“Is there wormsign, or are you just glad to see me?”
Sexualtiy was an overt part of the Duniverse. The Bene Gesserit manipulated men with sexual mastery. One of the stories related by Irulan told how concerned the Sisters were by the Emperor turning down the seductive powers of a girl who was trained to be the sexual equivalent of a ninja. He was immune to their most powerful form of persuasion (as Frank Herbert seemed to see it, anyway) Later in the series, I think one of the clone Duncan Idahos turns the table on his Bene Gesserit lover and they end up addicted to each other sexually.
This was in the last two, Chapterhouse: Dune and Heretics of Dune, which are set several thousand years after the end of God-Emperor. It gets complicated…
The woman wasn’t Bene Gesserit (originally). She was an Honored Matre, which were an amalgamation of the old Bene Gesserit and Leto’s Fish Speaker Amazons brought together in the Scattering (the explosive outward migration of humanity after the God-Emperor’s static rule ended). The Honored Matres used sexual addiction (literal addiction, not just “Whoa…she’s so hot!”) to control men, which the contemporary Bene Gesserit considered to be vile and immoral.
The Duncan ghola in question had been created with a buried imperative to counter-addict whoever tried to sexually imprint him. That person happened (by accident) to be this Honored Matre (Murbella). (It was supposed to be the sister who was intended to sexually imprint (different from sexual addiction) him prior to the release of his memories, so as to control him)
you are taking 2 words from a short paragraph and assigning them meaning that is way the hell out of context to the actual paragraph. in the case of Lynch and the movie he found a way to put that meaning in as well but the other dozens of times that phrase gets used there is zero possibility for sexual connotation.
Whatever. It’s not in the least important that the phrase is familiar to you, or that you’re convinced. The phrase has a very specific and very well established meaning. Reducing a loaded phrase like “little death” by abstractly referring to it as “two words,” as if it were just as significant as “if the” or “she said,” is ridiculous. It’s an extremely loaded phrase that carries its own meaning and I refuse to believe that I’m better read than Frank Herbert: if it means that to me, it meant that to him. That the phrase is less familiar to random internet posters couldn’t possibly be more irrelevant.
No. The fact that some random internet poster is convinced that Herbert must have thought just as he did is what is completely irrelevant.
Herbert was, indeed, well-read. And well-written; had he meant for the Litany Against Fear to have had some freakish association with the petit mort, he would have made that association.
Instead, what the Litany says is that “Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” Notice the utter lack of association to an orgasm that “total obliteration” conveys. Herbert used “little-death” because that is, exactly, what he wanted to convey – fear is like dying a little.
Substituting “Fear is the orgasm that brings total obliteration.” makes the Littany utterly absurd and nonsensical.
Whatever, indeed.
Put it this way: if Herbert used a loaded phrase like “the little death” and did NOT intend that its loaded associations be a part of what he was trying to communicate, then he was a fucking retard. Anyone who would use the phrase “little death” and NOT intend there to be a whiff of orgasm (um, ew?) is not worth the effort it takes to read them. I’m not a huge fan, but I have more respect for him than that.
The English language is endlessly flexible, and many phrases can have more than one meaning, depending on context. Herbert was not bound by a French-into-English idiom, and a non-orgasm-related meaning is reasonable, in context.
Consider that the characters speak English only for our benefit. I don’t recall any connection to Earth, so a phrase like “little death” can be uttered without any relation to an Earth term.
Now why would that be?
There IS a connection to Earth, but our modern world is 20,000 years or so in the past. The characters and civilization in Dune are descended from Earth.
Of course phrases can have more than one meaning; that’s what I’ve been insisting all along: that Herbert used the phrase specifically because it had layered meanings. But a halfway culturally aware author would NOT use the phrase “little death” without the intent to imply, however subtly, a sexual connotation, any more than he would use the phrase “sleeps with the fishes” (for a lame example) entirely literally, without an intent to refer to death.
Some phrases are too idiomatically loaded to EVER mean just one thing. This is one of them.
And again, if Herbert meant to use it that literally, entirely ignoring its idiomatic meaning, then he’d fall another notch in my estimation. That’s just bad writing.
The connection to Earth is that–wait for it–it’s being read on Earth. By a readership who is largely aware of the meanings of well establish idioms. It’s not a document from the distant future; it’s a document about the distant future.
Actually, no; *le petit mort *is correct. I don’t remember most of my high school French, but for some reason, big and small (grand et petit) are two adjectives that seem to always come before the noun: le petit mort; la grand bouffe; Le petit prince; grand mal seizures; mon petit chou; etc.
He did. Quite clearly. By referring to it as “the little death.”* Fait accompli.*
So, Herbert was saying that fear is like an orgasm? It really makes no sense in the context of either the litany or the book as a whole.
Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
My sense is that he was adding a kind of Freudian layer to the scene; the innate sexual nature of most fears and passions.
fighting teh ignorance,
ur doing it rong.
Yeah I know, it’s not working. Whatever. I’m struggling to think of something I care less about than convincing a few random internet posters that THEIR familiarity with, in this case, a particular idiom, is by no stretch of the imagination relevant to an author’s familiarity with the idiom, let alone the established meaning and usage of that idiom beyond their individual familiarity with it. I understand, guys, that the phrase doesn’t mean that to you. Again, not really relevant.
But if you want to insist that Herbert used the phrase in total ignorance of its established meaning, or that he simply borrowed a hollow cliche and completely ignored its established meaning–i.e., that he was a terrible writer who used cliches indiscriminately and was wholly indifferent, at best, to their meaning–have at it.
I was actually defending Herbert. But hey, you want to insist he was a fucking retard, I’m not really gonna debate that.