Paul Atreides is a Brutal, Manipulative Warlord. He is also the Messiah.
Themes in Dune, Part 1
A Three-Part Analysis of Themes in Dune
Welcome to the inaugural post of Dbakesquared, where Dave Baker, I, and hopefully a few other people will post their thoughts about science fiction, occasionally philosophy, and, as we become increasingly middle aged, complaints about the trivialities of life. I might celebrate the first 1,000 subscribers by posting about the transportation strikes in Germany, for instance.1
This post will be the first of a three-part series on Dune. It and the second part will focus on themes of the 1965 novel, and the third part will explore how the message of the recent movie differs from the book. For the record, I think the movie is amazing, and it does capture certain themes that the other adaptations—not to mention a lot of readers—missed. But it does also drop certain themes, and ultimately turns the story into a traditional tragedy. The novel has aspects of a tragedy—the sequel even references Oedipus—but ultimately the ending is too different from anything else for it to be tragic in the standard sense. The ending is so strange, in fact, that I think people regularly misinterpret it. Is it a happy ending? A sad ending? You’ve already misunderstood what’s going on.
A word of warning, if you are primarily familiar with the movies, a lot of what I say about the character of Paul will seem baffling. So, you either need to read the book or just accept that everything I’m about to tell you is true. Discussion of themes in the movie will have to wait until Part III.
Paul Atreides Is a Brutal, Manipulative Warlord. He Is also the Messiah.
The moral universe of Dune is widely misunderstood, a misunderstanding that’s recently taken the form of accusations that the story is a white savior fantasy transposed into space. This is followed by defensive replies that no, Frank Herbert was actually criticizing the whole idea of a white savior. More generally, one sees arguments that Paul is in fact the villain of the story. Dune, you see, is a very dark story in which there are no heroes. Dune Messiah presents Herbert’s final judgment on Paul, when Paul, wracked by guilt or alienated by cynicism, compares himself to Hitler. Dune, we are told, is a meditation on the dangers of messianic politics. Paul manipulates Fremen religious beliefs to fulfill a personal vendetta and seize control of the galaxy. In the process he kills billions and destroys the Fremen’s traditional culture. His gruesome jihad against the Imperium is an implicit critique of the eugenics project that led to his existence. Paul’s son, the God-Emperor Leto II, is called the Tyrant after his death. Clearly Herbert wants us to know that Leto’s own millennia-long eugenics program was a bad thing.
None of this is entirely wrong, except maybe the idea that Dune Messiah gives us Herbert’s final judgment on Paul. What it all misses, however, is how comprehensively ambivalent the moral outlook of Dune is. Judgments in these stories are never final. They always come from some perspective, and so are always incomplete. Good and evil are intermixed without hope of divorce. It’s a dark story, yes, but darker still because of the lack of final answers. Paul Atreides leads a holy war that kills billions—but he might be the hero, nonetheless. Messiah never takes that back. Its first chapter is an interview with one of Paul’s victims—a historian awaiting execution for criticizing the regime. He warns the reader about understandings that are too one-sided:
A: … It is not enough to see Dune as a place of savage storms. It is not enough to talk about the threat posed by the gigantic sandworms.
Q: But such things are crucial to the Arrakeen character!
A: Crucial? Of course. But they produce a one-view planet in the same way that Dune is a one-crop planet because it is the sole and exclusive source of the spice, melange.
Q: Yes. Let us hear you expand on the sacred spice.
A: Sacred! As with all things sacred, it gives with one hand and takes with the other. It extends life and allows the adept to foresee his future, but it ties him to a cruel addiction and marks his eyes as yours are marked: total blue without any white. Your eyes, your organs of sight, become one thing without contrast, a single view.
Dune Messiah is not intended to undermine Paul’s status as the Fremen savior, but to remind us of something that was already clear in the first book: a Fremen savior will be in many ways a terrible thing, for the rest of the Imperium and for the Fremen themselves.2
Herbert isn’t warning us about the dangers of messianic politics—who needs to be reminded of that? Herbert is pointing out to us the dangers of an actual, honest-to-god messiah. After all, this is science fiction. We can imagine a messiah: a superhuman being with prophetic powers who liberates an oppressed people, leading them to their promised future. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, it might be nice for the last to finally be first. But a messiah, if he’s to rule, would still need politics. And what could those politics be but messianic? Paul sets the Fremen on a bloody crusade, destroying their traditional culture in the process, but that’s perhaps because he is their savior. Perhaps there was no other way to save them.
Is Paul the liberator of the Fremen or a villain who exploits them and murders billions? Paul Atreides is the Kwisatz Haderach, a superhuman being who transcends human concepts of good and evil.3 As the final chapter explicitly tells us:
He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad’Dib’s motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad’Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies’ skins, the Muad’Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: “I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough.”
Of course, saying who Paul really is is more complicated than simply finding a single quote. This isn’t Herbert’s voice or judgment, which we never have in Dune, but Irulan’s.
Herbert’s prose and dialogue can be clunky at times, but the decision to begin each chapter with an excerpt from one of Irulan’s histories is one of the fantastic aspects of the writing. On the first reading, these quotes provide crucial information and help orient the reader in an alien society. On the first reading, we are also likely to take these histories at face value. The noble Atreides. The evil Harkonnens. Heroic Paul. But on rereading we realize that while these histories may contain important truths, they are nonetheless propaganda. An early chapter begins with a quote from “A Child’s History of Maud’Dib” which tells its readers that “You will sing some of Gurney’s songs as you read along in this book.” On the first pass this seems innocent: even young children are taught to emulate Paul’s heroism. Only after finishing the book do we understand the real meaning of this passage: Paul’s holy war will crush opposition so absolutely that even young children learn about his greatness and wisdom in sing-a-long books.
So perhaps the quote above is more propaganda. Perhaps Irulan is trying to excuse the crimes that can’t be hidden by telling us that Paul stands outside of morality altogether. Only note that she doesn’t say quite that. “Ogre,” “saint,” “chivalrous,” “ruthless” do all apply to him. He transcends our moral concepts but he does so without quite falsifying them. The problem is not that he is not an ogre. It’s that only seeing him as an ogre is too one-sided.
Irulan’s histories are as partial and unreliable as every other perspective in the book. But her verdict in the final chapter fits thematically. Science fiction stories often begin with a “what if…”, the story itself being largely an exploration of that initial counterfactual. The first what-if Dune asks is this: what if all human value systems are contingent and transient? What’s more, what if they are ultimately inadequate to the realities of life, the realities of human biology and evolution, and the ecological realities on which life depends? And what if, besides all that, a person were capable of fully understanding those realities on their own terms, rather than through the distorting lens of human values?
Herbert’s answer: for us, it would be as though an Old Testament God had chosen to act through a human vessel.
A possibly unnecessary disclaimer before going on: the moral outlook of Dune is not my own. I’m not sure that it is even, entirely, Herbert’s. Much of the book is, by contemporary standards, quite reactionary—the intense gender essentialism, for example. While the book is critical of the Bene Gesserit eugenics program, there is a eugenics-curious social Darwinism running throughout. I would note that neither of these aspects is unusual in a story from the golden age of sci-fi. Just read Heinlein. In any case, while I understand some of the defensiveness about the message of Dune, reading a straightforward liberal-egalitarian critique of various forms of oppression into the story ends up distorting it. I want to understand why, despite clumsy prose and dialogue, the story has been so fascinating to many, and I think that requires highlighting some of its themes, whether those themes are ones we find morally edifying or not.
A Distant and Morally Distant Future
As I said, the moral outlook of the books is not necessarily Herbert’s own. A writer can entertain a what-if without thinking that it will one day be true. But Herbert’s what-ifs are strange ones. Most science fiction focuses on a technological what-if, what if a robot could love, what if people stopped aging. Herbert’s what-ifs are sociological and ethical.
What if value systems are historically contingent and transient? What if our liberal, humanistic outlook is not the culmination of millennia of progress, but just another blip in human history, destined to give way to something else? Perhaps our distant descendants will be as foreign to us as the ancients. Reading the tale of one of their heroes would be like reading Homer. We could sympathize with the heroism and tragedy, to a point, because their heroes would still be human. We would also find ourselves fascinated at times by their customs, and read for that. But there would be occasions on which we would be shocked. To appreciate the story we may have to suspend parts of our own outlook and agree to temporarily adopt theirs. Odysseus enslaves people, but to understanding the Odyssey we have to accept that the society that produced it would never have taken that as an argument against his heroism.4
Dune, I think, should be read in the first place as an attempt to imagine a future society almost completely alien to our own, and then to present, in a sense, one of its epics. The challenge for the author is to get the reader to sympathize with the heroes, to understand how they can be heroes, even as they shock us at times. Another function of Irulan’s histories, I think, is to create distance. We are reading the “in universe” story of Paul Atreides. The narrator is of that world, too, not one of our contemporaries.
This aspect of the book leads to misreadings. We’re more moralistic now than in 1965: we expect more didacticism in our literature. Readers see the feudal society of Dune and expect to find what they find in A Game of Thrones: repeated reminders that feudalism is bad, actually. Dune has its criticisms of the society it portrays, but they focus on the way its ruling class has gone decadent—the pleasure-seeking, arrogance, sexual depravity, infighting and loss of loyalty. In other words, Dune critiques its society in terms of the worries that feudal aristocracies always have about themselves: perhaps we have become soft and treacherous. Even Duke Leto, the closest to a morally admirable leader in the book, sees the problems with his society in these terms:
“I am tired,” the Duke agreed. “I’m morally tired. The melancholy degeneration of the Great Houses has afflicted me at last, perhaps. And we were such strong people once.”
Contemporary readers of Dune fail to find the expected admonitions against slavery, concubinage, revenge killing, hereditary rule, killing strangers for their water, eugenics, and so on, and begin to wonder if Herbert endorses these things. But there is no omniscient narrator in Dune to make the judgments we want.5 Judgments always come from a character or faction within the story, and so we are limited to the critiques this society could have of itself. Postwar liberal values are not something the characters even seem to be aware of, so transient a blip were we, and so criticism from our point of view never comes.
George R. R. Martin, admittedly, shows that you can tell the story from characters’ points of view, and still communicate external societal critiques to the reader. So I guess at this point I can only ask whether this is really a worthwhile aesthetic goal. Do readers actually need to be reminded, repeatedly, that feudalism is unjust? Might there be something preposterously self-congratulatory about constantly pointing out our moral superiority to a fictionalized version of the Middle Ages? I suspect that Herbert didn’t think that there was any risk that in the near future we would settle our political disputes through knife fights rather than, say, voting, and so overlooked the need to tell us that the people in Dune are doing things badly. We now understand the risks better.
Dune is closer to HBO’s Rome than its Game of Thrones. Rome, for those who missed it, attempts to present the rise of Caesar in a way that is faithful to the value system of the Romans themselves. I will leave to historians how successful it is, but the goal is to confront audiences with an alien value system, and lead audiences to sympathize with and even sometimes root for characters despite the fact that, judged by modern standards, they must be monsters. (They are very casual, the characters in Rome, about violence and slavery.) Sometimes we judge as the characters do; sometimes we have to approach them with anthropological detachment; and occasionally the show startles us with the brutality of some character we liked. Paul says of his sister that she is “Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times… She’s killing enemy wounded and marking their bodies for the water-recovery teams.” And Alia is one of the heroes, in the first two books at least.
This explains, by the way, why the story must be set so far in the future, in the 11th millennium (AG). Admittedly Dune does try, in general, to blow the reader’s mind with its scale, including its unimaginably vast timeframes. But it’s worth thinking about the problems Herbert faces in telling his story. That story, in summary form, is this. The hero comes from a great civilization, capable of wonders. But this civilization is decaying. Because of its hypocrisy and greed, he is forced to live among the natives of a hostile world. The native customs are strange, disorienting, and on occasion murderously cruel. The natives nevertheless possess a kind of purity and wisdom that the civilized have lost. They are more aware of the truth. Privation has taught them to be more aware of their natural environment, of its indifference to human well-being, of the necessity of violence and the inevitability of death. The hero absorbs this wisdom and intensifies it, becoming enlightened. He realizes that human society and conventions, including our moral judgments, are epiphenomenal in the face of ecological and biological reality. He uses this knowledge to overthrow the stagnating civilization that betrayed him.
Okay, so now let’s imagine that the civilization in question is more or less our own, but with better technology. The United Federation of Planets—in its senescence, perhaps. What are the politics of the story just told? It sounds like straight-up fascism. The Islamic State conquers the West, because liberalism is decadent and weak. The politics of Dune are, I acknowledge, reactionary in various ways, but not like that.
This is the challenge for Herbert, then. How do we tell the story without it being read as a very dark critique of liberal humanistic values. To begin with, the civilization cannot have our values. The United Federation of Planets must be replaced with the Imperium of the Padishah Emperor. The social structure of the Imperium will blend western European feudalism with the empires of Islam, the first to give readers something to latch onto, the second to disorient them. (Its audience, remember, is western readers in 1965.) Technological development has taken a surprising turn. Superior technology is not primarily about superior gadgets or machinery. There are, of course, spaceships, shields, lasguns, and lots and lots of poisons. But the advanced technology, mostly, is new forms of meditation, psychological manipulation, yogic techniques, voice control, prescient trances, secret languages, conditioning that enables a human to function as a computer, and drugs that assist in all of this. It’s very sixties, and somehow it works. What’s top secret in this universe are not the plans for some new superweapon, but the methods of training and indoctrinating elite soldier-fanatics. It’s technology that leads to secret societies like the Guild and Bene Gesserit, each offering its own style of training and corresponding promise of enlightenment.
This also prepares the reader to accept the hero’s final epiphany. Readers pass through three value systems in the course of the book. We begin with our own. Then, in the first part of the story, we encounter that of the Imperium’s ruling class. We must, to engage with the story, sympathize with those values enough to understand the heroism of the Atreides. Then there is Paul and Jessica’s flight into the desert. Now the reader must pass into the morality of the Fremen. The morals of the Imperium give way to something more openly brutal, but in the service of preserving one’s family and tribe. The Fremen are honest and loyal, and, we understand, would all die without their brutality. The change in moral values is paralleled by an inversion of economic values. The spice, we originally learned, is the most valuable thing in the galaxy. But in the desert it is everywhere, and people will kill each other for a glass of water.
After these transitions the reader is confronted with a possibility. What would a being who saw things objectively make of all these values, limited as they are to times and circumstances? Would the Kwisatz Haderach see through all of it? But thanks to the setup, this question, when we encounter it, isn’t read as an attack on liberal humanism. It’s the oathbound, slave-trading, feudal society of the Imperium that is weak and decadent.
A problem still remains. While the United Federation of Planets can be three or four centuries in the future, the Imperium needs to be much later. Why? Because as it gets closer to us in time, it is harder, once again, to avoid implicit social critique. Our society, in the next few hundred years, gives way to slavery and hereditary rule? What does the writer think is happening now that could lead to that? The reader expects some indication. And then you have Neuromancer or The Handmaiden’s Tale. Or the author thinks the slavery is an improvement on the current dispensation. I don’t know which book that is, but personally I don’t want to read it.
8,000 20,000 years from now, though. Do you really think people 8,000 20,000 years from now will see things the way we do? Maybe there’s nothing wrong with our values, but of course they will give way to new ones, which will themselves give way to new ones, and so on. That’s just the way of things.
This way of summarizing the story is a simplification. It gives the Kwisatz Haderach the final say, and this is a story in which, to repeat, there is no final say. Gurney Halleck returns in the final chapters to represent the values of Paul’s father. Gurney cannot fully disapprove of Paul. He believes too strongly in the loyalty he owes to his feudal lord and the son of the man who saved him. But part of him clearly disapproves of how callous Paul has become about human life.
Dune Messiah, for its part, can be seen as the revenge of the human. The messiah, insofar as he remains human, must still, at times, judge himself by human standards. The problem with human standards is that there are such an awful lot of them. The revenge of the human may not mean, then, what we’d like it to, the revenge of humanism. It probably couldn’t, if that was never on the table to begin with. Paul embraces his humanity at the end of Messiah, at the cost of his prescience. But the humanity he embraces is Fremen humanity, obeying the custom that a blind Fremen must wander out into the desert to die.
Two Jihads
The world of Dune exists in the shadow of the Butlerian Jihad, the great holy war to liberate humanity from its thinking machines. This war is responsible for the unconventional form technological development has taken in the Imperium:
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted.
“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?”
“I’ve studied with Thufir Hawat.”
“The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.”
“Bene Gesserit schools?”
She nodded. “We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild.
And what do these schools, the Bene Gesserit and the Guild exist to do? The Guild maintains a monopoly over space travel, restricting trade and extorting ever greater fares from the people of the Imperium. Reverend Mother Mohiam describes the goal of the Bene Gesserit, for its part, like this:
“The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there could be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock—for breeding purposes.”
The old woman’s words abruptly lost their special sharpness for Paul. He felt an offense against what his mother called his instinct for rightness.
In the space of a few sentences she moves from celebrating humanity and the exploration of human potential to declaring that most of humanity isn’t even human at all—they’re mere animals. Even those judged human are simply regarded as breeding stock. This is one of the major ideologies birthed by the Butlerian Jihad. The struggle to free humanity from slavery to thinking machines leads to radical dehumanization by other humans. And it isn’t simply the Bene Gesserit. The Butlerian Jihad has resulted in “a feudal trade culture that turns its back on most of science,” one which practices slavery and concubinage and is dominated by a repressive caste system.
This points to the foundational paradox of the culture Herbert is imagining. Thinking machines have been wiped out in order to ensure the irreplaceability of humanity. But by doing that, it may have made slavery viable once again.
The science-fictional technology of Dune, as noted, is largely the technology celebrated by the Reverend Mother, the development of human capacities to levels we would regard as superhuman. But it is not just that. These advances in what humans can learn are accompanied by intensified forms of conditioning and psychological control. Both the training and the conditioning aim, it seems, to turn human beings into superb tools for those who can afford them. Suk doctors undergo conditioning so extreme they have never betrayed their masters before the Arrakis affair—and even that betrayal required putting the doctor’s wife in something called a “pain amplifier.” Jessica wonders at one point if she was conditioned at her school to fall in love with Duke Leto, if Leto’s father had intended to purchase his son an especially loyal secretary. The Harkonnens bury Paul’s would-be assassin in a cairn for over a month, where he waits for his chance to kill the ducal heir. Sardaukar training does not simply produce super-soldiers, but fanatics religiously devoted to their emperor and army, through a process of extreme physical and psychological brutality. The Butlerian Jihad has outlawed machines in the likeness of the human mind, and society has responded by molding human minds into the likeness of machines.
The moral universe of Dune is one in which every gain implies a loss. Every achievement risks becoming another crutch. Every new form of freedom is bought through an intensification of oppression somewhere else. The Butlerian Jihad allows us to more thoroughly hone the powers of the human mind and body. But it thereby gives new reason to the ambitious to dominate, and simply purchase, those increasingly powerful bodies and minds.
This universe only ever allows two paths. There is “the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.” Or one accepts that “God made Arrakis to train the faithful.” We will be forced to pay something either way, but the faithful know these costs and pay them upfront.
This is probably the most reactionary aspect of Dune: the compensatory view of gain and loss that rules out progress and valorizes suffering. Brett Devereux has criticized it compellingly, both in general and how it appears in Dune.6 Most notably, it relies on a view of human history and military strength that is probably false. In reality, the Sardaukar would likely brush aside the Fremen, because better fed and better equipped armies typically win. As much as we might share anxieties that increasing comfort must be making us softer, suffering itself purchases no strength or wisdom, it simply hurts.
Accurate to our world or not, though, the universe of Dune is governed by such a law. This is necessary to understand how Paul can be the story’s hero and villain at the same time. Paul saves the Fremen. He absolutely does. But what is Fremen salvation? It means having enough water. It means an Arrakis that supports normal human modes of life. It means they are no longer poor or hunted like animals. In other words, it means that they cease to be Fremen. Paul saves them, which means he makes them weaker. To terraform Arrakis is to destroy God’s training ground and turn his faithful cynical and greedy.
I think the sequels are not good books, but they have their moments. As Arrakis is terraformed, it feels progressively smaller and seedier. It can only have its epic grandeur as long as it is Dune. And only so long as it is Dune can it provide the spice, the drug that makes space travel possible. Of course, the spice itself is ambiguous. It “gives with one hand and takes with the other.” But that is everything in this universe. Hence the warning against one-sided views.
Paul is the monster who unleashes the Jihad, killing billions. But the only clear alternative Paul ever sees to the Jihad is a future in which he allies himself with the Baron. The Imperium has been on the clear safe path for a long time, and it will only stagnate further. If things continue as they have, there will eventually be a Harkonnen on the throne. The caste system, the Guild monopoly, the decaying Great Houses are all bulwarks hemming in human potential. They must be smashed, and that can only be achieved through the Jihad. The Fremen Jihad liberates people—just as the Butlerian Jihad did. It liberates people in the same way that it prevents a Harkonnen from taking the throne—that is, by making the Baron’s grandson Emperor.
In short, Dune is dark because these revolts, Jihads, schools, epiphanies, and breeding programs can never bring about a utopia that feels commensurate to the suffering. Paul’s enlightenment seems at times to be little more than an ability to guide the ebb and flow of inevitable pain with a bit more intelligence. At the same time, it is a mistake, I think, to see Herbert as criticizing these things, at least if the goal of criticism is to imagine a society at some point in the future in which humanity learns its lesson, in which they no longer occur. This is simply how history happens. Violent jihads are how new historical epochs comes to be. We can see the what-if of Dune as imagining beings capable of understanding and acting on such a vast scale that they could plausibly attempt to guide history, not the way certain megalomaniacal dictators have thought that they could, but to really do it. Messiah asks, from the point of view of the humans who lived through their choices, what would the difference be?
And, of course, for history to be directed by superbeings sounds in its own way like a very clear and safe path. This seems to be part of the message of the later books, that perhaps Paul and Leto’s attempts to avoid stagnation have unwittingly led to it. (Even the perspectives of the superhumans are limited, perhaps seriously defective.) Human development may demand that humans make their own choices, using limited human values, on limited human scales. These books are, unfortunately, not well executed. There is also the larger problem that Herbert has written himself into a trap. Once we understand the nature of the game, who cares who wins? The sequels all have the problem that, while we can imagine the society changing further—and it is sometimes interesting to see how Herbert imagines that—progress is impossible. The foundational problems cannot be solved, because those problems are the basic karmic law of Herbert’s imagined universe.
For next week
Next week’s post will continue to discuss Dune. Find out who the Harkonnens are, and why the Kwisatz Haderach must be one. We will explore the theme of traps, and ask whether Paul really passed the test of the gom jabbar. Finally, I will put forward my view on Dune that I expect will get the most pushback: an Old Testament God did in fact intervene. (Or at least, you should not be entirely sure that did not happen.)
I am extremely lazy and absolutely will not do this.
Similarly, while it makes complete sense that the characters of the final books would think of Leto II as the Tyrant, it remains obscure whether he was merely the Tyrant, or if his choices were necessary to some greater good.
Or as my friend John likes to put it, “Nietzschean Space Jesus.”
--But the slavery in The Odyssey is genuinely bad and this should affect how we judge it as literature!
Okay, the story you want to read is Sandman, which is all about this problem. It’s really good. But I’m writing about Dune. I may write about Sandman later, but not if everyone demands to know why Dune isn’t Sandman.
The narrator is third person, but only ever knows what the characters in the scene could know.
Devereux, though, reads Dune as much more straightforwardly endorsing the judgments put forward in the book. I think there are too many indications of moral ambiguity and imperfect reliability for this to be right.
The clumsy dialogue and prose in Herbert’s writings I believe are an artifact of the typewriter. Had he been able to edit digitally it would have been a most different book.