The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  The nemesis as symbol of our own wild and untamed desires — what Freud would call the Id — is another common trope. Witness Alan Moore’s reading of Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example. The double allows us not only to “confront and recognize the dark aspect of one’s personality,” as Ozolins suggests,25 but also to show another facet of our personality. At the House on the Rock, Shadow simultaneously sees gods in their human and divine aspects: irreconcilable dualities indeed. In Anansi Boys Graham Coats — a weasel in the metaphorical sense — becomes a stoat. In Odd and the Frost Giants, Odd meets the gods of the Norse pantheon in the guise of animals appropriate to their natures (Loki the cunning fox, for example). A double as a facet of our personality can also be seen in two sets of warring brothers: the Anansi Boys, with Charles Nancy forced to endure what to him feel like mortifications (Karaoke, among other things) but which his twin would have seen as deep pleasures, and Cain and Abel, whose relationship also echoes binary opposition (secrets/truth, victim/perpetrator, brave/coward). It is perhaps for this reason that Cluracan’s nemesis —released from a mirror — is identical to his creator, the fairy being mostly Id anyway.

  Familiarity with one’s reflection is used also to show self-knowledge or self-delusion. In A Game of You, Barbie looks in a mirror and doesn’t recognize herself, foreshadowing the conflict of identity that will form the basis for the remaining book; in “Façade,” Urania Blackwell attempts to hide her face, achieving release only when she presents it to her creator. In “Troll Bridge” a man volunteers to take over the job of bridge troll,26 in doing so allowing another to take over his human body; in Brief Lives, the Alder Man becomes a bear, literally shedding his skin. In the latter cases the protagonists, knowing themselves, become their doubles by choice.

  In the above cases we see the idea of the shadow, the Id, as our true self, unmediated by social niceties and honest about our natures. Surrealism sought this liberty, to express ideas “in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”27 Rather than be limited by our mere physical nature, Gaiman’s characters are able to shape themselves to represent themselves truthfully (as possessing multiple aspects) rather than as a single entity; or, as Morpheus puts it: “Dream the world. Not this pallid shadow of reality. Dream the world the way it truly is.”28 It is interesting that Dream himself casts a shadow “when it occurs to him to do so,”29 uniting the Unheimlich and the surreal; he may appear human but he is not. So sometimes the double is welcome, as in “The Wedding Present” (where a woman chooses a troubled life with a living husband over her own) or the voluntary transformation of “Troll Bridge” or Morpheus’ voluntary abdication/reinstatement. More often they are villainous mirrors of those we know, as in the case of Coraline’s other mother, Mr. Punch (the suppressed Id of Violent Cases), or the zoomorphism of Graham Coats.

  Mirrors: Both Sides of the Curtain In American Gods, Shadow and Wednesday are on the run, driving a Winnebago on the interstate, when they spy a roadblock ahead. Ignorant of any alternative routes, Wednesday has Shadow continue driving, as he traces complex shapes on the dashboard, “making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzle.”30 At the last minute he has Shadow turn right, taking him beyond our world into a place he later calls ‘backstage’ or, at another point, ‘behind the curtain.’

  Fantasy and science fiction imply two worlds: our own, the one in which we are reading, and the other — the world of aliens, myths, fairies and gods. Whatever its function —whether as metaphor, to mirror the conflicts, triumphs and disasters, or to offer polarized versions of our own (echoing the idea of binary opposition) —it remains inaccessible; the world of the fantastic separated from our own. This is not the case in Gaiman’s fiction, which cuts through that barrier, breaking a hole in the wall between our worlds (or the wall in Wall, if we recall Stardust).

  He is not unique in this — the idea of a rift between the worlds, a means by which creatures can pass from one to the other, is a common trope — but Gaiman is different. He rarely follows the conventional logic of an alien invasion or demonic incursion, relying on pat villainous plan or shadowy corporation bent on “closing the rift”; he explores what might pass through that barrier, how the idiosyncratic creatures of our collective unconscious — every supernatural being, god, nightmare—might cope if they found themselves in our world. This interzone, where gods and mortals walk together, can be explored through the idea of liminality.

  Liminality literally refers to a threshold, where two planes intersect. In Stardust, for example, the hole in the wall is a liminal space, through which mythological creatures and Victorian mortals may pass. The same logic applies to Wolves in the Walls. This threshold need not be literal: in The Graveyard Book, Nobody Owens is granted the freedom of the graveyard, which removes him from our world and makes him invisible to Jack.

  Mirrors perform this function for Despair: despite her realm being one location she is able to look through any mirror, just as Door’s (Neverwhere) family home has doors that open into every location in London Below. In “Dream of a Thousand Cats” it is a critical mass of cat dreamers who are required to transform our world into one in which we are playthings for feline overlords. For Richard Mayhew (Neverwhere) it is merely laying hands upon Door that precipitates his transfer from a denizen of London Above to London Below. In Coraline, the reference is more explicitly Carollian, with a small door leading to a mirror world that recalls the miniature doors, rabbit holes, and mirrors that allow Alice access to Wonderland.

  There are some worlds, however, which exist as models or inaccessible archetypes. In “Ramadan” we see Baghdad at its height, a city which the Caliph believes can grow no better. Desperate to keep it perfect forever, he gives it to Dream, who takes it into the realm of stories, to inspire dreamers forever. A similar sentiment is expressed in Books of Magic:

  The true Atlantis is inside you, just as it’s inside all of us. The sunken land is lost beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds. Atlantis is the shadow-land, the birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the west that is lost to us, but remains forever, true birthplace and true goal.31

  Like the Endless, these cities exist as archetypes of which we see mere facets. In Plato’s famous allegory, we are asked to imagine prisoners chained in a cave who have spent their entire lives watching shadows pass across the wall. When one of their number frees himself, he sees the true things that created those shadows and is irrevocably changed. There are the real things that cast the shadows, which we cannot change; then there are the shadows themselves, which we can interpret in the same way we turn vapour in the sky into rabbits and sheep and faces.

  _ ___________________

  1 Clute and Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 422.

  2 Andrea, “The Fifty Names of Marduk in Enma eliš,” 507-519.

  3 Gaiman, Mists, 12.

  4 Neville , 107.

  5 Nooy, 164-5.

  6 Zizek, 39.

  7 Gaiman, Mists, 11.

  8 Lacan, 1998, 62.

  9 Gaiman, Brief Lives, 7.

  10 Gaiman, Brief Lives, 16.

  11 Gaiman, High Cost, 19.

  12 Broekman, 23.

  13 Edgar and Sedgwick, 1997, 28.

  14 Levi-Strauss, The Naked Man, Volume 4, 559.

  15 Derrida, 1981, 41.

  16 Gaiman, Mists, 10.

  17 Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 79-80.

  18 Gaiman, Sandman #20.

  19 Gaiman, Sandman #54.

  20 Royle, The uncanny: an introduction, 1.

  21 Gaiman, Kindly Ones, 14.

  22 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 247.

  23 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 235.

  24 G.R. Thompson, Gothic Imaginations: Essays in Dark Romanticism, 34.

  25 Ozolins, 103-110.

  26 Gaiman, Introduction 1999, 59.

  27 Breton, 26.

  28
Gaiman, Mists, 17.

  29 Gaiman, Mists, 12.

  30 Gaiman, Gods, 343.

  31 Gaiman, Books of Magic 1, 26.

  Through a Telescope Backwards: Tripping the Light Fantastic in the Gaiman Universe

  Kristine Larsen Like J.R.R. Tolkien, an author to whom he is often compared, Neil Gaiman is a master myth-maker. He takes age-old motifs and breathes new life into them, giving them a fresh face and a modern voice. He creates new fantastical worlds—what Tolkien called Secondary worlds—into which the reader can immerse themselves while willingly suspending all disbelief. The reader loses him or herself within this Secondary world, and at the conclusion of the experience, the reader finds him or herself reemerging into our primary existence with a keener understanding of both human nature and human interactions with the natural world. Like all great literature, Gaiman’s works seamlessly combine reality with fiction, and in his able hands, even the most mundane and obvious aspects of the world become shiny and new when viewed through his personal lens. Light is an example of such an everyday occurrence that becomes sculpted into something novel and unexpected within Gaiman’s worlds.

  In a 1951 letter, J.R.R. Tolkien explained that “Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed.”1 Central to the creation of the universe in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis is the deity’s utterance “Let there be light!” and the subsequent separation of the light from the darkness.2 According to the Icelandic creation myth recounted in the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturleson, there was once a southern land of fire and light separated from the northern land of ice and darkness by the Guinnungagap, the primordial void. In the mixing of these two primeval opposites, life first took form as the frost giant Ymir.3 In Gaiman’s modern creation myth MirrorMask a troubled young girl, Helena Campbell, separates herself (and reality) into light and dark within the dream world of her drawings. This bifurcation mirrors her feelings of being torn between her everyday life in the circus and the larger society beyond which she dreams of escaping to. Each of these lands has a queen, and the “land of shadows”4has a copy of Helena, a princess who, like Helena, is desperate to escape from her life (from her universe) into another existence —a parallel or mirror world—which happens to be the world that Helena herself inhabits.

  Darkness is not merely the lack of light, or its simple opposite, but is instead a powerful thing on its own. Gaiman explains in Neverwhere that darkness can be “something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light….It felt not so much as if the lights were being turned down but as if the darkness were being turned up.”5The Other Mother of Coraline and the Dark Queen of MirrorMask have black button eyes, symbolic of the power of darkness in their souls. Likewise the Four Horsemen of Good Omens have negative auras “like black holes,”6 and Joey Harker of InterWorld experiences a darkness “like something you could touch, something solid and tangible and cold.”7 Gaiman and Terry Pratchett jokingly describe “dark light” or “infra-black” as being the color that one experiences when running headfirst into a brick wall,8 but there is nothing funny about the black light “like rays of obsidian”9that Lord Dogknife uses to trap the mudluff Hue, who is himself the living embodiment of light. These examples remind this author of Tolkien’s description of the ghastly spider Ungoliant: “she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling doom.”10 After Ungoliant and the satanic figure Melkor destroy the light-giving Two Trees of Valinor, “the Darkness that followed was more than loss of light. In that hour was made a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with being of its own….”11

  Darkness has the power to seduce one, to corrupt one utterly beyond redemption, with the archetypal example being Lucifer and all other fallen angels (and by extension fallen humans). In Tolkien’s universe, Melkor seeks the Light Imperishable throughout the cosmos so that he can become as powerful as Ilúvatar the Creator. He finds it not, and his mind and soul turn to darkness and destruction. Not merely the absence of light, Melkor embodies the very power of darkness. It cannot create, but it can certainly destroy and corrupt. When the first humans awake in Middleearth, Melkor also corrupts some of them, appearing as a great voice in the darkness. “Greatest of all is the Dark,” boasts Melkor, “for it has no bounds. I came out of the Dark, but I am Its master…. I will protect you from the Dark, which else will devour you.”12 Melkor promises humans knowledge and power, but in the end, can only lead them into evil behavior and regret. In Gaiman’s short story “Murder Mysteries” Lucifer is likewise set on his downward spiral by being seduced by voices in the darkness. “They promise me things,” he explains, “ask me questions, whisper and plead.”13 He claims that he alone among all angels is strong enough to resist the darkness. But as we all know, Lucifer is mistaken, for the darkness is powerful. As anyone with young children knows from firsthand experience, the fear of the dark is a potent motivator. It can overwhelm someone, and even after one is shown that there is no monster under the bed or in the closet, somehow the fear remains. Like Tolkien before him, Gaiman reminds us that sometimes this fear is well-warranted.

  If both the darkness and the light are sources of power, what are we to make of their balance—the various shades of gray that one finds populating a moonlit night? In Gaiman’s worlds, gray often represents the dynamic tension between worlds, whose balance is easily disrupted. Examples are the gray winding sheet of Bod, the living boy who inhabits a cemetery in The Graveyard Book, and the gray suits worn by Walkers in InterWorld to protect themselves against the harsh conditions of the space between realities—the so-called In-Between. Shadow, the main character of American Gods, also inhabits a space between realities, as he uneasily navigates between the world of humans and the world of the gods (referred to as the world behind the scenes). Gray can also denote uncertainty, uncertainty as to the state one is in, or whether one’s motives are good or evil. For example, the normally colorful Hue turns a “terrified shade of translucent gray” when he and the Walkers are captured by Lady Indigo. The Angel Islington, whose true motives are not revealed until the end of Neverwhere, has gray eyes “as old as the universe.”14 Like Lucifer (whom he bristles at comparisons to), Islington is a fallen angel, and has not only fallen from heaven to an underground world, but from lightness to the dark. It is as Gaiman and Pratchett offer in Good Omens: “most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”15 In Gaiman’s works, angels—and demons—show themselves to be people as well, in terms of their equal potential for good or ill. The most interesting characters are therefore those who are an uncomfortable shade of gray, those whose motives are far from obvious and are capable of both acts of good and evil, depending on the situation.

  But to merely describe Gaiman’s universe in terms of black, white, and gray is to be superficial in one’s analysis. For light is not only primeval, but like Gaiman’s works, it is complex. One might say it is legion—composed of an infinite number of wavelengths that we mere mortals simplify into the seven colors of the rainbow or the sixty-four colors of a crayon box. Gaiman’s works are populated by a series of ‘colorful’ characters, including Miss Violet and Scarlet of The Graveyard Book, Miss Indigo of InterWorld, and Mrs. Cherry of Stardust. The tattooed men Scarabus (InterWorld) and the Indigo Man (The Graveyard Book) wear their colors on their skin for all the world to see. How does one describe the indescribable, what physicists would term the hyperspace between parallel universes? The In-Between traveled between realities in InterWorld is represented as a dizzying geometrical cacophony of shapes and colors that leaves Joey in awe. A specific geometrical shape that continually changes its number of sides is tentatively described as yellow “because that’s the color it was saturated with.” Shapes throb, colors pulse, and the view is “like a 3-D collaboration between Salvador Dali, Picasso and Jackson Pollack.”16 In such a space words fail
, and only colors can hope to convey meaning. Hence we are introduced to the little alien mudluff dubbed Hue by Joey Harker, a bubbleshaped creature who speaks in colors. Although Joey initially laments that he doesn’t “speak colors,” he and Hue grow to understand each other, and Joey is able to discern between “a rather miserable shade of purple” and gold as a sign of agreement.17 Where words fail, colors, music, and even bodymovements allow communication, as vividly seen in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The soul lights of InterWorld—the boileddown remains of Walkers—pulse in firefly colors, and certainly make their intentions known as they threaten Lord Dogknife, their nemesis. Joey uses the stone necklace given to him by his mother to converse with the soul lights in their tongue, and notes that watching the pulsations of color is like “hearing two contrapuntal melodies that are slowly merging.”18 A similar use of non-spoken communication occurs in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy when Lyra uses physicist Mary Malone’s computer to speak with the angels. The ethereal beings answer her via “A stream of dancing lights, for all the world looking like the shimmering curtains of the aurora…. They took up patterns that were held for a moment only to break apart and form again, in different shapes, or different colors.”19