Episode 126: A CLASH OF KINGS, DAENERYS IV: "House of Leaves (Part 1)" SHOW NOTES! (Patreon)

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.          

Welcome to the one hundred and twenty-sixth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “House of Leaves, Part 1: An Analysis of ACOK, Daenerys IV,” in which Dany gets waaaaaay too high. Stay in school, kids. Don’t do drugs. Stay out of Qarth. 

This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil: 

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack 
• Grandmaester Timbob, troubleshooter of systems and designer of circuit boards
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N. 
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves, Captain of the war galley NIGHT WOLF, the ship that stalks the Seven Seas, and Wielder of the Valyrian Steel trident SUMMONER, the blade that brings the Deep Ones
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Micah, the Quilled Lion, Warden of the West, Herald of the Golden Tooth, Master of the Banefort and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised
• The High Bearded Priest
• Lord Jake, Assistant (to the) Hand of the King
• Lady Xena Valyrian
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen's Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• His Grace’s High Inquisitor Frank
• Ser Jasper the Cruel, the King’s Justice
• Laurence, Prince of Dorne
• Kelly, Warden of the East and Mistress of (Old) Bay of Crabs
• Steven the Steadfast, Master of Hounds
• The Blue Winter Rose Knight of Highgarden
• Lady Stephanie
• Lord Anonymous
• Lord Carlos
• Lord Andrew the Restless, a Priest of the Drowned God
• The King's Cook, Nolly (No-lee) Olly (Oh-lee), Master of Cannoli
• Ser Sourcedelica 
• Low Energy Dent, True Master of the Banefort and True Master of Coin
• Lord Penchant for Nostalgia
• Queer Alex, Rainbow Commander of the They-des and Gentle-thems (ladies and gentlemen)
• A-a-ron Damphair Prophet of the Forsaken and High Priest of Euron Crows Eye
• Lieutenant Glenn Lord of H town
• Vanerys of the House Colgaryen, the First of Her Name, Princess of Dragonstone, Mistress of Art, The Overworked, Queen of the Pencils, the Eraser and the First Draft, Queen of Monochrome, Devotee of the Great GOT, Portraitist of the Realm, Lady Realist of the Seven Kingdoms, Blender of Paints and Maker of Drawings
• Lord Adam T
• Lady Alexandra of Tarth
• Ser Kristoph Logas, Bloody Scorpion of the Red Field, Defender of the Letter of Kin, and the Wolverine of house Qorgyle
• Lady Elizabeth, Mistress of Horse (Faced Lesbians)
• Ser Josh Snow Bastard Bounty Hunter of the North
• Ser Veyor, Chief of Parties in the Frozen Wastes
• Lord Peter
• Lady Ashley
• The Dead Sheppard Reborn, Preacher of the Poor Fellows
• Marshall Harrison—Absent, shipwrecked in the Jade Sea
• Grave-Robb Stark, the Cadaver King and Horror of Harrenhal
• Olaf, proponent of establishing a feudal, pseudodemocratic system of Great Councils, wherein every count votes
• Ser Tim: The Knight Who Was Guided By Voices
• Lord Nick
• Thucydides, Lord of Plagues
• Ser Jack, Lord of Ser Arthur Dayne and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen’s Sad Prophecy Boys Club
• Lord Gene the Splendid, Master of Coin, Warden of Tampa Bay who believes that the sudden vacation plans made by certain witnesses clears him of all charges  
• Lady Anna, The Lovely Castellan
• Pat Yronwood, the bloodroyal and guardian of the Boneway
• Lord Charles Tyrell of Highgarden, Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach, Warden of the South, and The Heir of House Tyrell
• Luke, Lord of Lone Leaf & The Pillar of Autumn
• Squid Pro Quo
• Master of Zorse
• Joe Snow “King of the Metro North and protector of the Tri-State”
• And our newest, returning small council member! Everyone welcome back Hedrigal, captain of the airship arrogance!

Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

Red Rahloo himself, a high lord, asks:

Epithets are a common way George likes to give a little extra flair to his characters. The Young Dragon, the Sea Snake, the Young Wolf. In season six of tv show, Wyman Manderly calls Jon Snow the White Wolf one time, and then no one mentions it again. I always thought this might be from George himself as we see bastards sometimes reversing the colors on their noble parent’s banner; Jon might reverse the Stark grey direwolf on a white field to a white direwolf as an homage to his favorite good boy (also a Black Dragon parallel maybe? Who knows). The White Wolf would be a great epithet for Jon if he comes back from the dead more “wolfish,” as some have put it. My question is, how would Jon’s new wolfishness affect his story going forward? I imagine he would become more decisive and ruthless, and maybe this change would affect how he views Daenerys. Would it make him even more likely to be attracted to her? Maybe he would more aggressively pursue taking Winterfell for himself after learning of Robb’s will? Any thoughts?

So, thank you Red Rahloo himself for the question. If you’d like to ask us questions we’ll answer here for every episode, you’re welcome to become a Sworn Sword or higher patron over at patreon.com/NotACastASOIAF where you can get show notes, access to the NotASlack at the two highest tiers and monthly bonus ASOIAF and Fevre Dream episodes.

Absolutely. We’ll be recording both our analysis of Fevre Dream chapter 13 and the fifth and final part of “The Second Coming”: our full analysis of TWOW, The Forsaken over the next week and a half! So, stay tuned. But enough about patreon! When we last checked in with Daenerys Targaryen, she has bumbled her way through Fantasy Tampa, AKA Qarth getting rejected by soulless, bored pale weirdo Floridians, AKA Qartheen and decided on a lark to check out the House of the Undying. Let’s find out if Dany indeed makes it over to said house in this synopsis of ACOK, Daenerys IV, part 1!

Synopsis

In this city of splendors, Dany had expected the House of the Undying Ones to be the most splendid of all, but she emerged from her palanquin to behold a grey and ancient ruin.

Oh, great another Qarth chapter. Here, we go. It’s all image, a facade, yeah, yeah, George, WE GET IT ALREADY. Hey, wait, a sec, did Dany mention “The House of the Undying.”

Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue leaves made the stuff of the sorcerous drink the Qartheen called shade of the evening. No other buildings stood near. Black tiles covered the palace roof, many fallen or broken; the mortar between the stones was dry and crumbling. She understood now why Xaro Xhoan Daxos called it the Palace of Dust. Even Drogon seemed disquieted by the sight of it. The black dragon hissed, smoke seeping out between his sharp teeth.

Wait a minute, inky blue leaves, shade of the evening. Coming off our analysis of TWOW, The Forsaken that we’ve been doing, this is starting to sound familiar. Oh my god, it’s finally happening! We’re finally at the House of the Undying chapter! 

Jhogo calls this an evil place, which, yes. But Jorah thinks this is just a ruin, and there is no power in it. Xaro says just leave the warlocks and their palace of dust behind. They can’t give Dany ships. Aggo says that few people come out of the Palace of Dust which, I guess, is the thrilling narrative purpose for all of those investigations the Dothraki conducted in Qarth back in Dany II. Jhogo agrees, and Aggo says they’re sworn to live and die as Dany. They want to go with her.

"Some places even a khal must walk alone," Dany said.

"Take me, then," Ser Jorah urged. "The risk-"

"Queen Daenerys must enter alone, or not at all." The warlock Pyat Pree stepped out from under the trees. Has he been there all along? Dany wondered. "Should she turn away now, the doors of wisdom shall be closed to her forevermore."

Xaro says that Dany should come to his pleasure barge where his flutists will sooth her with music and a small girl will, jesus, I really fucking hate this guy, pleasure Dany. Jorah gives Xaro a sour look which may be Jorah’s most human moment in the entire story. He calls Dany to remember Mirri Maz Duur, and Dany does. She had knowledge, but she was only a maegi. 

Pyat Pree smiles thinly, probably thinking about nothing at all, because he has the personality of bleached construction paper. But he offers his arm to Dany to lead her into the house. She finds it dark under the trees, and the way was longer than it appeared from the outside. Pyat tells her that the front goes in, not out. He urges her to listen to him. The HoTU was for those who were dead. Dany needs to take care and listen to what he says. Dany promises that she will, and then Pyat Pree gives the rules of the game:

"When you enter, you will find yourself in a room with four doors: the one you have come through and three others. Take the door to your right. Each time, the door to your right. If you should come upon a stairwell, climb. Never go down, and never take any door but the first door to your right."

"The door to my right," Dany repeated. "I understand. And when I leave, the opposite?"

"By no means," Pyat Pree said. "Leaving and coming, it is the same. Always up. Always the door to your right. Other doors may open to you. Within, you will see many things that disturb you. Visions of loveliness and visions of horror, wonders and terrors. Sights and sounds of days gone by and days to come and days that never were. Dwellers and servitors may speak to you as you go. Answer or ignore them as you choose, but enter no room until you reach the audience chamber."

Dany says that she understands, and Pyat Pree states that when she gets to the Undying, she needs to listen well and be patient. 

So, Dany and Pyat reach the door carved into a wall which looks like a human face. Uh-huh. It’s a haunted house. Got it, George. The smallest dwarf Dany had ever seen comes up to Dany and offers her a cup, telling her it’s the shade of the evening.

"Will it turn my lips blue?"

"One flute will serve only to unstop your ears and dissolve the caul from off your eyes, so that you may hear and see the truths that will be laid before you."

Dany raised the glass to her lips. The first sip tasted like ink and spoiled meat, foul, but when she swallowed it seemed to come to life within her. She could feel tendrils spreading through her chest, like fingers of fire coiling around her heart, and on her tongue was a taste like honey and anise and cream, like mother's milk and Drogo's seed, like red meat and hot blood and molten gold. It was all the tastes she had ever known, and none of them . . . and then the glass was empty.

And that is ACOK, Daenerys IV, Part 1! I don’t know why, but coming to the end of this synopsis for Dany IV, Part 1, I feel like at long last, we’ve made it as an ASOIAF podcast. I am almost positive I said the same thing when we did Ned’s execution from AGOT, Arya V. No matter. This is the chapter! What did you think, ser?

Depth

What a fateful coincidence that we should arrive at this chapter while in the middle of our five-part series on “The Forsaken” for patrons! That Aeron Damphair chapter released from TWOW is the evil twin to this chapter. If ACOK Daenerys IV is George’s update of Alice in Wonderland, “The Forsaken” is what’s waiting on the other side of the looking glass. “The Forsaken” is my favorite chapter in the series, but in the published books, nothing captures what I love about this story quite like the House of the Undying. 

It sits atop the rising magical tide in ACOK, the definitive exploration of sorcery in the series so far. It is a crucial hinge in the story of Daenerys Targaryen, a harrowing gauntlet shaped for (and by?) her that will haunt her dreams and waking life alike going forward. It is a repository of the best imagery George brings to bear in ASOIAF, every tableau rendered in glittering stardust. It is a case study in pure craft in which the author plays on every emotion like strings, invoking horror and pity and shock and delight and utter stillness with equal measure, the reader as in thrall to his vision as Daenerys is. 

Like “The Forsaken,” it is a culturally resonant and empirically accurate rendering of the psychedelic experience. Also like “The Forsaken,” it takes the form of a postmodern kaleidoscope of influences, a cacophony of reference points gradually finding its own distinct rhythm. Both chapters are journeys into the unknown. But what makes ACOK Daenerys IV its own beast, and probably my favorite chapter in this book, is the genre in question. “The Forsaken” is a work of horror, wearing that status proudly on its blood-spattered sleeves. The House of the Undying is unmistakably high fantasy: the apex of the genre, its perfection. 

The most surprising thing about this chapter is how it just comes out of fucking nowhere. Okay, not nowhere. Dany I has Dany occupying the Moses/Wisemen leading her people through the wilderness pursuing a comet ever eastward. But little in Dany II and III (really beyond Pyat Pree inviting Dany to the House of the Undying in Dany II and the close of Dany III) leads us to arguably the most high fantasy chapter in the series so far. This is the chapter that launched a thousand theories, a chapter that boggles the minds of the most serious fans of ASOIAF and the chapter that appears as a series of near and far lighthouses as seen through a storm. Visions from this chapter that depict events from A Storm of Swords now appear bright in retrospect, and if we sail but a little closer, we can just make out the fuzzy outlines of The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring … but before we get to all that, I think it’s important to talk about the structure and purpose of this chapter. So, Emmett, take us away!

• What is this chapter about? Why is it like this? What’s the best metaphor for it?
  • Before we get into the chapter proper, I think we need to talk about how we see it as a whole. It is arguably the most structurally radical and unique chapter in the series, and it demands the most active reader engagement
  • Dany’s trip through the House of the Undying can be seen as a shamanic vision quest fitting into her messianic arc you were talking about, a self-contained tribute to the psychedelic era, an interrogation of the concepts of magic and prophecy in fantasy, a refinement of George’s exploration of corpse-city-hive-minds in his previous works, etc etc etc
  • It is like this by design. As with many of the images contained within, this chapter can bear multiple threads of interpretation, because that is the nature of the divine sight Dany experiences in the chapter
  • If there is one way of looking at this chapter that appeals to me the most, it is that the House of the Undying is a metaphor for the creative process, and more specifically, for the contact point between author and audience
  • What was it Jojen said? A reader lives a thousand lives. That’s the animating idea of this chapter. The Undying are undying because they are steeped in story, marinated in it like pickles or pig’s feet. They feast on imagery, on foreshadowing. Plot beats give them literal power
  • Their House is alive with story, the word made flesh. Dany wanders past narrative branches, subplots calling out to her from past, present, and future alike. Bran journeys to the Tree of Life; this is the Tree of Story
  • In essence, the House of the Undying is George R.R. Martin’s brain on drugs. Dany literally enters the building through a door shaped like a mouth, in a wall shaped like a face! She’s accessing his creative process
  • His mind is aswirl with concepts, characters, plot beats hidden in the backstory and waiting to emerge in the books to come. Dany sees them, hears them, all without quite knowing what they are
  • The Red Wedding is here. Aerys’ order regarding the wildfire is here. The song of ice and fire is here--the only time that phrase appears in the story for which it is named! This is the font, the wellspring of narrative itself
  • It’s difficult to imagine a more effective imprinting of an author’s soul on their work, and it’s all done through imagery, metaphor. Astonishing artistry
  • This chapter, therefore, is a work of metafiction, constantly calling attention to the nature of its own construction in order to force the reader to contemplate our own role in shaping the meaning of narrative fiction
  • It is a labyrinth not only for Dany, but for us; Dany stands in for the reader. The House of the Undying dwells in the space between text and audience
  • There are so many influences to talk about with the House of the Undying. You can talk about Alice in Wonderland, Doors of Perception, Dune, The Last Temptation of Christ, A Christmas Carol (h/t Attewell), on and on
  • But we can also think about this chapter as part of the lineage in metafiction ranging from Don Quixote to the works of Thackeray to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
  • You nailed it, brother. This is a work of metafiction, and it’s in that light that I’m going to attempt to piece together what was going on in the background of ASOIAF and where George was in his thinking for the series.
  • I’ll try not to get too, too in the weeds here, but I do have a forthcoming essay which will get very much into the weeds called The Bastard Narrative. I say no more.
  • First off, as we’ve talked about in our episode on ACOK, Daenerys I, Dany was never supposed to come to Qarth. The pitch letter has Dany birthing dragons and then gathering the Dothraki for her invasion of Westeros.
  • George, himself, indicated that he finished all the Dany material for AGOT before he finished what became AGOT itself (circa 1994/1995).
  • So, here, we can definitively say this was not leftover material from the first book. It was written 1996 or after.
  • And I’ll make the argument that this was one of the final chapters from ACOK that was completed, but again, that aforementioned essay will cover that.
  • In an overall sense, this chapter works to seed the future of the story in its ambiguous, and oft-debated prophecies.
  • It’s also here that I think we see Martin thinking about the future of the series.
  • As Adam Whitehead noted in his “Facts and Figures” article about ACOK, George began to think about the future, and he decided to do something unique:
    • This time, he also wrote a more detailed outline. This new outline (which has never been seen publicly) suggested to him that the whole series would be longer than originally planned. What had been the first novel was going to be three, whilst the originally-planned final book would now be two. As a result, the series leapt from four volumes to six: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter and A Time for Wolves (a title he disliked, but a better one escaped him for the moment). – Adam Whitehead, “A Song of Facts and Figures: A Clash of Kings” 
  • I think this outline that George developed for the series coincides strongly with this chapter.
  • We won’t see this outline until after ASOIAF is finished (and it will, just #believe), but I think the outline was inspired directly by this chapter.
  • Intriguingly, we see some glimpses of moments that will occur in ASOS (The Red Wedding, mhysa, Jaime revealing the backstory to Aerys), but published stuff from AFFC/ADWD stuff is largely absent from the book with the possible exception of the dead face with grey lips smiling sadly.
  • And this makes sense as GRRM believed that Dany would invade Westeros in ADWD as he stated a few times in the years after the publication of ACOK.
  • But Dany’s invasion was pushed back to TWOW. So, we’re seeing glimpses of TWOW/ADOS material, and that’s a huge part of why this chapter is exciting, and why fans keep coming back to this chapter, plumbing its depths for hints for the future story!
  • HOTU is a means for the author to communicate to us not only the expansion of his story, but the excitement and awe he feels about it 
  • Story is given form as a labyrinth, a familiar archetype underneath the surreal imagery. Whereas in our Forsaken episodes I argued that the ur-text of that chapter is Augustine’s Confessions, here I’m going to argue that the ur-texts for HOTU are two stories by Jorge Luis Borges
  • Borges reigns supreme in metafictional literature, as much as Beckett in metafictional theater or Godard in metafictional film. Umberto Eco makes direct reference to him in The Name of the Rose, a book about the sacred uncertainties of text (I’ll come back to it), and my boy Thomas Pynchon makes up a Borges couplet out of thin air in Gravity’s Rainbow: 
    • The labyrinth of your uncertainty/enmeshes me with the disquieting moon. 
  • Why does Borges loom so large for those interested in breaking the border between text and audience? His fictions, as he termed them, used blatant artificiality to expose that there is no border between art and life
  • Thought and language, text and memory, performance and identity: the distinctions between these things are so porous as to be irrelevant
  • Reading his stories is not about following an exciting plot nor becoming dramatically invested in a character. It is about the queasy exhilaration of realizing that, without your consent, you have become part of the story
  • This form is laid out most exquisitely and memorably in “Garden of Forking Paths,” a story about a character who tries to hide from his killer in a labyrinth built by his ancestor, only to find that the “labyrinth” is a book
  • The book is a labyrinth because every time a character within it makes a choice, the author depicts the splintering off of alternate dimensions
  • The story itself that we are reading is shaped from a bewildering spiral of perspectives, fragmented information, and possible deceptions
  • The protagonist makes his choice, yet cannot escape his fate, laid out explicitly at the beginning of the story when he realizes his killer is coming
  • Along the way to his ancestor’s house, the protagonist is told to reach it by turning left again and again--you can see the connection to this chapter!
  • Within this mazelike atmosphere of repetition, the protagonist finds serenity, losing himself in nature. Borges puts it so beautifully: 
    • I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars. Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny - that of the hunted. For an undetermined period of time I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator. 
  • Such is the position Dany finds herself in this chapter: a perceiver of the world, in which reality is rendered as art, which is pure thought and being
  • Yet as in Borges, the dictates of time, fate, and mortality all snap shut around us even as we wander this labyrinth of enlightenment
  • If “Garden of Forking Paths” captures the spirit of the House of the Undying, Borges’ story “Tower of Babel” lays out the structure
  • The Biblical invocation fits HOTU perfectly. This is a monument to story, language, though in image as much as word, a ladder to the divine
  • In “Tower of Babel,” the universe is a library, seemingly infinite, containing all works, none ever repeated. Everyone pursues them forever
  • The library is broken off into hexagonal platforms--like the room with six doors early on in HOTU. The residents theorize that their vindications must await somewhere in the library, and fight for the privilege
  • Again, the connection to HOTU is clear. Both Dany and the reader project into these prophecies, hoping to be right; trapping us is their true function
  • Information and artistic expression become weaponized, turned inward on the seekers of knowledge. It only torments us in our incompleteness
  • HOTU applies the insight of Borges’ stories and those influenced by him to high fantasy: the labyrinthine images become sorcerous prophecy
  • I’ve never read Borges - not only due to my unforgivable illiteracy, but that reads as spot-on for what George is doing with this chapter.
  • The warlocks have tempted Daenerys to come to the House of the Undying with the promises of giving her truth and wisdom as Xaro said back in Dany II.
  • Invitations by the Undying Ones were as “rare as the summer snows” as Xaro in that same chapter.
  • That phrase “summer snows” triggered a memory about the creation and background of ASOIAF.
  • And then I looked through the So Spake Martin archive and found George talking about it in 2012:
    • Suddenly I just got this idea of vision whatever I just saw this scene with the finding of these wolf pups by some medieval people in the summer snows I remember that phrase the summer snows so I knew there was something wonky about the seasons even then but I knew very little else but the scene came to me so vividly that I knew I had to write it so I put the other book aside
  • So, I didn’t catch it back in Dany II, but now I’m re-looking at the use of “summer snows” and thinking this might be important.
  • Now this gets deep into the meta of ASOIAF proper and maybe it’s totally fucking bonkers, but George’s use of that alliterative phrase “summer snows” w/r/t to the Undying might have a lot of signifigance in context of how it became the genesis for all of ASOIAF.
  • And now Xaro uses the same phrase to indicate how rare it would be for Dany to receive an invitation from the Undying ones.
  • I feel like that’s significant, and here’s my interpretation of why: through the House of the Undying, George is inviting the reader into the creative process, the primordial ooze of words and phrases that George gardens into sentences, then paragraphs, chapters and books.
  • Think about it in the context of things we know about Dany’s arc in A Storm of Swords. A thousand tongues shouting “mother” was the inspiration for Dany’s conquest of Astapor and Yunkai and the freedmen of Yunkai shouting “mhysa!” 
  • Meanwhile, the cloth dragon swaying on poles amidst a cheering crowd is something that hasn’t happened yet, but this likely refers to Young Grift’s initial triumph in Westeros.
  • In that example, George hasn’t gardened his way into the full revelation of this plot (or maybe he has by the time we’re recording this).
  • But that’s the spark of inspiration which drove George’s writing of the Blackfyre plot forward. Shortly after the publication of ACOK, George wrote notes about the backstory inspired from this spark, imagined up the sword Blackfyre, Aegon IV legitimizing his bastards and granting the sword to Daemon, the Blackfyre Rebellions and the Redgrass Field, The Sworn Sword, Jon Connington’s backstory in Robert’s Rebellion and eventually Young Grift popping up in Tyrion’s chapters in ADWD and the Golden Company’s invasion of Westeros at the end of ADWD. The cloth dragon swaying on poles amidst a cheering crowd has yet to be revealed but is likely coming in TWOW.
  • So, when we think about the HoTU then, we might think of it as “summer snows”: the raw material that inspires GRRM to imagine and create the dizzying and immense worlds, characters and plots that captivate us over and over again.
• Introducing the House of the Undying
  • As we enter this chapter, let’s review how it works within the context of Qarth as a setting and Daenerys’ ACOK plot as a story
  • Qarth is a city of stone cows, a city that promises everything and delivers nothing, a gorgeous overwhelming sea of imagery that ultimately functions as a mirage. Dany only gets the decorative surface of what she needs
  • Everyone is promising to help, but what they really want is for her to get stuck in place, so distracted by the beauty and intricacy of everything that she doesn’t realize there’s nothing of substance underneath
  • Dany becomes a cog in the machine, a temporary sideshow used to put some money in the pockets of the already wealthy. It’s all a con
  • The reason I love the House of the Undying so very much despite being kinda meh on the rest of Qarth is not because it changes the game 
  • It’s because it takes all those themes and imagery and finally weaponizes them, turning them into the fantastical gears of a suspense setpiece
  • What I’m trying to figure out is whether the narrative purpose of the crumbling aesthetic for the House of the Undying is making the reality of Qarth, such as it is, metaphor in the HoTU?
  • Or is it similar to Arya from last week where the metaphor becomes reality?
  • The argument for the former is how the beauty of Qarth is constantly expanded upon, but it’s all crumbling, decaying lives. 
  • The argument for the latter derives from the undying themselves (as we’ll find out in part 3) as they appear beautiful and speak well until their true faces are revealed to be dead, their words coming out as a death rattle.
  • Since you made such a wonderful point last week with Arya’s story, ser, I figure I’d turn it over to you to resolve this!
  • This is what I wanted the rest of Qarth to be like: a place where the deceit and indulgence has real teeth behind it, a place where I can feel danger
  • Of course, this is the climax, so there is a particular catharsis to the true face of the city emerging at last that wouldn’t be there without the setup
  • Dany has been sufficiently frustrated by Xaro (and confused by Quaithe) to put her trust in the most obviously untrustworthy of the three wise men
  • Pyat Pree and the warlocks are mistrusted by everyone. The Dothraki, Jorah, even the other Qartheen. Every culture around Dany hates them
  • It doesn’t matter where you’re from; everyone knows not to live like this, in utter thrall to sorcery and drugs. This is the wrong path for Dany to take
  • But she’s here, not retreating to Vaes Tolorro, nor giving up and marrying Xaro, because this seems like the only path to Westeros and her crown
  • She needs power, and while Qarth seems to embody every kind of power, none of it is accessible to her, and that is starting to eat away at her inside
  • I don’t know if this was on George’s mind when he was writing this chapter, but I can’t help but see the parallels between how the late 90s brought a slew of media about rich white people who grew bored with wealth and status and sought wisdom from mystics - particularly Buddhism.
  • Then there was American cinema of the 90s with the white people finding “truth” and “wisdom” from Native Americans and Asian mystics: Dances with Wolves, Legends of the Fall, Seven Years in Tibet come to mind here.
  • The general draw was that the wealthy grew bored and sought the ethereal and different.
  • With Dany, we see something similar - albeit her temptations are to join with the wealthy of Qarth, but she finds them repulsive, their lifestyles bored and listless.
  • So, if they’re not going to get her to where she needs to go (Westeros), perhaps it’s time to seek out the mystics of Qarth.
  • If everyone in Qarth hates the warlocks, and Dany herself hates them, perhaps they’re on the same team, perhaps they can share interest to gain power.
  • Since Qarth is such “a city of splendors,” Dany had expected the House of the Undying to be the most beautiful sight of all, the very heart of beauty
  • But it’s not. Instead, it’s the ugliest part of the city. There’s nothing to it architecturally, just a straight line. It’s dusty, moldy, breaking down
  • The House of the Undying is a twisted mirror image of the Hall of a Hundred Thrones, where the Pureborn heard and rejected Dany’s plea
  • The Undying are ultimately just as listless as the Pureborn, and just as malevolent with their intentions regarding Dany
  • The exterior of their lair, however, does not speak to the ostentatious beauty and wealth beloved by the Pureborn, Xaro, etc.
  • Instead, it exposes what Qarth actually is. A decrepit dilapidated hallway that leads Dany nowhere even as it dazzles her along the way
  • The other Qartheen dislike the Undying so much in part because they reveal the apathetic rot that truly rules their city of skin-deep beauty. They call it the Palace of Dust; no other buildings stand nearby, as if the decay of both magical and political power is a disease they can catch
  • That’s not to say that the Undying are actually interested in truth. Rather, they take Qarth’s addiction to deceptive surfaces to its logical extreme
  • They’re so addicted to ideas, images, concepts, that they’ve let physical reality completely fall to pieces. It’s another haunted City of Bones
  • As such, George frames the House as a temptation from which Dany is warned off by everyone around her: warnings she ignores, one and all
  • The Dothraki hate it because it violates their cultural taboos surrounding magic, but also because they’ve heard that no one who enters ever leaves. It’s Willy Wonka’s factory and the Hotel California; it’s the Greek Underworld and the Land of the Lotus Eaters; it’s Wall Street, it’s Washington, it’s Hollywood. It’s every labyrinth of wonder and power
  • At a purely visceral level, the House seems to back up these fears. It drinks the morning sun, as Jhogo says, a vampiric invocation of evil
  • The House is like Valyrian steel, drawing its power by absorbing light and blood and converting the raw elements of humanity into pure power
  • It draws Dany in as well, a character often associated with light, the sun, and fire. It has a magnetic, seductive quality to it, like power itself
  • Yet as Jorah asks: what power can they have if they live in that? So what if it drinks the sunlight and has a fearsome reputation? Look at it! It’s a ruin!
  • This is the duality at the heart of the House of the Undying: is this a vision of power at its apex, or at its nadir? Or is it somehow both at once?
  • Does the ruinous state of the House of the Undying speak to the power they have attained, that they have transcended the physical plane?
  • Or does it speak to the hollowing-out effect of power? They’re so stoned that they don’t even pay attention to taking care of their living environment
  • Even as this chapter indulges in dazzling high fantasy imagery, it is profoundly uneasy about the state of mind such imagery supports
  • Will Dany, too, end up rising to and falling from power at the same time, so struck by the prophetic imagery around her that she doesn’t realize until it’s too late that she has left the real physical world a decaying ruin?
  • I’m reminded of your point w/r/t Joramun’s Horn and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the cup of Christ that you made so well in History of Westeros’ “Euron” episode.
  • The other “cups” that Dany sees in Qarth are jewels in comparison to the crumbling palace of dust.
  • However, in contrast to the horn that Jon finds and chalice that Indy drinks from, the form of the House of the Undying Ones matches the aesthetic.
  • Yet we understand her decision to proceed, because the alternative is falling back on Xaro Xhoan Daxos, who is just as manipulative, not to mention exploitative (the young girl with her tongue *shudder*)
  • Political and magical figures take potshots at one another, but ultimately serve the same structure: the double-helix DNA strand of power
  • Dany spends her time in Qarth trying to make these structures work for her. They don’t, so she burns them down in ASOS, only to find in ADWD that she can’t seem to avoid recreating them; prophecy drives her on
  • She’s always looking for home, trying to find the wisdom that will unlock her path, and wisdom is precisely what Pyat Pree offers her
  • He emerges spookily from the trees like a white walker to tempt her with “the doors of wisdom,” a reference to William Blake via Aldous Huxley
  • It’s difficult to imagine the capital-R Romantic era of the verbal and visual arts without Blake’s influence. He found ecstasy in the natural world, looked upon religious structures with trepidation, and argued through his works that man was forever caught in between the beast and the angel
  • Of particular relevance to the House of the Undying is his seminal work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a subversive mixture of prose and poetry composed in the wake of the American and French Revolutions
  • Blake was riffing heavily on Dante and Milton to argue that rather than representing a strict moral binary as religious officials have said, heaven and hell reflect different aspects of humanity and universal energy
  • The title of Blake’s book is an ironic reference to Heaven and Hell, a book by Christian mystic and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg that attempts to lay out the metaphysical structure of the universe in detail
  • Blake loved the cosmic grandiosity of Swedenborg’s approach, but was unsatisfied by the strict Manichean view of good and evil
  • Blake argued that instead, we should think about Heaven (and angels) as embodying rational controlling structures, and think of Hell (and devils) as embodying creative energy and freedom. The two feed on one another
  • You can see how this would appeal to George RR Martin, who draws from Faulkner and Solzhenitsyn to argue that good and evil coexist within us
  • The human heart represents the marriage of heaven and hell, the unity of seeming opposites; we can never resolve the contradiction, for it is us
  • Blake believed that art, nature, and the combination of the two could lead mankind to this insight about the order of things and about ourselves:
    • “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
  • It’s an extension of the allegory of Plato’s Cave, and it has obvious applications to the House of the Undying. Dany’s vision has been cleansed, and she sees the infinite connected nature of everything
  • Author and philosopher Aldous Huxley borrowed Blake’s line for the title of The Doors of Perception, a drug diary in which he recorded his experiences on mescaline, drawing heavily from Blake’s concepts
  • The psychedelic experience, Huxley argues, strips away functionality from objects and leaves them as they truly are, pure Being for you to behold
  • It also takes away the ego, leaving you with “not-I,” the passive observer of the world described by Borges in “Garden of Forking Paths”
  • Huxley entitled his followup essay “Heaven and Hell,” clearly following in the footsteps of both Blake and Swedenborg. In that essay, he argued that the extremes of experience in the human mind (“antipodes”) are the true embodiment of heaven and hell, and can be reached via psychedelics
  • These areas of the mind are not biologically useful, and so cannot be accessed easily, but spirituality springs from these antipodes
  • This is the inner labyrinth that will lead us to heaven, but also simultaneously to hell, for they are forever intertwined in our perception
  • This is the path Daenerys Targaryen follows throughout her story, made explicit here. She is both in control and not, rising to heaven and falling to hell, expanding her perception but always forever a victim of it
  • Pyat Pree says she must come now and alone or the doors of wisdom will remain shut. Dany hungers for truth, the Thing in Itself, which is precisely what Qarth has denied her. She badly wants that cleansed perception
  • Dany can’t see that Pyat is selling her a bill of goods, and he’s using a tried and true technique of salespeople everywhere: the urgency of the sale.
  • Pyat Pree has imposed an artificial deadline, advertised the value of his product (Truth! Wisdom!).
  • He's embedded a cosmic FOMO into Dany, used powerful titles (Undying!) to win her over.
  • It’s a one time offer, Dany. You won’t get better prices elsewhere!
  • The temptation is so strong for Daenerys to take the offer, because she is magical, she did do magical shit at the end of AGOT.
  • And that sense of destiny carried her from the birth of the dragons across the red wastes. 
  • People died to get her where she is now, and there’s an implicit sunk cost to Dany’s choice here.
  • If I look back, I’m lost is more than pressing ever forward. It’s the belief that Dany is being carried by destiny.
  • Pyat Pree had to know all of the above. He was one of the three wise men (two men, one woman) who came to Vaes Tolorro to seek out Daenerys.
  • He’s heard her story, and now he’s using that information to sell Dany a bill of goods.
  • Jorah cautions her to remember Mirri Maz Duur. Last time you gave yourself over to sorcerers, they did not bring you clarity nor satisfaction
  • Last time you presided over the marriage of heaven and hell, it ended with the collapse of your khalasar, the end of your pregnancy, the death of your husband. Such are the wages of the fiery ladder. You’ve been warned!
  • But Dany rejects this final warning. She remembers things her own way. She remembers that Mirri had wisdom, which is precisely what Pyat has offered her. That demonstrates that magic is not just a gigantic fraud
  • There is something real to be uncovered here, waiting beyond the doors of perception. What Jorah is trying to get Dany to recognize is that she already went through those doors once. He carried her through them!
  • The Desert of the Real waiting in Mirri’s tent was a horrorshow. Why would HOTU be different? But Dany dismisses Mirri as having only been a maegi
  • Waitaminnit, Dany: that’s contradictory. Did Mirri have vital wisdom, or was she only a maegi? It’s both, whatever Dany needs to tell herself
  • Mirri having wisdom means Dany is right to walk through the doors of perception. Mirri being only a maegi means that she was nothing to fear
  • You can’t have it both ways. If something is powerful enough to make a difference in your life, it’s also dangerous enough to destroy your life
  • It’s a sword without a hilt: no safe way to wield it. Dany can’t accept that, and I sympathize, because her other options don’t seem much better
  • Can she weld these opposites together? Pyat Pree says she already has. She’s a child who speaks with the wisdom of a crone. She is all archetypes brought together, the threefold goddess made into one, the marriage of heaven and hell breaking down the borders of spacetime
  • But of course, he’s lying to her. Manipulating her as the Undying themselves will. They offer her not truth, but more mirages. This is George reckoning with how enlightenment can be a lie. Huxley himself said the drugs offered nothing more than temporary grace. It will all fade
  • Dany is looking for something permanent, undying, but that doesn’t actually exist. Everything will keep slipping through her fingers
  • The trap of prophecy and secret information is an alluring one, and like you, I find it fascinating that Dany is still harking back to Mirri Maz Duur and seeing her as still having wisdom.
  • Looking at MMD again, Dany continuously thinks that her final fuck off “When the sun rises in the west, when the seas go dry, etc” words meant something more than “when pigs fly.”
  • Here, Dany is still seeking the hidden truth and meaning in what MMD told her, saying that she had real power and truth.
  • But back in ACOK, Dany II, she was much less sanguine about Mirri Maz Duur:
    • Dany was wary of the warlock; the maegi Mirri Maz Duur had soured her on those who played at sorcery.
  • But now? MMD and the HoTU work as temptations to engage in sorcery again, despite the disastrous consequence of sorcery at the end of AGOT. 
  • Can we see this as a parallel to Stannis’ Yet dare I disregard her? (Ding)
  • Like Stannis, Dany filters her own perspective into sorcery, giving it its own meaning. The warlocks claim they can provide Dany with wisdom and truth. But they’re mostly lying to her, much as MMD mostly lied to her about saving Drogo’s life.
  • If Dany is meant to be the reader avatar for much of this chapter, maybe George is calling us out! Maybe we self-deceive ourselves in reading too deeply into the text of ASOIAF
  • Dany is a special, and she has good reason to think she is special as I was talking about before.
  • The problem for Dany is that her status as the chosen one doesn’t lend ethereal omniscience. She has to seek gnosis, secret knowledge, and she chooses sorcery as the means to discover truth.
  • But not all sources of knowledge are of equal value. Dany walked into the flames and came out with three dragons. MMD mocked her attempts then. She did it all by herself.
  • And the knowledge that she’ll gain at the HoTU, the secrets she’ll unravel don’t truly help her. 
  • Consider the prophecy of the “three treasons.” It doesn’t help Dany uncover who the treasons are. Rather, it makes her paranoid, wondering at who these treasons are. Is Jorah one of the treasons? Illyrio?
  • Sorcery amps her suspicions, creates ambiguity and self-doubt and has nothing but hardship for Dany throughout ASOIAF.
  • In other words, as George has stated in the past, magic doesn’t simplify, doesn’t provide a shortcut. 
  • It complicates the narrative, lays out a harder route for the protagonist to walk. 
• The Rules
  • Dany follows the white rabbit, and immediately discovers that nothing in Wonderland is as it appears: every image is a deception, a lure, a trap
  • The path is darker than she thought, and longer. It’s a metaphor for her own narrative path as a character, never as simple as she wants it to be
  • They don’t head for the front door. That way doesn’t lead back out again

In other words, Dany may want a linear path, but a one-way ticket for humanity has only one possible destination: death. We saw that in her dream back in AGOT Dany IX, which prefigured HOTU in many ways

• The true story shape is not a line, but a circle. We only think it’s a line due to our limited perception, which also tells us our round world is flat
• Gravity’s rainbow is a circle, with neither beginning nor end; we see only the arc. The Hero’s Journey is a circle that looks to the hero like a line
• By recognizing these story shapes, distillations and imitations of life, we can break the bonds of death and conceive of life as a regenerating cycle
• If Dany is the reader, if HOTU stands in for story itself, then we are being instructed to think carefully about how we go into a narrative, because that will determine what we take away when we come full circle at the end
• Definitely the story itself, but also the creative process of creating stories - especially for George.
• The writer enters a room with his or her character, and there are four doors to choose from. Where does the author take the character and the story?
• George has talked about how he doesn’t write linearly. He didn’t start writing A Game of Thrones by writing the Prologue and proceeding forward. He wrote Bran’s first chapter, then Catelyn’s.
• But George has talked about how he’ll write from one POV’s perspective before circling back to write other POVs, while also engaging in additional circles back to rewrite earlier chapters to fit the narrative of the story as it progresses.
• Meanwhile, story directions that George attempts often result in dead-ends. 
• We can look at the cut Tyrion chapter in ADWD where Tyrion meets the Shrouded Lord that George really tried to make work but ultimately led the author into a dead-end for Tyrion’s story in ADWD. So, he ripped it out entirely.
• Or we can see how George wrote three versions (or doors) of when Quentyn Martell arrived in Meereen to see how each version worked.
• The pathways for creation circle, false starts and closed doors abound. 
• You run for hours, days, weeks, months years, pursuing the path towards literary greatness.
• Pyat tells her that HOTU was not made for mortals. The power of narrative is ultimately the power of creation; artists create in imitation of the divine
• Stories aren’t real, in the same way the visions Dany sees in HOTU aren’t real, but they refer to real things and their power over us is very real
• It’s true that HOTU wasn’t made for mortals. It was made for fictional characters, who by their very nature are immortal. Dany can never die
• We are the ones who really experience Dany’s life and death, just as HOTU’s images aren’t meaningful without an audience to see them
• This sense of destabilization carries over to the rules Pyat tells Dany about how to operate within the House of the Undying in order to survive
• These rules just emphasize that nothing here makes sense, that the structures around Dany do not conform to our mortal perception
• It is again like the whimsical absurdism of Wonderland, in which characters tell Alice utter nonsense in earnest tones, as if they’re helping
• You can’t go in by the front door. You can’t walk a straight path. You have to turn right at every fork...which, logically, should lead you in a circle
• And so it does, eventually! Dany is spat right back out this door at the end, having gone right every time. But the circle she follows is not a strictly rational one. It appears from the outside as one long hallway
• Moreover, as she will say later in the chapter, there do not appear to be towers from the outside, yet there are stairs, which she is told to climb
• You can’t take appearances seriously. You can’t judge a book by its cover. 

Your own POV, which is the only POV we get as readers, cannot be trusted. Unreliable narration is simply a fact of life for all of us

• As readers and as characters, we walk a path whose shape we do not fully comprehend even as we are the ones giving that shape meaning
• What is that shape? How is the House of the Undying actually laid out on the inside? Like a story. Like the word made flesh through which you walk
• I talked earlier about Borges and “Garden of Forking Paths.” In that labyrinth, he proceeds always to the left. George changes it to the right
• I would argue he did so to represent the reading experience of a Western audience: across the page from left to right. If I look back, I am lost
• Going to the left = going back in narrative time, which neither reader nor character is allowed to do. Same with going down. We don’t get to see the foundation of story, the author’s thoughts: only upward into the story itself
• That upper level doesn’t appear to exist from outside. The story doesn’t exist in the physical book, but in our minds, a projected fantasy space
• You make it so with your thoughts, as Catelyn creates the faces of the gods from the faces inside her in that sept down in the Stormlands
• The House of the Undying has the uncanny feeling of narrative structure made into physical structure, thus able to esnare readers and characters
• In that way, the best analogue for HOTU is the book that gave this episode its title: Mark Danielewski’s metafictional masterpiece House of Leaves
• House of Leaves is a book about a labyrinth inside a house inside a movie inside a memoir inside a book. The POV keeps changing, along with the tone and even the format of the writing across (and all over) the page
• The only constant is a dreadful sense of imminence, a pit-in-your-stomach certainty that something unimaginably horrifying is just around the corner
• What’s around the corner, of course, is the book itself. The endless layers of story don’t detach one from horror--they are the horror
• A house of leaves is a book: the leaves are the pages, like the leaves of the trees from which the warlocks make shade of the evening. Endless scholarship in the form of footnotes and edits call it all into question
• Within the universe of the story, the documentary about the house (“The Navidson Report”) doesn’t seem to actually exist. It is merely described
• Art is depicted as a search for truth destined to fail not only due to our foibles, but because ontological truth is buried under layers of exegesis
• What happens in House of Leaves is less important than the slow revelation of a guiding structure that has you, the reader, in its grasp every bit as much as any of the ostentatiously fictional characters
• The opening words of House of Leaves are “this is not for you.” Pyat Pree puts the same idea slightly differently: HOTU is not made for mortal men
• Of course, House of Leaves can’t be an influence on HOTU because it came out a couple of years later. They are best thought of as peers
• In both cases, the author is filtering classical mythology, 20th-century psychology, and the worship of The Novel through a genre framework
• By calling attention to their manipulation of genre imagery and expectations, GRRM and Danielewski put fantasy and horror respectively in direct dialogue with Freud, Melville, and the Greeks
• They provide uniquely mesmerizing experiences for the reader by grounding us in a psychedelic present moment while also exposing how ruthlessly that moment is being crafted for an audience
• Another great metafictional work around this same time was David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., which approaches classic Hollywood noir and melodrama like GRRM approaches fantasy and Danielewski approaches horror
• It’s all an index of imagery wrung from its context and exposed as fantasies, implicating character and audience alike in self-deception
• Early on in that movie, a character describes a recurring dream of his, which takes place in the diner in which he’s now sitting. In the dream, he’s scared for a reason he can’t describe. Then he realizes why: 
  • “There’s a man. In back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it.”
• He is describing David Lynch, the director of the movie! The man stops his description as he realizes that the dream scenario is playing out again in front of him. He walks to “back of this place” and finds a monstrous figure
• Lynch has said his favorite film is The Wizard of Oz; he returns to it in this scene as he has many times. HOTU and House of Leaves draw from the same disorienting situation as the revelation of the titular wizard
• There is a man, in back of this place. GRRM. He’s the one who’s doing it. These wonderful images, these exciting stories, they are all controlled
• The Undying are not sharing divine vision with Dany out of the kindness of their hearts. As in House of Leaves, it’s all a trap. Whenever we are lost in a dream, we must remember Lynch’s question from Twin Peaks:
  • “But who is the dreamer?”
• Since you talked so well about the HoTU in the context of its place in the oeuvre of fiction and especially metafiction, I figure I’d spend a few moments talking about the HoTU within the context of other spots where people have prophetic dreams and visions.
• First up, we have Melisandre and Stannis seeing ambiguous visions in the flames: Renly’s death, an alternative universe where Renly destroys Stannis at King’s Landing, burning crowns, towers collapsing into the sea and a girl in grey upon a dying horse.
• In Theon’s penultimate ACOK chapter, he has a magical vision similar to Dany’s about the Red Wedding while sleeping in Ned Stark’s bed in Winterfell.
• Dany’s tent became a magical spot briefly when Mirri Maz Duur danced with shadows within it, and Dany experienced visions of Rhaego’s death and probable visions of her future w/r/t King’s Landing.
• Jaime has a vision of his future fighting back to back with Brienne against white shadows while wielding a flaming sword while sleeping on a weirwood stump.
• The HoTU has elements of all of the above, working to show the fuzzy past, present and future of both Dany’s story and the larger story of ASOIAF.
• Still, the HoTU feels emotionally different from these other visions and prophecies. Certainly, part of that is the alternative universe that we see with an adult Rhaego burning a city, but I think there’s a mood and tonal difference between the HoTU and other vision-centric chapters and dreams.
• And I think that difference is Dany taking in her own baggage and backstory into the vision spot, and in that, it feels most similar to me like Ned’s Tower of Joy vision in AGOT, Eddard X. 
• In that vision, Ned revisited one of his most traumatic memories of his seven vs. the three kingsguard with Lyanna in her bed of blood.
• Dany is going to have a similar moment next week with the House with the Red Door (still in Braavos) that will evoke the Tower of Joy sequence so strongly that I can hardly wait a week! (But I will)
• For Ned, that vision of the Tower of Joy was brought on by Pycelle giving him a draught of milk of the poppy.
• For Dany, her visions will be similarly brought about by a mind-altering substance — a wine instead of a milk.
• Shade of the evening
  • I talked at length about shade of the evening in our series on “The Forsaken,” I’ll give a capsule of that here as regards this chapter
  • The warlock wine is George’s catch-all psychedelic drug. The imagery is rooted in DMT, hence the dwarf suitor holding the goblet of shade
  • DMT tends to shut you down physically, though, holding you in thrall to imagery. Shade of the evening eventually does that, but in a way that seems to resemble heavy opiate use, as we’ll discuss in a later episode
  • For the first time user, the structure of tripping on shade is more rooted in LSD and psilocybin. Dany can walk around, talk, and look at things
  • George may also be influenced by the legacy of soma, a psychedelic substance used by Vedic Indians. We aren’t sure exactly what it is
  • Regardless, the way it’s described in the Rigveda sounds like the shade:
    • We have drunk soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the gods discovered. Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?
  • You can see the multivalent nature of the drug in how it tastes:
    • She could feel tendrils spreading through her chest, like fingers of fire coiling around her heart, and on her tongue was a taste like honey and anise and cream, like mother's milk and Drogo's seed, like red meat and hot blood and molten gold. It was all the tastes she had ever known, and none of them...
  • It breaks all borders, a rainbow flood of pure sensation, which is an accurate aesthetic reflection of the psychedelic experience
  • The dwarf suitor wears purple and blue; his hands are pink. It’s a dizzying rush of colors like Dany’s first sight of Qarth back in her second chapter
  • The difference is that now, she’s internalizing the rainbow. She’s climbing the holy mountain and passing through the doors of perception
  • Once she takes that drug, there’s no turning back. It’s like eating the cake in Wonderland, or eating the pomegranate seeds of the Underworld
  • As well as paralleling those tales of exploration and deceit, the shade of the evening also situates this chapter as a tribute to the psychedelic era
  • The House of the Undying very much feels like a relic of the trippy Western pop culture of the 1960s and 70s, in which the drugs themselves combined with counterculture politics and (half-understood) influences from various Asian traditions to produce a distinct approach to art
  • That approach persists in television (Twin Peaks), film (Enter the Void), and especially in pop music, where dub wooziness became the norm
  • But the era of its breakthrough remains distinct for its novelty and its connection to the rise-and-fall of the aforementioned counterculture
  • George RR Martin became a writer in that era, and took part in many of its most cherished works and traditions. This is his tip of the hat to that time
  • These reference points carry such resonance because of the importance of psychedelia to the development of high fantasy as a genre
  • LSD and psilocybin users seized on Dune and Lord of the Rings not just as diversions, but cultural emblems
  • The combination of rapturous imagery, episodic plotting, and spiritual yearning in these books spoke directly to the psychedelic audience
  • These stories took you to other worlds and made you feel the lived-in details of them. That’s what George says is the heart of fantasy:
    • Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli … Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer.
  • And that’s also the heart of the psychedelic experience: sensual overload, as well as an understanding of how those stimuli connect to structures
  • The House of the Undying gradually emerges as a walking tour through the heart of high fantasy itself, manifested as a house of leaves and fueled by the psychedelic mindset that has animated the genre’s biggest fans
  • When these substances are at play in your veins, you feel like the lord of creation, to quote Fevre Dream. You feel like your third eye is open. You feel like you can see, smell, and taste everything, and so goes the shade
  • Dany can taste fire and blood. She can taste the mother’s milk, the taste of innocence, and also Drogo’s seed, the taste of adulthood
  • Red meat, fresh cream, the molten gold that claimed Viserys’ life. It’s all here, everything she could ask for, the world in her grasp...and it’s gone
  • Underneath that psychedelic rainbow of flavor lurks the foul initial taste: ink and spoiled meat. That’s what the shade and the House are made of
  • Spoiled meat: the taste of corpses and death. And also ink: the flavor of writing, of story. The taste of story is the taste of death. Dany is tasting her own doom, her narrative fate spoon-fed to her as a fictional character
  • The tastes that Dany experiences here serve as preamble to what Dany will experience in the HoTU proper.
  • She tastes her previous life experiences in the shade of the evening.
  • And when we get into the HoTU, she will once again experience a multitude of previous life experiences in real-time. 
  • Pyat Pree promises that the shade of the evening will deliver the truth, melting the scales from her eyes so she may behold the wisdom within
  • But it remains ambiguous what it is the shade of the evening actually does, which ties into the ambiguity of the what the Undying are up to
  • If Dany were to go inside without sipping on the shade, what would she see? Would it be nothing? Are the visions born wholly from the drug?
  • Or would she see the same things but less compelling, less detailed, like looking at an object in the real world sober v. on psychedelic drugs?
  • Would she be able to understand what she sees less, or more? Does the drug offer insight, or does it obscure clarity? We don’t and can’t know
  • All of this would seem to depend on why Pyat Pree is offering her the drug in the first place. Presumably the warlocks are in thrall to the Undying
  • Does the shade help them trap her by slowing her reactions? Or by making her vulnerable to imagery? What’s the true mechanism here?
  • Ambiguities abound before we even get to the prophetic visions, but the mere presence of the shade of the evening lends a distinct tone to this chapter, marking it as an intense sensual experience for the reader
  • HOTU contains the best imagery in the series, and the drug is part of what makes that possible for Dany; that experience is transmitted to the reader
  • Spielberg said he went into 2001: A Space Odyssey sober and emerged high, because the movie itself was the drug; same applies to this chapter
  • Agreed! And just this once, I won’t ask you if George wrote this chapter while taking LSD. Asked and answered several times by you, ser. No!
  • The only other character who drinks shade of the evening doesn’t spit it out is Aeron Damphair, and even after exhaustively going through that chapter, I’m left uncertain about what the drug does.
  • Of interest, Pyat Pree says: Within, you will see many things that disturb you. Visions of loveliness and visions of horror, wonders and terrors. Sights and sounds of days gone by and days to come and days that never were.
  • At the very least, Pyat isn’t precisely lying to Dany about what she’ll see. She sees all that as we’ll find out in parts 2 and 3.
  • But again, is that hallucination brought on by the drug? Does the drug cloud her ability to see more?
  • It’s so unclear as you were putting together, and that’s intentional on George’s part: we are meant to be confused, and it’s that confusion that George weaves the ambiguities of story construction, character and the future.
  • This is where the fun begins.

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

The whole chapter.

Theory/Discussion

How do we feel about the show’s take on the House of the Undying?

Before we give our takes, I figure we’d lay out Dany’s general S02 plot and then highlight the different things that Dany sees in the show’s version as for most listeners, it’s probably been several years since they’ve seen this (It was for me before recording this episode!)

• First, let’s start with the context for how Dany ended up in the HoTU as it’s vastly different between books and show.
• In Season 2, Dany is out and about Qarth trying to get support for her claim, and she gets rejected.
• Her final rejection comes from the Spice King. She returns to find that Xaro’s manse is in ruins, with most of her people dead, her handmaiden Doreah missing.
• Xaro calls the Thirteen to session where he and the warlocks murder the Thirteen and take control of Qarth.
• Dany stabs Pyat, but it turns out he’s a duplicate Pyat. The real Pyat reveals that Dany’s dragons are at the House of the Undying, and she’s invited to the party.
• Afterwards, Dany consults with Jorah who says he’s booked passage for Astapor, and that they need to GTFO from Qarth.
• Dany refuses, and she shows up to the House of the Undying.
• Entering the HoTU, Dany sees the following visions:
  • The destroyed throne room in the Red Keep with snow coming down 
    • (Interestingly, many fans thought this was ash coming down, but as revealed by our friend Joanna Robinson in her excellent examinations of the scripts from GoT, the script note for this scene reads: “She looks up. The roof is missing and snow falls from the sky. [. . .] At the far end of the room, the Iron Throne waits for her, dusted with snow. Her dream made manifest.”
  • Then we have Dany going through a tunnel which turns out to lead north of the Wall. 
    • She finds a tent and discovers none other than Khal Drogo with their child Rhaego in the tent.
    • Drogo asks Dany to stay in the tent with him, but Dany tearfully rejects this and walks on.
  • Dany returns to the antechamber, hears her dragons screaming and finds them chained.
    • Weird-ass Pyat Pree then returns to the fold, telling Dany that her dragons are the reason why magic has returned to the world.
    • Then Dany calls “Dracarys”, and the dragons light Pyat up. /endscene
• So, now that the plot essentials are there, Emmett, what did you think of the House of the Undying in the Thrones Show, Season 2?
• Emotionally-poignant IMO with a better ending with the dragons burning Pyat with that epic Dany assuming Christ-pose while the dragons dracarys Pyat from under her arms.
• Still, the substance wasn’t really there. The two visions read as “Dany destroys KL”: which we can now see was planned by D&D from at least the writing of S02 and the temptation of a present and future that never was in the form of Drogo and Rhaego to keep her from her “true path.”
• In the commentary for the scene in Season 2, GRRM provided an explanation why the substance for the HoTU wasn’t present in the show, saying:
  • There’s a wariness to showing a lot of prophecy in case some characters or story threads have to be trimmed later, Martin said. “It would be sort of stupid to have a whole prophecy of something that never pays off down the road because we have to cut that thread for budgetary reasons.” Having said that, he said he thinks the show will, at some point, have to deal with events concerning Rhaegar, Lyanna and Aerys Targaryen, the Mad King. 
• So, here, we’re already seeing where George had to know that aspects of his story were going to be trimmed down or cut due to the budget of the show.
• This is why the showrunners only went for the one thing they knew that Dany’s story was driving towards: the aforementioned destruction of King’s Landing.

Conclusion

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  • Red Rahloo Himself who has renounced his allegiance to the Squishers 
  • Lady of a Thousand Words
  • Septon Eastwood of Introvert Isle
  • Septon Merrybald, the Shoeless Sage
  • Sister Winter - Lady of the Wolfswood
  • Nessie the Elusive, warden of the Neck, Defender of the North and Keeper of Secrets
  • Sandie the Dragon, Blood of Queen Daenerys & Lady of Jameson
  • Lady Britt, Bastard Mistress of Harrenhal
  • Ser Thomas the Raven Knight, Lord of Blackwood 
  • Lady Dilsdale, the StarSpear of Crescent Hill
  • Ser Way of Course
  • Matt, Warden of the Sanguine Shore
  • Lord MarConnington, Heir to Griffin's Roost
  • Lord Sam K
  • Ser Michael Mertyns
  • Wisdom Benjicot, Alchemist of Sets and Quanta, Mage of the Arts of Boole and DeMorgan
  • Tibs the Great of House Catnapping
  • Lord J Manderly, Baker of the Frey Pies
  • Septon Merifullheadofhair
  • Lady Silverwing
  • Joe Snow “King of the Metro North and protector of the Tri-State”
  • Kaboth the Unfrozen, Lord of the Bricks and Castle Crimson Light
  • Ser Keith of House Corbray, wielder of Lady Forlorn
  • Lord Andrew - Warden of the Dubai Sands
  • Ryan Noye forger of the mighty hammer and keeper of the kings anvil
  • Lord Young of the Ghost Woods
  • Lady Meera Reed, Wielder of Dark Sister, slayer of tinfoil
  • Lady of Rainy Afternoons
  • Ser Will of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune
  • Lord Clay
• Join us next week for our second (of three) episodes on ACOK, Daenerys IV in which Dany bears witness to some increasingly wild visions.