During a question and answer
session between readings from his most recent books (one just published, one to
appear in September), Neil Gaiman
confessed to a sold-out Vogue Theatre in Vancouver last Thursday that he seemed
to have graduated into some next level of fame, when people who hadn't actually
read his work still knew something about who he was and what he did. I have to
confess, too, that I haven't actually read too much Neil Gaiman (some Sandman and a little Coraline,— and I have watched the two Doctor Who episodes he scripted in the
last three years), although I’m keen now to read much, much more. I was there
not so much as a fan, but just to see and hear him. What started to become
compelling about this public appearance were the ways in which he both
enlivened and managed his fans' expectations. They adore him, and every time he
(pretty expertly) name-dropped the title of one of his books, at least
two-thirds of the audience hooted and cheered. He's now much more than a
cultish comic book and fantasy writer, but he assiduously and warmly cultivates
connections with his readership, with his audience, around their willing buy-in
to his myth-making: the mythworlds of his fiction, yes, but also the myth of Neil
Gaiman, author and impresario of a set of collective subcultural imaginings.
His
performance was excellent, and well worth the modest ticket-price. It combined
reading from recent work, as I said, with him answering questions audience
members had submitted on cards ahead of time. (He told us our – Vancouver’s –
questions were the best he had had for the whole tour, probably an untruth, but
a nice appeal to our west coast intellectual vanity.) He stayed after the
reading for at least three hours, signing books and chatting – briefly, given
the numbers – with his keen readers. And that extra willingness to stay on,
which was anticipated in media build-up to his appearance, is the first part of
his myth: he gives you the sense not of distraction but of caring engagement
with his readers, making sure that they have some modicum of contact with him,
that they feel that he’s present to them. Neil Gaiman takes considerable pains
to offer his audience a feint of intimacy, disclosing what felt like private
details of his life particularly around his relationship to femrocker Amanda Palmer – Amanda Fucking Palmer (“No Neil Fucking Gaiman tonight,” he joked) – which
were the kinds of details he also occasionally lets slip via Twitter. (He
recently tweeted about his happiness waking up in bed beside her, for example.)
Now we all do this kind of thing on Twitter, mingling public and private idioms
for an indiscriminate readership, but given the extent of Neil Gaiman’s
following, as it shifts from cult to mass, it’s this feeling of access, of
closeness, that seems to firm up his fan-base, to keep them attached to,
immersed in, his writing.
This
autobiographical myth-making particularly both frames and informs his new book,
The Ocean at the End of the Lane,
which bears the dedication “For Amanda, who wanted to know.” (Indeed, it’s
precisely I’d say the idea of an intimate knowledge – or of a knowing intimacy
– that started to become an issue here, as Gaiman read to us, in person. What
exactly was it that Amanda wanted to know? How much access were we, as
listeners, as over-hearers, being given to that knowledge? Something is
described in the book, he told us, about his past, his childhood. This book, he
said, came about because he missed his wife and wanted to make her love him by giving
her a short story (which developed into a “novelette,” then a novella, then a
short novel) with "something me-ish in there," some small “slices of
real life and one slice of imagination when I was a child." Slices, maybe,
like the slices of burnt toast in the passage that he read from the second
chapter, which begins with the narrator’s depiction of his detachment from the
world – “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else” – but which, through
the slow careful accumulation of descriptive detail (like that toast),
gradually reconnects the observer to what seems to be going on around him at a
remove, even without him.
The
narrator’s doubled perspective – a forty-year-old man recalling what he experienced
as a seven-year-old – reinforces the essential interestedness (as opposed to detachment,
objectivity or disinterest) of the narrator, his being-with as opposed to
standing apart-from, those around him, which is how he’s positioned, or
positions himself, at the discovery of a corpse (I’m trying to avoid any
spoilers) in his father’s car:
I
don't remember who said what then, just that they made me stand away from the
Mini. I crossed the road, and I stood there on my own while the policeman
talked to my father and wrote things down in a notebook. (18)
Writing, here, is limited to
sparse note-taking, and the limitations of perspective and memory are candidly
foregrounded; we can’t even read over the policeman’s shoulder to see what he
has written down. Intimacy or closeness, in other words, remains denied to us,
Gaiman’s committed readers. He’s withholding, through the device of an
unreliable juvenile focalizer. Generational dictions meld throughout the
chapter (adult vocabulary often mingling with childish self-interest, for
example), but you can also hear, even in this short excerpt, Gaiman’s
inclination toward austerity and directness: how committed to the matter being
described here is the voice doing the describing? How involved or how removed?
This point-of-view
feels like objectivity, but during his presentation Thursday, when asked about
the differences between writing for adults and for – or perhaps about –
children, Gaiman asserted that what makes for good writing around children is
to “make every word count.” (I’d suggest, too, that there is something of that
directness cultivated in his writing for television and especially for graphic
texts.) What we might take for empirical distance here, in other words, is
shaped by close child-like observation, by the directness and directedness of a
child’s eye and ear (not just for descriptive detail, but also for details of
speech, of words themselves). While our narrator waits, he thinks back on his
father’s constant burning of toast:
At
home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. "Yum!" he'd
say, and "Charcoal! Good for you!" and "Burnt toast! My favorite!"
and he'd eat it all up. [The American spelling is original to the edition I
have.] When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked
burnt toast, and had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and, for
a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie: it was as if one
of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into
dry sand.
The doubled age of the voice
in this passage, audible in the mixed diction, also maps onto a personal
mythopoeia around burnt toast and the simultaneous demythologizing of those
intimate patrilineal memories, as his whole childhood begins to feel “like a
lie” (although likeness, it’s worth asserting, isn’t the same as it’s being a
lie). The with-ness of interest, of the narrator’s and the reader’s inter-esse, is caught up in this double
movement of Gaiman’s narrative, which both intimates and debunks.
I mean to approach, just so briefly, something of the
dynamics of fandom that inhere in Gaiman’s own writing, and in his performance
– his reading – last Thursday. The
declarative clarity, the confessional candour that circles through his speaking
subjects, his voice(s), isn’t so much a masterful feint as it is a
self-conscious address to the capacities of language itself to disclose, to
tell. Or, perhaps more clearly put, to give us what we want to know. Gaiman’s
success, in this terrific new book, strikes me as in part enmeshed in a
virtuosity of disavowal: the well-honed verbal craft of making his readers keep
wanting, even as he gives them more of the feeling of intimacy, of personal
proximity, that they crave. In a very peculiar and particular sense, what Neil
Gaiman offers us all is a species of mythical close reading, a closeness both in
and as reading. It’s what must keep
us coming back to his work, even if it’s for the very first time.
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