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SPOILERS FOR “GAME OF THRONES”
Every so often, I read something that is so ill-advised I want to jump on a soapbox and start ranting. This hasn’t happened for a while (unfortunately, because I could always use good subjects for blog posts). Now, luckily for me, along comes the article “The Real Monster in ‘Game of Thrones’ Is Its Hidden Reactionary Agenda,” by Timothy Malone. The article begins:
If one were to Google “White Walkers + metaphor”
Okay, let me stop you right there. Treating everything as metaphor is something that literary critics are trained to do, but it doesn’t work the same way in fantasy and science fiction. Tolkien’s ring is not “really” the atom bomb, and Sauron is not “really” Hitler. In science fiction and fantasy things are what they say they are, a magical ring, a powerful entity who wants to enslave the world. Sure, they can be given different symbolic interpretations, but that’s not their main function.
Google, according to Malone, would tell you that the White Walkers are symbolic of “catastrophic climate change,” and he goes on to quote George R.R. Martin saying that “there’s a certain parallel there.” Unfortunately for him, this demolishes his thesis right out of the gate. So how does he get around this?
But really, do we need the words of an author about his intent to interpret a text? Haven’t we recognized “the death of the author” for some time in criticism? A piece of art is subject to negotiation; its meaning is not universal.
Have we recognized the “death of the author,” the theory that the author isn’t important when it comes to understanding his or her text? Well, some people have, and some people haven’t. As a writer I’ve always thought that an author should at least get a say in what his or her work is about, but then I’ve also thought that the phrase “death of the author” sounds vaguely sinister.
Still, this allows our (still living) author to make his point. He goes on to say:
The genres of both science fiction and fantasy function as loosely veiled narrativizations of the contemporary moment.
This is misguided as the idea that everything in science fiction and fantasy is a metaphor. Science fiction and fantasy are not about “the contemporary moment.” They are about the future, or the past, or an alternative timeline, or an imaginary landscape. Of course they do function as -- oh, god, I’m going to have to try to spell that word -- “narrativizations of the contemporary moment,” but that’s because they can’t help using the assumptions of their time. But this is a bug, not a feature. If your book about 2319 sounds like 2019, you are, as they say, doing it wrong.
Malone goes on to say that the White Walkers are not a metaphor for climate change, no matter what that upstart George R.R. Martin might think. That’s because this theory does not take into account the wall that holds them back. What the White Walkers really symbolize -- but I’ll let him tell it:
The fantasy genre in which “Game of Thrones” operates is a thinly veiled representation of the contemporary political moment. The story is a deeply reactionary project meant to shore up white-supremacist ideology in its moment of crisis. It’s not about climate change at all. It is not progressive, not instructive.
(As an aside: Malone apparently thinks that to be progressive a story must be instructive. If A Song of Ice and Fire really was about climate change, he seems to be saying here, there might be hope for it yet.)
He goes on to talk about the language some in this country use for immigrants and incarcerated people -- a “scourge,” a “disease” -- and how this turns them into something like a biohazard. And you know, he isn’t wrong here; you can’t fault him about politics. It’s when he writes about fantasy that he runs into trouble.
The zombie is a metaphorical representation of the subhuman contaminant threat, the immigrant and the incarcerated, behind their respective walls. Through this narrative, they have the potential to contaminate us, to rip us down, to make us like them, to end “civilization.”
Another aside: The first book in the series came out in 1996, a far more innocent time, when the words “President Trump” sounded like the punchline to a joke. Immigration was not the issue Trump would make it later, and almost no one was thinking about building a wall across the entire southern border. If Martin truly was writing about the “contemporary moment,” he must have been prescient.
That’s not the point, though. The point is that the White Walkers are symbolic of zombies, a huge humongous crowd of undead coming to eat your face off. Critics can argue that they have another, symbolic, meaning, but what that meaning is is up for grabs. As Google says, they can represent climate change. If I had to write an essay for English class I’d say they represented the monsters in the unconscious, the ones we try to keep walled off but that come out no matter what we do. But you know, I just thought of that now, when I entered the terms “White Walker + metaphor” into my brain. What I mainly thought while watching “Game of Thrones” was “Oh my god, zombies!”
Malone then goes on a bit. The Wildings are the “poor whites” turned into cops and prison guards, and so able to feel superior to the “socially dead.” (No, they feel superior to them because they’re not zombies.) The “fear of the White Walkers breaking through the northern wall is a thinly veiled metaphor for immigrants...” (No, the fear is because they’re... oh, never mind.)
Then he makes another of his important political points. “You can have Black people close to power -- but not in power.” I almost hate to say it, but he’s right; there are very few black characters in ASoIaF, and nearly all of them are servants or slaves or soldiers. Every so often Martin will introduce a black person from the Summer Isles, but they’re always in the background, with no agency. Point to Malone, though this point has to be taken away later for misogyny.
It’s a shame Martin, with his enormous cast of nearly every kind of person, did not include black people in positions of power, and yes, there is some racism there. But to say that the series is a “project to shore up white-supremacist ideology,” that Martin approves of the system that created, for example, the Unsullied, is ludicrous.
Malone then says that ASoIaF wants you to identify with a particular house (I never wanted to do this, but okay), so you can cheer for one manifestation of white supremacy and become invested in it. He goes on to list the various houses, and, well, here comes the misogyny:
Maybe you consider yourself a conservative -- you have the patriarchal Lannisters, headed by Tywin and now Cersei/Clinton.
WTF??? In what way is Cersei like (Hillary, I assume) Clinton? Cersei: Loves her brother Jaime, to the point of an incestuous relationship; tries to kill her brother Tyrion; is partly responsible for the death of her husband, Robert; sleeps with a good portion of the court, and frames or tortures or imprisons another portion; sets the Great Sept on fire, killing a number of people; ignores the threat of the White Walkers in favor of consolidating her power. Hillary: Taught at the School of Law at the University of Arkansas; worked for children’s law, family policy, education, gender equality, and health care; First Lady, senator, Secretary of State, and got the majority of the votes in the 2016 presidential election. Yes, it’s true that Clinton was too willing to go to war, and too close to Wall Street, but that hardly makes her the villain Cersei is.
The only thing the two women have in common is their separate Walks of Shame. Cersei’s lasted for a day, but Clinton’s went from 1992, when her husband ran for president, to the present -- and if this article is any indication, it will probably go on forever.
