The Metafiction of Neil Gaiman's the Sandman
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UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM FACULTY OF HUMANITIES Master Thesis: The Metafiction of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Author: Ivana Babić Submission date: June 30, 2016 Discipline of study: MA English Literature and Culture Supervisor: Dr. Joyce Goggin Statement of Originality This document is written by Ivana Babić who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document. ‘I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no sources, other than those mentioned in the text and its references, have been used in creating it.’ The Faculty of the Humanities is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents. 1 Contents Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Chapter One: The Socio-Historical Context 12 Chapter Two: The Myth 18 Chapter Three: The Archetypes 44 Conclusion 54 Bibliography 55 2 Abstract This thesis’ main focus is the fantastic narrative of The Sandman, a comic book series which explores the storytelling as such. As will be shown further on, in the introduction, fantasy is a frequent genre in comics and it is what enables a multiplicity of themes and forms to enter the medium. The conception that stories, which are shaped by the human experience, in turn shape us and tell us something new about ourselves, lies at the heart of The Sandman. Gaiman uses this idea to formulate the principles of the modern world within the comics. Furthermore, this thesis will try and see how the techniques used by Gaiman relate to the comics legacy. Over a course of time comics has developed a self-reflexive approach to storytelling through intertextuality, specifically parody, which has foregrounded the metafictional aspect of their narratives. The potential of developing such complex narratives stems from the deep connection Anglophone comics have with the Western popular culture, within which they emerged. This heightened awareness of the constructed nature of stories in the American society, which helped create such comics, in hands of the ‘outside’ writers have secured a prominent place of metafiction in the comics medium. A rich and unique metanarrative, The Sandman explore the potential that lies in storytelling itself through creation of an elaborate modern day mythology. For this purpose, Gaiman also employs Junigian theory of archetypes in order to reflect upon the universal forces of human existence in relation to the potential for storytelling. 3 Introduction The thesis will examine the comics The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman as a metafictional narrative. Following the pioneers like Watchmen and Swam Thing1, The Sandman continued the work on reimagining the superhero. It was published in monthly instalments of twenty four pages from December 1988 to March 1996, and later collected into a comic book form. When writing about The Sandman this is always an inevitable note, as the numbering in the comic book series does not follow the sequential numbering of the monthly instalments, which can create confusion when citing. For this reason, it should be made clear that this thesis will refer to the work in its book form.2 There are two reasons for this sort of referencing. The first reason is it is much more expensive to come by individual issues than it is the collection. More importantly, the second reason is that The Sandman is constructed in long story arcs that are more easily followed in the book form than in the individual issues. Thus, referring to the collection will allow for a somewhat easier overview. As any comics reader will know, there is nothing strange in having complicated long story arcs in comics, either monthly series or comic books. It is, furthermore, not unusual to have a whole universe rebooted, or character’s history deleted.3 These techniques, known as retcon and reboot, are part of the comics’ narrative as they are of the publishers’ advertising and sales strategies. In other words, both the readership and the publishers are fine with the premise that 1 See Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion. 2 For more details on this see Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion in which he notes complications with numbering as well as with reprints of stories. It gives a clear and concise overview of the issues in the collection. 3 For example, the whole Xorn conundrum in the X-Men. 4 anything is possible in the comics. However, everyone (meaning the comics readership) also expects comics to be “real”4. This apparent paradox points to the relationship comics have with the (Western) popular culture and the study of the self-reflexive qualities in comics cannot be complete without such socio-historical contexts. Furthermore, this thesis proposes that The Sandman is a postmodern narrative which is structured primarily as a myth. As any postmodern work of art, one that is “conscious of its own historicity” (McHale, 1, paragraph 9), The Sandman is a net of popular and literary, as well as philosophical influences. A meta-story about stories, this comic book series makes use of the Anglophone culture’s historical contexts and makes it a base for its own narrative structure, from which it expands to other related cultures as per need. In this way, Gaiman’s primary inspiration for the Lord of Dreams lies in the Greek mythology. However, in a true metafictional fashion, his story is meticulously deconstructed and retold, using global religions and myths (e.g. Egyptian, African and Siberian folk tales, as well as Christianity and Islam). Although The Sandman’s narrative spans over the mythologies of the world, with African folklore and Japanese philosophies, Siberian oral tales and Egyptian deities, it is nevertheless firmly rooted in the West, with its history and mythologies, both through the use of the traditional myths and numerous references to its popular culture. We will therefore also shine some light on the socio-historical context of the development of the American superhero genre, as it was this environment that fostered the self-reflexivity in comics’ narratives. Additionally, the mythological structure allows story-telling to become the central theme and supersede the importance of any one character. It also empowers the individual and provides valuable insights into the heteroglossic nature of the world. 4 As in, events happening in real time, a superhero that could be anyone around us, because he lives a regular life as well, a familiar real-world setting, usually situated in a Western country (the USA in particular) etc. 5 Gaiman has created a universe in which the elements of fantasy and of reality not only coexist but merge and collapse boundaries at many points in order to uncover the postmodern philosophy of reality as a construct at its core. This invented cosmology that is presented through mythical narrative structure provides the grounds for exploring the instability of meaning. The Sandman, thus, on the tradition of mythical storytelling, builds a postmodern, self- reflexive narrative that offers an insight into how meaning is created and organized. This thesis will, finally, argue that The Sandman builds up a metanarrative from many varied individual stories based on the Jungian theory of archetypes, in order to explore the way the unconscious spills into our narratives to form patterns of thoughts. We shall see how through familiar modes of narration Gaiman offers a self-reflexive study of the purpose of narratives, which is to free the reader “from the anxiety of meaninglessness by the recognition that not only can literature never be free in terms of literary tradition; it also cannot be free either in its relation to the historical world or in its relation to readerly desire.”(Waugh, 67) The next chapter will serve as an overview of the relevant social and historical contexts that fostered the development of the form of comics this thesis is concerned with; the metacomics. That is to say comics as a self-referential narrative, in the sense that it analyses itself as a medium but also “…the determining conditions of the work- its institutional setting, its historical positionality, its address to beholders,” (Mitchell, 36) to borrow the explanation from Picture Theory. Admittedly, unlike what Mitchell talks about, comics is not an exclusively pictorial medium and it should not be treated as such, but borrowing terms from both literary and comparative art studies in order to explore the image and text relationship can be helpful in keeping up with the emerging narrative techniques in the comics. 6 Comics has come a long way since the time it was considered a bad influence that corrupts a child’s ability to read literature5. It has brought along a valuable set of new information on how value systems (in culture as well as art, both communal and personal) change their narratives. Building on the postmodern scholarly legacy, the academic circles have been producing works which explore the comics form by trying to establish adequate terminology and appropriate theoretical approach to such narratives, but also the history as well as social and political significance of what has come to be known as a sequential art, a term pioneered by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud (e.g. Orion Kidder’s doctoral dissertation as well as The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature turn toward individual phenomena or artists in order to explore the genre rather than trying to categorise and catalogue all the work in this form). 5 This was the attitude of the U.S. Congress, more specifically the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, supported (among others) by the research and opinions of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, which led to the establishment of the self-censoring regulations called the Comics Code that was developed by the Comics Magazine Association of America.