The first event in A Song of Ice and Fire is the haunting confrontation
continues to hold sway over the series’ narrative despite the sheer multiplicity of storylines. If Martin’s working titles for the final books—The Winds of Winter
and A Dream of Spring—are any indication, the onset of winter will provide the
climax for his epic by revealing the ultimate futility of the “game of thrones” in the face of the larger threat posed by the Others. Still, the progression toward this climax has been anything but continuous, and this lack of linearity is strongly reminiscent of traditional medieval narratives.
In his analysis of medieval narrative theory, William W. Ryding cites the writings of Torquato Tasso, noting the sixteenth- century writer’s emphasis of the need to reconcile “unity of action with variety of incident” (14). Tasso out- lines the desire to balance these two conflicting elements:
I judge that by an excellent poet … a poem can be formed in which, as in a microcosm, there would be read here arrays of armies, here battles on land and sea, here stormings of cities, skirmishes and joustings, here descriptions of hunger and of thirst, here storms, conflagrations, prodigies; there would be found seditions, discords, errors, adventures, magic spells; there deeds of cruelty, of audacity, of courtesy, of generosity; there experiences of love, sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, sometimes joyous, sometimes pathetic; but may the poem that contains so great a variety of matter be one in form and soul, and may all its elements be put together in such a way that if one part is taken away, or its position changed, all is destroyed [qtd. in Ryding 15].
Tasso’s list could serve as a virtual catalogue of the events that constitute Martin’s epic, for there is no shortage of battles, jousts, seditions, audacious deeds, and adventures in A Song of Ice and Fire. Nevertheless, the tight coherence stressed
by Tasso often seems to be lacking in Martin’s narrative, partly due to the author’s dividing the text between so many plotlines, locations, and characters.
Again, such divisions are suggestive of several celebrated medieval romances—narratives which David Quint describes as “interlaced” due to the juxtaposing and interweaving of multiple storylines (241–2). In the Prose
Lancelot (aka the Vulgate Cycle), the unknown author “follows the careers of
some eight or ten questing knights, telling a segment of one knight’s story before turning to a segment of another’s, and thus keeps multiple plots going at once” (Quint 242). Ludovico Ariosto took the process of interlacing narratives even further in his sweeping romance Orlando Furioso. Here, the sheer number of
characters and events, along with the abrupt transitions between the various story arcs at climactic moments (Quint 243), creates a dislocated and at times disorienting plot that is strongly suggestive of Martin’s narrative.
While Tasso disparages medieval narratives that feature the characteristic diversity of episodes but lack unity of action, Ryding asserts that the absence of overarching coherence does not justify the Italian critic’s cursory dismissal of interlaced narratives. Though romances such as Orlando Furioso do not neces-
sarily follow a coalescent pathway, “the various story threads tangle and untangle, cross and recross, in accordance with a carefully prearranged plan of narrative coincidences and interdependencies. This is not, obviously, a convergent pattern in which the various threads of the story move insistently toward a major knot … yet Ariosto has so arranged his story that the various parts are in fact struc- turally dependent on one another” (16).5Even more so than Tasso’s description,
this account is suggestive of A Song of Ice and Fire. As in Orlando Furioso, Martin’s
plotlines frequently intersect based on overlapping conflicts or reoccurring motifs; furthermore, just as Ariosto continuously draws the reader back to three central, overlapping story arcs (Charlemagne’s war; Orlando’s pursuit of Angel- ica; the love affair between Bradamante and Ruggiero), Martin does likewise (the “game of thrones”/War of the Five Kings; the conflict at the Wall; Daenerys’s maturation in Essos).
Still, Martin’s narrative is not convergent. Indeed, the principal movement, from A Game of Thrones onward, is one of continuing divergence: the divergence
of the various storylines, and the divergence of the Stark family, whose fragmen- tation furthers the scope and size of the narrative. Though the final texts in the series will likely be directed toward a climactic convergence—as winter finally arrives and the Stark children fulfill their destinies—the slow buildup toward this unification can hardly be described as orderly, particularly according to Tasso’s standards.6Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of interdependence per-
meating the series, and this interdependency comes through all the more force- fully in Martin’s narrative techniques. POV characters constantly make decisions that influence the fates of other POV characters in spite of the fact that the paths of these two individuals may never actually cross.
The central discrepancy between Martin’s narrative and the traditional medieval conventions that help to define his fabula clearly relates back to the discourse, and, more specifically, the narration. Due to the fact that medieval narratives emerged from an oral tradition of storytelling, narration tends to be extroverted, as the writer “think[s] in terms of speaking directly to the audience” (Davenport 43). Tony Davenport notes that third- person medieval narratives frequently feature overt and distinctive storytellers who take on a narrational role “somewhere in a spectrum ranging from the scholarly book- compiler to the popular entertainer” (43). In the prologues to his Arthurian romances, Chrétien de Troyes directly addresses the reader through an authorial/narratorial persona: “And now I shall begin the tale which will be remembered so long as Christen- dom endures. This is Chrétien’s boast” (Erec 1). The Pearl Poet adopts a similar
rhetorical strategy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; here, the oral dimensions
are taken even further as he reveals that he is passing on a story that he once heard: “If you will listen to this lay but a little while now,/I will tell it at once
as in town I have heard/it told” (25). In spite of his medievalist sensibilities and his paratextual framing of the narrative as a “song,” Martin forsakes this oral approach to discourse for an internalized, psychological approach, and his deter- mination to keep his narrator “invisible” is reminiscent of the narrative principles of the late nineteenth century. Roland Barthes once wrote that the notion of a limited narrator was an essentially modern development, claiming that “the … most recent conception (Henry James, Sartre) decrees that the narrator must limit his narrative to what the characters can observe or know, everything pro- ceeding as if each of the characters in turn were the sender of the narrative” (111). It is somewhat ironic to link Martin and Henry James considering thatA Song of Ice and Fire seemingly epitomizes the “loose baggy monster” (x) that
James condemned in his preface toThe Tragic Muse. However, James’s early
rejection of the ostentatious, omniscient narratorial techniques of the Victorians in favor of interiority and unreliability creates a unique connection to Martin. Like James before him, Martin stresses character point- of-view; furthermore, both authors opt to “show” their stories rather than “tell” them.