The peak of the inversion of roles is reached in the story “A Study in Emerald,”21 in which Gaiman pays homage to both H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle by inverting the point of view in a twofold way: the world is dominated by Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and their cultists, and accordingly the hero becomes Moriarty, while Holmes is the antagonist. The unusual setting of this story presupposes that the reader signs a sort of agreement with the author in the form of the suspension of disbelief. One should regard the combination of the fictional worlds of A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and H. P. Lovecraft’s extra-terrestrial monstrous deities as being one coherent and real world. Much in the same way as Wednesday, Czernobog, Mr. Nancy, and all other deities living in the America of American Gods, Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones are a firm part of the world in which this short story is set; even more, they rule it. In such a fictional world, the feeling of familiarity for the reader is achieved through a different means. Winking to Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels and to Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, Gaiman introduces in the story other characters and elements taken from other works of fiction ( Jekyll, Hyde, or Victor von Frankenstein). However, these characters are not part of the main plot, they are just mentioned in the epigraphs put at the beginning of each section.
According to G. Genette, the epigraphs belong to the category of paratexts, and are at the threshold of the text: “they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world…”22 and in our case, to ensure their presence in a fictional world. In the version of this story available on Neil Gaiman’s website, an ever stronger effect of “presence in the world” is granted by yet another means, which however does not belong directly to the content of text: the page layout. Online we have as faithful as possible an imitation of the page layout of a newspaper from the second decade of the twentieth century, and even an exact date is provided, Sunday, June 28, 1914.
As I have tried to outline in the preceding paragraphs, in his “Lovecraft” stories, Gaiman tries to portray all the situations as if belonging to the normal world and the daily routine of life-as-it-is. The notion of “normality” is of course subjective and has to be applied within the framework of each single world. Therefore, in an imaginary and fantasy world (like the one portrayed in “A Study in Emerald”) normality has fantastic features, but the reader should nevertheless regard them as normal. This process of “normalization of the uncanny” is central in the short story “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire.”23 The protagonist is a writer who lives in a fantasy and horror world, but writes fantasy stories settled in our common world, for instance, a story about a couple with a marriage crisis. Normality becomes thus myth and fantasy, and vice-versa.
Gaiman’s approach of turning the weird and unknown into the common and well-known may be considered to be an implicit manifesto, a sort of counterpart to the explicit and programmatic statements made by Lovecraft in two short essays in which he expounds his literary aesthetics. First in “Supernatural Horror in Literature:”
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown . . . The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life.24
Followed by “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”: I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best . . . These stories frequently emphasize the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear.25
Reading Lovecraft’s stories, one should abandon his or her everyday life and emotions to “feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities.”26 In order to achieve this goal, in his works Lovecraft often plays with the notion of time and its infinity, as opposed to the limits of human life.27 For instance, in the short novel “At the Mountains of Madness,” a scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers that millions of years ago an alien race colonized Earth and developed a technologically advanced civilization that lasted for a time-span unthinkable for humanity. The scientists involved in the expedition thus acquire the knowledge of the real history of the planet and of the very marginal role that mankind plays in it.
An even deeper confrontation with the abysses of time and space is experienced by the protagonist of the short story “The Shadow Out of Time,” Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a normal person with a normal job. Professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, his mind is switched with the mind of an extraterrestrial creature from the planet of Yith. Suddenly, he is no more in twentieth-century New England in a human body, but finds himself to be in an alien city in Australia during the Mesozoic era, trapped in the body of a cone-shaped cephalopod creature. When reading these two stories, much like their protagonists the reader too should sense the inanity of his own life and efforts in comparison with the immensity of the universe. He or she is removed from a familiar home place and transported to totally alien and uncanny places.
On the other hand, when we read Gaiman’s stories, we feel like Timothy Hunter on his journey through the realms of magic, having John Constantine as mentor. In The Books of Magic, the unknown and irrational lurking behind our common world becomes a matter of everyday life. When Timothy is guest of the witch Zatanna in her house in San Francisco, he calls his father to let him know he is safe, and his father asks him how he is doing in Brighton with his aunt Blodwyn. Timothy is understandably surprised, and when Zatanna asks him how is father is, he answers that his father thinks he is in Brighton.
“I told him I wasn’t,” he adds, “and he didn’t hear me. This is really weird, you know that? I mean, it’s okay when I’m with John. When you’re with him the weird stuff seems almost normal.”28
This is the feeling Gaiman’s narrative technique conveys to the reader. It is the normality of the actual lives of the gods and mythical beings that strikes us and brings us near to them. It is the removal of their mythological dimension, their descent in our world to live with us, to grow older and die like we do, that changes their status and our perception of them.
After having seen that the Gods too have to earn their living just like we have to, we feel that they are not all too different from us. In a more or less explicit way, the key to this interpretation is provided by Gaiman himself in the epigraph29 to chapter seven of American Gods, where he quotes a passage from W.D. O’Flaherty’s book Hindu Myths:
As the Hindu Gods are “immortal” in a very particular sense—for they are born and die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details... They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.30
In Gaiman’s worlds, these masks allow the Gods to live among us undisturbed. There are no boundaries anymore between them and us, and with some effort it is even possible to travel to their worlds—or if you prefer, to the backstage—and come back. The masking, the inversion of roles and the trespassing of boundaries, are characteristics of the spirit of carnival. However, they draw their power precisely from the fact that after the end of the celebrations, the natural order and roles are restored. In some Italian folk traditions, the personified Carnival even diesat the end of the celebrations.31 On the other hand, in Neil Gaiman’s stories the original roles are never restored, and the Gods go on wearing their masks: the myth abides in our world.
____________________
1 Gaiman, Fragile.
2 Brill’s New Pauly Online, s.v. “Myth (Antiquity) I. Theory of Myth,” by Fritz Graf, accessed February
21, 2012, http://brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=bnp_e815160.
3 Brill’s New Pauly Online, s.v. “Myth (Classical Tradition) I. Concept,” by Robert Matthias Erdbeer, accessed February, 21, 2012, http://brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=bnp_e1505640
4 See Sims’ essay in this present volume.
5 Gaiman, Gods, 72-3.
6 Gaiman, Gods, 73.
7 See note 5.
8 Gaiman, Gods, 74.
9 Gaiman, Gods, 75.
10 Gaiman, Gods, 84.
11 See note 9.
12 See note 9.
13 Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors, 173-184.
14 Gaiman, Mirrors, 175.
15 Gaiman, Mirrors, 176.
16 Gaiman, Mirrors, 181-2.
17 Gaiman, Mirrors, 201-18.
18 His hard-boiled characteristics are more marked in another short story in Smoke and Mirrors, “Bay Wolf,” a retelling of “Beowulf as a futuristic episode of Baywatch,” as Gaiman describes it in the introduction to volume (Gaiman, Mirrors, 26).
19 Gaiman, Mirrors, 202.
20 See note 18.
21 Gaiman, Fragile, 27-56.
22 Genette 1997, 1.
23 Gaiman, Fragile, 89-106.
24 Lovecraft 1927, text retrieved on http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.asp
25 Lovecraft 1937, text retrieved on http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.asp
26 Lovecraft 1927.
27 “The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.” (Lovecraft 1937).
28 Gaiman, The Books of Magic, chapter II: The Shadow World.
29 Again, by means of a paratext, like in “A Study in Emerald.”
30 Gaiman, Gods, 155.
31 Sordi, 1982, passim.
“It Starts With Doors:”
Blurred Boundaries and Portals in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman
Tanya Carinae Pell Jones Lucy has gone through the wardrobe and into the cold, Narnian landscape thousands of times with countless readers trailing after her. So too has Alice tumbled headlong down her rabbit-hole and into Wonderland while wide eyes and fingers (both big and small) track her movements across the page. And somewhere, even now, a book is being cracked so a portal can be opened and a reader can cross a boundary between worlds.
Neil Gaiman is not the first author to toy with the notion of worlds within worlds. The idea that there are worlds just beyond our line of sight has been a part of literature for hundreds of years as has the necessity of a point of entry. The portal between the reality and fantasy worlds is usually an everyday object:
[T]here is an object, at first not much noticed…as being of great importance…until it becomes plain that these objects are, in a way, touchstones: visible, physical concentrations of time magic.1
Mirrors, wardrobes, tollbooths, rabbit-holes, books—all have been portals into other worlds. The entry point may vary from story to story by growing larger or smaller, changing shape or changing color. The world beyond the gate may be upside down, from a different time, or on a different planet. But stories have shown us the portal is there and so is the world beyond.
Traditionally in fantasy literature, a portal is a passage between worlds. Specifically, the portal is employed “to move a character from the Primary to the Secondary space” or, rather, to move them from their (and generally the reader’s) known/reality to the unknown/fantasy.2 It should be noted that I will be using Tolkien’s definitions from his essay “On Fairy Stories,” referring to conventional reality as the Primary world and the fantasy beyond the portal as the Secondary world. The crossing of the threshold means passing beyond the established bounds of reality and into a neighboring world, one that is, quite often, a distorted mirror image of what we think of as reality. This movement symbolizes a character’s desire for more than they have been allotted in their Primary world and inevitably results in a change for that character. By making the movement between the known and the unknown, the characters are, consciously or not, putting themselves in a position where they will forever be altered.
The change in the character is mandatory, for every journey or adventure has its costs/rewards. In his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell said as much when he outlined the hero’s journey:
The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of yonder zone.3
Thus, regardless of the specifics of the journey, there are three possible outcomes: the character will return to their world changed for the better, changed for the worse, or they will not return at all.
In 2002, Neil Gaiman introduced us to the titular character in his novella Coraline. Early in the book, it is clear that Coraline Jones is a very average, unextraordinary little girl with ordinary parents and a peculiar name that her neighbors seem unwilling to pronounce properly. Though Gaiman’s heroine seems to have a penchant for exploring, it is only in a moment of boredom when she is wandering around her flat that she ultimately discovers the doorway through which her adventures will begin. There originally seems to be nothing remarkable about the door and the only reason it catches Coraline’s attention is because it is the only door in the house that appears to be locked. As Tolkien pointed out in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” a “Locked Door stands as Eternal Temptation,” and Coraline immediately entreats her mother to open it.4 Her mother assures her it leads nowhere and, indeed, only a brick wall is revealed upon opening, so the door is quickly dismissed as nothing special. But the savvy reader knows otherwise.
Soon, just as Tolkien predicted, the locked door is too great of an enticement for Coraline to resist despite the initial encounter of the brick wall beyond the threshold. She knows, as all children do, that there must be more to the door than appearance would have her believe. So, at the first opportunity, Coraline retrieves the key and fits it in the lock. This time when the door swings open, the bricks are gone and a hallway is in its place. Now, Coraline must decide if she is willing to move beyond the safe boundary of her home and through the portal without knowing what is on the other side. She has speculations, of course. Her first thought is that it is simply the empty flat next door. But that doesn’t explain the now missing brick wall. This little detail does not deter our heroine and, like countless characters before her, Coraline makes a choice to move beyond the veil and into her adventure, eager to put an end to her boredom and become the explorer she imagines herself to be.
When Coraline takes that first, deliberate step into the corridor, she is crossing the threshold into another world—an oddly distorted, incomplete version of her own world populated by “bad copies” of her neighbors and, more importantly, her “Other Mother” and “Other Father.” Like the world beyond the door, these parent doppelgängers are imperfect representations of her real parents; dirty mirror images of Mr. and Mrs. Jones. The same holds true for the faultily cloned neighbors. But, like Carroll’s Alice could have told us and as the Other Mother says, “Mirrors… are never to be trusted.”5 For just like a mirror shows only a limited amount of the space it reflects, so too does the “Other Mother’s World” only branch out so far. As Coraline ventures away from the Other Mother’s House only to immediately return to it, she finds that the scope of the world is rather small and that her Other Mother stopped creating when she had enough of a copy of the Primary world to please Coraline:
“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”
“Easy,” said the cat. “Think of somebody wal
king around the world. You start walking away from something and end up coming back to it.”
“Small world,” said Coraline.
“It’s big enough for her,” said the cat. “Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.” 6
The world Coraline has crossed into is one of very narrow boundaries. She may have entered another world when she crossed through the portal, but it is a small world indeed, constructed with great care by the Other Mother to entice and deceive. However, as the cat pointed out, a trap only has to be big enough to ensnare.
Temptation is how this Other Mother, with her black button eyes and twisted version of love, truly entangles her victims. She simply baits her trap (in this case, the Secondary world) with everything her prey could desire. It is here, possibly, that we see the reason for Coraline’s adventure. On a rainy day with nothing to do, she craves the exploration of an adventure, to prove her independence, and to even be a little disobedient. She had been denied her desires by her real parents (the Day-Glo gloves and the opportunity to do as she pleased) and is susceptible to enticement, especially when promised whatever her heart desired. In her Primary world, Coraline has been made to want. But in the Other Mother’s World (the Secondary world), Coraline finds that she will never be bored and, most certainly, “never be allowed to want.”7 Nothing is denied her in the Other Mother’s World because it is a world created for the sole purpose of pleasing Coraline in the hopes of trapping her forever. But the most gilded cage is still a cage, and Coraline soon realizes that having everything you could ever want means that you will simply never have the opportunity to want:
The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Page 28