Grief Poignant as Joy: Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe in A Song of Ice and Fire
2012; Mythopoeic Society; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-9339
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Resumobaby has known dragon intimately ever since had an imagination. What fairy tale provides for him a St. George to kill dragon. G.K. Chesterton, The Red Angel. consolation of fairy-stories, joy of happy ending: or more correctly of good catastrophe, joyous [...] a and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny existence of dyscatastrophe, of and failure: possibility of these necessary to joy of deliverance; it denies (in face of much evidence, if you will) final and in so far evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond walls of world, poignant as grief. J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories. WHEN J.R.R. TOLKIEN IDENTIFIED the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function, as eucatastrophe, the joy of deliverance, gave a local habitation and a name to satisfaction of this sudden joyous 'turn' characteristic of epic fantasy (On Fairy-Stories [OFS] 75). But named also its heart-breaking opposite, dyscatastrophe, sorrow and failure (OFS 75) in which we see again that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall (Tolkien, Beowulf: Monsters and Critics [Monsters] 23). Valar morghulis, say George R.R. Martin's Bravosi; all men must die (A Storm of Swords [SoS] 308). By Tolkien's reading, then, and by Chesterton's, Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, at least to date (1) very far indeed from eucatastrophic story which Tolkien proposed as apotheosis of genre in On Fairy-stories, essay which first laid out generic demands of what termed fairy tale and we call fantasy. High-couraged and banner-waving St. Georges haunt Martin's Westeros, it true, but this haunting literal, for--from Joffrey's execution of Ned Stark and Khal Drogo's fatal infection to Red Wedding--they have fallen, one by one, to dragons, and nothing remains but their shades. Even Jon's apparent but ambiguous fate at close of A Dance with Dragons [DwD], [w]hen third dagger took him between shoulder blades and he gave a grunt and fell face-first into snow (913), shadows forth not joy but sorrow. I want to examine these moments of and failure, of dyscatastrophe, when seems sure and lowering clouds of winter overshadow hearts of men, moving us to ask, with Yeats, is there any comfort to be found? (l.41) or if we are presented here with a form of fantasy fallen! how changed (Milton I.l.84). If it so changed, I think, first and clearest sign of this change death of Eddard Stark, whose point of view and story arc initially seem to promise salvation, of a kind at least, for a diminished and decaying realm, a counterweight of honor and duty to king's disdain for ordinary work of peace, order, and good government. His death, then, shocking to us as it to his eldest daughter, Sansa (A Game of Thrones [GoT] 60-67; 620), is, in Tolkienian view, more than a twist in tale; it a chill premonition of what Tolkien calls universal final defeat (OFS 75). Dark winds, dark wings, dark words: coming, as words of House Stark say (GoT 19-20), and Lord of Winter will not be there to meet it. Not by accident coming of winter in these books associated with nightfall, with darkening of world. Yet I propose, in what follows, it through dyscatastrophe George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire restores joyous turn of eucatastrophe, and in so doing, rekindles hope Tolkien saw at heart of fantasy. This illumination turns, as I will show, on a critique of chivalric honor and on its remaking in keeping with Tolkien's own. Tolkien's term of art, dyscatastrophe, appears for first time in On Fairy-stories, 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture revised and expanded for publication in 1947's Essays Presented to Charles Williams, but as Verlyn Flieger points out, it 1936 lecture, Beowulf: Monsters and Critics, which more fully expresses ineluctable sadness of dyscatastrophic (Flieger 11-13). …
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