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Reading Neil Gaiman

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Reading Neil Gaiman Fantasy’s Traumatic Take on the Bildungsroman: Reading Neil Gaiman Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln im Fach Englische Philologie vorgelegt von Laura-Marie Schnitzler aus Beja, Portugal 1 Fantasy’s Traumatic Take on the Bildungsroman: Reading Neil Gaiman :: PART ONE :: INTRODUCTION & THEORY :: Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Meeting the Author 1.2. The Scope of the Book Chapter 2: An Exercise in Definitions: Genres and Beyond 2.1. Defining Fantasy: Creating the Genre 2.1.1. Origins: Tolkien 2.1.2. Fantasy and the Fantastic 2.1.3. Reader Response Theory 2.1.4. Subtle Differences: Fantasy versus Magical Realism 2.2. Between Education and Image: The Bildungsroman 2.2.1. Etymology, Translation, and (Inter) National Application 2.2.2. Coming of Age 2.2.3. Coming to Terms: the Bildungsroman Revisited 2.3. Trauma and Trauma Narratives 2.4. Traumatic Fantasies? :: PART TWO :: POSITIONING THE ADULT PROTAGONIST :: Chapter 3: “You got a long way to go…” Quests, Beasts, and Choices in Neverwhere (1996) Chapter 4: “‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You became a man.’” Stardust (1999) and the transformative power of Faerie 4.1. A Fallen Star: Yvaine’s Traumatic Journey 2 4.2. Stardust ’s Bildung: Realising Personhood and Freedom 4.3. Of Lovers and Mothers Chapter 5: The Traumatic Power of the “ghost hurt”: American Gods (2001) 5.1. “He’s a hustler”: Of Fathers and Sons 5.2. Beyond Death: The Zombie Wife as Traumatic Metaphor 5.3. A Hero’s Journey? Birth, Death, Re-birth 5.4. Lakeside Revisited: Reuniting Shadow’s Identities 5.5. Into New Worlds Chapter 6: “it’s all a matter of confidence”: Postmodern Intersections of Comedy, Bildungsroman and Trauma in Anansi Boys (2005) 6.1. A Tale of Two Brothers: Fat Charlie’s Fantastic Split Personality 6.2. Of Birds and Spiders: Giving Shape to Traumatic Memories 6.3. Claiming Kin: “I am Anansi’s son” 6.4. A Shadow Bildungsroman: Changing Spider, an Afterthought Chapter 7: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold”: Fairy Tales, A Coming of (Postmodern) Age :: PART THREE :: POSITIONING THE CHILD PROTAGONIST :: Chapter 8: “How dark is too dark?” Coraline (2002) on the Path of Becoming 8.1. Freudian Feminist Dilemmas: Here’s Looking at you, Kid 8.2. A Child’s Bildungsroman Chapter 9: Rewriting Gothic Monsters in The Graveyard Book (2008): “People don’t behave like you.” 3 9.1. Murderous Origins 9.2. Subverting Gothic Conventions: the Monstrous as a Safe Space 9.3. A Rose by any Other Name: Identity Politics 9.4 Monstrous Ethics: A Question of Perspective Chapter 10: “Memories were waiting at the edges”: The Failed Bildung of The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) 10.1. Paths of Alienation 10.2. Reintegration and Rejection 10.3. The Metaphysical Challenges of Memory :: PART FOUR :: PARTING WORDS :: Chapter 11: Conclusion Works Cited Acknowledgements 4 “Critics disagree over whether genres should be defined systematically or descriptively, as logical possibilities or historical facts. Both approaches pose the danger of tempting one to believe too strongly in one’s own categories, and so genre criticism is rife with boundary disputes and definition wars. Still, by grouping similar texts together to see how they resemble one another and how far they may diverge without calling for a new category, we can begin to identify the pattern of expectations that allowed them to be written, that their authors drew upon and strained against to produce something unique and yet comprehensible.” (Attebery, Strategies 11) 5 :: PART ONE :: INTRODUCTION & THEORY :: 6 Chapter 1: Introduction “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return : which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man .” (Campbell, Hero 30, emphasis in original) In 1949, Joseph Campbell published A Hero with a Thousand Faces and introduced the influential idea of the monomyth. Arguing that “whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described” (35). 1 Positing that across all sorts of different mythologies, tales follow the structure Arnold van Gennep sees at the heart of rites of passage, Campbell attributes narratives with a decisive function: It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are fantastic and ‘unreal’: they represent psychological, not physical, triumphs. (Campbell, Hero 29) The monomyth can consequentially be understood as a metaphorical representation of humanity’s fears and desires, their negotiation, and as an exploration of the collective subconscious. Observing mythology’s tendency toward happy endings after periods of trials and tribulations, Campbell draws on Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, “the ‘purification’ or ‘purgation’ of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror” (26). Campbell links the monomyth to both tragedy and comedy, insinuating that an experience of the former is necessary for an appreciation of the latter: 1 Campbell observes that “there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained. If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied – and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example” ( Hero 38). In the case of Gaiman’s work, The Ocean at the End of the Lane features one such significant omission in that it refutes the successful heroic return; for an extensive reading, see chapter 10. 7 Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wold and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathados and anodos ), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (catharsis =purgatorio ) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form). (28) Noting that the mutual existence of both comedy and tragedy within the monomyth is somewhat paradoxical, Campbell further argues that [t]he happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what is was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. (ibid.) Precisely because of this “emphasis within the subject”, Campbell’s formulation of one universal plot pattern far exceeds the narrow category of myth. Campbell’s pattern is perhaps nowhere more used and omnipresent than in fantasy literature, which generically borrows heavily from mythology. Stefanie Kadenbach links the presence of the monomythical pattern in contemporary fantasy to a renewed demand of great modernised mythological narratives (cf. 135). 2 The presence of the monomyth in fantasy literature also serves to formulate common expectations of the genre. Understanding genre as “a set of constitutive conventions and codes, alterating from age to age, but shared by kind of implicit contract 3 between writer and reader”, M.H. Abrams points to the dual adherence to generic markers and the ensuing deviation from them in any genre’s natural course of development (Abrams 77). This contract plays on the relationship between these conventions, the expectations the reader formulates, and of course, on the subversion thereof. This “set of expectations […] may be controverted rather than satisfied, but enable[s] the reader to make the work intelligible” (ibid.). Basic generic expectations must therefore be fulfilled in order to make the subversion thereof recognizable, or “intelligible”, to the reader. The monomyth and its structure have come to be understood as one such basic generic expectation for fantasy literature. 2 Kadenbach applies the monomyth to Neil Gaiman specifically. In contradistinction to this project, she emphasizes Gaiman’s work as a graphic novelist/comic book writer (her monomythical reading focuses on Sandman ). Her much briefer analysis of American Gods and Anansi Boys will be drawn upon in chapters 5 and 6. 3 For more information on the contract between writer/reader, see Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens . Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (1976). 8 Yet, where myths 4 are usually epic narratives consisting of a variety of smaller tales, much fantasy instead extends the pattern to full-length novels of several hundred pages. What happens when the monomythical structure finds not only quantitative expansion, but also a contemporary update that gives prominence to postmodernism? While I agree with Campbell that many a hero narrative draws on similar components, and while this is without a doubt exceedingly relevant a model for a genre that so frequently embraces heroic narratives, the following analysis seeks to review the use of Campbell’s model within other works discussing universal plot configurations before then critically interrogating the effect of postmodernism on such metanarratives.
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