Can You Untangle Fate by Suppressing Your Shadow Self? | The Philosophy of Dune

Dune Read-Along Companion Essay 5

One of my all-time favorite Dune pieces! This is an oil painting by John Schoenherr for Analog Magazine’s serialization of Dune.

“Sometime I must recount for you the legend of the phoenix” (409) -Lady Fenring

Welcome to the Parker’s Ponderings Dune in June (and some of July) Read-Along. This is the fifth of six companion essays that I’m writing for those reading through Dune with me.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you all, so make sure to leave your own thoughts and favorite quotes from the sections in view down in the comments.

Here’s the rest of the reading schedule:

Zoom Book Club – either Wednesday July 9th at 9pm central or Wednesday July 16th at 7pm central

July 10^th – pages 516-616 (the end of the book, before appendices)

Zoom Book Club – TBD

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There’s a ton that happened in our 5th section of Dune readings (pages 408-515 in the A5 sized orange cover Ace edition). I’d love to cover it all, but I can’t and you wouldn’t want to read that much from me anyways. Instead, I’m going to focus mostly on one major theme and then just quickly touch on few others. The main theme I want to focus on is the connection between the na-Baron, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and Paul Muad’Dib Atreides. And then the minor points I want to quickly touch on the philosopher-king motif and Good Guy Paul. I’d love to talk about the ‘thrownness’ of Alia and how she might represent postlapsarian Eve but I think I’ll do a separate bonus post on it. There are some other themes I’d love to talk about but they all get ratcheted up in the final reading so I’ll talk about them in my next companion essay.

Let’s jump in!

Feyd and Paul. Shadow and Ego.

Feyd-Rautha and the Baron from the original serialization of Dune in Analog Magazine by John Schoenherr.

Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is something like Paul Atreides’s shadow self, or just ‘shadow’ in the Jungian “analytic” pyschological sense. Now, I’m not an expert on Jungian psychology, but perhaps Frank Herbert wasn’t either—and perhaps one need not be an expert to appreciate Herbert’s use of the shadow in Dune. All that to say, I’m hedging just a bit, like always, because I could be misreading what’s going on in the text.

The shadow (self?), as best as I understand from a cursory look, is something like the whole of the Freudian unconscious, it’s everything that’s outside the light of self-consciousness—it’s whatever we don’t want to know and acknowledge about ourselves. Folks say it isn’t necessarily evil, but then go on to explain that all sorts of evil desires and intentions are stuffed away in the shadow like an evil storage locker in a dark basement of a Uhaul. It’s both the suppressed and repressed parts of oneself. We can see qualities and impulses that we don’t like in others, but we choose not to recognize them in ourselves, we hide them from the light of our consciousness in the unconscious shadow.

Apparently, it’s through a confrontation with one’s shadow that the process of individuating oneself off from the collective unconscious is achieved. I’m not totally sure what that means, but confronting one’s shadow seems important.

In confronting the shadow, and acknowledging those aspects of one’s self that you’d rather repress, it’s better to assimilate and incorporate pieces of that shadow into your own self-conception than to wholly ‘merge’ with the shadow, which could end up with that suppressed identity overwhelming your ego and taking control of your personality. Which sounds pretty bad! I think of the Venom symbiote from Spiderman which fed on Peter Parker’s repressed desires and threatened to overwhelm and overtake him completely.

But just as the individual has their own shadow, so too, the collective unconscious has a collective shadow—which might be the dark, masculine spot in the collective unconscious that the Reverend Mothers aren’t able to look and which terrifies them, but which the Kwisatz Haderach will be able to fully view—unifying the two Jungian archetypes of anima and animus, anima being the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and animus being the unconscious feminine side of a man. I’m not saying it’s a full 1 to 1 correlation, but it really looks like Frank Herbert was intentionally playing with these Jungian ideas in Dune.

In fact, Herbert even explicitly claimed to have been very heavily “imbued” with Jungian psychology. Here’s a quick interview with Frank Herbert where he says as much (there is a spoiler in there but it’s not for Dune nor Dune Messiah and it won’t make sense until you get to the God-Emperor of Dune (book 4) so if you think it’s a spoiler for Dune, you’re wrong, no worries):

So, if there are some seeming allusions to Feyd as being Paul’s shadow, it seems reasonable to assume that they’re there for a reason—Frank put them there.

Now, what are some of the allusions I thinking of? Well, on page 417, the Bull and the Matador motif is brought back up to the forefront of our minds just before we see Feyd in the arena. We find that the Baron has taken the portrait of the Old Duke and the head of the bull which gored him to death back to his home world of Geidi Prime as his own talismans:

He looked up at the new talismans flanking the exit to his hall—the mounted bull’s head and the oil painting of the Old Duke Atreides, the lake Duke Leto’s father. They filled the Baron with an odd sense of foreboding, and he wondered what thoughts these talismans had inspired in the Duke Leto as they hung in the halls of Caladan and then on Arrkais—the bravura father and the head of the bull that had killed him. (417)

In light of the idea of confronting one’s own Jungian shadow, I think the bull and matador motif takes on a whole new meeting—it’s a metaphor for that very confrontation and a reinterpretation of the human vs. animal motif. The Old Duke confronted his own beast, his own unthinking animal shadow and it cost him his life. But who is the bull and who is the matador after the Old Duke and the literal bull?

In our last reading, we saw Paul’s coming of age in the forced confrontation with Jamis (in our current section we saw yet another coming of age in Paul becoming sand rider). Paul tries to show mercy on Jamis but is forced to kill him. It was a straight forward fight, Paul won fair and square, no use of the voice by him or Jessica. Paul kills reluctantly and for a small audience of Fremen and is full of remorse for the situation—even though there was nothing he could do. Paul is the thinking human, the ego, the center of consciousness, the matador.

This is contrasted with Feyd-Rautha’s coming of age in the form of his 100th kill of a slave gladiator on his 17th birthday. Feyd loves killing, killing with poison, and letting his slave-victims suffer as he demonstrates the effects of the poison he injected into them through his blade to satisfy the bloodlust the colosseum crowd. Feyd is devious. He plotted with Hawat to fight an un-drugged man—who turned out to be an Atreides fighting-man—in the arena in order to make himself look like a hero at the cost of the slave master who will be falsely accused of treachery. Feyd almost lost to the Atreides and had to use a conditioned code word to stun the man so he could hit him with the poisoned edge of his blade—and the poison was even on the wrong blade—yet another act of deception!

Feyd-Rautha fighting the last of the Atreides fighting-men captured from Arrakis by John Schoenherr for the Illustrated Dune.

Feyd is the shadow, the mindless animal in the depths who doesn’t control his lust for the lady Fenring and blurts out an intemperate offer of dedication to her, who regularly ‘sleeps with’ the slave women. Paul is kind to Harah, the former wife of Jamis, whom he has inherited through killing Jamis. Paul is likewise gentle and tender with Chani—who does end up saying “Tell me again about the waters of thy birthworld, Usul.” on page 488, which is a callback to the prescient dram that Paul described to Jessica and Gaius Helen Mohiam way back in the Castle on Caladan (31)!

Feyd tries to kill his own father figure, his uncle the Baron, by playing on his pederasty. Paul would give anything to have his own father back, his own father who died in his confrontation with his own bull, the Baron.

Feyd is the personification of dark desires and those vile traits that people aren’t comfortable acknowledging in themselves. For the Harkonnens, evil is good and good is evil—think of Feyd’s blades, “white for poison, black for purity”. For them, the blackness of the shadow is pure rather than evil, and the whiteness of the light (the light of consciousness?) is poison.

Feyd is the bull and he used subterfuge to gore an Atreides in the arena, but like Duke Leto before him, the Atreides soldier fell on his own knife rather than give a Harkonnen the satisfaction of vanquishing him.

Feyd is bull, the shadow in the unconscious. Paul is the matador, the ego of consciousness.

Feyd Rautha by Sam Weber for Folio’s Illustrated Dune

We even find a direct discussion of the ‘heroes’, Paul and Feyd, through Count Fenring,

You know, when you think what this lad [Feyd] could’ve been with some other upbringing—with the Atreides code to guid him for example…Would that we could’ve saved both the Atreides youth and this one. From what I heard of that young Paul—a most admirable lad, good union of breeding and training…but we shouldn’t waste sorrow over the aristocracy of misfortune. (429)

Perhaps Paul will have to confront the shadow and integrate it into himself in order for him to become an individuated self, a whole person? But in so doing, he’ll need to beware lest he ‘merges’ with the shadow and is overtaken by it.

But again, I could be drunk on too much Jungian spice beer right now, though, so you make up your own mind on my reading of Paul and Feyd and leave me a comment:

What of the Cardinal Virtues Reading?

Plato’s Allegory of the Chariot depicted on the Art of Manliness.

In the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th companion essays, I’ve been tracing the idea that Frank Herbert wrote Dune partly as a response to Plato’s Republic and specifically, as a caution against trusting in a philosopher-king.

This idea initially hit me as I read the following quote from Gaius Helen Mohiam:

“A world is supported by four things… the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing… without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition.” (38)

I finally recognized those as the four cardinal virtues that Plato treats in the Republic and realized that Herbert might be personifying the virtues as people in Paul’s life to help him through his adolescence into the philosopher-king, the one skilled at the art of ruling, who knows the science of reigning (art and science is a nice touch, Frank!). Reverend Mother Mohiam even explicitly called Paul a descendent of kings who never learned to rule well, exhorting him to be different from them, to be a king who rules with knowledge of his planet’s language (39).

Later, on pg. 58, Paul confirms that Duncan is the moral (or righteous, or temperate (from temperance)) and that Gurney is the valorous. Leaving Duke Leto to be the obvious personification of Justice and Hawat to be the obvious personification of wisdom—sure, Jessica is very wise as well, but I think she’s probably a personification of some Jungian stuff like the anima or a foil for Jung’s mother complex or something like that.

Anyways, while I think that Herbert is definitely stepping over into Jungian psychology throughout this 5th reading in order to layer on the theme of the confrontation with one’s shadow, I still think the cardinal virtues reading is valid and present in this 5th reading as well.

We’ve seen that Frank Herbert has disdain for ‘bravura’ (a dazzling display of skill or brilliance and courage) which got the Old Duke gored to death by his bull (mentioned again in this reading). Bravura, an air of which Duke Leto sought to cultivate through propagandizing Arrakis in order to win the people’s loyalty. Bravura, which Count Fenring attributed to Feyd after his gladiator fight (427). And bravura which Jessica finds and disdains in Paul, “‘You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura,’ she charged. ‘You never cease indoctrinating.’” (483).

Courage is all that’s left of the four cardinal virtues. Justice is gone with the death of Duke Leto, temperance is gone with the death of Duncan, Wisdom has been absconded with in the capture and poisoning of Hawat, and the only one that’s left is Gurney, courage. But what is courage left unchecked by wisdom, temperance, and justice? Bravura—showy, borderline arrogant, dazzling skill and brilliance used for captivating the masses and winning their favor. The Strong Man without virtue is a tyrant.

So, I think my “response-to-Plato” reading is still valid. Additionally, I remembered Mohiam’s lore drop about the three-point civilization on pg. 29, which may correspond to Plato’s three parts of the soul: the Imperial house = the rational part which loves truth (the emperor is the only one with a truth sayer), whose virtue is wisdom and whose vice is pride/sloth; the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad = the spirited part which loves honor/victory, whose virtue is courage and whose vice is anger/envy (the great houses are always trying to climb the ladder); The Spacing Guild “with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport” is the appetitive part which loves pleasure, whose virtue is moderation and whose vice is greed (we’ll see more on them in the final reading).

Good Guy Paul

Okay, this post is getting long. Let me try to buzz through this quick for you. Paul is complicated. Do feel like he’s a good guy or a bad guy or what? When we hear his thoughts, they’re not bad—he’s always actively trying to avoid the coming jihad. He looks into the future and every time he tries to make a change to bring about something different, the future becomes unsure or clouded or muddled. He’s trying to untangle what feels like a gordian knot of fate. But when we hear Jessica talk about here, it’s as though Paul is becoming a villain—she was the one who first wanted to appropriate the Fremen religious myths for their own gain.

It does seem as though Paul has successfully embraced his mother’s vision, however, and his own myth has supplanted the mythic vision of Liet-Kynes. Paul has become a sand-rider, being first up on the biggest sandworm any Fremen has ever even heard about. And the myth grows. But again, Paul seems weary of the his myth already, seeking to undue it at all cost. He seeks to maintain control of the Fremen to keep them from spilling out into the universe on a massive jihad in his name. Not the inner thinking of a space Hitler.

I think one of the points that Herbert sought to make with Paul is that any leader who would function as a dictator/philosopher-king/messiah would have to have knowledge of past, present, and future, trinocular vision—they’d have to basically be omniscient in order to play the roll of God. Paul has prescience (pre-scientia, knowledge beforehand, or knowledge of the future) and access to the collective unconscious and the memories therein, but his abilities aren’t helping him lead the people away from religious fanaticism and galactic jihad. Paul seems to still be a victim of circumstance. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Let me know what you think in a comment!

Of, if you just want to say a one-time thanks, consider buying me a coffee:

Jessica and Alia receiving the memories of the old Reverend Mother of Arrakis by John Schoenherr for the Illustrated Dune.