Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  King Joffrey initially responded by ordering Ser Dontos’s execution, stating, “I’ll have him killed on the morrow, the fool.”10 Upon Sansa Stark’s recommendation, however, Joffrey decided to turn Dontos into a fool. Joffrey declares, “From this day on, you’re my new fool. You can sleep with Moon Boy and dress in motley.”11 In naming Dontos a fool, Joffrey used his power as the king to construct a new identity of Dontos, an identity as a lackwit idiot.

  Foucault called this the power/knowledge nexus. Because you have named the category, you are perceived as knowledgeable or an expert in the subject. As a result, your expertise in the realm of madness gives you additional power to continue naming and categorizing. Foucault further argued that we must vigilantly tease out these knowledge/power relationships so “we can grasp what constitutes the acceptability of a system, be it the mental health system, the penal system, delinquency, sexuality, etc.”12

  Pointing a Finger at the Crazies

  Kings aren’t the only ones with enough power to decide who is crazy in Westeros. Madness also manifests itself through other examples of naming and sorting the mad. Quite often this sorting is seemingly harmless and is used as a means of explaining a person’s abnormal behavior. For example, Tyrion Lannister characterized Ser Loras Tyrell’s response to the murder of Renly Baratheon by saying, “It’s said the Knight of Flowers went mad when he saw his king’s body, and slew three of Renly’s guards in his wrath.”13 Catelyn Stark’s sister, the Lady of the Vale, Lysa Tully, was believed to have gone insane with grief after having five miscarriages and losing her husband, Lord Jon Arryn. King Robert Baratheon stated, “I think losing Jon has driven the woman mad,”14 and Grand Maester Pycelle remarked, “Let me say that grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds, and the Lady Lysa was never that.”15 In these instances, naming madness seems like no big deal. After all, we are constantly describing people’s actions and valuing them as appropriate or inappropriate, reckless or crazy, logical or illogical. It becomes a big deal, though, when this naming is done in a systematic way as a means of marginalizing an individual or a group in order to justify one’s own questionable actions. This is exactly what occurs with Aerys “The Mad King” Targaryen.

  Meet the Mayor of Crazytown

  As Catelyn Stark notes in A Clash of Kings, “Aerys was mad, the whole realm knew it.”16 Granted, King Aerys’s mannerisms were enough to raise eyebrows. According to Jaime Lannister, King Aerys’s “beard was matted and unwashed, his hair a silver-gold tangle that reached his waist, his fingernails cracked yellow claws nine inches long,”17 and he was seen “pacing alone in his throne room, picking at scabbed and bleeding hands. The fool was always cutting himself on the blades and barbs of the Iron Throne.”18

  Furthermore, Mad King Aerys had a reputation for brutality. When talking to Hallyne the Pyromancer, the Imp Tyrion Lannister thought to himself, “King Aerys used you to roast the flesh off enemies.”19 Aerys also had Ser Ilyn Payne’s tongue cut out for no more than claiming that the King’s Hand, Tywin Lannister, actually ruled the kingdom.20 Perhaps most brutally, after being held captive by Lord Denys during the Defiance of Duskendale, Mad King Aerys went on a killing rampage: “Lord Denys lost his head, as did his brothers and his sister, uncles, cousins. . . . The Lace Serpent [Denys’s wife] was burned alive, poor woman, though her tongue was torn out first, and her female parts, with which it was said she enslaved her lordly husband.”21

  According to these accounts King Aerys was an incredibly dangerous individual due to his madness. This is a phenomenon that Foucault similarly traced to the nineteenth century and the birth of psychiatry, contending, “Nineteenth-century psychiatry invented an entirely fictitious entity, a crime that is insanity, a crime that is nothing but insanity, an insanity that is nothing but a crime.”22 Foucault demonstrated how psychiatrists, using their credentials as medical experts, defined certain instances of mental illness as criminal and certain criminal behaviors the result of insanity. Being able to identify the criminally insane gave psychiatrists more power, because their diagnoses claimed to reduce crime and make cities safer.

  This seems to apply to the Mad King, since he murdered and brutalized people. But think of it this way: Jaime Lannister, among others, defines Aerys’s brutality to be a result of his madness. Is he one to talk? In A Game of Thrones Jaime Lannister threw Bran Stark, a child, out a window because he caught Jaime having sex with his own sister, Cersei.23 And remember Jaime’s also the Kingslayer, responsible for murdering King Aerys, even though he was a sworn brother of the Kingsguard.

  This is only the tip of the iceberg. The series is full of examples of brutally violent behavior, yet only a select few individuals have their violence attributed to madness. Is this because some acts of brutality and violence are justified or logical? Was it logical for Jaime to throw Bran out the window to preserve his incestuous secret, but illogical for Aerys to cut out Sir Ilyn Payne’s tongue for undermining his power?24 In the world of Westeros, this is exactly the case: one instance of brutality is justified and the other is not. This is because by naming the acts of others mad, a person places himself within the group of the sane, or logical. Such a person’s sanity isn’t scrutinized then, no matter how crazy the person’s actions might seem. For how can the person who has the power to name what it means to be insane actually be insane her/himself? As we’ll see, this is well illustrated by the heated debate between Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon over whether to send assassins to murder Daenerys Targaryen and her unborn child.

  We Had to Murder the Mad Murderer!

  In A Game of Thrones, King Robert Baratheon received word that the last of the Targaryens, Daenerys, daughter of Aerys, was pregnant with “the stallion that mounts the world,” future son of Khal Drogo. Ned Stark, Hand of the King, disagreed with Robert’s command to have Daenerys and the unborn child assassinated. “Your Grace, the girl is scarcely more than a child. You are no Tywin Lannister, to slaughter the innocent.”25 Here Ned referred to the fact that upon usurping the throne from Mad King Aerys, Tywin Lannister (Aerys’s own Hand) presented Robert with the corpses of Aerys’s heirs, Rhaegar’s wife and children, “as tokens of fealty.”26 Ser Gregor Clegane had dashed the children’s heads against rocks and raped Rhaegar’s wife, Elia. Robert replied, “Seven hells, someone had to kill Aerys!”27 Whereas Robert saw the killing of Daenerys as justifiable and logical given his hatred of the Targaryens, Ned drew the line at killing children, stating “the murder of children . . . it would be vile . . . unspeakable.”28

  King Robert’s argument is that the death of Mad King Aerys and his family, along with Daenerys and her unborn child, is justifiable based on the necessity of preventing the mad Targaryens from holding the throne. In truth, Robert’s feelings for the Targaryens stemmed from his hatred of Rhaegar for naming Robert’s betrothed, Lyanna Stark, “the Queen of Love and Beauty” after a tournament victory at Harrenhal where Rhaegar subsequently ran off with her.29 Instead of announcing it in those terms, which would have made the error of his logic obvious, Robert’s excuse rested on the supposed madness of the Targaryen family. Robert, from his position of power and authority as the King of the Seven Kingdoms, defined the acts of Aerys as mad in order to justify his own actions. In response to Ned’s question, “Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?” Robert replied, “To put an end to Targaryens!”30

  Robert frames the knowledge or facts of Targaryen insanity in such a way as to link Aerys’s acts of violence to madness. We might think that ordering the murder of a child is completely insane, but Robert considered it justified in order to prevent another mad king from eventually taking the throne. Foucault claimed that the early psychiatric movement sought to solidify its position of power and authority in European society by proving its own necessity. Likewise, Robert tried to demonstrate his power and authority by killing Daenerys and her unborn child. Early psychiatrists demonstrated the
ir own necessity by linking crime with insanity, and insanity with crime. As Foucault says, “Crime, then, became an important issue for psychiatrists, because what was involved was less a field of knowledge to be conquered than a modality of power to be secured and justified.”31 In other words, instead of psychiatrists seeking to learn all they could about what it meant to be insane, they were more concerned with establishing and maintaining their position of power and authority.

  By linking madness to despicable crimes, especially murder and death, psychiatrists made it clear that all mental illness was to be feared. Since you never know when the insane will turn to murder and crime, you should be wary and thank psychiatrists for institutionalizing them! As Foucault wrote, “It must not be forgotten that . . . psychiatry was then striving to establish its right to impose upon the mentally ill a therapeutic confinement. After all, it had to be shown that madness, by its very nature . . . was haunted by the absolute danger, death.”32

  Technologies of the Self

  As we’ve seen, Foucault believed that knowledge influences our actions by serving as a form of power. Linking madness with crime and inevitable death, for example, served as a powerful means of social control: it justified the institutionalization of those socially awkward individuals deemed insane. Subjective morality influenced notions of insanity, yet psychiatry pretended to rely on knowledge of objective truth about madness. This process reflected a change in the manner in which governments wielded power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas the primary means governments used to maintain their control over people up to that point involved outward and open punishment or confinement (what Foucault referred to as sovereign power), the psychiatric asylum represented a shift to a more subtle form of control, or disciplinary power.

  Disciplinary power is more subtle because the point is to encourage subjects to govern themselves. This type of power is evidenced in A Storm of Swords when Jon Snow falls in love with the wilding Ygritte. Periodically Jon hears a voice in his head reminding him he is a member of the Night’s Watch and that his actions violate his vows. Jon didn’t fear physical torture or punishment, examples of sovereign power; instead he feared not living up to the code of the Night’s Watch. By ensuring that members of the Watch remained loyal to their vows, the code itself served the function of disciplinary power, encouraging individuals to regulate themselves.

  Similarly, rulers in eighteenth-century Europe realized that if they pushed people long enough and abused their power through public punishment or torture, the people would eventually push back with revolution. The key to disciplinary power, then, is that the criminal, or in our case the insane person, is encouraged to see himself as insane. By convincing persons that they are not “normal” or that they need rehabilitation, the expert exerts power over the patient externally in the form of an expert diagnosis, but also internally in the form of a self-image. Foucault referred to this as the “technologies of the self,” “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”33 By diagnosing and labeling a person as mad or insane, the expert begins the process of disciplining the patient’s mind. Patients are encouraged to critically analyze themselves, change their conduct or way of being, in the hopes of being seen by themselves or others as rehabilitated.

  Am I Sane? I Think I Am. . . . I Think I Am. . . . I Think I Am. . . .

  Power is wielded in A Song of Ice and Fire primarily through sovereign power. The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and beyond are full of outward and open struggles for power. There are games of thrones and clashes of kings; there are public executions, like Ned Stark’s beheading and Viserys Targaryen’s golden crowning. There are also, though, examples of disciplinary power in which characters question and sometimes change their behavior in an attempt to govern themselves according to arbitrary social or political rules.

  For example, upon being named a mad fool in King Joffrey’s court, Ser Dontos internalizes his new identity and genuinely behaves as a mad fool. On a number of occasions Dontos lived his new identity, galloping around on his horse broomstick while he “made farting sounds with his cheeks and sang rude songs about the guests” or pretending to beat Sansa Stark with a melon-headed Morningstar, “shouting ‘Traitor, traitor’ and whacking her over the head with the melon.”34 In the case of Dontos, King Joffrey had the power to decide what we know of him. No visitor to the king’s court would ever know Ser Dontos the knight. This labeling wasn’t based on objective truth but on a subjective opinion. The identity imposed on Dontos encouraged him to change his behavior to meet societal (or royal) expectations. According to Foucault, “He is mad because that is what people tell him and because he has been treated as such: ‘They wanted me to be ridiculous, so that is what I became.’”35

  Another example of disciplinary power, where a character internalizes an imposed subjective identity, is found with Daenerys Targaryen. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, Daenerys was used to hearing about her family’s mental illness. After all, “Every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness.”36 On a number of occasions Dany questioned her own actions based on this constructed identity. This was especially true when Khal Drogo died and Dany struggled with how to move forward. After ordering the preparation for Drogo’s funeral pyre, “She could feel the eyes of the khalasar on her as she entered her tent . . . they thought her mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon enough.”37 Remembering her brother Viserys, Dany thought, “He must have known how they mocked him. Small wonder he turned so angry and bitter. In the end it had driven him mad. It will do the same to me if I let it.”38 Dany’s self-identity had been influenced by the dominant discourse surrounding her family.

  As a final example of the effects of disciplinary power as it relates to madness, consider Catelyn Stark’s freeing of the Kingslayer Jaime Lannister in A Storm of Swords. Catelyn secretly freed Jaime and sent him to King’s Landing with Brienne of Tarth to return her captive daughters, Arya and Sansa. Robb Stark’s bannermen responded with anger, until the Castellan of Riverrun, Ser Desmond, attributed the decision to her mental state. “The news must have driven you mad . . . a madness of grief, a mother’s madness, men will understand.”39 As she sat confined to her sick father’s bedchamber, Catelyn asked him, “What would you say if you knew my crime, Father. . . . Would you have done as I did if it were Lysa and me at the hands of our enemies? Or would you condemn me too, and call it a mother’s madness?”40

  Everything Is Dangerous

  Is someone who acts unreasonably or illogically mad? After all, Catelyn’s decision to free Jaime in order to free her two daughters seems like a logical decision, whereas Aerys’s love affair with fire is illogical.41 On the other hand, a person might make illogical decisions based on stupidity or naiveté, as Sansa Stark’s naive trust in Dontos Hollard gets her sent off to live in captivity with Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish.

  Foucault’s point is that any process of sorting and categorizing individuals is an act of power. When we self-sort and identify ourselves as a student, a Democrat, or a Chicago Bears fan, it’s probably no big deal; we use these labels to reflect our membership in certain communities with like-minded individuals. But when we use our positions of authority to arbitrarily place people into categories, we are walking on thin ice. When discussing this issue, Foucault famously said, “The point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.”42

  Because madness and mental illness have been defined and treated arbitrarily throughout history, we should question the power that allows experts to determine what it means to be insane. Just as we should question the foundation of madness in A Song of Ice
and Fire, we should also question the foundation for our present understandings of mental illness.43 Our awareness of the danger of categorizing someone as mentally ill due to subjective social norms could prevent gross abuses of power. As Foucault said, “My role . . . is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.”44 Thus we should question the truth of claims about mental illness in order to expose potential abuses of freedom, as there may be a fine line between sanity and insanity. As Daenerys Targaryen climbed down off of Khal Drogo’s funeral pyre, the witch, Mirri Maz Duur, shouted, “You are mad!” Dany responded with a question: “Is it so far from madness to wisdom?”45 Based on what we know about power and knowledge in Westeros, we can confidently respond, “No.”

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 987.

  2. For a great introduction to postmodernism, see J. Jeremy Wisnewski, “Killing the Griffins: A Murderous Exposition of Postmodernism,” in Introducing Philosophy through Pop Culture: From Socrates to South Park, Hume to House, eds. William Irwin and David Kyle Johnson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 24.