We started two weeks ago with Preludes and Nocturnes, and where Neil Gaiman started his sprawling epic The Sandman. First produced as a series for DC Comics and running for 75 long issues, The Sandman is Gaiman’s first great work, and one that stands up as a fine and intricate novel as much as it does a post-modern tour of culture both high and low, loosely-connected episodic stories and, dare we say it? great literature. Yes, we dare say it.
There really isn’t another work out there quite like The Sandman; it’s entirely unique. A mansion full of rooms, much of it built of the stones of earlier buildings (or, to thoroughly mix a metaphor, elements from Tolkien’s great Cauldron of Story), and yet original, unique. We’ll get to a consideration of the whole thing eventually, but a look at its many parts is in order. Therefore, tonight, after my apology for missing last week because the flu came to my house and stayed for a while, the second volume of this messy and magnificent series—The Doll’s House.
In the original introduction, horror maestro Clive Barker defines fantasy as one of two types. The first, “a reality that resembles our own then postulates a second invading reality, which has to be accommodated or exiled by the status quo it is attempting to overtake” (1). Most fantasy falls into this category, whether the work be The Exorcist or Superman; it posits a normality that is invaded, threatened by an external force which either must be defeated or given a way to fit into the order of things. Another way to think of this is the archetypal division of stories into two kinds of plots: either someone goes on a quest or a stranger comes to town. You can distill just about every plot of every novel you’ve ever read into one of these two types. Something intrudes on the known world, the world of our protagonist, and the protagonist must either defeat it or make it safe for the world.
That’s Barker’s first kind of fantasy. The second is much more rare:
In these narratives, the whole world is haunted and mysterious. There is no solid status quo, only a series of relative realities, personal to each of the characters, any or all of which are frail and subject to eruptions from other states and conditions. (1)
Barker calls Edgar Allan Poe the patron saint of the second kind of fantasy, but he dubs Gaiman as its current foremost practitioner:
His stores are perfectly cavalier in their re-ordering of realities. He doesn’t tell straightforward read-it-and-forget-it tales; he doesn’t supply pat moral solutions. Instead he constructs stories like some demented cook might make a wedding cake, building layer upon layer, hiding all kinds of sweet and sour in the mix. The characters who populate these tales are long past questioning the plausibility of the outrages Mr. Gaiman visits upon normality. They were born into this maelstrom and know no other reality….(1)
Which is a fine introduction, but ultimately I think it comes up short. Whether because Barker hadn’t read the entire Sandman when he introduced the second volume, or because of some other reason which remains unrevealed, he misses the artistry and intentionality behind the narrative. The many elements that make up Sandman are not a disparate pastiche, but pieces drawn from across time and culture to make a coherent whole. Gaiman is not Poe reborn; he is about something different, something deeper.
One thing Barker nails in his introduction is the horror element that is present here more than in the other volumes. Only “Twenty-Four Hours” in Preludes and Nocturnes can match the run-up to the Serial Killer convention for horror of both varieties: the physical and psychological. In “Twenty-Four Hours,” the brutality results from John Dee’s relentless need to break boundaries and, in that sense, he defines Morpheus by showing us what Morpheus isn’t. The Doll’s House is a more thorough exploration of horror. The Corinthian’s cross-country rambles, picking up his journey in single-page scenes scattered through the other stories, builds the tension as we approach the showdown between Morpheus and the Corinthian. That’s one kind of horror—the slasher kind, exemplified in one extreme by Mr. Nimrod and in the other by Fun Time, and both them normalized by the rituals of the convention (and you just know that Gaiman is having a ball translating every con you’ve ever attended, small and large, literary, comic book, SCA and any other, into one peopled by serial killers). The exception: the tormented, self-aware serial killer who comes to the convention looking for help and finds none, not even a kindred spirit. He knows he’s sick; the rest think they’re just fine.
Gaiman gives us the twisted self-justification of the serial killer, the purveyor of evil spawned by the Corinthian, the kind of evil that Morpheus calls ultimately disappointing and small. He tells them, the men and women who have succumbed to the Corinthian’s lure,
“For all of you, the dream is over. I have taken it away. For is is my judgment on you: that you shall know, at all times, and forever, exactly what you are. And you shall know just how LITTLE that means.” [pp. 174-175]
And when they scatter, “they left more tentatively than they had come, as if they had seen something unholy inside themselves, something they would never be able to forget.” (p. 177)
But their kind of horror pales compared to what’s been going on with Jed.
Clearing the Table
A good part of Preludes and Nocturnes is taken up with Gaiman making the Sandman his own creation by incorporating earlier versions of the DC character. In The Doll’s House he finishes the process by bringing Jed Walker from Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s 1970’s minor comic series. As Gaiman refashions this part of the Sandman universe, the nightmares Brute and Glob become the prime movers, and Garrett Sanford and Hector Hall are their dupes. Gaiman’s Jed is abused in what is the darkest, most wrenching, and most absurd episode in the series. To pair child abuse with infantile escapism is at once terrifying and utterly tender; whatever the nightmares might intend, they preserve Jed’s innocence and his sanity.
When Morpheus blows up Brute and Glob’s scheme to make their own Dreaming inside Jed’s head, everyone manifests in the basement—Brute and Glob, to face their lord’s judgment, poor long-dead Hector Hall, whom Morpheus consigns to the world of the dead, and Hector’s wife Lyta, who has been two years’ pregnant in the Dreaming, only now wakening and sure of one thing—she hates Morpheus with an implacable passion, one that only deepens when Morpheus callously dismisses her and tells her he will come for her baby one day, because the child is now his.
This feels like a throwaway scene, but it’s not. After all, Lyta is a Fury. And it’s clear that Lyta will give birth to more than a child; something dark and sinister is gestating inside her. Put a marker there—it becomes important later.
Interlocking Tales and Gendered Stories
It’s actually very hard to write comprehensively about the interlocking stories that make up The Doll’s House, and to write about them too much bleeds the joy and delight out of the reading. Gaiman has written elsewhere that his books have genders. If so, The Doll’s House is female.
We’ve already met Nada (in hell), but now we get her story, told as an initiation tale exclusively for men (although we’re told that the women might tell the story slightly differently). Nada pays a terrible price for her wisdom, because she understands that loving Morpheus would be cataclysmic. She rejects him, “though she loved him,” as the wise elder tells the initiate, “she knew this was not meant to be, and she could not countenance his destruction, and hers. For love is no part of the Dream-world. Love belongs to Desire, and Desire is always cruel.” (p. 27) The piece of glass that occasions that telling is green and heart-shaped. A heart made of glass.
We also meet Rose Walker, grand-daughter of Unity, who fell asleep in Preludes and Nocturnes and dreamed she had a baby. She did. The baby Miranda was adopted and had babies of her own. “The Doll’s House” gathers the three generations of women together, a family found. Meanwhile, Rose dreams of odd things going on in the Dream-world while, in the Dream-world, people gossip about a dream vortex, and the three Fates (The Furies, the Kindly Ones, Maiden, Mother and Crone) try to warn Rose about what is to come. They only turn up when big things are about to happen.
That heart-shaped glass finds its counterpart in the annulet, the glass heart that Rose returns to Unity as Unity takes her place as the dream vortex. Unity sacrifices herself and breaks the heart (reminiscent of the glass heart in Nada’s initiation story). The heart is Desire’s sigil (keep that in mind).
We meet other women, too, Chantal and Zelda, the gothic lovers and keepers of stuffed spiders. And in a meaty aside in this volume of classic horrors, Zelda and Chantal dream of walking with Melmoth through the corridors of Otranto (4, p. 184) — two obscure classics of gothic literature. This little tidbit is an easter egg for goth fans, and a nod to the literari-ness of Gaiman’s form of comic.
We meet Barbie, who is not at all what she seems to be or what she will become; we meet Hal, who makes himself into Dolly and foreshadows the more tragic Wanda, and we meet Morpheus’ androgynous sibling, Desire, who doesn’t much like his/her stuffy brother and has a long plan for dealing with him.
In counterpoint to all the feminine and androgynous figures we meet, in a much-needed breather and break in the relentlessly rising tension, we are also introduced to Hob Gadling, who in 1389 decides he won’t die. Death agrees, and Dream decides to see what Hob makes of life. They meet every century, and in Hob’s story we also meet Will Shakespeare and Lady Joanna Constantine, whose story lines will expand and recur. We hear Shakespeare in conversation with Marlowe, declaring that he would make a Faustian bargain “to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead.” (p. 127)
Faustian Bargains
In The Doll’s House Faustian bargains and the painful cost of knowledge echo. Nada pays one kind of price for wisdom, Lyta another, and Rose a third. Brute and Glob try their bid at power and taking over the Dream-world, although it’s doomed to fail, at least, as they say, they had fun while it lasted (and while it lasted, they saved Jed). Hob makes his Faustian bargain with Morpheus, as does Shakespeare, and we will have to see if either of them feel the deal was worth making. Barbie learns the cost of her bargain with Ken and won’t pay it, the serial killers learn the cost of theirs when their Mephistopheles is caught, and even Melmoth in Gaiman’s throwaway line in Zelda’s dream has a piper’s fee to pay.
But the real question of The Doll’s House hearkens back to Clive Barker’s introduction and the nature of the narrative’s reality. Rose muses on it as she looks back at the events of The Doll’s House:
If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know is a lie. It means the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don’t even want to think about.
It means more than that.
It means we’re just dolls. We don’t have a clue what’s really doing down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored. [p. 222]
If The Doll’s House gives us a dark look at reality and hints of its sinister hidden currents, it also offers hints of endurance and compassion. Barbie leaves Ken, Hal seems to have found a sense of stability, the Walkers make a family. At the end, despite all the damage Jed and Rose have suffered, our last sight of them is a brother and sister running through the woods to look for fox kits.
Who is in charge here?
The question of agency underlies the entire volume, and it addresses the essential nature of the Endless. More powerful than gods, they are the ordering concepts of consciousness. Yet, as characters, they are peculiarly vulnerable. Instead of taking an average person and transforming him into a hero, Gaiman takes an all-powerful entitity that is not human and makes him into….
Well, that’s the story, isn’t it? Morpheus tries to explain the paradox of their existence to Desire,
We of the endless are the servants of the living—we are NOT their masters. WE exist because they know, deep in their hearts, that we exist. When the last living thing has left this universe, then our task will be done. And we do not manipulate them. If anything, they manipulate us. We are their toys. Their dolls, if you will. [p. 226]
Desire doesn’t understand. “Human beings are the creatures of desire,” it thinks. “They twist and bend as I require it. If I thought otherwise, I would crack, like Delirium, or I would abandon my realm, like our lost brother” [p.227].
If Desire is capable of seeing through to consequences, we haven’t seen it yet; Desire can’t even follow Dream’s train of thought. Even so, The Doll’s House is Desire’s volume, and Desire drives all the action. Desire is a creature, Gaiman tells us, of the moment, and Desire is always cruel. Desire lives in its Threshold—its Fortress, shaped just like a doll of Desire, where it lives in its glass heart.
Next week, we’ll head into Dream Country. The table has been set, the DC universe fully incorporated; we’ve met some of the family and many of the main characters. Now we watch the story spin out.
References
1. Clive Barker, “Introduction.” The Sandman, Volume Two: The Doll’s House. NY: Vertigo, 1990. All other page references from this volume.