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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. Orion Usner Kidder’s dissertation provides a nice overview of both the significance of the Code, as well as the challenges of comics’ historiography.

Chapter One: The Socio-Historical Context

Although, as Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest point out6, the term has failed to catch on in general usage, it almost feels as if the name “sequential art/narrative” has justified the academic interest in the medium, but “sequential” has hardly been the only word used to describe it.7 Whether this is true or not, it is certain that comics, as any art form, has evolved; its narrative has exceeded the pre-established boundaries and gone beyond “the usual way” of communicating with its readers/viewers. It is perhaps this new take in the comics development, this often termed “graphic novel” aspect of storytelling (to distinguish it from or possibly renounce its pre-Code legacy) that induced interest in this art form, initiating lengthy discussions and theories about contemporary comics and its beginnings. However interesting the history of the art form in relation to social contexts might be, this thesis will limit itself to one of the major events in the Anglophone comics history that shaped the development of the self-referential comics; the introduction of the Comics Code.

Moreover, curious relationship between image and word in this medium has so far defied categorisations. It is, indeed, a medium that is “in between”, with few rules and many variations, which has proven difficult to categorise and define.8

6 In The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature, editors and authors Goggin and Hassler-Forest collected a number of essays on the form, dealing with everything from development and terminology, contemporary adaptations and politics, to nonfiction subgenre. 7 The history of the critical debate is as rich as comics’ history itself. Kidder traces the debate on comics to about early 1940s, enumerating a number of examples on how critics have reached in all possible directions to define the characteristics of comics; from completely ignoring the form (like Sheridan) to historically focused definitions of comics form, to conceptualising comics as a syntagmatic system. (Telling Stories About Storytelling: The Metacomics of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis, pg 9) 8 There is no clear historical overview, no agreement among the scholars on what it is, except that it has images and words that are often in balloons and gutters, which are variously termed by different scholars, which are gaps in between the images where at least part of the meaning is created through the reader’s/viewer’s cooperation and competence to fill in the gaps.

What is clear, though, is that comic book writers rely on the skills and competences of their audience (i.e. they must trust that the reader/viewer will recognize the shapes, the importance of perspective, know how to recognize and decode symbols, analyse the plot etc.), who make the often masterfully suggested snippets of time and space on the comics pages come to life.

This might very well be why the Comics Code era brought about the self-reflexivity; in an effort to please the audience (and their parents?) and through the process of thinking about what is “appropriate”, the writers in the genre have started to turn inwards, to explore the mechanisms of the medium.

Orion Kidder, inspired in part by McHale’s notion of postmodernism as a global crossing on which writers worldwide found themselves standing before the choice of whether or not to cross the street once the light turned green, writes extensively on meta-comics and their development in his dissertation9. He places the market demand for realism in the centre of his argument that Silver-Age (i.e. the mainstream) and Underground comics, the two main types of narratives at the time, helped “teach American comic-book audience how to read/view metacomics” (Kidder, 53) while trying to provide for the market demands. He uses Todorov’s term, verisimilitude, to explain the nature of reality in the comics, arguing the devices used by comics, both Silver-Age and Underground, work towards the introduction of metacomic techniques into the medium.

Verisimilitude is thus useful to him in exploring the nature of dual expectations (for a more realistic fantastic narrative) that occurred in comics, but it also serves to show that the fantastic genre of comics turns the concept on its head by applying it to fantasy and turning it into a

“convention of perception” (Kidder, 55). In this way, he makes clear that the narrative techniques (e.g. intertextuality, self-reference, parody etc.) had been present for a while before

9 See Telling Stories About Storytelling: The Metacomics of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis for more details

9 the metacomics emerged, and have been brought to the centre when the social circumstances provided a favourable space for them. That is to say, the time of the Code.

Whether the implementation of the Code is seen an ingenious marketing strategy or a genuine attempt to purify and protect the medium by the Comics Code Authority, there is no denying it was an important moment of cultural self-questioning, induced by an art form which had, by that point, gotten into the stage where value and quality were measured in sales numbers.

As Nyberg notes in Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, the Code was largely written by several of the leading publishing houses of the day (Nyberg, 106), which would imply that its purpose was primarily to keep the sales numbers from declining.

In this way, the U.S Senate did what parents had asked; it protected the youth and maintained the free-market, as the CCA was able to introduce the self-regulated “highly authoritarian”(

Kidder, 61) document. This shows the interdependence between the popular culture (i.e. the readership and its parents or guardians) and the medium, but it also demonstrates the importance of the publishing industry in the creation of comics. In this way, many major publishing houses chose to be included in the Association, and to obtain Seal of Approval, exclusively to keep up (or boost) the sales.

Whether the aim was to improve the comics genre or to keep up the sales numbers, it is important to recognize both the Code’s significance in installing the notion of compliance to authority in Silver Age style, as well as the ensuing ‘rebellion’ that was brought about by the

Underground comix.10

10 Underground comix saw its boom in 1960s as a small-press or self-published alternative to the mainstream superhero genre, deliberately depicting provocative content forbidden by the Code thus exhibiting the freedom of writing/drawing in the medium. For this reason they were sold primarily in head shops, targeting alternative subcultures.

This division; the mainstream that followed the Code and the alternative that rebelled against

“the authority” primarily by mocking and parodying the themes in mainstream comics, will make it ok for the comics to be self-referential, to not only question how best to serve their purpose, but to question the purpose as well.

Of course, the Underground comix history, just like the superhero genre, has a much longer line of development, but it was not until the Code that the two would engage in a dialogue that was crucial for the introduction of metanarrative techniques into the medium. Indeed, Kidder makes it a central point of his dissertation to argue that Revisionist comics, i.e. the comics at which core lies the struggle to reinvent or revise the notion of reality in (primarily) superhero genre, draw their metanarrative techniques from these two styles. They are understood here as styles within the comics medium, and not eras or ages, primarily because any categorization of ages so far has proven to be too problematic. 11 Admittedly, ages as eras are part of the comics culture and should not be ignored, but for the purposes of understanding The Sandman’s background, the terms Silver Age, Revisionist and Underground comix will do well to name and differentiate between predominant narrative techniques within the medium, in order to understand the metafictional aspect of comics.

Undoubtedly, it is possible to see that the preoccupation with the sense of reality and time in

Silver Age style (e.g. the sense that superhero adventures are forever in the present; superheroes such as Superman or Batman don’t age, but they do change according to contemporary moral norms) could have induced questions such as “What is time? What is real? What is a world?” that would be asked by metacomics. Kidder is, however, careful not to suggest this transition from Silver Age to Revisionist (that he equates to metacomics) is a straight forward affair by

11 There is little agreement in categorization between fans, publishers, creators and scholars because of their differing motivations for constructing these systems, as thoroughly explained by Christopher Woo in “An Age Old Problem: Problematics of Comic Book Historiography”.

11 drawing a comparison between the Silver Age/Revisionist relationship and modern/postmodern dichotomy, and quoting Brian McHale’s Constructing Postmodernism. In this sense, the shift is not a radical break with the previous traditions, but two alternatives that exist together and do not merely progress from one to another.

So, while the metanarratives emerged partly due to challenges Silver Age style met in respect with the fantastic-vs.-real contradiction (thus the solutions such as retcon and reboot devices), it did not necessarily signify the end of the Silver Age style of storytelling. In fact, such comics, as Kidder notes, have been commercially successful although their self-reflective techniques

(again, the aforementioned retcon) are generally unsuccessful in obtaining the coherent relationship between the fantastic and the conventions of realism. Similarly, the formulaic nature of the Silver Age leaves them devoid of the freedom to explore or experiment with the modes of narration.

In other words, their narratives are too rigid because their main purpose is to establish an internal order, a stable image. The “shifting of aspects, the display of pictorial paradox and forms of nonsense” (Mitchell, 57) that Mitchell sees as internal structural effects of multistability in a metapicture may occur in SA comics in the attempt to stabilize the relationship between the seemingly real and the fantastic. Kidder compares the way in which

Silver Age narratives achieve fluidity to the way a bag of marbles would behave like a fluid, saying how the (both publishers and creators’) drive to create stories that could continuously be told without any big changes over time leads to the overuse of narrative devices that create more contradictions than resolutions. So, “the more SA comics attempt to maintain the neverwhen, and fixity in general, the more they insatiate the fluidity.”(Kidder, 67)

On the other hand, Underground comix were perceived as “an unsavoury deviation from the inexorable progress to the present-day triumph of the "grown-up" superhero” (Witek,

“Imagetext”,par. 9). Such comic books were, in this sense, free of rules and sales numbers, which provided a space for personal expression. In the rebellion against the Code, Underground comix exhibit the “wildness of the metapicture”(Mitchell, 57) through (primarily) parody of the contemporary themes which, in order to be successful, needs to be recognizable. This is achieved through what Kidder and Hatfield call “ironic authentication” (Kidder, 80), i.e. the paradox in which by stating its own falsehood the information becomes more honest.

So, while Silver Age comics struggle to create a perfect resemblance to reality in the primarily fantastic genre (e.g. the aforementioned sense that superheroes live forever in the present, or can cross from one reality/universe into another), Underground comix strived to mimic that struggle in order to ridicule the conventions and moral values of the style and, to put it plainly, show how ‘fake’, limited that narrative is.

Unsurprisingly, Underground comix were consequently limited as a “reactive, counter-cultural product.”(Witek, par.8) This means that those comix that parodied themes and narrative techniques of superhero comics were not only highly self-referential but also greatly dependant on the audience’s knowledge of the mainstream narratives. To mention but one example, when talking about Zap#4, Witek singles out a Superman parody starring Wonder Wart-Hog who, like Superman, hides his true identity and is enamoured with a co-worker who is in turn attracted to his alter ego.

His disguise as a reporter, as well as the scene in which Wonder Wart beats an infamous cartoonist Robert Scum (the infallible allusion to Crumb) saying “I’ll teach you to corrupt innocent American kids, you God damn fucking son of a bitch! You prick! You cocksucker!”

(Witek, par. 22) is a fine example of that layered parody that relies on the reader’s knowledge of the superhero narratives and (or, in) relation to the Comics Code. It, indeed, parodies both

13 the self-imposed restrictions of the main stream as well as its own role as a rogue in the comics’ world.

In other words, for the comix to have any meaningful effect on our understanding of it, readers need to be familiar with the historical and social context that is being reflected upon in it. Thus, although through parody comix gains the freedom of expression, the Underground comix’ narratives concerned with Code and mainstream relationship have its own clearly defined parameters within the social context.

It might seem SA style is more superior to the Underground. It might also be considered to be true from the commercial aspect. However, both are equally important for bringing meta- elements to the forefront, as their interaction with each other as well as the audience sets comics storytelling on a new path, one that has by this point gone global not only through literature, but audio and visual media as well. 12

Indeed, it could be said that the relationship between the readership and comics draws similarities to the relationship between The Sandman’s Endless and humans, in that the interaction between the two serves as an example of instability of power relations; we are never quite certain where the centre of it lies.

Thus, the Code dominated comics publishing gradually brought about concerns over narrative stability and, in doing so, paved the way for the postmodern narratives of The Sandman or

Watchmen, for example, as well as the remakes of the superhero narratives (i.e. Batman: The

Dark Knight, The Amazing Spider-Man, etc.), all of which worked on reinventing the image of a superhero through metafictional elements.

12 See Brian McHale in Reconstructing Postmodernism, where he discusses the phenomenon of “global postmodernism”, offering several possible explanations for it and finishing with the very optimistic third possibility of a “dialogic moment” in which cultures of the world are able to exchange models and memes outside the contexts of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

Although not immune to the profit making purposes of their publishers, the new wave of comics’ narratives are in a bigger measure creator-owned and more independent. They could now tap into horror, fiction, crime, biography, satire and so on, in order to create narratives that explore the relationship between the fantastic and the real in a new way. The questions such as: “What is reality?”, “What makes the world around us real?” often become focal, and unlike

Silver Age, metacomics (dubbed Revisionist by Kidder) has no intention of creating a stable narrative. Things can fall apart, heroes and good people can die too, superheroes go rogue, morals are twisted and bad guys are not always punished or not always as bad. Furthermore, explanation for the impossible is not necessarily provided, and real sometimes feels strange.

Pictures and words have now become a platform for multidimensional deconstruction of stories; collective and individual ones, famous and old ones as well as those never heard before.

Building on the legacy of the Underground comix’ parody, such comics often use bricolage to shape their narratives, which reflects the ontological turn they have undertaken (for example, in The Sandman, Shakespeare is initially a lousy writer who acquires his skills through a pact with the Dream Lord, in exchange for two plays that will turn out to parallel both of their lives, posing questions as to how much control one has over one’s life and imagination, and whether it is his imagination at all).

Kidder places these meta-stories under the term Revisionist in saying they “embrace various forms of self-reflexivity with which they can actively analyse their own fantastic nature and its relationship to conventional realism” (2) thus blurring “the common-sense separation between

‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’” (3). Additionally, B. Keith Murphy in The Sandman Papers collection puts forward the importance of being British (although he fails to see the value of Underground comix’ use of parody). In other words, he ascribes the infusion of horror into the comics genre to the new wave of British writers that were building their narratives on the legacy of Gothic

15 novels and the Victorian Penny Dreadfuls (4). This can certainly be seen as an added dimension of the metacomics style, but not the determining factor for its development.

However, there is logic in Kidder’s proposal that the insider-outsider status13 of the newcomer British authors was an invaluable factor in the development of metanarrative techniques within the genre, especially if we take into account the fact that English counterparts of the American superhero comics, like Marvelman, share more with the Underground style than with the Silver Age. Such new takes on the familiar characters meant: a) Britain did not have the holy respect for the American superhero genre and the existing characters; b) because there was no sense of holiness about these characters and themes, it meant they could be reshaped to fit a new environment and a new audience, the British youth that grew up reading comics filled with slapstick and “disdain for authority figures” (The Sandman Papers, 9). It is, then, easier to understand why it was precisely the British authors who were fitted with the proper tools to reshape the themes and characters in the American comic books.

In addition, Alan Moore cites the New Wave science fiction of Delany and Zelazny as a massive influence on the writers’ way of thinking about stories, which inspired an idea “that you could take an old form and create something completely unanticipated with it…” (Bender,

Furthermore, in his essay on the origins of The Sandman, Murphy quotes Gaiman saying:

“The problem with a lot of American writers is that they’ve grown up reading comics and nothing else.” (Gaiman qtd. in “The Origins of the Sandman”, 13) This would insinuate that this surge of fresh ideas and the audacity to reshape the stories and characters comes from being

13 Kidder notes the British authors possessed a peculiar status among American comics writers as they had grown up outside of the American culture but within the English speaking country, reading American comics. For him, this is the reason why they had an entirely different notion of what the superhero is. (Find reference) In addition, Murphy argues the British were reading the counterpart of the American comics that was more similar to the underground narratives of the 1960s than the actual superhero style, seeing they were prone to retaining a disdain for authority figures (“The Origins of the Sandman”, The Sandman Papers, 9)

16 able to look at the comics from the outside, as being part of the grander universe with complex moral values. Both McHale and Kidder recognize the importance of what McHale calls “bi- culturalism” (McHale, Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism, 361) in the emergence of ontologically oriented postmodern fiction: In an era increasingly dominated by Internet and global interconnections in all fields of human activity, Anglophone comics could hardly be expected to stay unaffected by the outside sources (or indeed, to not affect other cultures).

So, finally, the emergence of metacomics can be seen as the natural progression of a medium that is closely connected and dependant on its audience, as well as on the fact that it is read not only in the Anglophone countries, but in other, non-English speaking places around the world.

The turn towards the postmodern in the comics opens the medium up to the memes of the other, non- Anglophone cultures, as we see in The Sandman.

The collection thus mixes religious myths, newspaper clippings, high literature and popular culture. Gaiman creates a postmodern context in which the story constantly draws the reader in, insinuating that “it” could have happened to her as well, but it also makes the reader/viewer aware of the constructed nature of the text. Comics is specific in this sense because its constructed nature is very apparent from the very beginning - it is drawn, so the pictures on the page show us a lot more than words alone and one might argue that less is left to the reader’s/viewer’s imagination. Also, we need to suspend our disbelief in order to “believe”, and then ultimately know what we have known all along: this is not real. There must, therefore, be “the coexistence of a frame of reference that is both outside the story and yet is somehow invoked or referred to from inside the story, such that the boundary between inside and outside is blurred.” (Atkinson, 109,110)

Gaiman chooses myth as a formal category precisely because of its fictitious nature; we are never asked to believe in imaginary things, but to ask ourselves what imaginary is.

Chapter Two: The Myth

Sandman, originally a folklore character, was a pseudonym of several superhero characters in the DC universe, and was then picked up as the name of the title character of the adult comic book series of the 80s and 90s in which its (re)creator, on the basis of familiar narratives of

Western culture (i.e. central European folklore, Greek mythology), strips it down to the basic idea of the lord of dreams, giving him all the names at once.

This enables Gaiman to use Dream as a bricolage: he becomes the perfect frame through which

Gaiman can explore the width and the depth of the genre. Thus he is called Morpheus, Oneiros,

Dream Shaper, Dream Lord, Dream, Sandman, Kai’ckul etc., depending on the perspective of the creature with whom he is interacting. In “Dream of the Thousand Cats” he is pictured as a cat, alluding to the abilities of the Oneiroi as well as borrowing and building on the ancient

Greek myth of Dream gods. But Gaiman does not exclude any other stories of the Dream Lord:

“Names are used to display the arbitrary control of the writer, and the arbitrary relationship of the language…” (Waugh, 94) In this way, the metafiction focuses on the problem of referencing through names.

This chapter will explore myth as a fictional frame that will, through the use of metafictional devices, be deconstructed in order to provide “extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems.” (Waugh, 9)

Besides the references to the mythical creatures of Classical antiquity, readers are bound to read/ see the allusions to European folklore as well as popular culture14 throughout the series,

14 In Preludes and Nocturnes’s story “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, a reference to Ella Fritzgerald’s song, John Constantine tells Mad Hattie that “Sandman’s a fairy story you tell kids to get them off to sleep. Sprinkles

18 but especially in the Preludes and Nocturnes. Each of the stories in the first book gives us bits and pieces about the Sandman myth so thoroughly that it even includes the explanation for the pre-superhero phenomenon that is Wesley Dodds.15 Through these stories we are given information about the Lord of Dreams, his artefacts and his powers. We see not only what he can do, but what happens if he is absent, prevented from acting. Gaiman creates a sort of bulletproof myth, a mega myth that can claim centuries’ worth of stories as mere shreds of this one “true” story.

The myth in The Sandman runs through multiple individual stories which sometimes feel unrelated but come together through the title character’s monomyth. Gaiman uses this type of storytelling to create layers upon layers of fictional frames that enable the reader/viewer to look at the story from the inside and the outside at the same time.

Being a metaficitonal work in which the central theme is the storytelling itself, The Sandman represents an archive of familiar stories from all over the world and different aspects of life, that have been presented in a new, unfamiliar way. Familiar stories are thus transported to an unfamiliar setting, revolving around a family of anthropomorphic creatures, the Endless, who embody the driving forces of the human existence and are named according to their ‘power’;

Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium.

The name Endless stems from the idea that the fundamental forces they are projections of are indestructible, immortal. In this way, they are the perfect plot generators: As immortal beings their existence, as well as the narrative itself, is unlimited by time. Furthermore, the nature of

magic dust in your eyes and brings you…sweet dreams.” After she tells him “Morpheus. The Oneiromancer (…) The Sandman” is back. 15 A 1930s comics character appears immediately in the first story, “Sleep of the Just”, in his green business suit and his fedora. Wearing a gas mask “he puts evil people to sleep with gas, then sprinkles sand on them, leaves them for the police to find in the morning...” (Preludes and Nocturnes, 30)

19 their existence entails they possess god-like powers over human beings. This, in turn, means human notions of the world (that is to say, their stories) are bound to be driven by such forces.

The focal characters, thus, literally reflect the notion in the theory of narrative that literary characters are not human beings. In The Sandman, they really are not. They are indeed

“anthropomorphic figures provided with specifying features the narrator tells us about” (Ball,

112) that resemble human beings but are not “real”. By constructing a narrative around a group of characters that are not human but resemble people, Gaiman calls attention to the constructed nature of those with whom literature is concerned.

As we have seen, comics historiography shows that fantasy in the comics genre always operates on the opposite side of the spectrum to reality (Clark Kent is Superman but nobody knows his superpower, and he never flies as Clark Kent, with the glasses and the suit). The readers/viewers are used to a special kind of reality in comics, one that accommodates the fantastic without changing the course of human history. That, as Kidder notes, is possible because the viewer/reader enters a sort of a pact with the writer, agreeing to postpone her disbelief.

However, that is only possible because reality is always clearly dominant over fantasy. In other words, as long as there is a familiar social system that does not radically change through the introduction of the fantastic elements, we are willing to accept the fantastic elements as part of that system (e.g. Clark Kent may be able to reverse time if he flies really fast but we still feel that he is his mother’s and father’s son- he has parents whom he loves and that makes him

“real”). The Sandman’s anthropomorphic hero defies this expectation by being very much not human (i.e. not only is he seen by different species in different ways but also does not hold allegiance to any species- cats are as important as human beings, if not more so).

By choosing such a title hero Gaiman creates the familiar narrative that is typically used to explain phenomena and employs an alien character through whom he can provide “a critique of commonly accepted cultural forms of representation”(Waugh, 8). Myths, as sacred stories about the origins of human kind and the world, represent the very essence of the human condition; the need to know, or more so, to organize the world around us. Indeed “in the myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind” (Campbell, 15). This is why such a story is an excellent frame for Gaiman to dismember and uncover the inner workings of the narrative in order to dig deeper into the relationship between humans and “the world”.

The setting for The Sandman is mainly divided between two worlds; the waking world and the

Dreaming, Lord Dream’s realm. However, other worlds that appear throughout the narrative indicate the postmodern notion of the world as manifold constructions that derive from the human rationalization of the world. In this way, Hell, Hades, as well as some of Dream’s siblings’ realms and the realm of Faerie, all become story settings. Some of the individuals’ dreaming worlds are also part of the Dreaming, but have their own autonomy and reign over their dreamers, such as Jed’s dream in which he becomes an observer of the “life” of Hector and Hyppolita Hall, two pawns taken by the rogue nightmares Brut and Glob during Sandman’s imprisonment to pose as a surrogate dream king.

Because The Sandman as a metacomic deals with its own origin, the mythical structure can provide the perfect self-reflexive tools to accommodate abstract ideas without causing the collapse of the “real world”. So, myths, as (sacred) stories about the origins of human kind and the world, internalize the very essence of the human condition; the need to know, or more so, to organize the world around us.

The collection begins with, and is thus framed by, the imprisonment. In a manner of an eerie gothic novels16, the reader is introduced to the Lord of Dreams at his weakest, and to the consequences suffered by the humanity (e.g. snippets of stories about sleeping sickness are introduced into the story in order to show what happens to the waking world devoid of dreams).

The central storyline of the first book, structured as hero’s journey, acts as a metaphor for the entire collection.17 Campbell sees the standard path of a myth as a narrative magnification of the rite of passage narrative consisting of separation, initiation and return but is careful to note that there is “no final system for the interpretation of myth , and there will never be any such thing.” (Campbell, 329) In this way, after seven decades of separation by imprisonment,

Morpheus sets out on a quest to reclaim his belongings, for which he needs to descend to the

Underworld and fight against his own powers stored in an amulet in a psychotic’s possession.

Eventually, his powers are restored but this does not bring about narrative resolution. Instead, it indicates another frame has been set and it parodies the outworn literary conventions in order to provide a constructive criticism that might lead to the renewal of meanings attached to the narrative.

Indeed, in Preludes and Nocturnes, the first book of the series, the completion of the epic quest in the central storyline initiates a more elaborate narrative, one that is concerned with its own nature as a construct.

Moreover, being already given the god-like characteristics, Sandman is no ordinary hero. The standard storyline of a hero being forced to leave ordinary surroundings to go to shadow realms and do battle is here turned upside down; The dweller of the shadow realm is the actual hero who, entrapped by an ordinary creature in an ordinary world, gives a very long silent treatment

16 This is Gaiman’s British legacy, along with the style of a penny dreadful. 17 The series ends with the rebirth of the hero, who now has new personality, better fitted for the “new” world.

22 to his captor and generally appears very apathetic towards his destiny. By parodying the standard structure of the epic journey in this way, The Sandman “deliberately sets itself up to break the norms that have been conventionalized. “ (Waugh, 65) In this act, Waugh notes, the text liberates itself and the reader through the “paradoxical recognition” that there has never been a free, original text; it has always been created.

Furthermore, towards the ending of Preludes and Nocturnes, Dream’s existential anxiety brings about a break in the narrative frame through metalepsis: Morpheus does not so much celebrate the triumph as he sits in the waking world feeding pigeons and musing on the lack of purpose. He explains the situation to his older sister Death by saying: “I’d had a true quest, a purpose beyond my function…” (Gaiman, Preludes and Nocturnes, 219) Significantly enough, through his purpose (i.e. breaking free and retrieving his belongings) he gains his morphological function (i.e. he is revealed as a hero). Through this, he transgresses the boundaries of text’s reality and his character and calls attention to his own nature as a construct.

Also, the monomyth in the first book of the collection is symbolic of the entire series, which is ultimately an overload of heroes’ journeys. The purpose, once more, is to call attention to the constructed nature of stories in which characters’ quests serve to ultimately reveal them as characters.

For example, Barbie’s disillusionment after her failed marriage causes the identity crisis and she is searching for herself quite literally, as it turns out, because the villain called Cuckoo who is threatening to destroy her perfect dream world is actually her young self. After the successful self-realisation in the Dreaming, she is faced with the death of her friend in the real world and does not remember her adventure. To attend her friend’s funeral, she needs to go to Kansas.

Juxtaposed with the image of her late transvestite friend as Glinda the Good Witch, this alludes

23 to the Wizard of Oz18, implying that we are looking and reading about yet more characters.

Finally, we see her waving at us amidst the white smoke while reading: “And if there’s a moral there, I don’t know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.”

(The Sandman: A Game of You, 186). In the next two panels, Barbie turns away and leaves.

She has, indeed, left the stage and has broken the frame of the story by not fulfilling her expected role; she has been reborn through her quest but has failed to return “transfigured and to teach (us) the lesson of the life renewed.” (Campbell, 15)

We are constantly faced with characters that go through their own quests for self-realisation, failing to obtain any. Like Shakespeare who, driven by his desire to become a good writer, strikes a bargain with Dream to write him two plays. Shakespeare’s quest for a good story reveals him as a short-sighted man, unable to appreciate anyone or anything as more than story materials.19 His desire to become a writer stems from the desire to battle and defeat death, to be remembered forever. He is thus, another hero in this collection. But the way he defeats death, by making a deal with Dream and writing unforgettable stories while his own life passes him by without him noticing, once again frustrates the reader’s/viewer’s expectations; the hero does not act like heroes do. Ironically, what both Barbie and Shakespeare (and many other characters) do is precisely a heroic act of revealing the truth to the reader/viewer.

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Furthermore, the notion of time in The Sandman reflects the complexity of the task of showing how (and for what purpose) stories are created. The time can flow in a linear way in one story

18 The whole A Game of You book is full of references to Wizard of Oz: Barbie’s helpers can be seen as Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion seeking a brain, a heart and courage. Martin Tenbones alludes to Toto. Thessaly is a witch, Wanda is from Kansas and there is a hurricane that destroys a building Barbie lives in etc. 19 In The Sandman: Dream Country, Hamnet says of his father W. Shakespeare: “I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays. Mother says he’s changed in the last five years, but I don’t remember him any other way. Judith- she’s my twin sister- she once joked that if I died, he’d just write a play about it.” (75)

24 or a collection (like in Preludes and Nocturnes) and then jump a thousand years into past in another and go back to recent past or even present once more (e.g. the African folk tale and the tale of Rose Walker are part of the same collection).

Often there is little sense of sequence in time as readers/viewers are introduced to an army of new characters. Their stories may have little in common (like Luz, Wilkinson, Prinado and

Martin Tenbones and the serial killers of “The Collectors”) or there may be a longer story arch that tells an individual’s story over a long period of time (such as that of Unity Kincaid or

Barbie, or Lyta Hall), but their stories are always connected to the dreaming world and reveal different forms of imprisonment.

Additionally, unlike the typical superhero genre, Sandman’s adventures are not at the forefront. The reader/viewer learns about bits and pieces of the main hero’s history through the individual and collective (hi)stories that play out over a dispersed course of time. The passage of time in The Sandman thus serves to tell the grand myth of the Lord of Dreams: By the time the reader is introduced to Morpheus in the first story, Morpheus has been around for many millennia and the imprisonment is soon revealed as yet another frame. The storytelling that jumps back and forth through time, offering snippets of the myth here and there evokes the sense that “life is constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins” (Waugh, 29)

This quality of metaficition helps convey the constructed nature of both the story and the reality. To mention but one example, Fables and Reflections is made up of stories about characters from disparate times; four stories about emperors, four completely unconnected ones

(“Fear of Falling”, “The Hunt”, “Parliament of Rooks” and “Soft Places”) and the special on

Orpheus, in which new details about the Endless are revealed. What the reader gains through

25 loss of chronological order is the ultimate realisation that stories make more stories20, and that boundaries are so fluent between dreams and reality that it is unwise to deem one less important than the other. So called “soft places” in The Sandman, where the dreaming world and the real one merge, crossing the boundaries of time and space, is a good example of this.

Young Marco Polo meets the writer of his future autobiography and Fiddler’s Green21 as G.

K. Chesterton there, “where the border between dreams and reality is eroded, or has not yet formed.” (The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, 141) The linear sequence is not only challenged but completely lost for the better part of “Soft Places” story, where characters are brought together from different points in time, which creates a chaotic atmosphere, especially since the story is told from a point of view of a character that is lost (Marco Polo) and does not really understand what is happening to him. Gaiman does it emphasize that all of the content here belongs to Morpheus’ narrative. In this way, Dream is the sole linearity. We orientate by examining his traits and the way he speaks.

Comics is a medium in which much is shown from the very beginning. For one, the reader/viewer can preview the whole page immediately. Moreover, the story needs to be strategically distributed by the author over the space on the page and framed into panels. This

“physical support for…(the) narrative articulation” (Atkinson, 113) in The Sandman is challenged by the distribution of time, i.e. the meta-myth is dispersed through an indefinite amount of time in order to point to the subjective nature of it – we are experiencing the events as they are controlled by someone else. Because we can also see the images, arranged by someone else in a particular order, we feel like we are in someone’s dream or a memory.

20 For example, in Fabels and Reflections, every story involves characters telling stories. 21 One of Dream’s creations that, after Dream’s imprisonment, assumes human form and escapes the Dreaming.

This movement through time and space in the comic book series also serves to undermine the notion of closure, of finality, thus undermining the mythical structure as such. As previously mentioned, in the monomyth of Morpheus, the reader may see the whole of the first book as representing the departure (Sandman’s imprisonment), initiation (escaping the prison, meeting with the Triple Goddess, the descent into Hell and battles) and return (in which Dream wins his possessions back and returns to his kingdom).

However, as the first book moves towards the end and Dream converses with his older sister

Death, the whole of the first book reshapes into a call to adventure. It will not be until towards the end of the series that the words: “There is much to do in my kingdom, much to restore, much to create.” (The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, 234) resonate as the actual resolution and not just the call to adventure.

Similarly, the quest for the new Dream of the Endless begins soon after the events in the first book, but the reader remains unaware of the impending destruction of the current Dream until

The World’s End, when the attentive reader starts to suspect Daniel’s purpose and to “connect the dots”. By the time Dream is destructed the reader is already aware that it is not the end.

This is what time does in The Sandman; it converges stories into one another and erases boundaries between beginnings and endings. All the individual stories, which were significant in themselves, take on a larger meaning once the frame collapses when the ending fails to

“end”.

Thus, Gaiman’s manipulation of time in the series enables him to create a most elaborate frame and provides the kind of “space” not provided by the page. That space is where the reflexivity, which “implies an awareness both of language and metalanguage, of consciousness and writing” (Waugh, 24), happens. The dispersion of time is indeed a fragmentation technique that

27 deconstructs familiar contexts and invites the reader to set out on a hunt for meaning that hides in the fragments. In this sense, the crucial fragments of meaning are stored in Destruction.

Destruction is one of the Endless who is packed with symbolism. He is referred to as the lost brother for the better part of the series and is the only Endless to abandon his realm and pursue his interests, explaining “People and things are still created; they still exist; are still destroyed.

They tear down and they build.” (Brief Lives: Journey’s End, 8) Before Delirium talks

Morpheus into the search for Destruction after she remarks that she needs a change. This is, quite literally, the representation of the mythic path. By stating it in such literal terms, Gaiman calls attention to the mythic structure. Later on, when Morpheus sets out on a path of change

(i.e. he grants his son’s wish to die), the reader remembers the dinner conversation where it was revealed that an Endless can be destroyed.

In retrospect, Morpheus’ search for Destruction through Orpheus becomes his search for destruction through the merciful murder of his own blood. The reader then immediately remembers the events at the beginning of the series: the moment when Morpheus uncovers

Desire’s intentions to make him spill family blood by killing a vortex that is Desire’s secret granddaughter.22 These examples reveal the metafictional tendency as operating on more than one level “through exaggeration of tensions and oppositions…of frame and frame-break, of technique and counter technique, of construction and deconstruction of illusion.” (Waugh, 14)

Gaiman plays with symbolism the same way he does with parody, or better yet pastiche - the purpose is to lay bare the rules and roles in fiction by “preserving the balance between the unfamiliar (the innovatory) and the familiar (the conventional or the traditional)” (Waugh, 12).

The reason why this is such an effective self-reflexive tool is because the constant framing helps to retain reader’s attention and avoid confusion, as the metafiction works through

22 In Doll’s House, Morpheus says: “Was I to take the life of one of our blood, with all that would entail? Or was it more devious than that?” (225)

“regular construction and subversion of rules and systems.” (Waugh, 40) Thus, the nonlinear narrative, combined with symbolism shows how the framing occurs at the narrative level.

The vortex, on the other hand, is a good example of the framing that is happening at the level of the page (i.e. image and text). It is through defamiliarization that Gaiman can introduce fragments that build a bigger frame over the course of the series.

The collection opens with the tale of African queen Nada, Morpheus’ love interest, as part of the prologue, and is followed by the short introduction of two more Dream’s siblings, Despair and Desire who introduce the story of Rose Walker, the vortex. The story of vortex becomes one of the melting pots for the fantastic and the ‘real’ when Rose Walker finds herself “at the crossroads” (Doll’s House, pg 58). Here, the ‘real’ life of Rose Walker is gradually intruded by her new abilities to bend the boundaries of Dreaming and Waking worlds that emerge through a series of unusual events. In this way, her dream in which she unintentionally eavesdrops on Morpheus’ and Lucius’ conversation is framed so the panels are tilted to the side of the paper, forcing the reader to literally shift the perspective. When she encounters Hecate, the setting is framed by Rose opening doors and entering a dark room. The return to the ‘real’ time is achieved when she turns on the light in the room.

Eventually, over two full pages the image of Rose as vortex, the words “The walls come tumbling down.”(Doll’s House, pg 194) and the four panels filled with confused dreamers, tilted to four different sides of the world, indicate the crossing of boundaries between dreaming and waking (and between individuals’ dreams) worlds and suggest that the frames have been broken.

Rose then brings chaos to the worlds by attempting to merge them. She is unable to comprehend how such an act could cause the whole system to collapse on itself: Without any structure to support it, such a world would float in an unending chaos. Not only are the worlds

29 revealed as constructs here, but the scene comments on the human relationship with our inner psyche in relation to the outside world.

What’s more, Rose voices the narrative break by saying: “[…] everything we think we know is a lie.”(Doll’s House, pg 221) and “It means the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of the well of black water […]” (Doll’s House, pg 222) Moreover, a set of various discourses, such as the serial killers’ reasoning of their actions, the experience of

Fiddler’s Green as a human being, the realities of Ken and Barbie whose dreams reflect how utterly mistaken they are about their image of themselves as a happy couple, serve to undermine the credibility of one possible reality. In other words, the lives of the people in the Waking world reveal the struggle between the inner and outer worlds, while the vortex comments on

“the concept of reality as a fiction.” (Waugh,51)

Another important metafictional tool in The Sandman is intertextuality, which is employed to create a bricolage of styles from both literature and visual arts that, again, call the attention to the “relation of ‘fiction’ to ‘reality’, the concept of pretence.” (Waugh, 41)

For this purpose, Morpheus’ imprisonment is told as a parody of the gothic fiction, the snippet from Jed’s dreams is visually and verbally a pastiche of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in

Slumberland comic strips, Shakespeare performs his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Dream and the party of fairies on a meadow, and “Tales in the Sand” was drawn and told in a repetitive layout in a manner of an oral narrative.23

Intertextuality appears on any scale, from allusions (in the form of song lyrics or a character24) to the award-winning pastiche of the aforementioned Shakespeare’s play A

23 Jed’s dream and “Tales in the Sand” examples are explained by Neil Gaiman in an interview with Hy Bender in The Sandman Companion 24 The librarian Lucius is revealed as the first raven, which according to Wikipedia might be an allusion to Mr Raven from McDonald’s Lilith, while Hy Bender considers it an allusion to the first man.

Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this play specifically, defamiliarization is achieved in a matryoshka style of storytelling through Puck, who we see play an actor who plays Puck after he knocks the actor unconscious, saying: “You played me well, mortal. But I have played me for time out of mind. And I do Robin Goodfellow better than anyone.” (The Sandman: The

Dream Country, 77) Thus, the reader is able to see the familiar through a new frame; a work of high literature in a popular medium, where a character’s original characteristics are being reused to highlight a new point of view. Puck goes on to become an integral part of the

Sandman’s monomyth. As involuntarily predicted by Peaseblossom, Puck will be “that giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb…” (The Sandman: The

Dream Country, 72). But his ability to “escape” the frame of his own story and to step into

Morpheus’ monomyth signifies the need to “release new and more authentic forms.”

(Waugh,65)

Puck’s purpose transgresses the boundaries of his own story, as he breaks the frame by saying:

“And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream. Gentles- do not reprehend. If you pardon we will mend.” (The Sandman: The Dream Country, 85) Reminding the reader that she is looking at an artificial content, he will move on to another story: The metaphorical elements break into more metaphorical elements, uncovering ever new levels of artifice.

We have seen thus far that the monomyth is built through retardation; a dispersion of time, a delay in resolution or an incomplete resolution, all of which point to the cyclical nature of the meatcomic. Furthermore, there is a constant clash of familiar and unfamiliar stories, of the beginning and of the end, fantastic and real, story and history, immortal and mortal, female and male, self and other etc. In true postmodernist fashion, the comic book challenges the idea of centre by exploring the notion of dychotomies. Gaiman points to the opposites as the constructions of the human mind that we employ to make sense of our inner worlds. They are, thus, revealed as “little more than artificial constructs.” (The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable

Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series, pg 21) In The Sandman dichotomies such as male/female, bad/good, death/life, and reality/fantasy clash in all manner of ways, most of the time even in a single storyline, to challenge the authority of consciousness in which they reside. Ironically, the comic book examines dichotomies as the fundamental structures of the narrative through the tensions of building and breaking the frame.

The first and most obvious of the dichotomies is the division between the waking world and the dreaming world, which will show there is no objective world; there are only alternatives, arising through the process of “accepting and flaunting the creation/description paradox”.

(Waugh, 90) The story of Lyta Hall, for example, starts in the second book where she is a pregnant prisoner of nightmares (Brut and Glob) in Rose Walker’s brother’s dream25 and Mrs.

Sandman to (the deceased) Hector Hall, a DC character, and she has this slight suspicion she ought to have had a baby by now. In this way, she starts off as a construct, a stuff of dreams, to be turned into a ‘human being’ once the dream has been dispersed by Morpheus.

Moreover, it is also alluded that she was a superhero Fury and a daughter of Wonder Woman.

The purpose of this is twofold: The allusion to an already existing comics’ character is the self- referential tool that reveals her as a construct, but at the same time foreshadows her new purpose. She will later falsely believe that Morpheus kidnapped Daniel and will seek revenge, helped by the Triple Goddess. Her brief agency turns out to be another frame and she is finally revealed as a “pawn…who briefly became a knight…or a queen. And you’ve just been taken off the board.” (The Kindly Ones: Part Thirteen, 20) During the time she was possessed by the power of the Three in Dreaming, she lives an utterly miserable life in real world, unable to take care of herself. Her actions in the Dreaming ultimately cause her pain in the Waking world.

The reader is once again reminded of the struggle for ‘realness’.

25 Another good example. Jed’s waking world is made so miserable by the stuff of dreams that he escapes it by creating ever more elaborate dreams.

This is shown much more literally in “A Dream of A Thousand Cats”, in which it is explicitly stated that stories not only affect the real world but shape reality. In it, we learn that cats were once superior to humans and the only reason why humans are now living the kind of reality in which they are superior to cats is because they once chose to believe.

When talking about the metaficitional novel, Patricia Waugh identifies the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, i.e “the language systems (a set of rules) and any act of individual utterance that takes place within this system” (Waugh, 11), explaining how every metaficitional work sets its individual parole against the langue, the traditional codes. This is highly symptomatic of the Sandman’s structure, divided onto the otherworldly and that which resembles the real world, in which the fantastic realm on the first look seems to be ruling over the Waking world (i.e. the resemblance of reality). As we have seen in the above examples, the relationship between what is real and what is fictional is unstable. One is not more powerful than the other. If anything, one is the other.

Here, we can again turn to the example of Barbie. Her dream’s characters escape into her reality when the dreaming “place” is in danger of the Cuckoo. The same character, a fluffy Martin

Tenbones, can also get killed- as he does- in the real world. Barbie’s dreamland is an elaborate

Land in which she is a princess, known by her full name. This indicates a curious relationship between Barbie’s external and internal worlds: in the dreaming she has the agency and purpose that she lacks in the real world. A typical hero, dreaming up the adventure with pursuit, loss of friends and betrayal/realization on the one hand, and a character paralyzed by the lack of introspective abilities on the other.

Similarly, the bad-good dichotomy is explored here. Cuckoo is a villain in Barbie’s dream land with an agenda to kill her, who turns out to be her young “almost” self, captured in a limbo of her childhood dreams. Barbie is the reason Cuckoo exists; she provided the context and the

33 place for it to nest in. Thus, Gaiman alludes to the idea of personal responsibility through

Barbie’s story: The good and bad stems from the same place, symbolized here through Barbie’s struggle with the self, both in the dreaming and the waking world.

The Sandman’s stories contain the multiplicity of dichotomies. There is almost always more than one at play, at any given time. So, Barbie’s childhood dreamland in which she is a hero needed a villain- another dichotomy. Cuckoo provided that, but it was the need that Cuckoo was able to fill because “(…) She acts according to her nature.” (A Game of You, 164) Gaiman asks then if that is evil and if Thessaly needs to be killed for wanting to kill Cuckoo? In this way, the truth turns out to be more complex than a simple hero journey plot, where good and evil are indeed complete opposites. In a postmodern world, the complete opposites serve to deliberately disorient in order to point to the imperfect system of hierarchies. Wanda, i.e. Alvin is the perfect example.

Interwoven in Barbie’s storyline, Wanda, unlike Barbie, knows exactly what she wants.

Wanda is a former southern American boy named Alvin, turned a New Yorker with a “thicker hide” (Game of You, 29) with knee high boots and typical “boy” dreams of superheroes26 whose names indicate they are, like Wanda, mirror images of something else. She quotes to

Barbie: “Us do opposite of Earth things in Weirdzo world.” (Game of You, 31). This is again a kind of play with fixed categories. Wanda continuously tries to convince the reader she is a girl, but leaks little clues like superhero dreams that undermine the “truth” that she is a female.

This is felt particularly strongly when juxtaposed to Cuckoo’s definition of boys’ and girls’ dreams:

26 Here, Wanda talks about Weirdzos from the old Hyperman comics, which are allusions to Bizzaro and Superman.

Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster or smarter or able to fly…Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry

Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke is really Hyperman…Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. (Game of You, 125-126)

Indeed, according to Cuckoo, and later to the witch Thessaly, Wanda is not a girl, no matter how hard she wishes it to be. Here, Gaiman also plays with the notion of reality on the example of female/male perception; our inner truths clash with the established categories of knowledge.

In that case, whose reality is the real one? Is what we know as true really true if nobody believes us?

Wanda dies during a storm, while guarding Barbie’s sleeping body with a talking dead face nailed to a wall (named George) and a crazy homeless lady she and Barbie met earlier on a train. The only two people recognizing her femininity are the people that don’t fit the norm in any sense. When the storm pulls her out, the homeless lady shouts “Lady” to her and George sarcastically calls her “the princess and the queen”. However, she is buried as Alvin Mann, looking “pretty good, after the morticians were through with him. They cut his hair and put him in a suit and everything.” (Game of You, 176), unable to escape the irony of her family name. Gaiman, thus. sets the frame; Barbie’s hero quest to find and redefine herself incorporates helpers with their own mini quests, quite similar to her own in their search for meaning of identity, or meaning as identity. He then dissects all of their stories to reveal those details that are in some way off, strange. Sometimes with parody, as in George’s face’s sarcastic comment about Wanda, and sometimes with intertextuality (e.g. subtle and not-so-subtle references to the Wizard of Oz culminating in Barbie’s arrival to Kansas, ironically, for a funeral) questions dichotomies of male and female, in relation to our notion of reality and fantasy. By doing so, he provides the more “realistic” reality in the narrative, one that reveals

35 its instability and proves to be no safer than our deepest darkest thoughts and dreams. It indeed raises the questions of the truthfulness of the reality.

In her dream on the bus, Barbie sees Wanda as the perfect lookalike of Glinda the Good

Witch, together with Death, waving at her happily. Alvin Mann finally becomes the perfect woman in an inner world of someone who cared. Thus, Gaiman reinforces the break in the reality-fantasy dualism. If fantasy is just as real as reality, if people can be hurt or die in the dream world, is the dream world just as “real” as reality? Is Wanda as much a girl as she wanted to be because she wanted to be? Can she be both?

Ironically, although she proves to be very perceptive in her dream state, Barbie herself does not nearly end up reaching any conclusions about her own identity (/ies), still painting her face on, still not reaching any decisions, and feeling powerless. This sort of a break in the usual hero quest ending serves to induce reflexivity of the text, in turn making the readers/viewers focus on the meaning more. Brisbin and Booth point out that Gaiman’s characterizations reflect the reality the reader encounters in his or her own life. (pg 22) So, Barbie, Wanda and numerous other characters, serve to mirror the complexity of the reality of life. They are we, they all have something we can relate to; a thought, a piece of history, problems, interests, feelings etc.

In addition, the introduction of the image of a comic book is quite a literal reference of the comics to itself. It breaks away any and all frames to reveal itself as a construct. By doing this, by putting comics into Barbie’s hands and making her leave them on Alvin’s grave, Gaiman achieves two things. First, he deepens the question of male/female dichotomy, as we have

Barbie (who didn’t understand the initial story Wanda had told her about childhood superhero fantasies) leave the copies of the aforementioned comics on the grave while at the same time rewriting Wanda’s name on the tombstone with her favourite lipstick colour, signalling thus her unawareness of the struggle at hand (the subconscious that pours into the conscious as a

36 series of allusions). Secondly, he draws attention to the fact that the “reality” of the story readers are immersed in is in fact a construct. Now, this could be seen as “aggressive remediation” of the same medium, as it tends to draw on the drawbacks of the previous superhero comics. Namely, the presumption that it was read exclusively by male population and that women felt out of place in that subculture.27

Furthermore, the male-female dichotomy is woven throughout the series, starting (or ending- there’s no telling which) with Desire, who is simultaneously male and female, living in the realm of his/her own body. Desire is, in such a way, quite literally at the Threshold28. It is a point of beginning, containing the chaos of undivided dichotomy. Desire, being androgynous, also brings balance to the family of seven Endless, where other six are equally divided into males and females. Chaos is the core of Desire. It is easily the cruellest of the Endless, which stems from the fact that it is uncontrollable. It is uncontrollable because its actions aren’t governed by reason, and it is equally unaffected by the consequences of those actions. The explanation is given here: “(Desire has never been satisfied with just one sex. Or just one of anything…excepting only perhaps the Threshold itself.)” (Doll’s House, 40) And here: “Given

Desire’s temperament, however, there was only one place in the cathedral of its body to make its home. Desire lives in the heart.” (Doll’s House, 41)

Thus, Gaiman gives us Desire to counter all the notions of reason and to question another dichotomy- that of good and evil. If Desire stems from the heart, and the heart is capable of good equally as of evil, can we claim that Desire is evil? Are its actions evil if it does not feel the consequences and if it acts only within the range of what is in its nature?

27 Barbie notes about her experience buying the comics: “And there was this big greasy guy behind the counter who seemed really amused that I was like, female, and asking for this comic.”(Game of You, 182) 28 The name of Desire’s realm is Threshold; a giant replica of itself which it calls its home, signifying Gaiman’s idea that desire lives under the skin.

Also, Desire is an idea, a concept that was given a body. Opposed to that, Wanda is a character that represents a concept. The dichotomy happens on all levels of narrative construction, saturating the story and resisting separation.

Desire is the ultimate shifting concept, put into a human body where its natural fluid tendencies become framed within the good/evil framework. Wanda and Barbie, or any other character for that matter, are first represented as characters and are later revealed to be representative of the concepts that challenge the dichotomies their characters are framed in. In this sense, Desire and Barbie or Wanda are two sides of the same coin. Their stories all serve the same purpose- they make the established concepts more unstable, more vulnerable by engaging readers/viewers’ attention to ideas “outside the page”.

What we have seen so far is that at any one moment in The Sandman multiple frames are being built or destroyed. The narrative is, as Kidder notes, fluid. There is constant shifting and moving of the boundaries and set grounds that travels through the series; from the smallest, shortest narratives (i.e. like Maisie Hill’s) all the way to Morpheus’ monomyth.

In this way, Desire can also be seen as an example of the freedom-captivity dichotomy. Earlier in the story, it is revealed to us that it fathered the child to Unity Kincaid, the grandma of the vortex Rose Walker, whom Morpheus nearly killed. As aforementioned, this would have resulted in his death, as the only way an Endless can be punished is if she/he spills her/his own blood. Desire and Morpheus have a tête-à-tête about it and he explains to it that the Endless do not control the living, that, if anything, they control them. Desire is not capable of understanding what he means. It cannot conceive that the Endless could be in the service of people. This is because its whole existence is defined by the presupposition that human beings are governed by impulses, by desires.

In this moment of Desire’s reflection two dichotomies converge; that of good vs. bad and freedom vs captivity. Desire is incapable of thinking it did anything wrong to Morpheus. It sees the actions as typical dynamics between the two of them. It is also incapable of understanding the idea of being a servant of the humans, because “…Desire is a creature of the moment. And

Desire walks the Endless pathways of its body certain that he, or she, or it, is in sole and only control of its destiny. The only inhabitant of the realm of Desire; and it feels nothing like a doll. Nothing like a doll at all.” (Doll’s House, 227) Juxtaposed with Morpheus’s idea, Desire is suddenly revealed to the reader as a creature who is, more than anyone, unable to escape its role. Desire is painfully trapped, within the body, in the moments. If it thought it was trapped, it would quite simply crack, as it itself reflects.

In this way, Desire indicates it knows it is a prisoner of its own function, but that is what keeps it free, in a sense. That is the only freedom it needs, the freedom to be there, in the moments that don’t last, never reflecting for too long, never caring for the wrong or right. The frame-break thus induces another series of questions: If you do not feel the captivity, and do not want to escape it, is it still “right” to try and show you the freedom? Is freedom always

“better”? Can the concepts of freedom and captivity even be quantifiable in such terms?

Such questions indicate that the dichotomies are not only two sides of the same coin, or the opposite sides of the spectrum, but as levels of the same concept that resist separation. As seen with Desire, several dichotomies are at play at once. Desire reflects the good-bad, male-female, and free-captive relations perfectly because its nature is an ideal platform for that sort of examination.

Lucifer is, however, the explicit example of the tension between the concepts of good and bad.

As one of the lords of Hell29, the readers’ expectations are for him to be the ultimate villain to the hero. Hell is, after all, the ultimate bad place. This is very evident on the page as well; as

Morpheus arrives to Hell, the panels are flooded with blood red, bright yellow and crimson colours- a chaotic combination that, when juxtaposed against Lucifer’s smooth, calm face has more effect in creating the feeling of horror than do all of the demons’ teeth and eyes together.

By the end of Morpheus’s visit to Hell, Lucifer establishes himself as a believable bad guy; the viewer sees him perched above the Vastly Plains, asking Morpheus why they should ever let him leave Hell. Morpheus responds that Hell has no purpose if those imprisoned are unable to dream of Heaven, drawing thus the interdependent quality of dichotomies into focus. As

Morpheus leaves Hell, the panels steadily become lighter. The ombre page ends with Lucifer’s promise that he would destroy the Lord of Dreams. This is how the frame is set. Bad is bad, and the reader has seen it in Hell.

Unlike with Desire, categories are clearly shown here and seem simple; you can either be good and avoid ending up here, or be bad and come down to Hell to be tortured for your sins.

Furthermore, Lucifer’s vow, juxtaposed against Desire’s vow to make Morpheus spill family blood, indicates that Morpheus is on the other side of the dichotomy; if Lucifer and/or Desire are bad, then Morpheus must be good. Moreover, Morpheus, as the title character of the series, must be the good guy, for that is the definition of a hero.

However, throughout the book Morpheus makes a series of bad decisions or ones that seem bad from the perspective of the human race looking at the deeds of their hero. In fact, although

Dream sometimes behaves like a hero (e.g. telling cats the story of how their race used to have

29 As Lucifer remarks in Preludes and Nocturnes, “things have changed in Hell…” (116) and he is no longer a sole ruler of Hell. Hell is, in fact, a triumvirate, much like its counterpart Heaven. There is, indeed, another dichotomy at play.

40 ruled the world; saving Calliope from imprisonment), and certainly operates as a hero in the sense that only a few are aware of his existence and his power, one soon learns that his actions can also be rash and selfish (e.g. sending Nada to Hell).

Although a hero, Sandman is as fragmented as any other concept in this metacomic. He dresses cool, looks fierce and speaks ominously, yet he is distant not only to most of the characters but to the reader as well. He is also distant to himself. For example, he has powers beyond comprehension and mostly demonstrates good use of them. He is a just ruler and his subjects seem to like him. However, he is also a selfish, uncompromising lover and a cruel ex boyfriend.

Thus, through him the work problematizes the dichotomy between self and other. He constitutes meaning of the individual stories and is the point at which all the fragmented elements come together. For example, Morpheus feels the overwhelming responsibility towards his realm but, as we are shown in Preludes and Nocturnes, he feels it as a weight, like he has no choice but to fill his function. However, Destruction’s abandonment of his own realm indicates that Dream chooses to feel this way, instead of trying to change. His former lover

Nada, after she has been released from Hell and has gotten a rare apology from Sandman for putting her there, tells him: “You could give all this up, you know.” (The Sandman: Season of

Mists, 202) This was the second time she was suggesting it and his answer, after some ten thousand years, still remains that he cannot abandon his responsibilities.

Additionally, earlier in the same book, he muses while travelling through what he calls

Nowhere, in between the places, to get to Hell: “I could stay here, abandon my quest, hang forever in the void, safe and cold and alone.” (The Sandman: Season of Mists, 65) When he gets to Hell, though, he finds that Lucifer has quit. Lucifer, as Morpheus’ mirror image of the lord of the dark realm, has done one thing Morpheus is incapable of, and he reveals once more that it is possible for a character to quit his function. Lucifer, thus, breaks the frame of his own well-known story by recognising he is an idea, a construct which serves to fill his narrative

41 purpose. He also notes that all of them, possibly meaning the conscious representations of the unconscious elements, have changed: “Even you, Dream Lord. You were very different back then.” (The Sandman: Season of Mists, 78) As Morpheus derives meaning from his function within the Endless family and the self, which is admittedly less powerful than his function, his monomyth rests on this shift within his character, which enables the story to continue for as long as there is a struggle between self and other.

The point here is to recognize the complexity of the human mind. For this purpose, The

Sandman is framed as a monomyth that can be dissected to reveal its structure to the reader in order to foster the interaction which will ultimately bring about the new awareness of the function of stories. Additionally, by exploring the relationship between dichotomies, the binary opposites, Gaiman probes at the structures on which all human cognition is based.

Various dichotomies resist division because they can be looked at as different aspects of the same phenomena. Furthermore, the stories point to the existence of this phenomena through complex interactions of symbols, set against other self-reflexive techniques.

Chapter Three: The Archetypes

An important things about Dream is that he is a door opener. He opens doors literally and figuratively. For example, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he is the one who calls upon

Wendel to open the door to the land of the Faerie. When Lucifer abandons Hell, Dream is the one to hold the keys to it for a while and as the ruler of Dreaming, he is constantly operating between consciousness and unconsciousness. Just like Campbell’s myth, the Dreaming is

“…the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation” (Campbell, 1).These energies of the cosmos in The Sandman can be understood to manifest throughout the series as incarnations of the contents of the collective unconscious, i.e. the archetypes.

The Sandman, as a metafictional process of assessing reality in a mythical form, explores the relationship between humans and the ideas. Gaiman grounds the exploration of this psychological process on Jung’s theoretical model. The theory of archetypes, as Jung notes, has been around for a very long time, citing Philo Judaeus and Corpus Hermeticum. Jung describes archetypes as “an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.” (Jung, 4) In other words, they exist in the unconscious and, because they are so abstract, they are inaccessible on a conscious level.

Furthermore, they are part of the collective unconscious, as opposed to the personal unconscious- a more superficial layer of the unconscious mind. Because they are the primary, fundamental concepts of all human minds and are located at such deep levels of the unconscious, their expressions vary.

In a text, they are symbolic images and figures which become metaphorical expressions that mean something more. The symbols can vary from one person to another, or from culture to culture, or they can manifest in one instance and can later lose significance as archetypical images. For example, in Season of Mists Odin visits Dreaming, together with various gods from all over the world, to ask Morpheus for the key to the gates of the abandoned Hell. He is, at a first glance, the typical image of the Norse god. However, when we juxtapose the way Mathew nonchalantly tells Dream he was talking to Huginn and Munnin and how they are “nice guys…”(The Sandman: Season of Mists, 162) to the way Odin compliments Dream, saying:

“You’re a cool one, dream-weaver. Sometimes I think you could almost be one of the Aesir.”

(The Sandman: Season of Mists, 157), Odin is revealed as an intertextual allusion. Sure, his mythical power is intact, but it loses its significance as he fulfils his purpose here by revealing himself as a construct.

The Sandman is full of religious and mythical elements from cultures from all over the world and not all of them have their symbolic meanings. It is, indeed, more about the way an archetypal image interacts with its environment and the effect that interaction produces: They depend on the context. The way they bind to other elements within the metacomic is very symptomatic of The Sandman’s structure as a chronicle of stories from different times and cultures. Gaiman is interested in how myths, theologies and philosophies interact with the humanity that has created them.

Morpheus himself represents the ultimate meeting point of the myths, theologies and philosophies with the human experience. We have already emphasized the significance of his name; Gaiman has fused most of the known myths and stories about the dream deity. In this

44 way, Dream is both Morpheus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his father Hypnos, while his physical appearance and his speech patterns rely on the popular culture.30

As the title character of the metacomic, he is the main character, but he is absent much more than a main character ought to be. We realise this as his story unfolds through fragments in individual stories (and through his million dollar appearances), which serves as a defamiliarization technique within the mythical structure. In other words, by telling stories about him rather than through him, Gaiman draws attention to the constructed nature of the hero myth.

Also, while he is the catalyst for the development of the self-conscious narrative, he is the least introspective character in the series. As a character, he balances between what he is and who he is, reminiscent of the unconscious potential that dissolves when brought to the conscious mind. He is, of course, aware of the clash of human inner and outer worlds, as he presides over the part of human psyche where the two meet. He seems to be much less aware of his own status as a product of the unconscious mind for the better part of the series.It is only towards the end that he reveals himself as an archetypical idea, sustaining the whole narrative with its powerful and complex expression.

Morpheus’ status as a hero is charged with symbolism by the very nature of his function in the monomyth. He is to be our tool for understanding, acquiring new knowledge. Gaiman makes him the symbol of rebirth because, as the main character, Morpheus carries the responsibility to ultimately reveal the function of the myth itself, which is to “facilitate the jump- by analogy.”

(Campbel, 221) The Sandman does this gently, through a stable frame containing all our favourite traditional forms and conceptions, in order to explore and challenge the stability of

30 Gaiman discloses in Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion that Sandman’s look sprung from his wanting to convey a rock star type of brooding adolescent, as he felt that the rock stars were the true royalty of the day. His speech is based partly on Phantom Stranger’s formal, gnostic way of speaking. (Bender, 236)

45 the frame. The reader is constantly invited to observe the allegoric meaning of the symbol on the page and the archetypal within herself.

Through Dream’s death and continuation in Daniel, the narrative becomes the symbol of rebirth. As Lucien explains Eblis O’Shaughnessy: “Nobody died. How can you kill an idea?

How can you kill a personification of an action?” (The Sandman: The Wake, 44) This concept manifests in different forms, which in a typical postmodern fashion, fuse and interact with each other.

Firstly, Dream’s rebirth is executed through reincarnation, i.e. “rebirth in a human body”

(Jung, 54). Daniel reveals himself as the perfect vessel for the new Lord of Dreams during the time his pregnant mother was trapped in the Dreaming. However, Daniel develops a personality of his own and, while he does remember Dream’s memories, his personality is quite different than the one we have come to know in Morpheus. This is obvious on the page (e.g. he is dressed all in white and his amulet is a green stone) and through his (inter)actions31. He is thus, also a symbol of resurrection because he represents the element of change.

Mortal Daniel carries part of the symbolism as well, as an individual through which an idea is reborn. He is the symbol of the renewal, “brought about by magical means” (Jung, 55). This is made known through the new Dream’s conversation with Lyta Hall, where he explains that

“what was mortal of Daniel has burned away; what was immortal was…transfigured.” (The

Sandman: The Wake, 87)

Finally, the symbol of rebirth in form of the participation in the process of transformation manifests through other characters. Jung describes that the form manifests as a transformation that is “brought by indirectly, by participating in a process of transformation which is conceived

31 In his conversation with the raven Matthew, he reveals he is vulnerable and he needs a friend, something the previous personification would hardly ever consider appropriate. (The Sandman: The Wake, 49)

46 as taking place outside the individual.” (Jung, 55) In this way, Death and Lyta Hall become the symbols of rebirth. Death stands with Dream and observes as the Furies gradually take the

Dreaming apart, while Lyta Hall is a part of the Furies trio that facilitates the transformation through the destruction of Morpheus’ creations. The destruction is, thus, the rite of transformation that will enable change.

This change is aimed at the reader/viewer’s experience: As much as the Dreaming and the

Waking worlds are affected by the death of the lord of dreams, the reader/viewer experiences the death of a “puh- point of view” (The Sandman: The Wake, 44), as Abel puts it.

Our expectation is met, but not in a traditional sense. We are given the narrative which contains all the elements of the familiar narrative, only this one is also saturated with additional elements that question our sacred truths. Gaiman reveals what Campbell calls the cosmogonic cycle as an element of conscious mind that indicates the existence of the unconsciousness. By doing so, he invites the reader/viewer to become aware of the sublime paradox; The Lord has a purpose, and it is to wake the human soul, to paraphrase Jung.

In other words, the narrative that has shown its inner tension between self-awareness and desire to create, has become larger and greater than itself by showing the reader/viewer the reflection of her inner life.

The text’s ability to show the inner psychology is never more obvious than in the symbolism of the trickster archetype. Jung defines it as “a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.” (169) In The Sandman,

Gaiman introduces the trickster as a bricolage, assembled from both the ancient myths and high literature.

Together, Loki and Puck are indeed subhuman and superhuman, and they come together seemingly out of nowhere, to steal the dream child Daniel. But by burning away Daniel’s humanity, the two of them drive the monomyth towards resolution. In this way, Gaiman employs Jungian theory of archetypes in a layered manner.

The Sandman does not renounce the trickster’s traditional perception of the bad guy, but it makes him more complex. Both Loki and Puck, and indeed Lucifer and Desire, are in-your- face type of characters that take over the page. They are many types of grand. Loki’s and Puck’s jokes and pranks are funny only to them and are moistly pointless, while their actions seem aimless but maleficent. In other words, they are Sandman’s complete opposite.

Gaiman employs them as opposites; while Morpheus represents the structured world of the consciousness, Loki is the deep shadow of the unconsciousness, with no introspection. Loki goes through the whole process of stealing and burning Daniel to defeat and recapture in a whirlwind of raw energy that bursts out of the pages in orange flames. He is the personification of the untamed, of the potentials of the psyche. He does not reflect on his purpose and thus breaks no frames, but if he and Puck haven’t stolen Daniel, Lyta would have no reason to rage against Morpheus. They are the bringers of disaster, Gaiman shows us, because it defines the saviour, the resolution. Once the trickster fulfils his purpose, he scatters (Puck) or is dragged into the shadows until the next time the human consciousness needs a reminder of the personal responsibility.

Lucifer, in this sense, is a threat to the state of consciousness, because he is supposed to represent the ultimate evil. He might never be perceived as harmless. So, when he quits hell and accuses the humanity of blaming him for having desires they cannot or will not explain to themselves, he reinforces the idea that the psychological capacities that the humanity ascribes

48 to symbols is what lie within ourselves. In other words, “they belong to themselves…they just hate to face up to it.” (The Sandman: The Season of Mists, 82)

One of the prominent images that is interwoven into Morpheus’ storyline, is that of the Mother

Goddess, which appears in the form of the Triple Goddess. The triple goddess exhibits numerous aspects, and is named in various ways by various characters. The name a character chooses seems to indicate two things.

Firstly, the triple goddess is not just a character but something much more powerful. We see

Morpheus and his Endless siblings as characters in a story, but although Morpheus in particular takes many shapes, he always remains in his character. On the other side, the Triple Goddess appears as evoked in so many forms, through many different characters, and various situations that we can’t really call it a character.

Furthermore, the narrative indicates she has the ability to kill the non-killable, to destroy the indestructible- she can kill an Endless. As the reader comes to think of the Endless as ‘more than gods’ through the way Morpheus interacts with ancient gods when given the key to the gates of Hell, this information about the Triple Goddess is greater significance. In terms of the story and its characters, then, the Triple Goddess possesses the ability to “finish” the story by killing off the character, which it eventually does. In this sense, the Triple Goddess is an extension of the author and his will.

Secondly, the Triple Goddess, as indicated by the very nature of her name, is a sum of multiple characteristics. Thus, she defies the subjugation to dichotomy. Consisting of three, she is not dividable into equal parts. She is, therefore, able to be represented as evil or good, dark or light, god or human. She is, by the very definition of her name, more and she exists in conflict. In this sense, she is the perfect tool to break the meta-frame. In the narrative, she never helps and always helps somebody.

Another thing the name indicates is that the Triple Goddess is female. Thus, by definition, it seems to be responding to the female characters’ pleas for help (e.g. Fox, Hazel and Thessaly travel the moon road to help Barbie). On closer inspection, though, this might not be quite as it seems.

Rather, what seems to summon the Triple Goddess into the story is a deep desire or a need to act. In this way, the characters that summon the primordial images32 into the narrative sometimes become or already are part of the primordial image. Lyta Hall’s rage towards

Morpheus turns her into one part of the triple goddess image that will be the vessel for the magic transformation and rebirth of Dream. Thus, she transcends her character as a personified idea. However, once she fulfils her symbolic purpose, she regresses to her character again. This highlights the instability of symbols in the postmodern narrative; just because she transgresses the boundaries of her own character by becoming more, does not mean that Lyta Hall gains any new knowledge.

She has symbolically travelled to the depths of human unconscious but has failed to achieve any enlightenment. Gaiman here brings the collective unconscious and the conscious together; a heteroglossia in a single character that fail to dominate one another. Lyta remains a desolate mother without her child, with no further purpose and no contentment.

Additionally, as “the place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided by the mother” (Jung, 15) Death periodically symbolizes the mother archetype. As opposed to the Triple Goddess, Death exhibits the favourable meaning through “sympathy and maternal solicitude” (Jung, 15). She is arguably the most cheerful and easy going character in The Sandman and is Dream’s sole adviser and comforter. Gaiman, thus,

32 In relation to archetypes, Jung explains that primordial images express the human quality of the human being and which in fantasy become visible because the concept of the archetype finds its specific application. (Jung, 9)

50 employs both aspects of the primordial image in one single character; Death easily connotes the negative meaning of the mother archetype by being the anthropomorphic representation of the idea of death but simultaneously symbolizes the favourable aspects of the archetype. This type of representation is the core of The Sandman, in which the postmodern narrative rests on the ambivalence of meaning.

Furthermore, the mother archetype appears as a pictorial symbol of maiden, matron and crone, when Rose Walker, her mother Miranda and her grandmother Unity all look in the mirror. The image is a frame within a frame, contrasting in colour to the ‘outside’. However, as Banks and Wein note, this is less reliant on “Jungian representations and more on typical

Celtic and pagan thought” (“Folklore and the Comic Book”) with the goal of creating an atmosphere of psychic unity.

Couple of pages further, Rose meets Hecate33 who caution her and tell her to count herself lucky to have met them in this form and not as the Kindly Ones. Here, their appearance is twofold. They are at the same time a representation of a helpful instinct, as Rose is about to turn into the Vortex, and a foreshadowing of their ambivalent aspect as a mother goddess archetype. Gaiman, thus, has the primordial image comment on its own function within the text, drawing attention to the fact that archetypal expressions are a product of the interaction between our ideas and the expressions of those ideas.

The narrative reveals the human experience as a deluge of ideas, drives, emotions, which are unlimited, unlike the stories that we tell in order to understand it. This is frightening and liberating at the same time, as the concept of the world becomes too fluid and the only constant is uncertainty. Gaiman offers a solution to the postmodern anxiety in form of a personal

33 One of the three indentifies them as Hecate by saying: “You are at the crossroads.” (The Sandman: The Doll’s House, 58)

51 responsibility, where our narratives would be self-reflexive in relation to the symbols and constructions of the world around us.

In this way, Rose and Lyta represent the possible outlooks: Lyta treats the world around her as solid truths, even when her world consists of a Dream Dome and a dead husband. She is unable to reflect upon the world around her because she is stuck in her certainties and learnt patterns. This is why she is unable to accept the instability after her return from the Dream

Dome, and even after her life is devastated following the events in the Kindly Ones. On the other hand, Rose’s experience as the Vortex makes her more critical of the world around her.

She has embraced the confusion and the sorrow, thus opening herself up to the potential of new knowledge on the verge of sanity, saying: “It means the world’s about reliable as a layer of scum on the top of the well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don’t even want to think about.” (The Sandman: The Doll’s House, 222)

The Sandman also introduces the fantastic that bleeds into the representation of reality on paper, and vice versa. But things happen and the reader soon learns there are consequences to having dream creatures stroll down the streets of the waking world, as well as to having people dream. People get hurt in both worlds. What you do in your sleep may affect how you perceive the waking world. Or, even worse, it may not affect you in the waking world at all (e.g. Barbie finds what she has been looking for in her dream realm, but in the waking world she is no less confused and lost than she was before).

The point is, as The Sandman shows, the reality cannot be measured or defined in a simple way. Reality and fantasy are complex notions that are interdependent. Unexplainable true events that were woven into the comic book series (like the sleepy sickness) or the horrific deeds humans are capable of doing just because of an “idea”(or for an idea) blur the line between the real and the fantastic. In this way, Shakespeare’s bargain with Morpheus to be able to create, or the Dream library of unwritten books, or Emperor Norton serve to reveal the reality

52 as the construct of the mind by revealing the text as a construct itself. Indeed, the frame can be broken by the realization that, as Waugh puts it, “life, as well as novels, is constructed through frames, and that is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins.”(Waugh, 29)

Conclusion

Gaiman uses the idea that human interaction with the world around us happens primarily through stories to create a postmodern myth, in which the centre does not lie in the story. He creates the anthropomorphic beings that over the course of two thousand pages help us understand how our minds work.

The Sandman comprises of stories concerning the main character and his anthropomorphic family, the Endless, and individual characters’ stories. Such structure enables Gaiman to celebrate the power of the imagination while, at the same time, self-consciously dissecting it.

His choice of mythical structure might be obvious, but in order to make a metaficitional narrative work in a medium that is as much drawn as written (if not more) he must constantly create and break frames between fiction and “the world outside fiction.” (Waugh, 3) Tools such as intertextuality through parody, pastiche and bricolage facilitate the frame-break and sustain the tension between the fictional and metafictional contexts.

This tension also reveals the postmodern theory as a philosophical framework of the narrative.

The Sandman, thus, offers a plethora of subjective worlds and comments on their relationship to the dominant narratives through the dynamics of dichotomies.

Finally, the aim of the metafictional myth is to not to leave the reader anxious and insecure but to reassure her of the power of the mind. This is achieved in a Jungian manner, through the self-conscious use of archetypes, which ensures that we as readers get to keep both our fundamental values and the connection to the deeper part of our minds. Also, “Omina mutantur, nihil inherit. Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.” (The Sandman: The Wake, 142) If it does not give us any other wisdom or ending, The Sandman gives us that.

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