Storycraft is soulcraft

In a bid for supposed realism, prestige drama over the last twenty years has exhausted itself in irony and shallow nihilism. This matters because stories are how we gain a collective sense of identity, direction and meaning. They enable us to make sense of who we are and provide a vision of what we could be. Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk), hero of George R.R. Martin’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is an everyman who pursues honour. He shows that morality is not subjective. It is not only a mask for the powerful to conceal their cruelty, or a club to wield against the weak. Morality is a code and practice that must be followed in the face of hardship. It must be enacted so that the good and the true have a chance to survive and even triumph. This matters more than ever in the world we are entering today.

Fantasy “realism” and moral reality 

Having watched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, it’s hard to believe that it was written by the same man who wrote A Game of Thrones. In the former we have a positive vision of heroism in pursuit of the good. In the latter, we see a world where morality is what you make of it, and those who get to make it are those who can impose their will on it. Power shapes reality, and everyone is exploited for one’s own ends. It is a cold, cruel world where courage and nobility are for fools, and virtue is for the feckless and naïve. This view of human nature and human relations are the foundations for why A Game of Thrones is so grim, a grimness employed in pursuit of supposed realism, but which in the end is more fantastical and unrealistic than any dragon or White Walker.

The philosopher Charles Taylor, according to Robert Joustra and Aussa M. Wilkinson, provides a framework through which to understand Martin’s portrayal of our world. Taylor argued that we inhabit a Secular Age, which means not only that religion has declined in adherents, but that our whole conception of reality has changed. We no longer live a life where faith is the baseline assumption but one where doubt and choice between contested visions of reality, truth and goodness are the norm. Ultimately, we live in an age where it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God in … 1500 in our Western society, while [today] many of us find this not only easy, but inescapable”.

One aspect of the Secular Age is a “slide to subjectivism”. In the Secular Age we can come to see ourselves not as discovering and conforming ourselves to a moral reality external to us, as in the classical world or Christendom. Instead, we are creators of our own meaning, imposing it on the disenchanted world around us. Our moral horizon shifts with the whims of our restless spirit. Any kind of higher spiritual reality is hidden. We are left inhabiting the flattened world of late-modernity. Our world is what we make of it. 

This leads us, and the characters in Game of Thrones, to instrumentalism. If reality and morality are what we make of it, our actions are performed according to a cost-benefit analysis: what benefits me, how much effort does it require, and what will I pay for any gain? What’s right and good is reduced to what is right and good for me, that embodies my own unique way of being. 

Of course, the problem is that no man is an island and we are born into an unchosen web of relationships that shape us and our sense of self. In such a world, the question can come down to: who decides? Who has the sovereignty to not only choose their view of reality and morality but to make others conform to this worldview? Of course, the answer is those with power. As Cersei Lannister says to Ned Stark: in the game of thrones, you live or you die. 

In this vision of how we might live, those around us are not treated as beings created in the image of God, or individuals who have the potential to fulfil their nature through living a virtuous life. People become means to your end, however defined. Power determines who is victorious and who is defeated. Those who wish to triumph employ moral codes and religious faith as fictions to persuade followers to their side. 

The road to triumph is to go beyond such low-born ideas as good and evil. We decide what these are and impose them on the lower orders. As Varys says in his riddle of the king, priest, and rich man, each trying to persuade a sell-sword to slay the other two, power rests where we believe it does. And the tragedy is that the power invested in the Iron Throne is itself an illusion, created by a collective delusion that it is the highest achievement. The only consolation is that, as Cersei says to her son Joffrey, “one day you will sit on the throne, and the truth will be what you make it”.

And yet Martin’s “realism” is itself a distortion. What is a tendency in modernity becomes an iron law in his fiction. It reflects something real but does not completely capture how we live our lives, nor does it reflect the history Martin took inspiration from. We still have a nature, however flawed. There is an external moral reality, however dimly we perceive it, and failing to conform our souls to it as best we can leads to misery and suffering. 

Meanwhile, the conditions essential for political success are utterly impossible in Martin’s depiction of human relations. This depiction would have been utterly inconceivable to medieval people. As Joustra and Wilkinson write, “the cosmic hierarchy which endows king, priest, and nobleman with their powers has already been deconstructed … the commoners themselves presume it to be a ruse, and care nothing for its dimensions. It presumes, frankly, a widespread materialist secularity — one that was anything but the norm in medieval society.”

Only someone born and raised into the Secular Age could write a fantasy – by its very nature a literary form of re-enchantment where the divine, the numinous and the magical hold sway – and portray a politics so pathologically egotistical without the characters fearing divine retribution for their defiance of moral law. Game of Thrones is “a postmodern fairy tale. It is deliciously anachronistic precisely because, while it uses medieval Europe as the historical setting for its game theory, the game it sets and the rules of its play could only come into being in a Secular age.” And this kind of postmodern fairy tale can only be told and gain success in a society formed by a particular political order: the open society of the postwar consensus. 

Power and the open society

Game of Thrones tells a story that has resonated with our late-modern culture, where doubt is the norm and distrust is the rule. The moral and ideological paradigm that formed Martin is central to his literary vision.  As others have noted, his depiction of society, politics and religion, and the use of power in Game of Thrones is symbolic of the logic of the open society, the world he was born into in the postwar years. 

This order, R.R. Reno writes, was born out of the trauma of Europe’s second Thirty Years War of 1914-1945. This culminated in the turning of industrial modernity towards liquidating an entire people in the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews, and the turning of science’s discovery of the structure of life itself towards forging weapons from the sun’s power, granting us the ability to end all life itself. 

From this arose the postwar consensus, built on a repudiation of the “strong gods” that were held to have led us to this catastrophe: strong truth claims, virtue, tradition religion, objective morality, communal belonging in ethnic groups and nations, the heritage of the past passed on as a legacy to posterity, and the use of power in service to all these goods. The strong gods “are the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unites societies”. 

These strong gods were rejected as comprising the “closed society”, leading to racism, militarism, antisemitism, fascism and communism. The old ideals, beliefs and practices were rejected by “relativizing them, putting them into their historical contexts, critiquing their xenophobic, patriarchal, cisgender, and racist legacies, and showing how they are products of a sociobiological process that produces in us a reptilian ‘tribal mind’.” The “open society must be anti-metaphysical”, for we must work ceaselessly to remove “the vestiges of sacred authority that blinker men’s reason”.

They were replaced by thinkers of left and right with the low but broad ideals of the open society: moral relativism, individualism, religious scepticism. WWII and its consequences “evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist.” These imperatives “define[d] the postwar era.” 

The prophets of the open society, enmeshed in the networks and institutions that comprise the ruling class and its cultural communicators, formed the mindscape of the postwar consensus through what Taylor calls the “social imaginary”, the shared and implicit understandings of the world and our place in it. It is a “series of pre-theoretical understandings and practices we acquire from the families, communities, and countries into which we’re born that help us navigate the world.” 

We witness the effects of the postwar consensus on Martin through his views on power, God, and heroism

We absorb the norms, mores, and sense of right and wrong by which we orient and conduct ourselves “from the stories and mythologies of communities in which we grow and live our lives, something that can’t really be explained easily by us.” This provides the understandings and worldview that undergird our sense of individual self and collective belonging cultivated through the habits and practices we pick up through imitation and repetition. None of this is pre-thought or rationally discovered at first. It’s a sense we have of how things are and how they should be.

We witness the effects of the postwar consensus on Martin through his views on power, God, and heroism. We get a glimpse of this from this quote from a 2014 Rolling Stone interview: “I was born three years after the end of World War II. You want to be a hero. You want to stand up. Whether you’re Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin or the Americans saving the world from the Nazis, it’s sad to say, but I do think there are things worth fighting for. Men are still capable of great heroism, but I don’t necessarily think there are heroes.” 

While not denying that heroism is possible, the fact that Martin portrays heroic deeds as leading to that character’s doom reinforces the impression of Game of Thrones’ moral vision laid out earlier. Ultimately, in a subjectivist and instrumentalist world, heroes as an archetype cannot exist, because there isn’t a way virtue can be acted out in the world and recognised as such. One person’s hero becomes another’s villain. Those who win decide who is heroic and villainous. Heroism, rather than something to inspire and imitate, becomes licence for and the road to tyranny. As Sansa Stark says, “there are no heroes. In life the monsters win.”

The point is not that Martin’s literary vision is uniquely bad. It is that both he and his work are  emblematic of the broader pathologies of the postwar consensus. Any talk of the strong gods described above must be treated with scepticism at best and cynicism at worst, for it usually if not always obscures a darker reality. As a result, fantasy fiction becomes a way of illuminating the supposedly entirely bleak reality of the world, rather than providing in narrative form characters practicing the pursuit and achievement of virtue, even while struggling against their own flaws and the challenges of their worlds. Heroes, in other words.

The lesson Martin took from the postwar consensus is that power can never be used for righteous or noble ends. But power is inevitable in our fallen world. What matters is the end towards which power is used. Power used in the name of objective morality has unleashed horrors, only surpassed by power unbounded from any external moral constraint. Power, channelled and directed, can create as well as corrupt. The war against Nazi Germany embodied Augustine’s argument that “it is the iniquity of the opposing side that imposes upon the wise man the duty of waging wars.” 

In Martin’s eyes, the only correct response to the world-rending disaster of WWII is to disenchant the world of all higher ideals, lest we fall back into the corpse-strewn past of the closed society. Power must never be used in service of such ideals. The strong gods must be shown for the blood-drenched horrors they are. They must be cast aside to usher in the new millennium of openness and true enlightenment. Game of Thrones acts as one of what Reno calls the “therapies of disenchantment”. This precludes any sense of the heroic or the search for enchantment in modern fantasy, defeating the very point of this literary form.

The stories we tell

By contrast, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is almost shocking. Gone is the depiction of humanity that supposedly shows sophistication but is really a soft, irony-poisoned nihilism. Instead, we see not only a story laced with beauty and poignancy. We see characters who embody the existence of an objective morality, a vision of virtue by which we judge them and they judge each other. Martin’s creative talents can still be used in service to the elevation of our spirit rather than just the illumination of our baser natures. 

Dunk may not be a stereotypically heroic figure. We repeatedly read in the novella that he is “Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall”. He isn’t clever or quick witted. He doesn’t possess grace of body or manner. He is a simple man. But this is the point: even simple men, raised from the “small people”, can look to the heavens and reach for greatness. 

This reach for greatness is buttressed by adherence to a code that places right and wrong outside oneself. As Dunk says of Sir Arlan in the show, “He charged me to be a good knight and true, to defend the weak and innocent, serve my lord faithfully, and defend the realm with all my might, and I swore that I would.” Dunk hews to this code against monstrous odds and at the possible expense of his life. Because, fallen though we may be, and even though we see the will of God (or the Seven) through a glass darkly, it is our duty and obligation to serve the most high by serving the lowly. 

Later in the show, Dunk has entered the tourney at Ashford Meadow. In the meantime he has defended a puppeteer called Tanselle the Tall from the predations of Prince Aerion Targaryen, scion of the royal line that still ruled Westeros before Game of Thrones. Aerion is enraged that the puppet dragon is killed by a puppet knight; “the dragon ought never lose”. Dunk wades in, striking Aerion down and kicking him before being pulled off. Eventually, justice must be served. Dunk faces the ‘Trial of Seven’, from which the seven gods decree who is righteous by who is victorious. In the process, Dunk gathers six others to his side. Sir Steffan Fossoway, seen earlier in the show, initially declares for Dunk, but defects to the other side on the promise of a lordship. 

This sounds like classic Martin: moral character sacrificed for mercenary gain. And yet, we see again that something like honour still holds sway. Ser Steffan’s squire and cousin, Raymun, is disgusted: “you’d sell your honour for a lordship?” Raymun then begs to be knighted, as “any knight can make a knight”. Ser Lyonel Baratheon, “the laughing storm”, then does so, uttering the knightly oath: “In the name of the warrior, I charge you to be brave. In the name of the father, I charge you to be just. In the name of the mother, I charge you to defend the innocent.” 

In Game of Thrones, this is seen as mere rhetorical drapery for the imposition of will. But in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, it is taken seriously. It is a code that demands conviction, not convenience. And it has remarkable echoes of the Christian-inflected code of chivalry. The world of Game of Thrones may be caught in the shadow of the Iron Throne, but Martin cannot escape the shadow of the cross in which we all still sit, whether we know and like it or not. 

Dunk embodies this code when he rides in front of the tourney spectators in the noble stands, beseeching them to remember the example, service and sacrifice of his lord, Ser Arlan. Those who did indeed serve with Ser Arlan in battle turn away, unwilling to uphold their vows, seeing Ser Arlan and now Dunk as mere hedge knights, belonging to no lord or land, unworthy of their attention or loyalty. The finest scene in the whole novella and show comes when Dunk rises in his stirrups in righteous anger, yelling at the indifferent nobility: ARE THERE NO TRUE KNIGHTS AMONG YOU? 

He is on the verge of having his vision of knighthood shattered, when we see more evidence of there being a higher good than the gaining and use of illegitimate power: Ser Baelor Targaryen, son of the king, uncle to Aerion, declares for Dunk. Ser Baelor explains that it was his duty to make up the seven on Dunk’s side, as Aerion did abuse the puppeteers, proving unworthy of his privilege. Baelor gains nothing from doing this, and indeed makes the ultimate sacrifice, but is willing to do so. In Aerion we see power corrupt and abused. In Baelor we see legitimate and rightful authority, exercising power in concert with that authority and ordered by morality for the good. 

This points to another way in which the show shines: The portrayal of Dunk’s relationship with his young, diminutive squire, Egg. In the same way that Ser Arlan taught Dunk by example, and only clouted him when he deserved it, so does Dunk teach Egg by how he acts. He teaches through his deeds, not by mere words and argument. Egg learns that virtue is not only the property of the high, but may in fact have deeper roots down among the low. Dunk is not a hero because he is without sin; he is a hero because he reaches for and achieves virtue in spite of his sins. 

The way Dunk teaches Egg is a form of what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge, not always explicitly given form as instructions. This is how we learn our vocations, and how to be fully human. We grow in a web of relationships as part of families, neighbourhoods, and nations. We “know more than we can tell”, as we are nurtured through the formation of habits, ideally those that enable our flourishing. From these we form a sense of identity and gain a sense of meaning and direction in life. 

As with Egg, so with us. Stories like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (and Game of Thrones) are not mere diversions from real life. We shape our stories, and they in turn shape us. They weave the social imaginary. As Spencer Klavan writes, “any ‘message’ a story contains are not mere messages, but mimesis, an imitation and depiction of what the world is like and who we are in it.” Shows like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms matter because if the ideals it depicts could be given as an instruction manual we wouldn’t need stories at all: “we breathe in stories like oxygen, and they shape who we become”. For J.R.R. Tolkien, fantasy stories done correctly can become a window to Reality by allowing a form of escape into a fantastical second world, and when we return to our world, we “know the place for the first time”.

Stories move us because the events and narratives in them reflect the unfolding of our own lives. Alasdair MacIntyre writes that stories give us a sense of identity and place because “we cannot…characterize behaviour independently of intentions, and we cannot characterize intentions independently of the settings which make those intentions intelligible both to [ourselves] and to others.” This relies on relationships in the present, as between Dunk and Egg, but also between the present and the past, as between Ser Arlan and Dunk. 

Our stories are literary icons that point beyond themselves, and those who make them are the icon carvers

Even a fantasy tale like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms resonates because its narrative is recognisably like our own life. In “real” life, choices matter, and deeds have real consequences. Contra Martin’s subjectivist and instrumentalist world of Game of Thrones, when we say something is right or wrong and portray it as such in our art, we are referring to and imitating an external reality and independent truth. If we weren’t, art would be pointless as there would be no meaning to point to, experience, or express. In Klavan’s words, “the being and character of each thing is a sign, a symbol of the ultimate Being who made them all”. Our stories are literary icons that point beyond themselves, and those who make them are the icon carvers. Dunk is an icon for our time.

Heroism in a scattering time

Audiences have reacted so well to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because in our souls we long for tales where there is a clear sense of right and wrong, even if revealed through characters who are as fallen as we are. But this is the point: being fallen does not then mean characters cannot rise and become exemplars that inspire and to which we can aspire.  

If we learn by imitation, it is all the more urgent that we have compelling examples of what it means to be a good, virtuous person in a strange and frightening world. Fantasy stories, especially those conveyed in visual form, stand to act as the new means to sanctify the world of digital myth we are fast being assimilated to. But only if they allow us to see the good, true and beautiful expressed through the narrative. Ser Duncan the Tall’s plea of “Are there no true knights among you” is a question that demands each of us answer, and it is through such stories that we can hope to do so.

In a world that feels like it is increasingly designed to crush the life from us, drain our vitality and suppress our soul-deep need for symbols of nobility and virtue, we need heroes now more than ever, as the strong gods return and the postwar consensus cracks. Stories of heroism fortify our spirit to face the armies of the father of lies, whether in the shape of the managerial leviathan; a neofeudal economic order; or the emergent digital mobs that comprise the digital swarms whose name is Legion. 

If our lives are given coherence through narrative and are themselves part of a greater, grander story, then it matters what kind of stories we read, hear, and see. In a time when the digital world, that apogee of scientific rationalism, is itself the means for a re-enchantment that retrieves the numinous and the darkness of the damned, goodness in the face of evil and heroism in the face of trial are vital ingredients for what fantasy stories ought to be. They are modern myths that point beyond themselves to the ultimate reality. Ultimately, storycraft is soulcraft, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a step on the road to mythic rebirth.