We’ve all seen those people trying to psychoanalyze creators based on their work, right?
I’ve always found that fascinating, because while you CAN peer into someone’s mind through their work, the people that do that often have the wrong idea or analyze things in the most shallow way possible for the circumstances.
They also tend to have a surprising proclivity for projecting things about themselves and blaming them on anyone but them. Often focusing on what they have a problem with while the author makes very blunt remarks about what their point is elsewhere.
Yes, I speak from years of being called every name under the sun for the pettiest things while the things they’d have more grounds to accuse me of fly under the radar. Thank you for noticing.
This post doesn’t come purely from that place though. But I think it’s easier if I bring up an example.
There are many cases I could bring up, but this post was inspired by one in particular. While I’ve only written about Dune, I’m actually at God Emperor of Dune right now, and there’s certain patterns that you notice by the fourth book. In particular there’s this undercurrent of “marital sex good” “casual/homosexual sex bad”.
Now, it’d be easy to just call Mr. Frank Herbert a stuck up old man with old man ideas seeping through… and I’m gonna be honest, that’s a perfectly valid reading, but it’s also a dead end when analyzing the text.
I’m all game for talking shit about writers, even me (though that doesn’t mean “the writer can’t talk shit back” as far as I’m concerned), but ESPECIALLY if it’s the sort of person that weirdo nerds would idolize like The Guy Who Wrote The Saga Of Books About Why You Should Not Idolize Anyone.
The point is that if you stop at “Ok, Boomer” then the actual secrets of the text and the Actually Interesting Psychoanalysis is lost.
There’s a symbolism at play, one about the “holiness” of consensual sex, the sacredness of a husband railing his wife in missionaria protectiva position.
The space witches playing with Eugenics is seen as a manipulative perversion of the holy and natural, with Lady Jessica going against their orders and giving Lord Leto a boy instead of a girl being seen as a bittersweet triumph of love over the powers that be.
Likewise, Baron Harkonnen’s homosexuality (put a pin on this), rape, and casual sex with non partners is seen as hedonism gone rampant, as the moral opposite of the holy side, as using people and then discarding them like literal cumrags.
Despite being rooted in traditionalism (and maybe perhaps BECAUSE of it), this is used as an extension of a certain language that then permeates the story. Fremen raping and pillaging is an even more poignant shorthand for the decay that the Jihad has brought, characters that engage in that sort of really casual sex are marked by the shorthand of what their morals can become.
Now, let’s take the pin from earlier and talk about it, because you see, Dune is a series where one of the core principles is to not stagnate and subvert the established ideas. There’s a scene near the end of God Emperor where Cosmic Boytoy Duncan “Based AF” Idaho is outraged at peeking glances of some of the all-female guard having Gay Sex or just kissing each other. And the book sends a shock to the system by painting Duncan’s outrage as an outdated artifact of a bygone age.
However there is a different layer going on at play.
Another symbolism that Dune puts at play is that of males as dividing forces and females as community forces. The idea that women cannot access their male ancestral memories the same way a Kwisatz Haderach can, less from some arbitrary limitation and more from some inherent quality that’s also their strength.
Again, we could just leave it at “Ok Boomer” and move on, but then the text becomes less interesting as a result, and the implications of many moments and its consequences get lost.
So with the sum of all this, we can see Duncan’s outrage at homosexuality in one of two ways:
The shallow one where you just chalk it to the author being an out of touch old man and it showing.
Or.
A scene where the established symbols of what homosexuality is meant to represent in context is flipped on its head as a sign of how Duncan “Sex Bomb” Idaho is a man out of his depth, while also leaving the ambiguity of if maybe allowing that is just yet another sign of decay within the language of the story. All the while layering it with whether it is only allowed because it is women expressing their wish for community despite dialog defending the role of homosexuals as worthy and honorable warriors.
Hell, if you engage with the latter one, even the shallow psychoanalysis becomes a lot more interesting. Is Frank Herbert meditating on the change in times?
I… don’t think so, not really from a lack of self-awareness but rather because Writer Language is rarely too deliberate. It’s more often than not just a reflection of the ideosyncracies of the individual.
I don’t think Mr. Herbert wrote things that way “on purpose” the same way that I don’t think Robert E. Howard wrote black people as caricaturized villains “on purpose”. It doesn’t make it any less yikes or damning though.