The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  Crawcrustle is an enigmatic, elderly homeless man, the only club member to be impoverished. Despite his shabby appearance, he retains the formal dignity and gracious manners of a gentleman from a bygone era. He is fond of casually suggesting that he is much older than he seems and has a penchant for eating fireflies, lit matches, and hot coals. When a fellow club member worries about the dangers of his eating habits and gently warns him that he is “playing with fire,” Crawcrustle replies “That’s how I know I am alive.”28 The excitement of danger, the thrill of fear — such powerful emotions have physiological effects. The heart beats faster and the senses are heightened; our experience of the world becomes more vivid. The physically arousing reactions associated with death often, paradoxically, make us feel more alive.

  Once the club arrives in Egypt, Crawcrustle instructs them in the traditional way to capture and cook the Sunbird. When one of the club members objects that cooking the bird in a beer can filled with herbs and spices sounds “suspiciously modern,” Crawcrustle responds: “The oldest beer in the world is Egyptian beer, and they’ve been cooking the Sunbird with it for over five thousand years….And the beer can isn’t really that new an invention. We used to make them out of an amalgam of copper and tin in the old days.”29 The sun god Ra was the first being in the Egyptian pantheon to arise from the primeval waters and the first to create order in the universe,30 but it is Ra’s great-grandson, Osiris (the god of fertile vegetation and the lord of the dead), who is credited with introducing agriculture to the Egyptians and teaching them how to brew beer from barley.31 Archeological evidence suggests that metals like copper and gold were used by people as far back as the Neolithic era,32 roughly the time with which Osiris is associated. Even a mundane beer can, the lowliest of modern items, is infused with ancient hieratic significance, suggesting that the contemporary world may be filled with numerous hidden wonders tied to a time when technology was in the service of the sacred.

  Once Crustlecraw catches the beautiful but elderly bird with beersoaked grains and raisins, it is cooked in the half-filled beer can on top of a barbeque. As the club members happily consume the Sunbird (also known as the Phoenix), they become aware of a growing warmth in their bodies. Eventually they are engulfed in flames but continue to eat, some resigned to their fate, others embracing it with glee, each of them bidding farewell to their lives and each other in their own personal way until all that is left of the club is white ash. Only Crawcrustle remains, now a vigorous young man. He is the only one to see the baby Sunbird as it emerges from the carcass of the old Sunbird. Many years later the beloved daughter of the former president of the club, now a silver-haired woman with children of her own, oversees the Epicurean Club, whose members are once again beginning to grumble that there is nothing new left to eat.

  In contrast to the fragmentary structure of “Nicholas Was…,” “Sunbird” is marked by a continuity that stretches back ten thousand years to ritual sun worship and forward to touch on future generations who come after the main events in the story. Stylistically, it is characterized by playfulness, camaraderie, and warmth (both figuratively and literally). If “Nicholas Was…” is about loneliness, despair, and the desire for death before the birth of new life, “Sunbird” is about joy as one approaches death, a joy that comes from a life spent in the company of good friends, an appreciation for intellectual and sensual delights, and an insatiable appetite to experience the unknown. What is death, after all, if not the greatest novelty for those who have lived their lives to their fullest capacity? Both short stories can stand alone, yet together, “Nicholas Was…” and “Sunbird” form a complete circle, like the sun in its cyclical journey from death to rebirth.

  Thompson has argued that the genre of myth needs to be broadened to encompass both ancient gods associated with the sun and scientific observations about the behavior of photons.33 Gaiman seems to have heeded this call, drawing on motifs found in science and technology in a manner similar to the way he uses the beer can in “Sunbird” to discern hidden mythic dimensions below the surface of modernity. If myths are the narratives that shape and support a culture, then science and advanced technologies can be seen as the most recent forms of mythology—the newest methods to interpret the cosmos. In “A Study in Emerald” (a short story set in the past) and “Goliath” (a short story set in the future), Gaiman uses a recursive narrative pattern to represent descending and diverging perspectives derived from the paradigms of science and technology.

  “A Study in Emerald” merges the fictional mythos of H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones with the fictional realm of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Both the irrational universe depicted in Lovecraft’s stories and the highly rational world of Doyle’s Victorian detective spring from the same scientific model of reality. Lovecraft’s pantheon of monstrous beings are mythological in the sense that they were intended to be metaphors for the powerful and amoral forces that exist in a scientific cosmos that is, at best, indifferent to humanity, and, at worst, hostile to our well being.34 Doyle’s famous sleuth has no direct correlation in myth, but the scientific paradigm is equally central to Doyle’s fictional world, as evidenced by his character’s reliance on deductive logic, inductive reasoning, and scientific experimentation to solve criminal cases for the betterment of society. Like Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was…” and “Sunbird,” the fictional universes of Lovecraft and Doyle express the same myth (science), but from diametrically opposed positions.

  In Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” the two contrasting views of the scientific paradigm are complimented by four differently calibrated levels of reality. At the topmost level are the two authors who inspired Gaiman’s tale: Lovecraft (a scientific materialist who wrote stories of the supernatural) and Doyle (a physician by training who published books on spiritualism). A second level of reality contains the famous fictional characters created by Lovecraft (the Great Old Ones) and Doyle (Sherlock Holmes). The third level of reality is Gaiman’s “riff ” on the fictional characters created by Lovecraft and Doyle, which not only brings these divergent story worlds together but also creates a singular looking-glass world that reverses the thematic content found in both Lovecraft’s and Doyle’s tales. In “A Study in Emerald,” Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones do not live on the margins of human life, evoking fear and dread; instead, they conquered humanity centuries earlier and are now revered by humans as royalty and heads of state. Doyle’s Professor Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis) is the hero of Gaiman’s fiction-within-a-fiction. The renowned detective skills of Gaiman’s Moriarty are requisitioned by the huge and tentacled Queen, who is “called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle…the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name.”35 Moriarty’s task is to catch a murdering criminal mastermind Sherlock Holmes who works to restore humanity to its former place of prestige by overthrowing the authority of the Great Old Ones.

  Below this tertiary mirror-world that Gaiman has created is yet a fourth level of reality that both reflects and refracts the fictional worlds created by Lovecraft, Doyle, and Gaiman. Gaiman’s Holmes remains true to the spirit of the character Doyle depicted in his stories, working against Moriarty to reassert the world of human law that was disrupted by the coming of the grotesque Great Old Ones who defy rational human understanding. From that perspective, Holmes rather than Moriarty is the true hero of “A Study in Emerald.” Gaiman’s Holmes challenges the extraterrestrial Great Old Ones on behalf of humanity in the same way that Doyle’s Holmes sought to protect law-abiding citizens from a criminal underworld that would usurp the orderly structure on which Victorian society was founded. Then again, is Gaiman’s version of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones that much different from the historical British monarchy that Doyle’s Holmes supported? Did not the real British ruling class colonize countries whose people were “alien” to Western European culture in the same way that the fictional Great Old Ones colonized earth in “A Study in Emerald”? From this perspective, Doyle’s Holmes is as much a v
illain as Gaiman’s “heroic” Moriarty. Gaiman’s nested story forces readers at each new level to reevaluate the scientific, historical, and moral narratives that constitute the commonly accepted view of what we call reality.

  This disorienting blend of contradictory multiple identities and nested realities is also found in Gaiman’s “Goliath.” The main character of this story is a man whose real name we never learn. His varying personas, including a bookkeeper who is interested in computers and a teenager who yearns to fly a plane reiterate the trajectory of computing, from calculators to virtual reality machines. The unnamed man, who suffers from gigantism in all his personas, discovers early in the tale that he exists in a series of computer-generated simulations that seem to be constantly changing at random; he is a giant of a man trapped within miniature circuitry that can spin fictional worlds within fictional worlds into infinity. During one of his accidental and unnerving world-shifts he opens his eyes and catches a glimpse of the real world in which his body is hanging, connected to tubes and wires. He realizes that his real body is not in the last decades of the twentieth century, but is in a distant future where the position between humans and computers has been reversed. Humans are now nothing more than “central processing units or...cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world,” forced into a consensual hallucination that locks them in place while the computer and its ancillary programs use human brain power “to crunch numbers and store information.”36

  When his simulated life is reset once again, the man finds himself recruited to be a fighter pilot. After training in the simulation, his real body is released to him so that he can pilot a spacecraft against unseen extraterrestrials who are destroying the earth by launching gigantic rocks from a strangely organic ship that looks like “fungus or seaweed…growing on a rotting log.”37 The man succeeds in annihilating the aliens. Despite his act of heroism in saving the earth and its enslaved humanity for his machine masters, he is deemed a “disposable” unit and is left to die in his spaceship as the air supply dwindles.

  It is no coincidence that Gaiman’s story about the dangers of digital technology seems similar to The Matrix. Gaiman was commissioned to write this story for the movie’s Web site.38 Marvin Minksy once asked, “Will robots inherit the earth? Yes,” he answered, “but they will be our children.”39 One must wonder, though, will our children love us, or will they see us as Zeus saw Cronus, and as Cronus saw Uranus, an older way of life destined to be supplanted? In the future, humans may appear as “alien” to advanced machines as the grotesquely organic and ultimately primitive extraterrestrials in “Goliath.” It is not unreasonable to speculate that someday the artificial intelligences we are developing might view us in the same manner that the extraterrestrial Great Old Ones regarded humans in “A Study in Emerald,” which in turn echoes the way European colonizers viewed the “alien” peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

  There are potentially great perils that come with advanced technology, as Gaiman rightly notes. There is also, potentially, great promise. Kurzweil argues that the quest to extend our physical and intellectual reach through technology has always been a part of human nature, and the computer has done more to extend the reach of humans than “any other enterprise in human history.”40 As a child, Kurzweil was captivated by the computer’s “ability to model and re-create the world.”41 Computers, Sherry Turkle maintains, have evolved from tools of calculation to mirrors reflecting our ideas, fantasies, and fears.42 In a similar vein, J. David Bolter argues that computers are more than simply machines; they are a “defining technology.” A defining technology provides a window “through which thinkers can view both their physical and metaphysical worlds.”43 The defining technology of textiles, for example, gave rise to the Greek Fates who spun, measured, and cut the thread of life.44 Like a myth, a defining technology offers people a model of reality, a way to interpret the world. As “Goliath” reveals, humans are simultaneously fearful of and fascinated by the products of their own technology, the same way that people for centuries have been fearful of and fascinated by the gods that they create in their most sacred narratives.

  The supernatural beings in American Gods have a right to be concerned about their fate in a world of scientific progress and accelerating technology. If Kurzweil is correct in his assessment of the near future, the world and its humanity will be very different. This, however, does not mean the end of myth. Gaia, the mother-goddess who represented the earth before she was fragmented into numerous goddesses, has been reborn, reinterpreted ― through the scientific paradigm; James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis postulates that the earth is a singular, complex, cybernetic entity comparable to a living being.45 The popularity of Gaiman’s stories demonstrates that people hunger for myths in the same way that they hunger to make sense of their universe; the two impulses, in fact, go hand in hand. Kurzweil seems to be in agreement with Gaiman regarding the power of narratives to express our understanding of the universe. In The Singularity is Near, he quotes Muriel Rukeyser, who stated that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”46 Or, as a character in American Gods observes, “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods.”47

  ___________________

  1 Engel, 32.

  2 Leeming, 33.

  3 Leeming, 34.

  4 Gaiman, Brief Lives, chapter 5, 12.

  5 Gaiman, Brief Lives, chapter 5, 14.

  6 Gaiman, Mists, episode 2, 14.

  7 Gaiman, Mists, episode 2, 15.

  8 Gaiman, Mists, episode 2, 20.

  9 Gaiman, American Gods, 137-138.

  10 Gaiman, Gods, 54.

  11 Gaiman, Gods, 53.

  12 Gaiman, Gods, 536-537.

  13 Kurzweil, 3.

  14 Kurzweil, 16.

  15 Kurzweil, 11.

  16 Kurzweil, 316.

  17 Kurzweil, 256.

  18 Kurzweil, 257.

  19 Ibid.

  20 Thompson, 4.

  21 Johnson, 26.

  22 Johnson, 33.

  23 Thompson, 3.

  24 Campbell, Myth, 47.

  25 Gaiman, Mirrors, 48.

  26 Coffin, 134.

  27 Frazer, 633-634.

  28 Gaiman, Fragile, 283.

  29 Gaiman, Fragile, 286.

  30 Leeming, 17.

  31 Leeming, 148.

  32 Eisler, 45-46.

  33 See note 23.

  34 Joshi, 12.

  35 Gaiman, Fragile, 11.

  36 Gaiman, Fragile, 240.

  37 Gaiman, Fragile, 244.

  38 Gaiman, Fragile, xxviii.

  39 Kurzweil, 260.

  40 Kurzweil, 414.

  41 Kurzweil, 2.

  42 Turkle, 9.

  43 Bolter, 10.

  44 Bolter, 11.

  45 Leeming, 146.

  46 Kurzweil, 5.

  47 Gaiman, Gods, 170.

  The Playful Palimpsest of Gaiman’s Sequential Storytelling

  Colin B. Harvey “So, what are these fundamental principles?”

  —Ben Grimm, aka The Thing “ Stories.And they give me hope. We are a boatful of monsters and miracles, hoping that, somehow, we can survive a world in which all hands are against us. A world which, by all evidence, will end extremely soon. Yet I posit we are in a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can be only continuances.”

  —Richard Reed, aka Mr. Fantastic1 While Neil Gaiman is renowned as a writer adept at storytelling in different media, in this chapter I will specifically explore the manifold ways in which his comic books and graphic novels recall mythological archetypes, iconography, and narratives. Because remembering is necessarily selective, I will also examine the ways in which Gaiman deliberately misremembersand forgets the mythological as he deems appropriate to the story in question. My approach examines the extent to which Gaiman’s remembering, misremembering, and forgetting of the mythological is constituted by palimpsestic processes (erasing or scraping off parch
ment or vellum to allow for reuse), whereby memories — suitably attenuated —are offered up as a means of re-presenting the past in order to understand the present context in which the story has been written. The term palimpsest in its original conception refers to “a manuscript on which two or more texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next”.2

  As I will explore, some of these remembered memories are of old but enduring mythological archetypes, tropes, and tales, while others are echoes of mythologies altogether more recent and existing toward the forefront of collective memory. Central to my approach will be Laurence Coupe’s contention that the invocation of the mythological is inherently playful and Gerard Genette’s comparable ideas concerning the role of playfulness in palimpsestic remembering. I will examine the ways in which Gaiman uses remembering that is both playful and palimpsestic in his deployment of the mythological to achieve a dual sense of the contemporary and the past in his graphic novel storytelling. A major facet of my investigation will be the extent to which Gaiman deliberately maintains the continuity of the mythological versus the ways in which he chooses to transform it for his own purposes.

  As others discuss at length elsewhere in this volume, Gaiman is not only a prolific storyteller but also a writer proficient in many different media. He is a renowned novelist, screenwriter for both film and television, short story writer, poet, and lyricist. Frequently this work across media forms wins both critical plaudits and awards, as well as proving commercially successful.

  Gaiman’s extensive work in the medium of the graphic novel is as equally critically well-regarded and popular as his work in other media; as I will examine, his use of mythological imagery is no less prominent than in other of his fiction output. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on four examples from Gaiman’s diverse work in the field of sequential storytelling harking from different points in his career. I will examine Gaiman’s Future Shocks work for the British comic 2000AD, his thorough-going reinvention of Sandman, the melancholic Mr. Punch: The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy, and Marvel 1602, in which various Marvel superheroes and villains are reenvisaged for an adventure set in the Elizabethan age.