The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  No matter how overwhelming the preexisting ocean of story might seem when channeled into the margins of a single body, Gaiman deepens it further by developing its mythic traditions in three fundamental ways. The first is by inventing new figures for existing historical cultures, a long-standing custom of creative mythography often practiced by fantasy writers, but also by celebrated English poets; Leigh Hunt’s catalogical poem “The Nymphs,” for example, coins several new varieties of the feminine wood spirits, including Ephydriads, Limniads, Napeads, and Nepheliads.19 Gaiman engages in this sort of invention with Aziraphale in Good Omens20 and in The Sandman, with several demons, but also by attaching the Endless— including Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium, but especially the eponymous Dream—to several historical pantheons, most notably that of the Greeks. In The Sandman, Orpheus is the child of Dream and the muse Calliope, a parentage that is an invention of Gaiman’s in the sense that existing mythology attributes his fatherhood to Apollo, or possibly to the Thracian Oeagrus.21 In “The Song of Orpheus, Chapter One” in Fables and Reflections, all seven of the Endless appear at the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, and are fitted with Greek names.22 That the most detailed involvement of Dream and the Endless is with the Hellenic tradition is unsurprising, as the idea of a dream-deity is most associable with the Greek god Morpheus, one of the thousand children of Hypnos, god of sleep, according to the mythography of Homer, Pausanius, and Ovid. Not only is Dream often called ‘Morpheus’ in The Sandman, but he is also once summoned by its recitation into the waking world, suggesting it is in fact his True Name.23

  Another way in which Gaiman develops mythical traditions is by developing pantheons previously invented. Though the Endless serve as an example of this as well—through, for instance, the attachment of mythical archetypes such as Death and Dream to the more specialized creations of Despair and Delirium—there are more clear-cut examples, and beyond The Sandman’s weighty precedents. The Books of Magic explored many of the mythological and enchanted elements of the DC Universe, developing the pluralistic world of gods, spirits, and super powered beings which has remained central to Gaiman’s imaginary realities.24 His original work with Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comic series was to introduce both Angela, an evil angel, as well as to provide a back-story to the Hellspawn legacy that complicated the previously static and satanic Malebolgia who created Spawn himself.25 In the same vein, Gaiman’s contributions to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos were to add biographical depth to several of the Old Ones and their spawn,26 figures usually left in the shadows of the mythos’s imaginary world. The apparent predilection on the part of Gaiman to reach for the background of any portrait he touches is striking, suggesting his desire to manipulate not simply the characters, but also the cosmologies and cosmogonies that determine the significance of those characters’ thoughts and actions.

  Finally, Gaiman invents new pantheons entirely. The Endless of The Sandman again provide a good case, but there are subtler and more intricate examples, some where Gaiman works by allusive implication, and other times where he organizes preexisting figures into coherent social and political bodies. When, in “The Passengers,” Dream appears to Martian Manhunter in pursuit of the Dreamstone, the Martian sees Dream as L’Zoril—“a very old god,” presumably of Mars27—implying not only that a number of gods were known to the Martians of the DC Comics universe, but also that certain gods to some peoples are different gods to others28 (or, in the case of the Endless, that they are sometimes worshipped as gods when they are in fact a different class of being). Perhaps the best example, however, lies with Gaiman’s portrayal of Faerie and its government, which is presided over by the Shakespearean aspects of Titania and Auberon/Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rooted as it is in Shakespeare’s most celebrated comedy, and first portrayed in The Sandman story of the same name, Gaiman’s conception of the Seelie Court is unmistakably English. Though he and Shakespeare employ the same combination of English and Classical figures, their otherworldly society is cohesive and their aristocracy stately. British folklorist Thomas Keightley describes the fusion as follows:

  Shakspeare [sic], having the Faerie Queene before his eyes, seems to have attempted a blending of the Elves of the village with the Fays of romance. His Fairies agree with the former in their diminutive stature…in their fondness for dancing, their love of cleanliness, and their child-abstracting propensities. Like the Fays, they form a community, ruled over by the princely Oberon and the fair Titania. There is a court and chivalry.29

  That said, there seems more of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene than of Mab in Gaiman’s Titania—though Mab and Titania are later suggested to be one30—and as Faerie and its administration continue to be developed throughout The Sandman, they appear more like the Renaissance monarchy of the Classical woodlands (as in Spenser and Shakespeare) and less the anarchy of the English countryside’s folkloric superstitions.

  Gaiman’s engineering of the fairy pantheon is further demonstrated by its two most prominent characters, Cluracan and Nuala. The names of both belong to traditional Irish figures who bear little direct resemblance to their namesakes in The Sandman; a clúracán is a class of solitary fairy—another of which is the leprechaun—and is described as small and withered, while characterized as a layabout and a lone drunkard.31 Nuala, meanwhile, is no less than a form of Finnguala or Úna, wife of the Irish fairy-king Finnbheara, and so a version of Titania in her own right. In The Sandman, however, Cluracan is an individual—a foppish emissary of Titania—and Nuala is his sister, a diffident and lugubrious sprite. In A Season of Mists, Cluracan represents Titania at the court of Dream and offers Nuala in exchange for Hell. When Dream effectively returns the infernal realm to its Creator, Nuala is relinquished nonetheless, becoming a listless but loyal servant in Dream’s house and eventually playing a minor role in his fate. The fealty of these lone Irish figures32to the English Titania suggests the sort of Hiberno-English or Anglo-Celtic amalgam that has become common to fairy folklore—an aboriginal pan-pantheon, so to speak—but it demonstrates yet again Gaiman’s urge to reshape, recast, and/ or reorganize the mythic materials he adopts.

  The ultimate example of Gaiman’s mythological inventiveness, however—a figure who represents all three methods just described— belongs to the mysterious god Pharamond who first appears in The Sandman volume Brief Lives. When readers first meet him, he is head of a successful global travel company, and is called upon by Dream to provide means of transportation as he and he sister Delirium seek their wayward brother Destruction on Earth. The necessity of the old gods and spirits to change, branch out, and adapt to new times and modes of worship is leitmotif in Gaiman’s mythological works, and is central to Pharamond’s role:

  [Dream:] “You are well, Pharamond?”

  [Pharamond:] “Oh, yes. Keeping busy. I’m the last of my pantheon, you know.”

  [Dream:] “I know.”

  [Pharamond:] “I suppose you would, wouldn’t you? I wasn’t thinking. Diversification. That’s the secret. You were right about that.”33

  Unlike Susanowo, the last figure to voice these sentiments, the pantheon to which Pharamond belongs is unclear. His name seems to be that of a legendary fifth-century Frankish king.34 There are encouraging etymological considerations—especially the Germanic fara-mann ‘travel man’ or faramund ‘travel protection’—that make sense because Pharamond is a travel agent when Dream meets him in the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that neither the Roman alphabet nor the Germanic language in which his name is recorded yet existed when he and Dream last met, in Babylon.35 Furthermore, Pharamond is unlikely to be a Babylonian deity—not only because the Babylonians borrowed most of their pantheon from the Sumerians, but also because the Akkadian language included no ‘f ’ sound.36

  Whereas, Pharamond claims to be the last of his assembly, the goddess Ishtar is still alive when he says this, at least for the moment.37 In a conversation with Delirium, Dr
eam reveals that Pharamond was already in decline when they last met,38 suggesting that, like the witch Thessaly/ Larissa of A Game of You and The Wake, the lawyer Bernie Capax in Chapter Three of Brief Lives, and the nameless, buffalo-headed figure Shadow dreams constantly in American Gods,39 Pharamond may have hailed from a time and place long before living or written memory. Pharamond’s name presents several other possibilities, most notably that of the island of Pharos on which the lighthouse of Alexandria once stood, the Jewish Pharisees, and, of course, the Egyptian Pharaohs, to which Pharamond has a certain racial resemblance. One could go on with such speculation, but it is of course fruitless to presume to study empirically something that exists only within the imagination. As Samuel R. Delaney’s introduction to A Game of You pretends, “[w]hat—? You don’t know what sort of a goblin a Tantoblin is? Well, neither do I. What’s more, the OED won’t help us.”40

  Despite these uncertainties and potential inaccuracies, Pharamond is a credible character, and he works as a historical figure in the same way he works as a mythical one. To understand this operation, one must understand the sense of reality that is essential to the worlds of comic books and other collaborative franchises including bodies of myth,41 and to appreciate the idea that Gaiman’s narratives are not simply oriented by that sense of reality, but that they exploit it. Only the briefest of outlines is possible here,42 but it is important to admit that all fictional worlds are imaginary, and that a world does not need to be alternate to be fictional; the London of Gaiman’s Neverwhere is a product of fiction, as is The Dreaming in The Sandman. The foremost distinction between these two examples is the degree of fictive space each affords—effectively, how much the writer can get away with before the reader’s suspended disbelief begins to reassert itself. A literary world’s fictionality—the quality of or capacity to possess fictive space—is determined for the most part by the reader’s knowledge of and ability to investigate that world. Unlike The Dreaming, London possesses basic credibility, which means that the reader will recognize the world as part of his or her own so long as the narrative does not contradict the reader’s knowledge thereof; this is one of the reasons why Gaiman’s modern human characters exist primarily on the fringes of society, and not at its heart. On the other hand, truly alternate worlds such as The Dreaming afford the greatest amount of fictive space simply because the objective accuracy of its narrative development cannot be investigated. Only its consistency can be verified in such a way—and The Dreaming is an inconsistent place. This is also one of the reasons why Gaiman’s portrayal of alternate worlds such as Hell and Asgard focuses on the movers and shakers.

  Where comic-book and collaborative-franchise realities surmount this basic relationship, and how Gaiman succeeds in making his invented ancients credible, is through dimensional proliferation, where contradictory realities not only coexist, but potentially overlap. In comics, as in myths, lives are infinite, timelines navigable, and possibilities endless. Dead characters can come back to life or be revisited at a time or in a dimension where they never died; purportedly longstanding influences can be introduced and retroactively streamlined. As Delaney says of The Sandman, “[in] these narratives, the whole world is haunted and mysterious. There is no solid status quo, only a series of relative realities, personal to each of the characters, any and all of which are frail, and subject to eruptions from other states and conditions.”43 Nothing can be erroneous in a world of possibilities because the gaps required for fictive space can be introduced and inflated wherever necessary, much like airbags before a potentially violent impact. For a number of years in the late 1980s, for example, Marvel Comics offered a ‘No-prize’ to those who could spot potential fallacies and continuity errors in their stories, and who could then pose explanations or episodes that would rationalize them.44 Because they are constrained by neither time nor space, gods and other divine, magical, or extra-dimensional beings are the very embodiments of such correctives; consider the episode of The Simpsons where Lucy Lawless explains to a sceptical fan that every time an inconsistency occurs in Xena, “a wizard did it.”45 They are what Fantasy Studies calls ‘liminal beings,’46 and they are often as anachronistical as they are powerful; examples include the Genie of Disney’s Aladdin, Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the Merlin of T.H. White’s Arthurian tales. If, then, comic-book worlds afford the most permutable flow of events, the gods of these worlds represent their most liberated inhabitants—beings so immune to the idea of inaccuracy as to be close to pure fictionality itself.

  The gods are liminal beings within liminal worlds, and it is because of this that even the most problematic of Gaiman’s mythical characters, such as Pharamond of The Sandman, work. They work not simply because they can always be explained, but because they can always be excused.

  It is from this perspective that Gaiman neither rewrites nor truly contradicts the myths from which they derive, rather that he choreographs and reconciles their many traditions in the light of a single, grand, and boundless production—a sort of mono-mythic reality within which our own world is a small dimension. The original, disparate stories he treats as sort of rudimentary glimpses—peeks stolen through a cosmic curtain which he himself is determined to sweep wide open. In this way, Gaiman does not distort the myths on which he draws, but instead combines and elaborates them through appropriation and retelling, exploiting the imaginative and multidimensional potential that is the very essence of story. This is not to say that he does not ever change things—he has, some of which he has apologized for47—nor to say that his work is without errors, some more pedantic than glaring. His conflation, for example, of Samael and Lucifer in The Sandman poses an angelogical quagmire,48while the pronunciation of Loki he posits in American Gods—“Low Key”—is inaccurate according to the Old Norse–Icelandic record (Loki rhymes with hockey).49 Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon language in the Beowulffilm that Gaiman co-wrote with Roger Avary is nightmarish, at least to a student of Old English. Nevertheless, the liberties of Gaiman’s inventiveness are indulged primarily in the fictive spaces between and behind the traditions he combines, and not in their midst, a procedure encouraged and bolstered by the unobstructable continuity of comic-book reality. David Bratman notes that:

  …with Sandman, Gaiman aimed to use a comics-based mythos to expand on, interact with, and deepenclassical legends of mythology and popular history. On one hand, this approach might seem like merely another clever postmodern ruse, taking old Greek and Norse myths, European and Asian and Islamic folk tales, plus scenarios from Dante, Blake, Milton and Dore, and mixing them with 20th-century comics and horror elements. Still, Gaiman made it all work, and on his own terms. His tales of the Endless… resounded as works of both grand invention and wondrous apocrypha. Which is to say, sure, you could see the modernday sensibility in it all—the fun subterfuge of deities and comics characters sharing the same space, the same dilemmas. At the same time, it was as if you had discovered a timeless trove of fascinating lost legends and mysteries: missing vellums that revealed how so many different people shared so many similar patterns of fable and providence in their disparate histories of storytelling.50

  It should seem amusing to consider that no writer or publishing house holds the copyright to the gods; they are, in many ways and for all their power, the most vulnerable characters in fiction. No better illustration of their public ownership exists than the fact that the same pantheons appear in both the DC and Marvel Universes. As Bratman argues, however, Gaiman’s narratives are memorable not because the gods simply appear, but because their cosmologies are assembled and re-constellated so intricately. The originals need not fall for the new stories to stand; as the Icelandic Odin says of his American aspect Wednesday in American Gods, “[h]e was me, yes. But I am not him.”51

  So far, this paper has spoken primarily of the presence of mythical figures in Gaiman’s works. The number of artistic uses to which these figures are put, including the roles they play, is potentially infinite, limit
ed only by the imagination and argumentation of the reader. Among the many ways Gaiman seeks to invest his pan-pantheon with realistic traits and tendencies, however, sexuality and reproduction are crucial, fertilization being perhaps the most substantial form of engagement and appropriation one world can have with another. An introductory comment by director Robert Zemeckis from the Beowulf DVD well illustrates this aspect of Gaiman’s writing: “This has nothing to do with the Beowulf you were forced to read in Junior High School. It’s all about eating, drinking, killing, and fornicating.”52 The original Old English poem Beowulf has plenty of eating, drinking, and killing. It is overt fornication that it lacks, and which therefore most differentiates the film that Gaiman co-wrote, one which makes Hrothgar and Beowulf the lovers of Grendel’s mother, and the respective fathers of Grendel and the dragon. The use of sexuality to make the imaginative seem more real is by no means exclusive to Gaiman’s work, nor limited to the fantasy genre. For example, its constant and often gruesome involvement in the storylines of such successful television crime franchises as CSI, Criminal Minds, and Law and Order suggests that its basis in biology, combined with its complex scientific, psychological, and cultural ramifications, makes it an extremely effective hook for engaging secular audiences. Gaiman’s use of sexuality has similarly disturbing examples,53 but the manner in which his writings unite the elements of sex and mythology has far greater effect than gritty credibility. In Pygmalionlike fashion, Gaiman’s imagination first sculpts then embraces his most important mythical figures, to the extent that many of his central human protagonists and other characters are only partially human. These include Shadow of American Gods, Charlie Nancy of Anansi Boys, Tristran Thorn of Stardust, and, to varying degrees, Rose Walker, Jed Walker, and Daniel Hall of The Sandman. As one of the Three tells Calliope in The Sandman, “[t]here are few of the old powers willing or able to meddle in mortals’ affairs in these days,”54 but of those obsolescent gods and spirits who seek to remain active and known in the modern day, their most powerful form of intervention seems to be intercourse. Whether through the offspring it produces or the conflicts it creates, this communication in many ways moves Gaiman’s narratives towards their conclusions, and illustrates the various states of lordship and slavery in which the gods find themselves visà-vis humankind.