The Dune Encyclopedia

by Willis E McNelly

  1. The Fremen Naib Guaddaf wrote in his Judgment on Arrakeen, a collection of sermons, that al-Harba died of an intestinal hemorrhage following a prolonged bout of drunkenness. Piitpinail asks if this behavior is consistent with the author of the lines:

  Take in all things a little less than all,

  For surfeit fogs the eye and dulls the brain.

  Better a beggar crouched beside the curb

  Than a splendid sot beneath it.

  (DP IV, iv, 107-10)

  "To ask one to believe that these lines came from the pen of the drunken drummer-deformity from Yorba asks one to believe in creation ex nihilo." (Piitpinail, p. 33.)

  2 The actress Karené Ambern describes a meeting with al-Harba: "...immediately on his coming inside, I knew why Harq al-Harba had never attended a single performance, or allowed the public to contact him in any way. It is still hard for me to accept that such a poetic mind could be trapped inside such a hideously deformed body. I had never imagined that that kind of caricature of a human being could exist." (Piitpinail, p. 41; from Champagne in My Slipper: the Autobiography of Karené Ambern, as told to Ruuvarz Dillar, orig. pub. 10324; repr. Zimaona: Kinat).

  3 Al-Harba was a secret computer enthusiast. This strange charge develops thus: if, as tradition has it, al-Harba was a filmbook salesman, then his living depended on what, for his time, was high technology. Piitpinail asks if a "mechanotheist" (his term) could have written

  Machines hard and cold as Rossak, sterile as the second

  Of Salusa, they have ground us under wheels

  Of iron, have frozen up our blood.

  They stop the building letters, still the voice

  Creative. Death to King Machine!

  (Am I, i, 35-39)

  4. The final argument is that al-Harba's fellow playwrights considered him a brainless clod. The first evidence comes from a play, Arrakeen Corners (II, iii, 11-19), by Tonk Shaio. Elder and Staple, two of the characters, are discussing newcomers to Arrakis:

  ELD. Now our chief has come, the one who wants to be

  The button on our cap.

  STA. You mean the rube?

  The boondock traveler turned to flogging plays?

  ELD. The same. He started out with theft,

  By patching up the holes in worn-out plays;

  But now his needle-work's improved, he thinks

  That every writer's suit belongs to him,

  And when he's told this to his face, he laughs.

  The second evidence comes again from Guaddaf's Judgment:

  What justice is there in millions paid to witless actors and their hangers-on when poor starve in their sietches? What virtue in raising up to greatness those who live by telling empty lies? What profit in pratting stories of a cursed shapeless past that never yet gave man, woman, or child anything but make-believe to gawk at?

  "'Cursed shapeless past' is as clear a reference as we could wish to the play Lichna and its central character of Scytale, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer" (Piitpinail, p. 49).

  These four claims have an air of retrospection about them: having determined by act of faith that X, Y, or Z wrote the Harban plays, one then searches about for scraps with which to discredit the recognized author. To the first — the drunkenness story — we may note that Guaddaf compiled Judgment on Arrakeen in 10366. Granting that he composed the sermons at various times between the beginning of his career, 10335, and the publication of the volume, still, the earliest could not have been closer to al-Harba's death than eighteen years. Moreover, the sermons are an attack on the stage in general, with their harshest invective reserved for actors, and al-Harba was not an actor. Finally, every other event the sermons describe takes place on Arrakis, yet if the account of al-Harba's death is true, the drinking bout would have had to be on Fides. But suppose that the account is factual; what difference does it make? History preserves the names of great, middling, and wretched writers who drank more than they ought; if the quotation from The Dusty Palms shows anything, it shows that the writer thought a drunken stupor an undesirable state, an observation that might occur to alcoholic or teetotaler alike.

  Piitpinail seems unaware that his second and fourth charges contradict each other: Karené Ambern says al-Harba was a recluse; Tonk Shaio says al-Harba was called a plagiarist to his face. Moreover, if al-Harba was a traveling salesman, as arguments 3 and 4 presuppose, then he would have necessarily appeared in public, not just on one world but on many. The contentions fit together so poorly because their authors grasp at every straw that can possibly be interpreted as anti-Harban. Nevertheless, let us consider each separately.

  Champagne in My Slipper was published in 10324, seven years after al-Harba's death. The playwright was unable, and his wife, off on Fides, unlikely to challenge a misstatement Also, one must consider the credibility of the book in general. Apparently in an attempt to recoup her shrinking share of the limelight, Karené Ambern claimed in her book to have shared the bed of every important man (or woman) of the prior sixty years, including Police Commander Bannerjee, the ghola Duncan Idaho, Harq al-Ada, and Leto II himself. Some of her stories may be true; the difficulty lies in knowing which ones. No historian accepts anything stated in Ambern's book without independent corroboration, and literary historians should be no less cautious. There is certainly no supporting evidence for her claim that al-Harba had a "hideously deformed body."

  Was al-Harba a secret computer enthusiast? This charge is rather clearly more far-fetched than the others, and need not detain us long. Other than a traditional belief about al-Harba's earlier occupation, no shred of evidence supports the third point. Until such evidence is forthcoming, there is nothing to answer.

  Finally, what was al-Harba's standing among the playwrights of his time? Certainly Shaio's play preserves some literary squabble of the times; it may even refer to al-Harba. Such flytings were plentiful and, for the most part, mere showmanship. But the poet al-Mashrab, an occasional playwright himself, said in his memoirs that he loved al-Harba "for his understanding and quiet ways." The artist and set designer Anani Strosher said of al-Harba and the writer Au'Riil that "staging their plays has been the supreme joy of my life's work, but if I had to choose between knowing them and staging their plays, I would rather have known them." (Both quotations from F. S. Marik, Monuments of Atreidean Drama, III, 454; V, 628.)

  THE CLAIMANTS: FARAD'N CORRINO. If al-Harba did not write the plays bearing his name, who did? Farad'n Corrino was the first to be suggested. Like the two later contenders, he was of noble birth, furnishing his supporters with their first argument. Writing openly for the theater, they claim, was beneath the dignity of a nobleman and statesman, and knowledge of his authorship would have lowered his prestige at Court. This point furnishes a good example of the selective thinking so often shown in the controversy. Duke Mintor, the father of Duke Leto Atreides, performed publicly many times in the bullring and, in fact, died there; Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen killed over a hundred slaves in public gladiatorial contests, many of them while he was na-Baron, and often with members of the Royal House in attendance. If activities like these did not lower Atreides or Harkonnen's prestige, it is hard to see why writing a play would lower Farad'n's.

  The most original evidence in support of Farad'n Corrino was produced for the world in Izhnaikas Bauf's The Great Cryptogram (10647). Bauf discovered what he named the Plowing Cipher in the play Carthage, and its method was elegantly simple: Bauf would locate a passage in which the first letter of the first word was F (for Farad'n) and the first letter of the last word was O (for Corinno). Between these points, the first letter of any word could be selected, moving alternately along the lines from left to right and from right to left (hence the term "plowing"), skipping over words which did not contain the next needed letter. When the end of the passage was reached, Bauf proceeded back up to the top, and if necessary, back down again. Here is the passage Bauf takes from ACT III, Scene ii of Carthage, lines 235-47:

  As the example shows, Bauf finds the
name "Farad'n Corrino" in the passage, and adds: "One could scarcely fail to note — indeed it must seize the most casual observer — that not only has the name been spelt out, but that three words are used twice: and that when those words are extracted from the cipher (as these hundreds of years past their author had intended that they be) they form the message 'recognize — not — our.' We cannot choose but be impressed with the clarity and force with which al-Ada speaks to us over the centuries, telling us that we will recognize that these plays are not the work of the besotted salesman" (p. 248).

  The Plowing Cipher is no cipher at all; with enough lines, any name can be extracted. To demonstrate, reconsider the passage:

  Using the same method, we discover the message "Fremen cielagos too," showing that Farad'n had help from the small bats native to Arrakis.

  HASIMIR FENRING. Supporters of Hasimir Fenring as the hidden author accept the "loss of status" argument of the al-Adans, hut add another of their own. They state that the climate of Leto II's reign made the voicing of unorthodox political opinion very risky. Since many of the plays were histories, their author needed the protection of secrecy. In their version, Fenring did not die in 10225, but went underground. His death was announced to forestall inquiries, but he lived for another eighty-eight years, writing plays under the name "Harq al-Harba." When Fenring actually died in 10313, his fictitious cover identity was fictitiously moved to Fides, there to die a fictitious death four years later.

  There is some truth to the observation about the danger of expressing an unpopular opinion. The best known example of that danger is, of course, the burning of the nine historians, but that event occurred over two thousand years later, in 12335. Until the records of criminal proceedings of the early years of Leto's reign are uncovered, we will not know for certain if the murder of the historians represented a bloody aberration or part of a pattern throughout his occupancy of the throne.

  According to J. T. Duub's Half-a-Dozen Harbas, Fenring headed a group which wrote the plays collectively, with the failed Kwisatz Haderach as their head, Duub relies heavily on the reminiscences of Shishkali, one of Leto's early chamberlains, about a conversation with the emperor shortly after a rebellion led by al-Ataud in the early years of Leto's reign. As Duub notes, the play Shaddam IV, with its famous deposition scene, was performed in Arrakeen on the morning of the rebellion to stir the populace to revolutionary fervor. Until then, al-Ataud had been Chief of Customs for Arrakis, a post awarded him by Leto. Duub describes the conversation:

  The Emperor opened with a pensive remark, "Dear Shishkali! I am Shaddam IV; do you not know that?" To which the Chamberlain replied, "Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most ungrateful man, the most adorned creature that your Majesty ever made." He might have meant al-Ataud but the Emperor in his reply seems to have meant "al-Harba" (Fenring), by saying darkly, "He that will forget God will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played openly forty times." Al-Ataud, of course, had nothing to do with those forty productions. Fenring came close here to losing his life, and only the Emperor's remembrance of Fenring sparing the life of Leto's father, Paul Atreides, saved the Count from imprisonment or worse. (Pp. 80-81)

  Now, Duub cannot have it both ways: either Fenring's pseudonym is a secret to protect him from Leto (pp. 35-47), or it is no secret and Leto's knowledge protects Fenring during political tight spots (the passage quoted). If the secret is not intended to protect Fenring from Leto (as Duub has already claimed), who does it protect him from? This unappreciated contradiction is typical of Duub's reasoning.

  LETO II. In 10710, A. J. Kiilwan's book The Man Who Was al-Harba made the claim that the al-Harban plays were written by Leto II, a theory that has surpassed the others in popularity and permanence. Essentially it follows them in demeaning al-Harba, coming down especially heavily on the purported intimate political knowledge of the plays, and claiming that only one who had, so to speak, firsthand knowledge of the events portrayed could have been the author.

  Kiilwan returns to the play Carthage, not for cryptograms, but rather for lines that she says are meaningful only if the writer was Leto II. She argues:

  The God-Emperor must frequently think of himself as unique, entirely separate from humanity, essentially an alien, as he laments in "Thy expected alien am I" (III, i, 1), and "Why am I singled out then/For this alien role — " (130-31). With the memories of his ancestors ever within, he says, "This day, an alien awoke in me" (HI, ii, 5), telling us of his first spice-awareness. Later the experience became commonplace: "My kind walked among Greeks and Romans" (HI. i, 47), or again, "We've seen it all before, you know./Carthage, Assyria...." (137-38). Twice in the same scene he weeps over the burden of his long memories:

  I have my distant moods, though,

  When your history collapses,

  And I forget —

  Not the day—

  Not the year —

  But the age!

  Which eon is this? (III, ii, 248-54)

  And again,

  I have to remember who I am

  And when.

  It's awfully easy to mix up two thousand years,

  Just one big kaleidoscopic blur,

  Confuses me all to hell! (III, ii, 341-45)

  Could any mortal have written those lines? (pp. 217-18)

  If that question is not just rhetorical, the answer must be, "Yes, one could." Whether or not Leto II was Harq al-Harba, Leto was surely not the writer of every history ever penned, and what attitude comes more naturally to the historian than the feeling of watching the past? Fanciful theories are plentiful: no one has yet claimed that Harq al-Harba was a reincarnation of someone who lived in antiquity, yet the theory of metempsychosis, as old as mankind, can explain every reference anywhere to interior "voices" as well as every, instance of an accurate historical work.

  But we can go further, actually strengthening Kiilwan's case for her. The second scene that she quotes from, III, ii, contains these lines:

  Make way for a better instructor —

  Assur-nasir-apli, cruelest of the cruel,

  Whose reign began with patricide. (11. 125-27)

  Among the materials discovered in the Rakis Hoard were the originals of The Stolen Journals. In one (Rakis Ref. Cat. 31-A125) we read this: "Our ancestor, Assur-nasir-apli, who was known as the cruelest of the cruel, seized the throne by slaying his own father and starting the reign of the sword." And we can go even further: still another crystal records the gist of a conversation with one Malky, an Ixian ambassador. Leto had asked Malky if he knew the words Taquiyya or ketman. The ambassador did not know the first, but, fluent in Fremen, he defined the second as "the practice of concealing the identity when revealing it might be harmful." Pleased at his response, Leto then stated that he had written several histories under a pseudonym, including those of Noah Arkwright, and even Arkwright's biography.

  What capital the Letoites could have made of this! Their candidate states that he wrote histories (not plays, to be sure, but the next best thing) under a pseudonym, and in one of the Harban plays we find a quotation that closely parallels a passage in Leto's Journals.

  However, the support provided by the quotation is illusory. Students of Atreidean literature have long known that Harq al-Harba used sources, most of which have survived. In the case of the play Carthage, al-Harba followed Tovat Gwinsted's The Chronicles of the Conquerors, legends of pre-Butlerian times collected in 9222, and translated on Arrakis in 10295. The relevant passage from the Chronicles reads as follows: "In this he had a better teacher, Assur-nasir-apli, cruelest of the cruel, who slew his father to take possession of the throne." Here is all the information, down to the epithet, that al-Harba needed for the passage in question. And it was beyond the powers even of Leto II to ghost-write a book a thousand years before he was born.

  Finally, consider the definition of ketman that Leto praised: "concealing the identity when revealing it might be harmful." Harmful to whom? What power could conceivabl
y have harmed Leto that he might wish to have kept his authorship of some plays unknown? The Spacing Guild, the Great Houses, the Ixians, the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu, all tried to "harm" him, and all failed. Yet in no instance is it recorded that they were angry because they had discovered that he had covertly written stage dramas. This theory is simply silly.

  But there is another solution, one that has no more substantiating evidence than Kiilwan's, but no less either: Harq al-Harba was something new, something unexpected, in the reign of Leto. We know that as the emperor continued his rule, he clutched the power to surprise ever more jealously to himself. It sometimes seems that his reign was dedicated to reducing humanity on every planet to a uniform grayness. Would he not then have supported, perhaps even fathered the notion that he was Harq al-Harba? We find in Kiilwan's book no evidence, compelling or otherwise, for believing that Leto II was Harq al-Harba, but it has aroused suspicions about the identity of A. J. Kiilwan.

  In sum, the al-Harba Question is a question only in the minds of those clouded by snobbery, delusion, hero-worship, and ignorance of Atreidean literary history. No professional Harban scholar has ever lent it credence, and for good reason: there is more evidence that Harq al-Harba wrote the plays attributed to him than for the works and existence of Virgil, Rabelais, Milton, McCartney, Shumwan, Astiki, Carnwold, and a host of others put together. There is much more documentary evidence about al-Harba and his life than exists for any of his contemporaries except those of Great Houses, with their professional historians. The Rakis Hoard has done nothing to upset the conclusion that the Harban plays were the fruits of the genius of Harq al-Harba.