SOURCE: "The Ambivalent Hero of Contemporary Fantasy and Science Fiction," in Extrapolation, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 64-80.

[In the following excerpt, Prieto-Pablos examines the development of the ambivalent hero in Herbert's Dune, contending that it is a reflection of contemporary American culture.]

The voices of glorification of America's destiny have never been silent in North American science fiction, especially after the victorious end of World War II. For a large number of writers, this victory signified the beginning of a new era of optimism. Donald Wollheim's title for his study of modern science fiction, The Universe Makers, is illustrative of this mood. His view of the future awaiting human-kind was certainly not unique:

Atomic power—how many times had stories shown what a world of wonders and prosperity would be humanity's if we could tap the infinite power of the atom…. We could rebuild the world and with such power end poverty, make the world Utopia, and finally climb to the stars…. Transmutation of the elements would be open to us.

The use of this energy for military purposes was a marginal issue if compared with all the positive advantages of its use with other more edifying ends; and, in any case, it showed the power America had in its hands. The almost immediate emergence of the cold war did in fact cause similar optimistic responses, in that it emphasized the idea of a wealthy and powerful country that stood as the leader of all the free nations against any kind of evil.

It is this optimistic view that underlies much of the fantasy and science fiction of the last decades, in spite of the grim appearances it sometimes has presented, and that eventually contributes to expanding the limits of action by sending the science fiction heroes out to the most distant planets to fight for their most unrenounceable values. These galactic heroes have adopted different forms of behavior, though, ranking up from the all-action type, partly evolved from prewar pulp fiction and partly resulting from certain ideological stances (such as can be found in R. A. Heinlein's controversial Starship Troopers [1959] or in Gordon Dickson's Dorsai series), to the more meditative and intellectual type that uses his mind as a tool or weapon against the problems posed by man's domination of the galaxy. The characters in Asimov's Foundation series, van Vogt's postwar fiction (e.g., The Voyage of the Space Beagle), British author A. C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961), or Larry Niven's Ringworld (1971) all belong to this type.

Yet a more pessimistic view of man's future (and present) can also be found both in fantasy and science fiction. Its roots can also be found in the ideas expressed by writers of the 1940s and 1950s whose meditations on the consequences of man's technological advances had reached altogether different conclusions than those Wollheim presents. Probably one of the more relevant means of transmission of these conclusions (though not exclusively of these) once extrapolated into fiction was J. W. Campbell's Astounding. In Trillion Year Spree Brian Aldiss very adequately described its mood:

Astounding after the war was a very black magazine. Its writers and readers … were digesting the implications behind the nuclear bomb, its unlimited powers for greatness and destruction. It was a painful process: the old power fantasies were rising to the surface of reality. Many stories were of Earth destroyed, culture doomed, humanity dying, and of the horrific effects of radiation.

Aldiss himself observes the frequency with which these themes recurred in stories published between the late forties and the early fifties. A deeply deterministic view of man's destiny—which declared that when he is offered the choice between salvation and destruction he is bound to go for the latter option—underlies works of fiction like Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950 is the date of its publication in book format), Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1956). In all of these the crisis is not brought forth by an archvillain or an alien life form, but by mankind itself in the form of an all-powerful, man-degrading system. The hero (if he can be called a hero at all) may be wrapped in his sense of self-righteousness, like those in Bradbury's Chronicles (Yll in "Ylla," Spender in "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," Stendhal in "Usher II"), but in their fight against injustice they use the same means as the system they want to destroy, making them fair specimens of the civilization they seemingly refuse to belong to.

Reality has refused to comply with these dark forebodings. Civilization and Earth have not been destroyed—or not yet—and the more optimistic view of the future seems to have taken over. However, the fears of man's growing destructive potential have remained and have managed to find their way through in a substantial amount of contemporary fantasy and science fiction. The vehicle used for the expression of these fears is the most naturally extrapolable of literary conventions: the hero.

This process has produced, incidentally, one of the most significant transformations in contemporary romance. As Northrop Frye affirms, romance narrative results in a projection of man's ideals and dreams of wish fulfillment in the forms of the hero and the world he represents, while the opposite, a demonic world of nightmare and fears, is represented by the hero's antagonist. Gothic romance, much pulp fiction, and a substantial part of postwar science fiction shared that presentation of a hero in the midst of a demonic world, yet the hero still kept the links that allowed the reader to be bound up with him and what he represents. In contemporary romance, however, the links are split. There is still a world of dreams in need of protection, but the hero is no longer an intrinsic part of it. The powers he can tap—those that have sent him through the galaxy and settled him in distant planets—have placed him too far above ordinary readers and have transformed him into a source of the fears that had traditionally been provoked by the villain: if man's innate tendency is destructive, what could an extraordinarily powerful hero do but to destroy with a force n-times greater? Could he not destroy even the world he has pledged to protect? These are the underlying questions in a significant part of contemporary fantasy and science fiction. In this sense, these new heroes share the features of both romance and tragedy. As romantic characters, they are the direct inheritors of the galactic saviors of Asimov and van Vogt. As tragic heroes, they have a flaw in their capacity for self- and world-destruction, inherited from Bradbury's anti-heroes, and are to be feared; and, at the conclusion of the story, they must pay for their deeds—even if they have eventually saved the Edenic world—by suffering isolation from it, death or exile.

The most important representative of this type is found in one of the milestones of contemporary science fiction, Frank Herbert's Dune saga. Dune, first published in 1963, was the initial volume of a six-volume series that constitutes the most elaborate science fiction (or fantasy, as the series is at the edge of the distinction between both subgenres) since Tolkien's sagas of the Middle-World.

The plot of Dune, if summarized, does not give many hints as to its qualities. It would seem to be another story about a young deposed hero seeking revenge and restitution of his rightful throne, combined with the theme of the hero as the apparent fulfillment of an exotic prophecy. The innovations are not actually in the plot, but in what we might call the environment of the story, and especially in the characterization of the participants. In Dune, Herbert created a world in the manner of Tolkien: an abundance of background material provides a particular kind of coherence to both the events and the world described. As with Tolkien, the reader has the impression that the story he is reading does not start on the first page but exists beyond the book and extends backwards to the past, our immediate future. The effects for the reader are both an expansion of his imagination (wondering what may not have been told by the author) and a strengthening of the suspension of disbelief, as the story in the book becomes an episode in a potentially larger narrative, something which might effectively be assimilated into man's real, foreseeable history. These effects are similar to those produced by legends, where the exotic or wonderful is ambiguously mixed with real events of a distant past and therefore assimilated into the set of events that "might have really happened after all," even if they are incredible.

As for the characters, Frank Herbert's achievement lies in the elaboration of an almost new typology. There certainly were already superheroes in printed pages before Dune. Superman had been flying for decades, and Campbell's Astounding had been producing characters with mental superpowers for some time. Van Vogt's Gilbert Gosseyn of the Null-A books and Henry Kuttner's telepaths are instances of this type of paranormal heroes. Yet there are two features in their characterization that, in a sense, place them behind or below Paul Atreides. Their powers are frequently given to them by some superior entity or by some uncontrollable circumstance, usually of a scientific kind. Moreover, they (and sometimes the villains, too) are the exception in a world of ordinary people. Herbert's characters, on the contrary, grow their superhuman ability out of a strict control of mind and body gained from the application of mystical philosophies and techniques. Philosophy, not science, is the basis of their power. In Dune practically all the characters—from the Fremen and the Sardaukar, with their inordinate fighting skills, to the Bene Gesserit and the Mentats with their respective specialized tasks—are far from ordinary, even if not as great as the main characters. As Timothy O'Reilly points out, "Paul is a hero among heroes, wisest among the wise." Yet all these skills are not qualitatively different from those of ordinary human beings; they are the result of painful and slow personal progress, rather than something acquired suddenly and accidentally, or just given. This way the kind of Olympus that Dune portrays becomes an ideal inhabited by characters in whom a reader may feel himself projected, provided he accepts the possibility of evolving or changing through his own efforts.

This identification is also feasible with respect to the most desirable features of the main hero, Paul Atreides, even in spite of his uniqueness. He is the result of millennia of genetic manipulation and Bene Gesserit education, plus a series of unexpected circumstances; but much of what he becomes is the product of the hard learning of an extraordinary disciple who soon surpasses his masters. So when he goes further into the test of the gom jabbar than anybody else before him, we feel that he has smashed a previous record because he is better and not because he is different. The story of Dune is in fact the story of his progress in the knowledge and use of his latent powers until he becomes the leader of the Fremen in Dune Messiah. In this sense, Dune is a story of success, of Paul's learning the means to avenge his father's murder and regain his throne.

But Dune also differs from more typical narratives in a complexity of characters, which allows more than one reading perspective. So it may also be seen as the tragic story of a man with the flaw of having been born with the potential of a god. From this new perspective, Paul's figure is marked by a kind of nature that he does not fully assimilate and by forces that he can hardly control. Whether he wants it or not, he is the kwisatz haderach of the Bene Gesserit and the Mahdi of the Fremen, "the one who can be in two places at the same time," hence more a god than a man. The attributes conferred on him by this other nature give him abilities superior to those of any other hero before him and make him virtually invincible; he is a great warrior and is also very intelligent, and, above all, he has the power to see all the potential futures and to act accordingly. But these abilities, which would be definite weapons against enemies in other narratives, are here the real sources of the crises.

Paul's first important conflict is one of behavior resulting from the discrepancy between what he must do and the effects this must eventually produce. He wants to avenge his father's death and to liberate the people from the oppression of the Empire; but to do so he must set the Fremen loose and become involved in a process of revenge and bloodshed of, to him, too foreseeable consequences. The dynamics of liberation require the elimination of all obstructing forces and, eventually, the creation of another dictatorship where "unbelievers" are destroyed in the name of a faith emptied of all its original ideals. The fact that this effect seems to be inevitable in any revolutionary process ("Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation," it is said at the opening of one of the chapters in Dune Messiah, "It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual") does not offer any consolation to Paul, who holds himself responsible for the Fremen revolution: "Statistics: at a conservative estimate, I've killed 61 billion, sterilized 90 planets, completely demoralised 500 others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions." Indeed he is responsible, but at the heart of the problem lies the fact that the immense power he has acquired is the real cause of the situation. The exertions of power of the heroes of romance are always almost inevitably destructive, and often more destructive than intended. In the final battles the villains are killed in fair combat by the heroes; but then also (in an act of supreme sympathy, and because the villain dies, not because it is the hero's conscious intent) the world of the villain dies too: off go the witch's enchantments, Dr. No's island, Fu Manchu's underground head-quarters. With Paul's practices the same effects are produced, but they are increased in direct proportion to the power he exerts. As his powers are immense, so are their often uncontrollable effects. The result of his acts is that what he started as a local and rightful rebellion to regain the throne and liberate the Fremen in Arrakis has acquired universal consequences; and one of them is that he is a savior regarded in a multiplicity of worlds as a tyrant.

In the light of this process, the words of Duncan Idaho anticipating that Muad'Dib would "die of money and power" are justified. Nevertheless, that fate seems to be kept for his sister Alia, another character in conflict with her own supernatural self. His death is due to something very different, as he says at the conclusion of Dune Messiah:

"I'm dying of prescience, did you know that, Duncan?" "Perhaps … what you fear won't happen," the ghola said. "What? Deny my own oracle? How can I when I've seen it fulfilled thousands of time? People call it a power, a gift. It's an affliction! It won't let me leave my life where I found it!"

This leads us into the second and more important conflict in Paul Atreides, one that might be called the struggle between his dual self, or between nature and supernature. The key to understanding this conflict is in a phrase that is pronounced several times throughout the Dune series: "nature abhors prescience," when prescience is the main feature of Paul's (and later of Alia's and all the Bene Gesserit's) superhuman nature, and the only feature that makes him different from other romantic heroes: he can see, that is, he knows in advance what the effects of his acts will be.

The immediate cause of Paul's nature is the manipulation of the Bene Gesserit; but their contribution was to the creation of someone who, though unique in his abilities to rule the Empire, still remained human—ordinary enough to allow for his control by the sisters. To the Bene Gesserit, Paul's birth was a mistake: he was born before his due time, out of an act of love, and he was not born a girl. Furthermore, the interference in genetic evolution has produced in the victim, among other unexpected results, a complex dual personality which he can hardly synthesize. It is this duality that is released within him when he drinks the water of life:

There's in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty finding that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it is almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…. I'm the fulcrum…. I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without. [Dune]

Surviving the test of the water of life represents the last step in a process of assimilation of a more than human nature (hence more than just male or female, or more than either one of any two opposites). The previous trials had started after the death of his father and as soon as he came across a large mass of the spice that gave him the prescience. Paul must then face his new self, the "sleeper" that has been awakened in him. In an axial chapter, Paul has his first vision and at the same time realizes what there is of the extraordinary in him. His first reaction is of repulsion: "I'm a monster … A freak!"; then he sees his task, "I'm a seed," and "they'll call me Muad'Dib, 'the One Who Points the Way." And though he follows meekly the path shown in his vision, his revulsion is not averted when he sees the potential dangers of that path and realizes that seeing the future does not necessarily mean knowing the right thing to do. Thus, the faculty that makes him superhuman and gives him immense power over the Fremen can and does also become a curse. His assimilation and acceptance of his extraordinary nature after drinking the water of life does likewise not mean that he is reconciled with it.

Paul's dual nature does not cease to exist after the test. In order not to let go of his Empire, he must dislocate himself to be both the loving husband and the merciless tyrant, "warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man." In the end, he is glad to give his "water to the desert" as a way of escaping his affliction, and glad, too, we may infer, to leave the floor to his son. But at the conclusion of Dune Messiah, the reader is aware that the novel gives an end to the story of Muad'Dib while everything else continues as ever and even threatens to grow worse. The fate of Arrakis itself is a symptom of such a process, in the sense that what is initially beneficial—water for the planet—will be the cause of the fall of the Fremen way of life and of the disappearance of the big worms and melange production. This is Leto's inheritance, together with his struggle (and Alia's) against his own superhuman nature. As a matter of fact, Leto's life can be understood as an extension of his father's, a furthering of the consequences of supernature and prescience over 3000 years of tyranny. So, as Liet Kynes gave way to a prophecy incarnated, now the prophet Paul gives way to Leto the God. In this sense the tyranny is also a consequence of Paul's deeds, and somehow evidence of his failure.

The last two volumes of the series seem to shift the emphasis on the responsibility of the Bene Gesserit as keepers of the order in the galactic Empire and prima causa of the kwisatz haderach mistake. Saving the differences, their relation with Paul and the rest of the Atreides is similar to that of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. They created something they disliked and could not control, and made no attempt at understanding the monster's inner conflict. But while Frankenstein's monster worries about beauty and ugliness, the Bene Gesserit's must be concerned about nature and supernature and the practical use or misuse of them. A more fundamental difference, though, is that in Dune only the creators and creatures see the abomination. Herbert's twist of the plot is that Paul and Leto are welcomed by the Fremen as saviors and leaders, when their message—especially Paul's—is precisely of concern for the effects of heroic or prophetic voices. As O'Reilly comments, "Paul's real battle is with time, with the inertia of the human spirit, and with the paradoxes of messianic leadership" [Timothy O'Reilly, Frank Herbert, 1981].

The differences between what he wants, what he sees, and what the others expect him to do are the cause of the hero's reluctance to accept his role as a hero. And in his awareness of the inevitability of his role lies also the source of his tragic nature. This way Herbert breaks with a tradition of heroes convinced of the righteousness of their principles and therefore not in conflict with what others, or themselves, ask them to do. The clear-cut difference between the objectives of the oppressed and the hero and, on the other hand, those of the villain of traditional romance wanes when a character like Paul Atreides springs out to make everything relative and continuously changing. He is at the same time a hero and a monster—hence, like the villain, demonic—doing good and evil and subverting the distinction between these two categories.

For an average reader, especially in the sixties, this ambivalence might have been puzzling. Even such an expert on superheroes as John Campbell mistook the significance of Paul's nature: "In outline, it sounds like an Epic Tragedy—but when you start thinking back on it, it works out to 'Paul was a damn fool, and surely no demi-god; he loused up himself, his loved ones, and the whole galaxy'" [in Frank Herbert]. But what Herbert does is to create a contemporary hero, partly out of the same discontent with man's scientific progress that had produced Spender and Stendhal in The Martian Chronicles and partly out of the particular cultural situation of America in the 1960s. Dune is imbued with references extrapolated from life in the sixties, some of them introduced deliberately (the similarity in the effects of melange and of drugs is an obvious one) and some others, especially those associated with larger and more general preoccupations, probably introduced unconsciously. It is in fact easy to find parallels in the major conflicts at work in Dune and in the ones that were upsetting the America of that decade. The words of Chester Eisinger, applicable originally to the American 1940s, can be made extensive to the description of a state of mind common to the decades following:

The price of power is the loss of innocence and the knowledge of good and evil…. The United States came to the end of innocence … as it engaged itself everywhere in the affairs of the world and took, or at least struggled to assume, its place as the greatest power on Earth. Emerging thus onto the world scene, the United States came to know both failure and success, to understand the onerous responsibilities of leadership and to realize that not all problems could be solved or all questions answered. [The 1940s: Profile of a Nation in Crisis, 1969]

Of all the decades after World War II, the 1960s brought with them the most consciously determined attempts to tackle the problems presented by this situation. Counter-culture was one of these attempts, and in the most anxious minds it served to install a ferment of profound disagreement with established ideology and to open alternative paths towards new social changes. The rejection of machines and machine societies, the belief in a path of perfection of the mind and the body with the use of drugs and certain oriental techniques are some of the alternatives that Herbert introduced in his Dune series. But this forms part of his world of desire and wish-fulfillment. While these alternatives were being proposed, certain traumatic experiences also contributed to stir up a ferment of unrest by showing the darker side of American society:

In SF of the 1960s … one can see the stress lines which shattered the solidarity of the Cold War period. A central event, and one that reverberates in much of writing of the decade, is the assassination of President Kennedy. The assassin was not … an "alien," but an American … Another traumatic experience was the Vietnamese involvement which created in SF, as in other areas of American life, a division largely along generation lines. [J. A. Sutherland, "American Science Fiction Since 1960," in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, edited by Patrick Partinder, 1979]

If American ideals had been the central source of science fictional expansion across the galaxies, these two events together with many more made such ideals questionable. A superpower could act wrongly or mistakenly even when apparently answering the calls of the oppressed: but, above all, could show signs of having flaws of an essential—and therefore hardly resolvable—nature. Likewise, the science fiction superhero, who had elsewhere symbolized the greatness of the achievements of a nation, could now be an exemplary instance of the symptoms which a new view of reality made manifest. In this sense Paul and Leto show the inadequacy of the old romantic heroes to appeal to a reading public that had lost its belief in America as a world of dreams and innocence. The result is a kind of hero in whom the readers' fears are projected more intensely than their desires. In the forties and fifties, the fears had been of the effects of a nuclear holocaust or of the despotic rule of aliens and dictatorial leaders; but there was practically always the alternative of an ideal and righteous hero with his implicit message that hope always exists. In Dune … that hope has been shattered. Like Eisinger's America, Paul and Leto are the fallible leaders with immense power, aware of the fact that, while they must respond to their calling as leaders, whatever they do or fail to do the effects, because of their immense powers, will no longer be local and controllable….

The importance of the ambivalent hero type and its lesser subtypes in contemporary narrative cannot be denied. As a matter of fact, they have even spread to other fields of narrative, such as comics (Marvel's superheroes are evident variations on this hero type) and television serials (The Equalizer is the most representative example). Imitation may be one of the causes of this recurrence, but their relation to particular cultural situations of contemporary America cannot be denied either. Only when these situations are altered substantially will the ambivalent hero begin to disappear from contemporary narrative; and, so far, the cultural conditions that produced these heroes seem not to have changed significantly.