I've just reread the Areo Hotah chapter from A Feast for Crows, and it got me thinking about the relationship between moral and psychological ambiguity. The theory of moral ambiguity I laid out in the last post assumes that the springs of characters' actions are easily discerned, that my account of Jaime's personality suffices as a description of him and as a reflection of real human psychology. But that's pretty reductive: people are products of their environment, yes, but they also defy expectations and models with stunning regularity, and too much fiction forces its characters to embody theories of mind that are not coincidentally as restrictive as old-fashioned uplift-fiction moralizing. I think A Song of Ice and Fire is closer to that kind of psychoanalytically pat fiction than to what I might call, for lack of a better label, post-Freudian literature. But I also think Martin is interested in behaviors that can be explained equally well by two contradictory theories of mind.
Stannis is the best example of this, which is why he's been called a fan Rorschach test. Looked at one way, he's a self-sacrificing man who behaves according to a harsh, exacting, yet ultimately just sense of honor; looked at another way, he's a self-pitying man who manipulates the ambiguities (there's that word again) of honor in order to justify decisions that consistently benefit him over those he feels have slighted him. We can debate which is his real motivation, but in the end it's an unanswerable question, and maybe a false one, something that matters more in discussing actions after the fact than in explaining them. People do things, and then construct conception of themselves that fit their actions, because it's better than admitting that we're each a stew of irreconcilable impulses. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The reason the Hotah chapter brought all this to mind is that Doran Martell is another such character. Is he a prudent schemer, or a coward? The ending of the second Arianne chapter in Feast, which is one of my favorite moments in the book if not the series, suggests the former. But then there are those references to Doran's propensity for delay. He waits a long time before opening the letter that brings word of Oberyn's death, and both the Hotah chapters mention that he's the type to plan an early departure and then dawdle. So does he do things slowly because he's cautious, or because he's afraid? Is there actually that great a difference?
We could ask the same thing about Tywin, who is something of a foil for Doran in literary terms: similar in age, at the head of great houses, more inclined to win by subterfuge than by force of arms. There's that scene from A Storm of Swords where Joffrey accuses Tywin of having been afraid of Aerys. Joffrey's none too bright, and he got that notion from Robert, who wasn't exactly a genius either, but does that mean they don't have a point? In the long run it proved strategically prudent for Tywin to avoid doing battle with Robb, but was he motivated by clear thinking, or by fear of defeat?
This post is beginning to feel like one of those essays professors warn you against writing, where you ask a bunch of random questions you don't have answers to, because you can't think of anything else to say. But this sort of thing fascinates me, because it relates to one of the fundamental questions of contemporary literature: how to construct meaningful and satisfying fiction around fundamentally unknowable matters of motivation. If you can't reveal something coherent about human psychology (because there's nothing coherent to reveal), then what does your work build toward? With A Song of Ice and Fire, the answer is simple: the narrative resolution. And I'd be lying if I said I wasn't overly invested in what's going to happen next. But I'm also interested in what those plot points will reveal about the series' view of human psychology. I'm not entirely sure I'll approve, but I'm curious all the same.
