03/31/2002 - 04/06/2002

One other thought

OK, one other thought: Will Shakespeare plays a regular part in Sandman. It was the "Midsummer's Night Dream" issue which won the World Fantasy award and issue 75, the last issue, is about The Tempest. I like those issues well enough, though more in the thrown away parts than the things directly involving the plays.

That preference is somewhat due to feeling that any writer in English is secondary to Master Will.

Wait, no, that's not the right way to put it. In college, my pal Flynn had a professor who had studied under Bloom at U. Chicago. Bloom apparently had a copy of The Republic in which he had underlined every single line in different colors, a coding system which he had developed over decades of approaching the text. And after all this study, Bloom had concluded that, instead of Plato being a subset of philosophy, all of philosophy should be consiudered a subset of Plato, encompassed and anticipated by him. And all the subsequent history of philosophical thought was just a matter of filling in the margins and blanks spaces which Plato hadn't had time to address.

For a fiction writer in English, Shakespeare looms as large. In "The Tempest" issue, Gaiman kicks it up to the point that he has Shakespeare rewriting the Book of Psalms for the King James Bible. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble". And then, with Ben Jonson, WS creates the Guy Fawkes doggerel, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November..."

I don't actually agree that WS encompasses the entire history of fiction in English (nor do I agree with Bloom's purported opinion about Plato), but, like God, it's a hard fiction to resist. Especially since I'm finishing the edits on a damn book which has a title swiped directly from WS.

Return to the Sandman

So, because of that damn post about fake bios, I re-read all the Sandmans.

Preludes and Nocturnes / Neil Gaiman
The Doll's House / Neil Gaiman
Dream Country / Neil Gaiman
Season of Mists / Neil Gaiman
A Game of You / Neil Gaiman
Fables and Reflections / Neil Gaiman
Brief Lives / Neil Gaiman
World's End / Neil Gaiman

And after that, I moved on to the original issues I have of The Kindly Ones story arc, and The Wake, plus the two final issues.

Ten years of writing about stories. Man o man. It's pretty intense, and fairly -- hell, what's the right word? Not depressing. Maybe it's Thanatos. Thanatos-obsessed. Early on, in "24 Hours", the Diner Massacre issue, Gaiman writes , "All Bette's [the waitress who dreams of being a writer] stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death."

So, in the 6th issue of a 75 issue story that last over ten years, Gaiman pretty much tells us what's going to happen to the main character. That's a freightload of foreshadowing. Reading the beast all in one extended go, it's interesting to see how Gaiman works with stories echoing each other in various ways. For example, up until the point that Dream rescues his greatest love Nada (and you have to wonder if Gaiman was indicating that Morpheus was in love with the idea of nothingness even that early on in the story), he had been the bad guy in his relationships. (He spurns Calliope, for example, and as a result their son Orpheus goes through the whole Eurydice-Bacchae-Torn to Bits tragedy. He banishes Nada to hell for 10 thousand years.

But then Morpheus is imprisoned in a small space for 80 years, and suddenly finds limitation. From then on in, women bust him and bust him, from his sisters Death and Delirium, to Thessaly/Larissa, and most obviously Lyta Hall.

But it's the Nada event that seems to have the most resonance. She burns in hell for 10 thousand years. Then the other black women in the book burn in echoes of that event. Ruby, the driver in Brief Lives, burns in her motel room. Carla, Lyta Hall's friend, is burned alive by Loki in the Kindly Ones story arc.

It's interesting, anyway, how layered the whole thing is. Like Gore Vidal's (and Italo Calvino's) idea of the novel as cube -- where each item has resonance both on the past and future.

One particular note, about World's End. When Sandman was a more-or-less monthly publication, I liked World's End the least of the story arcs. It's much more satisfying as a collection, though my taste still prefers the issue with Petrefax's story about the Necropolis named Litharge. At one point, Gaiman is telling a story about Brant Roberts, who is telling a story about being at an Inn called World's End, where he is hearing a story told by a mortician named Petrefax, who tells a story about telling stories at a burial, where all of the morticians tells stories, and the Master Mortician tells a story about HIS teacher, who told him a story. It's reminiscent of the scene in Troilus and Cressida, where the audience is watcing Odysseus watch Troilus and Cressida. The amount of refraction, like two mirrors facing one another, makes an emerald look uncomplicated.

Oddly, in a 75 issue series which deals directly with the main character's drive toward suicide, I liked the well-adjusted characters the best: Destruction and Hob Gadling and Rose Walker and Barnabas and Death. Of course, EVERYONE likes Death. (Which is an enjoyable sentence to write.)

Back to editing Time's Fool.