In Dispraise of Realism

George R.R. Martin

A confession: I have only watched a few episodes of Game of Thrones, and none of its spinoff, House of the Dragon. I tried reading George R.R. Martin’s novels, and couldn’t. Nothing against either Martin’s writing, which has a strong voice and command of nuance, or the adaptation’s execution; I particularly like how they took Peter Jackson’s LotR ethos and made it sootier. Martin and his adapters work well.

Rather, I’ve struggled with the underlying ethic. Martin is probably the foremost proponent of a fantasy subgenre called “grimdark.” This neologism is sloppily defined and, like porn, we know it when we see it. Rather than having parameters, grimdark fantasy has a core interpretation of humanity defined by pessimism, and a petty, captious interpretation of human nature. Grimdark writers read humans as base, vile creatures, and depict this belief luridly.

Martin’s tone isn’t unique. Writers like Genevieve Valentine, Glen Cook, and Joe Abercrombie presume similarly that humans lack core values, honor doesn’t exist, and the best we can expect is to find the least awful antihero. Grimdark often exists in direct rejection to J.R.R. Tolkien, who aggressively rejected religious interpretations of his novels, but who nevertheless wrote from an essentially Catholic belief that justice must ultimately prevail.

This pessimism often gets characterized as “realism.” Both inside and outside literature, many people who pat themselves on the back for their supposed clear-eyed ability to see the truth, actively seek the bleakest, most hopeless interpretation for everything. Recall Tolstoy’s famous thesis statement of realism in Anna Karenena: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Then he sets out to prove it.

Similarly, in politics, “realism” often justifies history’s worst atrocities. Otto von Bismarck pioneered realpolitik, a PoliSci thesis contending that everybody’s a bad actor, and the wisest course is to destroy other nations before they destroy you. It’s easy, with historical hindsight, to draw a straight line between Bismarck and two world wars. Today, American politics is tainted by “race realism,” a primarily conservative principle that race-based conflict is inevitable.

J.R.R. Tolkien

It strikes me, however, that Tolkien and his weird shadow, C.S. Lewis, weren’t ignorant of the worst possible interpretations. Tolkien fought in the trenches at the Somme. Lewis’s allegorical Pevensie family stumbled into Narnia while literally fleeing the London Blitz. Tolkien and Lewis lived through the Twentieth Century’s most ignoble and hideous moments. And despite that, they believed goodness, Christianity, and capital-T Truth still existed.

Lewis himself, in describing Chretien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, noted that Chretien set his stories in a distant land, at a distant time. (Chretien was French, but in the 12th Century, overland travel was ponderous, and undertaken only with great purpose.) Because, Lewis writes, true virtue is always in another land, at another time. Historically, fantasy has shared that belief, whether Tolkien’s iron-age severity, or Lewis’ playful mythic candyland.

Contrasting the sociopolitical forces that steered Tolkien versus Martin, I notice two divergences. First, though both men were baptized and confirmed Catholic, Martin lost his faith moving into adulthood. He stopped believing that capital-T Truth existed, or at least was knowable. But no substitute source of moral confidence took Christianity’s place. Faced with a panoply of philosophical and theological moralities, Martin essentially surrendered to indecision.

Meanwhile, as Martin lacked any moral compass, he also lacked urgency in context. Lewis and Tolkien were shaped by literal war, with fascism, which was itself the final instaur form of imperialism. (America take note.) Martin and his grimdark cohort, by contrast, grew up amid the Cold War. They didn’t have the option to win or die trying. Instead, they lived beholden to powerful governments that were deaf to the people’s entreaties.

Actual violence, actual war, convinced Tolkien and Lewis that truth claims matter, and virtue exists. By contrast, the lingering threat of violence, with the pervasive reality that they could neither join in nor flee, convinced Martin et al. that nothing really matters, and humanity is necessarily execrable. It seems belief in truth and virtue emerges, butterfly-like, from the need to act. But the persistent inability to resist evil starves virtue.

And in both cases, True Believers cast their belief in virtue, or lack thereof, onto a distant land unreachable across countless miles and centuries. Because closer to home, we have to acknowledge that neither virtue nor vice are absolute. Real life is sloppy, and doesn’t move according to theory. In either case, Christian idealism or agnostic pessimism, the truth only exists in a mythic land.