The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  Light can also be distorted, for good or ill, by looking through a lens. For example, in Coraline the titular character gains a different view of reality when viewed through a stone with a hole in its center. The stone allows her to identify the hidden souls of the captured children. Gaiman sets the tone for Stardust by situating Tristran’s era within its scientific context. One of the milestones he mentions is John William Draper’s taking of the first photograph of the moon (in December 1839), “freezing her pale face on cold paper.”54 The view through the camera lens is clearly not that seen by the eye. In InterWorld Joey and his friends are tricked by HEX into thinking a magical world to be a technological one, leading to the capture of Joey’s team. By looking through the lens of Hue’s transparent form, Joey can see this world as it really is. However, in the In-Between Joey is not certain whether he is observing a normal Hue beside him “or maybe a Hue the size of Vermont was a thousand miles away from me….”55 Similarly, when he dons Jay’s travel suit and views the universe through its “Mirrormask” helmet, he finds it is “like looking at something huge through binoculars held the wrong way.” Although Hue is in reality the size of a cat, Joey can’t “shake the idea that it was truly the size of a skyscraper, only it was ten miles away.”56 Likewise, in the Dark Queen’s palace, Helena feels as if she is “watching the world through the wrong end of a telescope,” and in the spirit world of Anansi BoysSpider sees the world receding from him “as if he were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.”57 The fallen Angel Islington of Neverwhere is said by his henchman Mr. Croup to have “traveled so far beyond right and wrong that he couldn’t see them with a telescope on a nice clear night.”58 While the world does seem more distant when viewed through binoculars backwards (one barrel at a time, unless the binoculars are very small or one’s head is very large), the view through the wrong end of a telescope is more complex. When one looks down the tube of a common backyard telescope, one is more often than not greeted with a distorted view of one’s own face, not dissimilar to what Joey initially views as his own reflection seen in the mirrored mask of Jay’s helmet.

  Light interacts with our world in myriad ways. It can be diffracted around a barrier, bent through a lens, or bounced off a mirror. In each of these cases the visible image is not an exact copy of the original, but a distortion that may appear more or less pleasing than the original. Even the simple act of light illuminating the book you hold in your hand is only successful insofar as the light reflects off the page and then refracts through the lenses in your eyes (and in some cases after passing through reading glasses or contact lenses as well). Does light tell the truth? Can sight ever capture the true essence of reality? In the Gaiman universe, the possibilities for distortions and enhancements are often central to the story. In the introduction to Smoke and MirrorsGaiman explains that fantasy (meaning all fiction) is “A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror set at forty-five degrees to reality.” He continues to warn us that this mirror can be used “to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see” (or might not wantto see).59When one reads one of Gaiman’s works, one often sees one’s own self reflected within its pages, and if the interplay of words and light reflects back a potentially grotesque image of human nature, perhaps in this case the mirror does not lie.

  ____________________

  1 Tolkien, Letters, 148.

  2 Genesis 1: 1-4, KJV.

  3 Leeming and Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths, 133.

  4 Gaiman and McKean, MirrorMask, 22.

  5 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 102-3.

  6 Gaiman and Pratchett, Omens, 351.

  7 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 31.

  8 Gaiman and Pratchett, Omens, 308.

  9 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 184.

  10 Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 73.

  11 Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 76.

  12 Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, 346.

  13 Gaiman, Mirrors, 321.

  14 Gaiman, InterWorld, 135; Gaiman, Neverwhere, 202.

  15 Gaiman and Pratchett, Omens, 30.

  16 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 59-60.

  17 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 85-88.

  18 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 218.

  19 Pullman, His Dark Materials, 367-8.

  20 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 328-9.

  21 Gaiman, Odd, 50.

  22 Gaiman, Odd, 54-5.

  23 Gaiman, American Gods, 477.

  24 Gaiman, Gods, 416.

  25 Gaiman, The Graveyard Book, 78-9; 83.

  26 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 11; 15.

  27 Gaiman, Fragile Things, 237.

  28 Gaiman, Fragile, 64-5.

  29 Gaiman, Anansi Boys, 57; Gaiman, Gods, 251.

  30 Gaiman, Mirrors, 65.

  31 Gaiman, Fragile, 66.

  32 Gaiman, Fragile, 126.

  33 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 305.

  34 Cornwell, “Thorn Beta 5.”

  35 Ibid.

  36 The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 24.

  37 International Darksky Association, “Light Pollution and Energy.”

  38 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 23.

  39 Interested readers are encouraged to view the NASA composite image of the Earth at night (taken in

  2000) (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.jpg). The bright spots visible in this picture represent light (and therefore electricity, money, and in many cases fossil fuels) being wasted in upward-directed lighting.

  40 Gaiman, Mirrors, 92.

  41 Gaiman, Fragile, 201.

  42 Gaiman, Mirrors, 188.

  43 Gaiman, Graveyard, 95.

  44 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 42.

  45 Gaiman, Stardust, 41.

  46 Gaiman, Gods, 247-8.

  47 Gaiman, Gods, 378.

  48 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 85.

  49 Gaiman, Mirrors, 107.

  50 Gaiman and McKean, MirrorMask, 52.

  51 Gaiman, Mirrors, 1.

  52 Neil Gaiman was asked to write a short story for a collection celebrating the release of the first Matrix film. The result was “Goliath” (published on the film website and in the anthology Fragile Things).

  53 Gaiman and McKean, MirrorMask, 73.

  54 Gaiman, Stardust, 5.

  55 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 138.

  56 Gaiman and Reaves, InterWorld, 88.

  57 Gaiman and McKean, MirrorMask, 51; Gaiman, Gods, 293.

  58 Gaiman, Neverwhere, 320.

  59 Gaiman, Mirrors, 2.

  The Eternal Carnival of the Myth: Or How to Kill Myths and Live Happy

  Camillo A. Formigatti One thing that puzzles me (and I use puzzle here in the technical sense of really, really irritates me) is reading, as from time to time I have, learned academic books on folk tales and fairy stories that explain why nobody wrote them and which go on to point out that looking for authorship of folk tales is in itself a fallacy; the kind of books or articles that give the impression that all stories were stumbled upon or, at best, reshaped, and I think, yes, but they all started somewhere, in someone’s head. Because stories start in minds—they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena.

  —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things1 In a paper supposed to deal with mythological dimensions it seems suitable to start with definitions of myth and mythology as clear cut as possible. Unfortunately, this would prove to be quite an impossible task, at least within the scope of this short essay. The scientific and critical literature on this topic is broad and manifold, ranging from works with a historical or anthropological approach to others with a psychological or philosophical one, to include all nuances in between these two extremes. The risk of losing one’s own path in such a wide and thick forest is very high. Nevertheless, a minimal “working definition” should be provided, at least in order to help the reader understand better from which point of view Neil Gaiman’s personal and original (re)interpretation of myths and mythology is analyzed in the present paper.

>   The starting point is the admittedly partial and one-sided scholarly definition of myth as provided in the New Pauly Wissowa: [Myth is] a “traditional narrative of collective significance” . . . The term “traditional” implies a transmission that is not tied to a first original narrator known by name, and describes, in the context of oral narrative, not a transmission of fixed stories but of narrative structures (plots) that are tied to certain protagonists.”2 These narrative structures need to be filled with substance, in other words with the myths themselves. And it is exactly by this process of filling that we come to the mythology, intended as the “ ‘account’ (logos) of the deeds of gods and heroes” in the sense of “the total store of traditional narratives (‘myths’) of an ethnic group.”3

  After having more or less described the “playground,” one may think that there is still a fundamental question to answer, namely from where does Neil Gaiman take the “traditional narratives,” i.e., the myths he (re)tells. However, the answer to this question will not be the central focus of this paper. As pointed out by Harley J. Sims in his contribution to this collection, Gaiman creates a pan-pantheon consisting of “deities and spirits of all cultures and historical periods.”4 The focus of the present paper will be rather shifted to an analysis of how Gaimandeals with these deities, their stories, and their lives and how the reader perceives them. This approach has its roots in the simple and yet insightful question which is the starting point of many of Gaiman’s stories, namely, “What do Gods do when they are not worshipped anymore?” In The Sandman comic book series, and above all in the novels American Gods and Anansi Boys, Gaiman provides very accurate and amusing descriptions of the daily life, the troubles, and the occupations of the mythical protagonists. There are indeed many passages in Gaiman’s works that one could take as examples here, but on account of the limited space available I will examine in detail only some of them from American Gods and from selected short stories.

  With the first appearance of Czernobog and the three Zoryas in American Gods, the reader does not enter the magical and mysterious world of the Slavic deities, but rather is catapulted into the world of East European immigrants in today’s Chicago. If we take a closer look at how Gaiman constructs this first encounter between Shadow and one of his future travel companions, we may think for a moment that we are reading a realistic novel inspired by nineteenth-century French Naturalism, rather than a fantasy story ending with a battle between old and new Gods. It began with Shadow and Wednesday slowly approaching the city of Chicago, “driving through countryside” until “imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became a city.”5 They do not reach a holy place or an ancient and sacred temple, instead they park “outside a squat black brownstone.”6 When the two press the top button of the intercom box (no abracadabra, no magic formula or oath to open the door), it simply does not work. And that’s not the only thing that does not work in the building. We get to know that also the heating is out of order, and even if the tenants have already informed the superintendent, he did not fix the problem, because “he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest.”7 Who has not yet experienced similar problems and shortcomings? And that’s not all, apparently there is no elevator (or maybe it is not working) and unfortunately Shadow and Wednesday have to climb all their way up to the last floor (remember, they pressed the top button). But this it is not a marvelous journey through lands of wonder with pastel landscapes from which the sweet fragrance of blossoming flowers arise, for “the landing two stories up was half filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled of rotting vegetables.”8

  When they finally reach the top floor, Wednesday is panting— after all, he is an old man out of shape. They are welcomed by Czernobog in a rough way—who does not have among his neighbors a gruff old man? As soon as he lets them in, the reader gets a first impression of him, an old retired man wearing “pinstripe pants, shiny from age, and slippers.”9 He shakes Shadow’s left hand with his rough and callused one, and Shadow notices immediately that the tips of his fingers are yellow from too much smoking. The reader then gets directly an idea of the smells in the apartment: over-boiled cabbage, a cat box, and unfiltered cigarettes. Zorya Utrennyaya offers the two guests a coffee, and then they begin to chatter with Czernobog. He tells them that like all immigrants, they firstly came to New York and only afterwards they moved to Chicago; he worked in the meat business, but now he is retired. Like many other retired persons, he likes to play checkers, and offers Shadow to play with him, to kill time while they are waiting for dinner. At last dinner is ready, but they have to free the table from the game, because there is no extra table in the small apartment. They finally start to eat a typical Russian meal, whose detailed description leaves little space for imagination. It sounds not very appetizing, starting from the “ferociously crimson borscht … with a spoonful of white sour cream,”10 through the “leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer … greens, and were well on their way to becoming browns.”11 The last course is even worse, “cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, leaves of such toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering meat and rice all over the carpet.”12 At least the apple pie is good (no wonder, Zorya Vechernyaya did not bake it herself, she bought it in a store and oven-warmed it). By this time, the point of view of the reader has changed and he or she does not know anymore of whom the author is speaking, old Slavic gods or old Russian immigrants. Gaiman reaches this goal through a masterly description of the characters and their surroundings, and doing so he challenges almost all five senses of the reader, who, like Shadow, smells unpleasant odors, touches rough and callused hands, and eats food that tastes even worse than prison food.

  In a series of short stories (“Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,” “It’s Only the End of the World Again,” “A Study in Emerald,” “I Cthulhu”) Gaiman applies this technique of the changing and inversion of the point of view even to the literary pantheon of cosmic deities created by H.P. Lovecraft. In “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar,”13while on a walking tour of the British coastline, the young American tourist Benjamin Lassiter reaches the small and out-ofthe-way village of Innsmouth. After having spent five days wandering from village to village under the rain, he needs some rest and so decides to eat something at a local pub. Among the three pubs of the village—The Book of Dead Names, The Public Bar, and the Saloon Bar—he chooses the last one. He enters the bar and the reader finds himself again in a description very similar to the one of Czernobog’s apartment. First comes what the sense of smell perceives, “it smelled like last week’s beer and the day-beforeyesterday’s cigarette smoke.”14 Ben orders his meal, a “ploughman’s,” and so now we turn to the sense of taste—which is not pleased, for the food is awful, since “a ploughman’s turned out to be a rectangular slab of sharptasting cheese, a lettuce leaf, an undersized tomato with a thumb-print in it, a mound of something wet and brown that tasted like sour jam and a small, hard, stale roll.”15

  Meanwhile, two other guests, inhabitants of Innsmouth, come and sit beside him. They order for him a pint of local beer, the renowned Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar, and suddenly Ben finds himself involved in a lively discussion on H.P. Lovecraft’s literary style. After some time, Ben says that he is a student and asks his drinking partners what they do. They answer innocently that they are acolytes of Great Cthulhu. This is light work, they add, since it consists mostly of praying and waiting until their boss Cthulhu wakes up “in his undersea living-sort-of quarters” where he will “… stretch, and yawn and get dressed... probably go to the toilet... maybe read the papers” and after all this morning activities, “come out of the ocean depths and consume the world utterly.”16

  Life does not seem to be very different in the American Innsmouth, at least as we are told in another short story, “It’s Only the End of the World Again.”17 The main character
is Lawrence Talbot, a werewolf who works as an “adjuster,” as he defines himself. Actually he is very similar to a private eye from a hard-boiled novel,18but his rivals are not petty criminals or mafia bosses, they are evil Cthulhoid entities and their acolytes. Already the title of the story betrays one of the main stylistic aspects of the narration: the end of the world is nothing special; it occurs from time to time. The story begins in medias res, with Talbot waking up naked one afternoon in his room. As every self-respecting fictional private-eye, he has the symptoms of a bad hang-over and has to run to the toilet to throw up. However, among common things like a tomato peel, diced carrots and sweet corn, in the content of the vomit there are also two items that the reader does not expect to be there: a dog’s paw (possibly a Doberman’s) and a small child’s fingers. At this point, it is already clear to the reader that Talbot is a werewolf. Unfortunately for him, this condition does not help him very much in his everyday life. As a matter of fact, he finds under the door an unpleasant message from his landlady, in which she reminds him that he still owes her two week’s rent, and that all the answers are in the Book of Revelations. Moreover, in the future he should be quieter and not make too much noise when he comes home early in the morning, and just in the case that he has already forgotten it, she kindly reminds him that “when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the nonbelievers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water.”19 And last but not least Talbot notes, “she felt she ought to remind me that she has assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she’d thank me if in the future I’d keep to it.”20

  Towards the end of the story, Talbot even has time to drink a Jack Daniel’s in his favorite haunt, where he has the opportunity to listen to the barman reciting a poem by Tennyson. After all, the end of the world is not such an uncommon or thrilling event for which the pub should close in advance. Talbot’s last stop at the pub reveals to us an interesting common feature of the Innsmouthians of both sides of the Atlantic: they are fond of literature and literary critique (the Innsmouthians in England criticize Lovecraft’s literary language, while the barman in the American Innsmouth loves English poetry).