Anxiety of Influence

 George Lucas in interviews—when he is asked what influenced him to create Star Wars—will always cite spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon film serials, etc. All of which makes him come across as very humble and credible and self-disclosing. He is duly acknowledging the creators who inspired him. He is properly attributing his sources. He is giving credit where credit is due. 

But a knowledge of psychoanalysis tells us that people often reveal in order to conceal—they tell us everything they can possibly think to divulge about themselves—except for the one, big, hairy truth. 

And so we must ask of Lucas—to quote a novel by Mark Leyner (Gone With the Mind)—"what is striking in its absence here? What is being occluded? Because, doesn’t the real story always consist of the very content that’s being occluded?"

After all, there is one potential source for his films that I've never seen George Lucas cite in any interview: namely, that other major space opera franchise that dates from around that same time. 

I'm referring, of course, to Frank Herbert's Dune. 

A friend of mine once pressed the comparison on me. He thought the resemblances between the two franchises were unmistakable. I thought the notion was ridiculous at first. But he insisted. 

"Think about it," he said. "They mine 'spice.' They live on a desert planet. There's an evil galactic empire." He often also adds—at this point in the rant—something about a "Jedi-bendu"—but I confess that here I lack sufficient knowledge of both Star Wars and Dune lore to follow what he's saying or appreciate the force of this observation. 

The resemblances between the two works are perhaps most obvious in the first Star Wars film—which Lucas had the largest hand in writing, and which would have come earliest in time to his first consulting of Dune. "Instead of 'the Voice'," which they have in Dune, "they have 'the Force,' but otherwise it's the same," says my friend. "Everything people can do with the 'Force' in A New Hope they can also do with the 'Voice.'"

And indeed—the more I think about it—the more it seems to me my friend is absolutely correct. Lucas has dutifully cited every one of his sources and intellectual influences—except the one big one that most obviously and fully influenced him. Why? 

I think we know why. But in case we needed the psychological mechanism spelled out for us—I found one in Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey—which I discussed in depth in the previous post. 

Butler observes that whoever wrote the Odyssey (and he finds good reason to think it wasn't "Homer"—see the previous post) seems to have been intimately familiar with the text of the Iliad—to such an extent that she often unconsciously quotes from or echoes it (and this author was probably a "she"—see above again). But at the same time—she never refers to the events of the Iliad.

Why? Here's Butler's explanation: 

I remember saying to a great publisher that a certain book was obviously much indebted to a certain other book to which no reference was made. "Has the writer," said the publisher in question, "referred to other modern books on the same subject?" I answered, "Certainly." "Then," said he, "let me tell you that it is our almost unvaried experience that when a writer mentions a number of other books, and omits one which he has evidently borrowed from, the omitted book is the one which has most largely suggested his own."

Butler goes on:  

His words seemed to explain my difficulty about the way in which the writer of the Odyssey lets the incidents of the Iliad so severely alone. It was the poem she was trying to rival, if not to supersede. She knew it to be far the finest of the Trojan cycle; she was so familiar with it that appropriate lines from it were continually suggesting themselves to her[....] She knew she could hold her own against the other poems, but she did not feel so sure about the Iliad, and she would not cover any of the ground which it had already occupied.

Is it not quite possible that this is exactly what has been happening with George Lucas as well? He is happy to mention works from others, such as samurai films or spaghetti westerns—since they are not so similar to his own work that he could be accused of plagiarism.* So too—he is willing to cite space operas that are patently inferior to his own—such as Buck Rogers—since he doesn't actually need to compete with them. 

But Dune has its own fan base. I'm not a member of it—but there are many rabid enthusiasts for the world Frank Herbert created. Is it not possible that Lucas felt the need to cite every influence on Star Wars except this biggest and most important one—precisely because it was such an outsized and obvious influence that Lucas felt the need to disown it in order to preserve a conviction of his own originality? 

He need not have feared. "We need not fear excessive influence," as Emerson once wrote. He was no believer in that Bloomian bugaboo "the anxiety of influence." 

I do think it's undeniable—in light of the evidence my friend has marshaled—that Lucas had read Dune and been influenced by it at the time he was writing Star Wars. But for whatever reason—due to whatever strange combination of elements—the thing Lucas created means infinitely more to me than Herbert's work ever did. 

Dune may have a large number of elements in common with Star Wars. But whatever else it is—it is not Star Wars. 

Just as the Odyssey is not the Iliad—despite its author's fears of being overtaken by the latter. Indeed, it is much better. 

So let us have the truth at last—and fear no influence. Had Lucas read Dune or not? 

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*A similar thing happens often in cases of academic plagiarism. A writer will dutifully cite a large number of sources—but not the one book or article that pointed them to all these sources. As Anthony Grafton notes in his history of the footnote—writers have been complaining about this form of quasi-plagiarism since the academic citation was invented.