Devil's Party or Not

My friends and I get in fights about Milton occasionally. (/nerdalert) There are basically two readings of Milton. William Blake felt that Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it” — that in writing Paradise Lost, Milton lost control of one unruly character named Satan. Stanley Fish instead argues that Milton was fully in control of his work and that the seductiveness of Satan is part of the story’s message.


It's really a question of how much power do you attribute to an author and how much to the reader. When I argue with my Milton fan-friends, I find myself pulling away from attributing too much genius even to a genius like Milton; when I argue with my science-oriented friends, I find myself pushing them to think that "yes maybe Moby Dick is a symbol for something other than a whale." Everyone falls somewhere along the spectrum, and everyone falls somewhere different depending on how much they like -- or understand -- the work and the author in question.

Song of Fire and Ice: Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things

Sara was laughing about the opening to Game of Thrones.  Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf, calls Jon Snow a bastard no fewer than four or five times in a single conversation.  It’s pretty heavy-handed — it’s like Martin thinks we’ll forget — but it’s also the author tipping his hand a little.  Several of the heroes in the book are “cripples, bastards, and broken things.”  In fact, the majority of my favorite characters (and yours, right?) are “broken” in some way.

Bran Stark loses the use of his legs.  Tyrion is a dwarf, an imp, a half-man.  Jon Snow is a bastard.  Hodor is mentally handicapped.  Sandor “The Hound” Clegane is scarred with burns.  Samwell Tarly is fat, disinherited, and a coward.  And in Storm of Swords, even a villain or two gets taken down a peg along the way to becoming POV characters who are more readily sympathetic. (Spoiler: Jaime Lannister )

When travelling to the Wall, Tyrion says (more or less) to Jon Snow that because of his physical limitations, he’s been forced to consider other modes of strength.  This ultimately becomes the take-away point of Game of Thrones — learning your limits makes you flexible and resourceful, which makes you stronger. As the world changes, those who are used to change will bend and adapt.

This Writer: Backstory

By the time I was 21, I’d written out the first drafts of three novels.

In high school, I wrote two novels that could best be described as “melodramatic theological soft sci-fi.” The first included paranormal beings testing humanity in vaguely small sample sizes with magical powers. The second centered on a large, improbable dystopian society based on psychological principles that you might read about on Wikipedia. The books were humorless, incredibly dark, and interminable.

I wrote a bildungsroman in college that was a thinly-disguised idealization of my high school friends—and of me! (but thank god I wasn’t the main character) It included badly-written poetry and an awkward sex scene (that was meant to be awkward?) and a sarcastic but also rather serious narratorial voice.

But after I’d finished each and every one of these novels, I didn’t have the patience to revise, the insight to evaluate, the open-mindedness to accept critique, or the courage to submit. They all became apprenticeship novels.

You never write a book thinking that it’s practice. Whatever work you’re currently writing is desperately serious. I expect that the transition from practice to performance takes most of us by surprise.

Song of Fire and Ice: Beyond the Wall, Across the Sea

George R.R. Martin’s series is set (mostly) on the fictional continent of Westeros—a continent stuck in the medieval period for centuries, modeled most closely on England (The Wall = Hadrian’s Wall, the wildlings = the Scots, Lannisters and Starks = Lancaster and York, etc.).  Nevertheless, the show has a “modern” feel to it — and not just because of all the sex.

In particular, I think it’s laced with a rather modern paranoia — something fueled by the World Wars and especially the Cold War — where enemies become somewhat indeterminate.  Who is your ally?  And who is a mere enemy posing as an ally? 

If a war breaks out, who pays for it and who gets paid?  It’s an idea that’s been around at least as long as Heller’s Catch-22, where a certain commander gets rich selling and reselling supplies to his own forces.  In GoT, it’s characters like Littlefinger and the Boltons who serve as our own  no-bid war contracts and selected presidential cronies.

Song of Fire and Ice: Dark Wings, Dark News

 George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series (now an HBO series called Game of Thrones) has been read by some as a deconstruction of the high fantasy genre.  Some of these deconstructions are long overdue — knights, kings, politics, etc. — but some of them are all-the-more surprising to happen today rather than a half-century ago.

The one I’m thinking of today is simply the pace of communication.  We’ve reached an era where communication is almost instantaneous.  I have friends who are never without their smart phones, who are never lost in a city of millions of people, who are never unaware of who is eating what for dinner.  Our society is glutted with information — which is its own problem, sure — and so the idea of living in a world where the fastest news flies by raven is. just. unimaginable.