The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Read online

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  1 Miller, 8.

  2 Gaiman, Mirrors, 246.

  3 Gaiman, Introduction to The Sandman: Endless Nights, xxv.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Lewis, Letters to Children, 67.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Lewis, The Dawn Treader, 270. This instruction was given to Lucy and Edmund, but I believe it’s safe to assume Aslan said much the same thing when he spoke to Peter and Susan at the end of Prince Caspian judging by Peter’s assertion that it’s “all rather different than I thought” (Lewis, Caspian, 236).

  9 Downing, 83.

  10 Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 65.

  11 Lewis, Prince Caspian, 161.

  12 Lewis, Prince Caspian, 162.

  13 Downing, 71.

  14 Lewis, Letters to Children, 61.

  15 Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 74.

  16 Lewis, The Last Battle, 169.

  17 With the possible exceptions of Susan’s correcting of her own grammar, her observation is that she’d never heard a grown-up “talk like the professor and didn’t know what to think” (Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, 52). When he speaks of Narnia and the fact that in The Horse and His Boy she is a grown-up having to deal with royal suitors and not considered silly. Indeed, perhaps her longing for adulthood could be seen as a chance to return to this Golden Age of Narnia, though Lewis doesn’t acknowledge it.

  18 Lewis, The Last Battle, 177.

  19 Miller, 142.

  20 Miller, 162.

  21 Miller, 130.

  22 Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, 19.

  23 Lewis, Letters to Children, 106.

  24 Miller, 65.

  25 Lewis, The Last Battle, 228.

  26 Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, 67.

  27 Gaiman, Mirrors, 245.

  28 Ibid.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Gaiman, Mirrors, 244.

  33 Gaiman, Mirrors, 246.

  34 Gaiman, Mirrors, 236.

  35 Gaiman, Mirrors, 240.

  36 Ibid.

  37 See note 8.

  38 See note 29.

  39 See note 3

  40 Gaiman, Mirrors, 248.

  41 Lewis, Letters to Children, 53.

  42 Lewis, Letters to Children, 45.

  43 Gaiman, Graveyard, 31.

  44 Interestingly, this man is called “Jack Frost,” making winter a villain in this book similar to the way it is in Narnia with The White Witch.

  45 Gaiman, Graveyard, 160.

  46 Gaiman, Graveyard, 306.

  47 (Gaiman, Graveyard, 174) —a nod to an early, influential, children’s book?

  48 Thackery Porringer could not read; however, whether his focus on the novel represents the unattained goal of literacy, or the impossibility of Thackery adventuring the way Crusoe did, it still shows the limitations he now faces. The extreme popularity of Robinson Crusoe, itself part of the children’s literature mythos, makes me believe he would have had an idea of the adventure within the book, and feeds his desperation to possess it.

  49 Lewis ,The Last Battle, 228.

  50 Gaiman, Graveyard, 307.

  51 Miller, 9.

  Ravens, Librarians, and Beautiful Ladies: Bakhtinian Dialogueism in the Gothic Mythology

  of Neil Gaiman and George MacDonald

  Melody Green The similarities between the work of the contemporary fantasist Neil Gaiman and the Victorian novelist and Pastor George MacDonald are at times quite striking. Writing roughly 100 years after MacDonald, Gaiman uses some of the same mythological images, characters, and motifs to explore the same questions that MacDonald did. In some places, these two writers bring their readers to very similar conclusions, while in others, differences are sharply drawn. These similarities involve images and beliefs surrounding death, the nature of evil, and the possibility of forgiveness. One of the most striking of these similarities is the anthropomorphization of death as a beautiful woman, while another is the particular way that both use images of ravens, libraries, and the Lilith story along with Adam and Eve to explore issues relating to the meaning of life and the nature of both evil and forgiveness.

  While he is not read frequently today, MacDonald has often been called the founder of the fantasy genre. In his essay “Fantasy,” C. W. Sullivan argues that George MacDonald was the first fantasy writer to not simply retell older stories, but to use images, motifs, and other aspects of ancient tales to create new stories of his own.1 Sullivan argues that MacDonald’s stories therefore shaped the fantasy genre that followed it.2 In her article “Cosmic and Psychological Redemption in George MacDonald’s Lilith,” Bonnie Gaarden claims that MacDonald “wrote the first fantasy novels for adults in English.”3 More importantly, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, who have also been credited with shaping the fantasy genre as it is known today, all acknowledge in various places that MacDonald influenced their writings in one form or another.4 The similarities between MacDonald and Gaiman could possibly be simply a matter of inheritance. In his Guest of Honor speech at Mythcon 35, Neil Gaiman, acknowledged the influence that Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton have had on his own work.5 One could talk about the influence of MacDonald on Gaiman simply because MacDonald influenced people who in turn influenced Gaiman, but the similarities between the works of MacDonald and Gaiman are much more striking than those of MacDonald and any of these other three.

  For the purpose of this discussion, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic nature of literature may shed light on the implications of the similarities between the works of these two writers. In multiple texts, most notably in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin claims that every literary production, whether a novel, a poem, or any other genre, exists in dialogue with writings that had been created earlier. Each text, he argues, is a commentary on, response to, or continuation of texts and stories that came before it. Therefore, reading a contemporary text and an older text that deal with similar issues or concepts changes the way that the reader understands both. Read in this light, Neil Gaiman’s use of mythological images and ideas in his fiction can be seen as existing in dialogue with the gothic fantasies of George MacDonald. Both, in turn, can be viewed as existing in dialogue with specific stories that lend motifs, concepts, and even specific characters to their writings.

  While both MacDonald and Gaiman are clearly working in dialogue with specific myths, their shared approach to a concept that is quite important in every mythological system is a vital starting point. Both authors have written stories involving an anthropomorphic Death. Examples of living, breathing symbols of death can be found throughout mythology, including the Greek god Hades and the Norse goddess Hel, both of whom rule over the land of the dead in their own mythological systems. Another example would be from Jewish Midrash tradition, where the personification of death is an angel named Azrael. These mythological anthropomorphisms often have beautiful aspects, but they can also be quite disturbing. Both MacDonald and Gaiman work toward eliminating the disturbing part of death, to present visions of death that are calm, orderly, and playful. MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, as well as Gaiman’s Sandman series and The Graveyard Book, portray Death as a beautiful woman. Instead of being distant goddesses, these versions of Death actually meet and talk to individuals, and can be friendly, kind and even, at times, fun.

  Of these, Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book presents the most traditional image of Death. This Death often appears on a grey horse; at one point she and her horse ride across the sky, creating a striking image for those who witness it.6 Images of Death arriving on a horse occur in multiple mythologies, both Pagan and Christian. Her horse, however, is the most traditional thing about her. The Lady on the Grey has a laugh that is described as “the chiming of a hundred tiny silver bells.”7 At another point, she dances with the boy Bod, and tells him that someday, he will ride with her on her ho
rse, in the way one promises a special treat to a child.8

  Like Bod in The Graveyard Book,the little boy Diamond in George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind also spends time with Death. This stranger is, when he first meets her, little more than a voice outside of his wall that sounds both playful and plaintive. Their first conversation has a touch of humor, since Diamond mistakenly calls her “Mr. North Wind,” and it takes him a few moments to realize why she teasingly finds that offensive. Throughout the text she is both funny and playful, but she has a morbid job and has already begun to do her work on the child. As the Lady on the Grey in The Graveyard Book does with Bod, this woman Diamond calls “North Wind” talks to Diamond about the future. Unlike the Lady on the Grey, however, she begins to take the child on trips with her. After each trip he is a little sicker, a little weaker. But Diamond does not quite understand who his friend is, not even when at one point she leaves him behind because she must go sink a ship. While she never tells him her exact name, many hints are dropped to help readers discover it for themselves. She calls herself Diamond’s friend, but warns him that he, like most people, does not understand her real identity:

  People call me by dreadful names, and think they know all about me. But they don’t. Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune, sometimes Evil Chance, and sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all.9

  That name the reader is left to guess. But after she sinks ships and gives children fatal diseases, it becomes clear that her other name is Death. This Death can change sizes and shapes, but in Diamond’s mind, his friend is always beautiful. At one point, he reflects: “The face of the North Wind was so grand! To have a lady like that for a friend— with such long hair, too!”10 Even though the little boy eventually dies in the story, his death is presented as a gentle thing. Sad, yes, but not fearful or terrifying because Diamond has simply left with a friend he knows well.

  MacDonald’s North Wind also has much in common with Death of the Endless in Gaiman’s Sandman series. Both are supernatural beings, deathless themselves, and beautiful. Whereas MacDonald’s readers first meet North Wind in a playful mood, teasing the little boy Diamond about what he should call her and what he should call the hole in his wall (she insists that it is not a hole, but a window that she can use to look at him through), Death first appears in The Sandman series as a perky teenage Goth girl who tries to get her younger brother, Dream, to laugh by telling him a joke from the movie Mary Poppins, then continues to use words like “Peachy Keen,” “cute,” and “fantabulous.”11 After this cheery introduction, she takes her brother with her as she goes to work just as North Wind takes Diamond. Dream watches his older sister apologize to some of the people she takes, observes her talking kindly to others while he talks her job over with her, and finds his sister describing one as “sweet.”12 Just as Diamond thought North Wind was beautiful, many find this humanized Death beautiful as well. For example, when a teenage boy named Franklin has a brush with her, her physical appearance and slightly flirtatious manner leads him, like Diamond, to look forward to their next meeting. Of course, he does not understand what their next encounter will entail. Another example occurs in The World’s End, when a man sees Death as she walks behind her brother’s funeral procession. She looks up at him, and in that moment, he falls in love with her. He explains, “I’ll always love her. All my life.”13

  Not only do both North Wind and Death appear to be fun, beautiful women, but their method of bringing people into the afterlife is similar. At one point, Diamond hears from a preacher about a land that exists “at the north wind’s back,” and he asks his friend to take him there. Significantly, at this point in the story Diamond has had headaches, is frequently tired, and has been described as “not looking well.”14 North Wind explains to him that while technically that land is her home, she has never been there herself. She cannot go to the land at the back of the north wind, because that would undo her. But she does “allow” the curious Diamond to visit this land. In order to do this, she gives him a specific command: “you must go through me […] you must walk on as if I were an open door, and go right through me.”15 The boy does exactly that: as he walks toward her, he puts one hand on her knee, but instead of meeting solid flesh, he passes into her. She is described as being an “intense cold,” a cold that “stung him like fire.”16 Eventually, her cold “got into his heart, and he lost all sense.”17After losing consciousness, Diamond passes into the land at her back: the land that she herself can never reach.

  In the world of the Sandman, Death, like North Wind, draws people close to herself so that they can pass onto wherever they will go after life. Death, in this series, is one of seven undying anthropomorphizations who each rule over a concept in the same ways that ancient gods rule over specific aspects of life. In the first volume of The Sandman, Death’s brother Dream—who is himself also known as the Sandman, the King of Dream, and Morpheus—describes hearing the sound of wings each time she takes a soul. Like North Wind, Death clearly believes that people go somewhere after she has taken them, but unlike North Wind, the place is made less clear to the reader. When one old man hints that he is not sure if heaven exists, instead of answering him, she says, “Now’s when you find out, Harry.”18 Later in the series, it is revealed that people tend to receive what they expect in the afterlife. This is made most clear when Lucifer decides to empty out hell and give the keys to Dream.

  Both Gaiman and MacDonald anthropomorphize death in the way that they do in order to challenge attitudes about death, a concept that has long been a topic addressed by myth. At the same time, both also understand that within the culture that they are working in, there is one main reason people fear death. The fear of death is the fear of the unknown. In order to make death less fearsome, both authors understand that it is not enough to simply change the anthropomorphic metaphor that they are using; they must also reduce the fear itself.

  One common way that the fear of death is symbolized in western culture is in the concept of hell. The concept of hell comes from the Christian tradition, in which it is believed people go to hell in order to suffer the just punishment of their wrongdoing. There are, in different Christian traditions, different ways to get out of being sent to hell. Hell is discussed in the Bible; for example, in the gospels Jesus warns his followers that it is better to be physically maimed than to have a whole body but end up in hell.19 The New Testament books of 2 Peter and Revelation both describe hell as a place of punishment devised for rebellious angels, but John Milton’s Paradise Lost presents hell as the home of Satan and his followers. Milton’s Satan and demons punish the humans who are sent by God to hell. Ultimately, Paradise Lost has done more than the Bible to shape both Victorian and popular contemporary understandings of this ancient concept. Both Gaiman and MacDonald engage in a Bahktinian dialogue with these older texts in order to work toward a removal of the fear of death. The Scottish minister does this by retaining names but rejecting images from the earlier texts; Gaiman, on the other hand, embraces these images.

  In MacDonald’s novel Lilith, Mr. Vane, who owns a large mansion in England, travels through a mirror and finds himself in another world. When he asks Mr. Raven, his guide into this other world, to explain what has happened, Mr. Raven assures him that he has not really left home at all, but has entered “the region of the seven dimensions.”20 At one point in this other world, Mr. Vane watches two skeletons argue fiercely with each other. When Mr. Vane asks Mr. Raven what is going on, he replies, “‘You are not in hell […] neither am I in hell. But those skeletons are in hell!’”21 Upon being pressed for more information, Mr. Raven further explains that those two skeletons, since they were once a married couple whose love had turned to hate, were condemned to stay with each other until “they must grow weary of their mutual repugnance, and begin to love one another.”22 When this happens, they will regain flesh and eventually, they will no longer be skeletons. They will also no longer hate each other, and u
ltimately, they will no longer be in hell. Hell, in MacDonald’s Lilith, is a state of being that people bring with them; it is not a place one is condemned to because of bad behavior. Most importantly, Mr. Raven explains, everyone who is living in hell has the hope of personal improvement: they can, like the skeletons whose argument Mr. Vane witnessed, eventually find themselves living in heaven simply because they have changed their own attitude and approach to the world. Hell, in Lilith, is a personal condition that one can grow out of.

  Even though Hell is not a place in its own right in this text, Satan, the fallen angel once known as Lucifer and who in Paradise Lost is presented as the ruler of Hell, makes an appearance. This Satan is called “The Shadow,” and makes his appearance at the end of the story. At one point he attempts to keep Mr. Vane from accomplishing a mission he has been given. This Shadow, however, proves to be nothing more than what his name suggests: a mist that Mr. Vane can easily walk through, and even though Satan, the old enemy of man, looks frightening, he has no power.

  Gaiman’s method of weakening the power of hell involves a more direct approach. Instead of denying hell any existence of its own, in The Sandman series ideas of hell presented in the epic poetry of both Dante and Milton are embraced. In the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes, Dream goes to hell in order to retrieve his helmet, which has fallen into the hands of a demon. While traveling through a hell complete with prison cells, demons in all shapes and sizes, and images straight out of The Inferno, Dream encounters a woman he himself sent to hell. In an enigmatic moment, she asks if he still loves her; he responds, “yes, I still love you. But I have not yet forgiven you.”23 Later, inSeason of Mists, Death confronts her brother, insisting that it was wrong for him to send someone to hell simply because she refused to love him. Later in the series, the Sandman regrets having damned the woman Nada, and decides that he must go back and set her free. This story of Dream’s condemnation and eventual change of heart was written by Gaiman, and it directly confronts a system of beliefs that MacDonald was quite familiar with. MacDonald was raised in a strict Calvinist home. This Calvinism, Rolland Hein explains in The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald, taught that all humans deserve to burn in hell, but God, for reasons of his own, chooses some people to go to heaven, instead. The rest of humanity, the young MacDonald was taught, was condemned and could do nothing to change it.24 Richard Reis explains in George MacDonald’s Fiction: A Twentieth Century View that throughout his life, MacDonald found this particular view not only of God, but of humanity itself, to be “repulsive.”25 Out of this repulsion, MacDonald creates his idea that hell is a state of being instead of a place. Here is one of the points at which a dialogic view of the work of these two writers reveals something interesting: while MacDonald rejects this concept, it is Gaiman who creates the images and characters that directly weaken this view of the afterlife. Gaiman’s Dream, like the Calvinist God, sends people (or at least, a person) to hell for reasons of his own. Gaiman’s Death is the one who voices the injustice of this scenario—an injustice that MacDonald cannot as effectively address in the structure he has created.