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thejdizzler 4mo ago · Edited 4mo ago

In Defense of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R. R. Martin

If you think the series is nihilistic, you haven't been paying attention

There are certain takes on literature and culture that make me want to scream and tear my hair out. Harry Potter being decried as a book that encourages satanic witchcraft, when the books are explicitly (and somewhat heavy-handedly by the end) Christian, is one of them. Another is the insistence that post-modernism, fiction like Cloud Atlas or Infinite Jest have nothing to offer us because they don’t follow some Christian or rationalist world view. I’m pretty sure the early Church Fathers read pagan authors and some (like St. Basil) suggested that Christians should actually be well versed in pagan texts like the Odyssey and Aeneid before tackling the Bible. Most rage-inducing of all however is the idea that George R. R. Martin and his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world.

Now I think that many of those who make this critique haven’t even taken the time to read the books, much less the wealth of secondary analysis sources like [Race for the Iron Throne] (https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com) (RIT Steven Attewell), Mereenese Blot, Not a Podcast, or Wars and Politics of Ice that really clarify what the books are trying to say. The show, for all its success in adaptation during the first 2-3 seasons, unfortunately twists the message of the series towards nihilism and sex and violence for mere shock value. However, this is the fault of the show runners, and the requirements of television as a medium (once again Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true) rather than anything Martin wrote).

Rather I think Martin serves as convenient punching bag for people with a particular view about post-modernism (that it has been bad for human culture). He’s an easy target: he’s old, he hasn’t finished his series, and he doesn’t live a particularly healthy lifestyle. Many people have made these critiques, but the most uncharitable (and negligently so) on Substack comes from this post by The Brothers Krynn.

I found this essay repugnant in a number of ways, from its ad hominem attacks on Martin to the obvious fact that the guy clearly hadn’t read the books he was critiquing. However, I’ll do my best to give Krynn the critique that he fails to give Martin.

Krynn has three main points to make in this essay, which mainly revolve around critiquing a tweet that Martin made about hobbit sex, but he expands to the whole of the guy’s corpus.

"The sole thing that inspires and motivates Game of Thrones is sex. Martin admits that it is what he views a most transcendent.”
“His series is mediocre at best. It is not true Fantasy. It does not uphold the traditional values one should aspire to, it is not blessed with the Spirit of Truth that Fantasy embodies”
“with regards to the ‘religious structure’ as all religious characters are insane, and the Church is mocked and shown to be little more than a political organization, and one that we don’t know the rituals, ceremonies, and the ideals of.”

I would respond to these arguments as such:

1.Martin is a Romantic and places a primal role on Romantic love (which involves sex) as a human motivation. This does not just mean sex but also protecting your family and community of love (which all too abstract in Tolkien’s Gondor, although not as much in the shire). Martin is also careful to point out how various sexual and romantic fixations can ruin people, families, and entire nations.

There is plenty of truth in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, it is a (post-modern) novel that is by its nature deconstructive of traditional values. This deconstruction allows honest reflection on many traditional systems of values and myths that empirically don’t work (despite the lamentations of the trad caths and their ilk), and the reconstruction of a more truthful set of personal values.
Every single major religion in A Song of Ice and Fire is shown to have some kind of actual supernatural power. While many religious characters are rather likable (Davos Seaworthy, Catalyn Stark), you also have your fair share of insane theocrats (Damphair), and people who cynically use the church as a political tool (Cersei). It’s not true that we don’t see religious ceremonies at all: the drowned God, the Seven, the old Gods, and the Faith of the Seven all have various weddings, funerals, baptisms, and worship services on camera. These churches are shown to be political institutions (if you don’t think the Catholic church was or has always been an extremely political institution you need to crack open both a newspaper or history book), but not mere tools of power (their functioning is heavily swayed by true believers and the supernatural).

Sex and Love

I’ll start off with a little bit about the personal philosophy of George R. R. Martin, which should help clarify his position on the sex vs. love question. Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey in a working class family. Martin was raised Catholic, grew up reading comic books and adventure stories before beginning his writing career at Northwestern. Here he also was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. It’s also obvious from Martin’s early stories in Dreamsongs, that the guy is a Romantic (with a capital R), and extremely interested in beauty, gnostic individualism, and subjectivity. So we have an anti-war, Romantic, who still believes in many of the traditional virtues of Catholicism without believing in the faith himself. Given these things, the message of A Song of Ice and Fire starts to become a lot more clear.

So sex and love. Tolkien obviously thought love was important too, but he doesn’t take a Romantic view of it. Love for Tolkien is very abstract: for ideals (the shire), for peoples (the Men of the West), or for the idea of a person (which is what Arwen basically is). For Martin, whose is a Romantic, love is very specific:

Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.- Arya, AFFC

Love for Martin is built on personal relationships, and to describe the personal you have to describe specific intimate moments, some of which are sexual in nature.

Now, as many trad people like to point out, sex is powerful, and when that power is not used in the proper context, it can have terrible consequences. Martin knows and understands this, and contrasts sexual dynamics in two different families: the Starks (healthy), and the Lannister’s (fucked up). Ned has a healthy sexual relationship with his wife, and the resulting children love each other, and their father. This dynamic is also reflected in the political realities of the North, in which vassals are willing to die to save “Ned’s little girl”. Contrast this to the Lannister’s, who all have various sexual traumas inherited from their patriarch Tywin, and fail to meet the personal and political challenges presented to them as a result.

Of course the Brothers Krynn Disagrees:

"Because of this Ned Stark is very much a buffoon, and the likes of the incompetent sex-addled, drunkard Lannisters must triumph."

Ned makes mistakes throughout the narrative, but very much dies because he needs to for narrative reasons, not because of any fundamental trait the he has. Ned is honestly a very conflicted guy: a lot of his inner monologue is PTSD from the last war, and his inner concerns have little to do with sex, instead dealing with the conflict between trying to protect his family, or doing what he thinks is morally right and honorable. The Lannisters' are no less complicated, and the idea that they do triumph is laughable: very quickly after their "victory", House Lannister is in shambles. In fact you can argue that sex is central to their downfall. The incest between Cersei and Jaime is one of the direct causes of the war that is central to the first three novels. Tywin and Tyrion clearly also have their own sexually-linked problems, and Tywin's sexual treatment of Tyrion's first wife DIRECTLY LEADS to his death and the downfall of his house/legacy. George clearly does not think "sexy Lannister's good", and if you think so, you can't read. When Tywin dies, the regime he built quickly falls apart, as it's constructed on a level of fear, violence, and cunning that his children can't maintain. He also, as many people in the novel point out, dies stinking of his own shit.

Ned's legacy on the other hand is such that his vassals will march to battle in the middle of a snowstorm to save his daughter from a marriage with a monster. All his children remember him fondly and try to live up to the ideals he taught them, as fate slowly brings the whole family back together. Who really is the buffoon there?

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.-The King’s Prize, ADWD

Fantasy and Truth

The next banger from the Brothers Krynn:

The reason for this is that Martin is incapable of writing tales of honor, of chivalry, of faith, of goodness because let us be honest… he has precious little of it in him. He has no belief in it. He has only scorn for it, as is evident in all his tales.

This is just completely untrue as to be approaching the level of libel. The three prequel novellas, combined in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, are pretty much only about what chivalry looks like, and there are plenty of characters, ranging from Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth who are supremely concerned with their own code of conduct. I mean how can you not read the following passage and not come away thinking that Martin has some idea about what faith, goodness, and courage actually are?

Willow stepped out into the rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders, but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound's helm say, "Loose a quarrel at me and I'll shove that crossbow up your cunt and fuck you with it. Then I'll pop your fucking eyes out and make you eat them." The fury in the man's voice drove Willow back a step, trembling. Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. "Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me." - AFFC

George R. R. Martin is a Romantic who does believe in the ideals that you claim he scorns. But the world is complicated, and being a good person is not as simple as merely upholding those values because in the real world, those things are often in conflict with each other, and the institutions that claim to stand for those values are easily corrupted. We see this in the novels through the lens of the institution of knighthood, which confers honors onto to criminals like Gregor Clegane because of their noble status and physical stature, but fails to grant the same honor to people who actually follow the code due to their gender (Brienne) or social status (Dunk). It’s not that Martin wants us to believe that these ideals are a lie, but rather to critically recognize that institutions and symbols that represent said ideals are not 1:1 substitutes for them.

Tolkien recognized this too to some extent, especially in the Akallabêth in the Silmarillion: the kingship of Numenor as an office did not protect the kings from corruption by Sauron, and it did not protect their descendants in Gondor and Arnor from decadence. Yet because of the mythic quality of Tolkein’s story we do tend to get an exaggerated sense of trust of people and institutions as a collective rather than the personalities of the individuals that make up these groups. The Elves are all wise. The Rohirrim are all brave. The men of Gondor are all good. Of course there are some subversions of these expectations, most notably in the introduction of Aragorn (all that is gold does not glitter), but the pattern holds.

The other point that Martin wants to make is that it’s not always that simple to do the right thing. In Lord of the Rings, doing good may be hard, but it is always simple. There is never a question of whether the ring should be destroyed or Sauron resisted: the main questions revolved around the “how” of these things and the development of moral character to not breakdown when the going gets tough.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, doing good is not so simple. I think one of the best examples of this is Jon's story in the latest entry in the series. Jon is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, whose job it is to protect the world from supernatural evil. And he does this job very well in very difficult circumstances. However, in a nearby theatre of the plot (the North), there is a civil war going on between the forces of King Stannis Baratheon, and the Boltons, the later of whom killed all of Jon’s biological family (the Starks). It is very natural, and also certainly noble, for Jon to try and undermine the Boltons. They are evil characters who have done much harm in the story and deserve to be destroyed. But by acting on this noble impulse, Jon critically undermines his other duty of protecting the realm from literal ice zombies that want to kill all humans. And thus the folly of trying to follow all his noble impulses: which eventually gets him killed in a mutiny. For more info on this check out the essays on Jon over at the Mereenese Blot.

There are countless similar conundrums throughout all the storylines of all the novels. Martin is ultimately interested in exploring the ways our noble impulses come into contradiction with each other, and how simplistic morality stories can often get in the way of making good decisions. Life is not a song, sweetling.

Religion

This one is hard one to discuss because I think unfortunately many in the same space as the Brothers Krynn (and in my own parish) are in deep denial about the political nature that the church has now, and since the days of Saint Paul, has always had. Popes led armies into battle, helped to redraw the political maps of Europe, and had orgies in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Protestantism was just as much of a political movement as it was a genuine reaction to the spiritual excesses of the medieval church hierarchy. The Taiping Rebellion, still the bloodiest per capita war in Chinese history was spearheaded by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. And we don’t even need to start talking about the tight link between the political and the spiritual in Islam. Frankly, it is insane to not regard all organized religion as fundamentally political as well as spiritual.

Tolkien doesn’t even address this questions at all: most of the characters in the book are vaguely gnostic, despite the fact that we know the Eru Llúvatar (God) is real and acts in the world. I understand why he did this: he was writing a mythology for his own people. There was no need to complicate things with having the people in the myth have their own faiths.

Martin crafts a much more complex tapestry of faiths and belief systems in his world. There are at least four different faiths in the main continent of Westeros: the Faith of the Seven, the Drowned God, the Old Gods, and the Lord of Light, all of which have their own religious structures and various degrees of supernatural intervention. You have very religious characters, who clearly believe in their faith: Davos, Sansa, and Brienne are constantly making references to different members of the Seven, cynical atheists like Tyrion, and opportunists like Cersei or Stannis that use the faith as a political, or in the case of Stannis, supernatural tool.

We also get a fairly rich sense of what these faiths value. The followers of the Lord of Light are supremely concerned with coming Eschaton: a showdown between themselves and the great evil that lurks beyond the Wall. The Faith of the Seven is concerned with knightly values, while the old Gods are more concerned with traditional values that revolve around nature, the land, and the personal embodiment of justice.

And religious actions do have consequences. Cersei defiles the Great Sept of Baelor when her son orders Ned’s execution on its steps. This wins her no points with the Faith and leads directly to her downfall in the fourth book. Similarly, Stannis’ embrace of the foreign faith of the Lord of Light also makes it difficult to win over northern lords when his priests demand that their heart trees be burned. Beliefs do matter in this world, but so do politics.

Conclusion

Martin's fundamental critique of Tolkien is that the world isn't as simple as a struggle between good and evil. Yes there are elements of that, but often times it is our noble desires IN CONFLICT with each other that causes the real problems. From a Romantic (and gnostic) perspective each individual has to examine the contents of their own soul to make their own (subjective) decision. Of course there are general patterns to what is true and good and beautiful, Martin (and I) certainly think so, but the devil is in the details. And that is for each one of us to figure out: no one is coming to save you.

And that is why it is important to read these books, and everything else much more carefully than the Brothers Krynn. Even if you disagree fundamentally with what is being said, it does you no favors to claim that your enemies “have a black soul. have a wicked heart, and [don’t] believe in goodness. "[That they don’t] believe in righteousness," when that is so clearly not true. All that does is make you new enemies (me), and brings us further away from understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Context

CloudHeadedTranshumanist thejdizzler 4mo ago

Life is not a song

Life is a song. But sometimes, that song is a dirge.

Anyway good post. I appreciate the analysis.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024