George R.R. Martin and the Fantasy Form

Joseph Rex Young, Joseph Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138502161
• eBook ISBN: 9781351384599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

Using the frameworks of literary theory relevant to modern fantasy, Dr. Joseph Young undertakes a compelling examination of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and his employment of the structural demands and thematic aptitudes of his chosen genre. Examining Martin's approaches to his obligations and licenses as a fantasist, Young persuasively argues that the power of A Song of Ice and Fire derives not from Martin's abandonment of genre convention, as is sometimes asserted, but from his ability to employ those conventions in ways that further, rather than constrain, his authorial program.

Written in clear and accessible prose, George R. R. Martin and the Fantasy Form is a timely work which encourages a reassessment of Martin and his approach to his most famous novels. This is an important work for both students and critics of Martin's work and argues for a reading of A Song of Ice and Fire as a wide-ranging example of what modern fantasy can accomplish when employed with an eye to its capabilities and purpose.

1 The American Pratchett? – Muck and Modality

It is a commonplace of both popular and academic criticism of Martin to cite the death of Eddard Stark as the point at which the game of thrones became a distinctive, original contribution to fantasy. Brian Cowlishaw observes Stark’s execution as something that “should” not have happened, a “shocking” contravention of reader expectation with which Martin alerts his readership that they should not count on any previous experience to help them predict the course of his narrative (66). The execution is now looked upon as a programmatic example of Martin’s lack of hesitation about killing off significant characters. It contradicts what the reader thinks they know about “storytelling generally,” Cowlishaw states, ushering in a period of chaos and uncertainty. If a putative protagonist can die, it seems, nobody is safe.

One of the things overlooked about Stark’s death, however, is how unusual it is within Martin’s story. Eddard dies, almost literally, on-stage, in front of a crowd, in a manner carefully arranged by characters and author alike for maximum dramatic effect. King Joffrey clearly mounted the steps of the Sept of Baelor intending to flex his autocratic muscles and make a public example of Stark. For Martin as well, this is a major piece of theatre, the climax of sixteen chapters of narrative tension since Stark was arrested and 59 since he received word that Jon Arryn met with foul play. Most of the deaths presented by Martin are much more banal. Mycah, Arya Stark’s plebeian playmate, dies almost by accident. He is pointlessly killed by Sandor Clegane, largely as a consequence of living in a society that trains its ruling class to kill whether or not they possess the moral literacy to exercise that skill responsibly (Game 153). Clegane later suffers a flesh wound which becomes infected; Arya unceremoniously leaves him for dead (Storm 2.463–2.464). Other deaths are stupid. Ser Vardis Egan trusts his armour overmuch, allowing Bronn to tire and outmanoeuvre him (Game 424–427); Rolley breaks his neck climbing into Craster’s attic (Storm 2.458); the Mountain’s Men kill Lommy Greenhands to avoid the work of carrying him (Clash 278). Death in Westeros is an occasion of perplexing bathos more often than the theatrics – diegetic and heterodiegetic – of Stark’s execution. “Killed by a pig,” croaks Robert Baratheon: “Ought to laugh, but it hurts too much” (Game 488).

Martin often specifically thwarts attempts by the Westerosi to dramatise the passing of their fellows. Hoster Tully, for example, dies in bed after a long illness. Catelyn Stark means to take comfort from the dignity and traditionalism of her father’s funeral. Tully’s body, resplendently armed and armoured, will be set adrift in a boat on the Green Fork of the Trident by an honour guard of great lords. The boat will be set ablaze with a burning arrow fired by Edmure, Tully’s heir, and sink, uniting him bodily to the waters surrounding his ancestral home. Thus, the Tullys observe their defining connection to the lands they received from Aegon the Conqueror. Sadly, Edmure drowned his sorrows the night before and is still “tight.” He misses three times before swearing angrily and thrusting the bow at his uncle, who manages the shot just before the boat passes out of range (Storm 1.474–1.478). The effective failure of Tully’s funeral is more typical of Martin’s story than the theatrics of Eddard Stark’s execution. Catelyn’s sense of peace is tainted; Edmure seems to take none at all.

How different this funeral is from the departure of Boromir in The Lord of the Rings. Arrayed much like Tully, Boromir is set adrift on the Anduin, a river of rich symbolic importance to his family, but human error is not admitted into Tolkien’s report of this ritual. Aragorn and Legolas improvise songs as if they had been rehearsing for years and graciously accept Gimli’s appropriate declination to join them (The Two Towers 543–544). Tolkien does not allow Aragorn to slip in the mud – the difficulties encountered in carrying Boromir to the river indicate his stature rather than the weakness of his mourners (541) – or Gimli to insist on singing an inappropriate song. If an arrow needed to be fired, Legolas would surely have made the shot effortlessly, with the wind rippling his hair. Boromir’s funeral is exactly the sort of dignified, elegiac occasion the Tullys hoped for.

Such occasions are rare in Martin’s story, however, where conceits of glamour, ritual, aristocratic pretension and even personal dignity are frustrated or spoiled. Some of these let-downs are the result of villainy but others are the result of predictable complications – mourners drink; drunks are poor shots – that these people seem to have overlooked. This theme has itself been overlooked by those who seek to compare Martin and Tolkien. Such comparisons predate Time Magazine reviewer Lev Grossman’s 2005 “proclamation” of him as “the American Tolkien”. In his 1996 review of A Game of Thrones, Dave Gross of Dragon Magazine opined that its implied sequel “promises to exceed all the epic fantasy series since…you’re not going to make me say it, are you?” (59) More recently, Susan Vaught has praised Martin’s invented world as being “unlike the almost allegorical worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and his contemporaries, which are imbued with unambiguous representations of good and evil” (105). This no doubt gratifies Martin and his promoters, whose decision to include his middle initials – identical to Tolkien’s – in his nom de plume, and to trumpet his books as “the greatest fantasy epic of the modern era” (Clash back cover blurb), are surely calculated attempts to provoke such comparisons. No interview with or blog post about Martin is complete without a query regarding how his work relates to The Lord of the Rings. Given the centrality of Tolkien’s novel to perceptions of modern fantasy, this discussion is hardly unexpected. It is risky, however. Although he has become a locus classicus of modern fantasy, Tolkien is in fact a highly idiosyncratic practitioner of the form whose methodologies and output can only be cited as typical of the genre in certain broad respects (Attebery 1992 14–17). Accordingly, the overreliance on Tolkien as a stereotypical fantasist has led to some significant errors of analysis. Reviewing Martin’s A Feast for Crows, for example, Grossman observes:

What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien’s work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity. Martin’s wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. A Feast for Crows isn’t pretty elves against gnarly orcs. It’s men and women slugging it out in the muck, for money and power and lust and love.

These qualifications gesture towards the deflated glamour in Martin’s writing; his characters are “slugging it out in the muck”. Grossman makes this observation, however, in the course of establishing his broader point, that the conflicts of Martin’s morally ambiguous characters are more interesting than Tolkien’s depictions of noble heroes and evil villains. Subsequent critics, such as Staggs and Vaught, have echoed this point. In doing so, such critics have made two significant errors. They overstate the importance and innovation of Martin’s morally ambiguous characters and overlook the importance of his muck to the impression he creates of those characters. Martin’s characters are undoubtedly, commendably complex, though this is not as great a difference from Tolkien as the likes of Grossman, Staggs or Vaught contend. Nor is it particularly innovative within the modern fantasy genre. Three brief studies below will demonstrate that modern fantasy is in fact abidingly concerned with the ambiguities of good and evil. In presenting characters who force the reader to engage with such matters, Martin is continuing a trend rather than ploughing a furrow of his own. More innovative, particularly in a post-Tolkienian context, is the muck in which Grossman states the game of thrones is being conducted. Martin’s innumerable references to dirt and ordure are not merely gestures towards realism. They are carefully targeted to fundamentally alter the reader’s perception of the characters, serving as a crucial difference between his work and Tolkien’s. The effect of this theme can be elucidated with reference to Northrop Frye’s theory of modes. Tolkien recapitulated the rhetoric of the heroic age for the modern world, creating what Frye would define as a high-mimetic narrative in which readers are encouraged to look up to the characters. Martin, by contrast, uses filth as part a long-established technique for rendering medievalist texts modally ironic; readers look down upon his characters. His use of this mode, furthermore, closely parallels that of Terry Pratchett. His occasional decisions to stop using irony and employ Frye’s higher modes also echo Pratchett’s. If Martin must be called the American equivalent of any British fantasist, then Pratchett seems a more appropriate candidate than Tolkien.

In the first instance, Grossman’s suggestion that Martin’s morally ambiguous characters represent an innovation within the genre seems mistaken. Fantasists of literary ambition have long used the possibilities of the genre to raise, rather than settle, questions about the nature of good and evil. Some, such as E.R. Eddison and David Lindsay, do so very deliberately, presenting novels that exist largely to illustrate idiosyncratic meditations on moral philosophy. Other authors do so as the existence of magic in their written worlds causes them to gravitate towards the issue of whether and how such power affects the invented societies they depict. Three brief examples will serve to demonstrate that this is a central attribute of the modern fantasy genre.

Mervyn Peake’s Titus novels, for example, propose a supernatural situation that queries the nature of human morality. The supernatural element in these books, Gormenghast Castle, is a crumbling, ageless institution that, in its preposterous size and age, bears passing comparison to Martin’s Wall. The castle is home to hundreds of people but is nevertheless cavernously under-occupied. Characters walk miles between rooms and conceal themselves and each other for years at a time in labyrinths of forgotten chambers and corridors. No particularly comprehensive floor plan exists. Nobody born there has ventured out of sight of it; those few who arrive seem to lose interest in anything beyond it. This entirely self-contained society is governed by a series of inane rituals laid down by unknown scholars in time immemorial. None of these rituals make any sense, or have the slightest utilitarian value, but everyone in the castle treats them as utterly sacrosanct. Peake’s novels combine intricate, verbose descriptions of this environment with intimate portraits of the dehumanising effect it has on the characters. This of the incumbent ruler, Earl Sepulchrave:

How could he love this place? He was part of it. He could not imagine a world outside it; the idea of loving Gormenghast would have shocked him. To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would be like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat. (Titus Groan 42)

Sepulchrave sees himself as part of the castle. His fellows similarly reckon their existence almost solely in the context of their position there and engage in strikingly pointless, amoral skulduggery to protect their status in this castellated universe. Devoid of any other frame of reference, the inhabitants of Gormenghast behave and indeed exist only as this bizarre institution would have them do.

Into this world of rust, cobwebs and lunatics, however, Peake inserts Steerpike, a kitchenhand with the almost unique capacity to see the castle as the absurdity it is. Absconding from the kitchens Steerpike quickly begins to hatch plots for self-advancement that gradually bear fruit, as well they might. The other inhabitants of the castle divide their time between the plodding cyclical ritual and vicious scrabbling for meaningless pretences of power. Steerpike, by contrast, is a sensible, industrious lad capable of using his time effectively, moving up through the castle hierarchy and eventually becoming Master of Ritual, and thus one of the chief arbiters of his universe. He initially comes across as something of a hero, kicking against a repressive institution, though this view quickly becomes unsustainable. Steerpike is a picture of utilitarian rationality but not morality. He unhesitatingly causes several deaths and ruthlessly manipulates the other characters to his own ends. By the opening of Peake’s second novel, when Sepulchrave’s feeble-witted sisters displease him, he orders them to crawl under the carpet of their room:

Steerpike derived as much pleasure in watching these anile and pitiful creatures, dressed in their purple finery, as they crawled beneath the carpet as he got from anything. He had led them gradually, and by easy and cunning steps, from humiliation to humiliation, until the distorted satisfaction he experienced in this way had become little short of a necessity for him. Were it not that he found this grotesque pleasure in the exercise of his power over them, it is to be doubted whether he would have gone to all the trouble involved in keeping them alive. (Gormenghast 404)

Steerpike begins as a seventeen-year-old boy with an independent streak and an active dislike of a bizarre, absurd institution. He ends up “an almost legendary monster” (748), a grumpkin to frighten Gormenghast’s children. This trajectory stems not from any predestined capacity for evil but from his humanity, untouched by the stultifying, cretinising atmosphere of Gormenghast, and his willingness to abuse that advantage over the other characters. Out of a dissatisfaction with something the reader has also been encouraged to dislike, Steerpike uses the human characteristics his fellow inmates have been lampooned for lacking – rationalism, initiative, creativity, sensible ambition – to undertake a series of murderous, callous, dehumanising actions. Thus, the villain of the piece is also its most readily relatable character (Johnstone 8). The qualities that initially made him praiseworthy are those that make him abhorrent. This demonstrates Peake’s concern for using fantasy to raise, rather than settle, moral debates. Evil in this story stems not from any external threat, but from a human mind freed of moral constraints by a supernatural situation, forcing readers to reassess precisely what they mean by humanity. This, as much as Peake’s lavish prose, is what makes his work such a memorable read.

The story of a supernatural situation catalysing the native human capacity for evil also appears in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. At first glance Rowling’s tale of the heroic wizard ingénue Harry and his nemesis Lord Voldemort seems to be a straightforward case of good versus evil. To begin with the two antagonists seem polar opposites. Harry’s native moral courage is identified by his school’s Sorting Hat while Voldemort seems abidingly heedless of the human consequences of his expanding power. But Voldemort, like Steerpike, was not born bad, at least not inescapably so. He is a convincing villain in part because Rowling has provided an explanation of how he got that way. As the series progresses, Harry’s mentor Dumbledore reveals more about the Dark Lord. Voldemort was once a boy named Tom Riddle, who had much in common with Harry. Both are orphans, offspring of mixed marriages between a wizard and a non-wizard, raised in unpromising circumstances – Harry by boorish foster-parents, Tom in a “grim” (Half-Blood Prince 251) orphanage – before being whisked away to Hogwarts at age eleven. Both come to regard the school as their true home. From the same combination of problems and opportunities, Harry becomes a promising, upstanding wizarding citizen while Riddle becomes “the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time” (258).

Rowling has constructed Voldemort in such a way that it is possible to hazard guesses as to where he went wrong. Christopher Bell goes so far as to describe Voldemort as “wholly a creation of environmental circumstance” (45). Bell cites Riddle as a classic case of moral disengagement – a lack of investment in the moral orthodoxies of his society (43–44). He notes how Rowling’s wizarding world, like our own, features a number of institutions – notably Hogwarts itself – that both encourage the pursuit of power, rank and material success as well as moderating that pursuit by encouraging moral and humanitarian behaviour. As headmaster of Hogwarts, for example, Dumbledore enjoys unparalleled respect and freedom of action in the wizard community; he also carefully teaches his students “not only to use magic, but to control it” (Half-Blood Prince 256) via strict moral accountability. Riddle, Bell suggests, coverts the first part of this equation – the power and respect Dumbledore enjoys – but has been excluded from the moral community Dumbledore seems to try so hard to build. Isolated among Muggles, he also fails to form resonant friendships among wizards, something that Harry does singularly well. Thus, Tom does not have a stake in the moral regime of Hogwarts; the human relationships and lives that morality safeguards are of little concern to him. After he leaves Hogwarts, furthermore, his attempts to climb the ranks of wizard society are stymied as he is repeatedly passed over for a job at his prestigious school. A young man has joined a society that respects power and then been foiled in his attempts to gain respect within the moral orthodoxies of that society. As Bell notes (46), this kind of situation tends to produce moral dislocation in real human beings; when improperly integrated into the moral frameworks of society, people often resolve to pursue what their society values and applauds without reference to the strictures that society places on that pursuit. Although Rowling leaves the details sinisterly vague, by his twenties Riddle is already doing this:

“You call it ‘greatness,’ what you have been doing, do you?” asked Dumbledore delicately.

“Certainly,” said Voldemort, and his eyes seemed to burn red. “I have experimented; I have pushed the boundaries of magic further, perhaps, than they have ever been pushed –”

“Of some kinds of magic,” Dumbledore corrected him quietly. (Half-Blood Prince 415)

Thus, Riddle matures from bad boy to evil wizard. He is pursuing power without concern for the human consequences of that pursuit, an undertaking that troubles the man who took responsibility for his moral education. Voldemort’s unconcern for Dumbledore’s lessons stems from his inability or unwillingness to form genuine relationships with those around him and thus enjoy the wages of proper engagement in a moral community. Magic, an inarguable, supernatural power, provides Rowling with a mechanism to demonstrate this moral disengagement. Magic does not turn people evil, it provides a litmus test for the extent to which people remain morally engaged, literate and responsible. As in Martin’s work, evil in Rowling’s world is a human thing; as in Peake’s, the literary supernatural highlights moral issues rather than putting such issues to rest.

Tolkien’s characters are especially interesting in this regard. Critical dismissals of his work as morally simplistic date back at least as far as Edmund Wilson’s 1956 description of The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The American Pratchett? – Muck and Modality
• 2 “Enough about Whores” – Sex and Characterisation
• 3 “Look with Your Eyes” – Immersion and Thinning
• 4 “Dead Men Come Hunting” – Intrusion and Recovery
• 5 “Remember That You Were Brothers” – Superstition and Cohesion
• 6 “But Here You Are” – Magic and Healing
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index