Historical Narrative vs. Seeing The Future

(Note: This is an essay the author wrote as an assignment for their undergrad. It feels equally potent and relevant regarding today’s turbulent cultural and geopolitical climate. It’s also assumed anyone reading this is keenly aware of how easy it can be to feel hopeless, and this is meant to be a direct antidote to said feeling. We are the masters of our own narratives, individual and collective. We need only to remain active in the writing and acting out of it. Stay hopeful. Stay curious.)

Predicting the future, or prophesying of future events, is a long-debated topic in human history. Ultimately, one of the deepest questions implied in the debate is whether or not knowledge of future events is sufficient to change them or even stop them. In this essay, I will argue that knowledge of the future is useless when compared to the explanatory power of collective memory and narrative. Paul Connerton, in his book How Societies Remember, begins hinting at an answer when he says, “For it is the case that control of a society’s memory largely conditions the hierarchy of power; so that, for example, the storage of present-day information technologies, and hence the organisation of collective memory through the use of data-processing machines, is not merely a technical matter but one directly bearing on legitimation, the question of the control and ownership of information being a crucial political issue.” (Connerton, 1989, p. 1) As my argument is unorthodox (claiming to have answers about the future), so shall my methods be; namely, because our world is one without prior knowledge of events I will draw on source material from a world where knowledge of the future does exist. To do all this I will call upon the help of the novelist Frank Herbert and his seminal work Dune. I will also be grounding my argument in our reality with the works of Jennifer Cole (Forget Colonialism?) and William H. Sewell Jr. (Logics of History). Let us now leave behind the world we know as we enter the mind of Frank Herbert.

In the world of Dune, the Bene Gesserit are a secretive and elite sisterhood of what we might call “more-than-human” women. They have near superhuman capabilities such as control over their metabolism, and choosing the gender of their offspring, with the highest echelons of the Bene Gesserit having access to something called Other Memory. Other Memory is a collective memory; A pool that can only be accessed by those who have tamed it through an agonizing ritual of consuming, and then internally transmuting, high amounts of a potent hallucinogenic inside their bodies. (Dune Wiki, Other Memory, n.d.) However, our analysis and inquisition aren’t concerned with what the Bene Gesserit can do, but rather what they can’t: access the “masculine” Other Memory. For this, they would need to breed their ‘chosen one’; a male trained in the Bene Gesserit way. Or as one Reverend Mother put it:

Now, it’s not just memories this ‘chosen one’, or Kwisatz Haderach, can access. Due to his ability to “be many places at once”, he can also see the multiple potential strands of the future (an ability they call prescience), which was another key goal of breeding a ‘chosen one’ in the first place. The Bene Gesserit wanted to control humanity and bend it to their will in a way that would continue to uphold their power and give them more influence across the ever-growing cosmic empire (I hope the parallels to my academic text choices are already appearing).

This shadowy sub-plot is integral for us because Paul Atreides (the main character of the book) is the product of a Bene Gesserit woman married to a powerful Lord, and she chose to have a son despite opposition from the upper echelons of the sisterhood. She also chose to train him in the Bene Gesserit ways, again defying orders from above. As Paul grows older, his family is given stewardship of a desert planet, Arrakis, where the religious arm (the Missionaria Protectiva) of the Bene Gesserit’s influence has taken deep roots. They have planted religious ideals and prophecies rooted in their special breeding program and belief in the coming of a Kwisatz Haderach. Here lies the seeds for the true recognition of Paul’s future power, and here lies the power of my arguments.

In Forget Colonialism? Jennifer Cole provides us with explanations as to how the Betsimisaraka people of Madagascar explain being controlled or empowered by dead relatives. In this excerpt, we see the similarity between her conceptualization of a ‘memoryscape’ and Frank Herbert’s concept of “Other Memory” from Dune.

In a nearly direct parallel, the Betsimisarka and Bene Gesserit both believe in the power of spirits to control or direct their actions. Furthermore, the religious prophecies planted by the Bene Gesserit among the indigenous population of the planet are what shapes their memoryscape as well.

As Paul comes into more frequent contact with “Spice”, the hallucinogenic mining product of Arrakis (once refined it becomes the poison allowing access to Other Memory) , and as he matures, he gains more and more power and abilities. Eventually, his safety comes into question and his mother and he are forced to flee, finding refuge among the Fremen, the indigenous people of the planet. More specifically, they find a tentative home among a particularly religious group of Fremen. A group that knows, intimately, the prophecies about a Bene Gesserit mother and son coming to their planet to free them from the oppression of constant mining and extractivism. We see an active interpretation of these prophecies in an exchange between Paul and their Fremen desert guide (Liet Kynes) as he helps them fit their specially designed moisture-retention suits called a “stillsuit”:

One of the abilities Paul becomes increasingly familiar with is what the author calls “prescience”: the ability to see the future or to glimpse threads of all possible outcomes. As Paul begins seeing the paths unfolding before him, he sees his actions leading to atrocities and religious war across space. He makes decisions ‘accordingly’. However, despite his, and others, ability to glimpse the future, it begins to feel that his place as “Lisan al Gaib” or “Muad’Dib”, the messiah figure of the Fremen, is inevitable. But armed with our understanding of ‘memoryscapes’ we can push forward to better illuminate how Paul was a conscious actor making choices within socio-cultural structures (memoryscapes shaped by those before him); to the extent of knowingly using them to influence others. We’re still missing a piece of the puzzle though. Thus we’re brought to William H. Sewell’s work, Logics of History.

In this wonderfully crafted dialogue between multiple fields of social sciences, Sewell gives us an understanding of time, and history, as “eventful”. History is contingent on events played out by real people in their everyday lives. Sewell, paraphrasing Anthony Giddens, says, “. . .Giddens, makes it clear that structure is the outcome as well as the source of social conduct, that it enables as well as constraints, and above all that it can be transformed by human social practice.” (Sewell, 2005, p. 205) These events shape the structures they are a part of and are, in turn, reconfigured once again to either support or modify the existing structure and even constrain or limit future actions. Turning back to Dune, Paul’s recognition as a messianic figure is, in no small part, due to the religious fundamentalists among the Fremen people, and the structure of their beliefs. Throughout his time with them, we see them acting and thinking in ways that further cement the idea that Paul is, indeed, the one they’ve been waiting for.

From day one on Arrakis, we see firsthand how narrative interpretation is already taking place. The religious memoryscapes of Fremen ancestors and the shadowy work of the Bene Gesserit are already shaping the future. This means that as Paul’s influence among the Fremen grows, we’re plunged deeper into a narrative that (most likely) only has one outcome for him.

Now, by the point Paul is allowed among the Fremen, he’s already grappling with how to understand his role in all of it. He’s had visions here and there and tried to make choices to mold things in his favor, but ultimately he’s failed. These people see him as their savior no matter what he does, so he accepts it, hoping to gain more control of the narrative by co-opting it. So, following in the footsteps of his mother in an attempt to access the realm of the “Other Memory” Paul drinks the concoction and goes comatose for days on end. Among the Fremen, doubt begins to gather around his ability to overcome the odds, or that he’s still living at all. Yet, paradoxically, they know if he survives it will confirm what they’ve been suspecting all along: he is the chosen one. Spoiler: he survives.

This cements his superior status among the Fremen, but still Paul feels the worst of his visions can be avoided. What Paul is failing to see is the power that lies in, as Connerton (1989) said, “control of a society’s memory” because it “largely conditions the hierarchy of power”. It’s not that he doesn’t know about the prophecies, or that he doesn’t understand them; It’s that he doesn’t control them. The Fremen memoryscapes were placed and shaped long before he was born, and it’s not until much later in his life that he will finally gain more persuasion about how these will eventually be interpreted. Sewell (2005) says it this way, “That there are a diversity of temporalities operating in any present raises difficult analytical challenges. How do we handle the problem of sequence when we are dealing not with a chain of discrete and precisely timetable decisions, but the intertwining of long-term with punctual processes?” (p. 9)

My answer to that question is a bit circular, but I’ll restate it for clarity. I see Cole’s “memoryscapes” as some distant temporal place populated by events and agentive beings that can act and react across massive spans of time, or as a ‘punctual process’ like Sewell said. This is similar to the way the Bene Gesserit have used prescience and “Other Memory” in order to affect change at every temporal level of society throughout time and across generations. And lest you think I’m misrepresenting Cole, let me now move our focus to her, and give her more attention than we have until now.

Up until now, I’ve allowed Cole’s definition of “memoryscape” to be subsumed and overshadowed by my own nebulous simplification of it, referring to it as synonymous with “Other Memory”. While this isn’t wrong, per se, it understate the power of the work she did to uncover this idea. Speaking of memoryscapes she says, “It indicates the configuration of people’s memories at a given moment, as well as how easily people currently access particular memories; and it conditions the possibility for retaining in the future. The memoryscape includes the array of schemas through which people remember and the social-historical forces that draw these schemas into action and sometimes enable them to be formulated in narrative. . .As the memoryscape both elaborates some memories and diffuses others, it marks the crystallization of historical consciousness that occurs where social and individual memories provisionally meet.” (Cole, 2003, p. 290)

What Cole is saying here is what I’ve been trying to get across all along: the power of narratives, particularly historical ones, effectively has more power to shape the future than actually seeing the future. In Cole’s novel, the colonial memoryscape of older village members played a big role in shaping the outcome and response to elections years after colonialism had ‘ended’. This is echoed in Dune as Paul tries to shape his path, but is outmatched by what is being accessed within the indigenous memoryscape. Years of religious seeding have provided ancient schemas that are now arising, in full power, to shape the outcomes Paul experiences. This, in turn, helps explain the second half of the quote from Cole, “the memoryscape both elaborates some memories and diffuses others, it marks the crystallization of historical consciousness that occurs where social and individual memories provisionally meet.” Understanding this requires further digging, so dig we shall.

Anyone familiar with the works and content I’m analyzing will also be familiar with the conundrum of how one explains the turning of the historical tides. Was Martin Luther King the keystone of the civil rights movement? How are we to understand the power of individual actors inside of such all-consuming social processes? Our only hope for understanding requires turning back to Sewell and his work. So far he’s given us understanding regarding how strongly the future can be controlled by the past, and now he enlightens us about the complexity of it all, despite our perception of it as one clean historical narrative.

He says, “One significant characteristic of historical events is that they always combine social processes with very different temporalities. . .which are brought together in specific ways, at specific places and times, in a particular sequence.” (Sewell, 2005, p. 9) This is similar to Cole’s statement about the ‘crystallization’ going on when these events are occurring. Each individual actor has their own inner memoryscape that is being used to navigate the social memoryscape. Paul knows the prophecies, but his perspective of them arises from his inner memoryscape and projects wholly different interpretations and meanings onto the social fabric; different, that is, from the Fremen. When Paul makes a choice --when he kills a man in a duel, or when he fits his suit unknowingly using Indigenous knowledge, or when he survives the toxic transmutation -- his actions are being seen in a wholly different light. Not only because each and every Fremen individual has idiosyncratic views, but especially because the collective similarity of the Fremen and their collective memory/history (memoryscape) far outweighs that of Paul and his mother. The future he sees is one thing, but what the future means is another. As with real landscapes, the boundary between a mountain and its base is fuzzy. The boundaries of memoryscapes are identical. For Fremen and Betsimisaraka alike, whether figuratively or literally, the schemas and cultural memories of ancestors lives and breathes within the people. The power of this shapes the contours of memories yet to come, future memoryscapes already influenced by events long gone. How much power did Paul ever have? I think I’ve answered that question.

At the beginning of this essay, I set out to prove the futility of prior knowledge of future events. I relied heavily upon the robust works of Cole, Sewell, and Herbert assuredly strengthening my position. I painted a picture of the world of Dune, in order to access arguments about seeing the future. All the while I illuminated its academic counterparts within the works of Sewell and Cole. After showing the usefulness of a fictional story in my argument, I relied on the scholars even further to explain why things happened the way they did for Paul. Sewell taught us how to see and understand history, and Cole enlightened us with the true power that has over the future.

Cole, Jennifer. “Forget Colonialism?” In University of California Press eBooks, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520926820. Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511628061 Herbert, Frank. Dune. PDF. Chilton Books, 1965. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:cdb3c4bb-6bf3-48e7-91bc-7d722d3441d0. Other Memory. (n.d.). Dune Wiki. Retrieved November 25, 2024, from https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Other_Memory Sewell, William H., Jr. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, 2005. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226749198.001.0001.