Game of Thrones Inauthentic?

In the Arts section of Saturday's Globe and Mail there's an article that I find rather curious.

The article is an opinion piece by John Doyle, wherein the excellent columnist explains his utter dislike of Game of Thrones. He dismisses it as being aimed at teenage boys, as pompous, and as being based on "books, which are written in the most lividly purple prose."

The major thrust of Doyle's argument, or what it all comes down to, is that Game of Thrones doesn't come from "a bona fide cultural impulse," that it is slick and inauthentic. He uses the Arthurian Legends as an example of something coming from a more authentic cultural place, but this makes me wonder what he considers to be "a bona fide cultural impulse."

It's true that people no longer go around in suits of armor waving sharpened beams of steel at each other, nor do we (in North America) live under any kind of monarchy that holds as much power as that depicted in Game of Thrones.

But the stories of knights and quests and damsels and dragons in the Arthurian legends aren't necessarily perfectly in step with the reality of their times either. Stories are always an idealization of their source material. TV series set in the modern (or near modern) day, resonate because their characters or situations can be related to, but that doesn't mean that their characters are any more "realistic" than those on Game of Thrones.

Tales of chivalry and knights were told and retold in the medieval period because of their great symbolic and allegorical potential. After all, these stories were supposed to instruct as much as entertain. These dual purposes of storytelling might not apply as much to the original Arthurian tales, but by the time the stories were committed to vellum/parchment/paper these purposes were of chief importance.

Moreover, after Christianity took hold over medieval Western Europe there was also the sense that things needed to be written solely for the propagation of doctrine. Anything that seemed subversive was suspect, though some writers (like Chaucer) tried to escape suspicion by including written retractions of anything that they thought might seem "sinful" with their work.

But the medieval period is a time from which we really only have written cultural records from a single group - that made up of the nobility, the clergy, and those that both of these classes educated.

In a society like ours where there are multiple major cultures co-existing (and plenty of vibrant subcultures), who can say what comes from "a bona fide cultural impulse" and what doesn't?

It may ring just as inauthentic to John Doyle, but perhaps the columnist should look into the Society for Creative Anachronism. The fact that its ranks aren't swollen with carnage-hungry, hormone-driven teenage boys might just make clear that modern cultural impulses are not so easily nailed down.

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