In the Acknowledgments Section of The Sandman: World’s End (Volume 8), Neil Gaiman writes of this volume:
Each of these stories came about because I had a specific artist with whom I wanted to work. ‘The Golden Boy,’ for example, came partly out of Mike Allred’s desire to work with old DC characters and my own fascination with what people expect of their leaders; but the way the story told itself had much to do with the clean and simple shapes Mike Allred draws, with his people and their movements; ‘Hob’s Leviathan’ came as much from the knowledge that Michael Zulli was about to draw it (and, I suspect, only Michael Zulli could have done) as from my desire to explore an unfamiliar genre and to wave, across the centuries, at Kipling and Burton and Masefield; Alec Stevens’ haunting imagery inspired the city story as much as Lovecraft or Dunsany did (but then, the first time I’d noticed Alec’s work he was adapting a Lovecraft story); the knowledge that I was writing for John Watkiss helped shape Cluracan’s story as much as Shea Anton Pensa’s form and line shaped Petrefax’s; and through it all Bryan Talbot’s ability to ground anything and everything in reality gave me an Inn to return to as each of the tales was told. (1)
Through the first seven volumes of The Sandman I’ve argued for coherence and Gaiman’s organically-whole artistic vision. Here Gaiman himself says that the artist collaborator shaped the story; you could take him to mean that the artist determined the story. Or you could argue that the artist shaped, not the story itself, but the way the story is told. It’s a small but critical difference.
You could argue that the stories in Worlds’ End are a motley assembly of tales, each one told simply for its own sake, and I won’t argue with you. If Dream Country is primarily about the transformative power of myth and story (and it is) and Fables and Reflections is primarily a meditation on power and/or the human need to come together and tell stories (and it is), then the entire enterprise of making meaning, drawing connections between the individual stories of The Sandman would seem to collapse with Gaiman’s statement about the relationship between writer and artist in producing a hybrid product like a graphic novel.
I am of two minds when approaching Worlds’ End. On one hand it’s a collection of different genre stories, all told for their own sake. On the other hand, there’s a more subtle agenda at work. I wrote my dissertation about the practices of scribal editors in the later Middle Ages and the way they forged meaning across disparate texts, the way they edited them to produce a coherent reading experience for their reader/patrons. I see Worlds’ End in a similar light, not least because, in constructing the Inn at the end of all the Worlds, Gaiman tips his hat to the great grand-daddy of all storytellers, Geoffrey Chaucer.
Like the pilgrims at the Tabard, the refugees from the storm are gathered for safety, and to pass the time they tell stories. You could go back and count all the stories that are told in Worlds’ End, but there are six main ones: The Dreaming City, Cluracan’s Tale, “Hob’s Leviathan,” “The Golden Boy,” “Cerements,” and the frame tale of Brant Tucker and Charlene Mooney, and what happens when they run into a June blizzard and wreck their car when Brant swerves to avoid a weird wolf/goat/donkey thing. But that’s just the beginning, because within the stories are nested other stories, and the entire enterprise is a loving tribute to the power of storytelling itself.
The individual tales are masterfully-wrought. They’re testaments to the art of the short story. Your enjoyment of each varies with your taste. A great many critics love the Expressionist forms and incipient creepiness in the otherwise untitled “Dreaming City,” and most find Cluracan’s untitled tale to be wanting. Cluracan is not a universally beloved character in The Sandman, and even Gaiman was dissatisfied with the way the story turned out:
‘Cluracan’s Tale’ turned out rather horribly...This issue taught me the humbling lesson that there are certain stories one just can’t tell in twenty-four pages….
One of my errors is that I was slow in making the adjustment from previous Sandman issues in which what happened in a story was never very important—what mattered was how what happened affected the story’s characters. For Worlds’ End, I thought it would be fun to turn that strategy on its head and concentrate on sheer storytelling. But that requires precise pacing and lots of story details, and on that level, ‘Cluracan’s Tale’ needed forty-eight or sixty-four pages to do it justice. As it is, I ended up trying to do a swashbuckler Errol Flynn movie in fifteen minutes, and fell flat. (2, p. 180)
No one can say that Gaiman is not self-aware, and self-critical when it’s appropriate. (In fact, would-be writers would do well to follow Gaiman on Twitter, Instagram and his blog. In a world of missteps and Anne Rice-style meltdowns, he’s mastered the art of doing social media right.)
“The Golden Boy” is hilarious, not in its execution but in its reception. The story of Prez Rickard and his struggles with Boss Smiley resurrects an obscure 1970’s DC Comics figure of a teenaged President of the United States. It includes significant references to the Watchmen, and have inspired deep discussions online about the extent to which the Watchmen are featured, how the “reality storm” of Worlds’ End lines up with the DC universe Zero Hour phenomenon, etc.
Literary critics had no idea what to do with this story—more than one reviewer slapped Gaiman for being a British cultural neophyte who had no clue about American politics, while others smacked him for implicit Lefty bias against Ronald Reagan, while some Christian factions took issue with the Biblical overtones of Prez’ story, especially his Temptations by Boss Smiley.
It’s worth noting that Brant hears the story of Prez on his way back from the men’s room, when he runs into an Asian gentleman who tells the story as a kind of John the Baptist:
Some say that he still walks between the worlds, travelling from America to America, help to the helpless, a shelter for the weak.
Others say that he waits to be born once more, and that this time he will not come just to one America, but to all of them.
And I walk the worlds, following him, seeking him, walking ahead...spreading his word.
And when he comes back—wherever, whenever he comes back—I will be waiting. (1, p. 114)
There are some stories that have to be told to manifest reality—that is one of the lessons of Sandman, from “The Dream of a Thousand Cats” to the events of Sandman: Overture. By telling Brant the story of Prez Rickard, it’s possible that the gentleman is seeding reality, making manifest the dream that will become, must become, Prez.
Like each of the main tales, “The Golden Boy” is a particular genre tale, a Horatio Alger story, much like Cluracan is an Errol Flynn swashbuckler and “The Dreaming City” a nod to Lovecraft and the creepiness of the mundane. (If you’re following links, this is what Wikipedia is good for: getting your feet wet in a subject—but you knew that already.)
Like the other stories, “Hob’s Leviathan” is a genre tale, a Kipling adventure with a dose of Melville’s Moby Dick, from the initial line, “Call me Jim,” to the appearance of a metaphorical great white whale in the form of a “bloody great” sea serpent. The captain of the Whitby, however, is no Ahab; he and his crew know how to leave well enough alone. The entire tale, related by “Jim” who really isn’t a Jim, featuring Hob Gadling, is all about identity, secrets, and how they are best revealed.
“Cerements” breaks the form by planting stories within stories, and providing the reader with information that will be essential in understanding the last two volumes of the series. Petrefax, an apprentice mortician from the necropolis Litharge (a city devoted to caring for and disposing of the dead) tells the story of an air burial and its associated rituals. Foregrounding the tales is Master Hermas’ observation that after air burial only three things remain of the dead:
First, our pride in a task done well and honestly and with reverence.
Also our memories of his departure and disposal, which we in our turn will take to the grave. Memories of the smell of the client, and the feel of his flesh, and of the noise the wild birds make as they descend for their portion…
And the third thing?
The stain on the rocks. But the next rain will wash it away.” (1, p. 122)
After the client’s body is ground up and given to the birds, the necropolitans eat and tell stories, because that is the tradition of the culture the client hails from. The first tale, an old-Western-style story of cheating the hangman, comes from Mig, followed by Scroyle, who tells the story of meeting Destruction, and Destruction telling him the story of the previous necropolis, which
...went bad. In that Necropolis they began to regard what they did as a job, not a task. There was no care, no love. There was no longer a sense of completion. Bodies were placed in graves...or burned, without respect or love or solace (1, p. 129)
This previous necropolis meets its end when six strangers (The Endless) arrive because their sister has died and they have “come for the cerements, and for the books of ritual which are in your keeping,” (1, p. 130). When the necropolitans, having forgotten the rituals, can’t produce them, Destiny declares their charter revoked. The city falls, and the new charter is given to Litharge. When Petrefax questions the age of the city, Hermas tells him that the written history of Litharge goes back eighty thousand years, but there’s evidence that the city existed long before that. Then he says,
I do not know if Scroyle’s telling has any truth in it or not. Nor does it matter. The tales we tell for the dead are not told to teach us. (1, p. 131)
Ah, but Hermas is wrong. He goes on to tell a story he heard from his own master mortician when he was an apprentice, Mistress Veltis.
She was a wise woman. She told us that what we do is not for the dead. Death is not about the disposal of the client. “What do the dead care what happens to them? Eh? They’re dead,” [she said]. “All the trappings of death are for the living. It is the final reconciliation. The last farewell.” (1, p. 132)
One night, during a storm when the child apprentices (including young Hermas) are terrified, Veltis comforts them by telling them stories, and one story in particular bears careful reading. She tells of having gotten lost in the catacombs under the city and, after long wandering, stumbling into a room where she saw “six silver cerements...shining in the darkness; and a huge book, locked closed, on a lectern. And a voice said to her: Which of them is dead?” (1. p. 134).
Stick a marker in that.
Now, if you look at layers of tales, Veltis tells a tale to Hermas, (as Destruction tells a tale to Scroyle) who relates it to Petrefax, who relates it to the refugees in the Inn. Like Matryoshki, Russian nesting dolls, we have stories inside of stories inside of stories. But wait! there’s more: because the entire story of the Inn at the Worlds’ End is a story that Brant tells to a bartender, the story of himself and Charlotte wrecking their car in a storm of clashing realities and finding refuge in the great tradition, as Chiron says, of “isolated travellers exchang[ing] tales, to keep the dark at bay” (1, p. 142).
The nature of the reality storm isn’t evident until the end, and it’s worth me not spoiling it, so I won’t. But it makes it clear that Worlds’ End runs concurrently with the events of the final two volumes in The Sandman, events that make Brant believe in miracles, while Charlene….well, Charlene’s another case.
There is no shortage of skeptics in The Sandman, people who don’t believe in the reality of the Dreaming but are convinced otherwise by events. Worlds’ End gives us our first real skeptic, someone who refuses to believe in the power of stories: Charlene. Of stories she says,
I mean, sure, they pass the time. They entertain. But how do they help you make sense of anything? The world isn’t...like that. (1, p. 142)
Charlene, trying to hold to some normalcy (while she’s talking to a group of strangers that include the ghastly-white-perhaps-dead citizens of a necropolis, an innkeeper who bears more than a passing resemblance to Durga, a fairy and a centaur) strikes out against storytelling as sheer escapism; there are no real stories, and no real women in any of the stories, she insists. When Jim-who-isn’t-Jim protests, Charlene answers, “Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean,” to which Jim answers, “That wasn’t my story.” Charlene dismisses her, simply saying, “Sure it was.”
By dismissing the reality of the storytelling and the enriching power of the stories themselves (much like a literary critic), Charlene tries to escape having to actually defend her position. Chiron, the centaur, won’t let her get away with it, and challenges her to tell a story.
“I don’t have a goddamn story,” she answers, and follows it with a scathing tale of her own, one that exposes the threadbare nature of realism and denying the power of the imagination:
I’ve got a job I don’t much like, selling software. I’ve got an apartment that I loathe. I’ve got an ex-husband who comes over when he gets lonely and tries to talk me into having sex with him for old times’ sake, and sometimes I even say yes.
I joined a local theater group long enough to realize I’d never be an actor, and joined a writing circle long enough to realize that I don’t have anything to say worth writing down.
I come home from the office every night and fix myself nothing much interesting to eat or I send out for pizza, and I fall asleep in front of the tv….
As her confession continues, she starts to break down:
I always knew what I was doing, you see. In my life.
I don’t need people. I’ve never needed other people. I don’t…. (1, pp. 143-145)
And she runs away in tears.
“I don’t need people.” That’s what Cluracan says in his dream. Nuala tells him, “Nobody’s fine on their own...people need people” (1, p.58). And then she asks Morpheus to come and free him, because without help, he will die.
Morpheus and the Endless figure in these stories tangentially, but it’s significant that when we see Morpheus (only three times—four if you count him from the back at the necropolis) in two of those times he’s opening doors and freeing other people (as he freed Nada, and Calliope, and Orpheus): This time he frees Cluracan and liberates Prez from the realm of Boss Smiley. Tim Callahan, who led an insightful reread of The Sandman for Tor, noted that the series follows a rough structure of quest/aid/collections. It breaks down thus:
- Preludes & Nocturnes: quest
- The Dolls House: it's Rose's quest, Morpheus assists
- Dream Country: collected tales about power of myth and storytelling
- Season of Mists: quest
- A Game of You: Barbie’s quest, Morpheus as deus ex machina
- Fables & Reflections: collected meditations on power and convergences
The structure collapses somewhat in Brief Lives; there’s a quest, to find Destruction. But it’s primarily Delirium’s quest, with Morpheus assisting.
World's End: we’re back to stories, and here Morpheus is also assisting. In part the collection prepares us for the tragic end. But Charlene’s presence does something else; by giving us a character who claims to be immune to the consolations of stories, Gaiman exposes the sterility of her life and her imagination. Stories are born in dreams, and Morpheus is not only the King of Dreams, he’s the Prince of Stories. Charlene needs them so much that, once she realizes what she has missed, first she lashes out, then she collapses, and finally she takes action.
If the short stories in The Sandman are no more than mere diversions, genre tales to while away a time, each and every one of them incidental, well then, as Charlene said, there’s no value to them beyond entertainment. There is nothing to be learned, and reality is as shallow as the sum of Charlene’s life.
Funny thing, though. When the storm is over and the gorgeous three double-fold illustrations of the parade in the sky has gone past, it’s time to go home. But it’s Charlene who elects to stay and work in the Inn. The woman who has no story—no real life—decides to stay in the place of stories, and there she will stay until she’s ready to move on. Despite her protests to the contrary, her decision to say at Worlds’ End, where travelers come and where worlds are always ending and always being created, the lesson of each of the stories in the collection is the lesson of The Sandman itself: that there’s much more to reality than what we can see.
Deep breath now. Next week, all hell breaks loose, as The Kindly Ones take center stage.
References
1. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Worlds’ End. NY: Vertigo, 1994.
2. Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion. NY: Vertigo, 1999.
Previous Sandman Diaries