Remember the Words: Repetition, Textual Analysis, and ASOIAF

Reading Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of The Hunger Games, I was immediately reminded of the opening lines of a piece Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1966 about the Random House English Dictionary: “I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that everybody can spell and truly understand.” Hemingway, considered widely to be one of the greats of English-language literature (though I personally agree more with Kat Stratford), didn’t exactly whip out the five-dollar words or sentences in his writing. As Blatt points out in the end of his piece, Hemingway himself was pretty repetitive in his sentence structure. This got me thinking about the nature of textual analysis in general, and how it would apply to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Though I haven’t done any sort of official word count of the ASOIAF series–I both pity and applaud the soul who would undertake that mission–there are definitely a series of words or phrases that are repeated throughout the novels for great effect. The words of the Great Houses (“Winter is Coming,” “Fire and Blood,” “A Lannister Always Pays His Debts”), cultural and religious refrains (“Valar Morghulis/Valar Dohaeris,” “The night is dark and full of terrors,” “What is dead may never die,” “It is known”), personal vengeance (Arya’s list of names, Oberyn Martell’s refrain  of “Elia of Dorne: you raped her, you murdered her, you killed her sister” to Gregor Clegane), the many songs that are song (and related to the plot in some way), and the fan-favorite, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” There is a huge emphasis on “remembering words” and repeating them. What gets repeated says a lot about the series: it reveals the medieval fantasy setting (and the social hierarchies within it), the political nature of the grander storyline, and the themes of war, violence, and Jon Snow being a generally boring and dumb little goon (who we love anyway). And even though my thesis does focus on (what we’ll call) a positive feminist analysis of the representation of female characters, the sheer amount of times Martin has Daenerys thinking about her “small breasts moving freely beneath her leathers” might point otherwise. I may not be an expert on epic high fantasy writing, but I am an expert on people with small breasts (being one myself), and I do not think of them at all nearly as much as Martin seems to imagine.