"When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground." So says the narcissistic Queen Cersei Lannister to Ned Stark towards the end of the first season of what has become one of the most popular television programmes of all time. But after three seasons, most of author George R.R. Martin's major players are dead or maimed. Fans of the books know there are plenty more high-profile corpses yet to come. Remind me, who exactly is winning this game again?
Yes, Martin's television series is monstrous in its scope, but the endless murder makes it exhausting to watch. Although it has all the trappings of the fantasy genre - knights, dragons, magic - they are just the chassis that houses a thoroughly modern engine. Game of Thrones will for this reason be an enduring landmark in the genre and in popular culture at large. It is the best example of an entirely desacralised imagination: brutal, anxious, godless - and uncannily mirroring our modern predicament. It may well be the first major mass-popular moment when our imaginary worlds became as pessimistic as reality itself.
The Starks: Duty and oathkeeping in a fantasy world
The Stark family is the moral heart of Game of Thrones. Their stronghold, Winterfell, is a stoic place of honour-bound duty. The family guards the decadent southern kingdoms from the wildlings and worse without complaint. Their motto - "Winter is coming" - is the sum of Martin's moral universe: horror is always close.
In such a grim world, oathkeeping and mutual obligation are paramount because, in the North, no other incentives beyond virtue exist to motivate right conduct. After executing an oathbreaker from the night's watch in the series' first episode, Ned Stark, the Lord of Winterfell, says to his young son Bran, "He who passes the sentence, must swing the sword." As it happens, at the end of season one Ned is betrayed and beheaded with his own blade.
In the controversial "Red Wedding" episode, Robb Stark, Ned's successor, is murdered at his uncle's wedding. Robb had previously agreed to marry one of the daughters of Walter Frey, the miserly lord of the Twins - two castles that hold a strategic river crossing - in return for passage and soldiers to win his war against the Lannisters. Instead, Robb marries a foreign noblewoman for love and beauty, and his uncle takes his place. As G.K. Chesterton puts it, Robb "pays for his pleasure" with his life, and the lives of his mother, wife and bannermen.
Martin punishes the Starks for their medieval virtue: Bran is crippled when he witnesses the Queen in an act of incest; his sister Sansa is beaten and threatened with rape by the young psychopath, King Joffrey Lannister; Arya, the youngest daughter, becomes a stone-cold killer after her father's death. This could be the foundation for a gritty, but nevertheless sound, fantasy text - the heroes must of course suffer in some way before they win the day. After all, this is the law of fantasy, as Chesterton writes in The Ethics of Elfland:
"according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an 'if'. The note of the fairy utterance always is, 'You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word "cow"'; or 'You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion.' The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden."
But in Martin's world, the law of Elfland doesn't rule. Ned Stark forgoes all the pleasures of the southern kingdoms to defend the realm. He gives up his life in the North and forfeits the safety of his family to serve Joffrey's father, King Robert Baratheon (poisoned and killed in a hunting accident in season one), as the Hand of the King. He keeps the law of Elfland, but loses his head. To avoid breaking the law, all Robb had to do was keep his word. He could have won the war against the Lannisters, but instead had his throat cut. Oathkeeper or oathbreaker, it doesn't matter in Martin's world - everyone gets the chop in the end.
Fair enough, we might say. Isn't this more "realistic"? Perhaps, but don't we believe in heroes anymore? Obviously, we don't, and are truly astonished when somebody shows truly virtuous and self-sacrificing qualities. After all, who now takes oaths seriously, whether sworn to a political party (Eddie Obeid and Labor's Party oath spring to mind), to the law courts, or before the altar during a wedding?
In the brutal, unrelenting Hobbesian war of all against all, which is the natural state of things in Westeros, oathkeeping is a disadvantage - why keep your word when you're likely to lose your head anyway? In such a situation, trust becomes a liability. Game of Thrones constantly references Aerys Targerian, the "Mad King" who tried to burn the capitol in order to deny Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon's rebellion. Ned and Robert are far madder for thinking that others could be trusted. Again, perhaps this is the more "realistic" proposition. But weren't we talking about fantasy?
The profane world of H.P. Lovecraft, the sacred world of J.R.R. Tolkien and the dead world of Mervyn Peake
Let me ask a more pertinent question: What is fantasy, anyway? In his prose poem "A Fairy Tale," the Polish Catholic poet and Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz says:
"The novel as a fairy tale: the voice of the teller should be heard in it. He is present with his measures of good and evil, but he should not tell about himself. Had he been telling about himself he would prove he lacked maturity and peace of mind, traits necessary in a fairy-tale narrator. One more feature of the novel: magnanimity."
When a novel with a claim on the "fantasy" tag abandons Milosz's conditions - a moral universe, for the author to be heard but never seen, and to be generous (that is, to keep Chesterton's law of Elfland) - it ceases to be real fantasy. At worst, it becomes mere horror.
Lovecraft
Concerning the greatest horror writer in history, H.P. Lovecraft, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq totally accepts this formula. In Against the World, Against Life, Houellebecq documents how Lovecraft was driven to create his Cthulu mythos during his time as a destitute writer in immigrant neighbourhoods in New York. His revolting otherworldly creatures - it is important here that Lovecraft painstakingly describes their smell, sound, appearance and mannerisms - were racist caricatures of the people he saw on the street. As Houellebecq writes:
"Contempt is not a very literarily productive sentiment; it incites more to silence than to the 'well-turned phrase'. But Lovecraft will be constrained to live in New York; he will know hatred, disgust - and fear, far richer. And it is in New York that his racist opinions will be transformed into an authentic racial neurosis. Being poor, he will have to live in the same areas as those 'obscene, repulsive and nightmarish' immigrants ... 'rat-faced jews' and 'monstrous half-breeds that hop and waddle about absurdly'."
"Life is disappointing and full of sorrow. It would be pointless, then, to write more realist novels," Houellebecq continues. To escape such a trap, Lovecraft created a world far more violent than Westeros. "I am so tired of humanity and of the world that nothing interests me unless it involves at least two murders per page, or speaks of nameless horrors emanating from the outer reaches of space," he wrote in one letter.
Lovecraft is one of the few genuine atheists - "all the way down," as they say. Where Chesterton wrote in The Man Who was Thursday that Earth is "an engine of torture" to put mankind's virtue and fitness for heaven to the test, Lovecraft sees only an engine of torture. In his mythos, the ultimate powers of the universe, the Old Gods, really exist: some float hungrily in space, others lurk under the sea. They are uniformly hostile to humanity and seek to devour everything. Even the slightest contact with them drives human beings insane before they die inevitable, hideous deaths, which resolve nothing. In The Call of Cthulu, Lovecraft's best-known story, a container ship's crew steer their vessel into Cthulu's head to temporarily drive him back beneath the waves. Of course, they all die horribly anyway.
In the Cthulu mythos, violence is everywhere because the gods hate the world. Sadly, Houellebecq understands that this is precisely why Lovecraft's writing remains popular, remarking that, "amongst the numerous disciples of Lovecraft, not one has been struck by the simple fact: the evolution of the modern world has made Lovecraftian phobias ever more present, more alive."
Tolkien
Diametrically opposed to Lovecraft is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings has since defined "high fantasy," with its elves, dwarves and so on. Tolkien himself was a devout Roman Catholic, and yet The Lord of the Rings are not allegorical novels in the same way as the very Protestant C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles were. Tolkien had a more "analogical" Catholic insistence on natural theology. He sees the potential for sacredness in all living things; or, as Ralph Wood writes, Tolkien's "conviction is that everything has its own entelechy, its own end within itself that pushes it toward completion and fulfilment within a larger, indeed a final telos."
A common remark about Tolkien is that God is practically absent from his Middle Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth. That Tolkien imbues all his creations with a kind of divine spark should be obvious; such a Christian teleology allowed him the freedom to unfold his fantasy world in a way that was internally consistent. In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Tolkien's "world is charged with the Glory of God; it flames out, shining like shook foil."
"This freedom is most obviously present in the grotesque," Alison Milbank writes in Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. In Middle Earth, ugliness is not an indicator of evil; even the most hideous creatures can be redeemed. This gift extends even to the restless dead - in The Return of the King, Aragorn, the king-in-waiting of the fallen realm of Gondor, wins the climactic battle of the Pelennor Fields only by enlisting the spirits of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, who broke their oath to Isildur during the ancient War of the Last Alliance:
"'Oathbreakers, why have ye come?' And a voice was heard out of the night that answered him, as if from far away: 'To fulfil our oath and have peace.' Then Aragorn said: 'The hour is come at last. Now I go to Pelargir upon Anduin, and ye shall come after me. And when all this land is clean of the servants of Sauron, I will hold the oath fulfilled, and ye shall have peace and depart for ever. For I am Elessar, Isildur's heir of Gondor.' And with that he bade Halbarad unfurl the great standard which he had brought; and behold! it was black, and if there was any device upon it, it was hidden in the darkness."
It makes sense to expect the dead to keep their oaths in Tolkien's world, because Tolkien's world makes sense. If everything has the potential to touch the sacredness at the heart of creation, then everything can be redeemed. Likewise, Lovecraft's world is internally consistent. A common theme in his mythos is that access to forbidden lore about the Old Gods drives nosey scholars mad. There is no point trying to understand the world, because there is no truth at the heart of creation - only a hideous hunger.
Peake
A more ambiguous text is Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Written shortly after the Second World War, Peake recounts the life of the Groans, a royal family whose neverwhere keep Gormenghast is a crumbling parody of a Bavarian fairytale castle. Sepulchrave, the Earl of Groan, spends his days performing endless rituals: on certain days he eats red or blue eggs, raises a flag from this or that battlement and so on. The most important ritual is the presentation of the Bright Carvings, where the castle's indentured serfs present the intricate wooden carvings they have spent the year making. The Earl selects the choicest, which go into a dusty hall and are never seen again. The rest are burned in a solemn ritual.
The ritual law rolls on and on without explanation. Only a small caste, led by the Master of Ritual, have any knowledge of how it works. The Groans do their arcane duty reverently but without enthusiasm - the stones of Gormenghast demand fealty. Everything changes when two outsiders enter into this lifeless system: Titus Groan, the earl's violet-eyed infant son, and Steerpike, a kitchen boy whose utter ruthlessness and willingness to murder means he eventually ascends to the role of Master of Ritual himself.
Titus is the spark of life that might make the ritual law meaningful. In the pivotal scene of the first book, Sepulchrave decides to hold Titus a breakfast. Against protocol, he gathers the Groans and their retainers in the castle library, where he spends his isolated intellectual life. Steerpike and his terrorised accomplices (Sepulchrave's sisters) burn the library to the ground with the party trapped inside, which drives the Earl mad. He goes to the Tower of Flint, home of Gormenghast's owls - "[it] arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven" - and is devoured alive by the birds.
As in The Lord of the Rings, Gormenghast is a world without "God." But unlike Middle Earth, Gormenghast and its rituals are totally inert matter. They are easily swept away by Steerpike, the perfect antihero, who possesses a pure Nietzschean master morality:
"Equality ... is the thing. It is the only true and central premise from which constructive ideas can radiate freely and be operated without prejudice. Absolute equality of status. Equality of wealth. Equality of power."
He seduces Fuschia, Sepulchrave's daughter; has the loyal manservant Flay exiled and then murders him; starves the Earl's two sisters to death; and sets fire to Barquentine, the Master of Ritual, before stabbing him and plunging into the castle's moat. He institutes a reign of terror when he takes Barquentine's place. Only once Titus is grown and has assumed his right place as Earl does Steerpike face a true threat. In the climactic battle of the second book, Titus pursues him through the castle, which is flooded by a torrential downpour. He is not motivated by loyalty to Gormenghast:
"What do I care for the symbolism of it all? What do I care if the castle's heart is sound or not? I don't want to be sound anyway! ... I want to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not a symbol any more. That is my reason! He must be caught and slain. He killed Flay. He hurt my sister. He stole my boat. Isn't that enough? To hell with Gormenghast."
The real struggle isn't between Steerpike and the world - which never offers him resistance - but between the aristocratic wills of the two exceptional characters. Steerpike is eventually killed through carelessness. Upon seeing Titus armed and ready to fight, he becomes too sanguine about taking the young Earl's life, as befits his station.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Titus leaves the castle after defeating Steerpike, and finds, in the abysmal third book in the series, that the world outside is technologically modern. In this sense, Gormenghast can be read on some level as anti-Catholic polemic: what really matters is that the individual will breaks out of the Church's stultifying medieval rules and doctrines, and returns to the real, progressive world.
At any rate, the importance of Gormenghast is that Steerpike's violence isn't the norm, but a once in a millennia event so destabilising it brings down the entire system, before being defeated by an individual act of heroism.
Oaths as contract: The incompetent world of George R.R. Martin
On the other hand, returning now to Game of Thrones, one can imagine something as cataclysmic as the "Red Wedding" happening every other weekend in Westeros. Why is that the case? It's hard to come to any other conclusion than this: Westeros just doesn't work. Unlike Tolkien, Lovecraft and Peake, it is not a consistent creation. Where does the good exist? In Tolkien, potentially everywhere; in Lovecraft, nowhere; in Peake, in the individual will of Titus Groan. In Martin's broken world, good only resides in individual acts, only as long they don't get you killed, which more often than not they do.
So here we are, back in the twenty-first century! In his essay "Paul against Biopolitics," theologian John Milbank describes the predominant liberal-contractual late capitalist view of how relationships are governed as "biopolitical":
"Liberalism concerns the biopolitical, for liberalism promotes an imagined self-governing of life through a certain capture and disciplining of natural forces of aggression and desire within the framework of a cultural game, governed by civil conventions and instituted laws."
We shouldn't hesitate to name this game: The Game of Thrones. Milbank continues:
"Yet the life that biopolitics both unleashes and governs is also conceived as intrinsically wild and untameable and dynamically creative, since it has to do with the expression of egoistic passions."
These passions are governed by contract - "a regulated agonistic game" - or, in the pre-contractual mode of the Scottish Enlightenment, as a self-balancing, unplanned order of competing selfish interests. Milbank's biopolitical point is that liberalism itself contains a "threshold" where life itself overflows these boundaries, frustrating the various competing players. The result is excessive counter-reaction, either quasi-legal (state surveillance, authoritarian crackdowns and so on) or illegal (corporate fraud, violence).
Westeros is a broken world because the threshold at which the system breaks down is reached at the drop of a hat. After the death of Robert Baratheon, five kings simultaneously emerge, who then proceed to butcher each other. Theon Greyjoy is cruelly tortured for the entire third season, culminating with his genitalia being cut off and sent to his father in a box. This prompts military retaliation from his family. How did this kingdom function prior to the events recounted in the novels, and how has anybody in Westeros stayed alive?
Tyrion Lannister may be the only character in the series to recognise this. As he says to Cercei in the season finale:
"How much longer does this go on?"
"Until all our enemies are dealt with."
"But every time we deal with an enemy, two more emerge."
"Then it will go on for some time."
Even in the real War of the Roses, upon which the series is loosely based, the houses of Lancaster and York didn't commit genocide. Much of Britain was left untouched during the feud, because in the real world perpetual violence doesn't exist. Too much is at stake, and real people just aren't that stupid, unlike the butchers who inhabit Martin's world.
So why don't the characters in Game of Thrones care if they murder each other? Why are the oaths they swear basically meaningless? Nobody wants to be a cheerleader for the divine right of kings, but it's the right answer. The "Old Gods and the New" of Westeros are invoked like Puma and Adidas, and the only monotheistic religion is a human-sacrifice cult; nobody has a reason to expect others to keep their promises because there's no divine guarantor underwriting the system. Nor can there be any consensus-based values - Westeros is very much a feudal world. Like Gormenghast, what system of governance does exist is brittle, but at least Mervyn Peake's characters exhibit the very human trait of respecting things that are meaningless. Martin's world is inhabited by beautiful fascists in breastplates.
The really fatuous thing about Westeros is the posture the various characters take towards the real threat: the oncoming winter and the White Walkers. The White Walkers are a kind of primordial evil that can't be bargained with, only fought - but unlike Lovecraft's Old Gods, they are not destined to destroy the world. This is Martin's much-lauded climate change analogy. It works, but perhaps not in the way he intended, because unlike real climate change, the White Walkers aren't a result of individual behaviour or a systemic breakdown. They merely appear and want to kill everybody.
But isn't this the modern conceit about climate change - that it is happening, but isn't our "fault"? Moreover, we keep insisting that the agonistic game of the marketplace will "defeat" climate change. In reality, like the Game of Thrones, the defenders of the market resort to more and more brutal interventions into "real life" just to keep the system functioning.
Who is really winning the Game of Thrones?
It should be clear by now who is really "winning" the Game of Thrones: those who don't participate. Tyrion Lannister is revolting against the demands of the game and is becoming the show's moral conscience. Jon Snow, the bastard son of Ned Stark, was outside the game from the beginning and is leading the celibate, oathkeeping Night's Watch in their fight against the White Walkers. Daenerys Targaryen, the radical left-emancipatory figure, is freeing slaves on a different continent. One could also mention Brienne of Tarth - the female knight seeking to redeem the Kingslayer, Jaime Lannister - and the antihero Sandor Clegane - the Hound.
Tyrion and Jon Snow both act in an approximately Christian mode of self-sacrificial redemption in a world where it shouldn't work. Daenerys' motivation to reclaim the Iron Throne, hereditary right, is totally at odds with her emancipatory political stance toward the slaves. Rather than anticipating their victories over both the evil inherent in the game and the White Walkers, we're constantly waiting for Martin to have them killed off because they don't make sense.
In the end, Martin is breaking the rules, but will construct a consistent outcome where somebody wins. This is a sleight of hand, rather than a work of fantasy. In godless Westeros, there should be no guarantee of such an outcome; in fact, everything seems tipped against it. Martin's hand is clearly visible in his Hobbesian world - a violation of the rule of Elfland and a sign, as Milosz says, that he "lacks peace of mind." Who can blame him. No such deus ex machine exists in the real world.
This is why Martin's world exists to kill off the Starks - because, as John Milbank has indicated time and again, Christian virtue is seen (mainly by some sections of the atheist Left) to be an obsolete system prohibited from participating in any opposition to the real-world Game of Thrones. Following this, the probable hero of the series will be Daenerys, who will likely see that she doesn't actually want the Iron Throne of Westeros after all, but peace, goodwill and liberty. Perhaps I'm wrong - that sounds like total fantasy after all.
Adam Brereton is a Melbourne-based writer and editor, and a Catechumen in the Roman Catholic Church.