us, and captured within us.
One of Reid’s best gifts with this novel, is the way its characters – much like ourselves – reincorporate and reinterpret their pasts. As Alix returns again and again to her self-identity from a pivotal moment of her own past, and takes on Emira as a project to improve as a proxy to her own troubles, Reid’s ability to show how humans litigate our pasts and the selves we were within them, is truly masterful. The comedy comes from recognising yourself, even in Emira’s naivety of the questionably racist acts of her employer and her own boyfriend; or in Alix’s narcissistic tendencies which read so clearly from the outside, but make you wonder if our own flaws would be so easily telegraphed on a page for others to read.
Reid’s novel is startlingly human. But the surprise comes both from the words themselves, as well as the empty spaces they leave for the reader to pour themselves inside. Never trite, nor saccharine, Such A Fun Age is an acerbic, well-executed story that leaves you desperate for more after its last words.
Monsters all around us: On Director Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman”
Cassandra is the woman that no one believes.
In Greek mythology Cassandra is the woman that no one believed. Even though her prophecies always come true she is fated to be dismissed, maligned, infantilised and ultimately objectified by all those around her who do not heed her call.
So it is unsurprising that Cassandra (or Cassie) is the name director Emerald Fennell gives her protagonist in the arresting and mordant film, Promising Young Woman. What is so brilliant about Carey Mulligan’s performance and Fennell’s directing and screenwriting, is that the arc of Cassie’s story is very similar to a superhero origin story – like a Batman story. Cassandra, the person that has been victimised and brutalised, and is suffering through the grief and loss of her friend, decides to get the righteous justice that is so often, in both the media we make and reality it represents, denied to women to have experienced sexual trauma. This denial is intimately connected to a greater denial of the experiences and voices of women; even how, even as Cassie meet’s Bo Burnham’s nice guy Dr Ryan, he cuts her off. He interrupts her. But hey, he seems like a nice guy. So when that sting of the film arrives, we learn that for even the nicest of nice guys, scratching beneath the surface reveals that they’re not that nice at all.
In fact, Ryan is simply just like all of the men in this film; every one of whom is rendered as pathetic, dismissible, low. These men require the assent of other men and the women around them to support their self-image.
When Cassie reveals that she is not drunk or high to the many, many men who are about to rape her, they beg forgiveness; not becuase they know they have done something unconscionably wrong, but forgiveness because they know they’ve been caught. Red handed. It’s not an “iIm sorry, I did something that was hurtful and violently destructive”, but an “I’m sorry, please validate my self-image… I’m not a bad guy”
“I’m not as bad as those other guys…”
“We were drunk.”
“We were just kids…”
All excuses that are peddled forth by men, and many women, that allow this vile culture to persist. It seems comedic at times in its absurdity that human beings could behave this way to one another; it should beggar belief that Cassie and Nina’s friends, other women, would weaponise the very same logic that maligns and boxes them into its perverted shapes. And yet, they weaponise it against each other. This casual violence.
And violence is everywhere. All the time.
It’s not just the extreme violence of the end, where Cassie’s death (suicide?) is never cut away from, instead played out in all of its horror and all of its gruesomeness until it bends around to being an absurdist comedy. The absurdity of this violent act in particular, which I think is the ultimate terror and one of the facets which makes this film so astute, is that it’s just there. And it is no different than any of the other thousand little moments of dismissal. The casual violence with which men discuss women, interrupt them, it is there on show, and from guys who look and sound like the guys we’ve all heard and seen this from before.
It bears noting that the casting for this film is another shrewd directorial choice on Fennell’s part. Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, and Bo Burnham, are all actors who have public personas of being nice dudes; both Adam and Max have been known as heartthrobs from a teen drama and family-friendly comedy, respectively. And their characters are “nice guys”, the guy who won’t hurt you (immediately). These are nice white dudes, who also will not necessarily speak up when they hear other men saying or doing things they know are wrong. Nice guys who depend for the entirety of their nice guy self-understanding, by it being ratified by other nice guys and good girls. For clarification, “good girls” aren’t crazy; they don’t make those awful accusations that other girls do, because, as the rapist Al points out – “it’s a guy’s worst fear”, being accused of something they refuse to even name. That refusal is important, because to name the thing is to categorise it as the heinous violation which it is. That which cannot be named cannot be proven.
Such a stance is also taken by Connie Britton’s Dean Walker – the woman knows that there are certain ways to behave, and you don’t get into trouble, until her daughter is threatened. But more than teaching any one individual a lesson, Cassie’s indictment is against a culture, a culture that everyone participates in. PYW might come off as absurd and comedic and some sort of funhouse mirror of a world that many of us might be all too willing to forget existed and continues to exist, even in an evolved post Me-Too form.
In this film, we, the audience, ride as the Robin to Cassie’s Batman. We see everything as she sees, and like a sort of next gen Amy Dunne, we really hear and understand every line item of rage that is justified. Her name might be Cassandra, but perhaps the most accurate image or framework through which we might connect her to the great web of stories we tell around men and women and justice, might be the furies. She gives people the opportunity to atone – like Alfred Monlina’s lawyer, Jordan.
Jordan is the only one who remembers Nina Fischer’s name. He is the only one who feels any shred of remorse before the sword of justice falls upon him. He is the only one to tell Cassie just how detailed the destruction of Nina was. The only one to expose the grotesque system for its grotesqueness. Whereas Madison (played by Alison Brie), only gloats. She is gloating that the system is what it is, and she figured out how to survive within it. This is a very insidious character. And then when it almost happens to her, that spurs the memory. When the awful act of violence which presumably led to Nina’s suicide (or death) occurs, and Madison behaves predictably as many people who experience these awful things do – confused, ashamed, guilty, utterly transformed – (a point Cassie makes Al aware of in the penultimate confrontation of the film). It is only when the threat is at her door that Madison can begin to conceive of the terror that so many women experience. And then have minimised, and invalidated, and appended to them as the category of their being.
This film is so brilliant because it is utterly simple. It doesn’t sensationalise because it doesn’t need to. The reality in which we live is sensationally violent. And it has been accepted as such. It has been accepted that young women, young girls, must be taught how to dress, how to stand, how to talk, how to move, what to say, what not to say, how to appease the egos of the men around them as a means of maintaining their own safety. They always have to be performing.
Even in discussions of this film, horrible assertions have been made by critics who would probably see themselves just like the nice guys, that Carey Mulligan is “not believable” as Cassie because, in their estimation, she’s not attractive enough to fill the role as the honeypot they see the character as. They offer instead producer Margot Robbie, whose career and public life is often reduced only to her looks in favour of her considerable talent. They seek to suggest that she might have been a more appropriate choice because they find Margot Robbie attractive enough to believe that many people- perhaps they themselves – would take home drunk. This obvious lie speaks to the myth within rape culture that the threat is primarily the burden of “attractive” women, which exposes it as something conceived of as a perverse badge of distinction in the minds of many of the men who would seek to see themselves in the nice guys here. I think that’s what lies behind a lot of these analyses: Mulligan, an actor of fantastic ability – is thought of by these critics as not fuckable enough. And the great irony is many of these men are precisely the kind of men who might be sweating when they go home at night because they’re trying to wonder how much of a circle the venn-diagram between themselves and the Bo Burnham, Adam Brody, or Max Greenfield characters of this film really is. Just like people questioning the wisdom of the Me-Too movement and whether it’s “going too far”. Or the people who seek to silence those who do speak up. Or the people who overlook when their guys do something bad, because that’s just what guys do. The point is socialisation; these absurd, comedic, violent lies that lie in descriptive and prescriptive language.
Violence cuts away what is and denies us what might have been; the title PYW, describes both Cassie and Nina and pretty much every woman in the films who are overlooked to protect the interests of the promising young men, whose interests are protected by their friends, bro code, their lawyers, their academic deans. Those men have everything laid out for them and made for them; the promising young W? What has been stolen? The joy and experiences of Nina and Cassie’s friendship had Nina lived. Nina’s brilliance as a doctor, Cassie’s brilliance as a doctor, the good that they would do their communities and to each other and to themselves, has been stolen from them by a system that has victimised, itemised, and destroyed them. Even the men in it, the men who go on to become such casual destroyers around them. The men in this film are pathetic, weak, they are not portrayed in the manner we typically think of men in film or tv or real life. While 50 years of feminist evolution have enabled constant conversations to be had about what it means to be a woman, these conversations have not happened in such public forums with regards to men, especially straight men. Such discussions have been reacted against, seen as other, excluded, taken as threats by the same culture that mangles these men into the predators they become. Men socialized into violence.
The world turns. And these nice guys who are self aware enough to know they aren’t as bad as those bad guys, given the chance or the opportunity, find that the gap between their understanding of themselves as nice and the real bad guys, closes very swiftly. What is so absurd is that they are performing their nice guy routine for themselves, and require an audience and the light of golden adoration to make it real to themselves. It’s so easy to seem like a nice person. Every man in PYW is a paper shade of a human being – they are only alive when performing for each other. When Greenfield’s Joe discovers that Cassie has been murdered, he immediately believes that Al did nothing wrong. He is a good person. So of course the necessary thing to do is to take the corpse of the woman your friend murdered and burn her. You burn her in a pit of your construction, but right beside a river creek so the detritus and ash of this problem float down the rivulets so it can go away. Then you never speak of it, because bro code, and Al gets to marry his sexy underwear model, and Joe tries to go halvsies on Eiffel-towering some bridesmaids. Boys will be boys.
But, like Amy Dunne before her (or the World’s Greatest Detective, to continue the superhero parallel), Cassie knows her enemy. And boy is it the greatest feeling of catharsis to see such bumbling, casual destroyers destroyed in turn by fate turning its engines back upon them. With a 😉 from beyond the grave, Cassie has won the justice for herself, for Nina, and offered a vision for us all.
Long Live Cassie, Our Lady of Justice.
Depositions of the Soul: “Swimming in the Dark” by Tomasz Jędrowski
Every once in a while, something comes along that simply knocks us out of course. For many of us, I’d imagine, the challenges of this most challenging year have presented us with ample cause to seek something to break the spell (curse) of 2020. It may be a movie, or a new hobby, perhaps an album, or even a song.
And here comes a novel, a wholly made debut, absolutely the work of a man in total control of narrative voice. Swimming in the Dark is less a novel that reads like the reality of its 1980s Poland setting, rather more like a crucible of emotional and social life captured by its author between the pages of the book. It is a profound act of creation and feeling.
For those enraptured by the soul-baring confessions of Call Me By Your Name, Jędrowski’s debut novel paints a sensitive picture of a bitter time in Polish history, and the personal history of its narrator.
Ludwik, transplanted to the West, speaks directly to his past in an extended address to his lover Janusz, the fulcrum point of that past. Divided by time and tides, geographical and ideological alike, Ludwik’s deposition feels less like an attempt to arrive at any particular junction of factual truth, rather one of emotional veracity. The way Jędrowski writes, it feels as if he has crawled inside your heart and is writing the forgotten history you didn’t know you had buried inside you. Ludwik’s story is deeply personal, and profoundly familiar. In this way, Swimming in the Dark behaves exactly for you the reader, the way James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room does for its two men.
Alone in the country together, Ludwik and Janusz come to understand one another, and to understand the merged self they share, through Baldwin’s novel and the electrifying self-revelation it allows them. The rural reality opens up a place for the idyllic and the free within each man, one forced into constriction once they return to the city. The “nightmare of fossilized time” represented by the Party’s troubles always looms over them, over everyone. Their bifurcated responses to the difficulties this imposes on the lives, both public and private, one must choose to lead, serves as a grim counterpoint to the freedom of Giovanni’s Room, of the countryside, of their lake, and their furtive moments of self-reverence while swimming in the dark.
Just at the novel’s close, Ludwik asks his departed lover whether they ever had the right, or the chance for happiness. Why? Because no one had shown them what a successful relationship with two men looked like. Though they were free when they were alone, their happiness always remained connected – even by implication – to the minefield of Party politics and the ever-present potential to be turned by it into a traitor to the inner soul. The sobering tragedy of this tale, which is surely deserving of future classic status, is that neither man is proven right, nor is either is proven wrong. They live, and they love, and they suffer, and they grow, and they change, and they go on living. To render this truth in his exquisite prose is certainly a testament to Jędrowski’s flair.
Breaking the 4th wall with yourself: affective empathy in Fleabag
Who is Fleabag? What is Fleabag?
This is perhaps the perennial concern of PWB’s 2013 play and the 2016 TV show it bore. Is she the Everywoman? To that end, is it possible for the Everywoman to be Everyone? In her Richard III-esque soliloquies to her co-conspirators (you ane me), who is she performing, which parts of herself is she baring or baiting for our entertainment?
Is it that she actually is us, and isn’t, all at once.
Is it that her Difficult Woman™ is us as we are at our snidest, or sometimes self-pitying, cruellest iterations. Why do we like these funhouse mirror selves? Maybe because for once in our uptight pressure cooker lives it’s actually nice to see someone vaguely familiar to yourself having an emotionally stunted reaction to a stressful life because it makes us feel better. And maybe it makes us feel better because it makes us feel seen, and that makes us feel uncomfortable, but only in the way that sometimes doctors appointments for like rectal exams are uncomfortable even when we know they’re good and important and necessary.
Maybe Fleabag gets closer to expressing those unhappy ungraspable inexpressible feelings people get about their own families, their own bodies, their attitudes to sex. Maybe some of us aren’t having sex like her and we’d like to, or else we are and it’s nice to get some representation, or, maybe, she’s enough of a vacuum that the inner parts of herself she doesnt share allow us to pour ourselves into the crevices like a good silicon cake mold.
In more academese, we see the worst parts of ourselves onscreen so we can externalise it and empathise and eventually come to incorporate this back into ourselves. I call this ‘affective empathy’, a fancy way of describing this call-and-response relationship we so often have with the TV and Film that moves us. It moves us precisely because it shows us who we might be, which is to say who we are, or who we might not want to be, but still are. Fleabag talks to us directly so we trust her, a woman we know is lying to herself. But she is magnetic, unique, inappropriate and very much of her time. The specific does make for the most universal appeal.
Q: Do these questions matter?
A: Who cares! – Get to living.
All of This Has Happened Before, and All of This Will Happen Again: “Children of Dune” and Cycles of Renewal
If Dune is the classic hero’s journey, and Dune Messiah the troubling aftermath of the mythmaking of Muad’dib, then one might think of Children of Dune as the final nail in the coffin of that heroic elegy.
In the nine years since his ‘death’ at the close of Dune Messiah, Paul’s regency has come to resemble the complacent rule of the Corino dynasty it overthrew. Beloved Alia, Regent of this new Imperium, is as trapped by the ties of power as was her brother. Yet, unlike him, pre-born with all the genetic memories of the Bene Gesserit before her, she is susceptible to the world within threatening to overtake her. In this, then, one might glimpse the fully expressed terror of Children of Dune, that of cyclical repeatings. The close of this first trilogy of the Dune Cycle serves as the ultimate repudiation to any teleological, hero-based conception of history.
In the end, the great power of Paul Atreidies lies broken and bloodied on the steps of the Arakeen palace. In the bathetic figure Paul becomes as The Preacher, we glimpse the sad fate of this once greatest of Great Men: obsolescence. He has played the part history contrived for him, and now, with the flow of time and human affairs moving on beyond even his awesome control, he is revealed as what he has always been: just a man.
Even the greatest of the great remain irrevocably human, subject to the follies of a human existence. Though he sought to undo his own mythography by disappearing into the desert at the end of Dune Messiah, in its sequel, we see that those who inherit the vacuum of Paul’s abdication find many a way to turn his memory and his silence to instruments for their own ends. Never is this clearer than near the novel’s close, where the function of personal and social guilt is discussed as a tool of autocracy, in relation to Alia’s religious government. The memory of her divine brother is closest to her, then summarily disseminated through the class of religious bureaucracy created in his dubious honour. Through her hands, the Will of the Divine is done.
Stasis, then, appears to be the true death for both individuals and civilisation itself in the Dune Universe. First, Muad’dib’s revolution, then his religion, have become the very things they sought to destroy. Power, flowing in rivulets, tributaries, then great flows of resources, persons, plots and counterplots, inevitably fills the vacuums made by its movements and, at the focal points of royal and religious power, ossifies into the stasis which must destroy itself.
Could his children offer the way out, then? Leto II and Ghanima, extensions of their line and, through their pre-born awareness, its culmination, are simultaneously the climax of the Atreides dynasty, and the Fremen people alike. Paul Atreidies became Fremen, became the Kwisatz Haderach, while his heirs (like his sister) were already born with this within them. And so to the vessels of the future belong all the inherited pasts of those who came before them, every slice of knowledge, and every slice of ignorance to match. Where Alia was feared and reviled for her power, and eventually, through this, succumbs to the poisoning influence of her grandfather Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Leto and Ghanima fear the awesome power within them and its propensity to tip toward despotic corruption. History lives within them, and all the power available to the twins, the very same power that has wrought the ruin of House Atreides and the stagnation of the universe in their father’s shadow, lies ready to carry them off to their aunt’s fate: abomination.
Thus the new, the act of creation, must beget itself to undo the cycle of the old. Leto II’s transformation from apex of humanity to more than human is the sacrifice necessary to ensure the chaos and instability that is the fruit of life. Where his father saw this path and rejected it, ultimately creating the crises which make up the socio-political fabric of Children of Dune, it falls to the child to undo the mistakes of his forebears and move beyond them. Yet in moving beyond, we find ourselves once more at a familiar beginning? As Paul took Irulan as Princess Consort to seal the breach and ensure the royal-political continuity of House Atreides as the Imperial Family, so too does Farad’n Corrino become Ghanima Atreides’ secret consort and royal scribe. The mythographic history is again written by a defeated enemy turned aide. And as Paul outmaneuvered Shaddam IV to take the Golden Lion throne as a living god, so too does his son, the more-than-human Leto II wrest the throne from his aunt Alia, and as the living god his father could never be. The end of one cycle is the beginning of another, and the end reveals itself as the beginning inverted and fulfilled.
Everywhere in Children of Dune is this theme present; the realms of politics, the psychological, the economics of war, even the internecine worlds of ecology. For these latter two, Herbert’s universe continually reasserts the great connectedness of human lives in a vast array of forces. This scientific universalism subverts any lingering notions of Great Man theory, or even the greatness of man itself; humans are no different than the sound trout and the predator-fish of Arrakis, one part of a vast web of interconnecting systems that all feed into and constitute one another. To mistake oneself as the apex of any hierarchy is to invite the constricting worldview of pride and biological permanence. Leto’s apotheosis, which will eclipse his father’s accomplishments, is not to become the most powerful human in a human universe, but to become transhuman – a force of universal scale, an intelligence that behaves no differently from the physical laws that constitute the Dune Universe. Children of Dune sets the board for the multipolar, multi-powered chaotic reality that could never have persisted under Muad’dib. Paul Atriedies then, as child, as Kwisatz Haderach, as The Preacher, and ultimately as the shadow of his own power, becomes the needle eye through which life must pass before it flourishes on the Golden Path.
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