The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  With rescue her joie de vivre returns, though The Eremite still holds her symbol. Unperturbed, Didi/Death finds a cheap facsimile of her Ankh at a market stall. As soon as she wears it the object becomes the symbol of Death, rather than the cheap copy that it was previously. Here the symbol does not have implicit power, but by association with the larger concept it gains meaning and power. Dream’s stone, too, is explicitly stated to be not the source, but a means of focusing his power. Dream is Dream, no other symbol being capable of embodying his nature.

  Twins and Dual Identities There is a clear relationship between subtype Didi and super-type Death, which compels us to compare and contrast them. Such contrasting pairs — and especially twins – appear regularly in Gaiman’s work, often in the sense that de Nooy understands them: as “sites of contestation in the struggle to claim legitimacy for particular perspectives,” 5 representatives of contrasting or conflicting points of view. In this sense we are returned to the earlier idea of multiple facets of the same super-type.

  We can see this in the most prevalent and intriguing pair in The Sandman: Despair and Desire. Though referred to as twins, on the surface they could not appear more different: Desire is tall and thin, for instance, where Despair is squat and fat. Desire is meddling and hectoring, Despair depressed and solitary. In what respect, then, are they twins? The link is perhaps best explained through Zizik, who suggests that the function of desire “is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”6 So it is at the level of metaphor that they are twins; emotional desire wants only to replicate itself over and again, meaning it can never be satisfied; the inevitable outcome, then, must be emotional despair, mirrored in Desire’s twin shadows: “one black and sharp-edged, the other translucent and forever wavering, like heat haze.”7 We know what we want, but that want cannot be satisfied. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls this ‘object petit-a’8 (object little-a), something outside the body that is craved but cannot be possessed. So here we have Despair and Desire inextricably linked, twinned at the level of metaphor.

  Abandoning Despair for now, we can also think of Desire as embodying two natures: that of woman and man. Karl Jung, founder of analytic psychology, believed that there were certain universal ways of thinking that manifested differently in different cultures, but which share an affinity, an idea later developed by Campbell. Among these universal ideas, Jung suggested, is the concept of Anima and Animus. Jung believed that every culture would have an idea about what it was to be female and male, and that characteristics you shared with the opposite sex would find psychological outlet. This is the Anima and Animus; the totality of femininity in the male psyche and the totality of masculinity in the female psyche, respectively. This is equally explored in the characters of Wanda (a transsexual woman) and Hal (who performs in drag); both give play to the Anima whilst being biologically male. Gaiman posits gender as biological accident, while identity is a matter of choice. Desire’s androgyny represents this in extremis, since s/he is simultaneously both and neither, the Anima and Animus perfectly present or perfectly absent.

  Pursuing this idea of a divided self leads us to consider another pair of metaphorical twins: Delirium and Delight. Following the same logic, we can look at Delight (precursor to Delirium) not as precedent, but as twin. Delirium can be defined as both an acute disturbance of mind and a state of wild ecstasy and excitement, alluded to when Delirium is accused of being “E’d off her bonce.” 9 Thus Delirium and Delight are two sides of the same idea, a dualistic nature hinted at by their heterochromatic (twocolored) eyes. Destruction later extends this idea of embodying opposites: “Our sister defines life, just as despair defines hope, or desire defines hatred, or as destiny defines freedom.” 10 He is Destruction, yes, but he is also Creation, evidenced by his keen interest in (if not concomitant skill with) cooking, sculpture, and painting. When Dream subsequently asks what he then defines, Destruction suggests reality. Prosaic? By no means; Dream is shown repeatedly to be the Endless most wedded to his function (save, perhaps, Destiny), the entirety of The Sandman arguably being about his voluntary abdication of responsibilities. Death seems to concur, stating elsewhere that without limits, life has no meaning; 11 she is later seen granting the gift of life to the golem Eblis O’Shaughnessy. We can explore these ideas in more depth through the theory of binary oppositions.

  Mirrors: Binary Opposition The theory of binary opposition arose from the Structuralist movement, which sought to understand the world as a system of signs.12 A sign, in this context, is made up of two parts: a signifier (what we perceive) and a signified (what we understand by it); for example, the name Dream, despite being five arbitrary shapes we call letters, conjures in our mind the image of a tall, thin man with pale skin and strange eyes. The word Dream here is a signifier, the ‘anthropomorphic manifestation’ it makes you think of is the signified.

  Binary opposition, “the generation of meaning in one term or sign by reference to another mutually exclusive term,”13refers to two signs which, by virtue of being opposites, define one another. Recall Destruction’s speech: can something be simultaneously alive and dead? No; they are opposites, the limits of death defined by life.

  Many mythologies are underpinned by such oppositions — in Western Christianity, for example, God and the Devil represent good and evil, Adam and Eve masculinity and femininity, respectively. Around these opposites cluster other, related ideas: cruelty is an ‘evil’ trait, so the Devil is cruel; kindness is a ‘good’ trait, so God must be kind. The angels in Good Omens emerge from this tradition, their comic efforts to aid and hinder humanity respectively representative of their good/evil natures. It is worth noting here that, as with other Gaiman works, neither character is wholly good or evil, though the comedy comes from our polarized understanding of these archetypal characters.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss thought such binary opposition intrinsic to myth, calling it “an inherent feature of the means invented by nature to make possible the functioning of language and thought.”14 He believed that we use opposites (good/evil, friend/foe, night/day) to make sense of and define the world. By way of illustration, let us look at two indicative pairings from The Sandman: Chaos and Order, Brute and Glob.

  Chaos is defined as an absence of Order, making them classic opposites. When they are introduced in Season of Mists, their responses to the availability of Hell are placed alongside one another on the page, allowing us to contrast the clipped speech of Order, which omits unnecessary terms and is illustrated almost as a Mondrian painting, with the semi-intelligible, fractured world of Chaos. What is important is that Chaos, despite being fragmentary, does still resemble Order, if a distorted version thereof, emphasized by their mirrored panels.

  There are other explorations of these binary oppositions. Tall, thin Cain is associated with murder and secrets while his short, rotund brother Abel, the victim, is associated with truth. Daniel’s white robes when he becomes the Dream King directly contrast with the darker robes of his predecessor. Even landscapes can mirror this model: in MirrorMask it is shadows that consume the city of light; many of the stories in The Sandman take place in run-down tenements and motels, in stark contrast to the dramatic castles and spectacular environs that make up the mythic landscapes.

  In A Doll’s House, Brute and Glob are nightmares who, having kidnapped Hector Hall, plan to install him as ruler of the Dreaming. Brute is physically strong and slow-witted while Glob, essentially a brain with stick-like legs, is shown to be conniving and cunning. We see this correlation again in other Gaiman characters, such as Croup and Vandemar in Neverwhere. Here we see two cultural oppositions — weakness and strength, naivety and cunning — intertwined, as they often are. But why are they intertwined? What is this correlation between physical weakness and mental acuity, strength and naivety?

  This hints at one of the intriguing questions raised by Jacques Derrida. A member of the Poststructuralist movement, which sought to question and critique its pr
edecessor, Derrida queried the reality of these intertwined opposites. Firstly, he suggested that in any pairing there will be a ‘dominant’ member. In the West, for example, he suggests that in the male/female dynamic there existed a “violent hierarchy… [in which] one of the two terms govern(s) the other,”15 with women defined by what they were not (men). Secondly, he suggested that such terms were so value-laden that they automatically carried cultural assumptions with them. In the example above, strong/naïve and weak/clever are bound together, despite there being no implicit reason to connect the two.

  We can explore this idea through Ken and Barbie, first introduced in A Doll’s House. On the surface gender seems to be the only thing that differentiates them, emphasized by the identical clothes and the manner in which they complete one another’s sentences. Their contrasting dreams— one pornographically capitalist and lustful, the other a whimsical fairy tale—show them to be very different behind the superficial similarities. Similarly, in American Gods we have Czernobog and Bielebog, the black and white god (respectively) of Slavic mythology. Winter god Czernobog is cantankerous, moody and aggressive, while springtime Bielebog is playful and friendly. Even landscapes can mirror, in this description of hell as “Heaven’s dark reflection. Like a landscape inverted in water.” 16

  It is often from such cultural expectations that Gaiman derives his most surprising characters. Death, in his mythology, is compassionate rather than something to be feared, while life is often shown to be complex and cruel. In “Snow, Glass, Apples” the villain becomes the heroine. In The Graveyard Book a place of traditional fear and threat becomes a place of security and safety. By inverting our expectations—caring ghosts, innocent heroines as creepy, supernatural figures—our understanding of what can appear to be two dimensional archetypes is deepened.

  In his Morphology of the Folk Tale, structuralist Vladimir Propp took one hundred Russian folk tales and dissolved them down to eight constituent characters,17 suggesting that the interaction between these kinds of characters was what drove folk tales, which could then be clad in whatever way the storyteller chose—rather like a range of different colored cars may share the same engine and basic components. Certainly there is a correlation between this idea and the super-type/subtype relationship, with the Hero—one of Propp’s own categories—well represented in characters as diverse as Odysseus and Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaeffer in Predator.

  Again, where Gaiman differs is in his tendency to subvert rather than mirror these traditions. He is playful, subverting our expectations for narrative effect. In Good Omens he gives us friendly demons. In American Gods we meet a fatherly god compromised by fear. A Game of You offers us sympathetic witches. These are recognizable archetypes, but by changing heroes for villains (whilst still crucially retaining those characteristics that first made them heroes) he forces us to question the archetypes on which we generally rely. Witness this most spectacularly in “Snow, Glass, Apples,” where a mirror is held to our expectations of wicked stepmothers and naïve, lovely daughters. In Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman cites as a significant influence Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming,” a short story in which a human boy born to a pantheon of supernatural creatures gathers his family to mourn his inevitable death. Here the polarities of aberration and normalcy are revered. The supernatural becomes commonplace, monsters friends. Our expectations are subverted.

  Mirrors: Analogues and Real World Counterparts The Sandman offers an opportunity to explore in more depth how Gaiman’s work sets up comparisons between our collective understanding of a character and his own, unique reading. Eschewing the option to rehabilitate a retired DC character – to create a new subtype — Gaiman instead positioned his Sandman as progenitor — super-type — to the original Wesley Dodds. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters of our common cultural inheritance — the royal court of Faerie — come to see a play in which they are mimicked by actors, with some characters even objecting to the manner in which they are portrayed. Rather than parody or mimicry, Gaiman is engaged in a kind of cultural retcon (retroactive continuity), altering the histories of extant characters to fit with his own burgeoning mythology. Likewise his Cain, Abel, and Eve, also existing DC characters drawn from the common pool of myth, have now become the canonical originals.

  Another example of this intercession occurs in Fables and Reflections. At the opening of “Orpheus,” Eurydice is bitten on the ankle by a snake on the day of her wedding to Orpheus. From here the tale continues largely as originally written until, having washed up on a beach, Orpheus is almost bitten by a snake. This would be a perfect and poetically circular end to his tale, but Dream intercedes, kicking aside the snake and forcing his son to live on. In this Gaiman interrupts the myth, taking ownership of it. Doctor Destiny — referred to in the comic as D — is also an older character resurrected and complicated by his presence in The Sandman, his back story and history filled out in the comic. This material came to represent canon, an example of further ‘retconning’.

  In this way, Gaiman’s characters can be seen as analogs of existing ones, sharing a family resemblance. We see this in Urania Blackwell, 18 whose complex, agoraphobic personality expands greatly on her original comics’ persona. It is present too in Prez, 19 originally conceived as a oneoff parody of 60s student politics, now retrospectively recontextualized as a Christ allegory. In a way Prez’s frame story illustrates Gaiman’s process of appropriation and adaptation, the scribe whose stories carry amend figures from our pool of common myth.

  A real-world consequence of this is the question of copyright. While the mythological figures may appear under their own name, issues with ownership mean that characters like Spiderman’s Peter Parker appear as Perry Porter. The analog in these cases is concealed by an adapted name, but we know who they are because of a shared cultural context, the aforementioned pool of common myth. Gaiman himself spoke of his frustration that the Bizarros’ from Superman could not be used, necessitating the analogous creation of the Weirdzos (for all intents and purposes the same characters).

  There is something appropriate about this change, however. Wanda, in whose dream these characters appear, has dim recollections of these figures, and their behavior — darker, more adult when compared to their more playful actions in Superman — seems more appropriate rather than the real thing, under these specific circumstances. Subtypes of the same idea, Weirdzos are the Bizarros as seen through a distorting mirror: simultaneously familiar, yet creepily different.

  Distorting Mirrors: Nemesis and Shadow The Freudian concept of the Unheimlic, or “unhomely” refers to the feeling of unease generated by precisely this contrast between familiarity and difference. More specifically, it is the dread caused by “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar.”20 Gaiman-esque tropes like the rendering of juvenile characters in an adult way, children stumbling onto dark mirrors of their own world or the idea of our own familiar body suddenly behaving abnormally (“…but then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still…”)21 seem to invite such parallels. An aspect of the unheimlich particularly worthy of more careful study is the doppelgänger (German: ‘double walker’), an uncannily similar or identical person whose appearance is seen as a symbol of impending doom. Sometimes the connection is more coincidental — a shared birthday, for example — but more often the similarities are starker and less ambiguous.

  In MirrorMask for example, Helena, peering through a paper window from the mirror world to her own, sees her doppelgänger in her bedroom, arguing with her father. When she spies Helena, the double begins to tear the paper world apart, in turn dismantling the mirror world in which the real Helena is trapped. In Coraline, too, the eponymous protagonist passes through a doorway to an idealised version of her own world where all is perfection—save that everybody has buttons for eyes. During the most hallucinatory and paranoid sequence in Neverwhere, Richard believes he is speaking to his friends until they ask him to touch their faces, at which point th
ey distort “like warm bubblegum.”22

  In each case, there is a paranoia associated with the double, and consequences for questioning their reality. When doppelgänger Helena spies her progenitor, for example, she begins to tear the world apart. Equally when in Coraline the eponymous heroine refuses to become part of the Other Mother’s family — to make it her home — she starts a train of events that lead to the world’s destruction. In Neverwhere Richard’s discovery that he is indeed hallucinating almost destroys his sanity. The idea that an enemy might conceal themselves perfectly arises again in the almost Capgrasian perfection of Black Orchid’s disguise, allowing her to precisely mimic the behaviours of those close to her quarry. Perfect disguise is equally deployed by Loki in American Gods and The Sandman, as Low Key Lyesmith and when disguising himself as Susano-o-no-Mikoto, respectively. In the latter case Morpheus creates a duplicate made of ‘dreamstuff ’ to take Loki’s place, in return for a (then) unspecified favour.

  The doppelgänger makes another, similarly threatening appearance in the form of the nemesis. In current usage nemesis means a perfectly matched archenemy, but in classical literature it is a spectre of divine vengeance and restorer of balance. It is as vengeful restorer of balance that the term is used in The Sandman, when Lyta Hall summons The Kindly Ones to punish Dream for killing her son — though it is for the death of his other son, Orpheus, that he is truly punished. It is in this sense that Freud, after Rank, suggests that the double, created in childhood as an “energetic denial of the power of death,” becomes the opposite as we grow older — a harbinger of our future demise.23

  According to G.R. Thompson, Gothic literature is characterized by just such “irreconcilable dualities,”24by which token Dream is very much in the mould of a Gothic protagonist. Thompson suggests that Gothic literature presents conflicting ideas which the protagonist often cannot resolve. Dream is unable to directly abandon his role, as Destruction did. Instead he may be relying on the Furies (who appear as nemesis-like shadows as they set about dismantling the Dreaming) to facilitate his own desire for death by proxy. This would make sense given that, as Gaiman summarizes the plot of The Sandman in the foreword to Endless Nights, “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.” One so dedicated to his duty would need an equal nemesis to make him abandon it, a harbinger fit to restore the balance.