Here’s Staring at You, Dune

I’ve been listening to an audiobook of Dune, by Frank Herbert, which I borrowed from my library through the Libby app, which is a pretty neat thing.

Using Libby, I have also been reading a novella by César Aira called Artforum. It’s about someone who reads the magazine Artforum.

I first read Dune when I was maybe twelve years old. I’ve been surprised by how much of it I recognize from several decades ago. I remembered, when I heard it this time around, the scene where Dr. Liet Kynes is lost in the desert and hears the voice of his dead father lecturing him. He knows he’s about to die. A thing blows up and he dies.

I don’t usually like to hear audiobooks, mostly because three seconds after I press play I’ve already stopped paying attention. My mind wanders far beyond where the audiobook can reach me. But when I’m listening to a book I’ve read once already, it doesn’t matter if I lose track of what’s going on.

But then, I have no trouble paying attention to Dune. The novel has completely absorbed me. I can hardly stop listening to the thing, and I don’t know for sure why that is.

Perhaps I’ll never know—and that’s fine. It’s enough for me to shrug and say, well, obviously this book has that effect on people. It’s something like the most successful science fiction novel ever written. People love it, and I am merely one more of them.

But I don’t know. I have ideas.

I think Dune is such an absorbing text in part because of the sense of inevitability it starts off with. You’re told immediately that at least one of the major characters will die soon after they’re introduced. You’re told that the heroes are walking into a trap, and not only are you therefore in on the practical joke that’s being told at their expense, the characters themselves know they’ve stepped into a trap. They have no choice but to march to their deaths. They take measures to prevent those deaths, but they seem to know their efforts are futile. The powers arrayed against them are too great, and one’s fate cannot be sidestepped.

It’s a way to create suspense, I guess. You know something bad is about to happen to these charming space aristocrats, but you don’t know when it will happen, because they don’t know when. And there’s no telling what it might look like. And while they’re inching their way toward their own destruction, you catch glimpses of the vast superstructure of intrigue and “plans within plans within plans” that they’re unwittingly minor or major players in.

Or, no, they’re not unwitting players. They’re perfectly witting. They know every choice they make is circumscribed, that they can’t possibly escape the schemes of those who are more powerful than themselves.

I don’t know what more I can say about that with confidence or certainty. But I do have a complaint. It’s one I’ve made concerning other people’s writing, more than once.

Frank Herbert, when he wrote Dune, was apparently having an intense and sordid love affair—a romance for the ages, it seems—with the word “stare.”

Characters in this novel are constantly staring at things and at each other. They do it all the time. Whenever they look at anything at all, they’re not just looking, they’re staring.

Jessica crossed to the window, flung wide the draperies, stared across the river orchards toward Mount Syubi.

The door flew open and Jessica stood there staring hard-eyed into the room.

The Reverend Mother stared at him, wondering: Did I hear criticism in his voice?

Those three examples are all just from the first few pages. And there are others I could cite from those pages, the word appears so damned often.

What the hell is this about? Did Frank Herbert not know there are other words for what people do with their eyes? Had he never heard of words like gaze, watch, peer, eye (as in, “she eyed the fern’s deviated septum, and wondered how a fern even had a septum”), scan, glance, or—and I know this is a wild one—look?

It’s something I’ve noticed in other people’s writing, books I’ve read before they were published, if they were ever published. It’s something I’ve pointed out to those books’ authors. I have implored them—I have practically begged them—to use a word for someone who is looking at something that isn’t the word stare.

It is a widespread problem, one I’ve come across many times. And not only is this odd, incessant repetition of one word irritating. The word stare is just not one that can be universally applied to every act of looking.

When you stare at something, you’re not glancing at it. You’re not just noticing it. You are fixing your gaze on a thing, plant, animal, cloud, or person for a remarkable period of time. Maybe it’s just a few seconds, but that can be enough to be conspicuous.

“Why are you staring at me?” People don’t ask that when another’s gaze has swept across them momentarily. It means that someone won’t stop looking at them. Stare is a word that denotes this sort of extended gazing; it implies that something’s going on here that isn’t just a momentary bout of peering. And yet Frank Herbert seems to want the word stare to be a universal verb that encompasses every act of looking that people are capable of.

I’m sure this seems like a minor concern. But it’s distracting, and irritating.

It’s almost as if some influential society of psychic women long ago compelled Frank Herbert to use only one word for the act of looking as a way to then influence me, decades later, to—what?

To do what?

I don’t know. Their schemes are beyond the reach of my understanding.

Stare as I might into the vast web of their plans within plans, on the rare occasion I catch stare of them my stare can only penetrate so far. It isn’t far enough.

And I challenge anyone to listen to this same audiobook with my awareness of the overuse of the word stare and not be bothered by it. It’s not bad enough to make me not want to keep listening to it; I still like this book very much. But my god.

[SPOILER ALERT]: It only just occurred to me that maybe this incessant staring is what causes Paul to lose his eyesight, sometime in the sequel to Dune. I remember vaguely that that happens. Maybe that’s what all this staring is really all about. It’s preparing the reader for when, for the novel’s hero, all staring stops.

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