David Quinn
Game of Thrones’ nihilism does not work because we need stories to have a just ending or moral purpose, writes David Quinn
President Barack Obama is a fan. He got to watch the first episode of the new season ahead of almost anyone else. That, I suppose, is one of the perks of being the holder of the most powerful office in the world.
Ordinary mortals got to watch that same episode on Sunday or Monday night, depending on whether you live in the US or in this part of the world.
The show I’m referring to is, of course, Game of Thrones, which is apparently one of the most-watched shows in the world, and if not that, is certainly one of the most talked about.
So what is it, and why should we care? The show is based on the novels of George RR Martin. They fall into the category of ‘fantasy fiction’, that is, they are set in a wholly imagined world in which magic is real and so are fantastical creatures like dragons.
This may make it sound like the Lord of the Rings or the The Chronicles of Narnia, but that is only superficially the case because the world of Game of Thrones is much more brutal and violent and dark than anything put to paper by JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis.
Fantasy fiction
I watch Game of Thrones. This is mainly because I am a moderate fan of fantasy fiction. But despite watching it, I also dislike the show. I suppose I keep watching it in the hope that it might get better, that the plot might actually go somewhere rather than around and around in circles, that a character might emerge that we can root for and who doesn’t get killed off as soon as we do that, that one day we might actually get a resolution of some sort.
But that is not George RR Martin’s style. He likes tormenting his readers, and in the case of the show, its viewers.
Martin defends the violence and brutality, the lack of proper heroes and villains in his story on the grounds that this is more true-to-life.
He has based aspects of the books on the real-life War of the Roses that took place between the House of Lancaster and the House of York in Medieval England and was extremely brutal with many twists and turns. It was hard to pick out a hero in that.
Specific incidents in the books are also based on real-life incidents. For example, there is a massacre at a wedding feast in which several of the characters we had been rooting for are killed off in spectacularly bloody fashion. Something along these lines happened in Scotland in the Middle Ages.
Game of Thrones also has a lot sexual content. But the sex in Game of Thrones is deeply unsexy and is often another type of violence, carried out mostly against women.
Again, Martin would say this is true to life. When sexual violence happens in real life, women are almost always the victims.
But this gives rise to the question; why do we need to see this sort of thing in the fantasy genre? Isn’t the fantasy genre supposed to be more escapist than this? If Martin wants to portray such a horrible and brutal world, why not write historical fiction instead of fantasy fiction?
Another writer of fantasy fiction is Philip Pullman. His best known fantasy work is ‘The Dark Materials’ trilogy. Like Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, they are aimed at younger readers, but whereas the Narnia Chronicles are full of religious allegory, Pullman’s are full of anti-religious allegory.
His villain is a thinly disguised Catholic Church. Pullman thinks he is offering an antidote to the Narnia Chronicles, their mirror image as it were, but he is quite wrong about that because Game of Thrones is really the ‘antidote’ to both Lewis and Tolkien.
Why is this? It is because there is still a clear battle between good and evil and between heroes and villains taking place in Pullman’s stories, just like in Lewis’ Narnia and Tolkien’s Middle Earth.M
Mythology
Almost all fantasy fiction and all mythology going back thousands of years have in common a battle between good and evil and between heroes and villains.
This is what led Joseph Campbell to write The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. He studied many of the world’s mythologies and found that in almost all of them there is the same kind of hero, as if there is a sort of universal story imprinted in all cultures and therefore in human nature and that arises again and again and again in almost all times and all places.
Mythology has, of course, deeply religious roots. Tolkien once described Christianity to Lewis as a myth that happens to be true.
This time the ‘hero’ who rises from obscurity to vanquish evil is God made man, Jesus Christ, but he does so unexpectedly, not through a final battle, but through dying on a cross and rising again. The victory is over sin’s final grip on us.
Pullman ought to ask himself why a universal story exists at all, why it is so deeply religious, why it has a certain moral structure, if we have arisen, as he would have it, from a meaningless, purposeless universe?
It is Martin who has really turned all this on his head. His world has no clear good and evil. It has few heroes and many villains. There is no promise that ‘good’ will finally win. There is no clear moral structure underlying everything.
Perhaps Martin would protest that he is merely reflecting reality. But most people do not think in a nihilistic way. Most people think morally, we are ‘programmed’ to do so. That is why we are so drawn to stories that tell of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, of the heroes over the villains.
As Walt Disney is supposed to have said to PL Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, “a good story sets the world to rights”. That is to say, we have an expectation that a story will deliver justice.
In the final analysis, this deep assumption in us that the universe is finally just, and has a moral purpose and a moral end, is an inescapably religious one.
In the world of George RR Martin, this does not hold true. His world is nihilistic and in it the arc of history does not bend towards justice, to quote the Rev. Martin Luther King. This is why his stories offend and it is why they will not outlast the endless retelling of the universal myth of the Hero with a Thousand Faces.