Maimed Bodies in George R.R. Martin's a Song of Ice and Fire

Maimed Bodies in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Rhodes University By Amy Caroline Goodenough December 2016 Supervisor: Dr Jamie McGregor Abstract George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, has joined franchises like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings at the forefront of popular culture. Unlike other popular fantasy franchises, however, Song is notably ‘gritty’ - inspired as much by the realism of historical fiction as it is by its fantastical predecessors. The novels focus on a massive struggle for power, and that struggle is a famously bloody one: the violence of the novel’s medieval-inspired world and of medieval warfare, is placed front and center. This thesis argues that Song portrays this excessive violence with a view to more than mere sensation. The body is central to Martin’s text, and since power is the object of Martin’s characters, he depicts the way in which power interacts with the body with sophistication. The use of capital and corporal punishment is foregrounded frequently in the text, and presented as central to the process of ruling, but horrifying in its potential for injustice. For all that these acts of maiming - public execution, public torture - may be presented as ceremonies of justice, Martin makes it evident that they are in fact rituals of power. The spectacular display of maimed bodies occurs frequently - so frequently that it is clearly ordinary to Martin’s characters - and nearly always with a view to creating a perception of power. Heads are spiked on castle walls, gibbets hung in town squares, and slaves crucified on road-signs, and these all speak not of the criminality of the victims, but of the power of those doing the punishing. While such displays may be successful, they usually signal weakness to the reader: Martin writes numerous characters whose acts of violence come as misplaced reactions to their own vulnerability. This dynamic comes to the fore most powerfully in the absurd performances of violence by Theon Greyjoy, and, later, in his torture by Ramsay Bolton. i Acknowledgments With thanks, firstly, to my parents, without whose boundless support I would have had nothing to eat but my words; to Jamie, who guided me through this, no matter how many bad jokes I made, or how many times I spelled his name wrong; to Rosa, Chloe, Celia, Athena, and Joanne, who are accidentally to blame for this; to Lara, Jeannie, Erika, Sam, Cait, Grant, Brendan, and Natalie, whose kindness got me through it; and to Shaun with the bullet round his neck, who first showed me A Game of Thrones, and told me it was part of a trilogy. This is for AJ, who was taken by the Drowned God, and for Elsie, who went with the Lady of Lys. ii Contents Abstract.....................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................ii Contents...................................................................................................................................iii Introduction............................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: “a piece of prince”, “a chunk of king”, and a “dung-encrusted crown”: Martin’s Ignoble Bodies..................................................................................11 Chapter Two: “With mine own hand I take your life”: Justice and the Rending of Flesh..........................................................................................................28 Chapter Three: “How they loved to promise heads”: Maimed Bodies Displayed.......... 69 Chapter Four: “it rhymes with weak”: The Violent Performance of Ramsay and Reek........................................................................................................ 98 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 125 Works Cited.......................................................................................................................... 127 iii Introduction The past twenty years or so has seen something of a renaissance in fantasy media. From the astounding popular success of the Harry Potter novels, to the reinvigoration of Tolkien’s legendarium through Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and then more dubiously The Hobbit, to the resurgence of interest in fantasy roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons/ fantasy has migrated, at least in part, from the ghetto of cult following to the suburbs of popular culture. Bestselling fantasy novelist Lev Grossman has mused on this dramatic shift: When I was a kid in the 1980s, fantasy was not entirely OK. ... to be a fantasy fan was not to be a good, contented hobbit, working his sunny garden and smoking his fragrant pipeweed. It was to be Gollum, slimy and gross and hidden away, riddling in the dark. ... In the wider world, of which I was reluctantly a part, a love of fantasy was a sign of weakness. But that has changed. Something odd happened to popular culture, somewhere around the turn of the millennium: Whereas the great franchises of the late twentieth century had tended to be science fiction - Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix - somewhere around 2000 a shifting of the tectonic plates occurred. The great eye of Sauron swiveled, and we began to pay attention to other things. What we paid attention to was magic. (“How Magic Conquered Pop Culture”) We may ask, with Grossman, “why fantasy? And why now?” (ibid.), but regardless of the answer we give ourselves, it is clear that fantasy is, at least for the moment, perceived not as simply the purview of the bespectacled basement dweller, nor as rightly belonging to children.1 2 J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the greatest of the founding fathers of modern fantasy, who lamented that “[i]t is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories,” would have been delighted, although the subject matter of some of these stories might well have alarmed him. 1 The Player’s Handbook for the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons enjoyed brief success at the top of the Amazon sales charts when it was released in 2014 - a feat which would have seemed impossible for what is “essentially a niche gaming product” not long before (Mclllwain). But the resuigence in interest in Tabletop Roleplaying Games is most clearly evidenced by - and likely fuelled by - their appearance in popular television shows like The Big Bang Theory, Community, and Stranger Things. 2 Grossman’s own answer is that in our age of cyber-connection and social disconnection, “Fantasy holds out the possibility that there’s another way to live”, much as it did for the first modem fantasists, who longed fora connection to a pastoral world lost to war and technological revolution. The proposition seems not untrue, but nevertheless unsatisfyingly vague, and a little at odds with the some of the bleaker kinds of fantasy that have been gaining attention. 1 No franchise exemplifies the current state of this rise to popularity as much as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. As of April 2015, the books had sold over 58 million copies in 45 languages (Flood). HBO’s television adaptation, Game of Thrones, has been the most pirated television series every year since 2012 (Van der Sar) - a truly 21st-century achievement. Lily Rothman observed that “the slightest hint that Martin may be typing anything is met with near universal glee” from fans of the show. The franchise has spawned numerous memes,3 board games, video games, role-playing games, and at least three cookbooks.4 Martin has inspired not only countless fan-sites - a fact which is not particularly surprising in the current state of fan culture - but also a slew of anti-fan-sites: a “shadow fandom”, as Laura Miller calls it, “devoted to taunting Martin, his associates, and readers”, especially over the constant delays to the publication of the rest of the series. The Game of Thrones phenomenon is a strikingly modern one, and quite impossible to miss. In 2005, just after the release of the fourth novel in the series, A Feast for Crows, and some time before HBO turned Martin’s moderate popularity into global mania, Lev Grossman proclaimed Martin “the American Tolkien”, but cited as the secret to Martin’s appeal his dissimilarity to Tolkien: 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 ores. It’s men and women slugging it out in the muck, for money and power and lust and love. (“The American Tolkien”) Joe Abercrombie made a similar claim: In the broader consciousness, Lord of the Rings was how people saw fantasy. Detailed, focused on the setting, a lot of complexity, a good-versus-evil narrative. Game of Thrones has given people an alternative way of looking at epic fantasy. We’ve gone from orbiting one sun to orbiting

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