The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  At the crucial climax of her tale, Mister Fox attempts to counteract the effect her tale has with the iconic refrain so well known from the original tale: “It is not so, It was not so, And god forbid it should be so.” In the context of the narrative event, it shows him unsuccessfully making an addition to what the narrative means. His final attempt to deny her narrative is interspersed with her assertions of the truth and of her calling him the names of other Mister Fox types: “You Bluebeard,” “You Gillesde-Rais.”29 This dramatic and uneven call-and-response, so reminiscent of the pale woman’s ability to lead the room in the clapping song of “A fox went out” but here with much more sinister implications, highlights the way that she has effectively commandeered the narrative potential of the moment. The aggregate power of these inter-textual images of murderous villains lies directly before her reveal of the “proof ” of her tale. By seizing the narrative moment, the beloved is able to define the parameters of reality for her audience.

  Through the prism of a doubly narrated tale (the man and his beloved) we see the end of his story in a drastically different manner. “The White Road” shows a radically shifted version of the tale of Mister Fox in which the power that the tale-teller wields transforms the meaning of truth, where fiction becomes a death sentence.

  Yet despite the beloved’s power in this moment, there is one final image before “his tale is effectively at an end.”30 This image is that of the pale woman amusedly leaving and the narrator’s recognition of her fox-like nature when he sees “the tail between her legs.”31 This second reveal, in the indication that this woman is a trickster figure recognizable by her concealed tail, hearkens back to Mister Fox’s failed attempt to start a story of his own and reiterates his failure at commandeering the narrative. Her newly revealed role as the perhaps ultimately controlling trickster of this piece drastically shifts the way we relate to the hunter/hunted motif and raises questions about the trustworthiness of all of the narrators we are presented with in this story. No one is clearly and unquestionably confirmed guilty and no one is absolved: all we have is a series of intermeshing accusations through story.

  The unjustified and complex trust that the maid in the pale woman’s story places in her lover, where it is said “she believed him. / Or she believed that she believed,”32 reflects the way we as readers are asked to ponder how belief interweaves with assertion and how truth and complementary doubt are constructed through narration. In this way, the poem uses the availability of variation in the Mister Fox tales to explore truth as a negotiable concept and the power that the storyteller has in setting the parameters of the experience.

  “Locks” The final piece, the poem “Locks,”33 is not an adaptation in the sense of the previous two short fictions but is instead a piece about tale-telling itself with a familiar fairy tale at its center. Based around “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” the tale is familiar enough for the reader that basic refrains from the original are all that emanates from the page and the poem becomes an exploration of generations, growing knowledge, and the obligations we share as familial and social creatures as we build ever shifting relationships through story. The poem plays upon the thoughts that a father has as he retells the story of Goldilocks with his two-yearold daughter. It weaves together refrains from the tale itself, his spoken interaction with his daughter, and his own thoughts on this interaction. Gaiman shows a father who sees in the telling of this well-known children’s story the opportunity to reflect upon his daughter’s future growth and their changing relationships to the perspectives within the story they tell.

  As the pair begins telling the story of Goldilocks, the poem shows narration as a negotiable event between father and daughter. The girl insists her details are the way the story is to be told and the father gently acquiesces to her certainty. This emblem of the changeability of the story and the way that we interact through story seems to lie at the heart of the issues that Gaiman explores in this personal image of father and daughter sharing a narrative moment. The negotiation that starts off the poem becomes an appropriate context for the way that we ourselves develop and change, and Gaiman emblematizes his and his daughter’s physical and emotional growth through the images of the changeable story.

  Through the poem, narrative is shown as changeable, both in the negotiation the daughter creates and in the literary history of the tale itself. Gaiman uses a key change in the form of the story’s literary history to contribute to this. In Robert Southey’s original literary version of 1837, it was an old woman rather than a young girl who featured in the tale. Over the next seventy-five years, reworkings of the tale changed the main character to the now familiar girl with golden hair.34 In this change from the original literary version and in the negotiation between father and daughter we see an adaptability in the tale that exemplifies the distinction that folklorists make in regard to the way oral folklore functions.35

  Despite the move to a young blonde protagonist, the old woman of Southey’s version lingers in Gaiman’s retelling and this acknowledgement of the changes in the tale provide imagery for the changes from childhood and beyond. Within the poem this manifests itself as a focus upon hair as the image of change and maturation. The narrator says:

  I remember, as I tell it, that the locks of Southey’s heroine had silvered with age. The Old Woman and the Three Bears…Perhaps they had been golden once, when she was a child.36

  This self-conscious inter-textuality as a way to ponder changes in the shifting nature of the story in its own history allows the narrator to explore the future changes in his daughter. As Gaiman says in the introduction, “The form of the story and what happened was right, but people knew that the story needed to be about a little girl rather than an old woman, and when they retold it, they put her in,” indicating the importance of the adaptability of these tales as need arises. This is touched upon in the poem in relation to the daughter’s growth:

  The repetition echoes down the years. When your children grow, when your dark locks begin to silver, when you are an old woman, alone with your three bears, what will you see? What stories will you tell?37

  This pondering of his daughter’s future experience with her own narrative potential is complicated by the shifting nature of the way they relate to the story as a parallel to their own stage in life. This occurs throughout the poem: the narrator at times identifies both with Baby Bear and Father Bear and likens his own father to a bear.38 These changing identifications with the story are further highlighted by the potential for understanding the same story lines in a different manner:

  They reach the bedroom. ‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed.’39 And here I hesitate, echoes of old jokes, soft-core cartoons, crude headlines, in my head.

  One day your mouth will curl at that line. A loss of interest, later, innocence.

  Innocence, as if it were a commodity.40

  The concern involved in his daughter’s maturation through the loss of innocence as shown here is added to through an additional pun on the idea of the title ‘locks.’ This occurs directly before considering his daughter’s loss of innocence: “The bears go upstairs hesitantly, their house now feels desecrated. They realize what locks are for.”41

  The bears’ sense of violation here is directly followed by the idea of the daughter growing into sexual maturity and potential to understand the bears’ violation in light of innuendo. The narrator speaks of the wish, repeated from his father, of protecting one’s child from the implicit pain of experience: “But we make our own mistakes. We sleep/ unwisely.”42 By playing upon the idea that locks, as hair, are a physical symbol of maturation and that locks, as a form of home security, are a way to ensure (or hope that we have ensured) our family’s physical safety, the poem highlights the way in which our family’s emotional safety cannot be secured. After all, “we make our own mistakes.” This is developed at the end of the poem as the narrator continues his vigilance despite these inabilities. He says:

  These days my sympathy�
��s with Father Bear. Before I leave my house I lock the door, and check each bed and chair on my return.43 But the deployment of this secondary meaning for ‘locks’ is complicated by the fact that it places the identification of the narrator and the daughter in different relationships within the story. She is the young girl and will be the old woman, they both have been Baby Bear, and he has been the Father Bear. This creates antithetical viewpoints as they occupy various places in the story. The circularity of perspective here with each new retelling of the story indicates the openness of the narrative opportunity. The way that the telling of the story is an active and recurring event is important to untangling these antithetical perspectives. A told story, a narratively dynamic story, allows for meaning to change in the most meaningful way. This is reinforced by the daughter’s call of “Again. Again. Again,” asking for the tale to be retold, which is reflected by the father’s tripled refrain of “Again” as he checks the security of his home.44 Because each telling allows the opportunity to occupy a new place in the story, the dynamism of narration is a boon and the relationships that are established as the story is told can evolve as both father and daughter change and grow.

  In the introduction to the poem, Gaiman says of fairy tales that: They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)45

  The way that tale-telling connects with past generations is one that is directly linked to the nature of repetition in the telling of the tale. The opening of the poem is “We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply, not as father and daughter./ I tell it to you for the hundredth time.”46 Later in the poem, the narrator says “The repetition echoes down the years,”47 indicating both the repetitive acts of father’s wishes for children’s and perhaps also the way this is reflected as the familiar refrains of the story are repeated at each new telling.

  The generational repetition throughout the poem, and the invocation of a protectiveness that cannot ultimately be successful (the father may check the locks but his daughter will still “make her own mistakes”) come together in a way that shows the repeated act of storytelling to be a meaningful way to process these ideas. Through story, there is perhaps a way to rebuild some of the desecration implicit in experience. The repetitive nature of the storytelling and thus the ability for both to join in with the common refrains of the story is employed in a meaningful way in the poem. At one particular point, the two of them contributing to the story takes on the hint of a religious call and response. “‘All up’ you say. A response it is,/ Or an amen.”48 This implication is coupled with the way that experience is presented in the poem as connected with the bears’ feeling that “their house now feels desecrated.”49The religious tone of the storytelling repetition here perhaps hints at a redemptive process. In this way, the daughter may lose “the conviction of all two-year-olds”50 as she grows and changes through experience, as her father has done before her. Despite these inevitable changes, however, there can be a redemptive process in the familiar return to the repetition of shared storytelling.

  The tension in these repetitive cycles is maintained through to the end of the poem as every call for ‘again’ that the daughter makes, is matched by the father’s assertion that he will check the locks and beds and chairs “Again. Again. Again.” Though the poem doesn’t resolve the anxieties implicit in these changing relationships, it does point to the ongoing act of a lifetime of storytelling. Whether this story will be retold between the two of them or, when the girl’s locks have “darkened to silver,” there is a new audience; the repetition of storytelling through generations will continue to be a meaningful way to express our social relationships.

  Conclusion Through these three short fictions, Gaiman explores the juncture between the fairy tale tradition and the ongoing meaning of storytelling in our lives. Though “Snow, Glass, Apples,” “The White Road,” and “Locks” deal with this topic in different manners, they all play upon the fertile space between the familiar repetitiveness of well-known tales and the active evolution between teller, audience, and tale. Gaiman draws on the concept of storytelling and a storytelling frame for many of his works, and this is certainly not solely relegated to stories from the classic fairy tale tradition. Conversely, not every fiction of his that evokes fairy tale will necessarily directly engage with issues of tale transmission.

  However, within his larger approach to the role of author as storyteller and text as engagement with reader, the fairy tale tradition lends itself to the conversation very readily, and by focusing upon this particular prism we can come to understand some of his thoughts on the topic and how he employs these tales for particular narrative strategies. None of the three resolve their message definitively, and this helps to expose the way that narrative, especially indeterminate narrative, constructs meaning and complicates it. There is a great deal of space in Gaiman’s work to further explore the issues touched on here, but, with these short fictions, it has been shown that he utilizes the relationship between fairy tales and storytelling to explore the crucial way that meaning is constructed through the narrative. Gaiman seems to be, in his short fictions at least, intently focused on the act of tale transmission itself and exploits fairy tales from the classic core of the tradition as a particular medium to explore these issues of storytelling as a modern-day act.

  In his introduction to “Locks,” Gaiman says, “Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them.”51For “Snow, Glass, Apples” he reiterates a similar idea, saying, “I like to think of this story as a virus. Once you’ve read it, you may never be able to read the original story in the same way again.”52 In both of these images of tale-telling as a virus the image is one that is inherently about transmission. Viral story is a concept that focuses the organic and active nature of a self-replicating process as a means of understanding our own social interactions and the compulsion to continue the familiar repetition of a good story. As Gaiman says in his introduction to “Locks,” “I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.”53

  ____________________

  1 Gaiman, “Reflections on Myth,” 80-1.

  2 Dowd, 103-20, for a discussion of similar themes in Gaiman’s graphic novels.

  3 Warner, xix-xx. For similar assertions, see: Robert Darnton, 285; Zipes, 9.

  4 Gaiman, “Happily Ever After,” The Guardian.

  5 Gaiman, “Snow, Glass, Apples,” in Smoke and Mirrors, 371-84.

  6 For a full discussion of adaptations from the point of view of the Queen, see: David Calvin, 231-245.

  7 For a discussion of Gaiman’s use of vampire motifs in this story, see: Jessica Tiffin, “Blood on the Snow: Inverting “Snow White,” 220-230.

  8 Slabbert, 77-9.

  9 Gaiman, Mirrors, 374.

  10 Gaiman, Mirrors, 372.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Gaiman, Mirrors, 380.

  14 Gaiman, Mirrors, 372.

  15 Philip, 109.

  16 Gaiman, Mirrors, 384.

  17 Gaiman, Mirrors, 384.

  18 Gaiman, Mirrors, 384.

  19 Slabbert, 79-80.

  20 Gaiman, Mirrors, 384.

  21 Gaiman, “An Interview with Neil Gaiman,” in Smoke and Mirrors.

  22 Gaiman, “The White Road,” in Smoke and Mirrors, 119-30.

  23 Philip, 159.

  24 Gaiman, Mirrors, 119.

  25 Gaiman, Mirrors, 22.

  26 The Mister Fox variants can be seen in Philip, 158-92. As Gaiman cites Philip’s collection as the inspiration for “Snow, Glass, Apples,” it is quite possible he was aware of these particular versions from the same collection. A variant of the “A fox went out” song can be seen in Opie, Nursery RhymesNursery Rhymes

  75.
The statue of a boy eviscerated by the hidden fox is based upon Plutarch’s Lives: “So seriously did the Lacedæmonian children go about their stealing, that a youth, having stolen a young fox and hid it under his coat, suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen.”

  27 Gaiman, Mirrors, 122.

  28 Gaiman, Mirrors, 123

  29 Gaiman, Mirrors, 128.

  30 Gaiman, Mirrors, 22.

  31 Gaiman, Mirrors, 129.

  32 Gaiman, Mirrors, 120.

  33 Gaiman, “Locks,” in Fragile Things, 233-36.

  34 Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales,199.

  See, for example, Vladimir Propp, “Folklore and Literature,” 380. “Folklore also presupposes two agents, but different agents, namely, the performer and the listener, opposing each other directly, or rather without a mediating link. […] If the reader of a work of literature is a powerless censor and critic devoid of authority, anyone listening to folklore is a potential future performer, who, in turn, consciously or unconsciously, will introduce changes into the work.”