There’s moral relativity, which says “If it’s true for one person, then it’s true.” That calls to our moral responsibility to one another by pointing out that, no matter how much we disagree, we should work toward reaching a compromise. We shouldn’t just kill everyone who disagrees with us.
That’s how the Human Life value and Relativity get so nicely entangled throughout the story.
But before we come to argue about what’s true in the world, we each have to decide what we think is true. And before we can decide for ourselves what we think is true, we have to interpret it.
So there’s interpretive relativity too. A tree may look very different from two different angles. Who’s to say that the angle from which you’re viewing the tree is more valid than the angle from which I’m viewing the tree? Interpretive relativity says “If it’s true from one angle, then it’s true.” It calls to our responsibility to one another by pointing out that, no matter which angle we’re viewing from, we should work toward reaching a compromise of interpretations.
So truth in some interpretation is true enough.
But! I don’t think that is the same thing as saying truth in some interpretation is necessarily mostly truth. It can still be mostly a lie. Let’s look at an example in the story.
Taena’s lips were very full. She wondered what it would feel like to suckle on those breasts, to lay the Myrish woman on her back and push her legs apart and use her as a man would use her, the way Robert would use her when the drink was in him, and she was unable to bring him off with hand or mouth.
Those had been the worst nights, lying helpless underneath him as he took his pleasure, stinking of wine and grunting like a boar. Usually he rolled off and went to sleep as soon as it was done, and was snoring before his seed could dry upon her thighs. She was always sore afterward, raw between the legs, her breasts painful from the mauling he would give them. The only time he’d ever made her wet was on their wedding night.
Robert had been handsome enough when they first married, tall and strong and powerful, but his hair was black and heavy, thick on his chest and coarse around his sex. The wrong man came back from the Trident, the queen would sometimes think as he was plowing her. In the first few years, when he mounted her more often, she would close her eyes and pretend that he was Rhaegar. She could not pretend that he was Jaime; he was too different, too unfamiliar. Even the smell of him was wrong.
For Robert, those nights never happened. Come morning he remembered nothing, or so he would have had her believe. Once, during the first year of their marriage, Cersei had voiced her displeasure the next day. “You hurt me,” she complained. He had the grace to look ashamed. “It was not me, my lady,” he said in a sulky sullen tone, like a child caught stealing apple cakes from the kitchen. “It was the wine. I drink too much wine.” To wash down his admission, he reached for his horn of ale. As he raised it to his mouth, she smashed her own horn in his face, so hard she chipped a tooth. Years later at a feast, she heard him telling a serving wench how he’d cracked the tooth in a mêlée. Well, our marriage was a mêlée, she reflected, so he did not lie. (AFFC Cersei VII)
Here, Cersei is allowing the word melee to mean marriage. But without a doubt, if we were to look up the dictionary definition of the word melee, marriage would be nowhere to be found in it.
So Cersei is being very loose with the meaning of the word melee, and the reason is because she’s reflecting bitterly on her marriage. She considers her marriage to Robert to have been full of fights, such as the one about Robert’s treatment of her while drunk, and Cersei’s retaliation with a horn of ale.
The meaning of the word fight commonly spans the entire range of disagreement, including everything between a deadly altercation and the silent treatment. In Cersei’s and Robert’s marriage, the fights appear to have spanned much of that range, stopping short of permanent injury, except perhaps if you count a chipped tooth.
And the word fight is loosely synonymous with the word melee.
So the answer to the question of “What’s true?” regarding Cersei’s and Robert’s marriage being a “melee” depends on whether or not you will personally permit the concept creep happening between the word melee and the word marriage.
Cersei doesn’t have much if any objection to the concept creep, because the translation from marriage to melee was her idea, and she seems to get some humor out of it. But without a doubt, some characters and some readers will object to the concept creep, and will therefore consider the statement “Cersei and Robert’s marriage was a melee” to be mostly false or a lie. Characters who have taken part in a real melee with real weapons and suffered serious injuries might understandably disagree with the concept creep and consider the statement to be mostly false.
There are not any readers debating heatedly about the truth or untruth of this marriage-to-melee statement from Cersei. We all pretty much understand that these are fleeting thoughts in Cersei’s mind that provide humor, the interpretation of which is virtually void of any real stakes, of either the in-story or interpretive kind. Nevertheless, this is still a great example specifically because it doesn’t have any serious stakes.
But if you were so inclined, you could get serious about it. You could argue about the dangers or merits of concept creep versus concept rigidity.
The bigger point I want to make with this passage is that the story’s treatment of questions of truth is deliberately meant to elicit such arguments, especially about the in-story dilemmas that have real stakes. And the thematic purpose of eliciting those arguments, I gather, is to draw attention to the tension between objective and subjective concepts of truth.
The wisdom from the objective side is something like “You can’t argue with reality.”
The wisdom from the subjective side is something like “People don’t believe the things they believe for no good reason.”
The resolutions to A Song of Ice and Fire’s debates regarding the question of “What’s true?” seem to me to invariably nestle in a center point between those two insights.
Update Sep 11, 2022 – AFFC Cersei VII
Apples and Dragons 