The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

by Burke, Jessica

  While Adam, Eve, Lilith, and the children of Adam and Lilith appear in both stories, the two canonical sons of Adam and Eve only appear in The Sandmanseries. In MacDonald it may simply be that they, like many others, eventually found forgiveness and slept, but in Gaiman’s text, they play a very different role.

  Cain and Abel live in Dream’s country because they are a part of the oldest story ever told. As a part of the story that shaped much of human thought and dreams, they have a contract with the Lord of Dreams. The contract is, essentially, this: throughout all time, Abel offends Cain (sometimes by doing something directly, sometimes simply by existing), Cain kills Abel, Abel comes back to life again, the brothers live together in peace for a while, and then the cycle repeats itself. Abel tells the story of the original contract to the child Daniel shortly after Eve tells him the story of Lilith. After Cain killed Abel because “the Land’s Creator” liked Abel’s sacrifice better than Cain’s, Dream and Death both approached Abel and offered to let him live in the new gardens that they were creating.145 Death makes him no promises, but Dream promises him a house and the job of telling stories. Dream gives Abel a “letter of commission,” and eventually, the Lord of Dreams allows Cain to join his brother.53 The commission that Cain has says that Cain, because of the mark he has received, cannot be killed by anyone, and Abel can only be killed by Cain. The Mark of Cain protects him from everyone, while Abel’s contract protects him from everyone except Cain. Near the end of The Sandman series, Abel is killed not by Cain, but by the Fates. Cain therefore takes his letter of commission to the Sandman himself for retribution. Cain kills his brother, but he also loves him in a tortured way.

  Gaiman’s use of the story of Cain and Abel is another of the places where the difference between MacDonald and Gaiman’s approaches interact dialogically. MacDonald’s text apparently does not find these two characters worth mentioning, while Gaiman’s engages them as part of the oldest story ever told in order to invoke the mythological nature of their story. Both Gaiman and MacDonald place characters from the JudeoChristian creation story in an alternate world that is, at times, visited by all people from our world. In this sense, they both are working in dialogue with the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. Gaiman and MacDonald ask the same question: “now what?” When looking at Gaiman and MacDonald together, however, it becomes clear that they give two starkly different answers to this question. Gaiman’s sequel leaves the story openended: Cain forever kills Abel, the daughter of Lilith forever follows Lucifer, and Eve forever lives in the world of nightmares. In Gaiman’s world, there is no reprieve for these characters. They simply must live out the results of their actions or their choices, never deviating from the roles given them in their own stories. In MacDonald’s sequel to the story of Adam and Eve, however, there is closure for everyone. Each character receives forgiveness and reconciliation, and that forgiveness leads to both personal growth and peace.

  This, then, is where a dialogic reading of these texts brings the reader. Both Gaiman and MacDonald have taken on the same essential issues using the same basic images. Both are concerned with mythical presentations of death, the afterlife, and the relationship between these and the concepts of wrongdoing and forgiveness. Presented side by side, it becomes clear that one story uses Adam, Eve, Lilith, and their children to present a vision of hope, while the other presents a vague hopelessness. One provides escape from one’s mistakes; the other suggests a lack of any such escape route. Reading these two stories not only in light of myth, but in light of each other, as well, reveals that not only do they reinvent old imagery, but that both embrace new images. In both cases, the raven librarian and the playful, feminine anthropomorphic death help to create new spaces in which old ideas can be challenged and explored, rejected or possibly even embraced.

  ____________________

  1 Other writers than George MacDonald have been called the first to write this sort of fantasy, including H. P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and William Morris. For the purpose of this article, Sullivan’s claim is being used because MacDonald’s first fantasy novel of this sort, Phantastes, was published in 1858, while Lovecraft was not born until 1890, and Dunsany, 1878. The claim that Morris was the first to write such stories is more substantial, since his prose romance The Hollow Land was published in 1856, two years before Phantastes. Whether or not The Hollow Landcan be considered the same genre, however, is debatable, since this story can also be read as an allegory about the dominance of art over all other aspects of life.

  2 Sullivan, “Fantasy,” 420.

  3 Gaarden, “Cosmic,” 20.

  4 While each of these writers acknowledges the influence of MacDonald on their work in several places,

  examples include C. S. Lewis’s Preface to George MacDonald, an Anthology; Chesterton’s Preface to George MacDonald and his Wife, by Greville MacDonald, and Tolkien’s Letter on January 16, 1938, to the editor of The Observer, in which he states that George MacDonald is the only Victorian writer who influenced the writing of The Hobbit.

  5 Gaiman, Mythcon.

  6 Gaiman, Graveyard, 31.

  7 Gaiman, Graveyard, 30.

  8 Gaiman, Graveyard, 161,162.

  9 MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, 357.

  10 MacDonald, North Wind, 17.

  11 Gaiman, Preludes, 215.

  12 Gaiman, Preludes, 225.

  13 Gaiman, World’s End, 157.

  14 MacDonald, North Wind, 91, 103.

  15 MacDonald, North Wind, 111.

  16 MacDonald, North Wind, 112.

  17 MacDonald, North Wind, 112.

  18 Gaiman, Preludes, 224.

  19 Matthew 5:29-30; Mark 9: 43-45.

  20 MacDonald, Lilith, 21.

  21 MacDonald, Lilith, 93.

  22 MacDonald, Lilith, 94.

  23 Gaiman, Preludes, 113.

  24 Hein, The Harmony Within, 15.

  25 Reis, George MacDonald’s Fiction: A Twentieth Century View, 33.

  26 Gaiman, Mists, 129.

  27 MacDonald, Lilith, 21.

  28 MacDonald, Lilith, 25.

  29 MacDonald, Lilith, 9.

  30 Gaiman, Seasons, 40.

  31 Gaiman, Kindly Ones, part 11, page 15.

  32 Gaiman, Kindly Ones, part 12, page 20.

  33 MacDonald, Lilith, 9.

  34 MacDonald, Lilith, 14.

  35 MacDonald, Lilith, 27.

  36 Geduld, “The Lineage of Lilith,” 58.

  37 Gaiman, Fables, 216.

  38 Gaiman, Fables, 212.

  39 Gaiman, Fables, 204.

  40 MacDonald, Lilith, 27.

  41 MacDonald, Lilith, 27.

  42 MacDonald, Lilith, 40.

  43 MacDonald, Lilith, 27.

  44 MacDonald, Lilith, 148.

  45 Stern, Rabbinic Fantasies, 168.

  46 MacDonald, Lilith, 148.

  47 MacDonald, Lilith, 148.

  48 MacDonald, Lilith, 213.

  49 While discussions of this common Victorian attitude can be found in many texts, a standard starting place for such a study of Victorian attitudes would be J. H. Buckley’s The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture.

  50 For more information, see Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition.

  51 Gaiman, Mists, 85.

  52 Gaiman, Fables, 220.

  53 Gaiman, Fables, 220.

  Whatever Happened to the Time Lord? Mythology and Fandom in

  Neil Gaiman’s Contributions to Unfolding Texts

  Matthew Hills The mythological dimensions of Neil Gaiman’s work are nothing if not multiple. One might, for instance, consider how Gaiman’s Sandman series approximates to a Campbellian mythic structure,1 or how it posits ontology of the Endless standing behind prior myths-as-stories.2 Or one might address the “explicit mythology” of American Gods, i.e., how the novel appropriates scenarios and figures from classic myths in order to rework them in and for the present day.3 Whether affirming models of myth, or acting as meta-mythic reconfigurations, Neil Gai
man has repeatedly and self-consciously engaged with myth in his fantastic fabulations. In this chapter, however, I want to consider yet another mythological dimension, and one which has been less explored in scholarly studies of Gaiman’s creative output.

  My focus will be less on Gaiman as primary auteur-creator, and more as a contributor to media franchises creatively led by others. For example, Gaiman has contributed episodes to the TV series Babylon 5 (executive produced, created, and lead-written by J.M. Straczynski) and Doctor Who (under show runner Steven Moffat). He has also contributed to the Batman mythos, e.g., in the “last Batman story” Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader. Previous critical work has tended to marginalize these works within Gaiman’s oeuvre; The Neil Gaiman Reader offers no sustained study of Gaiman’s Babylon 5 episode, despite some contributors4 equating Gaiman’s craft with that of U.S. stage magicians (and guest stars in his Babylon 5episode, “Day of the Dead”) Penn and Teller.5 I would suggest that scholarship tackling Gaiman has displayed a tendency to celebrate his authorial persona, thereby rendering his franchise contributions of secondary importance. These supposedly cannot be read as straightforward expressions of Gaiman’s authorial vision, and are assumed instead to be hemmed in by the requirements of writing for others’ characters and others’ narrative universes. Of course, the line I am drawing here can be challenged: it might be countered that the Sandman was not Gaiman’s own character, but was instead a “revisionist” reworking of an established character.6 However, thought of as a revisionary comic book writer, Gaiman’s authorial agency has been stressed. By radically transforming the Sandman, Gaiman promotes — and is able to agentively control — his vision of the character.7 By strong contrast, Gaiman borrows the Batman temporarily, weaves a oneshot Doctor Who story, and shapes an interlude in a run of 61 consecutive Babylon 5 episodes from creator Joe Straczynski.8

  I want to argue that these franchise contributions deserve attention as “mythological” texts alongside the more frequently studied and celebrated canon of Sandman, American Gods, and so on. To leave “The Doctor’s Wife” or “Day of the Dead” to one side runs the risk of reproducing an art versus commerce binary, where Gaiman’s (graphic) novels deserve literary decoding, but his franchise entries are implicitly devalued or seen as less artistically worthy. Lance Parkin makes a related point when he discusses contemporary media franchises shaped by a series of producers:

  [E]ven decades after “the death of the author,” a text written by one person is still most commonly seen as inherently more impressive and worthy of study than one that is the work of many hands. The terminology used is often disparaging. The most popular U.S. term for ongoing narratives, “franchise,” places them in the realm of burger joints and pretzel stands, rather than art or academia... I will use a less emotive term, coined in the title of the first academic analysis of Doctor Who: “unfolding text.”9

  I shall follow Parkin’s lead here, focusing on Gaiman’s contributions to a range of “unfolding texts.” Parkin defines an unfolding text as a “fiction based around a common character, [or] set of characters...that has had some form of serial publication,” noting that although this can have a single author, unfolding texts are “typically written by many” as well as having decentred, multiple narratives: “most contain a number of distinct series, in different media, usually with different creators and even intended audiences.”10 Unfolding texts can run over many years. For instance, Batman began in 1939, while Doctor Who started in 1963. And their continuity can evolve and shift across different eras (e.g., the “pre-Crisis” Batman; the first Doctor), with new production teams or lead creatives taking charge periodically.

  Parkin suggests that despite these diachronic variations, unfolding texts are understood by readers and viewers to follow certain rules: In his study of Batman, Will Brooker11 suggests... that a Batman story... has a core set of concepts... readers and viewers understand them as “rules”... This may apply more to unfolding texts that were always the work of many hands – or it may be that “written by a particular person” is one of the core concepts for some unfolding texts.12

  The latter point brings Babylon 5 into my discussion, since unlike Batman and Doctor Who, this unfolding text was very much linked to a single creator, J.M. Straczynski. Babylon 5 is thus less multiple, and somewhat less “unfolded,” if you like, than Batman and Doctor Who. But Gaiman’s contribution to this narrative universe, similar to his work with characters such as the Doctor and the Batman, nevertheless has to fit into perceived “rules” and established continuity.

  Parkin makes the provocative case that unfolding texts and their “rules” are themselves akin to mythologies: “Throughout history there have been unfolding texts; Robin Hood, King Arthur, and the classical myths, for example, have all the characteristic of an unfolding text.”13 He is not alone in reaching this conclusion; writing of superhero continuity in comic books, Richard Reynolds also equates contemporary superheroes with mythology. Reynolds argues that “serial continuity,” which is how continuity develops over time, and “hierarchical continuity,” or the configuration of superhero continuity at a given moment, combine to form what’s called structural continuity:

  …structural continuity embraces more than the sum total of all the stories and canonical interactions.... Structural continuity also embraces... actions which are not recorded in any specific text, but inescapably implied by continuity…. If superheroes are to have any claim at all to be considered the bearers of a ‘modern mythology’ and in some ways comparable to the pantheons of Greek or Native American or Norse mythology, then this extra-textual continuity is a vital key to the way in which the mythology of comic books is articulated in the mind of readers.14

  For Reynolds, then, structural continuity becomes “metatextual,” i.e., it does not exist in any one text, nor in any series of texts, but is in fact a production of fan reading and knowledge: “The ideal fan is capable of envisaging an ideal DC or Marvel metatext: a summation of all existing texts plus all the gaps which those texts have left unspecified.”15 Such “metatextual structural continuity” is not merely a set of “rules” or learnt facts about a superhero character. It also includes “gaps” in the narrative universe—material that is not shown or given to fans, but nevertheless implied as a present absence. Superheroes become mythological through their “interaction with the audience,” and specifically the fan audience: “metatextual structural continuity... is the strategy through which superhero texts most clearly operate as myths.”16

  Reynolds’ work on comic book heroes resonates with my own work on cult TV and especially Doctor Who, where I have posited a similar process of continuity formation, termed hyperdiegesis.17 Like Reynolds, I emphasise the significance of textual gaps and implications, describing hyperdiegesis as “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according to the principles of internal logic and extension.”18 Piers Britton, writing recently in TARDISbound, argues that the “maintenance, ordering and enhancement of the Doctor Who hyperdiegesis have almost entirely been the work of fans,”19 with fan writers and latterly producer-fans attempting retroactively to re-order— or at the very least acknowledge20—contradictions and tensions between the show’s different iterations. Britton suggests that as a result of changes in production team, and changes in format, “Doctor Who’s hyperdiegetic framework is at best rickety. With its time-travel premise, Doctor Who was not conceived with an eye to internal coherence.”21

  Reynolds on comic book superheroes; Britton on Doctor Who; Parkin on the likes of Batman and Doctor Who—all argue in a variety of ways for the importance of fan activations of the “structural continuity” or “hyperdiegesis” of unfolding texts, themselves conceptualised as contemporary mythologies. This role for fandom now clearly extends into professional media production:

  …production teams of long-running shows are f
requently now themselves (as they are inevitably described in interviews) “selfconfessed fans.” Fans reading an Internet interview or attending a convention want reassurance that the producer “understands the show” (usually a thinly veiled euphemism for that fandom’s specific preferences).22

  This is important not just to reassure fan cultures that TV shows, and muchloved characters, are in safe hands. It also means that producer-fans have an understanding of “metatextual structural continuity,” thus being able to coherently build on, or bring to coherence, the “rickety” hyperdiegesis making up, for instance, Doctor Who’s mythological dimensions.23 I argue that fan knowledge is similarly privileged in Neil Gaiman’s contributions to Babylon 5, Batman, and Doctor Who. Gaiman positions himself as a producer-fan, relating to these unfolding texts through the lenses of lived fandom, and/or as a writer self-consciously drawing on fan knowledge via research and testing of story ideas. And as Lance Parkin has argued, “each new Doctor Who story... is inevitably part of something much larger and more enduring, something greater than the sum of its parts. This privileges the returning audience (particularly the fans) for an unfolding text.”24Fandom is likewise emphasised in Gaiman’s working practices when he contributes to unfolding texts. Here, he is structurally placed in the position of a “tie-in writer,”25 not having control over ongoing story arcs and developments planned by show runners/creators, and instead having to pitch and refine story ideas which fit into, and do not contradict or duplicate, developing mythologies.

  Gaiman’s work on Babylon 5, Batman, and Doctor Who shares a common focus on fan knowledge, and on exploiting and exploring the “gaps” in coherent, fragmented, or rickety hyperdiegetic narrative worlds. Gaiman thematically gathers together hyperdiegetic present absences (the return of dead characters in “Day of the Dead,” as well as fleshing out Rebo and Zooty); suspends hyperdiegetic coherence in order to acknowledge different iterations of an unfolding text (in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader); and creates synthetic continuity, i.e., building a new coherence across rickety, disarticulated eras of Doctor Who (in “The Doctor’s Wife.”) Each adds adroitly to established mythology, and each positions Gaiman in relation to fan knowledge, further blurring the line between producer and fan by offering up “fan service” (content aimed at garnering fan approval and appreciation). More than this, however, I will suggest that fan readings (and writings) tend to emphasise a character’s or a TV show’s mythology—that is to say, fandom activates an unfolding text as mythological. The mythological dimensions of Babylon 5, Batman, and Doctor Who do not coincidentally intersect with fan knowledge/ receptions; they are generated and sustained via fan cultural capital26 whether this belongs to “Big Name Fans,” assorted fan readers, published scholar-fans, or celebrated producer-fans such as Gaiman himself. In short, one game that fandom characteristically plays with its beloved texts is the game of learning, retelling, and reading-for the mythological dimensions of unfolding texts.