The words of the prophets
Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror has had a bit of fun at my expense, in a post that argues that prophecy in A Song of Ice and Fire is essentially bogus — or at the very least, that Martin’s point in including them isn’t to hand the reader a checklist the completion of which indicates that a plot point has been resolved. Noting that we’ve probably got around 2,000 story pages to go, making predictions at this stage a moot point, and that the failed “Stallion Who Mounts the World” prophecy calls into question the notion that any prophecy can be trusted, Curt continues:
…how many characters now can be interpreted as meeting the formal conditions for being Azor Ahai? At what point do we stop regarding some of those characters as red herrings, and just admit the prophecy is garbage? Ask yourself this: could you be Azor Ahai, by the standards that are being applied in discussion forums? Yeah, me too. If you’ve shaken a sodium-heavy flavor packet into a boiling pot of ramen noodles under the little red light bulb on the smoke alarm in your kitchen, then hey—you qualify!
Also, specifically: I prophesy that President Obama will know three betrayals, “once for gold and once for love and once for blood,” before the end of next week (9/24/2011). A special Groovy Age of Horror No-Prize to anyone who can name “three treasons” that make this prophecy come true. Hell, I’ll probably know “three treasons” in that time-frame, and so, probably, will you. That’s life. Why should Dany be exempt?
And I get that. I do! It actually echoes something brought up by A Podcast of Ice and Fire’s Apocalypse Dan in the show’s recent roundtable on A Dance with Dragons. At this point in the series, Dan notes, many characters have fulfilled this or that aspect of the Azor Ahai Reborn prophecy, in some cases multiple times. Dan’s takeaway from all that isn’t frantic scrambling to guess which one fulfilled the prophecy more completely — the “Who wore it best?” of ASoIaF fandom. Rather, he thinks Martin’s making a point of how primitive societies fudge prophecy to fit life as it happens. Dan doesn’t do this himself, but it’s a short leap from there to noting that all forms of mysticism and religion do this. Certainly my own personal journey into deeply, deeply, deeply lapsed Catholicism included the realization that for every Old Testament prophecy Jesus supposedly fulfilled, there were dozens if not hundreds of prophetic chapters and verses that the church fathers conveniently skipped over.
But the difference between our world and Martin’s, of course, is that in Martin’s world, magic actually works. Some form of the supernatural is repeatedly intervening on behalf of the worshippers of R’hllor. An army of snow demons is raising a larger army of zombies. And speaking most directly to the question of prophecy, multiple characters have actually seen the future. Now, they’re not always able to ascertain exactly what they’ve seen, and we’ve now gotten first-hand evidence that Melisandre fudges her interpretation of her visions to fit her preexisting ideas. But even so, they have, in fact, seen the future — it’s not just a random assemblage of vague bullshit they spit out, knowing that it’s sufficiently ambiguous that eventually something will fit the bill. I don’t see any reason why prophecy should work any differently.
In the case of the Azor Ahai Reborn prophecy specifically, there’s also a narrative consideration: I can’t speak for every reader, but I’m pretty sure that eventually we will in fact get at least one character wielding a bonafide magic fiery sword and defeating the Others with it. There’s no predicting Martin, but no, I don’t think that rug’s going to be yanked out from under us. So one of the reasons I think it’s fair to assume the AAR prophecy will be fulfilled by someone and therefore to discuss how that might happen is because I’m just pretty sure that that’s where a big portion of the plot is headed. I’m working backwards from that assumption.
Heck, I’ve even got an explanation for why so many characters appear to have fulfilled that prophecy: “The dragon has three heads.” My pet theory is that Azor Ahai Reborn/The Prince That Was Promised(/The Last Hero) are all the same figure, and that said figure isn’t one person but three. (Jon, Dany, and Tyrion, if you put a gun to my head.) So again, on the level of pure plot, I’m comfortable with this prophecy being fulfilled or semi-fulfilled over and over again. I certainly think red herrings and wishful thinking are involved (Davos Seaworth), as well as just lousy reading comprehension (Victarion Greyjoy), but I also think the prophecy is basically working as it should — with a twist.
And there’s the rub. The fun thing about Martin’s prophecies is how twisty and ironic (in the original, opposite-of-expectation sense of the word) they’ve all been. Like Oedipus, like “The Appointment in Samarra,” like Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane, half the fun is in seeing how characters’ efforts to interpret a prophecy, or stop it from coming true, or ensure that it comes true in a certain way, fail or backfire in such a way as to lead to its fulfillment in a completely unexpected fashion. Surely Cersei’s frantic attempts to stave off Maggy the Frog’s prophecy of doom have ensured its fulfillment. Surely Victarion Greyjoy’s hook-line-and-sinker swallowing of Moqorro’s visions is going to lead to a very different outcome than he expects. Surely Mirri Maz Duur intended her “prophecy” about Drogo’s return simply to be the equivalent of “when pigs fly.” But even in a world where mystical visions enable people to predict the future, events are still unpredictable.
That’s the fun of how prophecy works in the books: They don’t limit narrative options, they expand them. Rather than lock the story into a predetermined path, they open up all sorts of twisty new ones. They’re the mystical version of Curt’s concept of “narrative shrapnel.”
(At any rate, the prophecies, and the clues about them, are merely the icing on an enormous narrative and character cake. Indeed, my biggest problems with the various reader theories about prophecy I’ve encountered is when Martin’s techniques with respect to building character and narrative are ignored in favor of prophetic literalism. Not to keep harping on the idea of Victarion Greyjoy as Azor Ahai Reborn, but…well, no, yes, to keep harping on that idea. Martin loves subverting expectations, but making a remorseless wife-murdering mass-murdering homophobic misogynist rapist war criminal piece of shit the books’ messiah figure is a subversion too far, don’t you think? That’s where the theorymongers run into the same kind of problems faced by people who tried to plan the endgame of Lost anew at the end of each new episode: They’re ignoring how the text at hand really works.)
