Over the last twelve weeks we’ve looked at Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, a twelve-volume epic that covers well over two thousand pages and took more than twenty years to complete. No one diary will do justice to such a work, not one so big, so complex, so deep, so moving, so powerfully human as The Sandman. So I’m not gonna try. But I don’t want to just drop without a few parting thoughts.
I’ve been thinking over the past few days about this diary, and I’ve come away with two basic things I want to end with. [Brecht, if you’re reading this, it’s spoiler-free, so you can continue to read if you like.] First, the story as a whole is myth writ large; and second, it’s a story about stories and the power of stories. For the myth part of the discussion, I lean hard on Stephen Rauch’s Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’ and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Rauch does a good job with analyzing The Sandman in light of Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces, and I highly recommend it for Sandman fans, even if parts of the book are over-argued and tenuous. Rauch is a fan of both Campbell and Gaiman, and does justice to both.
The story part of the equation is pretty much my own musings, so here goes.
These Stories Have Power
Some time in the late 1990’s, Gaiman was asked to give a keynote speech to an academic conference about fairy tales, which he recounts in an essay in The View from the Cheap Seats. The first day of the conference he listened to a group of papers, and became “increasingly irritated and dissatisfied”:
My difficulty was not with what was being said, but with the attitude that went along with it — an attitude that implied that these tales no longer had anything to do with us. That they were dead cold things, which would submit without resistance to dissections, that could be held up to the light and inspected from every angle, and would give up their secrets without resistance (2, p. 60)
After listening to the academics for hours, instead of a keynote, Gaiman read his short story “Snow, Glass, Apples,” a retelling of “Snow White” from the viewpoint of the wicked queen.
It is one of the strongest pieces of fiction I’ve written. If you read it on your own, it can be disturbing. To have it read to you by an author on a podium, first thing in the morning, during a conference on fairy tales, must on reflection have been, for the listeners, a rather extreme experience, like taking a gulp of something they thought was coffee, and finding that someone had laced it with wasabi, or with blood.
At the end of a story that was, after all, just “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” an audience of several dozen people looked pale and troubled, like people coming off a roller coaster or like sailors recently returned to land.
“As I said, these stories have power,” I told them as I finished. (2, pp. 61-62)
That anecdote has stuck with me, partly because I’ve been considering the nexus of myth and storytelling. Myth is a living thing, an animating force that we scarcely recognize in the wild but respond to emotionally when we find it. Which is why, whether you consider, for instance, the Star Wars canon, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or the Erikson/Esselmont universe of the Malazan empire, or The Sandman, the power of the narratives doesn’t come from an extra special helping of artistic ability, but instead derives from the engine that powers the narrative — the myths that drive the stories.
Myths are living things that dwell somewhere on the border between the collective unconscious and the subconscious.* [See aside in the next paragraph]. We can give them different labels: for instance, Freud considered that the Oedipus myth is nothing more than a man’s repressed desire to replace his father; but then, the myth slips its label — Hamlet stands on the battlements of Elsinore, talking with a ghost. We can even dissect myths, in a sense, but they tend not to hold still for dissection; turn your back for a second, and they’ll get up, walk away, and take another form. They’re stories that have power — Lear on the heath, Hector on the battlements, Odin on his tree.
*Not for nothing is Delirium the catalyst for Morpheus’ adventures. If you think about the functions of the Endless — Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair — their roles are reasonably self-evident. Delirium is the conundrum; she doesn’t exactly function as an aspect of consciousness. I’ve come to think she’s more allied with the powers of the subconscious: she speaks in non-sequiturs; frequently she makes no sense; she’s incredibly wise and often is the only one who knows what’s going on. We return you now to your regularly-scheduled diatribe.
I realize I’m not being particularly clear, but these are muddy waters — you feel your way with your toes, and always be aware that a snake might slither underfoot. These stories have power. They live deeper in the consciousness than a suspense story, or a romance, or a stirring war chronicle. In the right hands, a coming-of-age story can become a Carrie. But few coming-of-age/horror mashups approach the depths of psychological anxiety that Carrie does…because Carrie is a story of initiation gone wrong. Under its bullying text, the subtext stands on the shoulders of generations of mothers initiating their daughters into womanhood (initiation myths), and what can go wrong when a mother refuses that responsibility. And that’s only one example. You’ll find that all the great stories, the ones that stick with you, do so because there’s something else going on under the surface.
These stories have power. Gaiman knows this. You can trace a line of mythic sensibility in almost all of Gaiman’s writing (I almost wrote all, but you know, there is that Duran-Duran bio….). Gaiman is one of the few writers working today who has an inherent grasp of how to grab that engine and drive it. His writing is not always smooth; it is not always pretty. It goes to some really dark places and doesn’t flinch. But it’s always powerful.
Myth inThe Sandman
According to Joseph Campbell, myth provides us four basic functions.
1) Mystic — It awakens in us a sense of wonder and awe at the mysteries of the world, the universe, and life itself.
2) Cosmic — It shows us what the world is and where we fit in it.
3) Social — It shows us how humans are supposed to behave in the world, positive examples being heroes and negative ones being villains and tricksters.
4) Psychological — It provides us what we need to be fully human no matter the situation; it gives us both examples to follow and the rituals we need to navigate the different stages of life: birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, and the biggest change of all: death.
You can see how all of this applies to The Sandman, a cosmos that encompasses all reality, time, and social order, but is also deeply personal. Barbie comes closest to stating the central truth of the meta-narrative in her “secret worlds” monologue — that all people, no matter who they are or how narrow, poor, mean, short, or superficially superficial their lives, all people carry amazing worlds within them. But then, of course, there’s the individual, the hero who develops and becomes more than himself. Morpheus is a truly novel reversal of the hero archetype, but his journey traces the same mythic arc. After all, the thrust of the story is the tale of Dream, an omnipotent and distant, immeasurably powerful, entity becoming human, learning how to deal with his faults, figuring out how to make up for his transgressions, and even embracing the changes that come to him.
‘Nuff said. I don’t want to dissect Morpheus. I’ll get distracted for a minute, and the next thing you know, he’ll get up and slip away, and I’ll look (more) like an idiot.
The Sandman and Story-Telling
At its base, The Sandman is a story about stories, about the human need to tell stories, about the ways that stories order reality and organize our lives, which is a pretty stellar subtext for an epic. You’ll notice in Sandman that the stories that don’t directly advance the main narrative — the tale of Morpheus after his escape and restoration — well, they fill in the background and flesh out the universe, but mostly they deal with stories and the nature of stories.
There are two kinds of stories in The Sandman: the written and the spoken. The storytellers come off better, whether they’re telling an African initiation tale, or a personal quest narrative related by a cat, or a letter written on the air to a distant friend, or nested stories told to a bartender on a slow night. The focus here is on the stories themselves, and the truths they reveal about human nature.
Storytelling is an art, and an eminently human activity. You need a tale-teller, and you need an audience, one that’s physically present and actively listening, whether it’s Loki telling Puck the story about Thor’s pregnancy or the ladies meeting Rose Walker first in a broom closet and second in a sitting room.
Writers don’t come off as well. We have four of them in The Sandman. Richard Madoc commits horrible crimes to ward off writer’s block and writes popular but lightweight tales. The playwright in “Fear of Falling” fears both failure and success and is paralyzed. This is Gaiman’s most direct imprimatur and advice to writers, “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly” (3, p. 11).
The other two writers merit more attention. The first appears early on in the story, in Preludes and Nocturnes, in fact, and that is Bette in the story “24 Hours.” The story of what happens in the diner starts from Bette’s point of view. She’s the writer who disregards the ugliness of reality and, in her stories anyway, ensures that everyone gets a happy ending; she’s still envisioning happy endings even as John Dee sits in the corner and begins to destroy the world, sharpening his knives first on the occupants of the diner.
“24 Hours” is, at least for me, the hardest of the Sandman stories to read (although the Cereal Convention runs a close second) because it’s so dark and cruel. Artistically it’s essential to have it there because it provides the dark underpinning that anchors the story; we can’t appreciate Dream without encountering nightmare. The ruby dreamstone harnesses such power that Dee can’t help but succumb to the awful seduction of the unspeakable, which gives us a perspective about Morpheus without us even realizing it: Morpheus could do exactly what Dee has done and it would be worse, because Morpheus is far more powerful. But he chooses not to. He chooses to abide by his rules and responsibilities, the same rules and responsibilities that will end up trapping him until he realizes that he can free himself, although his measures are admittedly extreme.
We also need Bette as the counterweight to our final writer. Bette imposes her desires upon reality, seeks to refashion the world according to her own vision, insisting that everyone is happy even when it runs counter to sense, character, and destiny. She uses her writing to hide from the world.
The final writer is, of course, Shakespeare, who sees the world in all its imperfections and glory and reflects it back to us. But to be Shakespeare in Gaiman’s world is not an unmixed blessing. He has written stories that will endure, yes, but he also rues his life and lives long enough to see the joy bleed out of his creations.
Through Shakespeare, Gaiman describes what it is to be a writer, which is essentially to be a spectator in your own life, to take your joys, your ecstasies, your heartbreak, even your boredom, and turn them into elements for the stories you tell, to discover that the characters who live in you are often more real than the people you live with. It’s an alienated and lonely prescription, but an accurate one. Strip away the glamour, Gaiman says, and you find an introvert who works all the time, always gathering material for use later. Someone who requires absence, that’s a writer—the opposite of the storyteller, who requires presence to make the magic happen. Shakespeare is, I venture, Gaiman’s mouthpiece for what make writing a craft, equal parts solitude, alienation, technique and inspiration. Morpheus “opened a door” for Will and inspired the great stories in him, but Will did all the work. It’s a metaphor for a writing life, and possibly (hell, almost certainly) an example that resonated deeply with the author.
And so we bid farewell to the Sandman, the lord of dreams and prince of stories. At least until the next time. The work is so complex and subtle, it needs more than two or three readings. Thank you for your indulgence and patience. It’s been a special pleasure to write, and I hope it’s been bearable to read.
Next week, Angmar has written for us an extended meditation on identity and avatars. You’ll enjoy it. Until then, see you in dreams…..
References
1. Stephen Rauch, Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman’ and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.
2. Neil Gaiman, The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction. NY: Morrow, 2014.
3. Neil Gaiman, Fables and Reflections. NY: Vertigo, 1993.
Previous Sandman Diaries