Le Cygne Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 It's actually quite a beautiful idea, that the writer needs to forget the fear of imminent apocalypse (this is a speech from 1950) and get in touch with these "universal truths": honour, pity, pride, compassion, endurance and sacrifice. It's an idea much stronger and deeper than notions of characters deserving "happy endings," and it seems clear to me from this passage that "the problems of the human heart in conflict" for Faulkner, and by extension GRRM, have nothing to do with sex, romantic subplots, happy couples paired off or lasting romantic happiness, but rather with concepts like courage, honour, hope, pride, compassion, pity, sacrifice...Why did you repeatedly excise love from William Faulkner's quote? He was an exceptional author who wrote this speech himself, he didn't include the word for no reason. I fail to see where you are somehow seeing he's not talking about love, or that anyone is talking about a Hollywood romcom.He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands...I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.And let's include the source, please, so everyone can decide for themselves what he means.http://www.nobelpriz...ner-speech.htmlAnd how many times does GRRM have to say sex is important to the story he's telling? I gave two sources upthread where he comes right out and says it, here he says it in no uncertain terms, and how is this for emphasis, he says it twice, before and after explaining the lengths he went to to keep it in the story:One of the reasons I wanted to do this with HBO is that I wanted to keep the sex. We had some real problems because Dany is only 13 in the books, and that’s based on medieval history. They didn’t have this concept of adolescence or the teenage years. You were a child or you were an adult. And the onset of sexual maturity meant you were an adult. So I reflected that in the books. But then when you go to film it you run into people going crazy about child pornography and there’s actual laws about how you can’t depict a 13 year old having sex even if you have an 18 year old acting the part — it’s illegal in the United Kingdom. So we ended up with a 22 year old portraying an 18 year old, instead of an 18 year old portraying a 13 year old. If we decided to lose the sex we could have kept the original ages. And once you change the age of one character you have to change the ages of all the characters, and change the date of the war [that dethroned the Mad King]. The fact we made all these changes indicates how important we thought sex was.http://shelf-life.ew...e-with-dragons/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Le Cygne Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 So the story we're talking about in this thread, we've seen phallic symbols (both sword and dagger, he uses them a lot in other stories, too), wanting a kiss ("kiss me", "you ought to be blowing me kisses", and there's another story in the books where a kiss is pretty central, too), naked dreams, and so on. And this:The swords kissed and sprang apart and kissed again. Jaime’s blood was singing...High, low, overhand, he rained down steel upon her. Left, right, backslash, swinging so hard that sparks flew when the swords came together, upswing, sideslash, overhand, always attacking, moving into her, step and slide, strike and step, step and strike, hacking, slashing, faster,faster,faster …… until, breathless, he stepped back and let the point of the sword fall to the ground, giving her a moment of respite. "Not half bad," he acknowledged. "For a wench."...The dance went on. He pinned her against an oak, cursed as she slipped away, followed her through a shallow brook half-choked with fallen leaves... He laughed a ragged, breathless laugh. "Come on, come on, my sweetling, the music's still playing. Might I have this dance, my lady?"...Instead she forced him back into the brook again, shouting, "Yield! Throw down the sword!"A slick stone turned under Jaime's foot. As he felt himself falling, he twisted the mischance into a diving lunge. His point scraped past her parry and bit into her upper thigh. A red flower blossomed, and Jaime had an instant to savor the sight of her blood before his knee slammed into a rock. The pain was blinding. Brienne splashed into him and kicked away his sword. "YIELD!"Jaime drove his shoulder into her legs, bringing her down on top of him. They rolled, kicking and punching until finally she was sitting astride him. He managed to jerk her dagger from its sheath, but before he could plunge it into her belly she caught his wrist and slammed his hands back on a rock so hard he thought she'd wrenched an arm from its socket. Her other hand spread across his face. "Yield!"She shoved his head down, held it under, pulled it up. "Yield!" Jaime spit water into her face. A shove, a splash, and he was under again, kicking uselessly, fighting to breathe. Up again. "Yield, or I'll drown you!""And break your oath?" he snarled. "Like me?"She let him go, and he went down with a splash...She looks as if they caught us fucking instead of fighting.I feel like I'm bolding the whole thing, but I keep seeing stuff. So yeah, wonder what's going to happen next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Elba the Intoner Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Yes - if that scene is not completely about sex then I don't know what is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brashcandy Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 I'm just reading this thread thinking: when the hell did sex and romance (love) become unrealistic or unattainable goals in either real life or literature? Martin has practically built his entire work on those foundations. It seems to me that just as with everything else, Martin is showing how love can be problematic, complicated and sometimes just plain wrong, but he's certainly not trying to downplay its relevance or to eradicate it from the novels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blackfyre the Bold Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 They're going to duel in a trial by combat. Jaime will fight very well, showing that he's wicked nice with his left hand, maybe not as good as he was with his right but good enough to beat Brienne. But instead, he'll intentionally lose to Brienne. Thus, committing his most honorable act: giving up his life for the woman he loves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kittykatknits Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 I'm just reading this thread thinking: when the hell did sex and romance (love) become unrealistic or unattainable goals in either real life or literature? Martin has practically built his entire work on those foundations. It seems to me that just as with everything else, Martin is showing how love can be problematic, complicated and sometimes just plain wrong, but he's certainly not trying to downplay its relevance or to eradicate it from the novels.From what I can tell, there are three arguments being made:1. The insistence that romance only counts if it is in the form of a Disney or RomCom cliche of two people living happily ever after with a house, white picket fence, 2.1 children, and a dog.2. The notion, based upon what I can't figure out, that the current state of the series or some past events is 100% proof that no other fate or ending is possible in the series.3. The idea that romance can be something that drives characters or plot or that a relationship in the making is very much a part of the human heart in conflict is dismissed.Why are these arguments being made? Well, I don't know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Le Cygne Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 It's a fantasy world, if we accept the framework the author set up, there's really beautiful writing to enjoy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lyanna Stark Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Le Cygne,Love the posts on Faulkner and on the sword fight!From what I can tell, there are three arguments being made:1. The insistence that romance only counts if it is in the form of a Disney or RomCom cliche of two people living happily ever after with a house, white picket fence, 2.1 children, and a dog.2. The notion, based upon what I can't figure out, that the current state of the series or some past events is 100% proof that no other fate or ending is possible in the series.3. The idea that romance can be something that drives characters or plot or that a relationship in the making is very much a part of the human heart in conflict is dismissed.Why are these arguments being made? Well, I don't know.I'm not sure either, especially as I think Jaime/Brienne is a wonderfully crafted and subtle romance.Most people seem to think it's more Jaime than Brienne, but then we have the wonderfully understated passage where Brienne considers going back to Kings Landing and wonders if Jaime would comfort her if she cried on his shoulder and that it would make her appear weak."That was what men wanted, wasn't it?" Which is basically asking what Jaime would want her to do, and it also places her as very strongly in a role as a female who Jaime would want, or she's like to be that woman. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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