Stardust (24 page)

Horror and fantasy (whether in comics form or otherwise) are often seen simply as escapist literature. Sometimes they can be - a simple, paradoxically unimaginative literature offering quick catharsis, a plastic dream, an easy out. But they don’t have to be. When we are lucky the fantastique offers a roadmap - a guide to the territory of the imagination, for it is the function of imaginative literature to show us the world we know, but from a different direction.

Too often myths are uninspected. We bring them out without looking at what they represent, nor what they mean. Urban Legends and the Weekly World News present us with myths in the simplest sense: a world in which events occur according to story logic - not as they do happen, but as they should happen.

But retelling myths is important. The act of inspecting them is important. It is not a matter of holding a myth up as a dead thing, desiccated and empty (“Now class, what have we learned from the Death of Baldur?”), nor is it a matter of creating New Age self-help tomes (“The Gods Inside You! Releasing Your Inner Myth”). 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.

I do not even begrudge the myths and the fairy stories their bowdlerisation: the purist in me may be offended by the Disney retellings of old tales, but I am, where stories are concerned, cruelly Darwinist: the forms of the tales that work survive, the others die and are forgotten. It may have suited Disney’s dramatic purposes to have Sleeping Beauty prick her finger, sleep and be rescued, all in a day, but when the tale is retold it will always be at least a hundred years until the spell is broken - even if we have long since lost from the Perrault story the Prince’s cannibal mother; and Red Riding Hood ends these days with a rescue, not with the child being eaten, because that is the form of the story that has survived.

Once upon a time, Orpheus brought Eurydice back alive from Hades. But that is not the version of the tale that has survived.

(Fairy Tales, as G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

Several months ago I found myself, somewhat to my own surprise, in a distant country attending a symposium on myths and fairy tales. I was a featured speaker, and was told that I would be addressing a group of academics from all over the world on the subject of fairy tales. Before this, I would listen to papers being delivered to the group, and address a roundtable discussion.

I made notes for the talk I would give, and then went along to the first presentation: I listened to academics talk wisely and intelligently about Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, and I found myself becoming increasingly irritated and dissatisfied, on a deep and profound level.

My difficulty was not with what was being said, but with the attitude that went along with it - an attitude that implied that these tales no longer had anything to do with us. That they were dead cold things, which would submit without resistance to dissection, that could be held up to the light and inspected from every angle, and would give up their secrets without resistance.

Most of the people at the conference were more than willing to pay lip service to the theory of fairy tales as stories that had begun as entertainments that adults told adults, but became children’s stories when they went out of fashion (much as, in Professor Tolkien’s analogy, the unwanted and unfashionable furniture was moved into the nursery: it was not that it had been intended to be children’s furniture, it was just that the adults did not want it any longer).

“Why do you write with myths and with fairy tales?” one of them asked me.

“Because they have power,” I explained, and watched the students and academics nod doubtfully. They were willing to allow that it might be true, as an academic exercise. They didn’t believe it.

The next morning I was meant to make a formal address on the subject of myth and fairy tales. And when the time came, I threw away my notes, and, instead of lecturing them, I read them a story.

It was a retelling of the story of Snow White, from the point of view of the wicked queen. It asked questions like, “What kind of a prince comes across the dead body of a girl in a glass coffin and announces that he is in love and will be taking the body back to his castle?” and for that matter, “What kind of a girl has skin as white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood, and can lie, as if dead, for a long time?” We realize, listening to the story, that the wicked queen was not wicked: she simply did not go far enough; and we also realize, as the queen is imprisoned inside a kiln, about to be roasted for the midwinter feast, that stories are told by survivors.
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It is one of the strongest pieces of fiction I’ve written. If you read it on your own, it can be disturbing. To have it read to you by an author on a podium, first thing in the morning, during a conference on fairy tales, must on reflection have been, for the listeners, a rather extreme experience, like taking a gulp of something they thought was coffee, and finding that someone had laced it with wasabi, or with blood.

At the end of a story that was, after all, just Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an audience of several dozen people looked pale and troubled, like people coming off a roller-coaster or like sailors recently returned to land.

“As I said, these stories have power,” I told them as I finished. This time they seemed far more inclined to believe me.

All too often I write to find out what I think about a subject, not because I already know.

My next novel is, for me, a way of trying to pin down myths - modern myths, and the old myths, together, on the huge and puzzling canvas that is the North American continent.

It has a working title of American Gods (which is not what the book was meant to be called, but what it is about).

It’s about the gods that people brought with them as they came here from distant lands; it’s about the new gods, of car crash and telephone and People magazine, of Internet and aeroplane, of freeway and mortuary; it’s about the forgotten gods, who were here before Man, the gods of Buffalo and Passenger Pigeon, gods that sleep, forgotten.

All the myths I care about, or have cared about, will be in there, put there in order to try and make sense of the myths that make America.

I have lived here for eight years, and I still do not understand much of it: the strange collection of homegrown myths and beliefs, the ways that America explains itself to itself.

Maybe I’ve made an awful mess of it all, but I can’t say that worries me as badly as I think it ought to. The joy of the book was putting my thoughts into some kind of order, it was actually learning what I think.

Ask me with a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and myths that I write about, and I’d have to say no. Not literally. Not in the daylight, nor in well-lighted places, with people about. But I believe in the things they can tell us. I believe in the stories we can tell with them.

I believe in the reflections that they show us, when they are told.

And, forget it or ignore it at your peril, it remains true nonetheless: these stories have power.

It’s a strange place, The Imagination. A lot of fun by day, when there are all sorts of reassuring and familiar sights and people around. But it’s scary, and cold at night, and places you knew perfectly well by daylight aren’t the same after the sun’s gone down. You can get lost easily there, and some people never find their way back. You can hear a few of them, when the ghost moon shines, and the wind’s in the right direction. They scream for a while, and then they stop. And in the silence you hear something else: the sound of something large and quiet, tentatively beginning to feed...

The imagination is a dangerous place, after all, and you can always use a guide to the territory.

Even if you never got to be a werewolf when you grew up.

About the Author

Neil Gaiman
is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of the novels
Neverwhere
,
Stardust
, the Sandman series of graphic novels, and
Smoke and Mirrors
, a collection of short fiction. He is coauthor of the novel
Good Omens
with Terry Pratchett. Among his many awards are the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

Visit his website at www.neilgaiman.com.