The very rawness and naivete of popular culture are signs of a vitality which can, without a breach with its origins, transcend itself in the inspiration of fine art. This fertile paradox is illustrated by Frank Herbert's Dune. It is the unstultified vigor of Herbert's imagination which is responsible for the complexity, the depth, and the symbolic virtuosity of his novel. At the same time, his art is rooted in the naive elements of good storytelling. The setting of Dune is an adventure—a wonder-land elaborately spun from the author's imagination. However, it coheres perfectly in its solidity of specification, never abandoning the concreteness and verisimilitude which are primal sources of pleasure. Dune at once captures our interest with the immediacy of its dense and vivid detail, and it intrigues us because it is strange and labyrinthine. Through his appeal to our curiosity and wonder, Herbert leads us beyond a childlike fascination with his fictional surface to the intellectual and visionary depths behind it. Every aspect of Dune is meaningful in relation both to a cultural environment and to an inner spiritual realm linking man with the transcendent.
Dune thus has associations with both realistic fiction and romance—the narrative of psychological and metaphysical symbolism in which the protagonist has supernatural powers, and in which character, event, and setting can be more clear-cut and highly colored than is considered proper to the "mimetic" modes. This "romantic" quality is largely responsible for Herbert's success in combining popular appeal with genuine profundity. Dune makes liberal use of the exoticism, the adventure, and the melodrama of "space opera," but these express spiritual forces of good and evil—of death and renewal—at work in a civilization. In addition, much of the power of Dune arises from Herbert's exploitation of a tension implicit at the heart of romance: a union-in-opposition of earthly and supernal realities, of the humanity of the hero and his preternatural stature. Hence, despite its conventionally happy ending, Dune incorporates the complexities and conflicts of a genuinely tragic vision.
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