Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago

by James Lowder

  In part, scientific romance—which included King Solomon’s Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard, The Gods of Pegāna (1905) by Lord Dunsany, and With the Night Mail (1909) by Rudyard Kipling—was a response to the antiseptic climate ushered in by the modern era. At the end of the nineteenth century, science was honing in on the most basic explanations of the natural world. (Or so we thought; nobody ever expected us to need CERN.) People had a chance to completely separate themselves from spiritual meaning—to abandon their souls in favor of cold, hard intellect—and the departure of magic from everyday life left a void. Scientific romance strove to fill that void while remaining true to the secularism that the modern world demanded. That meant presenting stories as if they were nonfiction, complete with glossaries, footnotes, and that essential component of today’s fantasy novel: the map. By buffeting their imaginative texts with ancillary paratexts, these authors anticipated the contemporary fantasy writer’s task of world-building, going behind the scenes to create a coherent world that readers could make their own.

  This new movement demanded critical attention. For one thing, scientific romance writers outstripped George W.M. Reynolds and the penny-dreadful crowd in sheer skill. Wells, Verne, and Kipling weren’t hacks; they were gifted if workmanlike storytellers who exhibited a legitimate, cohesive response to the modern era. Their books also became beloved around the world, even by children who would later become intellectuals. As Jean-Paul Sartre says of Verne: “When I opened [his books], I forgot about everything. Was that reading? No, but it was death by ecstasy.” If you’ve lost weeks to A Song of Ice and Fire, you know what he’s talking about.

  Yet the success of scientific romance did not sway critics, who accused it of being juvenile, having undeveloped characters, and not engaging the problems of the real world. Luckily for them, they soon had a more specific ghetto to place it in: “science fiction & fantasy.”

  This dual category, since formally split by critic Darko Suvin but still found in many bookstores with that dragon-like ampersand, was established in America in the early twentieth century through the pulp magazines. Like genre itself, the pulps were a marketing construct created, according to Richard Mathews’s Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination, to compete with popular-fiction dime novels. Through them, several major forerunners of George R.R. Martin first saw print, and within their pages many clichés were established that still dog fantasy: swords and sorcery, swords and sandals, and evil, sexy sorceresses. H.P. Lovecraft, who used the format to create a world of alien gods, felt that traditional fantasy stories were useless, as does Tyrion Lannister in A Dance with Dragons: “Talking dragons, dragons hoarding gold and gems [. . .] nonsense, all of it.” Lovecraft in particular went through great pains to create empirical backdrops for his tales, including the Necronomicon, an invented book of dark magic that has since been published in several versions. Unfortunately he had little success in his lifetime—and in death Edmund Wilson dismissed his oeuvre as “a boy’s game.”

  Yet outside the realm of literary criticism, pulp readers were treating “science fiction & fantasy” as more than a game. They were discussing it extensively and building the groundwork for what we now call “fandom.” Hugo Gernsback, editor of Amazing Stories, did the movement an immense service by publishing the addresses of those who sent in letters, enabling readers to contact one another directly to discuss the work. By the middle of the twentieth century, genre outsold literary fiction by something like nine to one . . . yet it continued to founder in the critical establishment, which had doubled down on its commitment to real-world settings. Serious literature was “defined by most critics as narrative realism and admitted nothing that was nonrealistic,” according to Ken Keegan in 2006’s ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction; nowhere in the vast stylistic void between Joyce and Hemingway was there room for a dragon or a flying god.

  With the position of the establishment essentially unchanged for a century, genre readers couldn’t wait for academics to lend structure and insight to their obsessions. They formed a para-academic environment of bookshops, fanzines, and “Letters” pages in the pulps—and, later, comic books—to analyze the work in the context of its ever-lengthening history. One active participant in this culture was George R.R. Martin, whose fan letters mark his first appearances in print. In 1965’s Avengers #12, he praises “the fast-paced action, solid characterization, and that terrific ending,” some of the same characteristics Stevenson brought up in his defense of “the novel of adventure.” Thus the champions of fantasy moved from responding to Henry James to writing letters to Stan Lee—even after the cultural supernova of The Lord of the Rings. Things weren’t looking good for fantasy in the genre wars.

  Enter A Game of Thrones, published as a genre title in 1996 to suspected commercial super-success. With Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga a hot commodity, publishers entered a fierce bidding war for what was then conceived as the Song of Fire and Ice trilogy. Subsequent sales have overshadowed the fact that Thrones was not an immediate hit, but rather a slow burn, encouraged by independent booksellers, reviewers, and a Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. In retrospect it’s easy to see why: Martin grew up in a world where fantasy’s rules were well established, but he had the courage to break those rules in ways that challenged critics—and readers.

  The continuum of genre writers from the scientific romance to today established tropes for fantasy that are less obvious and more insidious than the wizard in the black hat or the gruff dwarf. One, identified in John H. Timmerman’s Other Worlds: the Fantasy Genre (1983), is “commonness of character.” The heroes of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series (1968–2001) are everyday people—or everyday rabbits—saddled with the problems of “country folk.” Bilbo and Frodo are hobbits, not hobbit kings.

  Martin subverts this, returning instead to a pre-fantasy paradigm. The fourteen major point-of-view characters in A Song of Ice and Fire are not farmers or goatherds; they are men and women of noble birth worried about preserving their station and, in most cases, ruling the world. They have less to do with Le Guin’s young wizard Ged than the scheming protagonists of Trollope or Thackeray. And in this way they go against a trend of fiction—genre and literary—that has been gaining steam since the Renaissance. Mythic literature concerned kings and demigods, Enlightenment literature focused on nobles, and modern literature brought stories to the street. Martin transports us back to the halls of power, and that’s why A Song of Ice and Fire often feels less like a fantasy saga and more like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.

  Martin has been praised on Flavorwire by Lev Grossman, fantasy author and fashioner of the “American Tolkien” blurb, for shattering Middle-earth’s Manichaeism and replacing it with high-stakes political intrigue. But underlying this is the author’s refusal to make his characters naive—another common fantasy trope. “[N]aïveté in fantasy is always a good thing which suggests that the character has retained a willingness to wonder,” writes Timmerman. “[T]he pragmatists, the despoiled, the hard-bitten and cynical are often the villains of fantasy.”

  This is furthest from the truth in A Song of Ice and Fire. Pragmatists are the only survivors of the treachery of Westeros and Essos. The capacity for wonder that enables the childlike protagonists of traditional fantasy to enter another world or to make the best of it is a detriment here. The characters who stay alive are the despoiled—and thus, within Martin’s return to high-born Romanticism, we find antiheroes birthed from modern cynics. “[A] hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself,” claims the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). More than Frodo or the Pevensie children or even Lovecraft’s tormented New Englanders, Tyrion Lannister resembles this modernist icon: what does he spend time on other than defiling himself?

  Even the idea of a hero is up for grabs in Martin’s work. Fantasy has long been dominated, as has all genre fiction, by the myt
hic protagonist identified in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: the one who leaves home, sacrifices himself for the good of his people, and is reborn to live happily ever after. This figure has become especially boring in film. He is a kid or a cop or a spy, common enough to earn empathy but superhuman enough to avoid the arcs of bullets that kill his companions. We know he’s going to win; we just don’t know how. That’s why Ned Stark’s death had such a resonance with the readers of A Game of Thrones and the viewers of HBO’s retelling. For once, the hero actually bit it—after showing that he was a brave and principled family man against the backdrop of schemers at King’s Landing. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, as well as Martin, who served as executive producer, deserve special credit here for ensuring that Ned Stark was the marketing focus of Game of Thrones. The poster was Sean Bean on the Iron Throne! Having the guts to chop his head off in episode nine sent a lurch through TV viewers that was comparable to the gasp that greeted Janet Leigh’s demise in Psycho . . . and that stands as the greatest pop-culture moment of our developing decade.

  In the course of five books, Martin has lost none of his edge when it comes to killing family men, women, children, babies, and dogs, but he seems to hold a special contempt for the noble heroes who populate traditional fantasy. “The hero never dies, though. I must be the hero,” wills Quentyn Martell in A Dance with Dragons, shortly before he gets roasted. Quentyn’s eagerness for glory and deluded self-regard call to mind Don Quixote—and so fantasy comes full circle, poking fun at its past 150 years instead of the centuries of myths that informed Cervantes.

  Words are wind, of course, but it’s prudent to assume that A Song of Ice and Fire will also violate the most sacred fantasy trope of all: happily ever after. It doesn’t look like things will end well for anyone, even Tyrion. “[F]antasy does hold forth as one of its central points the belief that the end of a successful story is joy,” claims Other Worlds, but the joy in the Seven Kingdoms is more likely to come from a goblet or a girl than any triumph over evil.

  Given its impressive subversion of fantasy’s most sacred cows, one might expect A Song of Ice and Fire to be the saga that finally pulls fantasy out of the genre ghetto and enables it to be compared side-by-side to, say, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), a similarly hefty meditation on human failure and betrayal. To an extent this has happened; Martin pointed out on his blog that Time called A Dance with Dragons “the best book of the year (not the best fantasy of the year, or the best SF book of the year, but the Best Book, period).”

  But some critics, perhaps frightened by the flatlining sales of literary fiction, have come out even more strongly against genre. As novelist Edward Docx argues in the Observer: “[G]enre writers cannot claim to have everything. They can take the money and the sales [. . .]. But they should not be allowed to get away with suggesting that these things tell us anything about the intrinsic value or scope of their work.” According to Martin Amis, in a book of essays appropriately titled The War Against Cliché (2001), “When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page [. . .]. We are communing with the mind of the author.” Implicit in his statement is the assumption that genre fiction does not come from unique minds; it comes from common minds that have no aspirations beyond selling to an audience attracted to safe, predictable confines.

  It could be argued that George R.R. Martin has quite a unique mind—born in Bayonne, New Jersey, raised in comic book fandom, expert in Lovecraft and Tolkien (as Dreamsongs details), tempered by the brutality of Hollywood, and crazy enough about roleplaying games to have a “lost year” devoted to them. But hardcore critics of “science fiction & fantasy” can rightly claim these characteristics as proof that Martin does not escape his roots, that his books are really just souped-up fantasy serials. And worse than the criticism is the condescending praise of literary readers who enjoy slumming in Westeros, such as memoirist Dominique Browning, who praises Martin as an alternative to Tolstoy in a 2012 New York Times think piece titled, “Learning to Love Airport Lit.”

  Some critics have found Martin’s writing praiseworthy enough for elevation above the genre fray. The New York Times unequivocally anoints him better than Tolkien in its 2011 review of A Dance with Dragons, calling his saga “a sprawling and panoramic 19th-century novel turned out in fantasy motley.” And Nick Gevers of Infinity Plus applauds Martin for his facility with genre itself in a review of Martin’s 1982 vampire novel Fevre Dream: “[H]is fin de siècle canvas may variously take in dying planets, the death of the modern age, or the long decline of chivalry, but loss is always the keynote.” These are welcome words, but they do seem to be coming from outside the fantasy genre, from rarefied thinkers impressed with games of a mad world-builder like Lovecraft. Few critics have dared to approach A Song of Ice and Fire from within the genre and point out what really makes it so impressive.

  Put simply, A Song of Ice and Fire is now vying for a title in fantasy literature that everyone since the scientific romance must have at least conceived of: “Most Complex World.” It has hundreds of characters, a daunting and detailed chronology, and, as of this writing, over 4,500 articles on its very own wiki. Those who read it without jumping out of the text to explore the additional material—without immersing themselves in the paratext—miss out on what makes it unique. It’s possible to read a sentence like this one, from A Dance with Dragons, and dismiss it as a mishmash: “The cobbler told them how the body of the Butcher King had been disinterred and clad in copper armor, after the Green Grace of Astapor had a vision that he would deliver them from the Yunkai’i.” But the four proper names in there, requiring four trips to the map or appendix if you haven’t been paying attention, make A Song of Ice and Fire require close reading just as much as any modernist literary masterwork, albeit of a different, nerdier stripe.

  Martin thus fights the genre wars by sidestepping them. Working from within the system, refusing to apologize for what came before, he writes books that are too bloody, unexpected, and relentlessly story-driven to be ignored. In doing so, he elevates other fantasy along with his own. Praise from respected outlets like The New York Times doesn’t just help A Song of Ice and Fire, it legitimizes the fantasy that came before—works, for example, by Peter S. Beagle, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock—while making the world safe for literary novelists like Lev Grossman to try their hand at fantasy, in Grossman’s case with the successful Magicians series.

  It’s unlikely that the “fantasy & science fiction” section of your local bookstore will disappear anytime soon (well, until the bookstore does), or that fantasy books will begin appearing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review along with tales of twenty-first-century anomie. Some hardcore academic critics will always stick to their guns and discount any novel that isn’t strictly realist as “a boy’s game,” perhaps more viciously than ever as the real boy’s games threaten to prevent the next generation from reading at all.

  But in the genre wars, Martin is sitting pretty. His twisting of expectations has silenced some genre-haters and won over the culture mavens—and his industrious pacifism honors his genre roots. He’s like Bill Hicks’s pot smokers sitting in trees during the War on Drugs: “Are they fighting us? We’re not even in that fucking field!” It’s a brilliant strategy worthy of his characters.

  Since Stevenson, responding to Henry James, genre writers have been on the defensive, trying to stick up for their work as if there were something wrong with it to begin with. In a 2007 interview on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, Martin declared: “None of us wants to be consigned to the playpen, or have our work dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration as literature because of the label on the spine. Myself, I think a story is a story is a story, and the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

  That would seem like a statement all critics can get behind, genre and literary alike. For my own foray into fantasy, I don’t need a blurb from George R.R. Martin to approve of what I’m
doing. He’s lifted all the boats with A Song of Ice and Fire, making it okay for people like me—and those with much more literary credibility—to get in touch with our inner fantasy lover, while at the same time challenging us to do better with the quality of his work.

  NED VIZZINI is the author of It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah. . . . He has written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and MTV’s Teen Wolf. His work has been translated into seven languages. He is the co-author, with Chris Columbus, of the forthcoming fantasy-adventure series House of Secrets. He has contributed to Smart Pop anthologies about The Hunger Games, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Walking Dead. He has spoken at over two hundred universities, libraries, and schools around the world about writing and mental health. He received an award from UCLA in 2011 for Excellence in Public Advocacy Through the Arts. Ned lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Sabra Embury, and their son. His next novel, The Other Normals, will be published by HarperCollins on September 25, 2012.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THANKS TO Glenn Yeffeth, publisher and CEO of BenBella Books, for once again allowing me the chance to add to the Smart Pop imprint; Heather Butterfield for enthusiastic and inventive marketing support; Leigh Camp for production magic; the crack team of copyeditors and designers who made all of us look better; and most especially Leah Wilson, Smart Pop editor-in-chief, who, through her own high standards and tireless efforts on behalf of the line, inspires me to always push myself harder, yet manages somehow to keep the often-daunting anthology editing process a lot more fun than it has any right to be. Beyond the BenBella offices in Texas and Massachusetts, support and suggestions for the book were also provided by James John Bell, Scott Cuthberston, Stephen Dedman, Marc Fishman, Jeremy Jones, Helen Merrick, Chris Pramas, Jeff VanderMeer, and Stewart Woods.