ON THE KINSHIP OF HISTORICAL WITH SCIENCE-FICTION

ON THE KINSHIP OF HISTORICAL WITH SCIENCE-FICTION

By Nima Ghasemi

WHEN Paul arrives on the planet Arrakis with his father and his father’s commanders, he hears the crowd at the airport shouting: Lisan al Gaib! His mother explains that “Lisan al Gaib” is synonymous with the concept of “Messiah” for these people; That is, the one who appears and saves people from suffering and misery! “People say what they are told to say”, says Paul under his breath.

Lisan al Gaib means someone who can communicate from the hidden divine knowledge about the future events. Lisan is the Arabic for Tongue. Al Gaib is the Arabic for the Unseen, the divine realm, the hidden knowledge of the future.

So, it literally means the tongue that informs us about the unseen and the future. Lisan al Gaib is also the pen name of the

NOTES:

Translated by Google Translate with edits by Victor Vahidi Motti Originally published in Persian in Phoenix Cultural Centre of Toronto, Canada Phoenix Journal https://phoenixnews.ca/

great Persian poet Hafez, someone who is informed about the future! Many consider Hafez’ poetry a door into the hidden or unseen realm of the divine and knowledge of the future. People like to use Hafez’ poetry as a way to obtain God’s knowledge of the future when making tough decisions facing big uncertainty.

Frank Herbert gives Paul the title Lisan al Gaib due to this reason. To know how Frank Herbert, the author of the successful novel Dune which was published in 1965 knew this particular term and why he wanted to turn it into one of the key words of his epic science fiction requires reading the novel itself. But the character that the people of the Arrakis planet call the Lisan al Gaib, according to the story, has the ability to see the future.

The story begins in the year 10191! That is, in a future extremely

HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

far from our time. In this world, not only have the main characters of Herbert’s story (including Paul) the ability to see visions of the future, but the story itself is actually a vision, an insight, or a “image of the future”.

Fred Polak puts the term “image of the future” on the title of his famous book. Under the category of utopia, he studied all the images of the future produced by humans in different civilizations. According to his research, the stories that take place in a certain time, but in an unknown place, are classic utopias, because the Greek word “utopia” itself means “no place”. The place that Herbert depicts which the latest film adaptation brings to our eyes is surprising in many ways.

I am, however, interested in reconstructing temporal consciousness with the adverb “future” in this work from a philosophical perspective. It is remarkable that the author’s creative mind imagines a distant future with very old elements! The concept of the Promised Messiah, and the term “Lisan al Gaib” are just two simple examples. The indigenous people of the Arrakis planet, called Fremen, wear turbans around their heads and necks, reminiscent of the clothing that ancient Greek writers and artists depicted of Achaemenid soldiers. In both cases, this cloth is supposed to protect the eyes, ears and mouth from the desert sand.

In the title of Shaddam Corrino IV, the great emperor of the galaxy, there is a Persian word Padishah which means King. It shows the greatness of this great emperor, reflecting the image that the ancient Greeks had of Persis emperors. In the Foundation series, which is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novel of the same name, you also see great emperors, which western literature considers specific to Asian political systems, but it is interesting that in the reconstruction of the far future, political systems are led by emperors once more.

In fact, not only in the literature focused on the past, but also in the literature set in the future, Western writers imagine and portray comprehensive political systems of governance led by a single ruler (e.g., empires). One is tempted to say that new advanced technologies and the extraordinary possibilities of control over people they have enabled naturally leads to the

emergence of such empire systems of governance.

In this case, the likes of Herbert and Asimov have been following the logic that new technologies will possibly impose on the future social life of humans. But it is not just about the re-emergence of old political systems in the distant future. This future reconstruction of the past is practically a collage (mixture) of very old elements of human life and new emerging elements; even the design of the characters’ customs is subject to the same logic.

Literature directed to the past is often called “history” and literature directed to the future is called “utopia” or “science fiction”. The word “history” in the meaning we use today was naturally not relevant for the Greeks of Herodotus’ time. This word was often used in plural form (histories) and therefore comes from story. Therefore, the Histories by Herodotus, for his contemporary Greek, probably evoked something in the elements of stories. But Herodotus’ stories are in a genre called Persica, which basically means the story of Persis kings! There have been several authors (such as Ctesias after Herodotus, and Dionysius of Miletus and Charon of Lampsacus before Herodotus) who also wrote Persica. So here we can see that if history is a knowledge, like most other branches of knowledge, it was expanded from a concrete sample and actually had a prototype.

John Manuel Cook writes in The Persian Empire that for the ancient Greeks, history was only relevant in the sense of describing the actions of the Persian kings and the wars they had with the Greeks. If parts of the Greek colonies did not fall under the political and military influence of the Persian Empire, there would be no such genre from which the knowledge of

history was abstracted. It should be mentioned that out of the twelve volumes, nine volumes of Herodotus’ the Histories are the description of the war between the Persians and the Greeks.

In fact, in order to make such narratives, the Persica writers were indebted to completely real bloody events that they either participated in or heard from their fathers! That is, living elements connected to the present were available and it was enough to create an introduction with a little imagination. They would go back in time to explain, for example, that the Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus and how it was the turn of Darius I and his son Xerxes I. What exactly happened in the far east was beyond their means to find out.

Paul Ricoeur writes in Time and Narrative that the relationship

of the historian with the historical event as it actually happened is like the relationship of the researcher with the noumen (thing in itself/Ding an Sich) of Kant; the phenomenon as the manifestation of that thing in itself is recognizable to a certain extent, but it is not possible to access that thing in itself in the past.

Inevitably, historiography is about finding the connection and relationship between something completely real in the present, with elements reconstructed with the help of the imagination that must have been the introduction or background of the present. In this way, history, like arithmetic and geometry, is a science of ratios. If arithmetic and geometry is the science of relationships between separate and connected quantities, history is an effort to find the relationship between today’s living experience and imaginary elements that should be the introduction of today.

In this case, isn’t what we call science fiction or utopian literature the same kind of knowledge? It is only enough to mix today’s living elements with imaginary elements in the laboratory of our mind about the future, which should be today’s “epilogue” (as opposed to prologue).

Philosophically, the consequence of this outlook at futuristic literature and cinema is that this type of narrative is not different from history in its genus (genus in the Aristotelian sense). If narration creates knowledge, we can distinguish two types of knowledge within this general genus (narrative): retrospective knowledge and prospective knowledge. But narration is really knowledge because it is nothing but a calendar of temporal consciousness. In this way, temporal consciousness becomes substantive, and in Ricoeur’s interpretation, time is transformed from physical time to human time in the way of narration. In other words, the narrative lines up and arranges the scattered contents in the mind, and in this way, humans find their place in time.

From this point of view, the presence of very old elements in these forward-looking (utopian/futuristic) narratives, such as the linguistic interpretation of “Lisan al Gaib”, the outfit of the Ferman natives, a magic woman like Gaius Helen Mohiam, which reminds us of the archetypal character of Medea in literature used by the classical

writers of ancient Greece actually are not projecting elements of the past into the distant future. What has happened is the use of familiar imaginary elements, yet this time are considered epilogue to the present. These elements are not really intrinsically related to Persis or Persian kings, not even necessarily to the East. Rather, they are tools whose history of use in narration by the creative minds of the West goes back at least to the time of the prevalence of alphabetic literacy, that is, the era of ancient Greek writers.

From the very beginning, these elements were designed as distant elements from “now” and “here” and they play a role in the calendar of time consciousness according to whether the creative mind uses them for the epilogue or prologue. Referring to Husserl’s intentionality, it is the mind that sometimes determines whether the elements are “before” or “after”.

If we consider that narratives can also have a normative dimension or, as futurists call it, a self-fulfilling quality, then we have more sympathy with Paul when he says that people will say what they are

told. In fact, there is a kind of prophetic and preferably “apocalyptic” literature in the great traditions that itself introduces signs and attaches them to someone or something coming from the future. This is why forward-looking narratives, like retrospective narratives, always have a political function. These apocalyptic narratives have many examples in the traditions and religious literature of ancient civilizations, and the political function of all of them is due to the self-fulfilling character of the narrative. Narration leads to the creation of reality.

THE AUTHOR

Nima Ghasemi has a PhD in Philosophy from Shahid Beheshti University. He is a writer, philosopher, and was a resident of Iran, when in November 2021 “was sentenced to 4 years in prison on a charge of ‘assembly and collusion against the regime’ and eight months in prison on a charge of ‘propaganda against the regime’“ (https://www.en-hrana.org/writer-andphilosophy-researcher-nima-ghasemisentenced-to-four-years-and-eightmonths/). Since then, Nima has escaped from Iran and now is a resident of Canada.