The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?8

  Coraline neededthe adventure beyond the portal in order to take a step into maturity. She is growing up and this is evident in her recognition of the fact that life does not mean getting everything you desire. The wanting is part of the process. Her adventures and trials in the Other Mother’s World are milestones of maturity that require her to turn her back on the twisted Eden and, instead, fight for the return of her real parents. Coraline wins, but it takes being unselfish, a true indicator of maturity, and channeling reserves of will she was unaware she possessed to return to her Primary world more “grown up” and appreciative of a life that will be ripe with both days of boredom and gray clouds as well as countless joys.

  Coraline is not Neil Gaiman’s only child hero to move through the portal. In his short story-within-a-story, “October in the Chair,” we meet ten-year-old Donald “Runt” Covay. Runt, dissatisfied with the way he is treated by his teachers, his parents, and especially his twin brothers, decides to run away from home. With his backpack full of candy, comics, and thirty-seven dollars in quarters, Runt purchases a bus ticket “west.” When he climbs off the bus, he walks along a dirty stream with the intention of following it to the seaside. However, fate has other plans.

  Unlike Coraline, who has to open the portal and cross into another world to interact with the fantastic, the fantastic comes out to meet Runt in a moonlit pasture in the form of a little ghost boy. The ghost child, who introduces himself as “Dearly,” though he “used to have another name, but can’t read it anymore,” invites Runt to play with him in the abandoned houses near his little graveyard and to climb trees in the moonlight.9 In Dearly, Runt has found a kindred spirit, a boy just as lonely and desperate for a friend.

  In this instance, the two worlds have become one. Runt is able to experience the fantasy of a Secondary world while still keeping himself in the boundaries of his Primary world. He has not accidentally fallen into “Faërie” (at least not that we know), but he is still experiencing the fantastic and supernatural elements that are generally reserved for the Secondary worlds. No portal has been crossed and no physical boundary has been breeched. Yet.

  The confrontation of the portal comes near dawn, when Dearly must—as his tombstone implies—“depart.” But, Runt is reluctant to surrender the only friend he has ever had and he realizes that if he continues with his original scheme to run away to the sea, he will be found and forced back home. In a moment of desperation, he suggests that he might stay in the little graveyard with his new friend. But, in order to do that, he would have to be as dead as his new friend. Dearly suggests that Runt consider looking for “help” in the abandoned farmhouse that borders the pasture:

  “I can’t do it,” said Dearly, eventually. “But they might.” “Who?”

  “The ones in there.” The fair boy pointed up the slope to the tumbledown farmhouse with the jagged, broken windows, silhouetted against the dawn. The gray light had not changed it. The runt shivered. “There’s people in there?” he said. “I thought you said it was empty.”

  “It ain’t empty,” said Dearly. “I said nobody lives there. Different things.” 10

  Once again, Gaiman’s portal is an actual door. This time, however, the doorway is not as tempting as Coraline’s. Runt knows full well that nothing good lies beyond this threshold whereas Coraline had to venture beyond hers before she could learn that fact. Runt’s doorway is an almost literal separation between light, the known, and dark, the unknown: “It was darker inside there. Darker than anything.”11 Gaiman paints for us a vivid picture of a child caught between worlds and, once again, an issue of growing up is at stake. Does Runt wait to be caught, go home, and grow up as an inconsequential shadow fading in and out of rooms? Or does he cross the barrier in an attempt to ensure he never grows up at all?

  Just like Coraline, Runt has to make a choice: stay in his Primary world where he knows the rules and can guess at the outcomes, or venture beyond the veil and into the unknown. After eating his last candy bar and weighing his options, a terrified Runt walks up the farmhouse steps: “He stopped at the doorway, hesitantly, wondering if this was wise. He could smell damp, and rot, and something else underneath…Eventually, he went inside.”12 Here, very unlike Coraline, Runt has decided growing up is just too hard.

  Runt’s desire for a life different from the one he had been dealt is stronger than his instinct for self-preservation. He does what all children have dreamed of doing at one time or another: run away. However, by making the choice to enter the portal and cross into the farmhouse where danger—and perhaps death—almost certainly awaits, he has willingly thrown away his ties to reality, choosing instead the fantasy. Though it is possible that Runt will be granted his rather unusual wish to remain in the graveyard, he may find it more costly than he anticipated. Oddly enough, the average reader is quite likely rooting for Runt’s wish to be granted because we have been privy to the sad (though certainly not abusive) circumstances of his home life. We end up wanting Runt to be able to play with Dearly for eternity, even though we are consciously aware of the probable danger lurking in the darkness beyond the farmhouse door. Gaiman leaves us guessing as to what happens to Runt, but the reader is certain of one thing: Runt will not emerge from the house unchanged (if he comes out at all).

  Often, portal-quests feature a character who intentionally moves through the portal; crossing the boundaries between worlds in pursuit of an adventure. Yet, many characters are drawn through the gates and into the unknown without their knowledge or consent. These unwilling heroes may not realize what is happening to them until it is too late since an “adventure may begin as a mere blunder…or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man.”13 This is what happened to one of Gaiman’s most memorable characters, Richard Mayhew, in his urban-fantasy, Neverwhere.

  As the hero of his own portal-quest, Richard manages to move— though unwillingly—from his safe, urban life in “London Above” to the “sewers and the magic and the dark” of “London Below.”14 London Below, a nonsensical mirror image of the city of London, is a labyrinthine world of tunnels and sewers and subways that operates under fantasy rules. In the Secondary world of London Below, those people that “fell through the cracks of the world” have created a realm where rats are to be respected, one’s life can be kept in a trinket box as insurance against death, and succubae prey on the warmth of others. It is this world that Richard Mayhew has fallen helplessly into through a simple act of kindness.

  Walking to dinner one night with his overbearing fiancée, Richard, a rather dull and absent minded individual, finds a “homeless” girl bleeding in the street. He treats her wounds, lies for her when questioned, and even relays a message to a man known as the Marquis de Carabas, a mysterious figure who deals in favors. However, after helping the girl (an inhabitant of London Below), Richard has somehow become disassociated within his own reality. His employers no longer recognize him, his fiancée has no recollection of him, and his landlord cannot see him. For all intents and purposes, Richard no longer exists in his own world. So, he does the only thing he can think to do: find the “homeless” girl in hopes that she can undo the damage.

  The portal “through which” Richard will traverse into the fantasy realm of London Below is rather unconventional. The girl Richard found in the streets that he cared for is actually the Lady Door, daughter of the late Lord Portico. Door—“Like something you walk through to go places”—is an “opener.”15 Door’s family has been gifted with the ability to “open doors. They can create doors where there were no doors. They can unlock doors that are locked. Open doors that were never meant to be opened.”16 In a sense, they are doors. It is his first encounter with Door that puts Richard at odds with his kn
own reality; he has broken through the invisible barrier between worlds and into the unknown. His portal is a “door,” but not in the traditional sense. In Neverwhere, Gaiman has created not just a separation of worlds by an invisible boundary, but he has also utilized a device known as a porter.

  A porter, much like a portal, is a means of conveyance from “here to there.” However, unlike the traditional doorway, porters are “all those living beings…that act as agents for the hero(ine) to travel between worlds.”17 Here, Gaiman has introduced a porter by the name of Door to act as Richard’s doorway between worlds. (Obviously, Gaiman used a lighthearted touch when naming the family of “openers” after the very symbols they represent: Door, Portico, Portia, Ingress, and Arch.) Richard will use the subterranean passages in the underworld to travel through the physical spaces of the two worlds, but it is Door herself who is the true portal in the story: “The action of helping her had tumbled him from his world into hers.”18

  Yet, the “tumbling” Richard does from one world to another is both linear and “multi-dimensional.” Richard is able to physically move from his Primary world of London Above, into the sewers of London Below and back again following a linear course, but by interacting with Door (a living portal), he is no longer truly “there” in his Primary world. He has become an interloper. He may physically be occupying space, but he is no longer perceived in that space (just as Alice’s Looking-Glass House reflects what is not there as well as what is). Richard struggles with this very notion when he and Anaesthesia, a rat-speaker, are trying to locate the floating market. Anaesthesia tries to explain to Richard that even though the market is held in a physical space that they could reach easily from London Above, the market would not be “there” should they try to reach it using any passage from that world:

  “We can get to the place it’s in,” she said. “But the market wouldn’t be there.”

  “Huh? But that’s ridiculous. I mean, something’s either there or it’s not. Isn’t it?”

  She shook her head.19

  A similar conversation about object permanence was held between Peter, Susan, and the Professor in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Peter insisted that Lucy’s account of Narnia through the wardrobe was fabrication if for no other reason than Narnia had not been there when they had opened the wardrobe themselves:

  “There was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.”

  “What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.

  “Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.” “Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter didn’t know quite what to say.20

  Richard, like Peter Pevensie, cannot immediately rationalize a world where things can be there and not at the same time. For him, space and time have always been linear, but in London Below the rules seem to have distorted. These “new rules” explain Door’s associative home where the rooms are located miles apart from each other and how there are creatures and people in the tunnels that time cannot seem to touch. So, though he can physically move beyond the barrier from one place to another in a linear fashion, circumstances and characteristics ofthe space may change based on his orientation in the Primary or Secondary world and the road he chooses to travel. This paradox that Gaiman has created in Neverwhere makes the boundaries between the two worlds both visible (linear) and invisible (multi-dimensional).

  And yet, the idea of invisible barriers is not as strange as we would immediately believe. We consciously create boundaries and imaginary lines and borders to keep us safe and grounded in reality, especially globally and socially. In Neverwhere, Gaiman is merely illustrating that the world is boundless, yet we imagine boundaries everywhere: between nations, between social classes, and even between races. Gaiman, in an interview, addressed this very issue and has insisted on boundaries being “completely notional. They don’t tend to exist…They’re just imaginary lines we draw on maps.”21 By using both visible physical boundaries (London in relation to the underworld of the sewers) and invisible social boundaries (those from London Above in relation to the homeless/forgotten), Gaiman is challenging the reader to step outside the safety of preconceived notions and look at things from a different perspective, even if that means challenging norms and social values. Joseph Campbell argued a similar point about value systems in the two worlds in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: [T]he exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what was formally only otherness.22

  In London Below, the things Richard previously thought were important have little meaning, forcing him to turn inward to see what truly matters. Gaiman’s hero does challenge social norms and Richard is perfect as an ambassador between worlds because he is heroic enough—and possibly simple enough—to see past outward appearances.

  Though it is his selfless act of compassion for a stranger that forces Richard into the Secondary world, it is his desire to return to the normalcy of his Primary world that originally guides his feet throughout his adventures with Door and her companions. Richard’s quest is ripe with peril in the forms of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, two masochistic figures who stalk his and Door’s every step, a fallen angel, and the horrors and nightmares found below the surface. But, Richard is desperate to return to his previous life and he is willing to assist Door on her quest if it means getting back to where he feels he belongs.

  To his dismay, however, Richard is told by his new associates that he cannot return to his Primary world of London Above. They insist he is suddenly and irrevocably one of society’s forgotten:

  “You can’t go back to London Above. A few individuals manage a kind of half life…But that’s the best you could hope for, and it isn’t a good life.”23

  Time and again, Richard rejects this notion by claiming he does not belong in the Secondary world. He feels cheated out of his life and maintains there must be something that can be done to give him back the life he lost. His determination is not admired by his companions below. Instead, they look upon him with pity and frustration for his inability to understand that the place he considers “the real world” is closed to him and there is no going home again: “You can’t. It’s one or the other. Nobody ever gets both.”24

  And yet, all is not lost for Richard Mayhew. Through a twist of fate, it seems that Richard does have the power to go home. Since he is the one who conquered the ordeal of the Black Friars to win “the key to all reality,” he has become its master.25 By using the key and Door as his opener, Richard returns to London Above where he is recognized and accepted back into the Primary world as if he had only been on vacation. So, Richard goes home, like many characters before him, to the Primary world changed for the better after having assisted Door, defeating the great Beast of London, and saving the world(s) from a fallen angel who would overtake Heaven. The hero, as Joseph Campbell predicted, has returned.

  The problem with his return, however, is Richard cannot forget his time in London Below. Suddenly, the predictable Primary world with its work, pubs, and warm home is no longer enough (if it ever was in the first place). Though he was previously sure it was exactly what he wanted, Richard feels that his life is lacking substance after his return: “Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn’t what you wanted at all?”26 Richard, a mere observer in his own life prior to the crossing of the threshold, is no longer satisfied with the role he plays in his Primary reality because the void he now feels was once filled by adventure in the Secondary world. Richard has been changed by his adventures in London Below, and many of those changes were for the better, but now the safe life of mediocrity is too difficult to bear. So, in a moment of inspiration and intense longing, Richard uses Hunter’s knife to scratch the outline of a door into a wall. As if waiting for him, the Marquis appears, offering Richard a chance to return once mo
re to the Secondary world. Richard, like Runt, chooses the fantasy and he and the Marquis walk “away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.”27

  The portal, however, is not always as tangible as a doorway or a girl. Sometimes, the portal has no physical location, but it is there all the same. Perhaps it exists in that place between sleep and awake where we begin to dream. It is Morpheus, Neil Gaiman’s Dream King who rules this realm, guarding the portal as he passes in and out of worlds on a whim, leaping through dreams and nightmares, often dragging the unsuspecting along with him.

  In Neil Gaiman’s revolutionary comic series The Sandman, Gaiman wrote into being The Endless (Dream, Death, Destiny, Desire, Delirium, Despair, and Destruction), seven personifications of traditional mythological archetypes with a twist. Gaiman, a lover of mythology in all its forms, created The Endless to represent and control—or at least manipulate—various aspects of the universe, giving each anthropomorphic personality their own dominion (as their names suggest). As the title implies, The Sandman is really a collection that follows the true Sandman, Dream (aka Morpheus, The Dream Lord, the Prince of Stories, etc.), as he loses his power, regains it, makes choices and “faces obstacles, tests, and trials before coming to realize his ultimate destiny.”28 In his outline for the original series, Gaiman said Dream’s primary functions were “to rule the world of dreams” and “to guard the borders of things, since it is possible for dream things to escape into other places.”29

  The portal between the waking world and the Sandman’s “dreamworld” is the thin veil of sleep. Unlike the other portal quests discussed in this chapter, the portal in The Sandman series is open to all those who sleep and dream. In most fantasy featuring a portal-quest, the portal will only open for the hero(es) of the story, but each person that dreams becomes the hero of his or her own story. Though some may venture further into the dreamworld than others, the portal, and by consequence the land beyond, is not restricted to a select few: “Each human is connected to the dreaming. They spend a third of their lives in this realm.”30 The consequence of the crossing of the threshold and into the dream is that we do not have control over the dream because dreamers move “into the adventurous realm unconsciously, as we all do every night when we go to sleep.”31 Morpheus controls the “Dreaming,” and he manipulates it at will.