Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Claret, Anne-Bénédicte
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
The term “myth” has often become synonymous with falsehood, fiction, or outdated beliefs. Yet such a definition fails to encompass the foundational and ever current role played by myths in shaping the values, ideologies, and worldviews of the cultures from which they originate. Following from a Barthesian understanding of myth, this dissertation explores the representation of myths in novels by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, namely American Gods, Neverwhere, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (by Gaiman); Mort, Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum (by Pratchett); and Good Omens (co-authored by Gaiman and Pratchett). My argument postulates that these two authors’ interpretation and instrumentalization of myth is evidence not only of the relevance of myth for contemporary concerns, but also of the possibilities to be found, in fantasy, for reconceptualized and non-universalizing representations of myth. Through a comparative, critical analysis of the ways in which these novels articulate mythical constructs of space, time, and gender, this dissertation examines the tension at play between the reiteration of and the challenge to essentialized expressions of myth in the works Gaiman and Pratchett. I argue that at the heart of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalizations of myth lies an emphasis on the importance of interconnectedness, interdependence, and individual agency in the formation and constant reconfiguration of human worldviews.
INSTRUMENTALIZING MYTH IN FANTASY LITERATURE: MYTHICAL CONSTRUCTS OF TIME, SPACE, AND GENDER IN NOVELS BY NEIL GAIMAN AND TERRY PRATCHETT by Anne-Bénédicte Claret Licence LLCE Anglais, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2014. Master LLCE Anglais mention Recherche, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2016. Master LLCE Anglais mention Enseignement, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 2017. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) December 2024 © Anne-Bénédicte Claret, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Instrumentalizing Myths in Fantasy Literature: Mythical Constructs of Time, Space, and Gender in Novels by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett submitted by Anne-Bénédicte Claret in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Margaret Reeves, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Dr. Suzanne Gott, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Daniel Keyes, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Ilya Parkins, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University Examiner Dr. Allan Weiss, York University External Examiner iii Abstract The term “myth” has often become synonymous with falsehood, fiction, or outdated beliefs. Yet such a definition fails to encompass the foundational and ever current role played by myths in shaping the values, ideologies, and worldviews of the cultures from which they originate. Following from a Barthesian understanding of myth, this dissertation explores the representation of myths in novels by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, namely American Gods, Neverwhere, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (by Gaiman); Mort, Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum (by Pratchett); and Good Omens (co-authored by Gaiman and Pratchett). My argument postulates that these two authors’ interpretation and instrumentalization of myth is evidence not only of the relevance of myth for contemporary concerns, but also of the possibilities to be found, in fantasy, for reconceptualized and non-universalizing representations of myth. Through a comparative, critical analysis of the ways in which these novels articulate mythical constructs of space, time, and gender, this dissertation examines the tension at play between the reiteration of and the challenge to essentialized expressions of myth in the works Gaiman and Pratchett. I argue that at the heart of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalizations of myth lies an emphasis on the importance of interconnectedness, interdependence, and individual agency in the formation and constant reconfiguration of human worldviews. iv Lay Summary The most common definitions of myth today characterize it as an outdated or fictional belief, or, through the Campbellian concept of the monomyth, as an immutable, universal narrative about humanity and its values. This dissertation focuses on concepts of space, time, and gender in Neil Gaiman’s and Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novels, arguing that Gaiman and Pratchett challenge the interpretation of myth as something that is either outdated and irrelevant, or universal and calcified. In doing so, they herald a new way of representing and instrumentalizing myth in fantasy, placing the emphasis on the importance of interconnectedness, interdependence, and individual agency in the formation and constant reconfiguration of human worldviews. However, this dissertation will also show that, in the process of challenging these definitions of myth, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s texts also reinforce some of the problematic images and ideological associations which they sought to question and deconstruct. v Preface The research and findings presented within this dissertation are the original, unpublished, and independent work of its author. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used during the research, drafting, or writing processes. An early draft of chapter 2 was presented at the 42nd International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA), in 2020, under the title “Upsetting the Great Plan: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and the Apocalypse.” vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... ix Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... xi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 I. On the definition of “myth” ................................................................................................ 1 II. Pratchett, Gaiman, and the instrumentalization of myth ..................................................... 7 III. Myth, space, and ideology: A preliminary consideration of myth in American Gods . 10 IV. Revisiting literatures high and low: The contemporary enthusiasm for myth .............. 15 V. Mapping myth across Earth, the Discworld, and beyond: Reconceptualizing the role of time, space, and gender in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s mythmaking .......................................... 22 Chapter 2 – Upsetting the great plan: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and the apocalypse ........... 30 I. Envisioning the end of the world: Variations on the theme of the apocalypse ................. 33 II. Considering the function of myth in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s storytelling .................... 42 III. Time, order, and chaos: Reframing the apocalypse’s relationship to space and time .. 44 IV. Rescripting the apocalypse: Counter-utopian apocalypses and the recentring of human agency ....................................................................................................................................... 55 vii V. Upsetting the great plan: Defying fate by preventing the apocalypse .............................. 62 VI. Humans as the heralds, executors, and vanquishers of the apocalypse? ...................... 66 VII. Not with a bang, nor with a whimper: Lack of resolution in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives ............................................................................................................... 76 VIII. The land is what prevails: contradicting the anthropocentric notion of humanity as the saviour of the world .................................................................................................................. 80 Chapter 3 – The country and the city: Rural and urban myths in the novels of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett .............................................................................................................................. 88 I. Rural utopias? Pratchett, Gaiman, and their relationship with the pastoral ...................... 90 1. The “myth of rural England” ........................................................................................ 93 2. Scenery frozen in amber: Plain, quiet folk who have no use for adventures .............. 101 3. “Good country folk”: The rural as the bastion of moral values .................................. 105 II. Protean cities: Progress, decay, and the moral ties that bind them ................................. 109 1. The dichotomic city: Where chaotic past and orderly future come to meet ............... 111 2. Mapping the protean city: Urban exploration in Neverwhere and the Discworld ...... 129 Chapter 4 – Gaiman, Pratchett, and the Triple Goddess: Triads and dichotomies in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum ............................................................. 141 I. Gaiman’s nurturing, benevolent, and immutable Triple Goddess .................................. 146 1. The morally charged feminine dichotomy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane ....... 147 2. Ocean’s complex yet essentialized representation of masculinity ............................. 158 3. The gender dynamics of Ocean’s coming-of-age narrative ........................................ 165 II. Pratchett’s earthly, irreverent, and protean Triple Goddess ........................................... 169 viii 1. The Maiden, the Mother and the . . . Other One ......................................................... 171 2. The earthly and the divine: Comparing Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s Triple Goddess figures ................................................................................................................................. 179 3. Standing on the edge and making decisions ............................................................... 188 4. Religious vs. profane: Finding equilibrium between the Good and Bad Oats ............ 195 III. Breaking the rules good and hard: challenging dichotomies and interpreting myth in the Discworld .......................................................................................................................... 199 Chapter 5 – Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 207 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 214 1. Primary Sources .............................................................................................................. 214 2. Secondary Sources .......................................................................................................... 216 ix Acknowledgments I could not have completed this dissertation without the help and support of my supervisor, Dr. Margaret Reeves. I am infinitely grateful to her for her belief in this project, her wisdom, and her extraordinary kindness. Her mentorship, her endless patience, and her friendship have kept me afloat throughout the academic and health challenges I encountered over the course of my doctoral studies, and I cannot thank her enough for the unrelenting support she has shown me throughout this process. I am deeply grateful to my Ph.D. committee—Dr. Suzanne Gott, Dr. George Grinnell, and Dr. Daniel Keyes for their expertise and guidance. Their interest, availability, and above all their meticulous and insightful feedback have enabled me to enrich my perspective and refine my approach in unexpected and exhilarating ways. I would also like to extend gratitude to the other members of my examining committee, Dr. Allan Weiss and Dr. Ilya Parkins, for their insightful questions and feedback, and Renay Egami for chairing my doctoral examination. The Centre for Scholarly Studies and the Learning Strategists at UBC Okanagan have provided me with invaluable support as I went through the arduous process of editing this dissertation. I am thankful to the hosts of the CSC’s weekly writing community sessions, and I would like to express my deep gratitude to Jessica Lowry and Stephanie Jury for their availability, kind advice, and keen insights. I am also thankful to Nora Lambrecht and the Global Engagement Office for the guidance they provided me in navigating the challenges of international student life, and to Jason Taylor and the Disability Resource Centre for their support and endless resources. My time in graduate school has taught me the strength, joy, and inspiration one can find in one’s peers. I thank the friends in my cohort at UBCO, and particularly Dr. Rina Garcia Chua, x Emily Comeau, Dana Penney, Deserae Gogel, Kohlbey Ozipko, and Kyla Morris—who were there alongside me through thick and thin, and who helpfully dragged me out of the writer’s hermit cave, providing much laughter, nerdy conversations, and outdoor adventures. I am also thankful to the friends in Canada and beyond—Suzanne Johnson, Nat Wilkinson, Louise Boutan, Dr. Marion Coste, Dr. Christelle Centi, Dr. Frédéric Ducarme, Dr. Brendan D’Souza, and Dr. Anita Girvan—whose words of encouragement and whose support have helped me get through the harder times and fully enjoy the most exhilarating moments of these graduate years. I am grateful for the opportunities to learn, to teach, and to explore new areas of academia I have encountered as part of the CORH project alongside Dr. Aisha Ravindran, Dr. Jordan Stouck, Dr. Anita Chaudhuri, and Dr. Marie Loughlin; as a teaching assistant for Milka Beck, Dr. Sean Lawrence, Dr. Lisa Grekul, Dr. Bryce Traister, and Dr. Jon Vickery; as a research assistant for Dr. Margaret Reeves, Dr. Andrew Irvine, Dr. George Grinnell, and Dr. Michael Treschow; and as an editorial assistant for the Canadian Journal of Development Studies under the direction of Dr. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Dr. Ananya Mukherjee Reed, and Dr. Helen Yanacopulos. I am also thankful for the time I have spent advocating for graduate students within the SUO’s Graduate Student Committee and for the hard work by present and past members of this committee to ensure that graduate students, and particularly international graduate students such as myself, would have an easier and richer experience at UBCO. Finally, I would like to thank my family—my parents, Thierry and Chantal, my sister Aude, her wife Anna, and my grandmothers—for their love, for cheering me on, for sending me care packages and French treats when times got tough, for providing me with comfort, reassurance, and much needed distractions in spite of the time difference and the continent and ocean between us. xi Dedication For Kyla Morris (1996-2023), whose unwavering support, unfailing friendship, and utter brilliance sustained me throughout the process of writing this dissertation. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction I. On the definition of “myth” In a 1999 essay entitled “Some Reflections on Myth,” Neil Gaiman made an impassioned argument for the importance of myth and mythmaking in contemporary worldviews, claiming that “retelling myths is important. The act of inspecting them is important.” According to Gaiman, “[i]t is not a matter of holding a myth up as a dead thing, desiccated and empty . . . nor is it a matter of creating New Age self-help tomes . . . Instead, we have to understand that even lost and forgotten myths are compost, in which stories grow. What is important is to tell the stories anew, and to retell the old stories: They are our stories, and they should be told” (59). Gaiman’s argument, in this essay, is that myths ought not to be considered as antiquated, defunct artefacts of a given society’s cultural past, or as an updated, refurbished spiritual pantheon that anyone can claim and call on as a quick fix for the problems in their lives. Instead, he insists, myths are foundational components of the cultures and worldviews from which they originate. However, Gaiman’s phrasing is ambiguous, and it raises the question of whether or not he might be making problematic assumptions and generalizations. Indeed, his use of the possessive case “our” with regards to myth can and ought to be questioned. This possessive form could refer to the relationship between individual cultures and their own myths. Yet the possessive pronoun “our” can simultaneously imply that Gaiman is including himself in a collective ownership of myth and world mythologies—a position that veers towards Western entitlement and cultural appropriation. In both Gaiman's and Terry Pratchett’s respective treatments of myth, there is an ongoing tension between appropriation and inclusion. Gaiman's use of the possessive pronoun 2 therefore encodes a recognizable and problematic ideology in his claims regarding myth—an issue made salient by the fact that Gaiman’s claims are themselves part of a critique of dismissive generalizations made about myths in some literary circles.1 Gaiman’s insistence on the endurance and mutability of myth is indeed a direct reaction to the commonplace assumption in literary criticism that myths are fundamentally static, and reflective of a specific time, culture, and set of beliefs.2 According to this argument, the myths which were once the cornerstone of human societies’ belief systems and worldviews are now outdated, and can only retain an entertainment value as a fossilized, trope-peppered, and sensational narrative mode. Such a perspective underlies the classification of genres such as fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, and horror—where the echoes of myth are ubiquitous—as “genre fiction,” which is implicitly considered to be inferior to realism. Gary Wolfe describes this transition in the perception of the fantastic mode of storytelling as the portrayal of “[t]he notion of ‘fantasy for its own sake’ as a kind of aberrant indulgence” (Wolfe 8). In other words, this perspective suggests that the invention or description of worlds and stories steeped in mythical and/or supernatural imagery is trivial and inferior to works that are deemed to have a higher literary value because they reflect and offer critical perspectives on past and current worldviews. If this point of view has marginalised speculative fiction within the broader study of Western literature, it has also found its way into some scholars’ understanding of its genres 1 The consideration of this ambiguity, and of its potential repercussions on the interpretation of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of myths, is one of the key questions I address in my dissertation, and is discussed in more detail later on in this introduction. 2 See Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination on the replacement of myth by the novel through the emergence of heteroglossia (60). In his introduction to this work, Holquist clarifies the opposition proposed by Bakhtin between the novel, which thrives on diversity, and the epic or myth, which destroys it (Holquist xxxii). See also Jameson’s critique of what he calls “the reflex which concludes that the narrative fantasies which a collectivity entertains about its past and its future are ‘merely’ mythical, archetypal and projective” (Jameson 282). 3 themselves, and particularly in their understanding of the genre of fantasy.3 While definitions of myth vary depending on the discipline from which they emanate (specialists of literature, cultural theory, anthropology, or folklore may have very different understandings of the word), the predominance of this perspective within the theorization and critical analysis of fantasy is made glaringly obvious by its presence in the definitions of myth offered by the field’s popular reference works. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, for instance, defines myth as “something we like to believe in but know is false,” or alternatively, “almost anything once believed and subsequently proved false” (Clute and Grant 675), while the Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature starts off its definition by stating that the commonplace meaning of myth is “something once believed but now recognized as fiction” (Stableford 297). Both these definitions establish myth as a thing of the past which must now be considered of lesser value because it has been disproved by modern science or rationality. These definitions provide a bleak assessment of myth as both static and fictional, and therefore inferior. In Brian Stableford’s case, the very structure of the definition creates an unfortunate hierarchy: his statement that myths (in the plural) are “sacred narratives concerning the interaction of the human and divine worlds” (Stableford 297) is secondary to his initial refutation of the validity of myth (in the singular). These definitions’ dismissal of myth as static and fictional are grounded in a Western, secular, rationalist worldview; they leave little room for other beliefs and worldviews. The issue underlying the presupposition that myth must necessarily be fictional and obsolete is that it inherently assumes that only one worldview is accurate: Western secular rationalism. One could, 3 Here, “speculative fiction” is understood as “a meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory . . . and a field of cultural production” that encompasses such genres as “fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrid, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more” (Oziewicz “Speculative Fiction”). 4 and should, also consider how such a view applies to the perception and portrayal of mythology in the categorization and analysis of fantasy within the speculative fiction umbrella. In this dissertation, I examine the extent to which Gaiman and Pratchett avoid and/or dismantle such an interpretation of myth, as suggested by Gaiman’s position in his essay, or whether traces of it remain, in some form, in their representations of world mythologies. This Western, secular, rationalist stance presuming that myth is fictional or “false,” taken by scholars of fantasy such as John Clute and John Grant, as noted above, or Stableford, could be considered as somehow ironic coming from those who ponder the function and value of enchantment and imagined realities in the formation or analysis of worldviews. The definitions of myth offered by standard dictionaries and encyclopaedias are indeed often much more neutral, such as that proposed by the Oxford English Dictionary, which, unlike Stableford’s definition, presents the first meaning of myth as being “[a] traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon” (“myth, n.”). By considering the significance of myth in the formation and/or explanation of worldviews without commenting on its perceived obsolescence, the OED's definition positions myth outside a truth/fiction dialectic, and therefore avoids privileging one worldview over another. Unlike the definitions offered by Clute and Grant, and by Stableford, the OED’s definition does not imply a loss of power of myth through time. In this, the OED’s definition is paradoxically much more attuned with Gaiman’s interpretation of myth, and of its living, metamorphosing quality, than that offered by these scholars of fantasy. This definition underlines, as Gaiman does, one role of myth in making sense of the world that contemporary societies have inherited from their forebears, but Gaiman goes further: his claim that myths are 5 “our stories” is more radical. He implies not only the presence of the trace evidence of old myths in contemporary narratives and worldviews, but also their endurance, as well as their participation in the formation of contemporary myths. In arguing that myth serves to illuminate not only the past, but also the present, Gaiman suggests myth’s essential and perpetual relevance. This dissertation navigates the multifaceted and contradictory nature of myth as defined by fantasy specialists, literary and cultural theorists, and anthropologists. Here, I borrow from Gregory Nagy’s consideration of “an integral idea of myth”—by which I mean that I approach the notion of myth in a holistic manner, “through a study of all its multiformities” (Nagy 246). At the centre of my understanding of and approach to myth is Roland Barthes’ definition of myth as a “metalanguage” or a “type of speech defined by its intention . . . much more than by its literal sense” (Barthes 114–5; 124). Barthes’ structuralist, semiological approach to myth builds upon Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of communication, arguing that which is a sign in the Saussurean model of language becomes a signifier within the metalanguage of myth (113–114). Within this second order of meaning, that sign turned signifier comes to represent specific values and ideology. In other words, for Barthes, myth is a type of social discourse which relays the dominant values and ideology of the time in which it is produced. In relaying those values and ideology, Barthes argues, myth participates in their naturalization and their depoliticization (143). My analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of myth follows from a Barthesian understanding of myth in that I question the ideology underlying these representations, and the ways in which these representations might naturalize or essentialize—and, to some extent, repoliticize—specific sets of values and ideologies. I also explore the ways in which these representations are self-aware, and simultaneously challenge some of the values and ideologies associated with the myths they instrumentalize. It is within this context, however, 6 that the multifaceted nature of myth and the diverging definitions of it complicate my analysis, as Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives not only engage with “myth” as a metalanguage, but also with “myth” on the level of belief and faith—one definition for this understanding of myth would be Linda Adams’, who argues that myth is a “sacred narrative set in the primordial past," and who aptly emphasizes the fact that “[o]ne culture’s fantasy tale might be another culture’s sacred myth” (Adams 25-28). In working with these two seemingly contradictory approaches to myth, I am led to establish a clear distinction in what it is that I am analyzing and critiquing: throughout this dissertation, I refer to what Barthes himself calls myth as “the interpretation of myth” or “the instrumentalization of myth,” so as to distinguish it from “myth” as sacred narrative. In other words, the focus of my analysis is not “the myth itself”—the sacred narrative—but its interpretation, representation, and instrumentalization in popular culture and, more specifically, in fantasy, to convey particular worldviews and ideology. In this study, I use the term “instrumentalization” to refer to the act not only of reiterating a myth by retelling it in one’s own words, but of loading this retelling of myth with a metaphorical and ideological charge—the act of using myth to comment on social and/or cultural topics. By thus articulating these seemingly contradictory understandings of the term, my approach to Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of myth acknowledges the currency and cultural significance of myths, and considers the ways they have been and still are instrumentalized within cultures, as well as in the works which I study. This multifaceted understanding of myth is one I come back to and illustrate in chapter 2. 7 II. Pratchett, Gaiman, and the instrumentalization of myth My dissertation situates itself within the debate on the definition and value of myth in fantasy, as I, alongside Gaiman and a growing number of scholars who have studied his and other works that deal with mythology, contend that myth is indeed still relevant to contemporary concerns. I further contend that myth finds in fantasy—those of Gaiman and Pratchett in particular—and in the very fabric of their imagined worlds, the fertile ground necessary for reconceptualized and non-universalizing representations. Gaiman and Pratchett heralded the emergence of a new stream of fantasy in the 1980s (the first volume of Pratchett’s Discworld series was published in 1983, and Gaiman’s seminal work, the Sandman series, started running in 1989). Their influence can be traced in the works of many fantasy authors who came after them. This stream of fantasy went against the grain of mainstream production within the genre at the time, which privileged a codified kind of fantasy grounded in the works of seminal authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.4 Following upon the high fantasy of Tolkien and Lewis emerged an era of trope-laden fantasy—what might be called codified fantasy—which evolved its own subgenres, such as “Sword and Sorcery” fantasy. This type of fantasy saw the emergence of what Pratchett calls the “consensus fantasy universe” (“Why Gandalf”), that is to say, a reservoir of tropes and imagery that fashion a shared (Western) understanding of what fantasy ought to look like and how it ought to work. This 4 The worldbuilding in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s fantasies is, in large part, grounded in Euro-American mythology—as is the case with Tolkien, whose legendarium and narrative are heavily inspired by Norse mythology and the Eddas (Letters, Letter 131 & Letter 122), Icelandic mythology and the Völsunga Saga (Letters, Letter 131), Germanic mythology and the Nibelungenlied (Letters, Letter 229), and Anglo-Saxon mythology, with Beowulf (Letters, Letter 25), and with Lewis, who enmeshed Christian mythology into the narrative and ideological frames of the Narnia chronicles. 8 codified fantasy has been marginalized as genre fiction,5 distinct from the fantasy that has been canonized as having literary value.6 I contend that Gaiman and Pratchett play with the codes and tropes at the heart of these various streams of codified fantasy, and particularly those of the “consensus fantasy universe” as defined by Pratchett, and that by distorting or parodying them, they create opportunities to both reinvigorate the genre and reinforce its importance in making sense of and in shaping paradigms. I argue that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, their narratives, and their worldbuilding represent a new way to integrate and interact with myth within the genre of fantasy. This new mode of writing fantasy unambiguously establishes deep connections between myth and the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the era in which these works are produced by grounding these narratives in contemporary settings or settings which reflect contemporary places and times. These connections and parallels enable social commentary on contemporary socio-political and cultural landscapes. I contend that both Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize myths and rescript the conflicts and issues—both fundamental and subsidiary—that they illustrate in their novels, adapting them to fit contemporary concerns and affinities. Within this framework, I delineate how Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s depictions of place in their narratives reconceptualize the role of myth within the genre of fantasy. I start my analysis with the hypothesis that their portrayal and use of setting and place as narrative elements contribute significantly to the fleshing out of a distinct approach to myth within the genre, which Gaiman and Pratchett achieve by reconceptualizing the role and the characteristics of place within fantasy, and by grounding the representation of myth in this particular relationship to 5 Many of these publications thrived commercially as pulp novels and within the pages of pulp magazines. 6 The debate on whether or not fantasy as a genre qualifies as “proper” literature is still very much alive—see Kazuo Ishiguro and J. K. Rowling’s initial reluctance to categorize their own works as fantasy (Alter 2015; Grossman 2005). While it does appear that the works of specific authors, such as Tolkien (and, I would argue, C. S. Lewis—or, more recently, Brandon Sanderson and G. R. R. Martin), have attained canonical status, the fact that they have come to emblematize the genre means that other works often fail to reach a wider audience or are dismissed by a broader public as derivative and/or lacking in literary value (Moran 25). 9 place. There is a tendency in fantasy to present myth in a universalizing way. I explore how and to what extent Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s use of myth deviates from this tendency by playing with the tensions it establishes between the universal and the particular. By studying the ways in which these two authors subvert these tensions, I aimed to ascertain whether rooting myth in the particulars of a place might allow for new, non-universalizing representations of myth. In pursuing this issue, I came to question whether Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels—and more broadly, fantasy narratives grounded in a Western, secular, rationalist ideological framework—can achieve a non-universalizing, non-essentializing representation and instrumentalization of myth at all. The question at the centre of my argument is therefore whether Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of myths within their narratives effectively achieves a reconceptualization of the role of myth in fantasy, by challenging universalizing and essentializing expressions of myth in their experimentation with the tropes and imagery canonized by the consensus fantasy universe. In addressing this question, I was led to consider and analyze the ideological implications of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s reconceptualized instrumentalization of myth, and to examine the extent to which their deployment of myth is both respectful and fruitful. More specifically, this dissertation asks in what ways and to what extent Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels balance their reiteration of essentialized expressions of myth with the challenges and deconstruction they oppose to them; and why, and to what extent, such a reiteration might compromise their novels’ reconceptualization of the role of myth in fantasy. 10 III. Myth, space, and ideology: A preliminary consideration of myth in American Gods The questions and issues at stake in my research may be best represented through a preliminary analysis of Gaiman’s American Gods because it exemplifies many of the tensions I have just described. The analysis that follows aims to underline the way these tensions manifest in this particular novel, through its representation and instrumentalization of place, as well as show how these tensions might interact with and provoke different ways of reading and problematizing Gaiman’s representation of myths. In the postscript of American Gods, the protagonist, Shadow, travels to Reykjavik, where he meets with the Norse god Odin. As they discuss the events that recently occurred in the United States, Shadow blames Odin for Mr. Wednesday’s misdeeds. Odin, however, denies having nearly triggered an American Ragnarok,7 and he draws a distinction between Wednesday and himself: “He was me, yes. But I am not him” (741). The Odin in Reykjavik and Wednesday in the United States are both Odin, but they are not the same. They are two different incarnations of the Norse god, dissimilar both in their appearances and in their behaviour. This contrast, made at the very end of the novel, illuminates a tension, present within the whole book, with regards to the very nature of myth. On the one hand, Reykjavik Odin and Wednesday are two facets of one god—the essential Odin, one might say. Here, one might see a reading of myth as universal, a sacred narrative dealing with eternal, essential values and truths, in a Platonic sense.8 On the other hand, these two versions of Odin are distinct 7 Here, Gaiman draws his inspiration from Norse mythology, where Ragnarok (which translates to “Twilight of the Gods”) is an apocalyptic series of events during which many of the major Norse gods meet their ends. 8 I am referring here to Plato’s theory of forms, according to which things in the physical realm are only shadows, or imperfect reflections of their true form as it exists in the spiritual realm. In making this comparison, I do not mean that there exists, somewhere, one perfect representation of Odin, or that some representations are inherently 11 entities, tied to specific places, cultures, and people. The American Odin is the god of the worshippers who went to America, not that of those who remained in Iceland. His existence and identity are tied to these travelling believers’ experiences and their understanding of the world. This tension between the universality and the singularity of myth, which is expressed through the fragmented identity of one of the main mythological figures in the story, is also present within the structure of the narrative itself. The main storyline in American Gods follows the mounting tension between the Old Gods (the Gods brought to America by their believers as they reached its shores, willingly or not) and the New Gods (as described by Odin, “gods of credit-card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and beeper and of neon”), as they prepare for a final face-off—one which will decide who survives and who dies, both literally and figuratively, in the cultural pantheon of the United States (American 176). This conflict, however, is revealed to be an artificial one by the end of the novel: it is a “two-man con,” a sacrificial offering engineered by Odin (who “feed[s] on death that is dedicated to [him]”) and Loki (who feeds on chaos) in their own names, to regain their lost power (American 673, 675). By revealing their deception, Shadow effectively puts an end to the war between the Old Gods and the New. The outcome of this battle and of this storyline is rich in meaning. By refusing to pick a winner between the Old Gods and the New, the narrative suggests that their coexistence is, in fact, possible, as reflected through the return to the status quo, with all mythological entities—Old, New, and land (non)gods—remaining in place. Gaiman’s narrative therefore establishes a coexistence between two incarnations of myth. The Old Gods are religious figures, part of a pantheon known to their believers who worship them willingly and consciously; they represent myth as world mythologies, or sacred narratives. imperfect or invalid, but rather that each representation is a different facet of the mythological entity named Odin, and that these different incarnations of Odin exist concurrently. 12 The New Gods are gods of society and technology. Their identity is less that of a person than that of a function or tool. They are Media (media), the Technical Boy (technology and the Internet), the highway and the grey men (fast travel), and the Intangibles (money and finance). No shrines have been explicitly built in their names, but their existence and power are reinforced and perpetuated through an indirect, often unconscious form of worship through daily acts such as doing one’s morning commute on the highway, punching in one’s credit card code to pay for a new, top-of-the-line computer, or sitting down in front of the daily news. They are representative of a different form of myth: myth as a type of speech, as a metalanguage (Barthes 115): these New Gods illustrate and serve the values and ideologies underlying the social and cultural life of contemporary, mainstream America, such as capitalism and globalization. They are temporal myths, tied to a specific culture, context, and ideology. Yet as he plays with the tension between these two understandings of myth, and as he defends their coexistence, Gaiman blurs the lines between them. Might not the New Gods, through their ties with globalization, attain a form of essentialization, of universality? American media, for instance, is exported and consumed internationally. On the other hand, do the Old Gods not possess their own form of temporality in their different, localized (geographically and culturally) incarnations? Within Gaiman’s representation of this tension between two incarnations or understandings of myth, however, one can read a conspicuous absence. The Old Gods who face off against the New Gods are imported gods: Norse, Hindu, African, Slavic, Celtic, and Arabian. While they have been brought to the United States and rooted (more or less deeply) in its cultural landscape, none of them originated there. This is not to say that there are no gods who did originate in North America present within the narrative. Two of them, in fact, play an essential role in the story—Whiskey Jack and the Buffalo Man, whose depictions are drawn from (Whiskey Jack) or 13 inspired by (the Buffalo Man) Indigenous mythologies. They are distinguished from the Old Gods, however, in their refusal to participate in the conflict. Instead, it is through their guidance that Shadow understands Wednesday’s true purpose and prevents the battle from happening. This outsider status is also reflected in the description of Whiskey Jack and the Buffalo’s nature and identity. While the United States is repeatedly referred to as “a bad place for gods” (American 740) or “not good growing country for gods” (American 650), Whiskey Jack and the Buffalo’s survival is never really at stake throughout the novel. This point is explicitly made by Whiskey Jack when he first meets Shadow: “Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land’s not going anywhere. And neither am I” (American 651). What is suggested in this ambiguous statement is that Whiskey Jack is not a “god,” or at least not a god in the same way that the Old Gods and the New Gods are. He is “not going anywhere,” because he is tied to the land; he is part of it, and as the land is perennial, so is he. This suggestion is reinforced through the figure of the Buffalo Man, who later on in the novel answers Shadow’s inquiry into whether he is a god in the negative, and then with a clear assertion: “I am the land” (American 694). A secondary tension is therefore created within the narrative between the Old/New Gods and the land (non)gods, which is never truly resolved either. Indeed, while Whiskey Jack argues that gods die when they are forgotten, the Buffalo Man also tells Shadow: “[i]n America everything goes on forever. . . . You have all the time in the world” (American 680). Just as the status quo between the Old Gods and the New Gods is reinstated by the end of the novel, so is the status quo between them and the land (non)gods. This unresolved tension is reflective of that at play in Gaiman’s representation of non-Western and Indigenous mythologies, one that always straddles the line between representation and appropriation. Gaiman takes care not to constrain Indigenous mythological 14 figures within the boundaries of his own representation of them. He alludes repeatedly to their complexity and to the multiplicity of their incarnations and interpretations, by having Shadow realize that when he hears “Whiskey Jack,” he can also simultaneously hear another name beneath that name, whether it is Iktomi, or Wisakedjak; or in the portrayal of the Buffalo Man, who might appear and be named differently depending on the person whose dreams it is visiting (it is “the Buffalo Man” to Shadow, and “the Buffalo Woman” to Sam Black Crow). However, while the Buffalo Man and Whiskey Jack are given a central role in revealing the artificial tensions at play between the gods and in brokering peace between them, their influence is passive and mediated. Their message to the Old and New Gods is conveyed indirectly, by using Shadow as a mouthpiece, as pointed out by the Buffalo himself during their final encounter: “You made peace. . . . You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshipped them were here—because it suits us that they are here” (American 694). Their words have effectively been appropriated by Shadow, and while the Buffalo Man presents them as the technical winners of the gods’ power struggle, this victory can be read as rather hollow, as their questionable agency could, problematically, be read as that of a stoic, passive landlord. By having Shadow as a central character—the bi-racial, half-human-half-god product of the relationship between Odin and an African-American woman—Gaiman plays with the notion of cultural appropriation and turns it on its head: he casts a person of colour in the role of Baldur, a central figure in Norse mythology (American 14; “Monarch,” Chapter III), even though this pantheon has so often been re-appropriated by white supremacist ideology.9 This reversal is not 9 On the topic of white supremacist ideology’s instrumentalization of Norse mythology, see Dorothy Kim’s “White Supremacists Have Weaponized an Imaginary Viking Past. It’s Time to Reclaim the Real History” in Time Magazine, and Geoff McMaster’s “White Supremacists Are Misappropriating Norse Mythology, Says Expert” in the University of Alberta’s Folio. 15 as strong a statement as it could have been, however, given that Shadow’s bi-racial identity is never referred to clearly and unambiguously in the text. Further than this, Shadow’s eventual role as a mouthpiece for the Buffalo Man, Whiskey Jack and the other land entities of the United States positions him within a potential conventional appropriation pattern as well. This novel’s acknowledgement of and interaction with the notion of cultural appropriation results in an ambiguous balancing act that is reflective of cultural and ideological tensions arising from the juxtaposition of Old, New, and Indigenous mythologies. IV. Revisiting literatures high and low: The contemporary enthusiasm for myth Comparing and contrasting the instrumentalization of myth in the works of two of the most prominent and popular authors in the realm of contemporary fantasy literature seems pertinent at a time when myth has once again found a preeminent place in the popular imagination in books, graphic novels and comic books, films and television shows, and even videogames. One of the latest opuses of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, allows the player to take on the role of an exiled Spartan, roaming the cities and battlefields of Ancient Greece and wielding the spear of legendary Leonidas, all the while rubbing shoulders with Herodotus, Socrates, and Sophocles, and unravelling the secret history of the Greek gods (or Isu). Nalo Hopkinson’s award-winning Brown Girl in the Ring, first published in 1998, is a contemporary epic whose worldbuilding is grounded in Caribbean myths and the Caribbean patois. It depicts a future in which the inner city of Toronto has been deserted by the rich and powerful, and where its inhabitants have had to rediscover old ways of subsisting such as bartering, farming, and herbalism. It is within these particular conditions that the main character, a Canadian-Caribbean 16 young woman, has to open herself to and reconnect with her cultural heritage, as well as do the bidding of the gods, in order to protect her family. More recently, the worldbuilding and cultural landscape in Nnedi Okorafor’s acclaimed novel Who Fears Death and her Akata Witch series is grounded in Nigerian culture and mythology; meanwhile, the retelling of Greek mythology has also seen a resurgence in fantasy narratives, heralded by the publication of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles in 2011.10 The popular appeal of these contemporary takes on myth and folklore is evident: within the past ten years, American Gods, Good Omens and the Sandman series, which are among Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s most popular works, have received their own televised adaptations; Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments book series, whose worldbuilding is grounded in Christian mythology, has been adapted twice within a five-year span; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a variation on the motifs of Milton’s Paradise Lost, has received a similar treatment; and an adaptation of Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves is on the way (Balser). This current surge in the popularity of speculative fiction involving world mythologies can, at first glance, seem at odds with the manner in which these particular narratives have been disregarded by some theorists of the genre. However, it would be reductive, and even inaccurate, to claim that the value of fantasy and myth has been unanimously rejected by scholars of speculative fictions. Indeed, as early as 1943, Tolkien extolled the virtue of fantasy as a “higher form of Art,” describing the writing of fantasy as an act of “Sub-creation” in his famous essay, “On Fairy Stories.” He declared: “I propose . . . to use Fantasy for this purpose: in a sense, that 10 A number of fantasy novels centring figures from Greek mythology, and which sometimes seek to reinvigorate or recontextualize our understanding of these myths, have appeared in the wake of Miller’s The Song of Achilles, including such titles as Galatea (2013) and Circe (2018), also penned by Miller, Ariadne (2021), Elektra (2022), and Atalanta (2023) by Jennifer Saint, and Stone Blind (2022) and A Thousand Ships (2019) by Natalie Haynes. Several of these titles seek to offer a “fresh,” contemporary take on these myths, notably by centring feminist and/or queer perspectives. 17 is, which combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived notion of ‘unreality’ (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary World), of freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact,’ in short, of the fantastic” (Tolkien 47). Here, Tolkien argues that there is a clear opposition between the world of fantasy (the secondary world setting) and representations of the contemporary world, the world of the author and the readers (the primary world setting), and that the very nature of fantasy narratives is dependent upon this distinction. If one follows Tolkien’s argument, the main purpose of fantasy is then the very act of writing, and the use of imagination is an act of pure creation. Fantasy stories must be set in an invented world, with invented species, and invented customs, which cannot in any way be related to the real world: Hobbits are just hobbits, and not, for instance, a metaphorical representation of fading British rural communities. This argument presented by Tolkien had the very opposite effect from what he intended. Rather than restore the reputation of the genre, Tolkien’s argument has been used as an instrument to devalue fantasy and to criticize its significance in contemporary cultures. Darko Suvin, for instance, excoriated the genre for being a “subliterature of mystification” that is “inimical” to the empirical world and its laws, “causing a grotesque tension between arbitrary supernatural phenomena and the empirical norms they infiltrate” (Suvin 8). In this respect, Suvin’s arguments against fantasy are similar to those he presents against the significance of myth: to him, fantasy does not count as a literary genre because it does not provide the readers with any tools to apprehend and make sense of their own reality. Yet the clear-cut boundary that Tolkien and Suvin propose between fiction and reality in fantasy is only artificial, as parallels are nevertheless established between reality and fantasy worlds whether the author consciously intended it or not: despite Tolkien’s claims, much has 18 been written on the topic of The Lord of the Rings and the eerie parallels between its war-torn, fading civilization and the apocalyptical socio-political climate of the times in which it was written.11 In her endeavour to provide a new, subversive definition of fantasy, Rosemary Jackson pinpoints the inherent connection between fantasy worlds and reality. “Fantasy,” she argues, “is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar, and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different” (Jackson 8). What Jackson is suggesting here is that fantasy, rather than creating a secondary world entirely dissociated from the world outside the text, actually makes direct use of its features and characteristics, albeit in a new configuration which both disorients the audience, and provides it with a new angle from which to consider reality. Fantasy is therefore a metaphorical mode of storytelling, implicitly and irrevocably connected with reality. As she argues earlier on in her introduction, “[t]he fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen, of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (Jackson 4). Jackson’s understanding of fantasy underlines the social and political implications of the genre. It lends fantasy the ability, which Stendhal sees in the novel,12 to offer, through its reflection, a new understanding of the world and the way we perceive it. Jackson’s further claim that some works of literary realism might themselves be considered to be fantastic according to this new definition (Jackson 10) is debatable, however. There remains a difference between fantasy and literary realism, which lies in the fact that the reflection offered by fantasy is distorted. The 11 See Janet Brennan Croft’s “The Great War and Tolkien’s Memory: An Examination of World War I Themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien; John Ellison’s “‘The Legendary War and the Real One’: The Lord of the Rings and the Climate of Its Times”; and Barton Friedman’s “Tolkien and David Jones: The Great War and The War of the Ring.” 12 Stendhal writes, “Yes, monsieur, a novel is a mirror which goes out on a highway” (366). 19 reality depicted within it is metaphorical; it is present at one or several layers of removal, and must be decoded. Therefore, ironically, fantasy shares some common ground with realist fiction in that it hinges on verisimilitude: it is both like the truth, and not the truth at the same time. Fredric Jameson describes this epistemological function of the genre in Archaeologies of the Future, when he argues that behind the “traces of the political unconscious” within fantasy, one can find “the outlines of some deeper and vaster narrative movement in which the groups of a given collectivity at a certain historical conjuncture anxiously interrogate their fate, and explore it with hope or dread” (Jameson 282). My understanding of fantasy runs parallel to a similar understanding of myth, popularized by critics such as Joseph Campbell, which contends that myth deals with “the eternal values that have to do with the centring of our lives,” and that it has to do with “deep inner problems, inner mysteries, [and] inner thresholds of passage” (Campbell and Moyers 2). I concur with the notion that myth has to do with values and worldviews—although I am wary of calling them eternal or universal—but would take the argument even further: fantasy narratives use myth to interrogate the worldviews of the authors as well as those of their targeted audience. These narratives interrogate the fate of the collective as well as the role and fate of the individual in order to capture the duality of ideology as something that cannot be solely thought of as belonging to either the one or the many, but as something that exists as entirely duplicitous. The way Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize myth in fantasy narratives mystifies ideology by making strange and unusual those ideologies that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, and, in this way, demystifies them in the same motion. These various functions attributed to both fantasy and myth therefore make the inclusion of elements of myth in fantasy narratives particularly interesting: how are elements of myth instrumentalized by these writers in the elaboration of and within their narratives? To what extent do these works employ myths as 20 narrative frameworks to provide a critical perspective on contemporary societies and concerns? Such questions have united to form one of the major themes of the critical output on speculative fiction in recent years, as scholars have discussed the mythopoeic potential of fantasy,13 the place and function of religion and spirituality in fantasy,14 the role of fantasy as a mimetic, critical response to contemporary concerns and events,15 and the importance of worldbuilding (or “subcreation”, as Tolkien defined it) within the speculative genres.16 The role of space, place, and time is often central in fantasy narratives’ expression and instrumentalization of myth, as their articulation, experimentation, and sometimes deconstruction of spaces can be found to both reflect and participate in mythmaking or the interpretation of myth. My analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization and manipulation of space and time within their novels is tributary to the works of Elana Gomel, who explores the representation and function of narrative space and time in literature,17 as well as those authors, such as Stefan Ekman, who have undertaken analyses of fantasy settings and their role within the fantasy genre and fantasy narratives.18 Within this frame of questioning, a focus on the works of Gaiman and Pratchett is, I believe, justified both by their roles in heralding a stream of fantasy that reinvigorated this interest in myth, and by the predominance of their work within the realm of contemporary Western fantasy. Their numerous publications and their practice of multi-platform production have contributed to the creation of an elaborate, original universe and a transfigured pantheon. Their characters and 13 See for instance Brian Attebery’s Stories about Stories and Chris Brawley’s Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature. 14 See Sylvia Kelso’s “The God in the Pentagram: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Fantasy.” 15 See Kathryn Hume’s Fantasy and Mimesis. 16 See for instance Mark J. P. Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds; Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds; and Brian Stableford’s 2004 article, “The Discovery of Secondary Worlds.” 17 See Elana Gomel’s Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature. 18 See Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings; and Weronika Łaszkiewicz’s 2017 article, “Into the Wild Woods.” 21 vivid imagery have inspired or found their ways into the works of other artists.19 Scholarship on the role of myth in the individual works of Gaiman and Pratchett has been gaining traction in the past few years. Studies have been devoted to the role of myth within Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives,20 the mythopoeic nature of their works,21 and the place of philosophy, religion, and spirituality within their works.22 Furthermore, specific attention has been paid to the role of place in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s articulation of myth within their narratives, such as Siddharth Pandey's study of the importance of place in Pratchett’s magic system,23 and LaJeunesse’s, Meteling’s, and Raţǎ’s explorations of urban and suburban spaces in Gaiman’s works.24 This dissertation locates itself in the wake of this scholarship in focusing on the intersection of myth and place in the narratives of Gaiman and Pratchett; it is also connected to the significant scholarship on gender and feminism in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, and more particularly that which focuses on the intersection of myth and gender.25 My research focuses on the ways in 19 The Sandman Universe DC Comics series, for instance, which was launched in 2018, proposes new stories within Gaiman’s narrative universe written by new authors and artists such as Nalo Hopkinson, Kat Howard, Bilquis Evely, and Dan Watters. Gaiman’s depiction of Lucifer Morningstar in the Sandman series was also given his own spin-off series, written by Mike Carey, while the character of Death has made canonical and non-canonical cameos in various publications by DC Comics, as well as in the Marvel Universe. 20 See such works as Cyril Camus’ Mythe et fabulation dans la fiction fantastique et merveilleuse de Neil Gaiman; Kathryn Hume’s “Loki and Odin: Old Gods Repurposed by Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, and Klas Östergren”; Max F. R. Olesen’s “Ambiguous Gods: Mythology, Immigration, and Assimilation in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001), and ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ (2004)”; Mathilda Slabbert and Leonie Viljoen’s “Sustaining the Imaginative Life: Mythology and Fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods”; and Jenn Anya Prosser’s essay on American Gods, “The American Odyssey,” in Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century, edited by Tara Prescott. 21 See Irina Raţǎ’s “‘Only the Gods are Real’: The Mythopoeic Dimension of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods”; as well as Susan Gorman’s “Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: A Postmodern Epic for America.” 22 See Elisabeth Rose Gruner’s “Wrestling with Religion: Pullman, Pratchett, and the Uses of Story”; and Philosophy & Terry Pratchett, edited by Jacob M. Held and James B. South. 23 See Siddharth Pandey’s “Emplacing Tasks of Magic: Hand, Land, and the Generation of Fantasy Taskscape in Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching Series.” 24 See Jake LaJeunesse’s “Locating Lakeside, Wisconsin: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and the American Small-Town Utopia”; Arno Meteling’s “Gothic London: On the Capital of Urban Fantasy in Neil Gaiman, China Miéville and Peter Ackroyd”; as well as Irina Raţǎ’s “Representations of London in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere,” and “The Importance of Space and Time in Neil Gaiman’s Novels.” 25 See Aaron Drucker and Tara Prescott’s Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman; Janet Brennan Croft’s “Nice, Good or Right: Faces of the Wise Woman in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Witches’ Novels”; Clair J. Hutchings-Budd’s “Terry Pratchett’s Witches Novels and the Consensus Fantasy Universe: A Feminist Perspective”; Lian Sinclair’s “Magical Genders: The Gender(s) of Witches in the Historical Imagination of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld”; and Laura-Marie 22 which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s articulations of space, time, and gender within their narratives represent and instrumentalize myth, thereby intersecting these two angles of analysis in order to further explore the place and function of myth in fantasy. Furthermore, despite Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s individual works having already been the subject of several critical analyses with regards to myth and social criticism, I have not yet found any sustained comparative or contrasting examination of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, and therefore aim to open a conversation on the ways in which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s individual representation and instrumentalizations of myth may be similar or dissimilar, and investigate how they both contribute to a particular way of understanding myth in the context of fantasy. V. Mapping myth across Earth, the Discworld, and beyond: Reconceptualizing the role of time, space, and gender in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s mythmaking A comparative analysis of the works of two authors whose long and productive friendship led, amongst other things, to collaborative work can offer a better understanding of the seemingly different, yet often quite similar ways in which Gaiman and Pratchett have redefined the relationship between fantasy and myth. On a superficial level, one might not see much similarity between their works: Pratchett’s main body of work, the Discworld series, is set in a fictional universe borrowing heavily from (and then deconstructing) the tropes and codes of medieval and sword and sorcery fantasy. Gaiman, on the other hand, often sets his novels in the United States or the United Kingdom, and his novel Neverwhere has become an emblem of the subgenre of Von Czarnowsky’s “‘Power and all its Secrets’: Engendering Magic in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” 23 urban fantasy. His narratives often blur the lines between primary and secondary worlds. However, Pratchett’s imaginary Discworld openly satirizes the civilizations and customs of the Western world and of the United Kingdom, in particular. It draws its divinities and supernatural entities from diverse cultures. The Hogfather, for instance, is the novels’ incarnation of Santa Claus (Hogfather 137), and the Discworld boasts its own “Horsemen of the Apocralypse [sic]” (Sourcery 284). The Discworld series also parodies the corruption or absurdity of some institutions, as with Ankh-Morpork’s Unseen University and its ambitious, murderous academics (Sourcery 33-34), or the officially endorsed Guild of Thieves (Guards! Guards!), while some of its landmarks are clearly playful twists on existing historical monuments: The Fifth Elephant’s Scone of Stone, for instance, is depicted as an actual scone (Fifth 40). Both authors therefore make use of either critical commentary or satire in their instrumentalization of myth, and ground their use of myth and critique of society in place. Analysing and comparing these aspects as well as Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s thematic and stylistic choices can provide valuable insights into how the reconceptualization of place can play a role in a reconfigured relationship between myth and fantasy. I analyse a select number of works by each author, as well as their one collaborative novel, Good Omens (first published in 1990). Within Pratchett’s Discworld series, I focus on four particular novels: Equal Rites (1987), Mort (1987), Wyrd Sisters (1988), and Carpe Jugulum (1998). Given the extensiveness of his oeuvre—he has published seventy novels, forty-one of which fall within the Discworld series—it is necessary to be selective in my analysis. Mort, which is one of the main works analysed in chapter 2 of this dissertation, was chosen both because of its unconventional take on myths of the apocalypse, and because of the way it plays with concepts of space and time within both the novels’ narrative structure and the story itself. 24 The novel Equal Rites, which I explore in chapter 3, stands out within the Discworld novels as a narrative in which class and gender struggles are reconfigured through the magical and the mythical, and deeply rooted in locations and place: this novel establishes a stark contrast between the feminine and masculine, the rural and urban, as well as between witch magic and wizard magic, only to question and deconstruct these artificial boundaries. My analysis of Wyrd Sisters and Carpe Jugulum is concerned with the ways in which they further explore this overlap of the rural/urban dichotomy and the gender dichotomy in their articulation and challenges of the archetypical feminine triad. Another reason for this particular selection of Discworld novels is their way of exploring belief systems, interconnections with the functioning of the Discworld as a fantasy universe, and impact on its socio-cultural life. By focusing on the roles of Death, lore, magic, religion, ritual, and the power of belief, in conjunction with specific articulations of constructs of place and gender, these novels provide both an imaginative and farcical reinterpretation of elements of myth, as well as a biting commentary on their alteration and desacralisation within contemporary Western society. As for Gaiman, I analyse three of his novels: Neverwhere (1996), American Gods (2001), and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013). While Pratchett’s Discworld novels all take place in the same fictional universe, the three Gaiman novels in this selection are set in renditions of the contemporary world in which the supernatural makes diverse incursions. In American Gods, incarnated versions of the divinities worshipped by the indigenous peoples of the United States or those brought along by the historical waves of immigration cohabitate with regular American citizens, with the gods thriving on Americans’ belief, or fading into obscurity after having been forgotten. Neverwhere, in contrast, offers a multilayered geographical and mythological re-mapping of the city of London through the protagonist Richard Mayhew’s exploration of the 25 London Below. The Ocean at the End of the Lane takes advantage of the blurriness of an unnamed setting in the Sussex countryside to draw the readers into a tale of elemental forces and preternatural entities that seem to transcend the boundaries of time and place, as well as the Manichean opposition between good and evil. Finally, Good Omens is essential for my research, being Gaiman and Pratchett’s only collaborative novel. It incorporates themes and motifs recurrent through the authors’ individual works, such as the imminence of a world-altering event, the intervention of powerful supernatural entities in the lives and matters of humanity, and the tenuous boundary within their realms. This combination of narrative interests and merging of styles and tones makes Good Omens particularly significant for this analysis, as a distillation of the authors’ converging approaches to myth as well as a demonstration of the way in which they instrumentalize it. For this study, I perform a comparative analysis of the abovementioned texts, structured according to a thematic approach. This choice of a thematic analysis, rather than a chronological one, seemed most appropriate to exemplify the interconnection between the concerns of these two authors, as well as the differences and similarities (obvious or unexpected) in their instrumentalization of time, space, and gender within their narratives. There are many echoes, parallels, and contrasts to be made between these works, and a chronological approach might introduce redundancy within the argumentation, as well as establish artificial boundaries between works whose thematic progression seems circular, rather than linear, therefore hindering the tracing of these connections. The first thematic chapter of this dissertation, chapter 2, explores Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s use of destructive and apocalyptical events within their narratives. Life-threatening events on a large scale are recurrent in both authors’ storytelling. The worlds which they have carefully 26 constructed are, in turn, threatened with the biblical Apocalypse (Good Omens), Ragnarök (American Gods), or destruction due to the breakdown of the space-time continuum (Mort). Given Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s focus on worldbuilding and mythologizing, why is the threat of the destruction of the very worlds they build so omnipresent in their work? How might it reflect concerns about the socio-political context of these novels’ production? On the other hand, to what extent do these novels transgress or transcend the conventions of typical apocalyptic narratives? Could they actually be fundamentally optimistic, in spite of this apparent obsession with destruction? Focusing my analysis on American Gods, Mort, and Good Omens, I argue in this chapter that these three narratives’ interpretation of myths of the apocalypse offers the reader a perspective on space, time, and history that shifts the focus away from the dread and anxiety commonly associated with the end of the world. In these novels, this anxiety is symptomatic of a dysfunctional relationship between humanity—or supernatural creatures standing in for humanity—and the world. These novels explore the nature and cause of this distortion through experimentations with their characters’—and the readers’—understanding of space, time, and history. In this chapter, I study the ways in which Gaiman and Pratchett evoke myths of the apocalypse but never fully materialize their world-ending scenarios. In doing so, they do not instill fear in their readers or to impose moral guidelines upon them, but instead explore the nature of human life and of the role played by humanity in historical processes. Throughout this analysis, I demonstrate how Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives refute the anthropocentric positioning of humanity as the saviours of the world, emphasizing instead the importance of interconnectedness and interdependence with non-human life as characteristics of human existence and persistence. This focus on Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s takes on apocalyptic myths enables me to explore, in a broader sense, some of the ways in which these authors 27 interact with, replicate, or challenge essentializing interpretations of myth, while introducing some of the key concepts and questions which articulate my approach to their novels. Chapter 3 focuses on the rural/urban dichotomy in fantasy: it explores Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s mapping of myth through rural and urban landscapes. In this chapter, I consider how Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize settings, and more particularly their traditional associations with mythical elements, to retell and reconfigure mythical narratives. This chapter places a particular emphasis on the delineation of customary, repurposed, and transcended settings within the authors’ worldbuilding. In examining Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of urban and rural settings, I investigate whether they perpetuate traditional contrasts established between them: how might this opposition reflect persisting or changing approaches to myth? How is the common portrayal of the countryside as a near-utopian bastion of old beliefs, forgotten practices, and moral values, and that of the city as a protean locus of change, chaos, and decadence, evoked throughout these works? In what ways might Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives challenge such an essentializing and dichotomous representation of rural and urban spaces? In this chapter, I explore the persistence and even the reinforcement of the rural/urban dichotomy in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, and Equal Rites, effected through the crystallisation of ideologically loaded, essentialized expressions of rural and urban settings and communities. But, within this analysis, I also highlight the tension at play between such a dichotomous representation of the rural and the urban, and the way these narratives challenge that dichotomy through depictions of a secondary, urban dichotomy and explorations of possible movement between the opposing sides of dichotomies. This study enables me to offer a closer look at the ways in which Gaiman and Pratchett simultaneously 28 challenge and reinforce essentializing interpretations of myth in its articulation within their fantasy narratives through their use of dichotomic frameworks. Finally, in chapter 4, I narrow the scope of this analysis even further by considering the ways in which the rural/urban dichotomy and the gender dichotomy overlap in evocations of the figure of the Triple Goddess as represented in the feminine triads at the heart of Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters and Carpe Jugulum. Here, I study the ways in which both authors’ take on the Triple Goddess is threaded through with conventions of gender and cultural associations with rural and urban life, and the ways in which their articulation of the figure of the Triple Goddess mediates a number of considerations with regards to dichotomic thinking. Central to this chapter are questions of how the Triple Goddess might evoke or even challenge the binaries and triads that often structure myth, and how the articulation of this figure within a fantasy narrative and within a rural/urban dichotomic framework might underline and/or challenge the essentializing limitations of such categorizations. In other words, in this chapter, I ask how these novels challenge or reinforce essentialized and calcified dichotomous expressions of gender through their representation of the figure of the Triple Goddess, and I consider the limits of that challenge given the ways in which these novels also reinforce traditional portrayals of masculinity and femininity. Across these three thematic chapters, I consider the extent to which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of myth also entail instrumentalization, and how their narratives combine mythmaking with a consideration of the benefits and dangers of its social function; I also analyse the tension at play in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works between the universal and the particular, and between essentialization and the challenging of calcified interpretations of myth. Throughout this study, I argue that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s texts offer a challenge to the definition of myth 29 as outdated beliefs advanced by Holquist, or Clute and Grant’s definition of myth as false or fictional: for Gaiman and Pratchett, the articulation of mythology is an opportunity to insist upon the importance of interconnectedness (between people, between people and the world, between people and the unknowable or the divine, and between readers and their stories), interdependence, and individual agency in the formation and constant reconfiguration of human worldviews. 30 Chapter 2 – Upsetting the great plan: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and the apocalypse Who supposes that fantasies cannot be terrible? Terror does not depend upon an accurate estimate of the threat. That should be obvious to all who have experienced childhood fears. . . . So the prospect of the end of the world, accompanied by the last judgment and the tortures of damnation, vividly represented in many churches and enforced by terrific sermons, must in any case have been real enough, incontrovertible even, not a bit less certain than the fate we believed to be threatening us. (Kermode 182) The works of Gaiman and Pratchett weave together and play with mythical constructs of life and death, as well as time and space. Such an articulation of myth places humanity in relation to the world around it, and offers us avenues of interpretation and understanding of our relationships with the world and of our roles within it. In his essay “Some Reflections on Myth (With Several Digressions onto Gardening, Comics and Fairy Tales),” Gaiman ponders on the function of myth, eventually defining myths as “all the ways we try to make sense of the world we inhabit, a world in which there are few, if any, easy answers” (View 58). This grappling with understanding is never more evident than in one’s perception of the end. Myths of the apocalypse are omnipresent in the world’s cultural landscapes. Whether in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the Poetic and Prose Eddas’ Ragnarök, or the contemporary visions of nuclear and environmental disasters, humanity’s relationship to the world is intrinsically connected with life, death, and one’s perception of the passing of time. The apocalyptic narratives of science fiction and fantasy 31 are the outshoots of these myths: they are reflections of how their authors conceptualize the apocalyptic myths they have encountered, and often echo or problematize contemporary anxieties. They offer an understanding of the relationship between humanity and the divine, or the unknowable. They also offer an understanding of how one may perceive one’s place within space, time, and history. As Frank Kermode argues, they focus on the concordance of the past, the (apocalyptic) present, and the future, and they enable us to bridge the gaps—to find an understanding of and a justification for the process of time (Kermode 89). In this chapter, I consider three novels by Gaiman and Pratchett, and study the ways in which their interpretation of apocalyptic myths confronts our perception of humanity, space, time, and our place within them. These novels all depict different kinds of apocalyptic events. Good Omens engages with the theme of the Christian Armageddon—or rather, the Apocalypse as it has been crystallized in Western culture and pop culture. American Gods, while ostensibly a rewriting of the Ragnarök of Norse mythology, centres upon the idea of a cultural apocalypse, consisting of a battle between the old gods and the new, and the insidious scam or “two-man con” that underlies it (Gaiman 673). Mort depicts a spatiotemporal apocalypse—the creation and obliteration of an alternate universe and an alternate reality. In this chapter, I take as my starting point the notion that these three fantasy novels fulfill the function attributed by Connor Pitetti to apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives, of “[teaching] their readers to understand history and humanity’s relationship to it, the kinds of engagements and commitments they encourage, and the politics they enable” (Pitetti 451). Indeed, I argue in this chapter that through their depiction of apocalyptic events and the characters’ response to them, these three narratives offer the reader a specific perspective on space, time, and history, illuminating our complicated relationship with these concepts. I will show how Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives shift the focus 32 away from the dread and anxiety of the end of the world, instead presenting this anxiety as a symptom of a distorted relationship between humanity and the world, caused by a distortion of one’s understanding of space, time, and history. Throughout this chapter, I demonstrate that through this shift, Gaiman and Pratchett illustrate a contemporary take on the myth of the apocalypse through the metaphoric filter of fantasy. In doing so, I will demonstrate how Gaiman and Pratchett do not instrumentalize the apocalyptic narrative and the features of apocalyptic myths to instill fear in their readers, or to provide them with moral guidelines. Instead, they instrumentalize myth to explore the nature of human life, to reframe the role played by humanity in historical processes, and to refute the anthropocentric concept of humanity as the saviours of the world: as I explain in this chapter, their approach to apocalyptic myths emphasizes the notions of interconnectedness and interdependence with non-human life. In the opening sections of this chapter, I outline some of the interpretations of myths of the end of the world that underlie apocalyptic narratives, in order to better situate Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives within the genre. The first section of this chapter focuses on apocalyptic narratives as a genre, offering an overview of some of their themes and structures, and the ways in which those reflect specific understandings of time, space, and history. In section II, I then consider the role of myth in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s storytelling—whether their apocalyptic narratives illustrate or interpret myths of the end of the world, and whether such storytelling represents politicized or depoliticized speech. 33 I. Envisioning the end of the world: Variations on the theme of the apocalypse Myths of the apocalypse, and by extension, apocalyptic literature, according to its most common definitions, deal with the end of the world. Robert Lerner describes apocalyptic literature as a “literary genre that foretells supernaturally inspired cataclysmic events that will transpire at the end of the world”, and which “employs esoteric language, expresses a pessimistic view of the present, and treats the final events as imminent” (“apocalyptic literature”). The particular narrative style described by Lerner in his definition of apocalyptic literature is characteristic of many representations of the end of the world in Western fantasy. It draws a large part of its imagery and themes from Jewish and Christian eschatology, and in particular from the Book of Revelation. This particular style’s originating narratives have a prophetic function—as suggested by the very term “apocalypse,” which in Greek signifies “an unveiling, either (a) of future events, or (b) of the unseen realms of heaven and hell” (Glasson 1): the writer depicts a world in a hopeless state and requiring the intervention of God, whose intentions have been revealed to the prophet through a dream or a vision. This revelation, according to David Dowling, “usually involves an assurance of the intrusion of the divine will into human affairs with the subsequent redemption, in some form or other, of the chosen people” (117). For Dowling, these apocalyptic narratives are intrinsically connected to the perception of time, and to the divine: they imply that the prophet has an atypical relationship to the passage of time, a skill of foresight granted by the divine, through the medium of a dream or of a vision. These narratives also imply an active role of the divine in the unraveling of apocalyptic events: first, through the granting of this gift of foresight, and second, because the apocalypse is set in motion through divine intervention. There would be no apocalypse were it not the will of the gods. Therefore, the roles of humanity and the 34 divine are clearly established in this apocalyptic scenario: while the divine plays an active role, humanity is passive. In the Biblical apocalypses, humanity is often the indirect cause of the apocalypse, but not the entity pulling the proverbial trigger. The power remains in the hands of the divine. Humanity is granted the ability to foresee the apocalypse, but not the means to prevent it. Salvation, if achievable at all, can only be obtained through the will of the divine—from a Calvinist perspective, for instance, through the concept of predestination; or, from a Roman Catholic perspective, through one’s appeal to God’s mercy by means of repentance, prayer, or, at one time, indulgences. Lerner’s conceptualization of the apocalypse stands out because while it does not contain any direct reference to the divine, and while it could be read as a secular definition of the apocalypse, it is actually informed by the type of apocalyptic scenario that I outline above, which has itself grounded its understanding of the end of the world—of the myth of the apocalypse—in an interpretation of religious (and, very often, Christian) precepts and narratives. In contrast, there is a long tradition of secular representations of the apocalypse, particularly in the genre of science fiction, which “embrac[es] a rich variety of astrophysical, geological, climatological and biological dooms” (Wagar 4), often triggered by humanity itself. W. Warren Wagar argues that such visions of the apocalypse are “metaphors for modern anxiety” (4) and breaks down these anxieties into three types of fears: a universal yet private fear of separation and powerlessness; a fear of nature which, while it can be a metaphor for inner struggles, is most often a true and rational fear of the dangers of the world; and a fear of the harm that humanity can cause to itself and the world through abuses of technology and industry, or through social conflicts (66–67). As I will explore later in this chapter, both of these understandings of the apocalypse come in to play, to an extent, in Gaiman and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of apocalyptic myths, thereby creating a conversation between them. 35 Lerner’s definition of apocalyptic literature does not negate the established roles of humanity and outside forces (whether they be gods, other mythical entities, or supernatural forces) in the apocalyptic scenario: humanity remains passive, while some kind of outside, overpowering force retains the active role, whether it takes the shape of a god or a cataclysmic phenomenon. In this type of apocalyptic fiction, and in Lerner’s definition, this power structure ensures the same outcome: the end of the world is inescapable. The structure of such apocalyptic narratives (that is to say, narratives in which the outcome of the apocalyptic scenario is determined not by humanity, whose role is mainly passive, but by outside forces) is grounded in the contrast established between two worlds—one which is old and corrupt, and the second, a new and better world that replaces the old one. The central tension in these narratives is that between order and chaos; their driving force is the fear and rejection of the decadence of humanity. As underlined by Kermode, in such apocalyptic narratives, “[d]ecadence is usually associated with the hope of renovation” (9). In other words, these apocalyptic narratives are predicated upon the idea that the world has become so corrupt that it cannot be borne. While humanity might wish for renovation, it does not have the wherewithal to enact it. An outside intervention (a cataclysm, a natural disaster, or a pandemic, for instance, either triggered by divine or supernatural intervention, or brought on by natural causes) is therefore needed to redress the situation, destroy this corrupt world, and save the few that deserve saving. Chaos is vanquished, and order is restored through a providential rescue. This type of apocalyptic narrative—this arguably optimistic interpretation of the apocalyptic myth—is the one which Gaiman and Pratchett illustrate and engage with in Good Omens. 36 However, the concerns and structure of apocalyptic narratives are not confined to this one pattern. Indeed, through his analysis of the history of apocalyptic fiction, W.H. Oliver makes note of a different type of apocalyptic narrative: Few contemporary apocalypses except those still reproduced by Christian fundamentalists, retain the intimacy and comfort of a prospective providential rescue, except the markedly post-Christian versions of science-fiction. No one else appears to believe that we can save ourselves from the bomb, or from people, except by our own arduous effort. Whether this is gain or loss is quite another question. (241–42) The inherent optimism of the first type of apocalyptic scenario I have described, in which an outside intervention comes to restore order and reward the worthy with survival, is not uniformly reflected across all apocalyptic narratives. There are numerous apocalyptic narratives which take on a much more pessimistic approach. One may think here of the contrast between the apocalypse of the Book of Revelation or that of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (in which, while the world ends and the older generations die out, the youngest generation evolves and transcends its humanity to become a new form of being at the dawn of a new world), and the bleaker narratives of books such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, both of which depict the slow degradation of humanity, marching on towards its unglamorous and hopeless extinction. Such a contrast marks variations in authors’ interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse; for the purposes of this chapter, I focus on representations of the apocalypse within the genre of fantasy which draw from both the religious and the secular traditions of apocalyptic storytelling—in doing so, these fantasy narratives simultaneously raise 37 questions with regards to the roles of fate, divine intervention, human responsibility, and human agency in the apocalyptic scenario. My understanding of these variations within the genre, and more broadly, my understanding of the use of myth in fiction, are informed by Barthes’ argument that myth is “a mode of signification, a form,” that it is “a type of speech” (109). Barthes claims that myth is a “second-order semiological system” (114), that is, that myth is a type of speech in which the signs (the “associative total of a concept and an image”) of a previous semiological system, are given a signifying function, in order to relay a new, or different meaning. This relationship between myth and the conveyance of ideologies or worldviews through the action of a second-order semiological system is at the centre of my dissertation, although the approach I take to myth here diverges from Barthes when it comes to the nature of that relationship. Barthes understands myth as a type of social discourse relaying the dominant values and ideology of the day—and this social discourse is transmitted and relayed through film, television, music, advertising, and popular culture in general: myth is the naturalisation of these values as common sense. My approach differs from Barthes because I focus on narratives that engage both with the matter of myth as myth, and with myth on the level of worldviews, beliefs, faiths, ways of living, and ways of being. In this context, I find it important to establish a distinction between “myth” in the sense that Barthes understands it, and the “myths” or worldviews, beliefs, faiths, and ways of being that are illustrated and referred to within the narratives I am studying. Treating these myths themselves as the mode of signification to be analysed and deconstructed would lead to analysing, assessing, or critiquing those worldviews, beliefs, faiths, and ways of being themselves, which is neither my right nor my purpose in this dissertation. To use a Platonic analogy, I approach myth with the understanding that an illustration/interpretation of myth is the 38 shadow to the true form that is myth itself.26 What I interact with, therefore, is not the myth itself, but the interpretation and representation of it, which authors of fiction (here, Gaiman and Pratchett) instrumentalize to convey their own worldviews and ideologies. When it comes to apocalyptic narratives in fiction, then, the contrasts at play in representations of the apocalypse mark variations in the authors’ interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse: each of these variations on the theme of the apocalypse is informed by diverse social and cultural contexts, and each is grounded in and reflective of different understandings of humanity’s existence and of its place or role in the world. I will analyse how Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of the apocalypse—the imagery that they use, the themes which they place at the centre of their narratives draw certain images and themes from the optimistic and pessimistic variations on the theme of the apocalypse I have just described. Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize these two approaches and combine them with new elements in order to illuminate the interactions between humanity and life, death, space, and time. In his analysis of the genre, Kermode focuses on how the second variation I have described—that is, more pessimistic apocalyptic narratives which offer no new, better world to escape to and no redemption—represents a different interpretation of humanity and of history’s relationship to time. He writes: “[The] End itself . . . loses its downbeat, tonic-and-dominant finality, and we think of it, as the theologians think of Apocalypse, as immanent rather than imminent” (30). Indeed, while some apocalyptic narratives might have attempted to date the end of the world (Hans Hut and Martin Luther respectively argued the world would end in 1528 and in 1600; Christopher Columbus estimated it would happen in 1656 in his Book of Prophecies; 26 I am drawing here from Plato’s theory of forms, and more specifically from his theory of the divided line (274-278) and the allegory of the cave (278-286). 39 Nostradamus foresaw an end of the world happening in 1999), successive misses have, to an extent, alienated attempts at establishing a timeline. But, rather than vanish, Kermode argues, the sense of dread caused by the expectation of the apocalypse has instead evolved and become omnipresent, transcending the boundaries of linear time: “the stage of transition” between the old world and the new “has become endless” (101). Kermode sees reflected in this different conception of the end of the world as immanent a different understanding of our relationship to time and history: The fiction of transition . . . reflects our lack of confidence in ends, our mistrust of the apportioning of history to epochs of this and that. Our own epoch is the epoch of nothing positive, only of transition. Since we move from transition to transition, we may suppose that we exist in no intelligible relation to the past, and no predictable relation to the future. (101–02) In other words, rather than foresee the end as imminent, set to occur at a fixed point in time (one which might very well be inaccurate), Kermode’s interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse presents the end of the world as a phase—one that may stretch endlessly, reflecting a distrust in our perception of time and in our ability to predict or even comprehend it, as well as a lack of faith in humanity’s ability to change the course of history. One might find examples of the “fiction of transition” described by Kermode in works such as Shelley’s The Last Man or Alam’s Leave the World Behind: in both, humanity’s decline is portrayed as inevitable and the slow process of extinction has already started. However, neither of these two works shows the reader the end of the very last human on Earth. Instead, these narratives end in a state close to stasis: on the brink of extinction, but not yet fully gone. 40 This focus on the varying perceptions of time and history in apocalyptic representations is essential in understanding the purpose and driving force behind Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives. By envisioning the end of the world, these texts grapple with humanity’s relationship to life, death, time, and history. These novels interrogate the human understanding of how time flows, and of how, if at all, the human and non-human characters interact with the flow of time. As I will explore in more detail later, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives question the concept of temporal linearity. David Ketterer explains the role played by linearity in our perception of time as follows: “We can appreciate time only in terms of spatial sequences—the hiatus between a tick and a tock. Any kind of meaning depends upon the assumption of two fixed points: a starting point and an ending point; in terms of the meaning of human existence, a Genesis and an Apocalypse” (12). By moving away from a linear representation of time, a reconfiguration of our understanding of humanity’s relationship to time and history may happen on several levels, or at different degrees of distortion. Each narrative distortion of temporal (and, as I show below, spatial) linearity in apocalyptic fiction therefore echoes social and cultural shifts in the perception of reality and of human existence. One such distortion, envisioned by Kermode in his analysis of “fictions of transition,” affects our perception of the future: the end is no longer a set point in time, but a phase of transition, the extent of which is uncertain. This perception of time still assumes the concept of temporal linearity: there remains a before and an after, although the “after” has become distorted. However, such linearity should not be taken for granted when approaching texts that deal with the end of the world. Indeed, Pitetti proposes definitions of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives that present two opposing approaches to time: according to him, apocalyptic narratives, through their linear perception of time, enable us to “structure temporal experience, . . 41 . smooth out the complexities of historical change and allow one to know the world and one’s place in the world” (444). Post-apocalyptic narratives, on the other hand, “deny the possibility of any kind of final end,” and “emphasize the ambiguity of that experience and the need for active historical subjects to take responsibility for directing and shaping indeterminate and open-ended historical processes” (444). Pitetti’s distinction between the two genres allows for a reading of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives which focuses on one’s perception of time, of history, and of human agency. Pitetti’s approach redefines the boundaries of the genre’s characteristics. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives can both be perceived to belong to an overarching category of texts dealing with ideations of the end of the world, and how that ending is situated in relationship to history and humanity. But one could broaden the scope of Pitetti’s approach to include within this broader category near-apocalypses, that is, texts in which the apocalypse is indeed theorized or envisioned, and therefore described, but eventually prevented. Indeed, the capacity to comprehend temporal experience by structuring or destructuring it, and the capacity to situate humanity in relation to historical processes, which Pitetti sees in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives, are features of all texts dealing with the end of the world or the end of a part of that world—whether they depict the lead up to the end, the actual end, or its aftermath. These two capacities are what makes these texts specific interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse. Each of these scenarios grapples with the concept of an ending, with its cause and with its consequences—and it is this grappling that triggers the narrative’s portrayal of a specific perception of reality and existence, and of humanity’s relationship to them. Furthermore, Pitetti’s understanding of apocalyptic narratives also allows for more breadth in the definition of the apocalyptic event itself. If what qualifies a text as apocalyptic is 42 that it deals with the end of the world, or the end of some aspect of the world (Pitetti 444), and that it questions our experience of reality, of human existence, and of the relationship between them, then one may also consider the inclusion of other kinds of apocalypses, such as the annihilation of an alternate reality or a parallel world, like Mort’s creation and destruction, within the Discworld, of a bubble of alternate reality in which the princess has not died; or microcosmic apocalypses such as the end of a culture or of a civilization, like the decline and eventual destruction of the belief in the gods killed during Ragnarök in American Gods, and the consequences this would have on the different cultures coexisting in America. The terms “apocalyptic narrative” and “apocalyptic fiction” are therefore understood broadly, in this chapter, as categories with porous boundaries: they are inclusive of both post-apocalypses and non-apocalypses, and of any text which interacts with and interprets the myth of the apocalypse, at macrocosmic and microcosmic levels. Because each apocalyptic narrative is reflective of an author’s individual interpretation of the myth of the end of the world, and informed by their social and cultural context, the form that it takes—its structure, the images and themes within it—is protean and flexible, rather than adhering strictly to characteristics one might want to attribute to a genre. II. Considering the function of myth in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s storytelling With this in mind, I come to a question which is central to my analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives: that of their function. If their apocalyptic writing is a type of speech, then what is it, exactly, that it says, and to what purpose? As I analyse Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives throughout this chapter, I keep coming back to Barthes’ 43 considerations on the function of myth, and more specifically, to his claims that myth “transforms history into nature,” that it naturalizes it (129), and that, therefore, “myth is depoliticized speech” (142). While I agree that myth, in itself, is not inherently political, I must consider whether such a statement might apply to fictional narratives involving myths, such as those of Gaiman and Pratchett. Central to this chapter, therefore, is the question of whether Gaiman and Pratchett merely illustrate myths, whether they also interpret them, and whether they might actually be doing a little bit of both at the same time. If Gaiman and Pratchett illustrate myths—either by portraying existing myths or by creating fictional myths— then Barthes’ argument that being a second-order semiological system serves to naturalize myths and to “transform history into nature” applies to these narratives: their purpose is to relay and validate a certain interpretation of myth as the natural or the right one. On the other hand, since what I am studying is not myths themselves, but their use and portrayal in fictional texts, one might argue that myths are inherently politicized within these narratives, through the filter of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretations of these myths and the ways in which they shape our perception of and interactions with the world, and, as we shall see later, through the authors’ instrumentalization of other popular interpretations to better relay and bolster their own. Paradoxically, however, I would argue that these two purposes are not mutually exclusive in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives. I contend, throughout this chapter, that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives are simultaneously depoliticised speech—through their illustration and transmission of existing myths—and politicised speech—because despite their portrayal of elements from various interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse, they do convey a specific understanding of that myth, a specific ideology, and they bolster that understanding through the instrumentalization of these other interpretations. 44 In discussing the apocalyptic themes present in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s fiction, I therefore have several aims, which I address in the following sections of this chapter: in section III, I explore the interpretive characteristics at play in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives, starting with how they reject the order of spatiotemporal linearity. I contend that by introducing chaos into their interpretations of apocalyptic myths, they reframe humanity’s relationship to time and space. In section IV, I then consider how these texts rescript the apocalyptic narrative by questioning the role humanity has to play within it: Gaiman and Pratchett write counter-utopian apocalyptic narratives, in which they challenge the concepts of fate and predestination, and focus on the importance and the complexities of human agency. By studying how the texts interrogate the relationships between humanity, the gods, supernatural forces such as fate, non-human beings, and the land in the context of the apocalypse, the final four sections of this chapter underline the reframing and restructuring of apocalyptic scenarios in these three texts through depictions of spatiotemporal uncertainty and relativity, and the reframing of the power structures at play within these interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse. I will show how such reframings contribute to illustrate a contemporary take on the myth of the apocalypse which instrumentalizes the notion of the end of the world not to provide moral lessons, but rather to explore the nature of human life and the nature of endings. III. Time, order, and chaos: Reframing the apocalypse’s relationship to space and time American Gods, Good Omens, and Mort represent three different types of apocalyptical events. Good Omens, at first glance, seems to follow the patterns of Christian apocalyptic narratives. 45 The novel takes place in the contemporary world, and the main events of the narrative occur in England, where the fight between the forces of good and evil is sustained through the work of angels and demons who influence the lives and behaviours of humans through small acts—such as fixing a broken bicycle—and larger feats—such as turning a motorway into a satanic sigil working as a prayer wheel for Hell (99–100, 25). However, this status quo is challenged by the birth of the Antichrist, who is meant to herald the end of the world. An angel, Aziraphale, and a demon, Crowley, are tasked by the hosts of Heaven and Hell respectively to ensure that their camp will win the upcoming apocalypse, thereby establishing a new world order in which either Heaven or Hell is the new reality. The basic structure of the apocalypse depicted in Good Omens is drawn from the Book of Revelation; it includes a prophetess (Agnes Nutter), the birth and reign of the Antichrist (Adam) who triggers the occurrence of strange supernatural events and confers his power on a horrendous beast (named, ironically, Dog), a (comedic) version of the whore of Babylon (Madame Tracy), and the intervention of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Death, War, Famine, and Pollution).27 Its imagery and themes, however, draw much more from popular, contemporary fictional representations of the Christian apocalypse than from religious scripture: its portrayal of the Antichrist, for instance, echoes horror films’ child Antichrist figure, and Sister Mary’s suggestion of the name “Damien” when the child is born (44) is a clear nod to Richard Donner’s 1976 cult classic The Omen. Gaiman and Pratchett’s take on popular, contemporary representations of the Christian apocalypse straddles the fence between parody and pastiche—it delights in exploring the tropes of the genre, while 27 While the identity of the Four Horsemen might be more or less explicit and/or vary depending on the version and interpretation of the Bible one consults, Gaiman and Pratchett making “Pollution” the fourth horseman is a satirical modernization of an interpretation of the fourth horseman as Pestilence or Plague, which one can find, for instance, in the King James Version of the Bible: “For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?” (King James Bible Online, Ezek. 14:21). 46 simultaneously instrumentalizing them to offer a reflection on the social and cultural implications behind contemporary interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse. The apocalyptic event in American Gods is a cultural one. The novel takes place in an America where the gods, old and new, inhabit the land alongside their followers, whose belief is the gods’ lifeforce and fuels their divine powers. The narrative follows Shadow Moon, a former convict who is hired by a man named Wednesday to protect him, run errands, and, in the unlikely event of his death, hold a vigil for him (47). Wednesday, who first appears to be a shifty yet charismatic conman, is truly a god in disguise: he is Odin, the Allfather, leader of the Norse pantheon. Odin’s purpose in hiring Shadow is to use him as an emissary in his endeavour to prepare for an upcoming confrontation between the old and new gods of America. Shadow is to help him rally the old gods, in spite of their decline, to fight against the upstart new gods. At the end of the conflict, the winning side will gain control over the beliefs of Americans. However, this American Ragnarök is a sham: it is a two-man con performed by Odin and his partner in crime, the trickster god Loki, to claim the deaths of the gods on both sides of the conflict as sacrifices to themselves in order to renew their powers and regain their old glory. The Ragnarök of American Gods draws its name and essential characteristics from the Ragnarök of Norse mythology: the twilight of the gods, and their final battle which marks the end of the world. In Norse mythology’s Ragnarök, the Aesir fight and die along with the wolf Fenrir, who was sired by Loki, the Midgard serpent, and the Jotun. The battle results in the destruction of the world, but that destruction is followed by the creation of a new, better Earth where the surviving gods and humans are given a new chance at life (Sherman 324). The apocalyptic scenario of American Gods follows the main lines of Ragnarök, depicting the decline of the gods, and portraying Loki as the catalyst of their final conflict; but Gaiman’s interpretation of Ragnarök imbues it with 47 metaphorical meaning: the final battle of the gods in American Gods is a clash between cultures and worldviews, in which myths and ideologies (old and new, local and global) are pitted against each other. In Mort, Death takes on an apprentice and teaches him the rudiments of the job before leaving him to his own devices on his first assignment. The apprentice, Mort, fails to reap the soul of Princess Keli because of his infatuation with her. In doing so, he creates an alternate reality, a microcosmic world within the macrocosm of the Discworld, in which Keli is still alive. However, this act triggers a spatio-temporal apocalypse as the fabric of time and space does not bear alteration and will inevitably attempt to fix itself. The novel also evokes the possibility of a second apocalyptic event, connected to the nodes in Death’s office: if they are not calibrated properly, “all the Balance is destroyed,” and death gets out of control (179). The apocalypse envisioned in Mort is a destruction of the fabric of space and time, a clash of realities which may result in the destruction of one or both of the colliding realities. Through these three narratives, and their three different approaches to the apocalypse, Gaiman and Pratchett depict myths both extant (such as the Christian myth of the apocalypse, God, and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Good Omens; the Norse pantheon, the Ancient Egyptian pantheon, Indigenous mythical figures, and many others in American Gods) and invented (the gods of the Discworld, who are however heavily inspired by existing gods and myths). I will demonstrate, throughout this chapter, that Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize these myths in such a way as to illustrate another myth, a contemporary myth of the apocalypse which emerges from the evolution of apocalyptic narratives, and their depictions of time, space, historical processes, and human agency. 48 Time, order, and chaos play a central role in these three narratives. On the surface, each novel’s story follows an apocalyptically linear structure. In American Gods, the reign of the gods in America has declined—the old gods have lost believers and power, the new gods have risen and threaten the existing world order, and the characters are led to fear and await a destructive event (the battle between the two sides) which would herald the arrival of a new world order. In Good Omens, the decadent world sees the birth of the Antichrist, then becomes the battlefield for the conflict between the forces of Good and Evil, the winner of which is expected to establish the new world order. And in Mort, the transgressive act of Death’s apprentice gives birth to an alternate reality or world, the annihilation of which results in a destabilisation of the existing world order. Each novel begins with a world or a part of the world in a chaotic state, and set to go through a transition phase (the apocalyptic event), before the creation of a new and different version of what has been destroyed. These three novels do not fully adhere to this particular structure of apocalyptic narratives, which I have described as an optimistic variation earlier on in this chapter. Indeed, the apocalyptic event which is dreaded throughout the story never fully occurs: in two of them, the apocalypse is prevented at the last minute; in the third, Mort, destruction does occur to an extent, but parts of the destroyed world are preserved. Although the apocalypse is subverted in each of these narratives, they are all undoubtedly apocalyptic in theme. This variation in structure entails a shift in the focus and purpose of the apocalyptic narrative: if the apocalypse does not fully occur, then anxiety and dread are no longer central to the narrative, nor is the question of moral redemption. Gaiman and Pratchett therefore instrumentalize the myth of the apocalypse in such a way as to interrogate the social and cultural implications of the apocalyptic narratives they draw from, while offering an alternative interpretation of the myth which, as I will explore in further detail later on, places the focus on 49 the question of human agency and on the interaction and interconnections between humanity and non-human beings. Compounding this first variation on the theme of the apocalypse in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, the narrative structure of two of the novels—American Gods and Good Omens—also belies their apparent temporal linearity. Indeed, these novels feature forms of fragmentation or reorganisation of their stories’ chronology. The structure of American Gods is particularly fragmented. Its main storyline follows the quest of the protagonist, Shadow Moon, in a mostly chronological fashion. However, the different chapters of this main storyline are separated by fragments of other narratives and timelines. The specific date and time of the interpolated fragments entitled “Somewhere in America,” “Interlude,” and “Meanwhile. A Conversation” is not fully clear: they seem to take place in the same present time as Shadow’s narrative, but they could either take place within the chronology of Shadow’s narrative, occur simultaneously to the chapters that precede or follow them, or even at an indefinite point in the main timeline.28 Meanwhile, the “Coming to America” fragments are flashbacks retracing the history of various gods’ arrival in America (taking place, respectively, in 14,000 B.C (522–529), 813 A.D (88–92), 1721 (121–133), and 1778 (406–428)). In Good Omens, a similar fragmentation of the narrative takes place: the main storyline takes place at some indefinite time in the present, and follows the protagonists in their attempts to prevent the apocalypse. However, the narrative is prefaced with two sections “In the beginning” (a retelling of Genesis), and “Eleven years ago,” separated by a Dramatis Personae. These two sections, which both take 28 I refer here to the following sections within the novel: “Somewhere in America” (pp.35–40 ; between chapters 1 and 2); “Somewhere in America” (pp. 229–242; between chapters 7 and 8); “Meanwhile. A Conversation” (pp. 327–329; between chapters 9 and 10); “Interlude,” “Interlude 2,” “Interlude 3” (pp. 469–478; pp. 479–482; p. 483; between chapters 12 and 13). 50 place much earlier than the main storyline, are nonetheless directly connected to it as they set into motion the events necessary to trigger the apocalypse. Furthermore, additional episodes are included within the narrative, breaking its linearity, such as Shadwell’s dream, in which he gets a glimpse of the past and witnesses the death of witch and prophetess Agnes Nutter (297). Additionally, the chronology of the main storyline is broken by reflective paragraphs providing metatextual commentary on what is happening within the story. The origin of these comments is never fully clear and could be interpreted to be either an omniscient narrator, God, or both.29 The fragmentation and imbrication of these various episodes has several effects. An obvious one is to provide more information on what is going on within the story, and to create connections between the events occurring in the past, the present, and the future. But a corollary of this fragmentation is the irruption of chaos within the orderly, linear timeline of the apocalyptic narrative. The clear progression from past to present and future becomes muddled—even more so since time becomes relative. An episode might have happened earlier, or it might have happened later. The evolution of the plot therefore fragments into a rhizomatic network of possibilities, in which specific events may have occurred at various times during the narrative, on various planes of existence, sometimes concomitantly, and some of the characters, imbued with or granted divine abilities, can travel across this spatio-temporal network to access information from the past or from possible futures. Suddenly, the spatial sequence or hiatus between the tick and the tock of Genesis and Apocalypse (or beginning and end) described by Ketterer (12) is thrown akimbo: the characters become able to rewrite or rescript the apocalyptic scenario from within. This spatio-temporal fragmentation therefore enables the reader to explore and question 29 In the 2019 Good Omens TV series produced by Amazon Prime, script writers Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore made the choice to present these comments as a voice-over narration attributed to God, played by Frances McDormand. 51 the nature of time and space, the ways in which one interacts with them, and how this in turn might affect one’s experience of and interaction with rest of the world. The narrative structure of Mort does not follow the same fragmented pattern as American Gods and Good Omens, Pratchett having instead opted for a chronological telling of the story. However, the deconstruction of the reader’s perception of temporal linearity and spatial continuity engendered by the other two novels’ narrative structure is also present in Mort, although there, it is enacted by the characters themselves. In Mort, Pratchett plays with the characters’ experiences of distances and the passing of time, and this kind of distortion happens on several levels. The first and most obvious distortion of a character’s experience of time and space is the character of Death. As a personification of the concept of death, Death is a mythological entity with godlike powers and knowledge. He tells Mort that he knows “THE UTTERMOST SECRETS OF TIME AND SPACE” (29).30 Death’s existence indeed functions outside the rules of space and time: Death can slow down time or even step out of it at will. He does so to have his first conversation with Mort, to whom he explains, as they look upon Mort’s father who seems frozen in time: “I HAVE MERELY PUT US OUTSIDE TIME FOR A MOMENT” (12). Death can make use of his abilities to distort the fabric of space and time to conduct conversations privately, as he does here with Mort, but also to travel great distances in an instant, or to pass through matter such as doors, walls, and even people. He can also lend these characteristics to his tools of office (such as his horse, Binky) as well as the place he calls home: Pratchett describes the realm Death created as “a landscape that owed nothing to time and space, which appeared on no map, which existed only in those far reaches of the multiplexed 30 Death’s quotations will appear in full-capitals, as the character is consistently portrayed as speaking in all-capitals (either full- or small-capitals, depending on the edition) in the Discworld novels. This typographical choice underlines Death’s ability to speak directly into characters’ minds rather than aloud, which is impossible for him due to his lack of vocal chords. 52 cosmos known to the few astrophysicists who have taken really bad acid” (34). In Death’s realm, time does not pass. Both the wizard and caretaker, Albert, and Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabell, cannot age as long as they reside there. But the creation of the alternate reality in which Princess Keli is alive provides another obvious distortion of time and space: its material existence as a pocket of alternative time within the Discworld enforces the coexistence and even the intermingling of two different timelines, both when the characters of one timeline enter the other, and when the time pocket’s boundaries shift. Moving in and out of time, and in and out of different realities, once again provides the characters opportunities to apprehend the story they live in differently, and to affect it: they can step out of time to figure out their next actions in a moment of crisis, avoid death (by interrupting their aging process when in Death’s realm, or, as Mort did for Keli, by not reaping a soul when it was meant to die), and travel long distances in the blink of an eye—all of these abilities consequently enabling them to rewrite their own story. The characters’ ability to subvert the apocalypse by flouting the rules of rectilinear time and space directly impacts the purpose and significance of the apocalyptic narrative, as these abilities both stem from and illustrate the novel’s particular interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse. As I have shown earlier, apocalyptic narratives that draw from a linear understanding of time often depict a power hierarchy between divine entities, who play an active role in history, and humanity, which can only witness its own destruction. But the human characters in Mort transcend this division and regain power over their own lives and narratives, thereby escaping their seemingly hopeless fate. The novel therefore represents such a power hierarchy only to challenge it both thematically and through the very structure of its representation of time and space. This motif reflects Pratchett’s (and Gaiman’s) take on human agency and on the 53 interaction between human and non-human beings in interpretations of the apocalyptic myth—a topic which I will explore in further detail later on in this chapter. Gaiman distorts time and space in a very similar fashion within the narrative of American Gods. In Chapters 5 and 6, Shadow follows Wednesday to the House on the Rock. There, they board the Carousel, which Mr. Nancy compares to a prayer wheel or power accumulator (164). This Carousel is a transitional space, a border which enables Shadow to step into another dimension—which Mr. Nancy describes at this point as being inside Wednesday’s mind, and as Valaskjalf, Odin’s Hall (171). It is there that they meet with the Old Gods to discuss the upcoming war. Stepping into Valaskjalf is stepping out of earthly time and space. In a later trip to this other dimension, Wednesday describes it to Shadow in more detail: “Where are we?” “Behind the scenes,” said Wednesday. “Sorry?” “Think of it as being behind the scenes. Like in a theatre or something. I just pulled us out of the audience and now we’re walking about backstage. It’s a shortcut.” (439) The theatrical reference is quite meaningful here. Going backstage enables Shadow not only to see the reality behind the artifice (such as the real appearance of the gods), but also to participate in the manipulation of what is going on onstage (the play put on by Wednesday, that is to say, the main storyline of the novel)—in this instance, by using a shortcut to escape from Mr. Town. In both novels, these distortions of time and space enable a shift in the characters’ role and the structure of storytelling. They can suddenly take on the role of reader or spectator, looking upon the action at a remove, and accessing information that they normally wouldn’t have encountered. 54 This in turn enables them to take on the mantle of storyteller themselves, and to change their own stories by acting upon the information that they have gathered, and by manipulating the fabric of time and space within the story to fit their needs. By breaking up the spatiotemporal linearity of their apocalyptic narratives, Gaiman and Pratchett offer instead a form of immanence such as that described by Kermode. Rather than a single point fixed in time, the apocalypse becomes a stage of eternal transition, of perpetual crisis (102). Breaking with the past and making a new start for the future are no longer possible as the characters’ ability to flout the rules of time and space brings chaos to an ordered perception of time and of story: as the characters travel across the rhizomatic structure of space and time, gathering information and changing events, their relationship with the past becomes more complicated and more interactive, less unilateral, while the future becomes more unpredictable. Evidence of this apocalyptic immanence can be found in the novels’ endings: while the apocalypse is prevented, the threat of it is not so much resolved as abated—the fragmentation of time and space itself engendering innumerable potentialities for other ends of the world. The novels’ endings, and what, exactly, this state of immanence means for Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse, is a topic I will come back to and explore in further detail towards the end of this chapter. More broadly, however, foregoing spatio-temporal linearity and instead envisioning a stage of eternal transition means that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse focuses less on the how or the when of the world’s ending, re-centring instead the question of humanity’s role in the apocalypse, which invites scrutiny on humanity’s interconnectedness with the world. 55 IV. Rescripting the apocalypse: Counter-utopian apocalypses and the recentring of human agency Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives are written in conversation with an interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse in which the end of the world happens in three stages: decadence, destruction, and renewal. According to this interpretation of the apocalypse, the old world is corrupt beyond redemption, and the only solution is to wipe the slate clean and start over. However, while such an understanding of the myth of the apocalypse is featured within the three novels, Gaiman and Pratchett use their characters as mouthpieces to interrogate this interpretation: in all three novels, central characters scoff at the very idea of a wiping of the slate. In Good Omens, after learning about humanity’s seeming lack of interest in preserving and protecting the world, the child Antichrist, Adam, proposes a new plan to his friends: why not just destroy the world and remake it anew? “‘It’ll be a world just for us,’ said Adam. ‘Everything’s always been messed up by other people but we can get rid of it all an’ start again. Won’t that be great?’” (300) However, his friends, referred to collectively as “the Them,” balk at the idea. The world that their friend Adam wants to destroy is not some imagined concept that one can just scrap and redraft in a better format: it is “really real.” Its features, flawed or not, are not for one entity or faction to destroy at their leisure: “I can make them better, too. Better trees to climb, better ponds, better. . .” His voice trailed off. “You can’t,” said Wensleydale flatly. “They’re not like America and those places. They’re really real. Anyway, they belong to all of us. They’re ours.” (314) 56 Here, Wensleydale’s response highlights an important point with regards to the ideological underpinnings of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives. When they subvert the pattern of decadence, destruction and renewal, Gaiman and Pratchett question the possibility of a redemption or of a divinely ordained renewal allowing humanity, or a select few, to transcend the end-times. They reject the idea that some kind of divine intervention could produce an ideal world to conveniently replace the one that was so broken. Their apocalyptic narratives could therefore be considered to be counter-utopian narratives, in that they reach the same conclusion as the realist speculations which, according to Peter Paik, are “subversive of both the goal of utopia and the desire to secure the continuance of the established order” (22). If there is to be no divine intervention, then the imperfect, deteriorating reality that exists before the apocalypse is the real deal, rather than a god’s trial run at world-building perfection. By insisting that the trees and ponds of their reality are “really real,” in contrast with the ideal representations of “America and those places” that the Them like to imagine, Wensleydale suggests that reality cannot be “better”: it can only be real if its flaws and imperfections are included. A “better” tree would never provide him the same pleasure to climb as a real tree, because there is a history and a relationship between him and that tree. He knows, accepts, and works with its imperfections. And the potential “better” futures offered by Heaven and Hell would obliterate that history and that intimate relationship between beings and the world around them. An earlier exchange between Crowley and Aziraphale reflects this reasoning: “That’s it then,” said Crowley . . . “No more compact discs. No more Albert Hall. No more Proms. No more Glyndbourne. Just celestial harmonies all day long.” “Ineffable,” Aziraphale murmured. 57 “Like eggs without salt, you said? Which reminds me. No salt, no eggs. No gravlax with dill sauce. No fascinating little restaurants where they know you. No Daily Telegraph crossword. No small antique shops. No bookshops, either. No interesting old editions. No—” Crowley scraped the bottom of Aziraphale’s barrel of interests—“Regency silver snuffboxes…” “But after we win life will be better!” croaked the angel. “But it won’t be as interesting.” (55) Wiping out the world would destroy all the things that make it beautiful and enjoyable—all the things that make it the world. Furthermore, doing so to establish which entity, Heaven or Hell, gets to rule the future of reality would not effectively resolve the fundamental tension between these two factions. The winner would only impose their own foibles as the new world order. By having the Them, Aziraphale, and Crowley reject the notion that the world is beyond redemption, Gaiman and Pratchett effectively alter the focus of the novel, moving towards an apocalyptic narrative that is closer to the characteristics which Pitetti attributes to post-apocalyptic novels. Such a novel, Pitetti writes, “[rejects] the stabilizing concepts of the end of the world and of dichotomized old and new worlds” (444). For Pitetti, there is stability in perceiving the end of the world as a three-parted, linear process of decadence, destruction, and renewal: it suggests that while chaos might occur, order will later inevitably be restored. He sees postapocalyptic narratives as standing in direct opposition to this interpretation of the apocalypse, arguing that: “[at] the core of postapocalyptic narrative is the recognition that there is no new world, and that history can never be transcended or escaped” (447). Similarly to Pitetti’s understanding of post-apocalyptic narratives, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretations of the myth of the apocalypse reject the convenient dichotomy between an old, imperfect world and 58 a future utopia. They refuse the notion of a divinely ordained transcendence of humanity. Like Pitetti’s post-apocalyptic narratives, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives take into account the weight of history, as well as the role played by humanity in the ruin or salvation of the world. Where these two types of narratives diverge is in their relationship to time: while Pitetti’s post-apocalyptic narratives necessarily take place after the apocalyptic event, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives portray the lead up to and near miss of the apocalyptic event. In their interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse, the end of the world will not lead to a brand-new beginning, and the perfect world does not exist. In doing so, they question articulations of the myth in which ideations of the end of the world are instrumentalized to define what makes a world decadent or perfect, thereby promoting specific ideals of morality. Rather than represent a humanity that sits and waits for the apocalypse, either in the expectation of doom or that of restoration, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives leave it up to the characters (and, by extension, the reader) to confront the end of the world by addressing their own relationship and interaction with time and history. This counter-utopian aspect is also present in the plot of American Gods, where the conflict between the old gods and the new is revealed to be a sham, a two-man con performed by Odin and Loki to gain more power. The reader is presented with two different forms of apocalypse: the first one is the battle between the old gods and the new which Odin describes to the old gods as the American Ragnarök. In order to trigger this conflict, Odin riles up the old gods, taking advantage of their vulnerability to pit them against the new gods: “They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us,” Odin says of the new gods. “They will destroy us if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act” (176). By inflating the opposition between the two sides, by suggesting that there is no possibility of cohabitation, and 59 by presenting their conflict as a matter of life or death, Odin tries to convince the old gods that open war is unavoidable. Odin describes Ragnarök as the old gods’ final opportunity to take action and survive: “You have already lost everything. I am offering you the chance to take something back” (178). This American Ragnarök is a cultural form of apocalypse: the extinction of old beliefs in favour of new gods, those of money, media, and globalisation. The only way out, he argues, is a fight to the death. Yet Odin’s argument does not appeal to the old gods, and for good reason. The outcome of such a conflict appears inauspicious from the start: the old gods’ powers have declined, while the new gods are young and powerful. Furthermore, if the source of the gods’ power is belief, fighting it out themselves would not achieve much. A god who killed another god would not automatically gain the dead god’s believers, and dead gods may not remain so forever if they retain a significant number of believers. Instead, the only real meaning such a battle can have is to be a sacrificial one: by sacrificing other gods on their own altar, certain gods can generate belief—they are, quite literally, worshipping themselves by sacrificing the gods in their own name, as Odin feeds on deaths that are dedicated to him and Loki feeds on chaos (674–675)—and tap into that belief to gain more power. This is the crux of Odin and Loki’s scheme in American Gods. Shadow unravels the meaning behind this scheme at the climax of the novel: “. . . they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they have ever been. After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead gods? The game they played was called ‘Let’s You and Him Fight.’” (681) This plan is reflective of the tensions of cultural imperialism at play in the United States and more globally. Indeed, Odin and Loki are pitting the old gods against the new in a conflict 60 opposing cultural and spiritual traditions to a globalised culture stemming mainly from Western settler culture. But Odin and Loki’s sacrifice of gods, both old and new, to enhance their own power mirrors patterns of cultural appropriation, as the two Norse gods take advantage of the old gods’ marginalization and desperation, using these gods’ struggle for survival to enhance Odin and Loki’s own power. The complex history of the modern instrumentalization of Norse mythology in Western culture cannot go ignored here—in particular the allure this mythology has for right wing movements and fascist regimes, and the subsequent deformations Norse myths and folklore have undergone to justify ideologies of racial and cultural supremacy. Natalie Van Beusen underlines this appropriative tradition, tracing it back to National Socialism and Adolf Hitler’s idealisation of Norse and Germanic people, whom he perceived to be the pure, uncorrupted race described in Tacitus’ Germania (McMaster). Dorothy Kim explains how German scholars of the Third Reich “[blamed] socialism, Jews and class revolutions for the “decline” of a Germanic race they saw descending from this Viking past” (Kim). She underlines the persistence of this instrumentalization of Old Norse and Viking history and mythology to justify racism and persecution, citing far-right neo-pagan groups such as the Scandinavian Nordic Resistance Movement, and describing the intersection of the neo-pagan resurgence “with many facets of extremism today, from eco-fascism . . . to groups like the Odinists, who practice a form of white toxic masculinity based on the belief that the “barbaric” warriors of medieval Northern Europe functioned as a violent warrior comitatus” (Kim). It is no accident that in American Gods, Odin and Loki, gods belonging to a white, Western pantheon, are the ones who attempt to instrumentalize marginalized gods, and that the gods they try to exploit in their scheme belong to non-Western pantheons. Kermode underlines the inherent potential for extremist ideologies 61 within apocalyptic writing: “If we treat [assumptions concerning crisis and transition, that is, concerning the apocalypse] as something other than they are we are yielding to irrationalism; we are committing an error against which the intellectual history of our century should certainly have warned us. Its ideological expression is fascism; its practical consequence the Final Solution” (103). In American Gods, the artificial nature of the conflict only serves to underline its corrupted futility: all it would result in is the destruction of a cultural landscape to the benefit of a few winners who would get to impose their own flawed world order. This artificiality can be read as a denunciation of the binary thinking that can underlie apocalyptic representations—the notion that there can be only one way for the world to persist, for instance, or the notion of clear-cut boundaries between Good and Evil. In his representation of such an artificial binary conflict, Gaiman echoes Kermode’s argument by creating a direct connection between this binary thinking and the end of the world: while the binary thinking itself (the notion that the old gods and the new, and the cultures they represent, cannot coexist) is false, presenting it as true and acting upon it is what would actually cause the end of the world. The failure of Odin and Loki’s scheme reads as a denunciation of the imperialist, racist, or fascist ideologies that may find their way into apocalyptic thinking. And this brings us back to the intrinsic relationship between apocalyptic narratives and history. Just like Good Omens, American Gods’ retelling of Ragnarök is not meant to “structure temporal experience,” but instead, it “[emphasizes] the ambiguity of that experience and the need for active historical subjects to take responsibility for directing and shaping indeterminate and open-ended historical processes” (Pitetti 444). This is an ability which Pitetti attributes to post-apocalyptic narratives; however, as I have argued earlier, elements of his definition also apply to certain apocalyptic narratives: when considered in relation to spatiotemporality as a non-linear process, these narratives’ representation of the apocalyptic 62 myth becomes intrinsically connected to humanity’s agency in the historical process. In other words, the novels’ central characters must take historical processes into their own hands. They must rewrite their own story, and confront the apocalyptical threat and the role they are playing in it. Gaiman and Pratchett draw from and make references to interpretations of myths of the apocalypse in which the gods strike down humanity (either for its sins, or as collateral damage to their own conflicts and agendas)—narratives that pit humans against the will of the gods. But while Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives echo such interpretations, they do so in the form of a conversation between different interpretations rather than that of a more straightforward emulation or rejection. By centring the concept of human agency, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives in turn problematize and question the concepts of divine omnipotence and fate. V. Upsetting the great plan: Defying fate by preventing the apocalypse In each of our three narratives, the characters struggle against an end that seems to have been pre-ordained. Yet while Gaiman’s and Pratchett's novels echo apocalyptic narratives in which humanity is pitted against the will of the gods, they also resonate with interpretations of apocalyptic myths that place the power to save or doom the world in human hands. The dialogue that they establish between the concepts of fate, the will of the gods, and human agency suggests an interpretation of the apocalyptic myth in which these concepts are not antithetical or mutually exclusive. In such an interpretation, while fate may exist, it is conditional, flexible, and open to human interpretation. Human agency may therefore be exerted by exploiting the loopholes in a prophecy, interpreting the will of the gods through a different perspective, or appealing to the 63 gods themselves to get their help. In Mort, the alternate reality created by Mort is doomed from its very inception. He may attempt to alter the fabric of reality to change Keli’s fate, but reality is resistant to this interference, much like a body might reject the intrusion of a foreign organism: “It was like looking into a piece of another world, almost identical, that had been grafted onto the Disc. . . . And the Disc was resenting it, and surrounding it, and pushing it back into non-existence” (Pratchett 128). Mort and his allies struggle to slow down this seemingly unstoppable process in order to save the characters stuck in this alternate reality. Accepting the fated end of the world as an irrevocable fact would mean rejecting humanity’s agency in the causation and prevention of the apocalypse. Instead, the characters of these novels redefine their understanding of fate altogether. Fate and the gods are fickle, and their purposes are unknown to mortals. Therefore, humans may interpret the will of the gods in such a way as to reclaim their own agency. This is exemplified through the novels’ use of deus-ex-machina devices: in Mort, the gods do intervene to save Keli’s life despite the destruction of the alternate reality. Death explains it thus: “I HAD A WORD WITH THE GODS. . . . THE GODS ARE JUST. THEY ARE ALSO SENTIMENTALISTS. . . . BUT YOU AREN’T FREE YET. YOU MUST SEE TO IT THAT HISTORY TAKES PLACE” (254–255). However, while the gods’ intervention is, effectively, the only way to alter the course of history, Mort and his allies are actually the ones who changed fate, as it is only through their struggles and their convincing Death to intercede in their favour that the gods were inclined to act. Furthermore, Mort still needs to ensure that history follows its proper course. He will play an active role in his own fate, and that of the world. In Good Omens, the apocalypse, or the Great Plan, is established very early on as ‘ineffable.’ It is God’s intended plan, and therefore it is right, whether or not we understand its 64 purpose and ramifications. Yet, as the novel reaches its climax, Aziraphale and Crowley come to redefine their understanding of ineffability: “But the Great Plan can only be a tiny part of the overall ineffability,” said Crowley. “You can’t be certain that what’s happening right now isn’t exactly right, from an ineffable point of view.” “It izz written!” bellowed Beelzebub. “But it might be written differently somewhere else,’ said Crowley. ‘Where you can’t read it.” (369) This new understanding of fate enables Crowley and Aziraphale to justify their interruption of the apocalypse, and, eventually, it also enables them to save the world, in part through the intervention of their own deus-ex-machina (Adam, the Antichrist). Because Adam refuses to perform the role he was given in the apocalypse, the planned sequence of events is interrupted. The Metatron and Beelzebub, the ultimate corporate stooges, do not have the authority to make an executive decision to proceed. They must therefore refer back to the Powers that Be, and are reduced to empty threats: “I think,” said the Metatron, “that I shall need to seek further instructions.” “I alzzo,” said Beelzebub. His raging face turned to Crowley. ‘And I shall report your part in thizz, thou hast better believe it.’ He glared at Adam. “And I do not know what thy Father will say. . . .” (370) Once again, the apocalypse is, technically, aborted through the actions (or, more accurately, the inaction) of supernatural entities: the Four Horsemen do not launch a nuclear apocalypse, and Metatron and Beelzebub do not ensure that this apocalypse reaches completion. And this is achieved through the intervention of the main characters, namely Aziraphale, Crowley, Newton 65 Pulsifer, Anathema Device, and the children. A similar pattern also occurs in American Gods: the American Ragnarök does not take place because the gods refuse to fight after learning of Odin and Loki’s schemes. This disruption of the apocalypse is enabled by the efforts of Shadow and his associates: Laura killing Mr. World (Loki) and dedicating both his and her death to Shadow (668), and Shadow, imbued with this new power, riding the thunderbird to Rock City and heading Backstage to inform the gods of the scam (680). The great plan prophesized by Odin and Loki never comes to fruition. Despite being an incarnation of Baldur (a role which Gaiman confirms in the short story “Monarch of the Glen”), Shadow does not share the god’s fate but instead lives to prevent Ragnarök. In Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s fiction, fate is therefore not inescapable, and indeed ought to be questioned, as it is subject to interpretation. Such a stance is reminiscent of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, who cautions the reader against fatalism: “We must get it out of our head that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it. . . . We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with all its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I’ve had all the monstrosity I want” (Bellow 316–17). Like Bellow, I would argue that the notion that the apocalypse is inescapable, that the era one lives in is a “doomed time” can be paralyzing in its monstrosity. It invites a morbid fascination with the end, an obsessive dwelling over the “how” of the apocalypse, without giving any thought to the “what then”. This brooding over the end, in turn, invites a form of resignation and passivity. The ways in which Gaiman and Pratchett allow for the coexistence of the concepts of fate, the will of the gods, and human agency are interesting, because they reflect an approach grounded in openness and interpretation. Such an approach enables Gaiman and Pratchett to explore the myth of the apocalypse, and to offer an interpretation of it which reflects upon the nature of humanity and centres human agency, while remaining open to the possibility of, and indeed, in many ways 66 transmitting and celebrating other interpretations of myth. In doing so, they retain the pleasure and fascination which Bellow associates with apocalyptic narratives—but the thrill of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s takes on the apocalypse is not a morbid fascination or a brooding over the end. It instead lies in their exploration and interpretation of what the end of the world means for humanity, and how it might help us in defining ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. While accepting the possibility of fate, Gaiman and Pratchett reject the notion that it should allow humanity to sit back and deny its own agency in its survival and that of the world around it. Humans are agents of the apocalypse as much as fate is, and if the apocalypse must be countered, they will play their part in doing so. Gaiman and Pratchett acknowledge but move away from the notion of a binary and imbalanced conflict between humanity and the gods. Instead, they play with the representation and characterisation of human and non-human characters, they blur the lines between them and mirror them, thereby further problematizing the role played by humanity in the apocalypse, and more broadly, in its interactions with the world around it. VI. Humans as the heralds, executors, and vanquishers of the apocalypse? In these three works, Gaiman and Pratchett establish an intrinsic connection between humanity (and/or characters metaphorically standing in for humanity) and the apocalyptical events in play: the apocalypse is person-made, person-driven, and person-solved. Each event is triggered by a character or faction’s human foibles, features that emerge amongst angels and demons as well as humans. In American Gods, Odin and Loki seek to trigger Ragnarök in order to claim the gods’ deaths as sacrifices to themselves, thereby granting them renewed power. The choice of Norse 67 gods here is once again not insignificant. Odin, Loki, and the other gods of the Norse pantheon are not perfect individuals, omniscient, or ethically irreproachable. They are complex and flawed. They play tricks, lie, cheat, experience jealousy, greed, and hatred, make mistakes, and sometimes get duped. In this, they are very close to humanity—and indeed, many of their stories could be used as warnings against the consequences of certain behaviours. It is no surprise, therefore, that their role in American Gods is, in some ways, to stand in for humanity and represent the dangers of some of humanity’s behaviours and choices. Loki and Odin’s thirst for power calls for a sacrifice and, as we have seen before, they are ready to destroy the diverse cultural and spiritual landscape of the United States for their own benefit. Humanising the gods in such a way establishes a stark contrast with interpretations of the apocalyptic myth in which the gods are awe-inspiring, all-powerful beings on whose will rests the fate of the world. Yet the point here is not so much to demythologise the gods as to recentre humanity: the Norse gods’ portrayal as flawed does not serve to critique or to invalidate them, but to highlight how interpretations of myth—in this example, of Norse mythology—are invariably loaded with ideology. The gods become avatars for humanity, one faction amongst others similar in kind, if divergent in action. This is another way in which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives allow them to interact with and reflect upon other interpretations of apocalyptic myths, as each of these factions can be instrumentalized to create a conversation between differing, and sometimes opposing approaches to the myth of the apocalypse, as well as concepts of time, space, and extinction, and underline how these diverging approaches may in turn influence how a reader perceives and interacts with the world. Think here, for instance, of the text’s depiction of the Norse Gods, or Odin and Loki, whose scheme to generate belief—and therefore power—by sacrificing the other gods to their own metaphorical altar represents a desperate and destructive 68 raging against obsolescence and extinction; and how this portrayal is contrasted with the Buffalo Man’s removal from the ongoing conflict and his assertion that whatever the outcome of the gods’ conflict may be, the land will always remain. I will come back to this contrast between the positions of Odin and Loki and that of the Buffalo Man later on in this chapter. A similar pattern of mythical beings standing in for humanity is reproduced in Good Omens, where angels and demons are not represented as perfectly good or evil creatures. They can be just as petty and short-sighted as humans; they have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. The structure of their societies is also quite significant: their hierarchies, the way tasks are assigned by “The Powers that Be” to lower entities, the seemingly endless amounts of procedures and even paperwork involved in bringing about the apocalypse all come together to form a bitingly funny parody of bureaucracy (29). After all, Crowley officialises the arrival of the Antichrist on Earth by signing a receipt while discussing the quality of his pen with his associates (29–30), while the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse receive their orders and tools of power from an International Express Delivery man (195). The conflict leading up to the apocalypse loses its glorious purpose and epic proportions: it is nothing more than a corporate war between two petty and selfish factions who are ready to destroy the world and humanity to see who will end up on top. The paintball corporate retreat which Crowley and Aziraphale barge into when they visit the Chattering Order’s former monastery is a microcosmic representation of the conflict at play within the novel. And, as Tomkins (Assistant Head, Purchasing) notes: “If people told you business was a jungle and then put a gun in your hand, then it was pretty obvious . . . that they weren’t expecting you to simply aim for the shirt; what it was all about was the corporate head hanging over the fireplace” (108). Meanwhile, (theoretically) innocent bystanders—in this instance, Crowley—are the ones who get shot. This portrayal of angels and 69 demons as petty, selfish, and short-sighted corporate lackeys marks a contrast—or even a conflict— between the worldviews and positions of two human factions: the privileged, powerful majority (represented by the angels and demons) and the marginalized, often exploited minority (represented by Aziraphale, Crowley, and their human allies). As such, the novel’s apocalyptic narrative does not pit humanity against the will of the gods, but instead offers a reflection on how class struggles play a role in one’s understanding of and approach to the end of the world—that is to say, how an individual’s social identity affects their interpretation of myth. As with American Gods, this instrumentalization of mythical entities to represent humanity does not serve to demythologise the gods—to critique or invalidate them. Indeed, this distancing from myth itself to instead critique its interpretation is marked even more clearly in Good Omens where God is distinctly absent from the narrative: while God’s “ineffable plan” is central to the narrative, and while it is relayed, discussed, and questioned by all of the novel’s factions, it is never revealed in God’s own words, and God never appears to support or condemn a specific faction’s position or interpretation of it. God’s absence from the narrative plays an essential part in highlighting the importance of interpretation in one’s understanding of and approach to myth. But its secondary effect is to safeguard the representation of the Christian God as omnipotent and unknowable. Good Omens does not question God’s existence, motives, or actions—only how humans (or stand-ins for humanity) interpret them, and in doing so makes room for the readers’ own beliefs and worldviews. In Mort, the cause for the apocalyptic event is twofold. It is in part due to Death’s dereliction of duty: he teaches Mort the bare bones of the job and lets his apprentice take over his role in order to explore the mortal world. Mort himself, of course, also bears responsibility in triggering the apocalyptic event: he impulsively creates an alternate reality by failing to reap 70 Princess Keli’s soul because of his infatuation with her. Death stresses Mort’s responsibility in the apocalypse during the novel’s climactic fight: “YOU SEDUCE MY DAUGHTER FROM ME, YOU NEGLECT THE DUTY, YOU MAKE RIPPLES IN REALITY THAT WILL TAKE A CENTURY TO HEAL. YOUR ILL-TIMED ACTIONS HAVE DOOMED YOUR COMRADES TO OBLIVION” (242). Mort himself is conscious of his guilt very quickly after the fact: “He felt as though he’d thrown a snowball on the spur of the moment and watched the ensuing avalanche engulf three ski resorts” (88). The cataclysmic events in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives are therefore not purely driven by fate, by the will of the gods, or by an entirely external cause: there is no fateful meteor crashing into the Earth, no divinely ordered ice age freezing its surface or flood sinking its continents, no alien-engineered violent disease wiping out its human population. Instead, both the characters and the reader are led to look inwards and reflect on the contextual and direct causes of the apocalypse; and humanity itself (or what stands in for humanity) is instrumental in triggering and driving the apocalypse. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of the apocalypse therefore go against Pitetti’s understanding of the apocalyptic genre: here is no “[smoothing] out [of] the complexities of historical change” (444) but rather a recentring of humanity’s role in bringing about the apocalypse and in pushing the button themselves, so to speak. If humanity is the cause and driving force of the apocalypse, it is therefore also up to humanity to play a part in preventing it. As I have touched upon in an earlier example from Good Omens, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of mythical beings to establish a contrast between diverging human worldviews and positions highlights how one’s social identity influences one’s interpretation of myth. And the contrast which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels establishes between these factions serves to underline a disconnect and a conflict between the worldviews 71 and actions of the privileged majority, and those of the communities they have marginalised—suggesting, in fine, that this disconnect is one of the root causes of the apocalypse. In all three novels, the characters who succeed in preventing the end of the world are all representative of humanity, but they are also all representative of marginalized social groups. The gods do not sweep in to save the elect. Instead, the charge against extinction is led, each time, by a group of marginalized characters who stumble their way into finding a solution. As we have already seen earlier, in Good Omens, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley intervene to prevent the apocalypse, but they are not portrayed as fully divine figures: they are the most humanized figures and those who most closely, in all of their activities, represent humanity. God, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent from the action of the novel, and even the true meaning of his plans for the world and for humanity is unclear and debated by the other characters. In American Gods, the hero Shadow is a demi-god who has lived most of his life as a human and on the margins of society. He is a former convict and has lost the few significant relationships in his life (his mother, who passed away from illness; and his wife and best friend, who betrayed him by committing adultery before dying in a car accident). In the current context of far-right movements’ historical appropriation and distortion of Norse history and mythology to justify racism, persecution, and terrorism, the fact that both Shadow and the characters who assemble around him to defeat Odin and Loki all belong to groups who have been, and still are, discriminated against on a racial basis carries a strong political charge. It grounds the novel’s central conflict in the sociopolitical context of the resurgence of both fascist and antifascist movements in Western countries in the 21st century; and its instrumentalization of the gods as stand-ins for humanity underlines how our interpretation of myth is inescapably connected to our understanding of and position within our socio-historical context. Shadow’s ethnicity is left 72 ambiguous in the novel; his heritage is discussed and questioned several times: a prison guard believes him to be Hispanic, Romani, or part black (14); and Sam Black Crow wonders whether he might be part Indigenous (210–11). What is certain is that he is canonically a man of colour: while his father is Odin, his mother is coded as being of African descent, as suggested by her suffering from sickle-cell anemia (600); he is depicted as having light grey eyes (162) and “cream-and-coffee skin” (600).31 This is important not only because he eventually leads the resistance against Odin and Loki’s attempt at cultural supremacy, but also because his identity as the reincarnation of the Norse god Baldur challenges white supremacists’ appropriation of Old Norse history and mythology. Most of the gods who end up helping him on his quest also belong to non-Western, non-white pantheons: Mr. Ibis, Mr. Jacquel, Mr. Nancy, Whiskey Jack, and the Buffalo Man.32 The other entities that fight alongside Shadow also belong to or represent groups 31 Many readers of American Gods have called into question Shadow’s ethnicity, often reading him as white and refusing to accept other interpretations of the text. Aside from the various references in the novel, Gaiman himself has regularly confirmed Shadow’s mixed ethnicity in interviews and online discussions (see https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/95445770306/i-always-read-shadows-ethnicity-as-somewhat). On the other hand, some readers have attacked Gaiman for leaving Shadow’s ethnicity ambiguous, arguing that this could be considered a form of racism. These readers’ resistance towards Gaiman’s explanations of his character’s racial identity is interesting, because it suggests either a Western-centric perspective that automatically assumes a character’s whiteness, or a corrective perspective that automatically sees a mark of racism in a writer’s lack of specificity—which, when it comes to American Gods, disregards the fact that Gaiman is underlining the complexity of American identities in the wake of colonisation, various waves of migration, and cultural transformations, whether consensual or forced. 32 Mr. Ibis is Thoth, an Ancient Egyptian deity often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis; Mr. Jacquel is Anubis, the Ancient Egyptian god of death and the underworld; Mr. Nancy is Anansi, a trickster god found in West African, African American and Caribbean folklore; Whiskey Jack is Wisagatcak, the creator-god of the Cree people; and the Buffalo Man, whom Gaiman identified as the “spirit of the American land” and who does not exist as an entity within Native American mythology but is inspired by the buffalo’s “great significance for the peoples of North America” (Annotated American Gods 28). All of these identities are officially confirmed in The Annotated American Gods. 73 who have been historically marginalized: the leprechaun Mad Sweeney is drawn from Irish folklore; and Sam Black Crow is an Indigenous woman. Sam and Laura, Shadow’s dead wife, are the two central female characters in a narrative that contains few fully developed female characters. Given the narrative and ideological ramifications of Odin and Loki’s identities and roles in the novel, the fact that their opponents are a faction of characters belonging to historically marginalized and exploited communities bears much significance. Gaiman reframes the structure of the conflict within the narrative, shows the artificiality of opposing past to future (the old gods pitted against the new gods), and instrumentalizes myth to present a different conflict as the critical one: that between a patriarchal and colonial world order, and the communities it threatens and marginalizes. A similar pattern is at play in Good Omens, where the anti-apocalypse faction is composed of a rebellious, humanity-loving angel/demon duo, a talentless witchfinder and his socially inept witchfinder private, a witch, a medium who moonlights as a sex worker, a group of over-imaginative children led by the Antichrist, and the Antichrist’s dog. As in American Gods, these characters represent marginalized communities, minorities, and individuals rejecting oppressive, patriarchal and/or colonizing systems. In Mort, this pattern is more subtle, but still hinted at: the characters fighting against the apocalypse are the low-born and talentless Mort, who was chosen to be Death’s apprentice because he was rejected by every other master, and who is left to fill a position he does not have the skills to execute when Death goes on an unplanned holiday; the cantankerous, formerly legendary wizard turned immortal caretaker Albert, who is miserably stuck between life and death after a failed attempt to perform the Rite of AshkEnte sent him into Death’s domain; Death’s naïve and sheltered adopted daughter Ysabell, who spent her formative years isolated in Death’s domain after the death of her parents, 74 with little to do aside from reading about the lives of dead people; and the incompetent wizard Cutwell. While the marginalization of the characters in Mort is not based on race, it hinges on differences in social status (both Mort and Albert are low-born, and the two of them and Cutwell are subordinates to high-born characters: their social identities are entirely dependent on those of their masters, who exploit their services with little, if any, compensation), and on differences in gender (because of the skewed perspective she developed from reading the lives of dead women, Ysabell’s main expectation in life is that of marriage: unlike Mort, she was not granted the opportunity to learn a trade, not even that of her adoptive father Death). In all three novels, therefore, it is not the gods or some higher entities in possession of powerful magic who prevent the apocalypse, but coalitions of marginalized characters who have to fight against powerful and devious oppressive forces to redirect the course of history. In doing so, they bring a new form of balance to the old, corrupt world order they live in. This insistence not only on human agency, but also on the essential role played by marginalized communities in steering or redirecting the course of history, ties into the themes of interconnection and interdependence at play within Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels. In their apocalyptic narratives, balance can only be maintained when the hierarchy of power is challenged, and when the voices of the marginalized are heard. In this respect, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels provide a variation on a theme that is common in apocalyptic narratives—that of order and chaos. In our three novels, it is the established order that comes to be challenged—chaos, in other words, has to occur—in order to forestall the apocalypse. The implicit meaning behind this conflict is that the established order is artificial, and ought to be challenged. Myth—or, more specifically, certain interpretations of it—is therefore instrumentalized to represent that established order, a dominant worldview which must be questioned and confronted with other understandings of the world to build better responses to 75 the frailty and impermanence of human existence. Myth is not a false narrative, but, as each of these novels show, it is not the only narrative possible and definitely not the most desirable one for the survival of human life. Gaiman’s and Pratchett`s focus on marginalized characters as the vanquishers of the apocalypse and engines of change is important for a second reason. In his analysis of apocalyptic narratives, Dowling underlines how biblical apocalyptists, such as Paul and John of Patmos, “seldom identify individuals in the apocalyptic drama, choosing instead to describe outstanding features so that the characters become enigmatic, somewhere between reality and symbol” (121). Such impersonality is also a recurring feature in a number of secular apocalyptic narratives—one might think here of Clarke’s Childhood’s End—where the characters are not so much individuals with salient personalities and complex emotions as they are avatars of different aspects of society, or vehicles for depictions of societal responses to the apocalypse: they are the figure of “the scientist,” “the politician,” or “the working class man/woman” more than they are realistic, embodiments of complex individuals. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives clearly depart from such a tradition, instead focusing on individuals. Furthermore, characters such as Mort, Ysabell, Aziraphale, Crowley, Adam, or even Shadow are not entirely enigmatic or symbolic. The reader is granted access to their perception of the world, and to some of their thoughts and idiosyncrasies. There is nothing eminently heroic or grand about Ysabell, who has a love for scandalous romance stories, or Adam, who learns about the issues plaguing the world in New Age and paranormal magazines and names a hellhound “Dog”. On the contrary, these characters are eminently human. They are characterized by and draw their strength from their mortality, their flaws, and their partial understandings. Dowling argues that in an apocalyptic narrative, “[any] attempt to document the larger community or town or nation assumes a patently ‘false’ 76 perspective, and that perspective is justified by the writer’s political motivation; he wants to warn, terrify, educate or rally his present audience” (72). By focusing on individuals instead, Gaiman and Pratchett offer a “humanized” perspective: the aim is not to terrify and petrify the reader with the realisation that the end is inevitable and that their errors as a society cannot be redressed—it is to trigger thought and reflection at an accessible, individual level on the role played by humanity and by oneself in a potential apocalyptic scenario, and in its prevention. Here, one might be reminded of D.H. Lawrence’s definition of the role of the apocalyptic as “the undying will-to-power in man and its sanctification, its final triumph” (54). The apocalyptic genre is used by these authors as a call to reflection and to action, rather than a prophetic vision of doom. It is a recentring of the narrative on human agency within history and the historical process, as well as a recentring of human perspective and human agency with regard to myth itself. In Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s approaches to myth, the universe or the gods may have a will or a purpose of their own, but what truly matters from a human perspective is how humanity’s understanding of the world and humanity’s own will and purpose intersect with those of the universe and of the gods. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives therefore focus on marginalized individuals’ perspectives and instrumentalize myth in their portrayal of these characters’ struggle against extinction in such a way as to explore the nature of human life, and how humanity understands itself and its own role within the historical process. VII. Not with a bang, nor with a whimper: Lack of resolution in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives 77 What, then, of the novels’ conclusion? What happens when one has prevented the apocalypse? Towards the end of American Gods, after Odin and Loki’s scheme has been revealed, Laura asks Shadow who won the conflict. Shadow replies: “I think these things are kind of relative. But I stopped the battle they were trying to start” (685). In his definition of postapocalyptic narratives, Pitetti stresses their lack of resolution. They do not provide a perfect solution, a magical cure to history’s ills. Instead, they “emphasize the ambiguity of [the temporal] experience,” and they illustrate the “indeterminate and open-ended” nature of historical processes (444). Because Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives move away from linear spatiotemporality, they once again take on characteristics which Pitetti only saw in post-apocalypses, offering a complex, distorted temporal experience in which time can take many forms, such as stretching, creating loops, fragmenting, or diffracting. The apocalypse is averted in American Gods and Good Omens, while in Mort the protagonist and his allies manage to save the life of Princess Keli but the alternate reality is still destroyed. In all three cases, the protagonists’ victory is only ever partial. This makes Mort the novel which, out of the three, is the strangest from an apocalyptic perspective, as it combines both elements of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives. Because there are two realities present within the novel, we are presented with the destruction of one reality (an actual apocalypse), but elements from that reality are preserved by Death and integrated into the other reality (which was itself threatened by an apocalyptic event due to its unexpected superimposition with the alternate reality, but saved by that other reality’s destruction). Good Omens and American Gods, on the other hand, end in a restoration of the status quo. The apocalypse has been averted, but the initial conflict (between Heaven and Hell; between the old gods and the new) is never fully resolved, nor is it expected to be. Crowley’s observation to Adam after they have interrupted the Four Horsemen illustrates Pitetti’s point 78 quite clearly: “What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all. . . . Good effort. You’ve saved the world. Have a half-holiday. . . . But it won’t really make any difference” (Good Omens 364). What Crowley points out here is not only a restoration of the status quo, but also the nature and form of historical time and historical processes. Rather than the linear process which would normally characterize an apocalyptic narrative (that is to say, a forward thrust from decadence to world destruction, from world destruction to the birth of a new world, purged of corruption), the open-ended nature of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives suggests other temporal processes that are more complex, evoking a temporal experience that is at times cyclical, at times fractured or even rhizomatic. The novels’ rejection of spatiotemporal linearity means that the characters’ experience of time undergoes significant transformation as they are able to step in and out of it, travel through it, interrupt it, change its course, and create or navigate alternate realities. The consequence of this different approach to time and space is the introduction of significant uncertainty and relativity in the depiction of spatiotemporal and historical processes. If the apocalypse has been averted once, nothing prevents it from reoccurring at any point in the future; and the rejection of a clean slate or reset of history means that the tensions and issues that existed before the apocalyptic event are still in play. This complex nature of temporality and possible reoccurrence of the apocalypse is hinted at in Mort, when Death presents his apprentice with a precious gift—a pearl of reality: THIS IS A PEARL OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR. A PEARL OF REALITY. ALL THAT SHINY STUFF IS CONGEALED ACTUALITY. YOU OUGHT TO RECOGNIZE IT—YOU CREATED IT AFTER ALL. . . . ONE DAY IT WILL BE THE SEED OF A NEW UNIVERSE. . . . THE PRESSURE OF THIS 79 REALITY KEEPS IT COMPRESSED. THERE MAY BE A TIME WHEN THE UNIVERSE ENDS AND REALITY DIES, AND THEN THIS ONE WILL EXPLODE AND… WHO KNOWS? KEEP IT SAFE. IT’S A FUTURE AS WELL AS A PRESENT (256). As Death suggests, the destruction of the bubble of alternate reality does not prevent the occurrence of another apocalypse in the future, one that might bring about the end of the entire Discworld. Here, one is reminded of the nodes in Death’s office that constantly need to be carefully calibrated to prevent this kind of scenario. Meanwhile, the pearl itself is a distortion of linear temporal processes: it is a pearl of “congealed actuality,” a concentrated form of the present (which is the alternate reality Mort created when he saved Keli) that has ceased to function on the same plane or at the same rate as the Discworld reality in which the characters find themselves. However, the pearl is also a possible future as it would become a new reality if the current reality were destroyed. The existence of this pearl suggests a historical process that is both cyclical and rhizomatic: cyclical, because the end of the world does not appear to be a truly finite event, as reality may be able to just go on in another form; and rhizomatic because of the imbrication of realities which can be superimposed, adjoined, or even contained within one another. By distorting spatiotemporal linearity within their narratives, or in the structure of the narratives themselves, Gaiman and Pratchett reflect upon how one perceives one’s role in history, and consequently how much one can or should interact with the world. Through the instrumentalization of myth and the intersection of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s reflections on the concepts of fate, divine omnipotence, and human agency, the state of uncertainty and the lack of resolution that characterises their apocalyptic narratives leaves room for concepts such as fate or the will of the gods. While these are worlds populated by wilful gods, that hardly resolves 80 complex questions about how the world is created by those living within it. These narratives underline the essential role of human agency within historical processes—while suggesting that the true nature of such agency might lie in humanity’s interconnection and interdependence with the world around it. VIII. The land is what prevails: contradicting the anthropocentric notion of humanity as the saviour of the world In the context of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s reflections on how a non-linear perception of space and time influences an individual’s perception of their agency within historical processes, the relationship of humanity to the land and to the world around them also comes to take centre stage: These narratives become an opportunity to question and reconsider humanity’s place in the world, and the role that humans may or may not have to play in protecting the world. In apocalyptic narratives, the apocalypse is a world-ending event that often involves the actual destruction of the land or the planet, either partly or entirely. Dowling argues that there is a shared pattern and shared imagery in many of these narratives. According to Dowling, in such representations, which he views as an echo of the end of the world as described in the Book of Revelation, the apocalypse starts with “quick” initial upheavals: destructive warfare as a starting event, followed by “biological and environmental horrors,” and “physical upheavals” such as the extinction of the sun (123). After this initial stage comes a “drawn out, agonizing and lingering death like that of radiation sickness, usually described in terms of fire, disease, and the persecution of wild beasts” (124). The nightmarish evocativeness of this kind of imagery is an important part of apocalyptic narratives whether it is actually present within the text, or hinted at 81 with the assumption of a shared cultural heritage of apocalyptic representations and a reliance on the readers’ own capacity to draw on their worst fears to feed the nightmare of world destruction. This evocativeness works in contrast with the conception of an idealized past, carrying a load of nostalgic longing for a lost, idyllic state of the world. In some apocalyptic narratives, including the three novels we are discussing, this idyllic state of the world does not necessarily imply its original perfection before it deteriorated and/or was corrupted by humanity, but instead focuses on the historical bond between humanity and the world around them, and the emotional connection to the places and things that humans consider themselves to belong to, have a relationship with, or own—such as one’s connection to the land one inhabits, the cultures and communities one takes part in, and the beings or things one feels dependent on or responsible for, much like Wensleydale considers himself responsible for the trees and ponds of the countryside he likes to roam. The contrast between the evocativeness of apocalyptic imagery and humanity’s love or longing for the world is salient in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works because both authors devote so much of their narrative to worldbuilding. The intricate worldbuilding of the Discworld, in which Pratchett has crafted entire regions and cities down to sometimes very specific climatic, topographical, and environmental details, is all the more striking when it is threatened by destruction. Similarly, in American Gods, Gaiman devotes a significant part of the narrative to depicting small-town America, while threatening its current state of existence with the inevitable changes brought along by a cultural shift from old beliefs in gods of place to new creeds of globalisation and cultural uniformization. By threatening the worlds they crafted so intricately, Gaiman and Pratchett recentre the relationships between their characters and the worlds they inhabit, and in doing so create resonance with the emotional connections their readers have established with the places, beings, and things in their own lives and worlds. Their 82 reading of the myth of the apocalypse is one in which death and destruction are intrinsically connected with life and our relationship with the world around us: an illustration, one might say, of the prosaic notion that one can only appreciate something’s value once it has been (or risks being) lost. As I have argued earlier when discussing Adam’s role in the apocalyptic events of Good Omens, one of the important questions of the novel is whether it is God’s or humanity’s prerogative to abandon and replace a world they see as unfixable and/or unredeemable. Wensleydale’s questioning of Adam’s decision to trigger the apocalypse lies in an attachment to place and the world that they inhabit and have a relationship with. However, Wensleydale’s attempt to sway Adam’s opinion can and should also be considered critically. He uses the possessive “ours” when he argues that the trees are not like America or other places, because “[t]hey’re really real. They’re ours” (314). And this use of the possessive places an accent on his perception of humanity’s relationship to the world. For Wensleydale, the world ought to be protected because it belongs to humanity, and therefore it is humanity’s duty to maintain it and to protect it—the same way as the Them might take care of their other possessions, their bicycles, their New Age magazines, or their toys. This understanding of the relationship between humanity and the world suggests a distorted conception of environmental stewardship, in which humanity is considered as superior to other beings in the world in both knowledge and agency, and therefore is the rightful manager and protector of the world. Yet the fact that Gaiman and Pratchett present this distortion of stewardship through the naïve eyes of children is also significant. Indeed, Adam’s initial, misguided attempts to fix what he believes to be wrong in the world stem from a similar assumption, and his method in addressing every issue he encounters is inherently flawed. After having read the New Aquarian Digest’s theories regarding the evils of 83 nuclear power, he replaces the uranium in the nuclear reactor at Turning Point power station with a lemon sherbet (155). He also resurfaces the lost continent of Atlantis (172), and creates an alien space police whose role is to “give [people] a message of universal peace and cosmic harmony an’ suchlike,” and to regulate the abuses of dominant species (209). The way Adam addresses perceived threats to the world’s existence is akin to a world power implementing policies and programs based on flawed premises drawn from faulty and insufficient research. Having found information in a single (and questionably accurate) source, he immediately jumps to conclusions and proceeds to fix the perceived wrong without fact-checking or considering other theories. By using naïve child protagonists to portray this kind of imbalanced relationship with the world, Gaiman and Pratchett hint at its shortcomings: the assumption that humanity is the superior species, and that its leaders know best what the land and other beings need is a hasty and short-sighted conclusion, grounded in imperialistic and anthropocentric thinking. It ignores the fact that there is not one single approach to humanity’s relationship with the land and with the world, and that such approaches stem from worldviews and cultures which are also in complicated and imbalanced relationships of power. It also negates the agency of other beings. Anne Bell and Constance Russell argue “that disrupting the social scripts that structure and legitimize the human domination of nonhuman nature is fundamental not only to dealing with environmental issues, but also to examining and challenging oppressive social arrangements” (190). In Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives, the disruption of social scripts structuring and legitimizing human domination of nonhuman nature plays an essential role in preventing the apocalypse: the characters’ assumptions with regards to their stewardship and ownership of the world around them plays a part in triggering the apocalyptic event—whether it is their presumption of human (angelic/demonic) dominance over land and other beings, as in Good 84 Omens; their attempt to assert one culture or people’s claim to a land over others’, as in American Gods; or their attempt to warp the fabric of space and time itself for individual purposes, as in Mort. While this disruption leads to an acknowledgment of humanity’s agency and role in triggering and in preventing the apocalyptic event, it also resituates them within the broader context of human and nonhuman relationships and interrogates anthropocentric assumptions when it comes to the distribution of power in those relationships. Rather than support an anthropocentric worldview in which humanity is the only power capable of preventing world destruction, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives reframe the division of power between humans and nonhumans, and reconsider the weight of their roles in historical processes. Margaret Robinson underlines how “the human being is not at the top of the food chain, but is a part of a web of interdependence” (Robinson and Coman 246). This notion of interdependence is central in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels, where relationships between species or entities, and between privileged and marginalized groups are constantly being questioned and re-evaluated. In American Gods, Whiskey Jack uses the story of Fox and Wolf to make a point about the relationships between beings during his conversation with Wednesday. Wolf argues that all living beings must die, because an equilibrium needs to exist between them to avoid overcrowding. While this is partly true, it is convenient for Wolf, who is seemingly at the top of the food chain. Yet when Wolf dies, Fox reminds him of that equilibrium, underlining how while relationships of interdependence exist between living beings, what always lives is the land, and the embodiments of the land, which all beings depend upon (446). This anecdote has three levels of meaning: it addresses Laura’s unnatural state of undeath and hints at its unsustainability; it illustrates Odin’s refusal to make a choice between remaining interdependent with humans and other gods or seeing himself decline as an old god; and, at the same time, it 85 hints at the real power relationships between the American gods. The true revelation of these relationships of power comes later in the novel in the words of the Buffalo Man, who is Gaiman’s embodiment of the land in America.33 The Buffalo Man comes to Shadow in a dream, to congratulate him after his victory over Odin and Loki. He then explains to him why he succeeded: “You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.” (694) The Buffalo Man underlines a fact that is true in all three novels: while the apocalypse may rage and humans and gods alike may fight and win or lose, in the end the only thing that remains untouched, that makes it through the apocalypse unscathed, is the land. In Good Omens, the world stands on the brink of the apocalypse and goes through a number of transformations as Adam, the angels, and the demons interfere with reality. However, by the end of the novel, the status quo between the different factions has been re-established, and the world seems to have 33 The Annotated American Gods states that the Buffalo Man “is not a specific figure of Native American mythology, though buffalos had great significance for the peoples of North America. . . . In a private conversation with this editor, however, Gaiman indicated that the buffalo-man was not a god, but rather was intended to represent the spirit of the American land” (28). Gaiman’s decision to have a mythical entity inspired by Native American cultures and beliefs as one of the central figures in American Gods, and to make it a composite portrayal rather than drawing from a specific myth cannot be ignored when analysing his interpretation and instrumentalization of myth. He does not apply such a treatment to many other mythical entities in the novel, so one may wonder why he chose to do so in the case of Indigenous myths while drawing on specific interpretations of other mythical entities. Furthermore, creating his own composite figure drawing from Indigenous cultures and beliefs to represent the “spirit of the land” in America raises potential concerns with regards to the appropriation of Indigenous cultures and spiritualities; such a portrayal of Indigenous cultures and spiritualities could be read as implicitly and harmfully suggesting that they represent a lost, simpler, and therefore truer connection to the land. 86 gone back to some form of normality: St. James Park remains “comparatively quiet,” the ducks are still being fed, Aziraphale’s shop is back with “[not] so much as a soot mark,” and the only apparent change in the nature of reality is the song of a nightingale in Berkeley square (390–393). In Mort, the land also remains unscathed while history changes. When Mort distorts reality to pass through time or walls, he does not create rips or disturbances. The only disturbance that occurs is the bubble of alternate reality caused by his going against the relationship between life and death, and therefore the relationship of interdependence between living beings and the land. This disturbance itself causes no damage to the reality in which the Discworld exists, and when the alternate reality ceases to exist, it leaves no visible trace of its passage on the land. The significance of this persistence of the land in the face of the apocalypse is central to Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic storytelling. It reframes the role played by humanity in historical processes, underlining human agency while refuting the anthropocentric concept of humans as the saviours of the world. Gaiman and Pratchett reject the idea that humans should sit and wait for the end to happen, but they also show how they do not need to have all the answers in order for the apocalypse to be prevented. What is essential, they suggest, is an openness to the interdependent relationship between all beings and the land. Rather than focusing on grand civilizational assaults against the apocalypse, Gaiman and Pratchett consider how individuals can learn from their relationships with other beings and with the world, and make decisions and take action at their own level to maintain these relationships. This focus on the individual rather than the group, on the marginalized rather than the dominant, and on the relationship of interdependence between beings and the land enables Gaiman and Pratchett to illustrate a contemporary take on the myth of the apocalypse through the metaphorical filter of fantasy. This illustration occurs through Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of existing features and 87 interpretations of myths, which they articulate into a complex pattern of references, and which allow them to anchor their understanding of the myth of the apocalypse in its vast sociocultural context while not actively opposing other interpretations or articulations. Their own interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse does not centre as much on the dread and anxiety humanity ought to feel when faced with the idea of the end of the world, but rather on how such an anxiety is a symptom of a misunderstanding of the processes of time and history, and of the relationships between humanity and these processes in the broader context of their relationship to the world. This interpretation of the myth of the apocalypse is a warning bell, one that does not bring answers to the question of how to prevent the end, but that offers a reconfiguration of one’s perspective of the world and of one’s place within it. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives therefore leave the readers room for hope, while trusting them to refine their own interpretation of myth, to make their own decisions, and to cultivate their own relationships. 88 Chapter 3 – The country and the city: Rural and urban myths in the novels of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett There was a village tucked in a narrow valley between steep woods. It wasn’t a large village, and wouldn’t have shown up on a map of the mountains. It barely showed up on a map of the village. It was, in fact, one of those places that exist merely so that people can have come from them. (Equal Rites 3) Pratchett’s Equal Rites begins in a village—a rural setting which the narrator characterises by its very insignificance: it only exists so that one can claim it as one’s birthplace. No adventure ever takes place in a remote village, the narrator seems to suggest; it is only the starting point for our hero’s quest. Yet place, whether rural or not, plays a crucial role in the myths at the heart of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels. Myths are tied to the land that their believers inhabit; they influence communities’ relationship to place, and the way these myths are interpreted by their communities is also influenced by the relationship between people and place. In this chapter, I focus on the dichotomy between rural and urban settings in the fantasy novels of Gaiman and Pratchett, and I explore how the narrative role of this dichotomy is grounded in myths of the rural and the urban. This dichotomy is not unique to the works of Gaiman and Pratchett—and indeed has a long representational tradition in the arts and in literature. Raymond Williams aptly summarizes the ways in which myths of the rural and the urban have been essentialized into two opposing worldviews and ways of life: 89 On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (Williams 1) As Williams suggests, this dichotomy between rural and urban splits along spatial, temporal, and moral lines: while the rural is associated with nature, the past, innocence, and moral rightness, the urban is associated with industry and artifice, the future, and moral decadence. I do not mean to suggest here that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s depictions of the rural and the urban entirely abide by this dichotomy; indeed, throughout this chapter and the next, I will explore some of the ways in which the novels may question and challenge the ideologies underlying its fracture lines. However, it is undeniable that both authors draw significantly from the long traditional representation of the rural/urban dichotomy to fashion their fantasy worlds, and to illustrate the myths they thread throughout their narratives. It is therefore important to acknowledge how their instrumentalization of that dichotomy shapes their interpretation of myth—how their depiction of rural and urban spaces reveals both an awareness and a harnessing of the binary opposition theorized by Williams, and a challenge of its essentializing nature—and to consider when and for what reasons such reinforcements and challenges occur. Although Gaiman and Pratchett do, in a number of ways, challenge the dichotomous representation of rural and urban spaces, it is also necessary to demonstrate the extent to which they portray and reinforce this dichotomy. This chapter therefore focuses on how Gaiman and Pratchett draw from and illustrate dichotomous, morally charged interpretations of rural and urban myths. Throughout this chapter, I explore the representation of rural and urban settings in 90 Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels, focusing mainly on Neverwhere, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and Equal Rites, but drawing at times on other texts from the Discworld series. Following the structure of the rural/urban dichotomy, this chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, I focus on the novels’ illustration of a myth of the rural as a place connected with nature, tradition, and community—a place which in many ways is frozen in time (both historical time and narrative time), and which is established, whether rightfully or not, as a bastion of simplicity and moral values. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on the novels’ representation of the city as a place of progress, but also of chaos and moral decadence: I consider how this representation of the city is itself two-sided—how, on the one hand, both sides of the city’s dichotomy reveal a similar interpretation of the urban space and urban life, yet on the other hand, the city’s dichotomous representation—the dichotomy within the dichotomy—itself parallels, and therefore questions and challenges the rural/urban dichotomy. Finally, I consider movement within the dichotomous spaces of the city, as well as between rural and urban spaces—whether that movement is possible, and what its purpose is both narratively and in the illustration of rural and urban myths. I. Rural utopias? Pratchett, Gaiman, and their relationship with the pastoral A recurring theme in Western fantasy is that of a longing for a “perfect” rural–a place where life is simpler, closer to nature, where moral goodness reigns and where society is driven by a strong sense of community. This particular representation of the rural setting has its roots in the genre of the pastoral. Broadly speaking, one might say that the pastoral is concerned with a longing for an idealised rural past, a “Golden Age,” characterised by its celebration of nature, yet in some 91 ways simultaneously conscious of its own nostalgic artificiality (Gifford 18–19). In this chapter, I understand the genre of the pastoral as a second-order semiological system, or a type of speech, in the Barthesian sense: an interpretation of a myth, or myths, of the rural. In a surprising interpretation of the presence and role of the pastoral in fantasy literature, given the omnipresence of pastoral motifs in many works of fantasy, Gary Westfahl argues that the pastoral as a genre is somewhat antithetical to fantasy—that it is only a possible or ideal end goal rather than a setting in which the fantasy narrative might take place: Pastoral is . . . not the setting of fantasy but rather the goal of fantasy, a world from which evil is finally banished, all tasks are accomplished, and necessary HEALING has occurred; and the “happy endings” of virtually all fantasies constitute a brief but powerful evocation of a newfound pastoral world. (Westfahl 747) For Westfahl, then, while the pastoral can be found in fantasy, it can only be found at the narrative’s conclusion, because it necessitates the resolution of all of the plot’s conflicts: it is the ideal final state of a fantasy narrative. More broadly, while I acknowledge that the pastoral setting may be found in the real or envisioned happy ending of the utopian fantasy story, I would also argue that it may be found at its beginning, as the home which the characters will then long for throughout their quest (like the Shire, in The Hobbit, for instance, or Tiffany Aching’s family farm on The Chalk in Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men), and, sporadically, as the occasion for interludes in the narrative, where the characters can rest and regroup “outside” of the story, safely and away from the dangers of their world (like Tom Bombadil’s house in The Lord of the Rings). There is, therefore, a persistent sense of nostalgia connected to the rural setting in fantasy, and it is often perceived as simpler, kinder, happier, and safer than the urban setting. 92 This dichotomy between rural and urban settings is part of a broader tradition in literature, and helps bolster specific myths of the rural and the urban; and it is also present in the novels of Gaiman and Pratchett, where the rural and urban settings are often placed in stark opposition, as is the case in Equal Rites. Some of their novels focus on a specific setting—The Ocean at the End of the Lane entirely takes place in a rural setting, while Neverwhere is urban; American Gods explores small-town America, and Small Gods offers depictions of teeming cities and desolate deserts, with little in-between. In each case, there is an implicit contrast being established between the settings that are depicted and their implied mirror opposite. As such, the depiction of each setting, rural or urban, serves to underline this representational tradition and to perpetuate some of its characteristics—to strengthen specific and ideologically-loaded interpretations of the myths of the country and the city. The dichotomy between the rural and the urban is tightly connected to another dichotomy: that of fixity and progress. While the city, depicted as an animated, chaotic pole of change or progress, comes to emblematize time passing, the country is portrayed as being stuck or frozen in time—a place where one looks backwards rather than forward, where tradition is upheld, and where technological and social progress are either absent or perceived as deeply suspicious and threatening. As I argue throughout this chapter, the dichotomy established between these settings evokes specific ideologies and understandings of the world—it creates connections between rural or urban settings and a sense of time and progress (or lack thereof), as well as between these settings and notions of innocence, morality, and ethics. The connection between setting and ideology is particularly present in the instrumentalization of myth: myths in the Barthesian sense, and myths which are relayed and scrutinized through the anthropomorphisation, the embodiment of places themselves within the narrative. 93 1. The “myth of rural England” In a study of urban experiences in modern European literature and art, Edward Timms discusses the dichotomy between urban and rural, and explains how the idealised representation of the rural present in the pastoral is grounded in a reaction to the fear and alienation of city life and the process of industrialisation. Timms argues that to counter this fear, art is produced that focuses on places diametrically opposed to a city that is perceived as dangerously hurtling towards progress at the cost of physical, moral, and societal safety (3–4). Such art is based on what Timms calls the “myth of rural England” (113), an idealised version of the English countryside in which the artists, the authors, and their audiences “sought emblems of timelessness to counteract the disturbing ideological changes of their own day” (114). Time plays an essential role in this myth of rural England: we are not only dealing with the dichotomy between urban and rural, here, but with more connected dichotomies: that of progress and stasis, of time passing versus being fixed or stuck in time; and that of order and chaos, which can lead further into the dichotomy of morality and decadence. These dichotomies will be at the centre of this chapter’s analysis, and I will come back to them in further detail later. The “myth of rural England” evoked by Timms with regards to art produced at the turn of the twentieth century interests me, in this chapter, because its key characteristics are omnipresent in both Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works—with both idealized and negative connotations. Both authors have drawn inspiration, and sometimes directly referenced, art produced during that period of time and grounded in the interpretations of myths of the rural and the urban that emerged from nineteenth- and twentieth-century anxieties regarding progress and industrialisation. The theme of industrialisation and the 94 motif of an industrial revolution are not uncommon in fantasy: indeed, they are among the main characteristics of steampunk, and can be a feature of urban fantasy (although not all urban fantasy is set pre- or mid-industrialisation—indeed, most is set in contemporary times). Indeed, Pratchett’s Discworld series itself contains a six-novel industrial revolution arc. However, while the novels I focus on within this chapter depict the city as a protean locus of change and progress, their cities are either pre- (Ankh Morpork in Equal Rites; London Below in Neverwhere) or post-industrialisation (Neverwhere’s London Above). I opted to study these novels specifically for their centring of the rural/urban dichotomy and of pre- and post-industrialisation settings, and what it means with regards to the contemporary persistence of the anxieties born in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a starting point for this analysis, I would like to use an example from Pratchett’s Equal Rites, a throwaway comment by the narrator, one might think, but one which illustrates the novel’s grounding of its narrative in the rural/urban dichotomy. Early on in the novel, as Esk is looking for Granny Weatherwax, she looks into the witch’s privy: . . . it was neat and clean and contained nothing more sinister than an old almanack, or more precisely about half an old almanack, carefully hung on a nail. Granny had a philosophical objection to reading, but she’d be the last to say that books, especially books with nice thin pages, didn’t have their uses. (Equal Rites 20) This humorous moment provides us with significant characterisation for Granny Weatherwax, who is not only the village witch, but also the true community leader in Bad Ass. An almanac is a calendar which contains important dates, as well as information such as astronomical, astrological, meteorological, and ecclesiastical data (“almanac, n., sense 1”). Its location in the 95 privy, and its obvious use as toilet paper, tell us two things about Granny Weatherwax: firstly, that she has little faith in books and in the “modern” sciences, instead placing her trust in the oral tradition and first-hand knowledge. Secondly, she has no care for the passing of time and the train of progress, as suggested by Pratchett’s use of the outdated form of the word “almanack,” and by the use to which she puts this physical representation of time itself. Granny Weatherwax, the heart and soul of the village of Bad Ass, likes to follow tradition, grounds her practices in the knowledge and experience of the witches that came before her, and distrusts any object, concept, or technology that one could accurately describe as “newfangled”. As such, she, and her village around her, appear to live a life frozen in time, and to follow customs and practices long forgotten by the inhabitants of the city of Ankh-Morpork: Bad Ass’s architecture, social structure, and work practices suggest an indeterminate medieval-esque time frame common in fantasy, but seemingly disconnected from the organisation, lifestyle, economy, and technology shared by the Discworld’s small towns and cities. Granny’s and Bad Ass’ particular relationship with time is compounded by the fact that Granny seems to be ageless: she has been in the village as far as living people can remember, very little information is known about her past, and even when she appears to have passed away, it is a false alarm—Granny always seems to come back. This sense of a place frozen in time and inhabited by ageless entities is also present in Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, where the Hempstock farm and the Hempstock women never seem to undergo any significant form of change. The biggest concession that they have made to progress is the adoption of mechanical milking tools (Ocean 19). The three women’s agelessness is hinted at early on by the narrator who, gazing upon Lettie Hempstock standing at the bottom of his driveway, states that “she looked as if she had been waiting for a hundred years and could wait for another hundred” (Ocean 29). This unknowingly accurate assessment of Lettie’s 96 apparent immortality (and endless patience) is confirmed at the end of the novel, when the narrator, now an adult, realises that the woman he thought was an older Ginnie Hempstock was in fact the Old Mrs. Hempstock all along (Ocean 172). In both The Ocean at the End of Lane and Equal Rites, rural settings are places frozen in time, where communities embrace a lifestyle which might fit under the quaint label of “rustic”: their customs and traditions are grounded in a myth of the rural, one which considers pre-industrial worldviews and practices as inherently superior. They are also gendered spaces, inhabited, and ruled by women who also embody their values: Ocean’s rural spaces are the dominion of the Hempstock women, while the Ramtops mountains and their villages are the dominion of the Ramtops witches. The gendering of rural and urban spaces is a topic I touch upon in this chapter, and explore in greater detail in chapter 3. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the association between the rural setting and a simpler life, characterised by its safety and by moral goodness, is threaded throughout the descriptions of the Hempstock women’s farmhouse and lifestyle. Through the main character’s narration, life at the farmhouse, and by extension the Hempstock women themselves, is associated with safety and happiness. There, he is offered fresh milk to drink, which he describes as “rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth” (Ocean 20). The freshness and natural richness of the milk he is offered is placed in sharp contrast with the food he is given at home, which is portrayed as artificial and bitter, like the coffee his parents and houseguests drink (“In those days all coffee was instant coffee, a bitter dark brown powder that came out of a jar” (Ocean 11)), or unpleasant and burned, like the toast the narrator’s father makes (Ocean 15). The milk is perfect, because it does not come out of a jar, and is therefore perceived as more natural and more real than the food he is served at home. While that food is depicted in neutral, bland, or outright pejorative terms, happiness and warmth are associated with the food the Hempstock 97 women serve him—such as the warm porridge which makes him “as happy as [he had] ever been about anything. It tasted perfect” (Ocean 20). This happiness and warmth are by extension also associated with the farmhouse, through the references to its hearth, the description of which leads the narrator to conclude that the Hempstock’s kitchen is “a friendly place” (Ocean 31). In these descriptions, warmth is inherently connected to goodness, safety, and care, which is why the character perceives the kitchen as ‘friendly,’ as it contrasts with the ‘unfriendliness’ of the tense, artificial, and threatening family life taking place in his own kitchen. This warmth is also present in the colours used to describe the setting and the Hempstock women themselves: Old Mrs. Hempstock once walks into the kitchen carrying “so many daffodils that the light reflected up from them transformed her face to gold, and the kitchen seemed bathed in yellow light” (Ocean 32). These daffodils are used to decorate the house, and the narrator comments on how they “sat [in their vases] like patches of sunlight, making that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful” (Ocean 34). Throughout these descriptions, what stands out is the oppositions established between the Hempstock women and their farmhouse, and the narrator’s own house and family, which have been intruded upon and marred by modernity and artificiality, both through the influence of Ursula and that of suburban life. In contrast with the artificiality of his own home life, the narrator delights in the perceived authenticity of the farmhouse and the land that surrounds it, where one drinks milk that came straight out of the udder and freshly harvested honeycombs, where the walls are simply whitewashed and the floor is made of flagstones, where everything is big and spacious—the kitchen is “enormous”, the wooden table is “huge” (Ocean 20)—compared to the narrowness and near claustrophobia of his own home when Ursula is there. This rural authenticity is tied to honesty, happiness, moral goodness, and a sense of freedom which characterise the Hempstock women, in contrast with Ursula’s duplicity and the 98 sense of alienation she evokes. The narrator himself underlines some of these connections when he describes running across a meadow, away from home and Ursula, and towards the Hempstock farmhouse: he runs, “not caring about the cow-pats. The meadow was easier on [his] feet than the flint lane had been. [He] was happier, and [he] felt more real, running on the grass” (Ocean 80). The contrast is made very obvious in this sentence, where the narrator directly opposes soft grass to hard flint, and presents one as making him feel more real and happier than the other. One is associated with happiness and pleasure, while the other is associated with pain and anxiety. These associations establish the Hempstock women and their farm as a safe place for the narrator to seek refuge in. While Ursula’s presence strains and destroys the narrator’s family relationships, and her influence over his father makes his own home an unsafe place where he is isolated and physically abused, at the Hempstock farm he is provided with care, and with a sense of community: there, he is fed, he is warmed and dried when it is cold or rainy outside, he is comforted when he is sad, and protected when he is afraid. In this interpretation of myths of the rural, country life is understood to be simpler, safer, and inherently good, and this is done through an opposition with the non-rural, which is understood to be chaotic, unsafe, and artificial, and therefore inherently bad. While the narrative certainly provides nods to a more realistic rural life (where cowpats exist, smells are strong and often unpleasant, and farm work is hard and time-consuming), rural life is presented as inherently more authentic and more grounded in community and morality than suburban or urban life. This established contrast between (authentic) rural and (artificial) urban bolsters the ideological dichotomy between the myths of the country and of the city. In comparing Gaiman’s depiction of rural life in The Ocean at the End of the Lane with Pratchett’s in Equal Rites, it is worth noting how the Discworld novel retains some of the imagery and 99 connotations of this articulation of rural life, but without—or, more accurately, while being more critical of— the idealisation of the countryside that remains rooted in Gaiman’s novel. Here I come back to Westfahl’s assessment of the place of the pastoral in fantasy. In his definition, Westfahl takes the time to reflect on the fact that the pastoral “should not be seen as a projection of youthful innocence or childish delights” because “its inhabitants understand, and perhaps recall, evil perfectly well, but dwell in an environment where they have chosen—or managed—to remove evil” (Westfahl 747). This take on the pastoral is, of course, tied to Westfahl’s perception of it as the end state of the fantasy narrative: the place where one goes after the quest has been completed—where peace, happiness, and community can only be achieved after having gone through the peripetia of the fantasy narrative. Yet it is relevant when considering the way in which the village of Bad Ass and Granny Weatherwax’s cottage are depicted in Equal Rites. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator offers a depiction of Bad Ass as a “little island of heat and light” (Equal Rites 14). The village is presented as a safe haven—but this safety, characterized by warmth and light, can only be depicted as such in contrast with the cold, darkness, and dangers of the Ramtops in the winter. The narrator gives numerous examples of the warmth, safety and sense of community in Bad Ass. The forge is warm (Equal Rites 12) and “no one in the Ramtops let[s] their fire go out in the winter, as a matter of pride” (20). When the children go out to call on Granny Weatherwax, who provides numerous services to the community as the local witch, they take a basket filled with smoked sausage and preserves, both in thanks for the help they are about to ask of her, but also to help support her during the harsh winter months (17). There are many similarities between Granny’s cottage and the Hempstock’s farmhouse: it is simple and built in stages, as need required: “The witch’s cottage consisted of so many extensions and lean-tos that it was difficult to see what the original building had looked 100 like, or even if there had ever been one” (19)—one may also think here of the similarity between Granny’s cottage and the Weasleys’ house, The Burrow, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In both cases, there is significance in the seemingly haphazard way in which the houses were expanded upon: it suggests a functional need for more space combined with a lack of resources, leading to a disregard for aesthetic or architectural norms: a need for basic functionality, which supersedes long-term planning, and which is made into a characteristic of rustic (and/or poor) country life. Similarly to the Hempstock’s farm, there is always a big fire in Granny’s warm chimney, and her house is filled with potion fumes (21); the beds are warmed with hot stones (30), and as mentioned above, half an old almanack hangs in the privy, repurposed (20). Yet, just as the narrator provides these examples of rural warmth and community, the effect is counterbalanced with darkness, cold, and a sense of threat that do not remain outside of the village as foreign dangers, but instead infiltrate the community and its homes. The intrusion of cold, darkness, and a diffuse yet lingering sense of threat into the warmth and safety of rural life serves to underline and enshrine that warmth and safety, by contrast. Such a sense of threat and isolation is present in Granny’s seemingly abandoned house at the beginning of the novel when the children come to visit her, find the cottage empty, and fear that the witch might be dead: the cottage “radiate[s] emptiness,” with windows that “look like eyes, black and menacing against the snow” (19-20). The fear and disquiet the children feel upon perceiving the emptiness and coldness of Granny’s cottage are emphasised by the narrator’s pointing out of the custom, in Bad Ass, to never let a fire go out (20): we are made to sense that something is not right, not only because it is cold and dreary, but also because letting one’s hearth fire go out goes directly against local custom, something that Esk believes Granny—the witch, the knowledge-keeper and heart of their community—would never do. This disquiet is 101 amplified by the fact that the sense of threat does not stop at the doors of the community’s homes: as she considers the empty cottage, Esk notes that “[f]ront doors in Bad Ass were used only by brides and corpses” (20). In what could appear to be a throwaway statement, the reader is led to understand how, in this rural setting, there are no grand adventures or otherworldly dangers. One lives, and most often dies, in the same house all of one’s life, and early death or misfortune is likelier to come in the “natural” form of illness or an encounter with a wild animal: one may find an example of all of these “natural” threats to life in the scene where Esk, standing vigil over Granny’s body, becomes afraid of the idea of death and runs off, only to get tracked and nearly attacked by a pack of wolves (24). In his depiction of the rural, Pratchett might be considered to bring more realism than Gaiman—focusing more on the dirty, messy reality of rural life rather than an idealized, nostalgic image of it. Yet both novels’ depictions of the rural reinforce a perception of this setting as a space outside of time, and in some ways, outside of history: it is a space where nothing of import does (or can) really happen—a space which, natural deaths and catastrophes aside, is inherently safe and uneventful, and where danger, change, or adventure can only ever come from the outside, that is to say the other side of the dichotomy: the urban. 2. Scenery frozen in amber: Plain, quiet folk who have no use for adventures34 In such depictions of the rural setting, the rural is perceived and represented as fundamentally good, that is to say, as a place where a quest or adventure cannot happen, because a quest necessitates conflict, which is antithetical to the sense of safety and stasis evoked by the pastoral. 34 Quoth Bilbo in The Hobbit: “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them” (7–8). 102 This is the point made by Westfahl in his definition of the pastoral in a fantasy context: “fantasy in the modern sense is incompatible with the pastoral world, where there is no EVIL and no real conflict beyond comic misunderstandings and the like” (“Pastoral” 747). For Westfahl, the safety and peace associated with the pastoral mean that it can only be the final setting in the fantasy narrative: it is the place that the characters strive towards, rather than roam throughout their quest. Such a structure is in line with Campbell’s monomyth formula, in which “[a] hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” and, having completed his quest, “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (28). As I have already stated earlier, I would expand this interpretation of the role of the pastoral in fantasy a little further: in a number of fantasy narratives, including Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s, the pastoral, and by extension the rural setting which has taken on or retained pastoral characteristics, is a place or enclave outside of the story—outside of the timeline of the story—a space that is frozen in narrative time. As such, it may not only be the endpoint of the story, but also its starting point: the hero’s village, for instance, which they leave to go on their quest, long for as they face the adversities of adventure, and may finally return to once their quest is over. This is the case for Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites. This function of the rural setting as a space that not only appears frozen in time, but also removed from narrative time and antithetic to narrative progression plays an important role in sustaining the dichotomy between rural and urban settings in the fantasy narrative: in such a space, anything that comes from the outside—anything foreign, anything urban—represents change and progress, and is therefore inherently perceived as disquieting, or even evil, because it defies the rural setting’s stasis, and threatens to drag it back into the time of the story. In Equal 103 Rites, this is evident in the way the wizard’s magic is perceived as intruding into Bad Ass: the wizard’s staff, while in Granny Weatherwax’s keeping, “stood in the corner, where it wanted to be, wrapped in shadows that were slightly blacker than shadows normally are” (13). This wizarding tool, brought in by the interloping wizard and left behind after his death, lurks like an ominous portent in the background of Esk’s childhood, waiting for the time when she will finally pick it up and set out towards her fate. The apple tree in the smithy’s orchard is another foreign, disquieting presence in the village: it has grown in the orchard where the wizard Drum Billet was buried, taller than other trees (13–14), is covered in mistletoe, produces “stomach-twisting” fruit, and “[has] a habit of breaking twigs and dislodging feet at inconvenient moments” (16). Indeed, it seems to have developed some kind of sentience, one that is entirely focused on watching—and maybe supporting—Esk. These magical elements are portrayed as disquieting not only because they clash with their rural surroundings, but also, more specifically, because they represent a form of magic that is at odds with Granny Weatherwax’s rural magic. Their connection to the wizard Drum Billet ties them to wizardly—and therefore urban—magic, and in doing so marks them as foreign and suspicious. It is not that these magical elements which intrude into the rural setting are bad or evil in themselves—it is that they are a threat to the frozen life of this rural community, and threaten its values: they are both signs directing Esk towards her urban journey, and tools to help her attain and wield wizardly magic. The tree gives her a feel for wizardly magic and awakens her thirst for adventure as a child; the staff will become her companion and guide on her solo journey to Ankh-Morpork. By pushing her to leave Bad Ass and her rural setting in order to set out on her quest, they pull her out of frozen time and into the narrative proper. 104 In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, this sense of disquiet is evoked by two types of entities: the first is the Opal Miner, who intrudes into the narrator’s rural life at the beginning of the novel. The Opal Miner is not depicted as an urban character in the text—indeed, one cannot argue that opal mining occurs in cities. Yet what he brings to the narrator’s childhood home is a whiff of modernity, and the callousness of capitalist society that is characteristic of the urban in the dichotomy. He represents the pushing back of the boundaries of both wild and rural in a forward thrust towards modernity and industrialisation. His very arrival heralds ominous change, as he immediately announces that he has run over the narrator’s kitten (11). His approach to the situation is couched in business terms: “Always pay my debts. . . . There you go. Cat for a cat” (11–12). He offers up another cat in exchange for the dead kitten rather than presenting genuine sympathy, thereby suggesting that pets are interchangeable commodities, rather than living beings one might genuinely care for. The trade he offers is also tilted in his favour: it is not an equivalent exchange, as the new cat he presents to the narrator is “a huge, ginger-striped tomcat, missing half an ear” and unused to domesticity—a cat which, it is implied, he might have randomly picked up on the side of the road (12). This emotional detachment and focus on material goods or belongings also find an echo in his other arrival gift to the children: he hands out opals like they’re pennies, regardless of their worth to small children, or the suitability of such a gift (14). This comes in sharp contrast with the rural Hempstock women, whose gifts are both practical, and emotionally and physically fulfilling: they offer up food when one is hungry, warmth when one is cold, comfort when one is upset. In his ties to the urban, the Opal Miner represents one type of space opposed to the rural in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The other space is a dark, unknown, and chaotic one: the “wild” that stands beyond the rural, the “old country” (40), which is represented by the 105 antagonist Ursula and other “nameless things” (42), all “fleas” which crossed over the boundary alongside the Hempstocks when they came to the narrator’s world (40). While the existence of the other space hints at a challenge, in Ocean, to a strictly dichotomous understanding of space that is deserving of further study, what is relevant here is that both the Opal Miner and the nameless things are perceived as a threat in the narrative, and portrayed as such, because they symbolize the bringing of cultural and societal change (both regressive and progressive) to the community, as opposed to the “natural” dangers presented by wolves, illness, and old age. The Opal Miner’s intrusion into the rural space challenges and threatens the lifestyle and moral values emblematised by the Hempstock women, as well as the interpretation of the myth of the rural which they represent. In both Ocean and Equal Rites, the characterization of the rural space as a pastoral-like space, frozen in time, removed from narrative time and/or antithetic to narrative progression, while the urban is positioned as a place of modernity and change, bolsters an essentialized, dichotomous articulation of the rural and the urban—one which, as might have already been made evident by the association of the urban with conflict and the rural with quietness, carries a significant moral charge. 3. “Good country folk”: The rural as the bastion of moral values The backwards gaze of the dichotomic fantasy rural, as well as its tendency to “freeze” rural settings in time and history, work towards presenting the reader with an example of a perfect or longed for social order. If the rural is depicted as pastoral, or as having features of the pastoral, then one may assume it to be inherently utopian in nature, depicting a community which is 106 governed by an ideal social order and ideal values.35 In other words, within this dichotomy and within this interpretation of myths of the rural, the rural ends up standing for morality, order, and tradition, while the urban is characterized by immorality, chaos, and constant change. This opposition finds an echo in the works of Gaiman and Pratchett, particularly in the rural or non-urban characters’ perceptions and depictions of the urban environment. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the rural setting is presented as a profoundly feminine space, as emblematized by the Hempstock women. Men, on the other hand, often take on urban characteristics, as seen earlier in the characterisation of the Opal Miner. This opposition, and the distinction in social roles that stems from it, is underlined by Old Mrs. Hempstock, who does not hide her disdain for men and for their pointless fortune-seeking ways: “Men! . . . I dunno what blessed good a man would be! Nothing a man could do around this farm that I can’t do twice as fast and five times as well. . . . They went off to seek their fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There’s never any keeping them here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we’ve lost them, good and proper. Next chance they gets they’re off to towns and even cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at all.” (93–94) The contrast established here between women and men, and between the rural and the urban, hinges on social and moral values: women, who are tied to and who work the land, are portrayed as hard workers, who are ready and willing when the time comes to sustain and defend their community. On the other hand, men are presented as whimsical and unreliable, sacrificing their ties and duties to their community for the sake of adventure and novelty, as can be found in 35 The term “utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More, as the name of the island whose ideal society he depicts in his foundational 1516 work by the same name . Derived from the Greek and effectively meaning “no place” or “nowhere,” the term’s etymology itself underlines the imaginary or impossible nature of the place thus labelled: it is an ideal society and place that cannot be found anywhere, only to be theorized and longed for. 107 towns and cities. While the Hempstock women uphold tradition and safeguard their community’s values, the Hempstock men abandon them to embrace the chaos and decadence of urban life. Like Old Mrs Hempstock, Granny Weatherwax puts little stock in men and in cities; indeed, her strong distrust of the city and city folk is threaded humorously throughout Equal Rites. For Granny, it is not the city that emblematizes civilisation, as she states in an argument with Hilta about travelling to Ankh-Morpork on her own. While Hilta is horrified at the idea of the forests and wild animals she will encounter on her way, their perspective cheers Granny up considerably, as evidenced when she exclaims “Good, I could do with getting back to civilization” (99). If Granny finds herself at home in the forest and amongst wild animals, she perceives the city as a den of iniquity: “She had heard lewd things could happen to country women who were freshly arrived in big cities, and she gripped her handbag until her knuckles whitened. If any male stranger had happened to so much as nod as her it would have gone very hard indeed for him” (74). This perception of the city is not drawn from personal experience—indeed, Granny’s trip to Ohulan and to Ankh-Morpork is her first real venture outside her rural environment. Her mental image of the city must then have been constructed second-hand, from the testimonies of other travellers—and she relays this construct to her own community, for instance in her warnings to Esk about the “unspeakable things that [lurk] in cities” (80). Tales of the city, its corruption, and its dangers are therefore employed as a form of moral education for the rural characters—a bad example which they must not emulate or come in contact with. For Alice Nuttall, “Granny guards the edges of the world, and has embraced the separation from society that allows her to do this effectively; however, she also steers her society, exerting influence on everyone from the King downwards and performing the ‘small miracles’ that allow everyday life to continue” (Nuttall 33). Part of Granny’s duties, and those of the other witches 108 alongside her, is to support and guide their communities—to preserve the worldviews and values connected with the dichotomic interpretation of rural myths, and to ensure that they are upheld in the face of the corruptive influence of the urban. Non-urban characters’ perception of the urban setting as corrupt is also shown in the depiction of the Zoons, a nomadic people whose tribes travel the rivers of the Sto Plains on barges, and who make a living from trade. Several characteristics of the Zoons are reminiscent of the Romani people; yet Pratchett creates some of those echoes by countering harmful stereotypes that have been and are still used to marginalize Romani people. While negative, stereotypical portrayals of Romani people sometimes depict them as thieves, and in particular as child abductors (this stereotype is evoked, and partly challenged for instance, in Pullman’s Northern Lights), in Equal Rites, Ohulan’s dockmaster reassures Granny that she need not worry about, and indeed might even find reassurance in the fact that Esk might be travelling with Zoons: “You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life” (95). By placing the emphasis on the Zoons’ attachment to family values and their sense of community, the novel does not only rebut the stereotype; it also establishes a contrast between the Zoons and the Ohulans Esk encountered before them. While the town-dwelling pub owners, the Skillers, saw Esk as a golden goose who might make their fortune, and attempted to kidnap her (86–89), the Zoons, a nomadic, non-urban community, take her in and offer her safe passage to Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett’s depiction of the Zoons also satirically contradicts the stereotype according to which Romani people are deceitful: in the Discworld, the Zoons are known for their “rigid adherence to the truth. . . and, in fact, the very concept [of a lie] [is] enough to upset them considerably; telling a Lie [means] no less than totally altering the universe” (99). This “infuriatingly absolute” honesty and “total directness of approach” is, of course, a challenge for a trading people, and the Zoons 109 are therefore depicted as having come up with the office of “tribe Liar,” the only individual in the tribe who is able to lie, and who represents the tribe in its contacts and commerce with the outside world (100). Of course, the portrayal of the Zoons’ honesty, and of their necessity to come up with the office of tribe Liar, is once against double-edged: if they must learn how to be dishonest, it is because the people they trade with are dishonest themselves. While the nomadic tribe is presented as profoundly moral, the depiction of towns and cities as morally bankrupt places is also reinforced. Throughout the first half of this chapter, I have explored the ways in which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s depictions of the country both illustrate and reinforce an essentializing depiction of the rural, one that echoes what Timms calls the “myth of rural England”: in these novels, the rural is portrayed as a place frozen in time, removed from narrative time, and antithetic to narrative progression; it is characterized by order and tradition, and presented as a bastion of moral values. This ideological charging of the rural occurs within the narrative and is voiced by its rural characters themselves, as they oppose a pastoral-like, near idyllic view of the rural to a perception of the city as a locus of change, decadence, and chaos. II. Protean cities: Progress, decay, and the moral ties that bind them Both Neverwhere and Equal Rites follow rural characters who make the journey to the city where they are confronted with and explore not only different landscapes, but different ways of life and different ways of understanding the world. This role given to Richard and Granny Weatherwax may remind one of the figure of the flâneur, as theorized by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Baudelaire, who first theorized the concept of the flâneur, sees in them a “passionate spectator,” observing, delighting in and mirroring the city’s crowds, while rejoicing 110 in their own anonymity (9–10). In an analysis of and response to Baudelaire’s theory, Benjamin disagrees with Baudelaire’s interpretation of the flâneur as “a man of the crowd,” stating instead that: There was the pedestrian who would let himself be jostled by the crowd, but there was also the flâneur, who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure. Let the many attend to their daily affairs; the man of leisure can indulge in the perambulations of the flâneur only if as such he is already out of place. He is as much out of place in an atmosphere of complete leisure as in the feverish turmoil of the city. London has its man of the crowd. His counterpart, as it were, is Nante, the boy who loiters on the street corner, a popular figure in Berlin before the March Revolution of 1848. The Parisian flâneur might be said to stand midway between them. (188–189) Benjamin’s disagreement with Baudelaire lies in the posture of the flâneur, whom he characterizes as something of a perpetual outsider: observing, leisurely and at a remove, rather than interacting with the crowd of the city. Implicit in Benjamin’s redefining of the flâneur is a sense of a particular social milieu: his flâneur’s leisurely perambulation suggests the ability—the privilege—to be idle. The flâneur can afford to be at a remove from the daily affairs of the crowd or the loitering of the boy. Asking whether Richard and Granny Weatherwax can be characterized as flâneurs in their respective novels raises several intriguing questions in a consideration of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s depictions of the city, and how the filtering of the readers’ perception of the city through Richard’s and Granny’s experiences affects and directs that depiction: can Richard’s and Granny’s explorations of the city be characterized as a leisurely meandering? Are they outsiders peering in, or do they confront, interact with, affect and get affected by the city and its inhabitants? In what ways do their non-urban worldviews and values 111 influence and shape the image of the city the reader is given to explore? In sum, does their status as outsiders journeying to and observing the city necessarily participate in reinforcing an essentialized, dichotomous interpretation of myths of the rural and the urban? Throughout the second half of this chapter, I explore Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretations of myths of the city, considering the ways in which they might reflect and reinforce associations between the urban, artificiality, chaos, and decadence in line with an essentializing, dichotomous representation of the rural and the urban; as well as the ways in which they might challenge such a dichotomy. By exploring the tension between these two readings of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s cities, I underline and problematize the presence of a dichotomy within the dichotomy—an urban dichotomy which, as I will argue throughout the rest of this chapter, both echoes and undercuts the essentialization at play in the rural/urban dichotomy. 1. The dichotomic city: Where chaotic past and orderly future come to meet Timms’ study of early twentieth century representations of the city underlines the role played by anxiety about an uncertain future, the terrifyingly fast processes of industrialisation, and the looming shadow of war in the re-emergence of pastoral art and literature (111–114). Such anxieties are still present, and even central in many contemporary fantasy narratives (one may think here of the steampunk subgenre, for instance), suggesting that while its source, the city, might have changed and evolved under the influence of time and progress, the anxiety itself has remained a constant. At the heart of this anxiety is a contradictory, double-sided understanding of the myth of the city. On the one hand, the city is a place of change and progress, an emblem of order and civilisation—“an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light,” as described by 112 Williams (1). On the other hand, Timms describes how the city is also perceived as “unstable and insecure,” how it can be represented as “faceless crowds,” as “an atmosphere of impending collapse,” and as “energy and turmoil” (3). This urban dichotomy opposes a progress-oriented and (one might say inhumanly, mechanically) organised city to a chaotic, decadent metropolis: “[t]he vibrant modern city becomes [the] bearer of the myth that began with Babylon” (Gottfried Benn, quoted in Timms 118). This notion of one becoming the other suggests a descent from one to the other: the city becomes layered—there is the city above, the golden city, which emblematizes progress, order, and lawfulness; and then, there is the city below, the underworld, the underbelly, where the poor, the marginalised, and the criminals are gathered. This dichotomous division of the city plays an important role in the works of Gaiman and Pratchett, and particularly in Neverwhere, where the city of London is quite literally split into two different worlds. In Neverwhere, the reader is presented with two interpretations and two lived experiences of the urban space and of urban society, which are spatially defined and delimited in the form of the London Above and the London Below. The London Above is depicted as ordered, and driven by progress, profit, and expansion; it is governed by a strict set of social rules, and its inhabitant are expected to behave and think in very specific ways. In the London Above, the delineation between social groups and how they should interact with each other are made very clear, and one cannot deviate from them. This is made clear during Richard’s first encounter with Door. As Richard and his fiancée Jessica are heading to an important dinner, they quite literally stumble upon Door on the street (26). Jessica is so focused on their upcoming meeting with her boss that she ignores Door and acts as if she didn’t exist. Richard’s stopping to check on Door triggers an argument between them—one based in different values and understandings of society. While, 113 according to Richard, Jessica “[gives] to charity and [invests] ethically” (24), she refuses to stop to help Door, because she does not perceive her as an equal, and will only meaningfully interact with people on the same social standing as her. When Richard refuses to budge, she states her position clearly: “If you pay them any attention, Richard, they’ll walk all over you. They all have homes, really. Once she’s slept it off, I’m sure she’ll be fine” (27). Her use of pronouns here is meaningful; she switches between “she” as a direct reference to Door as an individual, and the vague “them” and “they,” which carry an implicit, pejorative weight. It is a generalisation—a briefer way of saying “people like that”—which itself is an implicit way of referring to marginalized people. In this switch from the individual to the general, a social separation is maintained between Door and Jessica, a boundary that cannot be crossed. Jessica’s generalisation reflects an intriguing correlation, in both Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s takes on the rural/urban dichotomy, between people and spaces: in these novels, rural and urban spaces appear to be primarily conceptualized through people rather than through their physical geography—their landscapes or architecture, for instance: here, the London Below is mainly perceived as being home to a marginalized community, and through a particular understanding of its morality and approach to time and progress (a rejection of the capitalist focus on productivity and financial success privileged by Jessica as an avatar of the London Above). This intertwining of people and spaces is also made evident through certain characters, like Door, whose identity is inextricable from their social (or narrative) function and the place they inhabit. As Jeffrey Weinstock argues, “Door is a kind of personification, although in this case of both a function and a thing. Not only does her name reflect her ability to open things—her name indexes what she does—but it also reflects her function within the narrative” (33). Indeed, the aptly named Lady Door Portico has the supernatural ability to open doors—or portals—to other places and 114 dimensions, and she is also the doorway which Richard employs to transition from the London Above to the London Below—from “real life” into the world of fantasy. Furthermore, the Portico House echoes this supernatural and narrative function played by Door and her family. When Door and the Marquis step into its entrance hall and gaze upon the pictures of different rooms hanging on its walls, the Marquis understands it to be an “associative house, every room of which is located somewhere else” (91): rather than being a home in the traditional sense, the House reflects the identity of its builders and owners both in its décor, and by being the channel for their abilities, a doorway to a multitude of other places which only they know how to use. Death’s realm, as depicted in Pratchett’s Mort, has a similar function in the narrative. This intertwining of people and spaces comes to play an important role in the dichotomous representation of rural and urban spaces in Neverwhere: by establishing social behaviours and values as the main characteristics of spaces, rather than their geography, it imbues them with a strong ideological load, and participates in the essentialization of their representation. When Richard ignores Jessica and actively interacts with Door (whose narrative function becomes, in essence, a pathway between the two sides of the different dichotomies), he crosses that boundary, both physically (as he embarks on a journey to the London Below) and socially: by interacting with a marginalised person, he unknowingly becomes marginalised himself. This process occurs in a way that is quite similar to a contamination: it begins with physical contact, as Richard touches Door to check on her, and tells Jessica that she is bleeding after looking at his fingers (27). In a narrative first published in 1996, there is significance in the fact that this apparent contamination of marginalisation occurs through contact with bodily fluids, and the ostracization that Richard later experiences eerily echoes the taboos and social rejection that characterised the treatment of marginalised people during the AIDS epidemic. 115 Richard’s narrative can be read through a perspective of belonging and passing—through the filter of socio-spatial and gender performance.36 While Richard moves to the city and becomes a Londoner, he is marked as an outsider from the beginning of the novel: he is a distinctly non-urban character—a rural character—thrown into an urban setting where he experiences a cultural shock and a form of cognitive dissonance. Upon arrival to the city, he is marked out as socio-spatially inferior, and his only way to transcend the socio-spatial divide is to transform himself until he can successfully pass as an urban character. This necessity for change is the crux of Richard’s cognitive dissonance and alienation while residing in the London Above. The dichotomous rural’s characteristics of being frozen in time and attached to tradition find an echo in Richard, who is unsuccessful in effecting that transition: the story opens on his departing from an unnamed small Scottish town to move to the city, and the narrator later notes that “[T]hree years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city” (9). This lack of inward change, concealed by a shift in perspective, is apparent in Richard’s actions and reactions to events and social interactions in the London Above section of the novel: they are markedly performative. His relationship with Jessica is emblematic of that artificiality and that performativity. Upon introducing her, the narrator notes that “Jessica saw in Richard an enormous amount of potential, which, properly harnessed by the right woman, would have made him the perfect matrimonial accessory” (13). Jessica is established as Richard’s guide and translator in the London Above, fashioning him in her image of the perfect urban fiancé in a grim echo of the makeover heroines undergo in romantic comedies—an inversion of the Pygmalion myth as interpreted by Shaw in his eponymous 1914 play, in which phonetics professor Henry Higgins “makes over” the flower girl Eliza Doolittle, striving to turn her into the 36 I refer here to Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance, which I explore in greater depth in the context of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of gender in Chapter 4. 116 perfect English lady. Like Eliza, Richard is taught how to act, behave, and to think in order to properly belong in the society of the London Above: he is taught how to pass. Richard and Jessica’s relationship is never described in a romantic light, but rather as a form of transactional exchange: Richard learns how to be a real Londoner from Above, gains credibility through his relationship with Jessica, while she will gain a “matrimonial accessory,” the ideal husband to parade at social events. The lack of real feeling or care between the two of them is revealed when Richard reminisces about their nights together: “he would tell her he loved her and always wanted to be with her, and they both believed it to be true” (23). Neverwhere’s switch in the genders of the protagonists of the Pygmalion myth is significant: Richard’s perceived socio-spatial inferiority as a rural character is compounded by a seemingly demeaning, or even emasculating gender inversion in which his fiancée educates him in how to perform urban socio-spatial class in order to become the perfect trophy husband. This instruction is presented as emasculating and alienating because it goes against his authentic self: as he tries to perform a socio-spatial class he does not belong to, Richard ends up not performing his own gender “right”, transgressing the dictates of patriarchal masculinity by allowing his fiancée to thrust him into a role—that of a socially superfluous partner—customarily reserved for women. What he does, in effect is fix one dichotomy by reinforcing another: by suggesting that socio-spatial class divisions are a sham through a display of their artificiality and performativity, the novel implicitly reinforces the notion that the gender dichotomy is real and should be followed. In centring Richard’s alienation through this process of urban assimilation, the novel suggests that he needs to reassert his own masculinity, which he was not able to perform when trying to fit into the “right” side of the socio-spatial class divide. Richard’s fall from London Above to London Below is a removal of the mask: he is revealed as never having belonged—and, as I shall 117 come back to discuss later—his peregrination through the two Londons in quest of identity and agency has notes of both a flânerie—or, more specifically, a Debord-like dérive37—and a katabasis,38 and yet it is fully neither, as he must eventually decide between returning to the artifices of the London Above, or embracing his true marginalised self among the people of the London Below. Before he embarks on that quest, in the days following his first encounter with Door, Richard is entirely erased from his own life—unseen, unheard, and dispossessed. His colleagues no longer see or hear him, and when pushed, will not recognize him (67–68); his belongings—the troll collection—have disappeared from his office (67), and his apartment is being rented out to someone else (71); when he attempts to withdraw money at an ATM, his card is no longer valid (75). As he himself observes, he appears to have become “some kind of non-person” (68), and the only people who can see him anymore are the marginalised, like the old man—Iliaster—who asks him for change (75). Their interaction is, once again, significant. As Richard expresses surprise that the man can see him, Iliaster responds: “Nothing wrong with my eyes” (76). Implicit in this statement is Richard’s change of social status: by helping Door, he has rejected the values and standards of the London Above, and embraced those of the London Below, thereby exiting one boundaried society to enter another. This social and spatial delineation ties into myth in the Barthesian sense, as we are presented with two different myths of the city: that 37 For Debord, “[i]n a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord 62). I come back to the concept of the dérive, and the ways in which Richard’s journey may qualify as one, in section II. 2. 38 “Katabasis” means a descent to the Underworld: it is part of the Western artistic motif of the journey to the Underworld, and drawn from Greek and Roman mythology. This journey is usually in two parts: the katabasis, or descent, followed by the anabasis, or return. Examples of this motif include the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, or Ulysses’ trip to the Underworld in the Odyssey. 118 of the urban as a polished and civilised place, and that of the urban as an uncivilised locus of moral corruption. On one side of this urban dichotomy is the motif of the city as a place of progress, industry, and civilisation. Williams points to this image in his retracing of the history of perceptions of the city, underlining how for Voltaire, for instance, “the city, and especially London, was the symbol of progress and enlightenment, its social mobility, the school of civilisation and liberty” (Williams 144). In this interpretation of the myth of the city, it is placed in stark opposition to the non-urban (rural settings, the wilderness): the city becomes a bastion of civilisation and modernity, as opposed to archaic and uncouth spaces: it is made the emblem of the future and of progress, while rural areas are perceived as being stuck in the past. In his analysis of the depiction of the city in modern European literature and art, Timms points out that the perception of Edwardian European cities as representative of “one of the highest levels of metropolitan civilisation” became “grounds for a sense of social progress, cultural achievement and civic pride” for the artists of that era (Timms 2). This understanding of the city is not unique to Edwardian artists and is common in fiction to this day, and it participates in sustaining the rural/urban dichotomy, while also strengthening a perceived social and moral hierarchy between the two: the city is inherently understood as superior—an evolved or improved version of the societal and cultural model found in the country, and therefore the one that should and will endure the test of time. This myth of the city is present in Gaiman’s Neverwhere, in the perception that Londoners from Above have of their side of the city, and of its opposition with the London Below: it is a central feature of the relationship between Richard and his fiancée Jessica at the beginning of the novel. Jessica’s perception of Richard as having “potential” that only needs to be “harnessed” to make him the perfect fiancé (13) is grounded in the fact that he 119 is not a born Londoner, but has moved there from a small Scottish town. As such, he is categorized not only as “other,” but as non-urban and therefore uncouth and in need of refining. Gomel argues that “[t]he sterile upper-class London Above consigns to the underground everything that interferes with its airbrushed self-image” (Gomel 187). While this erasure eventually happens to him, in Richard’s case, Jessica initially tries to stamp his divergence out—he is only erased from society once that option has failed. This reading of Richard and Jessica’s relationship is borne out by the fact that her way of harnessing his “potential” is to take him on trips to the National Gallery and the Tate, as opposed to his own sole visit of the Tower of London, which is implicitly marked out as less refined (9): an attempt to stamp out a perceived lower-class taste for violence, the sensational, and the macabre in Richard, akin to the Victorian engouement for penny dreadfuls. She also provides him with two books, “Dress for Success,” and “A Hundred and Twenty-Five Habits of Successful Men,” as well as “books on how to run a business like a military campaign” (13). This focus on business and success is deeply tied to the “city of progress” interpretation of the myth of the city. Gomel points to this when she states that the London Above “is the postcard city of high finance, high fashion, and high living, recycling mementoes of its past as tourist trinkets” (Gomel 185). In the London Above, people are characterised and hierarchized by their success in life, specifically at work and in business. This is why Richard’s lack of professional drive both puzzles and disturbs Jessica, for whom it represents a deviant form of self-sabotage. It is also why she is so dismissive and disgusted by Door when they come upon her: in a capitalist society, where progress and success are the standards by which one is measured, a person who she instantly and prejudicially believes has a home but is sleeping on the street for attention or to get cast-offs represents an unacceptable deviation, and a threat to the well-running of London Above’s society and economy. The 120 perceived deviation of people like Richard, Door, and the Londoners from Below is both a societal and a moral one: in Jessica’s, and by extension the Londoners from Above’s worldview, the poor and marginalised, the unsuccessful and the people who do not embrace progress and modernity are inherently immoral and corrupt, and present a threat to society. In the Discworld novels, there are also hints of this interpretation of the myth of the city as a place of progress and civilisation in the depiction of the wizards, who are described by Alice Nuttall as “ensconced in city-based universities, researching a strictly scholarly form of magic and rarely leaving their ivory towers” (Nuttall 23). The contrast established between the wizards and the witches in Equal Rites—the first being focused on the acquisition, control, and expansion of magical power, while the second ground their practice in a connection to the community and the land, and avoid exerting magical power unless it is a necessity—only serves to underline both the rural/urban dichotomy, and this image of the city as inherently superior and more civilised. Yet as I have stated earlier, this interpretation of the myth of the city is only one side of the urban dichotomy, which Williams evokes when he opposes to Voltaire’s optimistic, near utopian view of the city, with Adam Smith’s more measured perspective, according to which the city is “a centre of freedom and order, but in its very dependence as a market and manufacturing centre liable to breed a volatile and insecure people” (Williams 144). On the underside of the city of progress is the chaotic city, inhabited by the people who cannot or refuse to fit into the worldviews and lifestyle of the city of progress. Arno Meteling’s analysis of the vertical division between the London Above and the London Below in Neverwhere underlines the echoes between the novel’s depiction of the London Below and myths of a chaotic, uncivilized city. He underlines the ways in which the London Below is antithetical to the London Above, “a place for the stolen, the forgotten and the abandoned. It is 121 clearly the dump for London society’s trash from above” (70). As Meteling has signalled in his use of the words “dump” and “trash,” one is struck by the consistent depiction of this underside of London as dark, grimy, and chaotic: Richard’s first encounter with London Below society is with the Sewer Folk, who live underground, in a space characterised as smelling “musty, of damp and old brick, of rot and the dark,” where they gather around small fires, roasting small animals on spits (77). The Sewer Folk’s appearances are much in line with the space they inhabit: Iliaster’s “scraggly beard,” for instance, is “a matted tangle of yellow and gray,” he wears “a filthy coat over the ruin of a dark gray sweater,” and even the lines of his face are “etched deeply in black dirt” (75). This depiction of the London Below and its characters is equated by Meteling with a call back to medieval fantasy, as the London Below appears to be an archaic society, “organized like a mediaeval feudal system” (70). Indeed, while the full social hierarchy of the London Below is not made clear within the novel, there does seem to be a decentralised but medieval fantasy-like structure with fiefdoms ruled by Earls and Lords. Furthermore, the London Below’s economic model seems, at least in part, to be based on barter economy, as seen in the characters’ journey through the Floating Market (Neverwhere 122–124). The omnipresence of rats in the London Below participates in its representation of the city’s underside as an archaic, grimy, and chaotic space. Amongst the Sewer Folk, Richard makes the acquaintance of the Lord Rat-Speaker, a human who mediates between Richard and the Sewer Folk’s true leaders, the powerful and knowledgeable rats of the London Below. Rats are also omnipresent in the Discworld and its cities, where they may attain superior intelligence, like the rat Clan who team up with the cat Maurice to scam urban residents in The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents’ parody of the pied piper of Hamelin legend, but where they are also baked in pies and roasted on sticks as questionable delicacies. The existence of a death of rats in the 122 Discworld universe (Small Gods 212) speaks to the omnipresence of the species in the series. Across these novels, this important role given to rats contributes to the representation of urban environments as archaic, poor, and insalubrious spaces, where humans are led to cohabitate with or survive off of the creatures. This being said, it would be inaccurate to characterise the London Below as solely a medieval-fantasy world—it is instead a layering of eras and historical periods, reflective of the long and complex history of the city of London. One may think here of archaeology and how each discovered layer reveals traces of a different time, a different culture, and different worldviews—Alice Jenkins, for instance, borrows from McCallum’s geographical metaphor of sedimentation to show how such a space can be “particularly able to accommodate more temporal layers than can be present in locations on the surface” (Jenkins 32). But it is not a smooth layering process that happens in Neverwhere—it is a complex one, in which time periods, events, and mythological entities all blend together to form a blurry, yet distinctly “old-timey” world. Irina Raţă stresses how the “London Below is not necessarily only a repository of past events, but a kaleidoscope of changing perspectives, a heterotopia and a heterochronia as well” (Raţă 109). This kaleidoscope of time periods and changing perspectives allows for a complex layering of cultural references and myths, one that allows for dialogue to take place between them. It is not inconceivable that this complex layering might include pre-urban layers dating back to Roman times and beyond, a notion which complicates the reading of the London Below as a strictly urban space—indeed, in Neverwhere, the London Below can be read as taking on many of the characteristics assigned to the rural in the rural/urban dichotomy, as I will argue later on in this chapter. Similarly to this complex representation of the fantasy city in Neverwhere, while some of the Discworld novels fit many of the characteristics of medieval 123 fantasy, the series as a whole breaks out of its boundaries, as the city of Ankh-Morpork hurdles into industrialisation in later volumes. If there are hints of medieval fantasy in the depiction of the London Below, an even clearer pattern of references is the ghost of the Victorian underworld that permeates the settings and characters of the London Below. Indeed, it is infused into the narrative from the very beginning, through the name of its main character Richard Mayhew, which recalls Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew, famous for his ground-breaking survey London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Mayhew’s survey was part of a broader tradition of Victorian writing that permeated both the fiction and non-fiction of the time—a correlation of journalistic and political commentary, grounded in the exploitation of true crime narratives and narratives of escaping poverty. Authors like Mayhew and Charles Dickens not only focused on the poor and the marginalised populations of the city, but imbued their social commentary with a heavy dose of moralism. This type of storytelling evokes its own myths and archetypes—one of which involves the stark opposition between the saintly, angelic poor (who are usually depicted as, and often end up literally becoming, martyrs) and the ones who are depicted as descending or having descended into criminality and immorality, therefore becoming irredeemable. In Oliver Twist, for instance, the opposition between the characters of Oliver and Nancy exemplifies this dichotomy of the poor. While Nancy would appear (especially to contemporary readers) to be a good person, as she cares for Oliver and the other children and seeks to protect them, both her status as a sex worker, which, by Victorian standards, is perceived as morally decadent, and her association with and support of Bill Sykes mark her for corruption and death: because she stands by and doesn’t denounce Sykes until the very end of the novel, she cannot be redeemed and is doomed to die. Oliver, on the other hand, is the only character to get a happy ending—and that is 124 because he sticks by the moral principles he was taught. All the other major underworld characters in the novel come to a sticky end (whether it is death or imprisonment) because they compromised with these moral principles. Morality therefore has a central role in Victorian writings about the Victorian Underworld. It is interesting to note that Oliver, as is the case for many of the “good” poor characters in Victorian literature, does not originate in the underworld: he is revealed to have come from a “good” bourgeois family, and his journey through the London Underworld functions as a form of odyssey which eventually sees him coming back “home” to a respectable middle-class world (a journey not so different from Granny Weatherwax’s, one might argue). As such, he is not truly part of the underworld but a form of outside observer, akin to the figure of the flâneur, an avatar for the journalists and social commentators who explored the world of the London poor. Victorian narratives of the London Underworld are loaded with an ideological charge: they present observatory explorations of the poorer neighbourhoods of the city for the explicit purpose of denouncing the poor’s marginalisation and misery, both on a social and a moral standpoint. These Victorian morality tales in turn provide a strong—and lingering—illustration of the myth of the city as a dichotomous entity, divided along social and moral lines; one that finds a resonance in the depictions of Neverwhere’s London Below and the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork. This portrayal of the city is starkly different from that of the rural spaces depicted in these novels, where class doesn’t appear to factor in any significant way: social status, in Bad Ass, does not seem to be dependent on class, but on one’s ardour and efficiency at work, and one’s service to the community. This idealized and somewhat unrealistic perspective of the rural draws upon the “myth of rural England” theorized by Timms, which I have discussed earlier in this chapter, and which he further argues was established by poets who “were (for the most part) city-dwellers 125 who sought refuge in the countryside from the strains of urban life” (113). The contrast between the depiction of the idealized rural life and society of Equal Rites and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and that of the near-dystopian society of Neverwhere therefore positions the country as a space of honest work and innocence, as opposed to the anxiety and alienation of the city which one longs to escape from in favour of an idealized, pastoral rural setting. This brings us back to the representation of the Sewer Folk in Neverwhere, and how their appearance not only signals their connection to the underworld (the London Below) but also their alienation and rejection from the London Above. This rejection is evidenced in Jessica’s behaviour during her encounter with Door, discounting her as a social reject—and one who capitalises on her social status to take advantage of gullible Londoners’ good intentions—as soon as she sets eyes on her. This social rejection goes both ways, however: the inhabitants of the London Below are not necessarily dirty in appearance, as the Sewer Folk were, but there is a throughline of nonconformity in their dress. Old Bailey’s outer garment is “covered thickly and entirely with feathers,” (18) Door looks “as if she’d done a midnight raid on the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum” (34–35), and Carabas wears “a huge dandyish black coat that was not quite a frock coat nor exactly a trench coat, and high black boots, and, beneath his coat, raggedy clothes” (52). The raggedness and peculiarity of the characters’ clothing serves a double purpose: it asserts their individuality in a defiant rejection of the fashion and culture of the London Above, in a way that is reminiscent of the UK counterculture and London’s punk scene; but it also underlines the characters’ marginalisation and the stark social dichotomy at play within the novel: it pits the rich against the poor, the ordered against the chaotic, the clean against the dirty, and, implicitly, suggests the connection with a third dichotomy, that of lawful citizen and criminal. Indeed, while the London Below’s 126 fashion sense may remind one of the British counterculture, it is also strongly reminiscent of the fashion displayed by Dickens’ characters in Oliver Twist—of Bill Sikes’ “black velveteen coat, very soiled drab breeches, lace-up half boots, and grey cotton stockings,” the “brown hat on his head and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck” (Dickens 98) and the Artful Dodger’s rakishly (or haphazardly) tilted hat, oversized man’s coat, and corduroy trousers (Dickens 60); the narrator’s reference to the History of Fashion section in the Victoria and Albert Museum when describing Door’s clothing is no accident. It establishes a direct connection between the world of the London Below—its appearance, social structure, culture, and values—and the Victorian underworld. Within this context, Jessica’s interpretation of Door’s appearance, and her immediate assumption of deceit, exemplify the prejudicial association of poverty with criminality that underpins the urban dichotomy: if the upper city, the city of progress, is associated with order and lawfulness, the very structure of the mythical urban underworld is tainted by immorality and criminality. Elements of this myth of the urban are present in both Neverwhere and the Discworld. In Ankh Morpork, amongst all the artisan and trade guilds, one may find a guild of thieves and a guild of assassins, whose criminal activities have been normalized and encased within the laws of the city. The members of the Assassin’s Guild are Assassins, and not assassins: “The capital letter was important. It separated those curs who went around murdering people for money from the gentlemen who were occasionally consulted by other gentlemen who wished to have removed, for a consideration, any inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life” (Hogfather 8). Yet this social legitimisation and institutionalisation of criminality is intriguingly double-edged: while it cements the association between the urban underworld and criminality, it also creates a demarcation between true villainy and the enterprising deceit and 127 schemes developed by the poor for the purpose of subsistence. If there is a connection, in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, between marginality, criminality, and the grotesque, as suggested by Jenkins’ argument that the London Below is “a viciously hierarchical, squalid society whose highest communal achievement is a kind of carnivalesque shared degradation at the monthly Floating Market (Jenkins 39), it would be reductive and inaccurate to say that it is the poor who are the real threat or the real evil in the novels. Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah (the Small Gods avatar of Ankh-Morpork’s Cut-Me-Own-Throat-Dibbler), for instance, makes a living selling “suspiciously new holy relics, suspiciously old rancid sweetmeats on a stick, gritty figs and long-past-the-sell-by dates” (Small Gods 74). His shady dealings are portrayed with humour, and the reader is led to await, with bated breath tinged with delight, the inevitable failure of his various business ventures. If his goods are, in essence, toxic, and have the potential of being deadly, their main effect is usually the fooling of the most naïve elements of the Discworld’s middle- and upper-classes. He is proven to be mostly benign and not entirely morally bankrupt. In contrast, Hogfather’s main antagonist, Mr. Teatime cloaks himself in the legitimacy provided by his position within the Assassin’s Guild to pursue his own goal to murder Death. The true criminals and villains of Neverwhere similarly stand out from the other marginalised characters in the novel because they take advantage of the legitimacy provided by their societal status. The leering, smarmy assassins Croup and Vandemar, for instance, are reminiscent of the villains in penny dreadfuls and grand guignol theatre: a grotesque duo of sheer brutality and duplicity. One is tall, one is short, one is brutal and ogre-like, while the other is clever and scheming. Richard’s comparing of them to a fox and a wolf recalls the fables of Reynard and Ysengrin, whose deceitful schemes and quests for revenge often veer into ruthless brutality (38). Croup and Vandemar most certainly take after the fabled fox and wolf in their 128 deceit and brutality, as is made evident in their professional advertising pitch, which is both funny and chilling in its brutal sarcasm: “the Old Firm. Obstacles obliterated, nuisances eradicated, bothersome limbs removed and tutelary dentistry” (82). They have found a way to work their villainy into the rules and laws of the society they evolve in, cloaking their murderous ventures within the legitimacy of their vaguely named hitman business and under the patronage of their secret employer, the Angel Islington. As was the case with Carabas and Door earlier, Croup and Vandemar’s sartorial choices are very telling: they wear “the kind of suits that might have been made by a tailor two hundred years ago who had had a modern suit described to him but had never actually seen one. The lines were wrong, and so were the grace notes” (38). As is suggested by their not-quite-right suits, their social legitimacy is a sham—a flawed envelope that cannot fully disguise their true nature. The urban dichotomy therefore both sustains and is in turn sustained by a binary interpretation of the morality of the marginalised: in both Ankh-Morpork’s underworld and the London Below, the corruption, deceit, and plain evil of the “true” villains is enabled by the societal divisions and hierarchies of the urban dichotomy, while their criminal and immoral schemes sustain the underworld’s state of marginalisation and decadence. The dichotomic representation of the city in these novels present an intriguing counterpoint to their dichotomic representation of rural and urban spaces: while on the one hand, the reader is presented with an interpretation of rural spaces as near-utopian, frozen in time bastions of moral values, characterized by order and tradition, and of urban spaces as loci of change, chaos, and moral decay, the novels’ dichotomic depiction of the city itself complicates and challenges such a reading by echoing this ideological split within urban spaces themselves. However, the novels’ creation of a dichotomy within the dichotomy appears to be simultaneously sustaining, and even 129 reinforcing some of the ideologically charged, essentialized characteristics attributed to rural and urban spaces. 2. Mapping the protean city: Urban exploration in Neverwhere and the Discworld As I have argued so far, Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Pratchett’s Discworld novels illustrate an essentialized, dichotomous interpretation of the rural and the urban: the city and the country are established as simultaneously radically different and yet mutually dependent concepts in a social myth about the essence of a place and the ways of life it implies. In this section, I explore how this representation is complicated, in both authors’ works, by the protean geography of the city. While rural places, rural life, and rural values are essentially portrayed as unchanging and frozen in time, the cityscapes of Neverwhere’s London and the Discworld’s Ankh-Morkpork shift continuously, simultaneously revealing a dichotomy within the representation of the city itself, and creating avenues to challenge dichotomous articulations of urban spaces. The London of Neverwhere is a place where space, time, and reality are upended and blend together, and Gaiman’s protean, fantastical London is an apt metaphor for Saskia Sassen’s concept of a “new spatial expression” of the global city and its economy, where increased mobility has rendered both distances and time constraints meaningless (Sassen 22). In the London Below, distances can be shrunk or extended just by walking through a door. As Richard walks into what he believes to be “The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Houses,” he instead realises that he has stepped out into Down Street, a meandering, seemingly endless downwards path leading into the innermost depths of the London Below, to the dwelling of the angel Islington and the hunting grounds of the Beast of London (Gaiman 317–320). Richard’s 130 comparison of this path to the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel is intriguing in the context of the urban dichotomy. In the myth, humans arrogantly set out to build a tower that would reach the skies, and therefore the realm of God. They are punished for their promethean endeavour through the sudden appearance of languages and dialects, which breaks down their ability to communicate and prevents them from finishing the construction of the tower. One may wonder whether this breakdown in communication is echoed in the division between the two Londons, who cannot reconcile their divided worldviews and interpretations of urban myths. Indeed, may it not be read in a metatextual light, as a reference to the complex—and Babel-like in its ambition—endeavour to embody myth in narrative? In her analysis of narrative space and time in literature, Gomel argues that in “the city, space and time are already inextricably intertwined. Urban fantasies simply make this nexus explicit, articulating the dominant structure of urban spacetime as they create their impossible cities by projecting the temporal upon the spatial axis of narrative” (Gomel 180). In the urban fantasies of Gaiman and Pratchett, this intertwining of space and time is necessary in order to represent and create dialogue between several interpretations of myth, and it is achieved through fragmenting and layering processes. Weinstock describes the London Below as functioning, in some ways, “as London Above’s evolutionary unconscious—a sealed pocket of time where the past still persists” (59) and, indeed, in Neverwhere, Richard’s journey to the London Below can, in a sense, be perceived as a journey backwards in time. Richard is led by characters from the London Below to out-of-the-way spaces where time seems to have interrupted its course: “There were a hundred other little courts and mews and alleys in London just like this one, tiny spurs of old-time, unchanged for three hundred years. Even the smell of piss here was the same as it had been in Pepys’s time, three hundred years before” (88). Richard travels between the two Londons via these out-of-the-way historical 131 enclaves, which serve as stepping-stones out of linear time progression. Gomel portrays these spaces in a way that suggests they might be hidden nodes in the city’s memory map: The city’s memory, like the memory of the individual, is riddled by omissions, evasions, and lies. And these narrative lacunae generate their topographical counterparts: dark spaces, forgotten and forbidden nooks and crannies, underground lairs of the repressed. These traumatic spaces are Foucauldian heterotopias, in which ghosts of the past and phantoms of the future skulk in wait. (Gomel 180) As “liminal space[s] or world[s] within a world that [mirror] the outside world while also disturbing it” (Weinstock 40), Neverwhere’s heterotopias distort time, producing compressed layers of time that reveal the city’s multifacted history, and particularly the facets that have gone forgotten or have been repressed. As suggested by Weinstock, these pockets of compressed time function as the London Above’s “evolutionary unconscious,” mirroring the city’s complex history back to anyone willing or able to peer in. In these forgotten spaces, past, present, and potential futures come to meet, and by travelling through them, one can explore the city’s historical and cultural memory. While London may be the city that never sleeps, the London Below never seems to age or die, as older layers of the city appear to have progressively sunken between the cracks in the surface of the London Above. As he travels downwards, Richard unravels layers of the city’s history, encountering anthropomorphized embodiments of London’s landmarks such as Old Bailey39, the Black Friars40, and the Angel Islington41. These 39 The Old Bailey is the common name for the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, which looms, omnipresent, in the background of penny dreadfuls and Victorian novels about the city’s underworld. 40 The Black Friars, who are the Keepers of the Key in Neverwhere, take their name from London’s Blackfriars district, which itself was named after a priory founded in that location in the 13th century. 41 The Angel is named so after the Angel Station, in Islington, which opened in 1901, and was itself named after a historic inn (“The Angel and Islington High Street”). 132 anthropomorphised landmarks are instrumentalized to ground the narrative in a complex and multilayered yet recognisable historical and cultural context—they contribute to the creation of a protean, mythical map of the city. Like his namesake Henry Mayhew, Richard takes on the role of explorer and cartographer of the city of London. This role is suggested from the very opening of the novel, in which he is gifted an umbrella decorated with a map of the London Tube as a farewell gift by his friends before his move to the city. This map is a summary and static rendering of London, one which cannot encompass the multi-faceted complexity of the city. Indeed, a passenger who passes through the city on the Tube does so in isolation, cut off from the London Above and the London Below. Therefore, this gifted map reflects Richard’s incomplete understanding of the city at the opening of the novel: for him, London is uncharted territory. The fact that he almost immediately gives away his new gift to a homeless lady he encountered on the street is significant: it shows that he will not rely on this artificial understanding of the city but explore it himself, and create his own mental map of London.42 In Neverwhere, Richard’s journey takes on the shape of what Amin and Thrift call “a psychogeography of strange spaces” (Amin & Thrift 11): Richard, who is an outsider to the city, travels through tunnels and hidden courtyards, goes up buildings and criss-crosses the city on the Tube, and as he does so, he records the strangeness and uniqueness of the London Below into a sprawling, mutating and multi-layered mental map. Indeed, one may compare his journeys across London to Guy Debord’s depiction of the dérive, another take on the notion of the flâneur: Richard has “drop[ped] [his] relations, [his] work and leisure activities, and all [his] usual motives for movement and action, [his] relations, [his] work and leisure activities, and let 42 In this paragraph and the next, I re-explore ideas first developed in an essay on the mapping of cities in fantasy, written as an assignment for an urban studies class taught by Bonnar Buffam at UBCO in 2017. 133 [himself] be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [he finds] there” (Debord 62). The contrast between Debord’s dérive and Benjamin’s flâneur lies, as I see it, in their relationship to the place which they explore: while the flâneur stands at a remove and merely observes, the dérive’s encounters suggest an interaction—one may affect the people and the space one encounters, and be affected in return. This, I would think, is more characteristic of Richard, who talks to, debates, and asks questions of the people he encounters in the London Below, and who physically interacts with the places and things he comes across there. The geography of the city shifts incessantly as Richard explores new routes through wormhole doors and hidden passageways: the London of Neverwhere is a monstrous, mythical entity, and it demands a protean map, one capable of recording the historical and supernatural hiccups of the London Below. While Richard’s journeys—from small-town Scotland to the London Above, from the London Above to the London Below, and then down into the depths of the London Below—are all indicative of movement and communication between the two sides of the dichotomies, a closer look at the nature and outcome of this movement reveals boundaries that cannot easily be crossed through—and certain doorways which, once passed through, cannot easily be reemployed. In his analysis of Neverwhere, Meteling compares Richard’s journey to a hero’s quest in the Campbellian sense. According to Campbell, [t]he 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 134 from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (Campbell 28) For Campbell, the hero’s journey follows a circular structure: a departure from their home, an adventure which provides personal growth, and finally a return home, enriched by one’s experiences. Meteling sees a similar structure in Richard’s journey: descending to the world of the London Below, having to complete physical or intellectual challenges, and eventually, attaining growth; according to him, therefore, “Neverwhere is a novel about the development of the hero throughout his heroic journey,” and while Richard’s early behaviour was that of an unformed, child-like person, he “slowly becomes an adult developing a mind of his own” (Meteling 69–70). While, like Meteling, I see similarities between Richard’s journey and the hero’s quest as conceptualised by Campbell, I disagree with Meteling with regards to the outcome of that journey. Richard’s story is not a coming-of-age narrative, and he is not bettered, either physically or intellectually, by his adventures in the London Below. As I have argued before, I instead read Richard’s journey as a progressive rejection of “passing” and the uncritical performance of social norms: Richard does not undergo an evolution, but a process of self-recognition and reclaiming of his own agency. He does not become an older, or smarter Richard—he does not “develop a mind of his own,” because that mind, and that self-knowledge, existed from the very beginning and pierced through his attempts at passing in the London Above, as evidenced by the artificiality of his relationship with Jessica, or the signs of non-conformity he displayed in his office décor and the attention he paid to Door. He recognises and embraces his own marginality, rather than trying to be or fit into something that he is not. What changes is not Richard’s moral compass or the bases of his worldview, it is how he perceives himself and his own position within the world: it is self-recognition more than self-discovery, 135 and it is his acquiring of a critical perspective on the interpretations of the myth of the city he had been asked to buy into. As such, his journey is indeed not linear, but circular: having embraced an identity and values that are at odds with those of the London Above—an identity and values which strongly echo, but do not entirely overlap with the essentialized, near-pastoral rural values I have described in part I—he cannot remain in the decadent city. Meteling’s likening of Richard’s journey to a form of katabasis (71) is meaningful in understanding how morality is ingrained in the dichotomy between the two Londons. One can easily see why Meteling would compare Richard’s descent into the London Below to a journey to the Underworld: the obvious downwards movement aside, is it not a fantasy representation of the “underworld” of London—a realm inhabited by the poor, the marginalised, the criminals of the city? Jenkins points to this in her analysis of tunnels in fantasy literature: … tunnels are almost a defining feature of a certain kind of fantasy, often urban and often political, because always concerned with the relationship between the past and the present. In London fantasies they are all but essential, giving an ironic critical perspective on the social and moral structures of the above-ground world they distortedly mirror. (Jenkins 40) If the London Below is a distorted, critical reading of the society and morality from “above” (the non-fictional world), then it is hardly a positive one, but rather akin to Dorian Gray’s portrait, reflecting the city’s “true” nature. In both cases, whether the downwards movement, or the comparison between the London Below and the realm of the dead, this interpretation of Richard’s journey carries a heavy negative charge. Reading it as a form of katabasis entails an understanding of the London Below as a form of hell, a place of pain and alienation to be escaped from—a place for the corrupt and the undeserving of the comforts and pleasures of the 136 material world, or the “better” beyond (the Elysian fields in Greek mythology). This is the interpretation of Richard’s journey put forward by Meteling in his analysis, as he argues that Neverwhere . . . is also about the mythical heroic journey of katabasis that not only prefigures this concept but is the secret drive of the narrative as well for it is always about getting above or below. The hero Mayhew wants nothing more than to get back to the upper-side of London while the villainous angel Islington—like the original fallen angel Lucifer in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667)—wants to go back to Heaven. (71–72) Reading the narrative in this way, however, means overlooking Richard’s final decision not to remain in the London Above after his return, but instead to journey back to the London Below. Richard and Islington’s true longings, trajectories, and worldviews are not the same—they are mirrored images. Islington, like Lucifer, longs to return to Heaven after having been cast down into the London Below. But Richard’s final realisation that he cannot remain in the London Above indicates where he truly belongs: the London Below, which, in many ways, represents an urban avatar for the rural in the urban/rural dichotomy in Neverwhere—while it cannot be described as pastoral or idyllic, it is the place frozen in time in this novel; the place where tradition and customs are upheld; the place whose people regard their own practices and moral values as simpler and truer than those of the London Above. Ironically, therefore, in Neverwhere, the city’s inner dichotomy parallels the rural/urban divide, complicating and seemingly undercutting the essentialization of these spaces’ characteristics. The endings of both Neverwhere and Equal Rites reveal the tension at play in the novel’s representation of the rural/urban dichotomy—a tension between the reinforcement and the 137 challenge of essentialized expressions of myths of the rural and the urban. This tension is obvious in the novels’ representation of movement between these spaces as either a life-altering permanent decision, or an ephemeral journey to “see how the other side lives”. Straddling the line or regularly transitioning from one space to the other are not presented as viable options. Because the inhabitants of each side of the rural/urban dichotomy embrace worldviews and practices that are tied to their place of living, movement from one side of the spatial dichotomy to the other is necessarily limited or temporary, unless one is willing and able to change those worldviews and practices, and a character’s interactions with the “other side” are constrained by their own interpretation of the myth of the rural or the urban. In Equal Rites, the persistence of the dichotomy’s boundaries is made evident through the characters of Granny Weatherwax and Archchancellor Cutangle. The novel’s main theme is that of gender essentialism and its limitations: Esk, as a rural girl meant to become a wizard despite its being a traditionally masculine, academic, and urban role, represents the possibility of a blurring of the boundaries. But Esk is also, inherently, a special case born out of a wizard’s mistake. This is pointed out by Maxi Steinbrück, who states that Esk “remains an exception: a female wizard who has been granted access to the other gender’s higher educational establishment because she is the only girl with a ‘male’ disposition for magic” (Steinbrück 107). The essentialized associations between wizards, academia, and the urban, and between witches, non-academic learning, and the rural remain the norm across all the other characters. Granny and Cutangle’s discussion on what to do next at the end of the novel is quite telling: “I understand what Esk says alright, I just don’t believe in it,” said Granny. “Except the bit about wizards needing a heart.” “She said that witches need a head, too,” said Cutangle. (238) 138 As the story comes to an end, the leaders of the two schools of thought in the novel retain their essentialized worldviews. Their concession to Esk’s new path, the project of what is, essentially, a school exchange, reveals the shallowness of the change in their worldviews: it takes the form of temporary journeys from one side to the other—of summer camps, rather than meaningful, sustained exchanges or the possibility of permanent moves between the two sides, like Esk did. As Steinbrück aptly summarizes, Even Granny Weatherwax, as the most powerful witch, champions this stance, such as the wizards’ prejudices regarding the abilities of witches, thereby contributing to the dichotomy’s continued survival. Thus, it seems that, even despite Esk’s acceptance at the Unseen University, there are no effective solutions to the problem, as tradition has long hardened the opposing fronts. (Steinbrück 108) I am here reminded of the Victorians’ journalistic excursions into London’s underworld, and of the concept of the flâneur theorized by Baudelaire and Benjamin—who, as an outsider to the spaces they visit, never truly interact with them in a meaningful fashion, but rather with the entitlement of one who necessarily views that space through their own worldviews, and their own interpretation of it. It is a tourist’s perspective. As such, one may wonder whether the instrumentalization of these dichotomies in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives only serves to essentialize and freeze them in amber, reinforcing very specific myths of the urban and the rural. By threading the dichotomy between the rural and the urban throughout their narratives, Gaiman and Pratchett, in many ways, participate in essentializing the moral and cultural values and ideologies associated with these settings in that dichotomy. The rural and the urban may therefore appear as very boundaried spaces, both socially and geographically, in their novels, and 139 myths of the city as decadent and chaotic, as well as myths of the country as utopian are in many ways upheld. But enforcing this dichotomy is unsustainable, as Gomel argues in her analysis of the ending of Neverwhere: This looks like a happy ending. But, paradoxically, it is also apocalyptic, slamming the door on any imaginable narrative future. For this is where the urban chronotope collapses, unable to bear the weight of its own impossible spacetime. In the novel whose heroine is called Door, the two-way traffic between the two cities creates the temporal dynamics of the plot. Once the liminal zone of the Tube is off-limits, once the separation is perfect, the novel has run out of time and the city has run out of history. (Gomel 187) The prevention of any significant movement and interchange between the two sides of the urban/rural dichotomy is mortiferous—it can only lead to its collapse, as they both feed off of and sustain each other. Further than this, the cultural and moral boundaries between the two sides of the dichotomy are not as well-defined as they may seem, as one can see in the fact that Gaiman’s representation of the London Below takes on some of the characteristics of the rural in the urban dichotomy; they are entirely dependent on perspective. And these binary boundaries are further eroded by the fact that there exists spaces between, and outside of the rural/urban divide, such as small towns and wild spaces. As such, the dichotomous interpretation of myths of the rural and the urban is inherently essentializing and flawed—something that the texts’ multifaceted representation of the city, with its distortions of space and time, and with its, at times, taking on of characteristics otherwise attributed to the rural, points towards. As was the case in their interpretation of apocalyptic myths, Gaiman and Pratchett simultaneously depict and push back against these dichotomous interpretations of myths of the 140 rural and the urban—through the use of satire, and through the deconstruction and transformation of some of the images and tropes of the dichotomy. This tension, in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretation of myths of the rural and the urban, between essentialization and its challenge is something I explore further in Chapter 4, through a closer look at the overlap between spatial, gender, and moral dichotomies. 141 Chapter 4 – Gaiman, Pratchett, and the Triple Goddess: Triads and dichotomies in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum “Ah,” said Nanny. She took the girl’s arm. “The thing is,” she explained, “as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.” “And what’s that?” “When you break rules, break’em good and hard,” said Nanny, and grinned a set of gums that were more menacing than teeth. (Wyrd Sisters 171) Feminine triads are a recurring feature in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s fictions. Whether it is the Zorya sisters in American Gods,43 the Lilim in Stardust,44 The Ocean at the End of the Lane’s Hempstock women, or the Discworld’s Ramtops witches, in both authors’ novels, powerful women often come in threes. Such triads appear in numerous world mythologies (one may think here of the Norns of Norse mythology, the Fates of Greek mythology or, as mentioned above, the Zorya of Slavic myth) and in literature (the three witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, particularly, and their numerous echoes and declinations in pop culture), and they have also come to hold a significant place in fantasy literature. The influence of this triadic figure on the representation of powerful, magical or divine female entities in Western fantasy has been attributed to such sources as Robert Graves’ The 43 The Annotated American Gods identifies them as Slavic goddesses “charged with guarding the universe” — one is the morning star, one the evening star, and the last one the midnight sister — and equates them with the Aurora in Greek mythology (91). 44 In Stardust, the Lilim are three witch queens made immortal by consuming the hearts of stars. 142 White Goddess, and the role they have played in shaping feminist, neo-pagan interpretations of myth (Hutchings-Budd 11–12). Graves’ concept of the White Goddess, which he presents as a source-myth for the triple goddesses appearing in Mediterranean and Northern European mythologies, is a multifaceted goddess of death, birth, and beauty, and Graves positions her as “presiding over all acts of generation whatsoever: physical, spiritual or intellectual” (Graves 10–12). In Graves’ take on the Triple Goddess, the Triple Goddess’ power and identity are grounded in the act of creation, and she is characterized by a fertility that may be literal, metaphorical, or both. In addition to this, Graves’ description of the White Goddess as a goddess of death, birth, and beauty points to another common characteristic of mythical female triads: a connection to time and life cycles. Graves’ triadic representation of the White Goddess is therefore reminiscent of the three figures of the Maiden (youth, beauty), the Mother (fertility, nurture), and the Crone (wisdom, death). One of the curious features of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s feminine triads is the manner in which they articulate and confront some of our understandings of gender. Kristine Larsen argues, in an essay on goddesses in the Gaiman multiverse, that in his works, Gaiman deploys “a powerful set of new cosmological goddesses, who, rather than merely representing the moon or star, travel between dimensions and create and/or destroy entire universes,” and that by doing so, he “puts a fresh and empowering face on the Great Mother and her reproductive powers” (261). My analysis of the Triple Goddess figure in Ocean, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum, leads me to more ambivalent conclusions with regards to the empowering nature of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s depiction of mythical women. As I will discuss in this chapter, mythical feminine triads are deployed and instrumentalized within Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels as vehicles for social commentary: these triads become a way of exploring popular representations of mythical 143 women within what Pratchett calls the “consensus fantasy universe” (“Why Gandalf”),45 of investigating the functions and characteristics they are assigned, and of highlighting the essentializing nature of representations that lean so heavily into a dichotomous understanding of gender. I do not seek here to indiscriminately condemn any and all dichotomous ways of thinking or representational frameworks, whether in the context of gender or more broadly speaking, but to investigate how the integration of a dichotomous understanding of gender within fantasy worldbuilding participates in the propagation and reinforcement of essentializing gender roles and characteristics which preclude any deviation from those norms. I am concerned, in other words, with the crystallisation of specific representations of gender and gender roles as the only possible way to exist and perform one’s identity both within and without these fantasy narratives. Within this chapter, I consider what fitting within these roles and categorizations means, and whether it is even possible (or desirable) to fit within such representations of gender. I do not explore what may lie in-between the two sides of the dichotomy—not because I dismiss the existence of a gender spectrum, or the possibility of nuance in representation, quite the contrary, but because it is the dichotomy that permeates the texts I study here, and gender non-conformity, fluid understandings of gender, and trans identities haunt a space in which they are never spoken or suggested. Throughout this chapter, I focus on the characters of the Hempstock women and the Ramtops witches to explore the figure of the Triple Goddess as interpreted by Gaiman and Pratchett, and I consider how it is threaded through with conventions of gender and cultural associations with rural and urban life. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s feminine triads are a focal point in their interpretation and instrumentalization of myth, lying as they do in the overlap of gender 45 Pratchett’s concept of a “consensus fantasy universe” is one I engage with in more detail in part II of this chapter. 144 and spatial dichotomies through their embodiment and anchoring into space of the Triple Goddess figure. As I have touched upon in the previous chapter, while the novels’ male entities are associated with urbanity, change, and decadence, both sets of women are rural characters, and through their role as community leaders or guardians, they come to represent the soul and values of their rural communities and, by extension, the myth of the rural. They emblematize a simple life, characterised by moral goodness, authenticity, an attachment to tradition, and a resistance to technocratic patriarchy. A surprising feature that emerged within this analysis is the fact that Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s articulations of the Triple Goddess figure consistently raises questions regarding the essentializing role played not only by the dichotomies which they highlight and, in some ways, challenge, but by the triads themselves. Within The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum, the figure of the Triple Goddess mediates a host of considerations of dichotomic thinking. What does this mean for the development of myth and our interpretation of it, more generally? How does the figure of the Triple Goddess make plain, perhaps in its multiplicity, the ordering pairs that so often structure myth? And how might the articulation of this figure within a novel underline and/or challenge the essentializing limitations of such categorizations? My analysis is inspired, in part, by Emilie Kutash’s study of goddesses in myth and cultural memory. Kutash focuses on the resilience of gendered binary oppositions in the interpretation of myth, retracing their presence across the “cross-fertilization of myth and Platonist philosophy,” and up to contemporary representations of mythology (8–12). In her exploration of these persistent binary gender oppositions, Kutash discusses the tension between 145 binary and triadic structures in representations of myth, seeing in the omnipresence of triadic structures in the works of such authors as Proclus and Hesiod a challenge to binary thinking: Hesiod’s account, then, entails a third element out of which duality arises and another that facilitates coupling. There is a nascent awareness here that duality alone cannot be primordial and that the logic of a binary demands mediation: the continuity and unfolding of any progression from the combination of the two members of the binary require an agent catalyst. (96) According to Kutash, then, this preference for triadic structures is due to a perceived lack in dichotomic structures, as their oppositional nature generates conflict; the introduction of a third element in the structure therefore would provide a new equilibrium by mediating between the two sides of the binary. Kutash’s analysis of such triadic structures focuses on structures in which a goddess is added to an all-male binary—portraying how the goddess takes on the role of mediator, for which she is qualified by the essentialized conception of gender through which she is represented (her life-giving, generative capacity). I am interested in the ways in which Kutash’s reading of these mythologic and philosophical triads presents a challenge to essentializing dichotomies. However, triads such as those analysed by Kutash seemingly only resolve a dichotomic tension through the intervention of another essentializing dichotomy (that of gender), with the feminine entity playing the role of passive peace-keeper and fertile, creative bridge-builder between two conflicting masculine entities. Can the figure of the triad therefore be used to bridge the gap between the two sides of a dichotomy, as Kutash suggests, and do so without relying on the essentializing characteristics of other dichotomies? Could the articulation and instrumentalization of a feminine triad within a narrative offer avenues for challenging the gender dichotomy? How would essentialized gender characteristics play into such a triad, and 146 would there be opportunities to deconstruct and/or transcend them within the triadic structure? In other words, is the introduction of a third party between the two sides of a dichotomy a viable way of achieving its destabilisation or reconfiguration? I explore these questions through the analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of Triple Goddesses. I start my analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s takes on myths of the Triple Goddess with the hypothesis that the introduction of a third element within a dichotomy may provide avenues for flexibility and the blurring of the boundaries between the two sides of a dichotomy. Furthermore, looking at the articulation of the Triple Goddess figure in their novels, I ask how Gaiman and Pratchett challenge or reinforce essentialized and calcified dichotomous articulations of gender in their representations of the Triple Goddess figure—and consider the limits of that challenge given how these authors also reinforce traditional codes of masculinity and femininity. I open this analysis with a study of Gaiman’s Hempstock women in The Ocean at the End of the Lane and the ways in which they are both a triadic figure, and one side of gender-based dichotomies, exploring how the tension between these two roles offers a complex and somewhat paradoxical depiction of gender relations and gender performance. In a second part, I then consider how Pratchett’s Ramtops witches compare to Gaiman’s take on Triple Goddess myths, and study the ways in which their representation, despite its appearing more flexible than Gaiman’s, also suggests essentializing limitations within the triadic structure itself. I. Gaiman’s nurturing, benevolent, and immutable Triple Goddess With the characters of the Hempstock women, The Ocean at the End of the Lane offers what appears to be a straightforward representation of a Triple Goddess entity—a triad of powerful 147 female characters, one old, one middle-aged, and one young. Ocean’s Hempstock women are a variation on the Maiden/Mother/Crone archetypal triad, one whose characteristics echo Graves’ interpretation of the Triple Goddess figure. At stake in Gaiman’s interpretation of Triple Goddess myths are themes of creativity, nurture, and ethics, and those are overlaid by a deeply grounded relationship to the land. However, while this triad appears to play a central role in the novel, Ocean’s key conflicts operate through overlapping dichotomies: they are the good women opposed to Ursula Monkton’s embodiment of bad women, powerful compared to the novels’ impotent men, and represent an idealized rural against decadent, threatening urbanity. There is therefore a tension at play within Ocean: On the one hand, the centring and empowerment of the Hempstock women through the triadic figure of the Triple Goddess may be read as a challenge to the gender dichotomy. On the other hand, the novel consistently confines the Hempstocks on one side of binary conflicts, enshrining within their representation the characteristics of an essentialized and, one might argue, outdated ideal of womanhood. As I will illustrate throughout this section, the triadic figure postulated as an answer to dichotomic thinking by Kutash never achieves that purpose in Ocean, and its instrumentalization by the novel, either in its take on the myth of the Triple Goddess or in its explorations of gender roles and gender performance, sustains more often than it challenges or transcends essentializing interpretations of myths of gender and place. 1. The morally charged feminine dichotomy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane In their analyses of Ocean’s Triple Goddess figure, Courtney Landis and Laura-Marie Von Czarnowsky both examine how the novel represents the Hempstock women as an ideal form of 148 womanhood. Von Czarnowsky argues that the novel offers a binary model of “female-gendered magic”: on one side, there is the “protective, nurturing magic of the homely Hempstocks,” and on the other, “the dark and dangerous allure of [Ursula] Monkton’s power” (20). The Hempstock women are benevolent figures, providing the narrator with love, warmth, and safety: their womanhood is defined by motherliness. Through the depiction of Ursula Monkton, on the other hand, the novel presents a variation on the classic theme of the femme fatale: she is as beautiful as she is dangerous, and weaponizes her body and her femininity to break apart the narrator’s family. Within her critique of the purported feminist tilt of Ocean, Landis identifies these portrayals of the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton as a form of Madonna-whore dichotomy in which the “utterly desexualized” Hempstocks are opposed to the dangerous, voracious sexual appetite of Ursula Monkton (176). The novel thus implicitly establishes an association between goodness, chastity, and a nurturing nature; and between female sexuality and danger, if not outright evil. Through such a characterisation and the dichotomic opposition established between the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton, the novel upholds an essentialized understanding of gender, and more specifically of femininity, in which the Hempstocks represent a perceived ideal of womanhood that centres on chaste, dutiful nurturing. Meanwhile through its depiction of Ursula, one might argue that Ocean implicitly condemns sexual freedom and a desire for power and agency as evil and unnatural. What is intriguing here is the way in which this dichotomy is both grounded in and a structural element of a relationship to the land. The Hempstock women are nurturing, protective entities, whose magic is tied to their stewardship of the land they inhabit, as made evident through the emphasis placed on their farming and cooking, as well as through their relationships with animals. As such, the Hempstocks may be read as an interpretation of mother nature or 149 Earth goddess myths, in which the land is perceived as inherently feminine, both protecting and providing for humanity. However, both Von Czarnowsky and Landis argue that Gaiman’s take on these myths foregoes the characteristic of fertility which is so often associated with such myths. Indeed, as Landis postulates, the Hempstocks are “utterly desexualized,” and “Gaiman represents each woman with the least sexualized form allowed by the mythology: the maiden is eternally prepubescent; the mother is in her late 30s with visible signs of age; the crone is elderly” (175). There is an intriguing paradox at play in Gaiman’s take on the Triple Goddess, then, as this entity whose power is so often portrayed as that of creativity and fertility—within the context of Greek mythology, for instance, Kutash underlines how Hesiod established the “precedent for one of the most predominant of the goddess prototypes: the goddess as fertile mother” (9)—appears to be disconnected from the most straightforward, biological understanding of fertility. However, while I agree with Landis’ assessment with regards to the desexualisation of the Hempstocks, I am not as certain that it is purely a matter of age. Indeed, the argument that a woman is inherently desexualised because she is elderly or has a few wrinkles in her late 30s is rather ageist and inaccurate. Landis further states that “[w]ithin the Hempstock mythology, women exist entirely apart from men to the point of asexual reproduction” (175) and, here again, I am hesitant to fully embrace this interpretation of the Hempstocks. I agree that the Hempstock women exist entirely apart from men, but I would argue that there is no sign within the text to suggest that reproduction has occurred at all. Indeed the Hempstocks seem to be frozen in time and never age: the reader is given a first hint of this when the narrator describes Lettie as looking “as if she had been waiting for a hundred years and could wait for another hundred” (29); and the Hempstock women’ state of stasis is confirmed at the end of the novel when the now adult narrator realises that the woman he thought was an older Ginny Hempstock is in fact an 150 unchanged Old Mrs Hempstock (172). There is no indication that the Hempstocks were ever born, rather than always having existed in their current state. This state of stasis, I would argue, is what effectively desexualizes them in the novel and creates a potential conundrum with regards to Gaiman’s take on earth or nature goddesses: beyond the potential boundaries of human biology, can the Hempstocks still be perceived as generative, fertile goddesses when they themselves, their farm around them, and their practices are frozen in time and unchanging? Ironically, the Hempstock’s state of stasis simultaneously establishes their goddess status—underlining their non-humanity and imbuing them with generative powers—and curtails these generative powers by positioning the Hempstocks as static figures eschewing change and modernity. Are their powers not actually powers of re-generation (healing), then, rather than generation? While displacing the Hempstocks’ power away from an essentializing focus on creativity via biological fertility, the novel inadvertently lessens the strength of that power, relegating its Triple Goddess to a supporting role of “fixer” rather than creator (the only creator within the novel is the narrator, who becomes an artist in adulthood): Ocean’s representation of the Triple Goddess denies her creative powers and restricts her to a nurturing role, and in doing so displaces rather than challenges the gender essentialization at play in the interpretation of the myth. The novel’s representation of femininity and feminine power is articulated through the dichotomic opposition between the good Hempstocks and the evil Ursula Monkton—an opposition which is reflected in their relationship to the land. Indeed, in opposition to the Hempstocks’ embodiment of a land that protects and provides, Ursula Monkton is the outsider invading and laying waste to a land not her own. She is vicious and destructive, and this destructiveness is exemplified through a morally charged portrayal of sensuality and sexuality as 151 aberrant and voracious. As Landis aptly points out in her summarisation of the novel’s conclusion, “it is significant that evil took the form of a woman aberrant from the maternal femininity valued by the narrator. The world is returned to normalcy when the slut is dead” (176). In other words, the conflict between the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton is a conflict that revolves around morality: while the Hempstocks represent Good through their protective, desexualized motherliness, Ursula Monkton represents Evil through her portrayal of destructive rather than generative sexuality. This dichotomy finds an echo in the character’s relationship to the land: unlike the Hempstocks, Ursula Monkton is disconnected from the land and either ravages it or seeks to exploit it: she has abandoned her homeland and is, in essence, attempting to colonize Earth and the Hempstocks’ territory: When your people ripped the hole in Forever, I seized my chance. I could have ruled worlds, but I followed you and waited, and I had patience. . . . Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush. (87) Von Czarnowsky sees in Ursula’s disconnection from the land a sign of her disconnection from her true nature, because she has “[left] her home to haunt and hunt in the ‘real’ world” (22). Indeed, the novel suggests that Ursula is guilty of the double-crime of a lack of care for her own homeland, which she abandoned, and the invasion, exploitation, and destruction of a land that is not hers. She represents outside forces coming to threaten the integrity of simple and authentic rural life—symbolized here by the blackberry bush which she threatens to gorge on. The metaphorical appetite which she describes echoes her sexual voraciousness: she is portrayed as an insatiable, all-devouring threat to both men and the world they inhabit. As the hostile, invasive 152 outsider, she takes on characteristics which I have so far associated with the urban and with masculinity in my analysis of the rural/urban dichotomy in Gaiman’s novels: she brings change in the Hempstock’s static rural haven, and therefore she embodies chaos and decadent modernity. Her chaotic and voracious nature indeed echoes many of the characteristics associated with the urban in the rural/urban dichotomy, in a similar fashion to how the opal miner was portrayed in the first part of the novel: she splinters the narrator’s family unit, corrupts the sanctity of his childhood home by having an affair with the narrator’s father within its walls and by inciting his father to brutalize him, and she forcibly introduces the narrator to the adult concepts of sexuality and greed. One could consider further, here, to what extent the localisation of Ursula Monkton’s power in a voracious, abnormal, and evil sexuality fits the models of abject and monstrous femininity explored by Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. However, within this analysis, I will confine myself to point out the way in which the positioning of Ursula Monkton as the evil, corrupted opposite of the Hempstocks serves to reinforce and essentialize their idealized embodiment of femininity. Ocean appears therefore to uphold the rural/urban dichotomy through its narrative of moral conflict between Good and Evil, as emblematized by the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton: Good is found in the traditions and moral values of the rural setting, and particularly in strictly regimented gender roles and dynamics. Evil, on the other hand, is championed by the outside forces threatening to invade and irremediably transform that rural life. Von Czarnowsky surprisingly sees in the very blatantness of this depiction of dichotomous femininity a challenge to a boundaried, essentialized interpretation of gender: While the domesticity of the Hempstocks’ thus seems to communicate a surprisingly old-fashioned set of gender politics, continuously pointing to the complex constructedness of 153 gender roles actually makes the text a postmodern meta-commentary on the performance of gender roles. (26–27) Throughout her analysis of the novel, Von Czarnowsky argues that the intertwined dichotomies of gender roles and rural and urban spaces are not dispensed with, but that the characters are presented as performing their gender—and that the overtness of that performance represents a convincing critique of gender norms. I am uneasy with such an interpretation of the text, as I find that her application of the concept of gender performativity to the representations of the Hempstock women is flawed: it assumes intentionality on the characters’ part, and restricts the concept of gender performance to that of theatricality. As an example of gender performativity, Von Czarnowsky argues that “The Hempstocks have deliberately gendered their appearance into the three generation model of femininity, acting and performing their gender to full effect” (24). I see no evidence in the text of the Hempstock’s performance of gender being self-reflexive or even intentionally articulated, either to garner social acceptance, or to subtly challenge gender norms, as Von Czarnowsky suggests when writing that “[the Hempstocks] are too kind to mock, but their costumes point to the constructed nature of gender, and more importantly, the expectations tied to it” (24). I take particular issue here with the use of the word “costumes”—which evokes a conscious, articulated artificiality that tends towards a form of dismissiveness, if not mockery. The problem here, in my eyes, is that Von Czarnowsky's claim divorces a (critical, political) “performance” of gender from its social existence and embodiment—a perspective which would go against the way Judith Butler defines gender performativity. Indeed, Butler is insistent on theatricality not being the sole or central aspect of performativity: Performativity is thus not a singular “act,” for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or 154 dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition. Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated (and, conversely, its theatricality gains a certain inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity). (Bodies xxi) Butler’s understanding of performativity hinges on the coexistence and tension between dissimulation and disclosure—between the tacit repetition and reinforcement of gender norms and the display of their constructedness. This understanding of gender performativity does not discount a possible awareness of one’s performance of gender, but does not encode it as systematic: for Butler, gender identity can also be encoded through unself-conscious everyday practices of gendering. Yet Von Czarnowsky’s reading of the Hempstocks only envisions disclosure and perceives their performance of gender as fully self-aware and theatrical. Such a reading implies satire, and postulates the Hempstocks as dismissive of gender norms which they perform only for the sake of fitting into—and placating—human society. While I do not find any evidence to support such a reading within the text itself, I would agree that the Hempstocks participate in gender performativity in the Butlerian sense; and that any criticism of gender norms on their part (the height of which may be their dismissiveness of the Hempstock men’s ineptitude) is arguably counteracted by their compliance with and reiteration of essentializing gender roles. The novel’s ambiguous portrayal of gender norms is further compounded by the thematic dichotomies rhythming its narrative: at the centre of the text is the contrast between the Hempstock women and Ursula Monkton, particularly when it comes to their performances of gender and gender norms. Because the Hempstock women are, in essence, presented as the 155 embodiment of Good in the novel, while Ursula Monkton is the embodiment of Evil, the reader is implicitly led to understand the Hempstocks’ performance of gender as superior to that of Ursula Monkton. As such, these representations do more to reinforce the “surprisingly old-fashioned set of gender politics” described by Von Czarnowsky, and to enshrine an essentialist understanding of gender, than they challenge gender roles or the gender binary. In the conclusion of her analysis, Landis effectively demonstrates that the novel’s portrayal of the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton further reinforces a dichotomic understanding of femininity grounded in the perceived morality of sexuality and feminine agency: Gaiman places women in the key positions of power (both as antagonist and protagonists) within the novel. However, by glorifying the maternal and desexualized aspects of the Hempstocks while condemning the actions of the un-maternal mother and the maternal but sexualized Ursula, Gaiman engages in a rework of Freud’s Madonna-whore dichotomy that only allows female sexuality to exist as the unnatural threat. (176) The Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton do indeed represent two sides of a Madonna-Whore dichotomy, with the desexualized, benevolent, maternal women on one side, offering the boy protection and stability, and the sexually-promiscuous woman on the other, weaponizing her own body to enthral and compel the narrator’s father to do her bidding. Because the Hempstock women defeat Ursula Monkton, the novel presents the Hempstocks’ version of womanhood as morally superior to the alternatives: Ursula Monkton is destructive because she breaks down the narrator’s family unit and wreaks havoc on the countryside to satisfy her sexual desires. Situated between these two sides of the dichotomy is the narrator’s mother. Interestingly, she most closely represents the third, mediating element which Kutash describes as bringing together the two sides of a dichotomous pair. However, rather than mitigating the essentializing 156 nature of their opposition, Gaiman’s character ends up doing the exact contrary: stuck between two representations of femininity which she cannot live up to, she enshrines their characteristics as the only possible (and alienatingly unattainable) ways of performing femininity. The narrator's account of his mother’s role in the events of the novel implies that she fails as a mother because her decision to go back to work when the family is in financial crisis (51) allows Ursula Monkton to prey on her children and threaten their well-being. There is also significance in the several mentions of her charity work as an excuse for her absences from home in the evenings, and questions about the nature, motivations, and effects of that charity work. As her husband mentions to Ursula, “[s]he’s raising money for Africa. . . . For drilling wells, and I believe for contraception” (63). While this charity work might appear to be a benevolent action in line with the caring motherliness expected from “good” women such as the Hempstocks, her theoretically good endeavour rings false because of the vagueness of the project: there are no specifics as to which communities she is helping, and the broad scope of “Africa” as the object of her helpful efforts is simultaneously othering and reductive. There is also not so subtle irony in the fact that her work's purpose is partly to ensure that other women may elect not to be mothers themselves—helping women gain agency over their reproduction is a laudable goal in itself, but runs against the mothering and nurturing instinct that the novel attributes to “good” women. The narrator’s take on his mother’s charity work a little later is further loaded with meaning as, while he reiterates the purpose of her fundraising, he juxtaposes it with his own situation at home: It was Wednesday, and my mother was attending her meeting, to raise money so that people in Africa who needed water could drill wells, in the village hall of the next village down the road. She had posters that she would put up, diagrams of wells, and 157 photographs of smiling people. At the dinner table were my sister, my father, Ursula Monkton, and me. (69) The ambiguous structure of the first sentence creates a strange spatial contraction in which the unnamed and nondescript African location where the wells are being drilled is superimposed over the “next village down the road” from the narrator’s own home. This contraction creates more distance between the narrator’s home and any place perceived as beyond the village—as it suggests that even the next village down the road may be considered to be as distant and foreign as the continent of Africa. It also underlines the narrator’s sense that his mother is removing her attention and body from where they ought to be—that is to say her own home and children—and instead focusing her efforts on the distant smiles portrayed in the photographs she puts up. These smiles are immediately contrasted with the dour scene of the family dinner where the absent mother has been replaced at the dining table by Ursula Monkton. The suggestion is very clear: while the mother is working hard to make unnamed, distant villagers smile, she does not ensure that her own children are happy, and instead leaves them at the mercy of a monster. As such, the benevolence and care that one may read into her charity work are negated by the perceived neglect of her own children, and the novel’s depiction of her charitable endeavours may read, overall, as a somewhat unsubtle if pointed critique of liberal white feminism. While the narrator’s mother seemingly fails as a mother (and therefore as a good woman), the novel simultaneously implies that she also fails as a wife and that her focus on both her new job and her charity work lead her to neglect her husband to be seduced by Ursula Monkton—suggesting, ultimately, that his betrayal of his wife is her own fault for not attending to her own family. Moreover, she is essentially erased from the narrative as soon as she departs from the home—as if by failing to fit into either side of the dichotomy, she effectively relinquishes her 158 claim to womanhood altogether. The only way to be a woman, and to have power as a woman, the novel therefore seems to suggest, is to fit into either side of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy; but the only way to be a “good” woman is to be like the Hempstocks and to provide for men—both comfort and protection, physically and emotionally. The Hempstocks’ divine or magical abilities serve only these purposes. At first glance, the novel embeds feminine triads in its narrative—one such triad is the Hempstock women themselves; and a second is formed by the contrast between the Hempstocks, the narrator’s mother, and Ursula Monkton—in such a way as to open up the perception of its characters and their performance of gender and gender norms. However, rather than creating a flexibility of interpretation as well as consistently and convincingly challenging rigid interpretations of the Triple Goddess figure or gender roles, the novel’s resistance to transcending its dichotomic representation of womanhood ends up reiterating and further reinforcing essentialized expressions of femininity. 2. Ocean’s complex yet essentialized representation of masculinity The essentialized representations of femininity portrayed through the Hempstocks and Ursula Monkton speak to a broader essentialization of gender norms and gender characteristics across the novel. If the novel characterizes female power through the lens of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, and presents women as powerful in relation to the land, the men of Ocean, on the other hand, are disconnected from both family and the land, which they visit rather than inhabit. This masculine alienation is pointed out by Mrs. Hempstock herself, when discussing the absence of any Hempstock men in their household. After Lettie states that Hempstock men exist but come and go rather than live with them, Mrs. Hempstock elaborates: 159 They went off to seek their fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There’s never keeping them here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we’ve lost them, good and proper. Next chance they gets [sic] they’re off to towns and even cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at all. (94) By underlining the Hempstock men’s tendency to roam away from home, Mrs. Hempstock underlines a lack of connection to the land—both physically, and emotionally. This mobility and disconnection evokes and codes as masculine, as was the case with Richard in Neverwhere, Benjamin’s definition of the Baudelairian flâneur and Debord’s concept of the dérive: while Ocean’s women tend to the land and are tied to it, the men leave rather than cultivating and protecting the land, yet still expect access to its resources. This characterisation of the Hempstock men also applies for another character in the novel: the opal miner, both because of the role he plays in the narrative, and because of the ways in which his character is coded as urban rather than rural. As I argue in the previous chapter, the opal miner’s actions and values are portrayed as the exact opposite of the Hempstock women’s: he is cold and calculating where they are caring, and opportunistic where they are selfless. This is evident in the way he deals with the accidental death of the kitten, in the thoughtless and inappropriate gift of gems to small children, in his betrayal of his friends, whose invested money he gambled away after he squandered his own (21), and finally, in his stealing of the narrator’s family car prior to his suicide (15–16). The opal miner’s trajectory and actions echo Mrs. Hempstock’s description of the Hempstock men: their inability to stay put and their urge towards “towns and even cities” is mirrored in the opal miner’s trip from an unnamed location in South 160 Africa to England, and more specifically to English cities—to Brighton, and likely to London for his banking activities. As I have argued in my previous chapter, the urban is often associated with notions of modernity and progress, capitalism and opportunism, as well as corruption and decadence. The call which the Hempstock men and the opal miner feel towards the city is not exactly what one might term a call to adventure, but rather a call to a modern, capitalist lifestyle and, in the case of the opal miner, capitalist ventures. The opal miner himself is characterised by his opportunism, as he sees his trip to England as an opportunity to enrich himself through ventures ranging from semi-legitimate at best to entirely illegal and immoral. While his original goal to take his friends’ money to English banks may hold some legitimacy, Mrs. Hempstock’s phrasing it as “smuggling the money out of South Africa” (21) sheds some doubt on the legality of the endeavour, to which one might add some scepticism as to the ethical and legal legitimacy of his mining operations in South Africa, as well as his friends’ activities, which remained undefined in the novel. Any semblance of legitimacy is entirely thrown out of the window in Brighton, however, when after having gambled away his own money, he dips into and then siphons his friends’ investments. The opal miner’s urban drive—his opportunistic exodus towards centres for capitalism, his disconnection from others—is therefore characterised by greed and corruption. His selfishness and opportunism are perhaps best encapsulated in his suicide note, particularly the part which Lettie reads out loud without paraphrasing: “To all my friends, Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself” (21). While this statement may read as an acknowledgement of failure and shame, the lack of the pronoun I at the beginning also distances the opal miner from his actions and from the apology itself, immediately introducing doubt as to the sincerity and care he put in his words. This is 161 further emphasized by the passivity of “it was not like I meant to”: the opal miner presents himself as a victim of circumstances rather than taking responsibility or truly blaming himself for his own actions. By asking his friends for their forgiveness, he therefore makes an empty plea at best, and partakes in insidious manipulation at worst, as he puts the moral weight on his victims who are given the empty choice of forgiving or hating a man who died by suicide, thereby establishing him as the potential sacrificial victim of their resentment and harassment. The characterisation of the opal miner as selfish, opportunistic, morally decadent, and unmoored strongly establishes him as a male, urban counterpart to the female and rural Hempstocks—and he particularly represents the professional and public-facing aspects of this essentialized representation of men. While the narrator’s father doesn’t abandon his family for the siren call of the city, he nonetheless retains some of the characteristics of the urban, as he represents a manifestation of this opportunistic and decadent unmooring within the private circle—in one’s relationship with one’s family. In this, his characterization echoes that of the narrator’s mother, and is presented in direct opposition with the ideal of parenting displayed by the Hempstocks. He is portrayed as a bad father not only because he barely puts in any effort in caring for his children, but because he actively harms them both physically and emotionally. While each scene in the Hempstocks’ kitchen is an occasion for long descriptions of delicious food, warm fires and loving care, the breakfast this father shares with his son is brief and half-hearted: a promised comic which he left in his car and a slice of toast burnt to charcoal which the narrator fails to eat (14–15). In his father’s care, the narrator is left half-starving, and even punished when he rejects food. In probably the most harrowing scene in the novel, after refusing to eat the food prepared by Ursula Monkton and insulting her, the narrator becomes the object of his father’s wrath and undergoes a violent physical and emotional assault as the father breaks 162 into the bathroom in which he had hidden and waterboards him in the family’s bathtub (71–73). There are several aspects of this scene which contribute to its harrowing representation of the destruction of the narrator’s family unit and his trust in his father. One of these aspects is the father’s physical violence and his refusal to acknowledge that violence. Early on in the novel, the narrator mentions his father’s skewed sense of moral superiority because of the restraint he displays in not hitting his children: He would tell us how his father had hit him, how his mother had chased him with a broom, how he was better than that. When he got angry enough to shout at me he would occasionally remind me that he did not hit me, as if to make me grateful. (67) This recollection is a sign that not all is well in the relationship between this father and his children, and hints rather heavily at a particularly insidious form of emotional abuse in which the father figure’s virtuousness is characterized by passive and negative (not hitting) rather than active and positive (gestures or words of affection and care) parenting. This passage finds a chilling echo in the waterboarding scene, where, after the father has nearly drowned his son several times, the narrator tersely notes: “My father did not hit me” (73), underlining how, if one were to follow his father’s logic, the violence of the entire scene ought to be legitimized by the fact that he never actually struck his son. The second way in which this scene marks a rupture in the family and the relationship between father and son lies in its representation of the desecration and transformation of safe spaces into unsafe ones—a transformation which Yaeri Kim characterizes as that from “the familiar and reassuring—heimlich—into something unfamiliar and threatening—unheimlich” (152). This transformation occurs in two steps, the first being when the father breaks down the bathroom door: 163 Could he do that? I didn’t know. The door was locked. Locked doors stopped people coming in. A locked door meant that you were in there, and when people wanted to come into the bathroom they would jiggle the door, and it wouldn’t open, and they would say “Sorry!” or shout “Are you going to be long?” and— The door exploded inward. (71) In this passage, the narrator, having locked himself in the bathroom, expresses feeling safe because to this child’s mind a locked door—and more specifically, a locked bathroom door—represents an uncrossable social boundary: crossing it cannot be done without the consent of the person behind it, and therefore, his father should not be able to enter if the boy does not agree and unlock the door. The fact that his father not only does not wait for consent, as was expected, but also breaks open the door, obliterates the narrator’s trust in such social boundaries and, by extension, tarnishes his belief in the sanctity of safe spaces. This desacralisation of safe spaces is further achieved through the reconfiguration of the narrator’s perception of the bathtub as a space. As his father is repeatedly trying to drown him in the tub, the narrator comes to his own realisation: “I had read many books in that bath. It was one of my safe spaces. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die here” (72). Here, the transition is not only from safe space to not-safe space—it is from safe space to actively dangerous and deadly space. In a novel structured as a coming-of-age story, this moment of realisation marks the end of the narrator’s belief in his relative safety and of his early understanding of the world; it also symbolises a point of no return in his familial relationships: his father betrays his trust and actively harms him, his mother fails to protect him by her absence, and his sister can only stand and whimper on the other side of the door (71). This scene is a turning point, marking the 164 destabilisation of the narrator’s perception of the world—it reframes his basic, unconditional understanding of human relations and morality and challenges his perception of his own agency. As is the case with the father’s insistence that he does not physically abuse his son, the waterboarding scene finds an echo later in the novel—but this time through a counterimage rather than a repetition of the traumatic scene. After having fled the house following his father’s abuse and confronted Ursula Monkton, the narrator again finds refuge at the Hempstocks’ farm where he is offered the opportunity to take a warm bath. This moment represents a resacralisation of the act of bathing, but it is done through a displacement: the narrator is not led to a bathroom but takes this bath directly in the Hempstocks’ kitchen. One may read in this a suggestion that there is no going back—once a space has been tarnished, it may not be possible to cleanse it of traumatic associations. Instead, the sanctity of a safe haven has to be found elsewhere, in a place that is radically different and devoid of such associations. In direct, stark contrast with the traumatic experience he just endured, where “[t]he bath water was cold, so cold and so wrong” (72), the narrator is warmed up by the hot water of the Hempstocks’ tin bathtub, which is placed in front of a “huge fire,” and by the mug of “rich, and warming” soup Old Mrs. Hempstock hands him as he bathes (92). Indeed, this bath can be interpreted as a sort of cleansing ritual: Old Mrs. Hempstock’s instructions to “get scrubbin’. Rub the life and the warmth back into your bones” (92) can be read as a way to exorcise the trauma the narrator just endured, to physically scrub its stain and coldness out of his own body, in a fashion similar to the removal of the worm earlier in the novel (48–50). In this setting, in the company of the Hempstocks, the narrator once again feels safe through the intervention of what he calls “the essence of grandmotherliness” (92). In its depiction of female and male characters, Ocean seems to be just as dichotomously essentializing as it is in its representation of women 165 themselves: women (in their ideal form, at any rate) are depicted as benevolent, caring, and motherly figures, while men—the opal miner, the narrator’s father, and the adult narrator—are portrayed as selfish, fallible, and disconnected from positive emotions and relationships. One should note, here, the fact that the novel opposes human men to supernatural (potentially divine) women: whether facing off against the evil, monstrous Ursula Monkton or when presented in contrast with the benevolent entities that are the Hempstock women, the narrator’s father is fighting a losing battle and bound to be read as infinitely flawed and inferior. If this contrast can be read as an empowerment of women of sorts, it is inherently double-edged as it holds them to the unattainable standards of the nonhuman, mythical Hempstock women, while the novel’s male characters can only fail upwards, as the expectations for them are significantly lower. It is worth noting that there are no male gods in Ocean: the novel’s failure to present a model of positive masculinity insidiously suggests that it is impossible for men to attain perfection, and therefore that they need not strive for it, unlike their female counterparts. While the novel’s women are implicitly expected to emulate the Triple Goddess’ perfect embodiment of homemaking excellence, its men are content to ride her coattails. 3. The gender dynamics of Ocean’s coming-of-age narrative The interconnection of myths of the rural and the urban with gender norms and moral values that I explored in chapter 3 in the contexts of the “myth of rural England” and of the decadent, protean city is further reflected in Ocean’s take on a coming-of-age narrative: the male narrator can only achieve a better understanding of himself and his place in the world in a traditional, wholesome rural setting through the mediation of the Hempstock women as spiritual guides. The 166 warmth and safety provided by the Hempstock women can only be attained in a traditional, rural setting, because their performance of caring and generosity are coded as rural values. Urban familial relations, on the other hand, are presented as decaying or corrupted, and therefore inherently inferior to the rural hospitality of the Hempstocks. This mythical construct of the urban as a corrupting space first appears in the novel’s description of the narrator and his sister’s respective families once they reach adulthood. The scene of the narrator’s return for a family funeral or memorial is loaded with meaning, underlining the lasting effects of traumatic abuse and his lost trust in his parents. Despite the fact that one of his parents has seemingly passed away, his account obscures which parent has died, as if it were of little importance; while the father is not given any individual mention at all, the only memory of the mother that is evoked is that of a long-gone balcony (4). The narrator’s indication that he has not been back in a very long time, the absence of any description of what “talk[ing] about the departed” (4) may have involved, and the brevity of the scene—it is only two pages long—all indicate a long-lasting break down in the narrator's relationship with his parents, but one which only fully takes its meaning after one has read the forgotten memories of his childhood. The contrast established between his adult life and that of his sister's further emphasises the narrator’s dysfunctional relationship with his family and the long-lasting alienating effects of his childhood experiences. In another significant erasure, the sister is surprisingly absent from the action of this scene despite the fact that the event is hosted at her home. She remains unnamed, but the one brief mention of her by the narrator establishes her life as seemingly successful and happy. As implied in the description of her house as “bustling” and “cheerful” (4), she has a warm and happy relationship with her own family. In the same paragraph, the narrator immediately contrasts that family life with his own, which is marked by a failure to 167 connect with people, as he systematically lists the failure of his marriage, his inability to maintain romantic relationships, his apparent estrangement from his own children—who have “their own lives” and didn’t come to this funeral—and his inability to communicate his emotions directly to other people, for which he substitutes artistic creation as a way to “[fill] the empty places in [his] life” (4). By contrasting his sister’s apparent happiness with the main character’s alienation, the novel raises the question of why and how he came to be dysfunctional; and the answer to that question is provided in the exploration of his childhood memories. As is the case in the other gender-based contrasts in the novel, setting plays a role in the apparent disparities in happiness and success between the two characters. While the sister appears to have remained in the countryside, the narrator—like the Hempstock men and the opal miner before him—has departed from it, returning only for the occasion of this funeral. What one may read in these parallel behaviours is a suggestion that, in not maintaining their connection to the land and in abandoning the rural, the novel’s men cut themselves off from its values and its bounties—resulting in systematic failure, as evidenced by the opal miner’s ruin and suicide, and by the narrator’s dysfunctional family life. A woman who, like the narrator’s sister, maintains her connection to the land and upholds “rural” values of benevolence and hospitality is on the other hand presented as marginally more successful in life. The only way for the narrator to escape from this apparent cycle is to return to the rural and reconnect with the Hempstocks, who can then act as his spiritual guides to return his memories, heal his mind, and repair his relationship to both people and the land. Ocean is, fundamentally, a coming-of-age novel in which the young, male narrator is unmoored from the safety and certainties he had with regards to his family and his position in the world, and led to a new knowledge of himself and of the world through the guidance of the 168 benevolent and wise Hempstock women. In the context of a coming-of-age narrative, Jen Harrison argues that the novel’s themes centre on “the blurring of traditional stable categories,” such as the boundaries between the self and the other, between fact and fiction, or between genders, sexualities, and ethnicities (82). For Harrison, therefore, the novel is fundamentally posthumanist in its destabilisation of its narrator’s assumptions regarding his and others’ agency over themselves and the world around them, and its central argument is that “[t]o be a human being . . . is to be changeable and unstable, vulnerable to the agentic forces all around us” (83). Such a reading unravels the conventional structure of a coming-of-age narrative, in which the hero is empowered and embraces their own agency by the end of the story. Indeed, in Ocean, while the narrator is at the centre of the story and transitions from one understanding of the world to another, he is not the main agent in his own survival (one may even question whether he actually has any agency at all in the processes happening around him). Instead, the active role is played by the Hempstock women, who protect him and guide him through his self-discovery and renewed understanding of the world around him. But if this structure may suggest an empowerment of the novel’s central female characters and a celebration of women’s power through the figure of the Triple Goddess, such a reading is strongly undermined by the fact that these women’s agency and power are all geared towards protecting and educating a male character—they are only empowered in so far as it is in service of the male character’s coming-of-age. Meanwhile, they themselves are fixed in time and space in what one may argue is a profoundly essentialized and limited ideal of female power. This essentialization and limitation of female power is, in large part, due to the dichotomic oppositions that rhythm the narrative: while the deployment of two feminine triads may have suggested the introduction of flexibility and a challenge to an essentialized depiction of femininity and of gender throughout the novel, 169 the way they are articulated reinforces rather than transcends dichotomous oppositions by opposing good women to bad women, powerful women to impotent men, and an idealized feminine rural to a corrupted and masculine urban. The novel’s deployment of spatial dichotomies opposing rural to urban intensifies its gender oppositions, binding women to rural spaces through motifs of tradition, earthliness, and benevolent motherhood, while simultaneously establishing men as inherently urban, modern, opportunistic, and corrupt. In doing so, the novel’s articulation of the Triple Goddess myth perpetuates the problematic, essentialized representations of gender with which it engages. II. Pratchett’s earthly, irreverent, and protean Triple Goddess In a speech delivered at Novacon46 in 1985 shortly before the publication of Equal Rites (1987), the first novel in the Discworld’s witches subseries, Pratchett discusses the gendering of the representation of magic in fantasy literature, critiquing Western fantasy’s tendency to represent wizards as good, powerful, and wizened sages and witches as cackling hags with inferior power and a propensity for curses and “bad-tempered spells” (“Why Gandalf”). In this speech, Pratchett expresses a desire to challenge the rules and expectations of what he calls “the consensus fantasy universe”—a shared understanding of what a fantasy world ought to look like and how it ought to work, grounded in the tropes and imagery of the canon of Western fantasy literature. Arguing that he has little interest in travelling the same well-trodden path, Pratchett offers instead to shift the conversation away from a gendered representation of magical power altogether in his own take on “classical” fantasy wizards and witches: “The sex of the magic practitioner doesn't really enter into it. The classical wizard, I suggest, represents the ideal of magic -- everything that we 46 Annual British science fiction convention inaugurated in 1971. 170 hope we would be, if we had the power. The classical witch, on the other hand, with her often malevolent interest in the small beer of human affairs, is everything we fear only too well that we would in fact become” (“Why Gandalf”). In this statement, which can be read as a draft of what would become the central conceit for Equal Rites and the ideological starting point of the witches subseries, Pratchett rejects as stale a magical dichotomy that is grounded in a perceived hierarchy of gendered power and instead postulates magic as a non-gendered, amoral raw force, thereby turning to a magical dichotomy that is grounded in differing worldviews and ideologies with regards to the use of magic. The efficiency of this approach in displacing the magical tension away from the gender dichotomy, at least in the way Pratchett describes it in this speech, is questionable: it is indeed arguable that within the magical system Pratchett envisions here, wizards (men) are granted access to “the ideal of magic” while the witches (women) represent an “often malevolent” raw power that seems nonetheless restricted to petty neighbourhood conflicts—thus reinforcing, rather than deconstructing morally charged gender roles. However, the Discworld’s witches subseries expands upon and refines this original idea, crafting a magical system which, while still gendered in appearance, blurs the boundaries of its representations of witches and wizards—by playing with and challenging a gendered hierarchy of knowledge, and by rejecting an opposition between witches and wizards grounded in biology and immutable characteristics in favour of defining “witch” and “wizard” as flexible, protean social roles that may be taken on, discarded, and exchanged. I am particularly interested in how this interpretation of “classic” wizards and witches manifests in Pratchett's deployment of the Triple Goddess figure, and how, through it, it explores and challenges gendered articulations of magic, spaces, faith, morality, and their overlaps. In order to do so, I am focusing on two particular books in the witches subseries—the first is Wyrd 171 Sisters, being the book that introduces the witch coven in its triadic form; the second is Carpe Jugulum, which offers a rich and complex dive into the tensions between triad and dichotomy. 1. The Maiden, the Mother and the . . . Other One Wyrd Sisters is the first novel in the witch subseries to address the idea of a feminine triad. The novel, a parodic retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, introduces this triad as the Discworld’s take on the play’s iconic witches, the weird sisters. The Discworld witches are fast superimposed with the motif of the Triple Goddess, which the witches themselves refer to as the “power-of-three-business” within the series (Carpe Jugulum 193). Each witch is presented as a facet of the archetypal triad: Granny Weatherwax is the Crone, Nanny Ogg is the Mother, and Magrat is the Maiden. In Wyrd Sisters, Magrat is the one who convinces Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg to join her in creating a three-members witch coven (8–9), but neither Nanny Ogg nor Granny Weatherwax initially seem to be particularly enthusiastic about joining the coven, deeming it a nonessential custom—one that clashes with what they perceive as magic users’ inherently self-serving nature. Throughout the novel, however, they come to realise the power there is in unity. In Carpe Jugulum, the sixth volume in the Discworld’s witches subseries, the dynamics of the coven have significantly changed after Magrat’s marriage to King Verence and the birth of their daughter: Magrat appears to have taken a step back from the coven to attend to her queenly duties, the young Agnes Nitt has joined the coven and partly taken over Magrat’s position, and Granny Weatherwax disappears with no warning. Early on in the novel, as Nanny Ogg and Agnes discuss why Granny’s absence might necessitate a restructuring of the coven, Nanny explicitly broaches the topic of the feminine triad: 172 ‘It’s this business with . . . you know . . . three witches,’ she said. ‘The maiden, the mother and . . .’ ‘—the other one,’ said Agnes. ‘Oh yes, I know that; but that’s just a bit of superstition, isn’t it? Witches don’t have to come in threes.’ ‘Oh, no. Course not,’ said Nanny. You can have any number up to about, oh, four or five. . . . But three . . . sort of . . . works well. I don’t have to draw you a picture, do I?’ (Carpe Jugulum 124–125) This conversation between Nanny and Agnes raises several questions about the role of the feminine triad in the Discworld, such as whether the triad is necessary for the creation and function of witch covens, or simply a matter of preference or tradition. The question of tradition and custom is central to the Discworld’s witches subseries as a whole, and something of a leitmotif in the coven’s interactions. The witches constantly discuss the value of practices ingrained in the Ramtops witches’ culture, sometimes weighing in on the importance of wearing pointy hats—“Look at her. Doesn’t even wear the pointy hat. How’s anyone going to know?” (Wyrd Sisters 118)—other times on whether using specific magical artefacts is necessary in casting a spell (Wyrd Sisters 93), or even on the usefulness and composition of witch covens themselves. These debates over the importance of traditions and customs are linked to what Pratchett calls “narrative causality”: This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating itself. 173 Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. (Witches Abroad 2–3) This concept of narrative causality is a strong force in the Discworld series, and its characters are, to an extent, beholden to it. Within the Discworld series, it manifests in the character’s perceived necessity to adhere to typical fantasy roles and tropes—such as the witches’ need to wear a pointy hat, or the vampires’ weakness to light and garlic. Lian Sinclair expands upon Pratchett’s notion of lives being warped in the service of story, arguing that “[if] we too begin to identify with and perform the roles as they have been recited, the stories become inscribed onto our bodies and identities and the range of imaginable alternatives is circumscribed” (Sinclair 14). Sinclair’s reading of Pratchett’s narrative causality echoes performativity as it is understood by Butler—the tense coexistence of a tacit repetition/reinforcement of norms and the display of their constructedness. When it comes to the witches, narrative causality both grants and circumscribes their (magical, social) power: their communities believe they are witches because they dress, behave, and talk like witches are expected to, and community members come to the witches for magical help based on this belief. While the witches do not employ the term “narrative causality” itself, they are deeply aware of its power within the Discworld—they remark upon it, instrumentalize it, and challenge it at regular intervals throughout the series—this distinguishes them from the Hempstock women, who display little awareness of such a concept within Ocean. Clair Hutchings-Budd draws a direct connection between Pratchett’s notion of narrative causality and Butlerian gender performance, arguing that, for the witches, “magical performativity is inextricably linked with the performance of ‘right,’ gendered behaviour” (18). The witches must perform their gender and their witchhood “right” in order to be perceived and 174 believed—their social power and existence are reliant on that performance. This is something the witches themselves regularly come back to in the novels, and Granny Weatherwax often plays the role of the down-to-earth cynic in these conversations, usually advocating for a toned-down-to-the-essentials practice of witchcraft and a dispensation from the flair and artifices younger witches seem to favour. In Carpe Jugulum, both Granny and Nanny Ogg appear to put more stock in witch customs, in particular when it comes to the concept of the three-witch-coven. This change is apparent as Agnes, Magrat, and Nanny negotiate their new roles in the restructured coven: “I’ll make the tea, shall I?” said Magrat, getting up. “No, you sit down. It’s Agnes’s job to make the tea,” said Nanny. “You’re the mother, so it’s your job to pour.” “What’s your job, Nanny?” said Agnes. “I drinks it,” said Nanny promptly.” (Carpe Jugulum 197) As indicated in this passage, while Granny and Nanny may not fully admit that they place a lot of stock in the concept of a feminine triad, arguing that a coven can be composed of any number of witches, they in fact adhere to the three-member structure, its inner hierarchy, and its division of roles: Granny heads off immediately once she feels a shift in the structure of the coven, leaving the position of crone to Nanny, and Nanny, while she may reject the title of crone in name, promptly takes over the duties of the elder witch and assumes leadership of the coven once Granny is away. The disruption in the structure of the Ramtops coven becomes an opportunity for the witches to consider—and discuss—what the identity of a witch is: what a witch’s characteristics are, whether those are inherited and inherent traits, or whether they come along with a social 175 status and may therefore change as one moves along in life. The novel entwines these two understandings of witchhood together to form a complex representation of both the Triple Goddess as myth, and womanhood as a social role. Both Agnes and Nanny Ogg seem to have an essentialized understanding of witchhood that aligns with the concept of narrative causality—in their view, a witch’s nature and social role are inherent to who she is. This is made clear in the conversation they have after Granny’s disappearance, when Agnes considers how she, Nanny, and Granny all seem to embody the specific roles they inhabit: Nanny was someone’s mum. It was written all over her. If you cut her in half, the word ‘Ma’ would be all the way through. Some girls were just naturally … mothers. And some, Perdita added, were cut out to be professional maidens. As for the third, Agnes went on, ignoring her own interruption, perhaps it wasn’t so odd that people generally called Nanny out for the births and Granny for the deaths. (Carpe Jugulum 126) In Agnes’ view, it is the nature of each witch in the coven to be the member of the triad that she is—and that nature is so deeply ingrained in them that it would be seen “all the way through” if you were to slice them in two. This is reminiscent of the “essence of grandmotherliness” evoked by Gaiman in reference to Old Mrs. Hempstock—the Ramtops witches exuding the aura of a specific kind of benevolent femininity, aligning with a certain interpretation of Triple Goddess myths. Associated with that nature are characteristic behaviours and social roles, as suggested by Agnes’ adding that Nanny is usually called out for births and Granny for deaths: the maiden represents a form of youth and a pure form of love (indeed, both Magrat and Agnes are connected to romance during their tenure as the maiden); the mother provides care and is perceived through her fertility and her experience of it, therefore being the expected attendant at childbirth; and the crone is the elder, the coven’s leader and keeper of its knowledge and, as she 176 is the oldest, wisest and closest to death, is the attendant at the community’s deathbeds. Of course, there is a certain rigidity to that structure which it is difficult for women to fit into in all of their diversity and complexity: one may wonder, for instance, what status an infertile woman would be granted in a triadic coven, whether she would be unable to fit into one of its positions, or whether she would automatically be thrust into the role of crone; or ask whether the “motherliness” of the Mother figure is necessarily a matter of biology and fertility as is suggested by Magrat’s change of status upon her pregnancy and Nanny’s innumerable children and grandchildren. Over the course of the novel, however, Magrat and Granny’s journeys, as well as Nanny and Agnes’ reflections upon their own roles, distinctly challenge the essentialized understanding of a witch’s—and a woman’s—nature and social function that underlies such readings of the Triple Goddess myth, and the artificiality of the boundaries between each of the triad’s entities. Hutchings-Budd argues that none of the Ramtops witches “neatly ‘fit’ into any of the three prescribed archetypal roles” of the Triple Goddess (13); Karen Sayer similarly observes that “none of the witches easily adheres to the traditional/mythical roles assigned them as either women or witches” (135). Indeed, Magrat’s changing role in the coven, in Carpe Jugulum, is representative of a witch’s or woman’s ability to transition from one status or social position to another as she progresses in life. Initially the Maiden of the Ramtops coven, she lost that status upon marrying Verence, and takes on that of the Mother after having given birth to baby Esme. This transition is not instant, nor is it a smooth reconfiguration of how she perceives herself and her role within the coven, as is suggested by her impulse to perform the role of the Maiden when the witches make tea. However, the role of the Mother is not presented as something that she 177 would inherently be unfit for either, as she is seen by Agnes and her other personality, Perdita, to display what one may call motherly characteristics: I don’t like Magrat. She’s not like she used to be. Well, of course she’s not. But she’s taking charge, she’s not cringing slightly like she used to, she’s not WET. That’s because she’s a mother, Agnes thought. Mothers are only slightly damp. (Carpe Jugulum 170) Magrat’s ability to transition from the role of Maiden to that of Mother as she ages, gains new experiences, and as her priorities change indicates that the triadic coven’s Triple Goddess may consist more in social roles than in unmoving, essentialized characteristics: as she embraces married life and motherhood, she acquires new knowledge, new courage, and takes on new responsibilities—and therefore goes from being “wet” to being only “slightly damp,” as observed by Agnes and Perdita. In this blurring of the boundaries, the Discworld’s witches offer a challenge to an essentialized representation of the Triple Goddess: rather than being eternally fixed in a specific social role, like the Hempstocks, the witches are able to transition between them, offering a more complex and nuanced representation of gender, and thus tying in, as we will see by the end of this chapter, to a more fluid and less essentialized interpretation of myths. Granny’s identity and personal quest throughout the novel also underlines the blurry boundaries between the roles in the triadic coven. First, of course, is the uncertainty surrounding her status as the coven’s crone once the roles are shuffled and Nanny appears to have stepped into it in the coven’s new configuration. That uncertainty is the root of Granny’s uneasiness at the beginning of the novel, and the starting point for her journey of self-discovery, as she is unclear as to what role—if any—she is to have in the reconfigured coven, and whether this transition might be an indication that her time has passed altogether. The fact that the novel does not end on Granny’s death, or on her departure from the coven, indicates that the rules and 178 structure of the triadic coven are not as set in stone as they may seem, and that there is room for a resourceful witch to bend or stretch their interpretation of the myth of the Triple Goddess. I will come back to this particular example and its role in Pratchett’s challenging of essentializing dichotomies in more depth later in this chapter. However, I will note here that while many of Pratchett’s protagonists engage in asserting their agency and defying fate—something which I have shown in my analysis of Mort in chapter 1, but which James B. South also points out in the context of Wyrd Sisters where, he argues, “[t]here is a persistent undoing of all the stories lodged in the characters’ heads about destiny, kingship, magic, and even themselves” (South 38)—the witches’ way of doing so is quite distinct and fascinating in that they are shown to have an understanding and control of narrative causality which other Pratchett protagonists more often stumble into by accident. With regards to Granny’s characterisation, beyond the tension over the role of the Crone in the coven, one may question whether Granny could, by a technicality, qualify for the role of the Maiden—rejoining the Hempstocks in her atypical embodiment of a goddess most often characterized by her fertility and creativity. Indeed, Granny is shown in Wyrd Sisters to have never married or mothered children, and to scoff at the suggestion that she might be either a mother or a wife (262). One may wonder, in this context, what it is that makes one a maiden: is virginity the main characteristic of the Maiden, or is it a question of age or lack of knowledge and experience, especially carnal knowledge and sexual experience? Could Granny theoretically qualify as both the Maiden and the Crone? And what of Nanny Ogg, who feels herself a Mother more than a Crone? Is old age the main characteristic of the Crone, or could Nanny similarly qualify for both roles simultaneously? Sayer incidentally hits upon the shifting blurriness of these definitional boundaries, particularly when it comes to the crone, when she states that in representations of Triple Goddess myths, “the crone gradually lost her status as a 179 wise-woman to become a dried up old husk” (144). Through this statement, Sayer points to the—sometimes unsatisfying and sometimes downright problematic—ways in which the figures of the triumvirate have evolved according to shifts in worldviews and understandings of gender, age, and morality. However, within the witches subseries, one could hardly describe Granny Weatherwax as a “dried up old husk,” and Nanny does offer some form of answer to these questions in a conversation with Agnes, when she argues: But that ain’t really important, because it ain’t down to technicalities, see? Now me, I don’t reckon I was ever a maiden ment’ly. . . . When you’ve been around for a while, miss, you’ll see that some people’s body and head don’t always work together. (Carpe Jugulum 125) In this reply, Nanny suggests, as I have argued earlier, that for the Ramtops witches, their position in the triad and their identity may not overlap perfectly, and that their respective roles as Maiden, Mother, or Crone may function more as a social role than depend on biology and age, or the way that they identify themselves as individuals outside of the context of the coven. As I will further explore below, this separation between human individuality and the triadic coven as a social role, and the flexibility and blurring of the boundaries it allows, are part of what distinguishes Pratchett’s take on the myth of the Triple Goddess from Gaiman’s. 2. The earthly and the divine: Comparing Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s Triple Goddess figures While the Ramtops witches and the Hempstock women both illustrate the myth of the Triple Goddess, Pratchett’s take on the feminine triad diverges from Gaiman’s in the profound humanity of his witches, in contrast with the supernatural, quasi-divine remoteness that 180 characterises the Hempstock women. The Ramtops witches’ humanity is displayed through their bodies, behaviours, and language. Each physical description of the witches underlines that humanity, highlighting physical flaws and traits that remind the reader of the women’s ordinary physical embodiment, as well as the influence of time and nature on their bodies: [Granny] would not have described herself as anything much above ‘handsome, considering’. Nanny, on the other hand, was as gummy as a baby and had a face like a small dried raisin. The best you could say for Magrat was that she was decently plain and well-scrubbed and as flat-chested as an ironing board with a couple of peas on it, even if her head was too well stuffed with fancies. (Wyrd Sisters 43) There is something distinctly average about the witches’ appearances, whether they are termed “handsome, considering” or “decently plain”. The narrator avoids demeaning caricatures, but emphasizes their physical flaws in order to remind the reader of their humanity: they are no supernatural, ethereal creatures but living, breathing, and aging women whose bodies are perceived and evaluated through their functions rather than criteria of beauty, as underlined by the references to Nanny Ogg’s missing teeth and lined face. Like Nanny, an emphasis is also put on Granny Weatherwax’s physicality, although it takes a different form: It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one. (Wyrd Sisters 34) 181 Here, Granny’s physical appearance is compared with the stereotypical depiction of a crone and found wanting: she unexpectedly sports no warts, has lost no teeth, cannot put on weight, and has a good complexion. Granny does not look the part of a crone and is even shown to bemoan that fact in a reminder to the reader that, for Granny, part of a witch’s social role is to conform to popular understandings of what witches look like—yet in a suggestion of things to come, Granny’s body already appears to be defying narrative causality. One might note that the narrator also underlines her “slightly equine features,” counterbalancing a description that may otherwise read as too flattering. The witches, then, are no supernatural beings endowed with divine abilities—they are human women sharing the same characteristics and limitations as the other members of the communities they shepherd. Ocean’s Hempstock women do share some of these characteristics with the Ramtops witches: whether it is Lettie’s snub nose and freckles (19), the streaks of grey in Mrs. Hempstock’s red-brown hair (20), or Old Mrs. Hempstock’s “long gray hair, like cobwebs” and thin face (19), the three women are all described with humanizing details. However, the Hempstocks’ human appearance is counterbalanced by their unchanging features: while the Ramtops witches’ bodies are subject to the alterations of time and external influences, the Hempstocks are seemingly frozen in time, as is made evident in the text when the adult narrator realizes that the woman he believed to be an older Ginny Hempstock was in fact Old Mrs. Hempstock all along. Unlike the Hempstock women, the Ramtops witches are constantly aware of time, its passing, and the effect it has on them. One may think here of the comedic repetition of Nanny Ogg’s refusal to utter—or even hear—the word “crone” in Carpe Jugulum. The word is a reminder of the witches’ human temporality, and Nanny Ogg’s distaste for it reveals her reluctance to acknowledge her age, as well as her rejection of a potential change in social status 182 within the coven, from mother to crone—yet she is indeed changing, and eventually takes on the crone’s duties with gusto. Sayer argues that, rather than suggesting “inescapable biological determinism the witches’ sequence requires that we recognise the plasticity of the body and the interaction between it, our-self and the world” (137). Indeed, Pratchett’s witches are deeply interconnected with the world around them through their human nature and their physical embodiment. They are anchored in space and time in a way which the Hempstocks arguably only achieve superficially: Pratchett’s witches draw their power from, are born, live, and die in the rural communities and rural spaces which they shepherd and serve. This, however, does not necessarily mean they do not question or fear the effects time and change have on them and the world around them. Granny Weatherwax’s relationship to time in Carpe Jugulum is, like Nanny’s, connected to a distrust, maybe even a fear, of change and what it may entail. Her displeasure, at the beginning of the novel, at not having received an invitation to Magrat’s baby’s naming ceremony, and her resulting disappearance, are not caused by a perceived slight on Magrat’s part—if there is an echo of the Sleeping Beauty tale during the naming ceremony, the role of the unwelcome guest is not played by Granny, but by the vampires. Nor is it due to Granny seeing the missing invitation as a real barrier to her attending the party: as she points out in Wyrd Sisters, “[p]eople don’t have to invite witches, they just know we’ll turn up if we want to. They soon find room for us” (320). Instead, Granny’s anxiety and anger have more to do with her shifting role in the coven, and by extension, in the community: if Nanny becomes the crone, then is Granny, who is older, meant to die off, or to be nudged out of the coven? One advantage of being part of the coven, for her, is that it inherently labels her as one of the “good guys”—whether it is in Wyrd Sisters or in Carpe Jugulum, the references to the 1959 Walt Disney take 183 on Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, from unwelcome guests at the naming ceremony (Carpe Jugulum) to the “traditional” three gifts they grant to the baby (Wyrd Sisters, 51) continually establish the coven of three as stand-ins for the gift-granting fairies, and therefore categorizes them as emblematizing goodness. On the other hand, as the book suggests through allusions to older Weatherwax witches who have gone mad or evil (127), and through Nanny’s suspicions about Granny’s intentions regarding baby Esme (177), a witch without a coven is open to corruption—there are, after all, only four magical female entities in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty: three of them are good, and the fourth is the evil witch. The underlying theme in Granny’s struggle against this darkness that comes from within in Carpe Jugulum is that a witch “[goes] to the bad” (127) when she acts against the natural order. In an exploration of the roles played by the concepts of “Nice,” “Good,” and “Right” in Pratchett’s witches novels, Janet Brennan Croft argues that: The philosophy and ethics of witchcraft are firmly based on striving for Rightness. Throughout the "Witches" series, we can see the younger witches first resisting, then growing towards this ideal. Rightness is linked to the fact that magic on Discworld is a neutral power, neither black nor white. (161) As Croft suggests, because magic is a neutral power, the witches are positioned as having the purpose of maintaining magical and moral balance in the Discworld—putting the weight of upholding Good and morality on women in a similar fashion to what we have seen in Ocean. But unlike the Hempstock women, Pratchett’s witches themselves are not portrayed as simply inherently good and immune to the temptations of power and evil. They must actively strive and fight against themselves to maintain the balance. This inner struggle is displayed in the portrayal of Granny Weatherwax, whom several characters in the novel believe to have some underlying 184 affinity for darkness, if not evil. This seemingly hereditary tendency is pointed out by the Count de Magpyr in Carpe Jugulum: “Uncle used to talk about her grandmother. The Weatherwax women have always had one foot in shadow. It’s in the blood. And most of their power comes from denying it” (25). What the Count suggests here is a form of tragic flaw in Granny Weatherwax, who is postured with one foot permanently hovering over the abyss in what Hutchings-Budd refers to as “a state of constant moral angst” (16), fighting against an inherited and deeply ingrained tendency to deviance. In Carpe Jugulum, this perceived deviance is grounded in an unnatural relationship with time: darkness’s temptation is presented, in Granny’s case, as a desire to force the hand of time, to reject a “natural” death, either by old age, or by the vampire’s hand, and to attempt to prolong her own life through the possession of an innocent baby. Granny’s victory over darkness must therefore be achieved through self-knowledge and self-regulation: “No. I know you. I’ve always known you. The Count just let you out to torment me, but I’ve always known you were there. I’ve fought you every day of my life and you’ll get no victory now. . . . I knows who you are now, Esmeralda Weatherwax,” she said. “You don’t scare me no more.” (Carpe Jugulum 267) It is by acknowledging the darkness within her and by controlling it that Granny finds the strength and the strategy to outwit and eventually defeat the vampires. Unlike the Hempstock women, then, Pratchett’s witches are not immutably Good; they cannot stand outside of time or wield a magic that would put them beyond human limitations without eventually “going to the bad,” and their powers are grounded in psychology (or “headology,” as Granny calls it) more than in the control of natural or supernatural forces. 185 This discussion of Granny’s struggle against the darkness within is interesting in the context of the dichotomy of “Good” and “Bad” women in Pratchett’s witches books, and in how it compares to the portrayals of womanhood in Ocean. In both cases, the dichotomy appears to be fairly straightforward: Good is represented by the Hempstocks in Ocean, and the Ramtops witches in Wyrd Sisters and Carpe Jugulum; Bad, on the other hand, is represented by Ursula Monkton (Ocean), Lady Felmet (Wyrd Sisters), and the vampire women, particularly Lacrimosa and her Aunt Carmilla (Carpe Jugulum). In all of these novels, “evil” women are presented as manipulative and ruthless antagonists. Unlike Ursula Monkton, Pratchett’s evil women do not really qualify as femme fatales in the strict definition of the term: Lacrimosa is more of a surly teenager balking at her father’s departures from vampiric traditions, and she prefers the idea of snacking on a baby to that of drinking . . . wine (Carpe Jugulum 129–131),47 and Lady Felmet is prized by her husband for her ambition more than for her perceived beauty or charisma (Wyrd Sisters 25); neither of them is portrayed as instrumentalizing their sexuality and femininity to achieve their goals. The emphasis is placed instead on their ruthlessness—in Lady Felmet’s case, a ruthlessness characterized by her “exult[ing] in her disdain for the land and its creatures, absolutely ignorant of their power until they overwhelm her” (Bach 123). Rebecca Ann Bach aptly points out how that disregard for the land, nature, and non-human creatures is contrasted, in the novel, with the Ramtops witches’ profound care for other animals and for the land. A similar ruthlessness can be found in the reference made by Vlad to his Aunt Carmilla in Carpe Jugulum. As he and Agnes are exploring his portrait gallery, he notes, upon walking up to her portrait, that 47 The emphasis placed on the act of drinking wine in this scene is a reference to the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which Bela Lugosi, acting as the titular character, famously declares “I never drink. . . wine.” This homage to the Tod Browning Dracula firmly places Carpe Jugulum’s vampires within a specific, pop-culture heavy frame of reference when it comes to vampiric lore, the better to satirize and deconstruct what have become some of the most common and most beloved tropes of the genre. 186 “[s]he was said to bathe in the blood of up to two hundred virgins at a time. . . . I don’t believe that. Use more than eighty virgins and even quite a large bath will overflow, Lacrimosa tells me.” (216) This depiction of Aunt Carmilla is a reference to Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory who is alleged to have murdered (and bathed in the blood of) hundreds of young women.48 Báthory’s legend served as the inspiration for many evil women in fiction and has become shorthand to describe unnatural cruelty in women. As such, Aunt Carmilla, and by extension Lacrimosa, who could only know that more than eighty virgins’ blood would cause the bath to overflow if she had tried it herself, are the direct opposite of what a “good” woman—and, more specifically a good noble woman—ought to be: they are neither nurturing, caring women, nor humanists or philanthropists. Instead, they abuse their intelligence and power to hurt younger, vulnerable women in a portrayal that could easily be read as a condemnation of wealthy, idle aristocracy’s leeching off the poor’s work and life force to sustain its lifestyle and unnaturally extend its lifespan. This representation of powerful but evil womanhood finds an echo in the suggestion that Granny Weatherwax may have possessed a baby to foil death—in both cases, a woman is depicted as potentially abusing her power by harming the weak to serve her own selfish and unnatural purposes. Granny, however, being a rural witch at heart, has the capacity for evil but lacks the vampire women’s thirst for power and eternal life, and therefore does not transgress the laws of nature as they have. While this contrast established between Granny Weatherwax and the vampire women in Carpe Jugulum is grounded in the abuse of magical powers, in Wyrd Sisters, the opposition between the “good” witches and “evil” Lady Felmet also hinges on the way they handle political 48 Aunt Carmilla’s name itself is another cultural reference—in this case, to Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic Gothic vampire novella Carmilla. The figures of Elizabeth Báthory and Carmilla stand out, in popular culture, as powerful women who specifically prey on younger, vulnerable women for the alleged purpose of sustaining or prolonging their own lives and power. 187 power. Lady Felmet, as the Discworld avatar of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, pushes her husband to commit murder in order to gain social and political power. The witches, on the other hand, refuse to involve themselves in politics on principle. Granny summarizes their “official” position as follows: . . . I can’t go meddling. It’s not right to go meddling, on account of I can’t interfere with people ruling. It has to sort itself out, good or bad. Fundamental rule of magic, is that. You can’t go round ruling people with spells, because you’d have to use more and more spells all the time. (Wyrd Sisters 103) This perspective on “meddling” in politics reflects the witches’ broader approach to magic and its (mis)uses. For the Ramtops witches, true magical power does not lie in the ability to control people or to channel the elements in spectacular displays, because such actions would contravene the laws of nature and therefore result in increasing social costs and consequences. Bach stresses, for instance, how Granny Weatherwax only ever borrows animals’ minds “gently and respectfully,” and how “[she] always leaves gifts of gratitude when she is done borrowing” (Bach 125). Indeed, in the witches novels, the act of borrowing is presented in the form of a mutually beneficial, equivalent exchange between Granny and the animal she borrows from, rather than in the form of the exploitative, one-sided mining of a resource. Croft further characterises that approach as one that is grounded in rightfulness and the preservation of human (or, in the case of borrowing, non-human) agency: But witches must restrain their power as a matter of principle. Using magic on people removes their right to choose, and therefore using magic conflicts at a very basic level with being Right. And using magic on things can engrain the habit of using magic and lead to using it on people. (162) 188 The witches’ social power is therefore earned naturally, through their sensible serving and steering of the community in the right direction, as the witches point out in a discussion over helping Verence: they will watch over him because they “want him good and fresh” when he faces off against the Felmets, but will “leave him to fight his battles in his own way . . . . Provided he looks like winning” (250). It is not that the witches have no social power, or that they do not wield it to achieve their own goals, to an extent, but they instrumentalize power differently. Rather than cutting against the grain, they cut along it, providing what might be termed course correction rather than forcefully altering fate or people’s natural inclinations: if the vampires of Carpe Jugulum have a predilection for mind control, the witches embrace the more subtle power of suggestion and the crafty manipulation of narrative causality. Pratchett’s take on the myth of the Triple Goddess is therefore more embodied within the limitations of the human body and the human mind than Gaiman’s: while Gaiman’s Hempstock women are characterized by a supernatural, quasi-divine remoteness and their fundamental and immutable goodness, the Ramtops witches’ real powers lie in knowing how people work (both physically and mentally) and in using that knowledge to serve the community. 3. Standing on the edge and making decisions In the witches novels, Pratchett toys with and challenges the gendered hierarchy of knowledge which he detected in the consensus fantasy universe’s representation of wizards and witches: instead of having the wizards be community leaders and decision-makers by virtue of their university education, the Discworld series portrays them as, if not entirely incompetent, rather whimsical and irresponsible in their magical practice, often leading to catastrophic 189 consequences. It is instead the witches who are cognisant of the moral, social, and environmental consequences of magical experimentation, and who are therefore the ones who end up making the hard decisions, guiding their communities, and keeping the Discworld afloat. As such, the hierarchy of knowledge appears to be reversed—with the witches implicitly suggested to be superior in terms of both leadership and knowledge. Indeed, the Ramtops witches are often presented as dismissive or outright suspicious of city-born culture and forms of knowledge. Their suspicions extend beyond wizards’ magic to theatrical performance, as is evident in Granny Weatherwax’s reaction to the concept of the theatre: The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. (Wyrd Sisters 276) What disturbs Granny about the theatre is its ability to bend and reformulate reality at will. Theatre, in Granny’s eyes, grants the playwright and performers the ability to (re)write history itself: “This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it” (282). For Granny, the theatre offers both an interpretation of myth and a form of narrative causality: it presents a singular interpretation of history, which is disseminated and granted the seal of truth via its performance to a rapt audience. The play, in other words, becomes the approved version of history and elevates it to mythical status. Granny’s main objection, surprisingly, is grounded in its own form of elitism rather than an objection to the possibility of (re)writing history. In her opinion, “ordinary people” (and in this case, one may wonder whether “ordinary people” does not apply to men more specifically, as everyone 190 involved in the writing and performing of Hwel’s A Night of Kings, the play attended by the witches, is male) ought not to play with the fabric of reality because they do not know its rules, and therefore are wont to change the world on a whim, according to subjective and individual tastes rather than for the good of the community. Granny’s perspective on the theatre aligns with the witches’ understanding of the divide between witches’ (women’s) magic and wizard’s (men’s) magic which I have mentioned earlier: while they perceive their own magic as both grounded in and in service of the community, they view wizards’ magic as whimsical and irresponsible experimentation with the forces of nature. In other words, the witches perceive themselves as community leaders in possession of a knowledge, savoir-faire, and moral compass which “ordinary people” do not—and therefore think they ought to be the ones making the big decisions in the Discworld. This particular point of view is explicitly expressed in Carpe Jugulum: And one of the things a witch did was stand right on the edge, where the decisions had to be made. You made them so that others didn’t have to, so that others could even pretend to themselves that there were no decisions to be made, no little secrets, that things just happened. You never said what you knew. And you didn’t ask for anything in return. (48) The witches are established as the decision makers of the Discworld, assessing when the use of magic is actually warranted, and to what extent. Such an understanding of a witch’s life and purpose presents a challenge to patriarchal societal structures, as well as to the gendered dichotomy of rural/urban magic in which the witches’ magic is dismissed as “peasant magic . . . for fools” (Wyrd Sisters 19), instead establishing the witches as just as able as men, if not more so, as community leaders. However, this characterisation of witches maintains a dichotomous opposition within the novel, between witches and wizards, and implicitly between women and 191 men, within a hierarchical view of social power and morality, contributing to the tension between the challenge and reinforcement of the essentializing dichotomies within the novel. Through the moral choices they make and their selfless acts of service, the witches earn the love and respect of their community, which in turn grants them the legitimate social power to steer that community to act as they see fit. This social power is opposed in the text to that of the vampires, which can only be achieved through force and the medium of mind control. Nanny’s raising of a mob in Carpe Jugulum exemplifies this contrast. As the witches come to the conclusion that their only viable way into the occupied castle is to create a distraction at the front gates, Nanny elects to do so by organising a mob that will storm the castle. When Agnes points out that “You don’t organize a mob . . . A mob is something that happens spontaneously,” Nanny retorts that she can generate that spontaneity by mobilizing the seventy-nine Ogg family members that live in the region—but she also stresses to her son Jason, as she sends him to fetch them, that he should tell them their attendance is not compulsory (207). This scene functions as an overlap of dichotomies on several levels and plays with their structures. It satirically echoes mob scenes elevated to pop culture cult status by films such as the 1931 James Whale adaptation of Frankenstein or Disney’s 1991 take on Beauty and the Beast, in which the mob seeks to persecute a character whose main claim to “monstrosity” is their difference and marginalised status. When played straight, such scenes evoke criticism of the mindlessness of discrimination operating within a mob mentality. That same situation is played for laughs in Carpe Jugulum, however, as Nanny organizes the mob not through hate-fuelled, strident imprecations against their target, but in a fashion more reminiscent of the planning of a community fete, casually debating what their rallying cries should be (if any), what weapons they should bring, and how much actual damage should be caused (not much, as the stonework around the main gate is 192 “quite fragile”) (208). In this scene, the emphasis is not placed on the sense of danger and injustice evoked by a mindless mob unfairly persecuting a marginalised character: the “monster” hiding behind the castle walls is the powerful and manipulative vampire family. The mob itself is just a distraction, and therefore loses its political charge, as evidenced by Nanny’s suggestion that “general yellin’” would be appropriate, rather than any specific message (208). By satirically portraying Nanny’s craftiness in organizing a “spontaneous” mob, this scene achieves two effects: it displays the witches’ ability as community leaders, and it also establishes a distinction between them and the vampires by depicting how they rely on community organizing rather than mind control. Satirizing mob scenes, in this context, ironically drives in that distinction: while such scenes usually depict a mindless mob often driven by the manipulation of an evil character, the witches turn that scenario on its head by collaborating with the community they gather and by insisting on its members retaining their agency. This change in tone in Carpe Jugulum’s take on the mob scene further underlines the difference between a witch's exercise of power and the methods employed by female vampires. Nanny does not need to control the minds of her family members to make them do her bidding—indeed, she even explicitly tells them that their attendance is not mandatory—but relies on their trust in her judgement and leadership to achieve her goals, and has an open conversation with them on how this goal ought to be achieved. Kristin Noone argues that “[t]he characters in Discworld who find happy endings are those who recognize both the power and the danger of enchanting objects, who know that desire may be uncontrollable but can control their own responses to such desire” (34). In the Discworld, and in Carpe Jugulum specifically, both the narrator and the witches themselves constantly remind the reader of the distinction between having magical ability and knowing when it is right to exercise that ability. Goodness is 193 associated with self-control and the regulation of one’s powers and desires. As was the case in the earlier example opposing the witches’ approach to power and leadership to the female vampires’ supernatural powers, the mob scene emphasizes the opposition between rural and urban, and between the poor and the aristocracy. The vampires are led by the Count de Magpyr, an aristocrat whose name and emblem evoke the magpie, a bird associated with a love for shiny things and theft. He is characterized by the way in which he distances himself, elevates himself over, and exploits the community he inhabits. Both his immortality and privileged lifestyle are parasitic in nature—he sustains himself on humans’ blood and by appropriating others’ wealth and power. The witches, who are the representatives of modest, rural life, are the foil to the Count’s immoral, idle aristocracy: they anchor themselves and their power in their connection with the community not through a top-down, exploitative approach, but through the care and services they provide them with. As such, one might argue that they break down or challenge dichotomies of gender and location by claiming, as rural women, the social power and knowledge which are so often attributed to rich, educated men, and by regulating their use for the greater good rather than for selfish purposes. In this discussion of the Discworld witches’ ability to challenge gender dichotomies, a point remains to be made, however, with regards to whether a reversal of roles represents a true dismantling of an essentializing dichotomy. As I have argued earlier in my analysis of Ocean, such an inversion of roles, in which moral authority, leadership, and fighting power are given to the female characters rather than the male characters, can result in a unilateral shift of the emotional and physical burden of pushing society forward and towards good. In other words, the women appear to be doing all of the heavy lifting, while the men reap the benefits of their efforts. I would argue that this is the case in Ocean, where the narrator achieves his coming-of- 194 age experience through the efforts of the Hempstock women, and a similar pattern appears in Carpe Jugulum, where the witches perform endless acts of service to the community for the greater good, while ostensibly asking for nothing in return. Indeed, over the course of the novel, the witches essentially reclaim Verence’s kingdom, secure his position, and save his family on his behalf. The novel displays an amused awareness of this pattern, as indicated by Nanny’s reassurance to Magrat that “Nothing’s going to happen to him. It’s like that chess stuff, see? Let the Queen do the fightin’, ‘cos if you lose the King you’ve lost everything” (295). The comparison of the novel’s inverted gender roles with chess mechanics points to the limitations of that inversion: while the witches may appear to be the heroes of the kingdom (and of the story), they are not its true centre but rather an adjunct fighting on behalf of a male individual of higher value. The witch triad seems to hold a flexible position between the two sides of the gender dichotomy, not fitting within the bounds of specific categories, but connecting them together by blurring their boundaries—yet this raises the question of whether this position operates a real transition away from a dichotomous representation of gender roles and gender performance, or whether the mediation effected by the witches between the two sides only serves to rebalance them and maintain the status quo. Rather than dismantling or transcending the gender dichotomy, this example suggests instead an arguably satirical reinforcement of the features attributed to the Triple Goddess myths: as benevolent and nurturing figures, both Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s witches devote their powers to the care and support of a community in which men rely on women’s work to achieve their own development with less effort, thereby maintaining a form of hegemony within their fantasy worlds. 195 4. Religious vs. profane: Finding equilibrium between the Good and Bad Oats Among the dichotomies in Pratchett’s witches novels, there is one I have not mentioned yet, but whose overlap with dichotomies of both gender and location plays an important role both in the Discworld’s deployment of myth, and in its reflection on the nature of myth itself, as well as its function: the sacred/profane dichotomy. If Small Gods might at first glance appear to be the main Discworld novel devoted to the topic of religion, faith and religion are also central themes in Carpe Jugulum, in which a reflection on faith, religion, myth, and mythmaking is relayed through the dichotomic ideological conflicts between its characters, as well as the conversations and mediation that emerge out of them. What distinguishes the novel’s approach to those themes is not so much the way in which the religious/profane dichotomy overlaps with those of gender and location, but more so the way the novel plays with these overlaps. In Carpe Jugulum, organised religion is a patriarchal, urban concept in opposition to the witches’ general suspicion of religion and any organised approach to faith or magic.49 The witches, then, represent secularism. On the side of religion, The Quite Reverend Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oats satirizes missionary monotheistic priests; his conversations with the witches provide the novel’s longest and richest arguments on faith and religion. I would argue, however, that the vampires can also be read as a satire on self-improvement cults, with the Count de Magpyr leading them as a dangerously positive-thinking guru. The novel’s dichotomous structures create the space for an ideological debate over the role and danger of organized religion, as well as over the distinction between faith and religion, as it pits the witches’ secular 49 This characteristic of the witches is not new to Carpe Jugulum: in Wyrd Sisters, Granny Weatherwax already expresses her discomfort with merely performing magic together as a coven: “She always felt uncomfortable after getting involved in organized magic or, as she would put it, out of sorts with herself” (99). 196 understanding of myth and the role of faith in a community against Omnianism’s and the vampires’ proselytization and tyranny. At the centre of this debate is Oats’ wavering between the strictures of Omnianism—what his religion’s interpretation of sacred texts tells him to do and think—and his personal faith and beliefs, as they do not always intersect. Oats’ inner struggle, his being “in two minds about everything,” is humorously depicted in the novel as the presence of two warring voices in his mind, “the Good Oats and the Bad Oats,” which he has considered getting exorcized over (224–225). It is Oats’ encounter and subsequent conversations with Granny Weatherwax which bring this inner conflict to a head, as Granny explains to him her diverging opinion on what faith and religion actually are after an argument over the aggressive nature of Omnian religious practices: You say that you people don’t burn folks and sacrifice people any more, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just being nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbours. (Carpe Jugulum 337) In this passage, Granny calls out the hypocrisy in Oats’ argument that his religion does not resort to human sacrifice anymore, because such practices are still inscribed in the religious texts he claims to follow. True religion, she argues, would mean for him to uncritically follow those tenets and practices which he claims are in the past. For Granny, faith is couched in absolutes—either Oats truly believes in what he preaches, or he is merely play-acting for social credit. This reflection on the performativity of religious practices finds an echo in the depiction of the vampires’, and particularly Count de Magpyr’s, dangerous self-improvement creed. The Count de Magpyr teaches his followers that they will empower themselves by rejecting the very 197 idea that they might be weakened or hurt by such things as daylight or religious symbols. Heralding the power of “positive thinking” (Carpe Jugulum 352), the Count insists that the training he has provided to his family and followers will make them immune to the dangers of sunlight, garlic, and holy water: “Because of my training, you will regard it as rather a nuisance, not a reason to crumble into a little pile of dust. Reflect on this” (Carpe Jugulum 349). However, the emptiness of such promises is quickly revealed when the Count is injured at the contact of garlic, and when, shortly after, Cryptopher, the vampire he had urged to stand against the holy water bomb assault, bursts into flames on impact. The Count’s reaction to this situation is quite revealing: “‘You know, that should not have happened,’ said the Count, looking at his blistered fingers. ‘He obviously was not . . . truly one of us’” (Carpe Jugulum 352). Rather than displaying shock or questioning the validity of his teachings, he immediately blames Cryptopher for his own death. Because the Count relies upon his self-improvement practices’ promise of invulnerability to draw in and control the other vampires into doing his bidding, he cannot admit that his creed is based on a lie. Instead, he blames Cryptopher’s failure to be invulnerable on a lack of faith, as this will lead any doubtful followers to practice his creed harder in case they end up like Cryptopher. Ironically, however, following a false prophet such as the Count has dire consequences for the vampires as it reinforces the very effects against which they were trying to immunize themselves: “‘You’ve taught us how to see hundreds of the damned holy things! They’re everywhere! Every religion has a different one! . . . Everywhere I look I see something holy! You’ve taught us to see patterns!’” (Carpe Jugulum 368) In this scene, the Count’s false faith is pitted against Oats’ newly attained true belief: because Oats really believes in the power of the religious symbols and holy water he wields against the vampires, those are made effective. The vampires’ practices, on the other hand, are based on the Count’s lies and not grounded in 198 true belief. As such, they are not made invulnerable, but even weaker, as the Count has inadvertently made them vulnerable to religious symbols by raising their awareness of these symbols’ existence and the beliefs placed in them: by suggesting that they could overcome the effects of the symbols, he made them believe that they had an effect on them in the first place. This is an instance of the double-edged sword of narrative causality: on the one hand, widespread, true belief in a concept or symbol imbues it with power; on the other hand, the challenging of such a belief may itself counterproductively strengthen and empower it through its reiteration. While one might be tempted to read a wholesale dismissal of faith and religion in the depictions of Omnianism and the vampires’ self-improvement cult, and agree with Granny’s assertion that, in the Discworld, “[m]ythology’s just the folktales of people who won ‘cos they had bigger swords” (Carpe Jugulum 281), the novel offers no outright apology for atheism. The witches’ stance on the topic may be presented as superior to Oats’ or the vampires’ initial positions, but not because they represent “rationality” against a perceived “irrationality” of faith. The witches do not reject the concepts of belief or faith themselves; they are, instead, shown to be supportive of an individual’s beliefs—as long as they do not invalidate another’s and infringe on their liberties. As Granny eloquently summarizes it: “It’s not my place to tell ’em what to believe, if they act decent” (Carpe Jugulum 304). In this context, the satire and criticism of the performativity underlying Omnianism and the vampires’ cult cannot be read as a suggestion that true belief, being inherently uncritical, is bad. Sayer uses the example of the “power of three business” to show that Pratchett’s approach to superstition—and to myth—is a complex one: Nanny sees the necessity of three as a superstition that goes beyond books and writing. This is the kind of myth that helps us make sense of the world, that goes beyond Culture 199 and into Nature. And, though Agnes initially questions it, Magrat — who suggested they meet as a coven — Granny and Nanny are all equally convinced of the power of the figure three. (144) The witches are aware of and wield the power of belief throughout the novels—whether it is through the strengthening of their coven by a triadic structure or through their using the vampires’ beliefs against them. What they are critical of and combat is the uncritical adherence to social interpretations of myth. Granny’s conversations with Oats prompt him to perform a critical reading of the tenets and practices of Omnianism, distinguishing between his own true beliefs and the doctrines he does not adhere to. Granny teaches him, in essence, to perform his own interpretation of myth rather than to uncritically follow his religious leaders. III. Breaking the rules good and hard: challenging dichotomies and interpreting myth in the Discworld Throughout this chapter, I have explored Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of the Triple Goddess figure seeking to understand how they, and how representations of feminine triads in fantasy more broadly, articulate and confront some of our understandings of gender. I have focused more particularly on the ways in which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of the Triple Goddess figure highlight and, to an extent, challenge an essentializing, dichotomous perspective of gender and space. My initial hypothesis with regards to the introduction of a third element within a dichotomy, and with regards to the representation and instrumentalization of a mythological triad was that they may provide avenues of flexibility and a blurring of essentialized boundaries between the two sides of a dichotomy—here, the gender dichotomy. 200 This hypothesis has proven inaccurate in the context of Ocean, where the characterisation of the Hempstock women ended up, for the main part, reinforcing essentializing gender tropes and the overlap between an essentializing gender dichotomy and an essentializing spatial dichotomy. The answer to that question with regards to Pratchett’s witches novels is more complex and nuanced. I find clearer and stronger grounds for a challenge to essentializing dichotomous representations of gender in Wyrd Sisters and Carpe Jugulum, because of the roles played by narrative causality and the witches’ propensity to bend and break rules which they disagree with. The contrast between these two authors’ articulation of the gender dichotomy could therefore be explained rather bluntly by the fact that Ocean’s representation of womanhood and female power is more conservative and arguably outdated: it allows its goddesses power and agency, but centres that power in essentialized gender characteristics and constantly orients their agency towards the support or betterment of male characters. Pratchett’s novels, on the other hand, through their satirical depiction of gendered magic systems, question the nature of that power more than Ocean ever does, challenging the essentialized characteristics attributed to “powerful women” and the societal roles they are confined to. However, throughout this section, I will demonstrate that within Pratchett’s early witches novels, this challenge is only ever partial because the triadic figure of the Triple Goddess is constantly brought back into a dichotomic framework, thereby challenging and reinforcing essentializing dichotomies simultaneously. As I have stated before, narrative causality plays a significant role throughout the Discworld series. One may think here of the novel Hogfather, in which the eponymous character’s murder brings about an excess of belief in the Discworld. This overabundance of belief in turn leads to the creation of new gods as soon as an individual thinks them up and voices that suggestion, resulting in humorous encounters throughout the novel with such 201 characters as the Verruca Gnome and the Oh God of Hangovers. In the witches novels, it is quickly established that the witches’ magic is not characterized by spectacular displays of power, but rather by a deep understanding of the nature of people, their wants, and their actual needs. This fact is recalled throughout the novel by the humorous repetition of Granny’s insistence that “headology” (the Discworld version of psychology) is a key element of their magical practice: “A witch should act like that, you know. There's no need for any dramatic stuff. Most magic goes on in the head. It's headology” (Wyrd Sisters 306). Indeed, the witches only resort to bigger magic as a last resort—as is the case when they perform time magic in Wyrd Sisters—and most often rely on a combination of herbology, good old common sense, and the people’s belief that a witch’s remedies must work, as evidenced by the narrator’s observation that while Magrat may use “ear massage and flower-based homeopathic remedies for everything short of actual decapitation . . . Witches’ remedies generally did [work], regardless of the actual form of delivery” (Wyrd Sisters 89). As such, it is through the appearance of being a witch—by wearing the pointy hat, by having the behaviour expected of a witch—that the witches are imbued with power, and as long as they make it seem “witchy” enough, they can affect their community’s interpretation of myth and of their powers. This is the case when it comes to the concept of the feminine triad and the myth of the Triple Goddess. In Ocean, the Hempstock’s nature and power is neither questioned nor discussed in any meaningful way: they are a variation on the myth of the Triple Goddess (although this is never stated in the text) and are established as just and powerful with no further explanation. In the witches novels, on the other hand, both the existence and nature of the Triple Goddess figure appear to be more power of suggestion and narrative causality than set-in-stone characteristics. A coven of witches may or may not consist of three women; the maiden, the mother, and the crone may or may not personally, inwardly identify as 202 such; and their physical appearance may or may not match the expectations placed upon each member of the triad. They are able to wield the power of the triad and to exist as a Triple Goddess figure because they perform the role which they attribute to it. The Ramtops witches’ take on the feminine triad and the Triple Goddess figure is indicative both of their reliance on narrative causality and on their tendency to bend the rules. While Granny and Nanny, in particular, often discuss the rules of magic and what may or may not be done, as well as what is right and what is wrong, their victories often rely on them not practicing what they preach. As South argues in the context of Wyrd Sisters, there is “one way in which we can deny the facts of life: we can redescribe them and, in doing so, come to think about the world differently, and cause others to do so as well” (33): in the witches’ novels, the Ramtops witches defy narrative causality by changing their point of view, and effectively rescripting their own story. An example of this is given in the magpie scene, towards the end of Carpe Jugulum: As Agnes turned round again she saw the three magpies. They were perched on a branch over the road. “Three for a funeral—” she began. A stone whirred up. There was an indignant squawk and a shower of feathers. “Two for mirth,” said Nanny in a self-satisfied voice. “Nanny, that was cheating.” “Witches always cheat,” said Nanny Ogg. She glanced back at the sleeping figure behind them. “Everyone knows that – who knows anything about witches.” They went home to Lancre. (399) 203 In this scene, the witches come across some magpies sitting in a tree, in a repetition of an event that happened twice earlier in the novel. Yet while in these previous occurrences, the witches, and then the vampires, predicted disaster through the symbolism of a group of three magpies (“Three for a funeral”), this time, Nanny is not inclined to make such a prediction. By throwing a stone at one of the magpies, she performs a form of magic, both changing the prediction, and changing fate—from death to mirth. The witches take a similar approach to many of the magical and mythical dead-ends they encounter, bending the rules until they fit the world as they see it. The ending of Carpe Jugulum, Granny’s updated sign that reads “I <STILL> ATE’NT DEAD” (411), is a perfect representation of this approach. It is an unexpected conclusion to the feminine triad’s dilemma: while the changes in status of the other three witches—the arrival of Agnes in the coven, Magrat’s motherhood, and Nanny’s aging—would all suggest that Granny’s time as part of the coven and on the Discworld is up, Granny has defeated the odds, survived, and maintained her status in the coven, making the Triple Goddess figure a quartet. Across the witches subseries, the coven’s relationship to narrative causality and to dichotomies—particularly the gender dichotomy—progressively evolves, shifting away from binary oppositions to something more fluid and flexible. Hutchings-Budd and Sinclair’s feminist analyses of the subseries focus on the ways in which the novels’ narratives intersect with feminist theory in their answer to Graves’ interpretation of myth, particularly in the case of the myth of the Triple Goddess. Hutchings-Budd sees the feminism of the earlier witch novels as having a more essentialist tone, grounded in the gendered differences in magical practice that the characters themselves willingly and actively uphold. She takes Granny Weatherwax as an example, arguing that “Esme’s stance is central to Pratchett’s referencing of those strands of feminism (like de Beauvoir) that emphasised essentialism and separateness, with the character’s 204 voice joining wizardry’s refusal to accept women into their enclave, maintaining that biological sex determines magical abilities as fixed and immutable” (14). Indeed, looking at Equal Rites for instance, as I have in the previous chapter, a gendered, dichotomic representation of magic persists—despite Pratchett’s expressed desire to portray a magical system not grounded in gender but in differing worldviews and practices—up until the very end of the novel, where the witches and the wizards maintain their respective rural and urban enclaves, allowing only for exceptional incursions into the other side. Both Hutchings-Budd and Sinclair, however, have explored how Pratchett’s later witches novels progressively shift away from this strict dichotomic perspective by instrumentalizing and playing with the strictures of narrative causality in a way that is akin to Butler’s understanding of gender performance: 50 Sinclair argues that “we must acknowledge the dual truth that a witch’s power, especially Granny’s, comes both from being able to know when to adhere to narrative causality and when to subvert it, and the points where intervention is possible” (15). For Sinclair, one of the central themes of the witches novels is, therefore, one’s ability to “break free from the constraints of narrative” (15), that is to say, to overcome the strictures of narrative causality and of outside categorisation. Within this context, both the novel’s triads and dichotomies play a central role, as one is led to question the constrictive nature of dichotomies. Drawing from Kutash’s argument on triads, I have considered whether shifting from a dichotomous to a threefold structure might offer new avenues for flexibility and broadened interpretation. However, in the context of Carpe Jugulum in its individuality and without considering later novels in the witches subseries, this threefold structure is itself not impervious to essentialization and calcification, as I have shown 50 By Pratchett’s later witches novels, I mean here the Tiffany Aching subseries, composed of The Wee Free Men (2003), A Hat Full of Sky (2004), Wintersmith (2006), I Shall Wear Midnight (2010), and The Shepherd’s Crown (2015). 205 throughout this chapter with the figure of the Triple Goddess. In Carpe Jugulum, the Triple Goddess figure is often brought back into a dichotomic framework, both in its characteristics and in the way it is opposed to other representations of femininity or masculinity, thereby reinforcing this framework at the same time as it calls its limitations into question. Both Ocean and Carpe Jugulum, then, straddle the line between challenging and reinforcing essentializing interpretations of myth, although Carpe Jugulum interestingly presents a challenge to the triadic structure itself, opening avenues to consider different ways to transcend essentializing dichotomic interpretations of myth. By refusing to strictly adhere to the concept of a feminine triad, and by constantly playing with the characteristics of the dichotomies structuring the novel, Carpe Jugulum becomes a statement about an individual’s relationship to myth and its interpretation. The novel challenges rigid readings of myth, and offers flexibility of interpretation and the blurring of boundaries and rules as alternatives to essentializing dichotomous thinking. Ocean’s and Carpe Jugulum’s takes on myths of the Triple Goddess offer a fascinating glimpse into the ways in which both authors tackle the issue of universalisation and essentialization within the interpretation of myth, cementing Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s championing of individuality, agency, and flexible thinking. The analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s interpretations of the Triple Goddess myth provides another window into the advantages and issues underlying their instrumentalization of myth, in particular in the context of representations of gender roles and gender performance. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s novels place a strong emphasis on the notion of agency, especially when it comes to the interpretation of myth and of social norms; in doing so, these novels champion individual, de-essentialized, and flexible interpretations of myth through their instrumentalization (and often satire) of genre tropes. However, these novels’ challenge to 206 essentialized representations of myth always occurs through the deployment of dichotomies which replicate and reinforce the very essentialization which they seek to decentre and deconstruct. In order to move beyond this self-reinforcing loop, one may have to look to Pratchett’s later witches novels and the ways in which they instrumentalize Butler’s concept of gender performativity and push the boundaries of the gender dichotomy, as Sinclair has done, and further analyse how triadic and dichotomic structures are articulated, or maybe even transcended, throughout their narratives. As I have shown throughout this chapter, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of myth in Ocean, Wyrd Sisters, and Carpe Jugulum, is guided by a dichotomous understanding of gender, place, and myth grounded in a Western, secular, rationalist, and patriarchal worldview which the novels simultaneously challenge and reinforce. This conundrum is in part caused by the framework within which Gaiman and Pratchett construct their narratives: by repeating and challenging the tropes and imagery of the consensus fantasy universe as a springboard for their new, reinvigorated take on both fantasy and myth, their novels reinforce their omnipresence within the canon of Western fantasy. The universalizing, essentializing role played by these dichotomous representations therefore appears to be inextricable from these narratives’ take on myth, as much as they strive to challenge and deconstruct it. 207 Chapter 5 – Conclusion “You’re witches. That means you have to care about things like truth and tradition and destiny, don’t you?” “That’s where you’ve been getting it all wrong,” said Granny. “Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.” “Bugger destiny,” agreed Nanny. (Wyrd Sisters 331) Western narratives based on myths rely on tropes—traditional binaries that often recur from one telling to the next. Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives challenge this understanding of myths as something set in stone, fixed and timeless. However, while their works suggest new ways to use and rearticulate myths, they also reiterate those tropes in order to challenge them, which has the side effect of perpetuating and even reinforcing the very images and associations they sought to deconstruct. The apparent ossification of fantasy as a genre was identified by Pratchett when he articulated the notion of a “consensus fantasy universe,” a reservoir of tropes and images that are drawn from and that simultaneously bolster, through their repetition, the canon of western fantasy. This essentialization of particular images, tropes, and associations into fundamental, obligatory features of the genre participates in the calcification of myth within fantasy by reinforcing singular interpretations of myth and implicitly suggesting that the ideology and worldview associated with them are the lifeblood of the genre. One might be reminded here of Pratchett’s essay, and his questioning of the sexism underlying the representation of wizards and witches in classic fantasy. Narratives that colour within the lines of the consensus fantasy 208 universe run the risk not only of being rebarbative, but also of deploying worldbuilding in which linger unexamined conservative, colonial, and heteropatriarchal imagery, tropes, and worldviews; in other words, oftentimes such narratives do not question the ideology and worldviews upon which they draw within the consensus fantasy universe. While such a reservoir of images, tropes, and associations offers much material to play with, it bears asking why it seems so hard to think outside the lines of that consensus—why for instance, readers and viewers sometimes balk at the idea of depicting fantasy characters such as hobbits, elves or mermaids as people of colour (I am thinking here of the controversy surrounding the casting choices made in the production of the Rings of Power television series and the latest Little Mermaid adaptation by Disney).51 If this issue is caused by uncritically replicating the images and tropes of the consensus fantasy universe and calcified articulations of myth, it seems obvious that challenging that reliance—either by deconstructing those images and tropes, or by playing with them and refurbishing them—might be the answer. Throughout this dissertation, I have sought to understand the ways in which Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s articulation and instrumentalization of myth within their narratives participate in the reconceptualization and a reconfiguration of the relationship between myth and fantasy. A driving force of this argument has been the debates over the definition of myth, and the question of whether it is “dead”—by virtue of being a fundamentally static form of narrative, reflective of a specific time, culture, and set of beliefs, and therefore liable to be proven false by the passing of time—or whether myth is more complex, fluctuating, multifaceted, and sometimes even 51 See Aja Romano’s opinion piece in Vox, “The Racist Backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The Rings Is Exhausting and Extremely Predictable;” as well as Ben Rothstein’s “The Rings of Power Is Suffering a Racist Backlash For Casting Actors Of Colour — But Tolkien’s Work Has Always Attracted White Supremacists;” and Kristine Larsen’s “Falling Stars: Canonicity and ‘Meteor Man’ in Amazon Prime Video’s The Rings of Power.” 209 contradictory, which is reflective of its life, its cultural significance, and the ways in which it has been instrumentalized within cultures, particularly in the realm of literature. I argue that in fantasy narratives and in the very fabric of their imagined worlds, these authors find fertile ground for reconceptualized and non-universalizing representations of myth. In other words, I have sought to demonstrate through the works of Gaiman and Pratchett that a reconfiguration of the representation and instrumentalization of myth in fantasy narratives—the experimentation and play with the codes and tropes of the “consensus fantasy universe,” through their parody, distortion, or challenge—offer avenues for both a reinvigoration of the genre, and a reassertion of the importance of myth in making sense of and shaping paradigms. Within this context I have argued, throughout this dissertation, that both Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize myths, and rescript the conflicts and issues—both fundamental and subsidiary—that they illustrate, adapting them to fit contemporary concerns and affinities. I have explored how the depiction and instrumentalization of time, space, and gender within Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s narratives participate in this reconceptualization of the role of myth in fantasy, considering whether rooting myth in the particulars of a place might allow for new, non-universalizing representations of myth. Through my analysis of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s apocalyptic narratives, I have contended that their particular take on myths of the apocalypse focuses on the individual rather than the group, on the marginalized rather than the dominant, and on the relationship of interdependence between beings and the land. I have further argued that American Gods, Mort, and Good Omens’ focus on time and space, as well as on the persistence of the land, participates in a reframing of the role played by humanity in historical processes, and a recentring of human agency simultaneously tempered by a refutation of the anthropocentric notion that humans are or 210 should be the saviours of the world. This approach to depicting and instrumentalizing myth allows Gaiman and Pratchett to illustrate a contemporary take on the myth of the apocalypse through the metaphoric filter of fantasy. Throughout this chapter, I articulate some of the ways in which their novels account for and challenge the calcification of essentialized expressions of myth. Through a study of rural and urban spaces in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, and Equal Rites, I have explored the limitations of Gaiman’s and Pratchett's approaches by examining their articulation of the rural/urban dichotomy. I have shown the ways in which these novels reiterate and reinforce the essentialization of moral and cultural values and ideologies traditionally associated with these settings, and the ways in which they also challenge such an essentialization: they deconstruct and transform some of the images and tropes associated with the rural/urban dichotomy—notably by suggesting the existence of a similar dichotomy within the depiction of the urban—often, in the case of Pratchett, through the use of satire. I underlined how these narratives push back against the essentialization of a depiction of the country as a near-utopian space, characterized by its agelessness, its attachment to tradition and order, and its moral values, and a depiction of the city as a locus of constant change, chaos, and decadence. Consequently, these novels’ challenges to essentialized, dichotomous interpretations of rural and urban myths remain limited, both because these works reiterate these calcified images in order to contradict them, and in so doing, refresh and reinforce them, and because of the way in which essentialized dichotomies overlap, intertwine, and bolster each other within these novels. This tension between challenge and reinforcement is a notion I further articulate through a closer look at the representation of the Triple Goddess figure in Ocean, Wyrd Sisters, and 211 Carpe Jugulum, taking them as an example of the overlap of essentialized dichotomies of space and gender in Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s fantasy. Throughout this analysis, I argue that the instrumentalization of myth in these three novels is guided by a dichotomous understanding of gender, place, and myth which is grounded in a western, secular, rationalist, and patriarchal worldview. These novels’ depictions of the Triple Goddess in many ways echo the emphasis placed by Gaiman and Pratchett on agency and flexible thinking—notably by illustrating feminine power. However, I contend that they also centre that power and agency around fertility, benevolent nurturing, and the successful performance of gender norms and gendered roles; and they make the support and guidance of men, the fixing of men’s errors and flaws, and the stewardship of the land the main purpose of that power. In doing so, Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s takes on the Triple Goddess ultimately defuse, to some extent, the challenge made by the novels to essentialized representations of space and gender. I ask, in the introduction to this dissertation, whether Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of myth within their narratives effectively achieves a reconceptualization of the role of myth in fantasy, and I also ask to what extent their novels can be seen as balancing the reiteration of essentialized expressions of myth with a challenge and deconstruction of that essentialization. Over the course of this study, I have shown that in the novels I have selected one might find the outline of such a reconceptualization, as well as explore some of the ways in which it could be achieved. However, that process is only ever partial in these texts because, by working from within, such a process always ends up simultaneously bolstering the very tropes and imagery it seeks to deconstruct and reconfigure. I was struck, as I was writing this dissertation, by the fact that elements for an answer to the questions I was asking in the context of Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s instrumentalization of myths could be found in contemporary 212 speculative fiction penned by authors writing outside of the Western, secular, rationalist, heteropatriarchal framework I was contending with. I thought, in particular, of the ways in which works such as Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Neon Yang’s Tensorate series, Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills cycle, or Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring break down the boundaries of the consensus fantasy universe as it is envisioned by Pratchett, particularly when it came to its understanding and representation of gender. One might be tempted to look to such approaches to the genre as Le Guin’s, Yang’s, Vo’s, or Hopkinson’s, then, as the answer to the question of how to move beyond the essentializing calcification of the Western fantasy canon. The many ways in which Gaiman and Pratchett instrumentalize and reconfigure expressions of myth within their narratives—and in particular the way in which they present Western and non-Western world mythologies by putting them in conversation with each other—can be read as a reconfiguration of the consensus fantasy universe, one that refurbishes its tropes and images, and that de-centres Western, secular, rationalist, heteropatriarchal, and European-inspired worldbuilding. However, this instrumentalization of myth also raises questions with regards to the potential appropriation of non-Western or marginalized cultures and worldviews for the purpose of refreshing or renewing the genre. Within the scope of this study, I have focused on dichotomous and essentialized interpretations of myth in the context of apocalyptic narratives, the rural urban dichotomy, and overlapping spatial and gender dichotomies. A further analysis might explore how Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s articulation of specifically non-Western, secular, rationalist, heteropatriarchal myths and worldviews can, at times, inadvertently suggest a form of appropriation of these myths and worldviews as the answer to the calcification of the consensus fantasy universe; and in what ways their evoking and interacting with these myths and worldviews can also positively participate in the deconstruction of essentialized interpretations 213 of myth. In that regard, further studies might delve into Pratchett’s later witch novels—particularly the Tiffany Aching series, as both Hutchings-Budd and Sinclair have pointed to in their feminist analysis of the witches novels—and the ways in which they expand beyond the boundaries of essentialized representations of gender to offer a flexible and multifaceted understanding of the relationship between gender, magic, and power. As for spatial dichotomies, further attention might be paid to Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s representations of non-rural and non-urban spaces, and how their articulation of wild spaces or suburban spaces, for instance, participates in the deconstruction of the rural/urban dichotomy in the illustration and interpretation of myth. 214 Works Cited 1. Primary Sources Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, directed by Jonathan Dumont and Scott Phillips, Ubisoft Quebec, 2018. Sony PlayStation 4 game. Bellow, Saul. Herzog. The Viking Press, 1975. Clare, Cassandra. The Mortal Instruments. Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2013. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Penguin Classics, 2003. Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Dancing Cat Books, 2017. Fuller, Bryan and Michael Green, creators. American Gods. Starz, 2017-2021. Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. William Morrow, 2016. ---, creator. Good Omens. Amazon Studios and BBC Studios, 2019–Present. ---. The Annotated American Gods. Edited by Leslie S. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Reeves, Margaret (English teacher)
Instrumentalizing myth in fantasy literature : mythical constructs of time, space, and gender in novels by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Text