Two Mistakes Jonathan Franzen’s Haters and Fans Both Make

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Peter Schmidt

Introduction for Jonathan Franzen, Swarthmore College, Feb. 14, 2013.

Good evening. Speaking for our community of readers, I’d like to welcome you, Jonathan, back to Swarthmore. As for you, the audience, I will do you credit and not list Jonathan’s books and prizes, nor will I discuss a certain TV talk-show host, nor even cite what national magazine featured him on its cover. (Though I must admit that I’m grateful to them for printing an article on Jonathan’s most recent novel, Freedom, for their piece gave me some different reading when I came across it among piles of magazines like Guns & Ammo and GQ while enjoying waiting for an hour in the fluorescent customer lounge of a local auto repair shop.) Instead, by way of introduction I’d like to speak briefly on two common misperceptions about Jonathan’s fiction held by many of his detractors and his fans.

The first misperception is that many assume Jonathan’s fiction is disguised autobiography. This is a common problem many fiction writers face, particularly in the U.S. Jonathan himself in interviews and essays has been very open about the ways in which, say, Enid and Alfred Lambert in The Corrections are somewhat inspired by certain traits in his parents. He’s also spoken eloquently about how he sees himself basically as a comic novelist, and that a significant breakthrough in his development happened when he learned to treat ironically his own obsessions and self-delusions. “Self-deception is funny,” Jonathan’s said. As Henri Bergson argued about comedy long ago, we laugh at what is mechanical and unconscious in others, and comedy’s hope is that such laughter may liberate us from our own unconsciously imprisoning behaviors. But many readers either miss or downplay the critical self-engagement in Jonathan’s work and assume that his narratives are primarily self-regarding, a mirror held up to himself, even if that reflective surface is sometimes admitted to be a rather well-made fun-house mirror. Let me offer a somewhat different point of view. I think when we call his work autobiographical it is often a defense mechanism—it’s because his writing makes us uneasy. It touches a nerve; it holds a mirror up to us and shows us all too clearly delusions and difficulties we share with his characters. The Corrections, for instance, gives us not just richly drawn protagonists, one of the most profound portraits in all of American literature of the loving and demonic dynamic of family life. It also parodies all kinds of master narratives that hold sway over our psyches. To name just two, he imitates concepts from market economics that influence how we treat each other, and also what Jonathan has called the new materialism of the brain, in which character and memory themselves are seen as mere functions of chemistry adjustable by drugs. Jonathan is also adept at mixing competing master discourses in unusual ways, so that we become conscious of them as full of questionable assumptions and results. They seem suddenly rather laughable; their authority detumesces. A classic example would be a comic paragraph in The Corrections that describes Gary Lambert’s pornography using the diction of industrial mass production. “There was something of the assembly line in these images. The beautiful nude blonde was like fresh raw material…. [T]he worker clamped the material into a series of horizontal and vertical positions, crimping and bending the material as necessary, and very vigorously processed it with his tool” (169). (By the way, if you want an example of how this kind of discourse functions when it takes itself with utmost seriousness, as high-tech sublime rather than as parody, consider the recent Calvin Klein male underwear ad featuring abs, pecs, and oiled engine parts that got such a buzz during the Super Bowl. This new underwear design is dubbed Calvin’s “Concept” line.)

As Austen and Dickens and Thackeray well understood, fiction’s ventriloquism can expose such master languages as seductive fictions, I might even say frauds, and it does this not just by pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes, but also by showing us why we so intensely need to outfit such master narratives with robes and authority in the first place. “Concept” lines, indeed. As I said, the Franzen fun-house mirror is primarily directed at us, and this both delights and disturbs.

The second common delusion about Jonathan’s writing follows from the first, and it too is symptomatic of larger issues in American and contemporary global culture on which Jonathan helps us focus. Instead of being too autobiographical, this way of reading him overemphasizes the satiric. True, irony and satire are present on just about every page of his fiction, and they are delicious. Those who enjoy his work’s satire, though, often identify with the author as a kind of cruel god far above his characters—Olympian, aloof, ironic, and unforgiving as he skewers their self-delusions with sentences as sharply honed as Zeus’ thunderbolts. Yes, it’s heady fun; we can smile at a character’s misunderstanding of his or her own life from an apparent position of superiority somewhat approaching that of the author himself. But lots of contemporary popular culture is driven by safe mockery, even a kind of smiling sadism. To last, art has to counter this kind of arrogance, not just feed off it. Franzen is primarily a tragicomic author, as my colleague Phil Weinstein demonstrated in his faculty lecture here a few weeks ago. I agree. Franzen rightly understands that satire must be a means, not an end. The materialistic master-languages that he mocked in The Corrections have only become more powerful in contemporary life since 2001. That materialism, he believes, is “antithetical” to the ancient project of literature, which “is to connect with that which is unchanging and unchangeable, the tragic dimension of life” (Franzen, Paris Review interview). Empathy and catharsis, not just satiric distance, are crucial to understanding the full resonance of his art. That his sentences simultaneously inspire in us so many different responses is a miracle only the best writing can achieve.

For instance, consider the prose near the beginning of The Corrections portraying Alfred Lambert trying to pack a suitcase (p. 11). An expert builder of railroads and communications systems, Alfred has the work ethic and world-view of the mid-twentieth century generation that created modern industrial America. But now his own systems are beginning to fail due to Parkinson’s disease—his body won’t often do what his mind wants and his mind keeps losing its train of thought. Asked by his wife Enid what he is up to, he tries to speak a simple sentence— “I am packing my suitcase,” subject, verb, object, job done—but he gets lost in the middle of that sentence by runaway thoughts and fears. These are rendered for us by a magnificent periodic sentence of Jonathan’s that takes place between dashes in the time-space gap that opens up when Alfred pauses speaking. I’ve had to trim this long sentence for this introduction, but my excerpt will still give you a taste of its headlong momentum and haunting imagery:

“I am—” but when [Alfred] was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds…. In the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he … became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing when Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods— “packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. (11)

This sentence plunges us into Alfred’s vertigo, his desperate attempts to keep order and purpose even as forces he calls the “darkness” undo his efforts. We follow and feel his very self split into desperate child and dying man, a Hansel in the Hansel-and-Gretel tale losing his map of the world. The syntax here, which endlessly revises itself while also swerving in new directions, makes us as we read experience the chaos of Alfred’s thoughts. And yet the sentence itself, when seen as a whole, is not chaotic at all; it is superbly balanced and calibrated. As readers we experience Alfred’s panic from inside yet also are outside of it, guided by a master sentence-maker who shows us both the comedy and the tragedy, the outside and inside, of Alfred’s fate. This is great art indeed, and something far more rich and complex than just satire.

One good term for it might be borrowed from the critic James Wood, who has argued that much of the best modern fiction creates “comedies of forgiveness” very different from either mockery from a distance or tragedy experienced solely from within. Certainly the plots of both The Corrections and Freedom move toward profound moments of forgiveness, given and received, for some of their characters—Denise and Chip in The Corrections allowed to understand their parents in a new, more adult way, or Patty, my favorite character in Freedom, saying “it’s me, just me” near that novel’s end (559). (Whether Walter or Richard in Freedom, or Gary in The Corrections, eventually seek or earn forgiveness would be an interesting matter to debate.)

Introducing a fine novelist in under five minutes, as you can see, is an impossible task. So I’ll end with my own simple sentence. Please give Jonathan Franzen some Swarthmore Valentine’s Day love.

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Philip Roth Says He’s Done Writing Books – NYTimes.com

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

Are we supposed to be crestfallen about this news, or just relieved?  (I’m very much a fan of Roth’s early and middle period work, but think his fiction precipitously drops in quality beginning with American Pastoral, which was over-written and over-praised.  The Counter-Life and Ghost Writer, however, are at least two of his novels that will hold up brilliantly for future readers.)

Looks like from comments at the end of this interview that Roth is now most concerned with writing his own publicity and shaping how we should interpret his legacy….

Philip Roth Says Hes Done Writing Books – NYTimes.com.

 

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Introduction for Zadie Smith’s talk at Swarthmore, Nov. 7 2012: “Why I Write.”

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

It’s an honor to introduce Zadie Smith.  I shouldn’t be nervous, because introductions are easy, right?  Zadie Smith, meet Swarthmore College and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.  Swarthmore, Zadie Smith.  Yet introductions are really impossible, because more words need to be said but it’s hard to be brief—and don’t worry, I will be brief—about a writer whose intelligence in these insane times we desperately need.

Zadie Smith has published lots of fiction and nonfiction and won lots of honors, but I don’t want to list these, for you can easily find out about these on your own.  We all secretly know that prizes for books may be good for many things but they don’t ensure that new generations of readers will keep an author alive.  Only immutable but light-filled writing will do that.  So let me mention just a few of my favorite passages and sentences of hers, ones I believe will last because, as Ezra Pound said, only emotion that has found its form endures.

Consider some of the treasures to be found in her essay collection Changing My Mind.  There are meditations on Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, George Eliot, Barthes and Nabokov, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace that will make you want immediately to read these authors if you haven’t, and if you have will make you want to go back to your book shelves and pull them down again.  There’s surreal and harrowing journalism on what she saw and heard during a trip to Liberia, and delightful pieces on Hepburn and Garbo and what it’s like to be in Hollywood during Oscar Weekend.  (About the latter, she hilariously imitates both a star-struck celebrity puff piece and an intellectual’s disdain for everything that is fun but “vulgar.”  But don’t be fooled; Smith is ultimately up to something very different.)  Changing My Mind also has her thoughts on Obama’s Dreams of my Father, which include these sentences:  “The tale he tells is not the old tragedy of gaining a new, false voice at the expense of a true one.  The tale he tells is all about addition.  His is the story of a genuinely many-voiced man” (136).  And her analysis of contemporary fiction, which discusses its metafictional vs. realist divide and then slyly hints that really good fiction not just changes our minds but finds ways to synthesize these two traditions while making neither insular nor predictable.

But tonight I’d like to spend a little more time introducing you to two essays, “Smith Family Christmas,” written for the New York Times in 2003, and her moving tribute to the novelist David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008.  The commissioned Christmas piece contains no schmaltz.  It’s a sad and funny look back, at parents and siblings and the craziness of family, which in some ways mirrors the craziness of the nation you happen to be born into.  “On this most sacred of days,” she remembers, her uncle Denzil wanted to do “the things we do not do because we’d always done them another way, our way—a way we’d all hated, to be sure, but could not change.  Denzil wants to open a present on Christmas Eve—don’t do that, Denzil” (227).  Note how she’s both voicing the family rules here and viewing them from outside and beyond, a rueful retrospective on how small holiday tensions hide greater ones.  The same supple voice, full of deadpan wryness, works on her birth country as well:  “the Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war.  It was confusing.  I didn’t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan’s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles” (226).  Yet in the end her little essay about our wars disguised as celebrations is full of forgiveness.  Now that she has her own family, regarding holiday festivities she says let’s try it again, let’s believe we can do it better, “the ritual, the dream, the animating spirit, the whole shebang” (229).

Swarthmore’s Jonathan Franzen published in The New Yorker his own tribute to David Foster Wallace, one in which he recounts how he was tempted to put his own life in danger in a kind of bizarre tribute to Wallace’s own edgy battle between his death wish and his will to live and write.  Yet Franzen also suggested that for all his friend’s pyrotechnical writerly gifts there was one subject he couldn’t explore deeply:  human interconnectedness, especially love.  Zadie Smith takes a very different tack.  Writing about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace’s uncanny gathering of experiments in short fiction, Smith says that “the real mystery and magic lies in [its] quasi-mystical moments, portraits of extreme focus and total relinquishment.  We might feel more comfortable calling this “meditation,” but I believe the right word is in fact prayer.  It’s true that this is prayer unmoored, without its usual object, God, but it is still focused, self-forgetful, moving in an outward direction toward the unfathomable….  Wallace understood better than most that for the secular among us, art has become our best last hope for undergoing this experience” (295).  Wallace’s stories, she says, “repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egotistic individuals.”  And then, marking Wallace’s interest in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and what she sees as his spiritual affinity with Simone Weil and Kant, Smith gives us a dazzling Wallacean footnote that begins, “All three [have] in common that the business of ethics properly concerns good relations between people rather than the individual’s relation toward some ultimate goal, or end” (291).

Zadie Smith’s own fictions have quite similar concerns, and they map these locally and globally.  They appeal to the better angels of our nature even as they make us see ourselves at our most embarrassing worst.  In Smith’s latest novel, NW, the narrator at one point articulates a character’s worry and frets that “Nothing survives its telling” (16).  Yet for a novel to get written and live for readers, of course, that must not be completely true—we need to worry about how false language may lie and even kill, but novels we keep reading prove the right words eventually, after some struggle, can be found, and, when found, generate pocket-sized miracles of understanding.  Otherwise, why write, and why read?

We are passing through a time in our nation where many of us are increasingly self-segregating by class, education, income, religion, and politics—how we work and travel, to some extent, but especially where we live and how we spend our leisure time.  The factors driving such homogenization are many and complex, but these developments, if they continue, will be as corrosive for democracy as money buying politicians.  The trend is happening globally as well.  One of the purposes of education should be to combat stratification, but historically that has been the novelist’s role too—and it’s never more needed than now.  Don’t believe in the death of the novel.  It’s the dearth of novel readers that ought to cause worry.  Today’s best novelists model for us what it’s like to talk and to listen across our many divides.  And let me suggest to you they don’t sound like Tom Wolfe, whose characters only know how to scream at each other.  In the long history of social fiction, the great story-tellers have always told us tales about contact zones, not comfort zones.  Zadie Smith’s four novels are most famous for detailing the rhythms and crossings of urban contact zones, but she’s also explored how contact zones can be experienced on the road, or at a college or university.  This writer is a powerful search engine, a social network generator who works not by cajoling us to click “like” but to take risks as readers, to change our minds.  Please give Zadie Smith a most warm welcome.

 

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Tagging the Glass Essay poem (Anne Carson)

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

Sometimes ‘tagging’ texts to aid computer searches is utterly fatuous. Here are the tags the Poetry Foundation website uses to catalog the ‘subjects’ of Anne Carson’s magnificent poem “The Glass Essay.” The list below could easily be in a Carson poem, but then it would be invigorating & wry, not this endless march of moronic clichés:

“Break-ups & Vexed Love, Heartache & Loss, Realistic & Complicated, Home Life, Faith & Doubt, Time & Brevity, Separation & Divorce, Social Commentaries, History & Politics, Disappointment & Failure, Family & Ancestors, God & the Divine, Reading & Books, Arts & Sciences, Relationships, Nature, The Body, Love, Living, Religion, Sorrow & Grieving, Men & Women, Desire….”

(And not a word letting us know that Emily and Charlotte Brontë are major figures in the poem!)

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Favorite epic novels published since WWII?

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

In response to Matt Schwartz’s question on his Facebook page, “What are some of your favorite sweeping historical brick-sized novels written since World War II, along the lines of Pynchon’s V. and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke?”,  here’s my list:

Among North American-focused works (sort of) that are mostly in English & definitely going to stand the test of time, not counting Underworld & Jest Infinite, I’d list Ellison, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Another Country, Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, Kingston’s Woman Warrior and China Men (they were written together but then forced to be published separately), McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Crossing, Franzen’s The Corrections, Cisneros’ Caramelo, Eugenides’ Middlesex, Yamashita’s I-Hotel, Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay, Urrea’s Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Gaiman’s American Gods.

All are epics worthy of the name, but intimate too–and all are excitingly revisionist re both history and the idea of the novel.  Linguistic pyrotechnics, but always in the service of character & story, not author show-off points.

Of course, nothing since 1980 matches Mason & Dixon, but then nothing can; it’s da greatest (and also the most fun & funniest) if we’re looking at just the last 20 years.

Imho, of course.

For Matt’s page and some of the excellent suggestions he got, go here.

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The critic’s job

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

Except for all the male pronouns, Alfred Kazin’s credo remains good advice:

“A critic must reveal why we read him [a writer].  Everything else—the historical associations, the comparison with other writers, the placing in a school, the social, moral, and political significance thereof—all that comes later.  The first question a critic should ask himself is: in what does this man’s interest to us as a writer primarily consist?  Why do we read him and what do we read first?  The value of a critic can be defined by the extent to which he remembers that he is a reader and by his cleverness and passion in applying that remembrance to the service of his readers….  I go further: reading should be a sensual experience, and the critic is useful only in so far as he opens our senses to the work before us.”

—Alfred Kazin, Dec. 20, 1947, in Alfred Kazin’s Journals (Yale, 2011), p. 109.  Thanks for the gift, ¡Braulio!

 

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This may be the best short discussion ever written about words as signs (semiotics) vs. words as music, especially in poetry

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

A. R. Ammons, “Motion” (c. 1961-65)

 

The word is

not the thing:

is

a construction of,

a tag for,

the thing: the

word in

no way

resembles

the thing, except

as sound

resembles,

as in whirr,

sound:

the relation

between what this

as words

is

and what is

is tenuous: we

agree upon

this as the net to

cast on what

is: the finger

to

point with: the

method of

distinguishing,

defining, limiting:

poems

are fingers, methods,

nets,

not what is or

was:

but the music

in poems

is different,

points to nothing,

traps no

realities, takes

no game, but

by the motion of

its motion

resembles

what, moving, is—

the wind

underleaf white against

the tree.

 

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Want to see the influence of Chekhov on U.S. short story writing?

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

This is just one example of Chekhov’s influence, but it’s a great one.

An apparently previously unpublished (?) short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, dating from 1936, printed in summer 2012 in The New Yorker.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Thank You for the Light” : The New Yorker.

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Some Reasons Why Daenerys Targaryen’s Character Is Even Better in Game of Thrones Than in Song of Ice and Fire

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

 

Note: this essay discusses books 1 and 2 of George R.R. Martin’s The Song of Ice and Fire and seasons 1 and 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones.  There are no spoilers here regarding later books.

 

What thoughts do you have about how HBO is adapting Martin’s first two novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series?  Here are some of mine.

Daenerys is justifiably one of the most popular characters in Martin’s epic series The Song of Ice and Fire.  In the second novel in the sequence, A Clash of Kings, one of the most memorable chapters is Daenerys’ visit to the House of the Undying.  It’s a nightmarish and unforgettable episode, a great mix of Poe and Lovecraft as well as Martin, full of horror and dream-like disorientation, as the heroine risks her life by submitting to magic.  Daenerys, an exiled princess of the House Targaryen, does so in the hopes of making the sorcerers who rule the city of Qarth support her in her quest to raise an army so she can return from exile and conquer what was taken from her and her family.  But she knows she’s risking all: she has no way of knowing whether she can trust the sorcerers, especially Pree, not to mention no way of knowing whether she can survive their magic.

Among fans of Martin’s books and the HBO series based on them, Game of Thrones, there’s been a huge amount of chatter and hand-wringing about whether the HBO series is justified in rewriting some of its source material rather than just cutting it so that 1000+ page novels can be distilled into 8-10 hour-long TV episodes.  It seems like the majority of comments on the Facebook Game of Thrones pages regarding the “changes” introduced by the TV production have been negative—especially after Season 2 began and it was clear that the producers, directors, and writers were taking even more liberties with the text sources than they did in Season 1.  Some of the negative comments were reasonable and thoughtful, but many were just rants verging on textual fundamentalism.  How dare the HBO people leave out X or change even one plot point, snatch of dialogue, or even a tiny piece of my favorite character’s clothing or armor?

There’s been little exploration on either Song or Thrones fan sites (that I’ve seen anyway) of the opposite issue:  are the HBO episodes sometimes improving the novels, especially in terms of drama and characterization?  This is an important issue because Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones arguably give us some of the most complex and compelling characters in all “fantasy” writing—not excluding even Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a clear predecessor that Martin is both paying homage to and trying to top.  Although some have inner conflicts, Tolkien’s characters by and large are easily separated into good and bad, the one obvious exception being Gollum.  Martin’s characters, by contrast, can rarely be easily placed into easy moral categories.  Martin takes us deep into the world views of a wide variety of characters, even the most “evil” ones, so that even if we end up hating those we must see the world through their eyes and understand how they understand why they act as they do.

As John Bradley—who plays Samwell Tarly, Jon Snow’s closest companion in the Night Watch—smartly says about Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s interpretation of Jaime Lannister, one of the “villains” whom we love to hate yet can’t stop watching, Jaime loves playing psychological games with everyone, especially his captors, testing to see whether he can destabilize them and find an opening to give him power over them.  Bradley wonders how this Lannister villain can be so secure in himself, even while trying to dismantle others’ confidence.  (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQEj47gno-w&feature=youtu.be)  It’s sort of like the fascination caused by Iago’s villainy in Othello—one of many examples that could be cited in praising Game of Thrones as the most Shakespearean show on current TV.  It’s Shakespearean in terms of its violence, its seeming infinitude of fascinating characters and situations, and its rich exploration of the price of power and the powers that the powerless can discover in themselves.  Another Shakespearean element in Game of Thrones is that it’s quickly become the most pirated drama out there [footnote 74, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Thrones_(TV_series) .]

•

A strong case could be made that major characters such as Ygritte, Theon, Stannis, Cersei, Tywin, Sansa, Daenerys, and Arya (my favorite) all have more expressive dialogue and more deeply explored motivations in the HBO TV series than in the books.  The HBO characterizations of these wonderful personalities build on Martin’s books but they also take more risks and explore these key characters more profoundly.  This difference is in part caused by the superb actors playing these parts, but it’s also a function of how these characters have been reconceived and transformed by brilliant writing and directing that isn’t afraid to rethink who Martin’s characters are and what they might mean.

(I haven’t mentioned the obvious other major character, Tyrion Lannister, because he is a superb character in the novel, fully realized and unforgettable, in part because—as many, including his creator, have said—Tyrion is a modern person in what’s essentially a medieval world. Peter Dinklage’s portrayal of Tyrion is stellar too, worth all the Emmys he may get, but here’s a case where I would NOT want to argue that the HBO character is better than in the novels.)

With some of the changed portraits, such as Daenerys in Qarth or the characterization of Theon’s inner conflicts and self-hate, the HBO series mixes careful editing with really smart invention.  In other cases, such as those scenes in Season 2 between Tywin Lannister and Arya, the writers invented entirely new scenes and dialogue—but all in the service of brilliantly characterizing both these protagonists more thoroughly.

(It complicated our view of Tywin as a villain to see him testing his new servant girl yet unable to stop himself from admiring how she’s smartly making a way for herself in a tough world.  It was equally fascinating watching Arya maneuvering on a razor’s edge as she tried to be respectful while fending off Tywin’s attempts to ferret out more about her.  Plus, visually the scenes were stunning—all shadows and shafts of sunlight, with powerful closeups and pauses.  Arya parried each of Tywin’s queries as if she were fencing, and when she made a mistake she quickly shielded herself.  The swordmaster Syrio Forel taught Arya better than he knew!  By paring down the large number of plot complications involving Arya in disguise having to work for new “masters” in Clash of Kings and reimagining these as Arya having to work for one of the most ruthless of the Lannisters, the HBO revisions better kept the focus on Arya’s wily resourcefulness in the face of adversity.  Yes, some things were lost by all the cuts, but much was gained.)

•

OK, enough digressions.  Let’s explore a few reasons why the HBO Daenerys (Dany) might be even better drawn than the Dany in the novel.  I’ll take as my test case the climactic moment in Season 2, episode 10, called “Valor Morghulis.”  One of the most stunning scenes in a episode filled with great moments occurred when Daenerys puts her life at risk to get her stolen dragons back by entering the House of the Undying knowing she’ll be attacked by sorcery.

The “Valor Morghulis” episode—which got the highest viewership of any Game of Thrones episode so far, either in Season 1 or Season 2 [see the Ratings section of Wikipedia’s entry on Game of Thrones] —was written by the Game of Thrones producers, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and directed by the series co-producer, Alan Taylor.  Whether they discussed with Martin the changes they introduced I don’t know, but Martin’s been loosely involved in the entire series and it’s hard to believe that Benioff and Weiss didn’t share with him at least some of their ideas about how to do the season’s final episode.

It’s appropriate first to look briefly at what happens in the House of Undying chapter in Clash of Kings, told from Daenerys’ point of view.  (It’s the next-to-last “Daenerys” chapter, coming a little over two-thirds of the way in the novel.)  As I mentioned, there’s bits of Poe and Lovecraft and somewhat generic fantasy and horror motifs in the nightmare visions in this chapter, along with a plot that alludes to an epic hero’s journey into the world of the dead to learn something that will aid him (it’s usually a him) on his quest.  (Odysseus, Aeneas.)  As Dany says to some of the Undying she meets in Clash of Kings, “speak to me with the wisdom of those who have conquered death.”  She receives the prophecy she requests, but as in most epics the omens are confusing to interpret—though here the meanings are hardly as opaque as, say, Elijah’s prophecy to Ishmael in Melville’s novel Moby-Dick:  “three treasons will you know … once for blood and once for gold and once for love.”

Pyat Pree, head sorcerer of Qarth, at first appears to be on Dany’s side, giving her advice before she enters the House on how to survive its labyrinth and sorcery (“never go down, and never take any door but the first door to your right”).  Not too surprisingly, Pree later proves treacherous.  An avatar of Pree appears and tempts her to think she’s gone the wrong way, or even exited the House entirely; when Dany refuses to follow him, “his face crumbled inward, changing to something pale and wormlike.”  (This moment was probably one of the points that gave Benioff and Weiss inspiration for their revisions.)  At the chapter’s very end, Pree tries to kill Dany with a thrown knife when, to his surprise, she emerges from the House with her sanity intact.  But (unlike in the HBO scene) Dany’s climatic confrontation with Pree in Clash of Kings is rather anti-climatic; it’s Dany’s protectors who save her:  “the knife went flying, and an instant later Rakharo was slamming Pyat to the ground.  Ser Jorah Mormont knelt beside Dany in the cool green grass and put his arm around her shoulder.”  Benioff and Weiss wisely decided that this was not the way to bring Dany’s House of the Undying journey to its conclusion.

Another inspiration for the HBO revisions surely came from the moment in Clash of Kings when a wizard king tempts Dany by offering her knowledge, weapons, and luxuries.  In Martin’s words, “She took a step forward.  But then Drogon [one of Dany’s baby dragons] leapt from her shoulder.  He flew to the top of the ebony-and-weirwood door, perched there, and began to bite at the carved wood.”  Drogon, not too subtly, is reminding Dany that she must take the weirwood door, which lies to the right, rather than listen to her tempters.  Drogon later uses his fire-powers to save Dany from vampiric, decaying creatures who latch on to her and start to devour her.  “She could hear the shrieks of the Undying as they burned” will remind HBO viewers who read the Clash of Kings of Pree’s screams as he burns in the HBO version.

Dany’s hallucinations in the House of the Undying in Clash of Kings include tempting visions of childhood that make “her heart ache with longing.”  (Martin’s prose is not always cliché-free, unfortunately.)  One vision Dany has is of Ser Willem from Braavos calling her “princess.”  But this vision barely makes Dany pause; she’s in no way fooled or tempted by it:  she wants to kiss his hand, “and then she thought, He’s dead….  She backed away and ran.”  Benioff and Weiss would take this moment and revise it to make it much more interesting:  it becomes two different dream temptations for Dany.  And unlike in the novel, these temptations aren’t easily rejected by her; they appeal to deep needs within Dany that aren’t fully explored in the first two novels in Song of Ice and Fire.

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Now some arguments for the greater strength of the HBO Dany.  These ideas do not depend on the actress playing her, Emilia Clarke, though Clarke’s very good acting certainly does no harm to my case[footnote 1].  Rather, I base my claims on how Benioff and Weiss’ writing and the directing have transformed and strengthened the whole House of Dying episode.  Here are three points to consider regarding the HBO Game of Thrones changes:

  • what Dany knows before she enters the House of the Undying;
  • what visions she has inside it; and
  • what we should make of the episode’s fiery end

1.  There was much howling by fans on the Internet because Benioff and Weiss changed Dany’s motivation for entering the House of the Undying:  only in the HBO version the sorcerers have stolen her dragons and now she must get them back.  This doesn’t happen in Clash of Kings.  But this change makes Dany’s motivation to enter the haunted castle much stronger and more understandable.  Furthermore, unlike in the novel, Dany doesn’t get a verbal “map” from Pree telling her how to survive the castle’s physical and psychological maze.

Pree’s motive in the novel for giving Dany this accurate map confuses me.  Because he hopes to make an alliance with her and her dragons if she survives?  How plausible is it that she would do such a thing?  Not very, I think, given that Pree would have little power over her; she’d surely give him her thanks and move on.  It’s more reasonable, not to mention more Machiavellian, to think that in the novel Pree gives Dany his “map” thinking she won’t be able to follow it and so will become trapped by the House of the Undying’s spell, leaving Pree then free to take her dragons.  Either of these two possible interpretations are interesting, but they are hardly compelling:  if we assume that Pree’s “helping” Dany in the novel is a dangerous illusion, Pree’s treachery is far more vividly realized in the HBO version of the plot.  In Game of Thrones, Dany enters the tower with no guide and against everyone’s advice because her instincts tell her the Undying want her dragons’ power; she knows she’s in a life and death struggle with Pree and the other undead sorcerers who have slain most of the rulers of Qarth.  This makes for much better drama.  Pree’s evil is just as devious, but Dany’s response is more daring and dangerous—and much more is at stake.

2.  The dream visions Dany has in the House of the Undying weren’t just of random scary stuff, however frighteningly they are described in the book.  Dany’s visions in the HBO episode are directly tied to Pree testing her and trying to trap her.  Once she’s mysteriously drawn inside the House of the Undying, leaving her guardians behind, she has no map, just her bravado and intelligence to guide her.  She grabs a torch to explore the darkened chambers—and shouts defiance at the Undead and their “magic tricks.”  But the cinematography also superbly captures Dany’s vulnerability—it’s like she’s entering a crypt.  (It’s like that moment in all great horror films, when we want to shout to the heroine, “no no, don’t go into that room alone…”.)

Dany’s lost, imprisoned dragons become her allies in the HBO reading of the House of the Undying—they help her rescue them and herself.  It’s Dany hearing the dragons’ screams in the distance, for instance, that allows her in her dream vision to resist the temptation to touch the Iron Throne.

Think for a moment how superbly imagined Dany’s vision of King’s Landing and the Iron Throne was in the HBO version.  For Dany’s Throne temptation unfolds a vision of King’s Landing after it’s been burned and looted and abandoned to Winter.  The seat of power in Westeros has been abandoned, and Dany in her dream longs to approach it and to touch it.  Dany reaches out in her dream and almost touches a snow-covered arm (?) of the Throne.

But then Dany hears her dragons’ distant cries and pulls her hand away.  If she’d touched  the Throne what would have happened?  Could she have been frozen alive in the future forever?  And how should we interpret all this?  As a cool allegory for how Dany must to learn she can’t ascend to power too easily—she has to be patient and fight for it?  Or just as a vision of the dark, cold future awaiting not just Joffrey but the Iron Throne itself?

 

After Dany resists the temptation of the Iron Throne, she steps outside of “King’s Landing” and suddenly—it’s dream space-time, after all—she is far away, going through the gate in the Wall into the frozen North.   In this dream-geography for Westeros, Death is an even scarier boundary, giving a whole new meaning to “Night Lands” and what might lie on the “other side” of the Wall.  Dany wanders into the Night Lands—and it’s here that she encounters her most dangerous dream of all, a vision of Drogo “living” and yearning to reunite with her.  Their brief dialogue was superbly written, with both humor and tenderness (and a choice swear word from Drogo that really did make him seem to have come back from the dead).

Once again the dragon cries play a crucial role.  When they interrupt Dany’s hypnotized contemplation of husband and child, they prompt her to resist the illusion—the wish-fulfillment dream—that Drogo lives and all her losses can be recovered.  She’s touching foreheads with Drogo and looking at “their” child, until she hears her dragons screaming in the distance calling her away.  Another brilliant detail ends the scene:  when Dany was first enraptured by the vision, Drogo and the baby seemed fully alive; once she’s skeptical, Drogo’s eyes, we notice, have become unfocused, his body language stiff and all wrong.  It’s as if Dany’s doubt and then her refusal has made Drogo suddenly a living corpse, undying yet dead, exposing the fakery of the vision’s life-like hologram.

In the HBO version, then, Pree the sorcerer lays really powerful mind-traps for Daenerys.  Pree seems to be probing to find Dany’s weakness by tempting her with two of her most seductive but unspoken desires—her desire for power and revenge and her yearning to retreat into an alternate future where she’s not a childless widow.  If Dany succumbs to either of these seductions, Pree will truly control her; she’ll have enchained herself.  Dany has to resist those visions in order to continue on her rendezvous with her destined real power & leadership, still well in the future.  In short, the dream visions added by Benioff and Weiss are not just clever or gratuitous additions but reflect a profound understanding of how the entire House of Undying episode should work as a test of Dany’s character.  Ultimately these changes are very much in line with the primary “arc” of Dany’s character development in the novels, as she moves gradually from weak innocence to strength.  We could also say the HBO changes here are true to the spirit of Martin’s portrayal of Dany, if not to the letter.

3.  After leaving Drogo, Dany suddenly finds herself transported by magic back into the Undying tower room—the same one with multiple doors and a central pedestal that she first entered before her visions.  It may be that she’s never left the room—that all her “journeys” to King’s Landing and the Wall and Drogo’s tent have been merely implanted visions.  But now the room is no longer empty: Dany’s dragons are there on the pedestal, chained.  And Pree emerges from the shadows, a cadaverous grin on his face.  His temptation-visions having failed, he is now intent on confronting Dany with brute power—and the strength of cast iron chains.  Confident of victory, as the best villains always are, he makes the same mistake that those villains often do—he gives away his secret.  In this case, it’s his motive:  to keep his magic strong, he needs to imprison both Dany and her dragons.  It’s a kind of vampirism, but here Pree’s need is to feed on magic, not blood.  This is Dany’s final temptation—the temptation of despair.  But Pree’s reliance on mere chains to hold Dany proves a mistake.

I particularly enjoyed how the dragons played a part in Dany’s liberation by gradually discovering their power to kill.  (Previously, in an absolutely delightful scene, we’ve seen them being taught by Dany to use a tiny jet of flame to cook the meat scraps.  They’re sort of like leathery kittens learning to use their claws.)  As with the suspense involving wildfire in the “Blackwater” episode, the suspense here too is carefully built up before the fire is unleashed.  Dany first looks over her shoulder at the little ones.  Seeing her, they get a gleam in their eyes, then one of them emits a puff of smoke while Pree gets a somewhat worried look on his smug face.

 

When Dany gives the command for fire, one dragon lets loose with a short, tentative burst—and it starts a small fire on Pree’s sleeve.  Suddenly multiple, full-throated jets of fire stream out from either side of Dany as she stands chained and untouched by the flames, eyes closed, looking within herself.  Pree does his best imitation of a marshmallow melting, twitching, and collapsing into the fire.  And then it’s all over.  The dragons don’t break or melt their chains, or Dany’s; once Pree dies the chains turn to dust before our eyes, cold cast iron merely proving itself to be part of Pree’s spell.

As “Daenerys’s Dragons” [ https://twitter.com/DaenysDragons ] tweeted, the Emmy nominations academy should “create a Best Dragon(s) in a Drama category….”

In the great screen shot above, now circulating widely on Thrones fan sites, it’s almost as if the fires are coming from inside Dany herself, from her womb.  Chained, Dany in the HBO version learns how to unleash some of her dragons’ powers—just as she has repeatedly discovered strength before in the face of others, especially men, doubting or betraying or trying to capture her.  But the dragons are not just about Dany having better weaponry.  Dany’s dragons are both “real” yet also allegories for Dany’s own inner strengths of character, ones she must gradually discover.  In the endings of each of the first two seasons of Game of Thrones, Dany walked through fire to make her new powers born.  And we know there are more to come.

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So … what do you think?  How would you compare the House of the Undying chapter in Clash of Kings with how it was done on HBO?

I don’t know about you, but I rank the House of the Undying sequence as one of the best moments in the entire “Valor Morghulis” episode, and that episode of Thrones as one of the best and most moving TV I’ve seen in decades of watching.  (Yes, “Blackwater’s explosions and fighting were cool, but the season-ending episode had wildfire plot explosions and revelations of much subtler kind.)  Each of the other scenes within “Valor Morghulis” is rich enough for an essay too—I haven’t even mentioned White Walkers; or the scene with Tyrion and Maester Pycelle, Podrick, Shae, and Varys; or Arya’s magical last encounter with Jaqen H’ghar; or Jon Snow finding out that he actually does “know nothing”….

What’s maybe not so delicious is having to wait until spring 2013 for Season 3.

But high quality is rarely mass produced.

 

[1]  See Vintage-Blogs for 15 June 2010 for reaction to Emilia Clarke being cast as Daenerys, including facts about her audition, samples of her acting on the British TV show Doctors, and a rave review of her audition for Dany from none other than GRRM himself.  http://vintage-blogs.blogspot.com/2010/06/emilia-clarke-is-new-daenerys.html

 

For an essay of mine on the  Game of Thrones title sequence (the opening shots with theme music),  see this link.   It’s responding to fan sites and a friend’s blog.

 

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More Holly Golightly than Daisy Miller….

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Peter Schmidt

Am greatly enjoying reading Elaine Dundy’s comic novel about a young American in the Left Bank of Paris in the early 1950s, The Dud Avocado (1958). It’s just been reissued in paperback.  The heroine Sally Jay Gorce is much closer to Holly Golightly than to Daisy Miller, merci beaucoup! Looking back on all her adventures, she makes comedy out of her uncertainties and blunders, which are no worse than those made by her pals obtuse enough to think they know what they are doing.

And the prose! It’s got the bravado of youth and not too much—but just enough—of the wisdom of age. Sally Jay, who finds work as an actor, turns many a bon mot:  ”I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”

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