The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  In The Last Battle, Aslan assures Lucy that: …there was a real railway accident…your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over and the holidays have begun. The dream is ended. This is the morning.25

  This gels with Lewis’s belief that “there is nothing discreditable in dying,”26but does not acknowledge the brutality of the death and the effect on the one left behind. It is this oversight that Gaiman latches on to in “The Problem of Susan.”

  The story is superficially that of an aged children’s literature professor who is interviewed by a young journalist on the night before her death. The professor’s first name is never given, but she is Susan, truly allgrown-up. Her profession allows for a meta-examination of The Chronicles of Narnia. The young interviewer sums up the issue with Susan’s treatment: “All the other kids go off to Paradise and Susan can’t go. She’s no longer a Friend of Narnia because she’s too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties,”27 the incongruous explanation—both religious and anti-feminist:

  [S]he still had time while she lived to repent…not believing, and the sin of Eve…there must have been something else wrong with Susan…otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that— denied the heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward in a world of magic, and waterfalls, and joy. And she was left behind.28

  In a way, this character represents Laura Miller, the young woman who has become disillusioned by Narnia. However, the old professor represents the far deeper truths of Susan being denied heaven.

  “She was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies,”29 Susan says, and makes the point that “I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn’t for me. A little money—less than one might imagine— from her parents’ estate to lodge and feed her. No luxuries.”30

  Did Lewis think of this? Considering his disdain for hedonism, would he have considered the simple life a punishment, or a form of lesson teaching? Either way, it makes the actuality of what the Last Battleimplies even darker, especially when Gaiman further illustrates the professor remembering “I was taken to a nearby school—it was the first day of term,”31 which harkens back to Aslan’s metaphor about term being over for the Friends of Narnia. For Susan, it would have just begun, and started with this memory of her dead brothers and sister. Was she supposed to be forced into fate by the hope that she would have “seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holiday now?”32 This would be unlikely for a doubtful, reasonable girl. Gaiman predicts her belief manifesting itself more likely in the thought that, “A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well…he’s enjoying himself a bit too much isn’t he? Like a cat getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse.”33 This highlights the absurdity of transposing the tenants of a land where the Son-of-God is a lion into the “real world.”

  Through this statement, Gaiman highlights the two flaws in Lewis’s scenario. Not only does leaving Susan with the loss of her entire family make her less inclined to have faith in the Aslan-of-another-name in her world, it also shows the differences between the real world and Narnia. In Lewis’s Narnia, obviously created for children, you do not see the consequences of the brutalities, which Gaiman points out when he depicts Susan’s dream of “standing...on the edge of the battlefield... her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.”34 In Narnia these consequences do not seem to exist, and yet Lewis affects the real world with a train crash that kills not only the Friends of Narnia, but presumably the others that were on the train.

  Gaiman’s mastery of Susan’s character and thus his ability to speak on the subject is shown in the next part of the conversation wherein the professor corrects herself, realizing that the correct term would be a gram of enjoyment, rather than an ounce. She corrects herself in the same way Susan did in The Last Battle. A similar detail is shown when the professor notes that:

  She smells like her grandmother smelled, like old women smell and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking she bathes in scented water and naked and towel dried dabs several drops of Chanel toilet water beneath her arms and neck. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.35

  Thus in no way does he deny the claims Lewis makes about Susan.

  She doesn’t want to get old, to reach the age Lewis puts on a pedestal. She is somewhat vain. However, Gaiman’s presentation of her beliefs suggests that the truth of what Lewis is objecting to could be said to be—and Miller believes it is—sexuality. Sexuality is objectionable in a Christian worldview, but the children’s novel does not allow for the full exploration of this sin, and so Lewis’s objections to “lipsticks and invitations” seem petty.

  In the format of Gaiman’s story, a view of Narnia from the “real world,” Gaiman illuminates the problems with Lewis’s punishment of Susan for her form of being “grown up.” The scenario that Gaiman describes seems far too innocuous to be punishable by exclusion from Paradise, except for actually being sexual, which Lewis does not even allude to. Of Susan’s youth Gaiman says:

  …she had spent an evening once, kissing him, in a summerhouse.... It was, she decides, Charles and Nadia Reid’s house in the country. Which meant that it was before Nadia went away with the Scottish artist and Charles took the professor with him to Spain....This was many years before people commonly went to Spain for their holidays; it was an exotic and dangerous place in those days...and he took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach....She was twenty years old, and had thought herself so old.36

  Here Gaiman highlights the transitory nature of what Susan is being punished for. It is particularly necessary to remember that Susan has a history of seeing her own lack of faith and correcting it, as she does in Prince Caspian, as Gaiman seems to do. Lewis seems to forget Susan’s ability to come back to her faith after questioning it. He states in a letter that “she could (if she was the sort that wanted to) persuade herself as she grew up that it was all nonsense.”37 Perhaps he is merely determined to condemn Susan’s period of silliness, as Gaiman seems to think.

  Gaiman picks up on the threads of faith that Lewis drops and at least acknowledges that they are a part of Susan’s story. When Greta, the student, mentions that she discussed the leaving-behind of Susan with her English teacher, the teacher said “[Susan] still had time while she lived to repent...Not believing, I suppose. And the sin of Eve.”38 This explanation seems to fit more with the explanation that makes more sense within the Christian doctrine that weaves itself in and out of the tale of Narnia. Certainly lack of faith is a reason for not being allowed into Heaven, and Susan is said to have denied Narnia. It also makes more sense with Lewis’ assertion that Susan could convince herself that it was all nonsense, merely because she could keep not believing whether or not she was ‘silly.’ Indeed, to have her family torn away from her in the way that they were would, to most, be a satisfactory reason for not believing. The true problem of Susan is that Lewis does not emphasize this.

  Susan’s punishment and the fairness thereof is only one aspect of The Chronicles of Narnia explored in Gaiman’s short story. He examines the “remarkable power of children’s literature….”39 Although Gaiman obviously respects children’s literature, “The Problem of Susan” does suggest a certain contempt of the idea that it should be used to teach any sort of religious lesson. In a dream, assumedly after her death, the professor reads an “unpublished” Mary Poppins novel wherein “Jane and Michael follow Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven. They meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins, because she was his nanny....‘There’s no making her do anything, not her. She’s Mary Poppins....Not her’ said God the Father....I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins.”40 There is much to be gath
ered from this passage. First, there’s the somewhat laughable and flawed God who does not have power over this staple character of children’s literature. This idea emphasizes the dangers of explicitly embedding religion into children’s books. The idea, though, that Jesus might be afraid of Mary Poppins is something to note. Is it possible that ideas in children’s stories embed themselves as deeply into their readers as religious doctrine might?

  Lewis may have thought so; he designed his stories to be a primer, of sorts, to Christian faith, going so far as to assert to a reader’s mother that her son’s belief in Aslan was in its way a belief in Jesus.41 Gaiman himself was so moved by a book read in childhood that he crafted this story in response. And even if one sees “The Problem of Susan” as more literary response than sparked by embedded belief, I contend that children’s stories such as The Chronicles of Narnia are able to become part of the mythos, and did so particularly in the case of Neil Gaiman. After all, a few years after publishing “The Problem of Susan,” Gaiman penned The Graveyard Book, a novel that builds upon questions asked and themes introduced in The Chronicles of Narnia, and has the potential to stand under the umbrella of modern myth.

  I do not seek to claim that Gaiman asked himself “suppose there was a boy who lived in a graveyard, and suppose he solved the problem of Susan being exiled from Narnia” the way Lewis claims he created The Chronicles of Narnia—that is, by saying he thought “let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a man in our world, became a lion there.”42 In fact, to do so would be to negate both books’ placement in the evolutionary ladder of myth. Rather, the themes of The Chronicles of Narnia have become so important to Gaiman, whether consciously or unconsciously, that The Graveyard Book responds to them.

  In the novel, Nobody “Bod” Owens is a young boy who, not unlike Susan, has lost his entire family. In this case, however, he is the one to gain entrance to a “magical” land when the denizens of the local graveyard save him from his family’s murderer. They grant him “the Freedom of the Graveyard,”43 meaning he has the ability to fade, to enter graves, and most importantly to see ghosts. He is raised by Mr. and Mrs. Owens, a ghostly couple who never had children of their own. Bod has numerous adventures in the graveyard, climaxing in his triumph over the man who killed his family.44

  One of the main themes in the novel, similar to one of Lewis’s stated beliefs that may or may not have been transferred to The Chronicles of Narnia, is that death is not something to be feared. Rather, it is to be respected. The dead live on, either as the graveyard’s specters or in memory as Bod’s family does. Death herself is personified as the “Lady on the Grey,”45 which highlights the fact that death is neither ultimately good nor bad, neither black nor white. It just is. And though Bod does voice a desire to ride the horse (presumably to die and/or stay in the graveyard) he is promised that he will ride her one day. There are no caveats to this; nothing required of him. Death is an equalizer. In the lullaby Bod’s mother sings to him before he leaves the graveyard, she entreats him to “Kiss a lover/Dance a measure/Find your name/and buried treasure” and also “face your life/ its pain its pleasure/leave no path untaken,”46 quite a contrast from Aslan who tells his followers only to have faith while they are gone, so they might return. Here is the essential theme of living life to the fullest rather than ending it to stay somewhere comfortable.

  In fact, the two characters who have died young, the witch Liza Hempstock and the boy Thackery Porringer, have unfinished business and rather unpleasant personalities. Bod solves Liza’s problem for her by making her a headstone, but it is still obvious from her interest (perhaps romantically) in Bod that she did not have a complete life. Thackery is exaggeratedly attached to the copy of Robinson Crusoe, which he was buried with,47 showing a desire for adventure he never got to fulfill.48 Thus, Gaiman does away with the romantic notion of children dying early to access the magical land (graveyard).

  Moreover, in the last lines of the novel there is a huge contrast to the end of Narnia. Lewis ends The Last Battle with the assertion that: All their life in the world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page. Now at least they were beginning chapter one of the Great Story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.”49

  This quote emphasizes the importance of the afterlife, the return to the magical land, and belittles the life, howsoever short, the children have led in “The Shadowlands.” It allows Lewis to be disdainful of the adolescence his readers are approaching in favor of his old age, where one is approaching this theoretical “great story.”

  The tone of this passage is reflected at the end of The Graveyard Book. Bod goes through the gates of the cemetery with: [A] passport in his bag, money in his pocket. There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill, and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the back of her great grey stallion.

  But between now and then, there was Life, and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.50 Bod’s journey more closely resembles that of Gaiman’s Susan than Lewis’s heroes, and also more realistically reflects the life of a potential reader. Bod will live life, make mistakes, have adventures. Nowhere does Gaiman suggest disdain for the idea of growing up, for the adventuresome nature of Bod’s impending adolescence, nor does he so much as suggest that Bod could do something which would deny him reentry into his home.

  The parallels between the endings speak to the way in which the Chronicles have become etched into the mind of the next generation. Whether or not Gaiman intended Bod’s journey to be a response to Lewis, or a solution to the problem of Susan (and I prefer to think that he didn’t), it speaks to the power of a work that engenders such a response from readers years after they were part of the intended audience. Lewis is a part of the children’s literature mythos, and more than being a part of the canon for an author who sets out to write a fantasy for children, it is, in its own right, a form of the Greek myth drawn upon by Joyce and the Roman archetypes drawn on by Shakespeare. It is modern myth.

  Lewis wanted Narnia to be “a ‘fairy tale’ because he had something to say that could only be expressed in this way. He didn’t offer much detail as to what that something was.51 Although the “something” he wanted to express probably refers to the allegory that has caused such controversy, the designation of “fairy tale” is, in fact, the most accurate way of describing the way in which The Chronicles of Narnia fit the designation of modern myth, especially in terms of Neil Gaiman’s reaction to them. There have been many, many after-the-happily-ever-after short stories explaining away elements of fairy tales that become problems as time passes. Then thematic and structural pieces of the fairy tales are recycled in other works, wellwoven, but still recognizable.

  Of course, Lewis was in turn adapting older stories to a modern world. The world changed so drastically in the early part of the twentieth century when Lewis was writing, as reflected in his setting the first Narnia story in World War II. Writers and readers alike were searching for a way to explain the modern world, wherein machines had torn up the countryside and man had been killing man almost non-stop for forty years. For Lewis, the answer was to highlight the myths that came before, but to cushion them in idealizing what was lost—a love for nature and animals—to try to slow down the changes. Gaiman’s generation was the one who devoured these books, trying to make sense of the changes that had been made, of the world as their ancestors saw it, a world that was not as different as the modern from the ancients, but incredibly changed nonetheless. Maybe this is how Lewis became part of modern myth so quickly, because this generation had little else to draw on to explain the world.

  The world is still moving incredibl
y quickly. At least one member of the generation that latched onto The Chronicles of Narniahas questioned it and created the next fairy-tale, one that incorporates more contemporary beliefs. What once took thousands of years to create, question, alter, and embed is taking a single generation. One wonders what will come next in line, what questions The Graveyard Book will raise with readers, and how they will examine Neil Gaiman as a result.

  Gaiman is known for his investigations into the power of mythical figures in adult works such as American Gods. One wonders if, in the future, his less explicit explorations will be the ones remembered. C.S. Lewis is most well-remembered for The Chronicles of Narnia, even though in his time he was celebrated for being a writer of Christian thought. Will The Graveyard Book be what Gaiman is known for? Perhaps. Like the Chronicles, Bod’s story is a children’s book, which draws heavily on myths that came before and changes them to reflect the author’s thoughts (intentionally and unintentionally). On the back of the U.K. hardcover edition of The Graveyard Book, the late Diana Wynne Jones’s blurb asserts that The Graveyard Book is “the best book Neil Gaiman has ever written.” This is, of course, a matter of opinion, but the book’s popularity and the accolades it has received, as well as relation to its canonical forebears, puts it in a better position to become part of modern myth, and therefore be remembered as such.