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A trademark characteristic of Neil Gaiman‟s 2001 novel American Gods and much of ... ways, seeks a truer kind of value in both America‟s people and gods.
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Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Arts Cleveland State University May, 2004
submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH at the CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY May, 2008
This thesis has been approved for the Department of ENGLISH and the College of Graduate Studies by
Thesis Chairperson, Dr. James Marino
___________________________ Department & Date
Dr. Jeff Karem
___________________________ Department & Date
Dr. Sheila Schwartz
___________________________ Department & Date
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Page ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………… iii CHAPTER I. MAPPING THE TERRITORY, IMAGINARY AND REAL……………. 1 II. POWER AND SYMBOLISM IN FAIRY TALE AND MYTH…….…… 10 III. TRICKSTER GODS AND SHIFTING BELIEF......................................... 16 IV. DETOUR TO DYSTOPIA…………………………………………….. 29 V. GODS IN DECLINE…………………………………………………… 38 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………... 44
A trademark characteristic of Neil Gaiman‟s 2001 novel American Gods and much of his work in general is a fusion of the old and new. An accompanying sense of nostalgic mourning for a lost past pervades American Gods , along with a joyous pleasure in recalling and recasting certain traditional values and archetypes into modern, contemporary settings. The convergence of these two elements is what makes this particular narrative a work worthy of scholarly inquiry, as the novel surveys the growing pains of a cultural landscape under constant revision and expansion, and explores the consequences of such progress. The question the novel poses is: “What if the gods of antiquity lived today, in the 20th century?” As these older gods of classic myth and global folklore struggle for supremacy over the newer, “American” gods of modern convenience, the novel‟s symbolic battle and unresolved conclusion create a compelling trajectory of American and global culture on the cusp of the 21st century. In American Gods , the primary struggle between old and new gods at its basic level represents a clash between the values of an Old World past and the advances of a modern and increasingly technological present and future. Gaiman constructs the landscape of America within these sprawling, unstable dimensions; the country in American Gods welcomes
an uncanny comfort in Europe‟s foreign yet tangible history. No such permanence seems to exist in America, at least to any visible, easily detectable extent. Shadow in fact experiences quite the opposite in his homeland: a familiar landscape revealed slowly as a place with multiple unknown boundaries and inhabitants. Superficially, the novel follows Wednesday and Shadow, traveling across the continental United States on a mission to enlist the support of the old gods in Wednesday‟s war against the new gods. The symbolic mission, however, is a quest to find the center of America. At one point, Wednesday remarks to Shadow: “„[America] is the only country in the world ...that worries about what it is ...The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are‟” (116). This statement takes the anxiety over American identity for granted, or more precisely, asserts unquestionably that most other countries have no such ambiguity. The continental United States as a strange, amorphous geographic space emerges in the text in several ways both obvious and implicit. The sheer size of America contributes its sense of the indefinable: “Driving south was like driving forward in time… Shadow began to wonder if there was some kind of equation to explain it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future” (424). The diverse geography and time zones of the U.S. logically render a natural nationwide unity difficult. Wednesday tells Shadow at one point that “San Francisco isn‟t in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis…They may share certain cultural signifiers—money, a federal government, entertainment—it‟s the same land , obviously—but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show , and McDonald‟s‟” (306). Wednesday asserts all of these cities are part of the same land mass, unified only
loosely through these markers, but that these cities are not necessarily of one homogeneous country, a very subtle distinction that explains, in part, why America is no place for gods. Shadow‟s tour of America and the shorter Coming to America sections demonstrate the disparity of culture throughout the land; in casting each location as its own specific spiritual realm, Gaiman uses conventions of fantasy to further draw out and sharpen these peculiarities. In an examination of the difference between literary fantasy and fairy tales, Maria Nikolajeva in “Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern” writes, “In myth and fairy tale, the hero appears and acts within the magical chronotope. In fantasy, the main premise is the protagonist‟s transition between chronotopes…” (141-42). Invoking Mikhail Bakhtin‟s idea of the literary construction of time-space units called chronotopes, Nikolajeva sees fantasy as closely aligned with the postmodern break from traditional narrative structure. American Gods certainly deviates from straightforward storytelling, in that the novel can almost be divided into a series of nearly discrete short stories. (Gaiman follows up this novel with a book, 2005‟s Anansi Boys , and a short story “The Monarch of the Glen” from 2006‟s Fragile Things that continue the travels of Anansi/Mr. Nancy and Shadow. The author reuses characters within his novels, short stories, and comic books with a frequency similar to the way he recasts characters from myth, literature, and popular imagination into his works.) Gaiman includes over 100 gods and figures from global mythology. The people and deities within American Gods seem separated only by time and space, two somewhat flimsy barriers in the world of the novel. This again aligns with Nikolajeva‟s idea of postmodern fantasy as comprised of multiple chronotopes, and describes the genre‟s landscape thus: “Heterotopia, or a multitude of discordant universes, denotes the ambivalent and unstable spatial and temporal conditions in fiction” (143). Gaiman, however, strives to
sacredness. Places where they can build no temples.. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods only walk if they are forced to…All of America has it, a little,‟ said Czernobog. „That is why we are not welcome here…” (430) The newer gods are as wary of the center as the older deities; the core of the United States epitomizes the spiritual vacuum of the land, with nothing tethered to old values in land essentially resistant to any new systems. Wednesday‟s scheme of a war between the gods, with blood quenching the land in a sacrifice to him and revitalizing him, ultimately fails; this failure to effect deeper change becomes a structural phenomenon of the novel itself. As the superficial, surface quality becomes all there is and premise of the novel, i.e. nothing really deep or lasting sticks, becomes the form of the novel. Throughout the course of the novel, British author Gaiman explores the phenomena of myriad diverse American people: natives, early settlers, slaves, immigrants, and born-and- bred citizens. Paralleling to some degree the struggle between old and new gods, the America of American Gods seems a place characterized by the jostling of disparate ethnicities, languages, and ideologies. By circling around these issues of old ways against new ways and national purity versus cultural diversity, Gaiman explores what seems to be America‟s inherent lack : of a center, of history, and of unity, characteristics that apparently are more readily felt in Iceland. Finding the “heart of the land” is one of the novel‟s primary concerns; once Shadow leaves the US, he discovers what feels like the heart of Iceland almost immediately, finding the sensation both comforting and frightening. This simultaneous fear and embrace of continuity pervades American Gods in several ways. Just as the language of Northern Europe‟s countries maintains integrity throughout the ages, so too do their gods. Wednesday has died and reappears in the postscript near his homeland as Odin, “Bor‟s son” (586), “god of the gallows” (586), and “Lord of Asgard” (588). Gone are Wednesday‟s familiar charm, cleverness, and expensive taste; in their place is “an aging
hippie ...Or a long-retired gunfighter” (586), images that ironically call up specifically American archetypes. Meeting his father‟s “double,” Shadow marvels at the god‟s survival. The old man states: “„[Wednesday] was me, yes. But I am not him‟” (587). In some sense, gods are clearly altered by time, location, and death. Wednesday seems a singularly American incarnation of Odin, adapting to the land and its people. The Icelandic Odin represents a purer from of the god, yet he retains some substance of his Wednesday “incarnation,” if only in his memory of the experience. Through this final episode, Gaiman almost seems to suggest that going forward somehow requires going back, and the frequent interruptions of Mr. Ibis‟s immigration narratives seem to assert this as well. The postscript raises other questions that lie at the heart of the novel: In a world where gods cannot truly die in any mortal or permanent sense, what is truly at stake in a war between the old and new gods? How does America affect the gods? And (the refrain of the novel) if America is not a place for gods, old or new, what, then, is it a good place for? The idea of traceable continuity versus sprawling unpredictability surfaces in the novel‟s formal structure, as it resists a clear generic classification and even at times, narrative stability. As the central plot branches off into many side excursions, dream sequences, and historical digressions, Gaiman attempts to guide these diverse elements into a unified whole, with mixed results. Roughly the first half of American Gods recounts the meeting of Shadow and Wednesday and their travels to rally support for Wednesday‟s war against the new gods. Wednesday introduces Shadow and the reader not to a different America, but to a different way of experiencing an excruciatingly stereotypical America. Wednesday‟s defamiliarization of America reveals a shallow place, with the land, its people, and its gods, both native and imported, available for anyone‟s own personal ends. Shadow, Gaiman‟s metaphorical everyman, willingly accepts Wednesday as his boss and follows him, more out of a seeming
based on the postmodern concept of indeterminacy, of the relativity of good and evil” (148). Gaiman creates a fantasy that seems to allow for the idea of good and evil, however, no character fits easily into either category. Wednesday, though never presented as wholly good , appears for most of the novel as Shadow‟s protective guide and a force against the newer gods and their agents. The “evilness” of the new tech gods seems less so when it is revealed that Odin and Loki control them, and likewise, the two Norse gods become betrayers to a cause Shadow once believed just. Le Guin convincingly argues that “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul” (68). In one sense, American Gods relates the struggle in the soul of Shadow; in a more total assessment, the novel represents the conflict for the American soul, using the language of fantasy to reveal the fissures within American culture.
In the novel‟s Part Two, “My Ainsel,” Wednesday deposits Shadow into Lakeside, Wisconsin, to keep him “out of sight” and safe from the “black hats” (280); though he returns for Shadow several times, Wednesday disappears from the remainder of the central plot, no longer a presence in the foreground. The travelogue of America continues, but much more erratically. Wednesday no longer solely guides Shadow, and while the old god‟s deceit slowly becomes inevitable, Shadow learns more about the nature of America‟s other various transplanted gods. Wednesday shows Shadow his jovial but cynical side as the old god tricks the system to win small victories. As Shadow‟s path diverges from Wednesday‟s, Shadow more fully embodies all the connotations of his name, almost an immigrant himself within his homeland. He no longer trails Wednesday as constant companion, but “shadows” the life of someone grasping for meaning within the junk culture that Wednesday has revealed by taking on the identity of Mike Ainsel in Lakeside. The novel‟s main story line rarely leaves the perspective of its protagonist, the carefully named Shadow Moon. Shadow‟s name and characterization reflect the idea of dichotomy that Gaiman explores throughout American Gods. The presence of a shadow
from the leprechaun Mad Sweeney. He gives the sun coin to his dead wife, Laura, who wears it to follow and protect Shadow on his journey; he keeps the moon coin until he meets Zorya Polunochnaya again when he dies holding vigil for Odin. At Shadow‟s death, the sky is moonless, and returning the coin is his first act in restoring himself to life: “„It brought you your liberty twice,‟ [Zorya Polunochnaya] said, „And now it will light your way in dark places‟” (470). While this coin literally helps to free Shadow from death and illuminate his path, Shadow throughout the narrative, including his time in prison, his capture by the opposition and his stay in Lakeside, uses his coin tricks as intellectual liberation, to occupy his hands and stave off anxiety and doubt. The moon, to earthly observers, waxes and wanes like the eminence of the various gods in the novel, and the moon also contains the dichotomy of brightness within night as well as represents the hidden dark against the sun‟s daylight clarity. Shadow also expresses these contradictory aspects of light and dark within himself: as a son of Odin, he exhibits a close affinity with Balder, one of the brightest gods of the Norse myths, and both Shadow and Balder are inextricably connected to death. The death of Shadow‟s wife, Laura, precipitates his journey and he himself dies during the course of it. In myth, Balder is protected against all weapons except mistletoe, evetually killed by a branch of it ( Larousse 286). Mr. Town seeks a branch from the ash tree of Shadow‟s vigil, and after Laura kills Town and takes the bough to the scene of the gods‟ war, she meets the god Loki, appearing previously in the novel as Shadow‟s prison-mate Low Key Lyesmith and as Mr. World, the partner in Odin‟s two-man con. Loki tells her: “„When this is done with, I guess I‟ll sharpen a stick of mistletoe and go down to the ash tree, and ram it through [Shadow‟s] eye. Now. My stick please… It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world, the symbol is the thing‟” (525-26). Symbolic death recurs throughout the novel, and the idea is explored
by many characters. Shadow‟s own death seems inevitable, though like Odin and his wife, physical death is not permanent. In Gaiman‟s American myth, gods cannot die and men, too, are able to come back from death. Compared to another character from a seminal work of science fiction, other facets of Shadow‟s first name will be explored later in this essay, but the idea of sacrifice, specifically through bloodshed, is attached to many of the gods in the novel and in the worship they require. The deities in American Gods emerge from various cultures and mythologies, and Gaiman constructs sub-chapter narratives as short biographical portraits of people who travel to the continent and the gods they carry with them. Woven into the larger fabric of Shadow‟s journey, these tales all depict the struggle and hardship of the voyage to the New World, and the suffering of each new transplant to America seems to cling to the attendant gods. In Cairo, Illinois, Shadow meets two gods of Egypt, Mr. Ibis/Thoth and Mr. Jacquel/Anubis, in a funeral parlor. Shadow notices that “Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in the mind of a college professor…” (193). Shadow recognizes intuitively the role of this new guide on his journey. Ibis tells Shadow: “„The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write a book of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives…‟” (194). Perhaps a refraction of Gaiman as author, Ibis provides the novel with the fragments of a body of work that betrays his modesty. These accounts, though perhaps containing no permanent artistic value, create the fabric that underpins the diminishment of the modern gods as unwilling transplants to the foreign and possibly soil. Interrupting Shadow‟s journey as the Coming to America sections, these episodes recount the voyages of immigrants and their attendant gods to America, track the worship that once made them great, and survey the consequences of the displaced tradition.
Both sides of the dualistic god have become gray, loss of faith resulting Czernobog‟s aged decrepitude, another description that seems a comment on the modern American landscape. Although two halves of a whole and now indistinguishable, the brothers‟ separation leaves Czernobog weakened; notably the dark “rogue” brother has survived in the new land. Czernobog offers one explanation for his brother‟s departure: “„I dreamed a strange dream…that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find that it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking them away‟” (424). Within the dual god lies the potential for both “good” and “evil,” and Czernobog struggles with this view, “imagined” by a world equally capable of both. Gaiman includes the three Zorya sisters in their roles of keepers of the day, ushering in morning, evening and midnight. Zorya Vechernyaya tells Shadow he has a “„good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the long shadow‟” (73), referring not only to her place as guardian of the dusk, but the shorter days of wintertime and the apparent twilight of the world as well. Presaging Anasi‟s judgment, Zorya Vechernyaya explains to Shadow the key to her success in fortunetelling: “Truth is not what people want to hear” (74), a principle Odin benefits from as well. Even with electricity dictating the rhythm of society‟s daily schedule, the sisters‟ place in the functioning of the world seems still necessary and the natural cycle of the sun, moon, and the seasons of the year do in fact play a large role in the planning of the war from both sides.
In the first Coming to America account, dated A.D. 813, Northmen who worship Odin sail to North America. When they find a “scraeling” native, they entertain him and then sacrifice him to their god: “...they carried him at the head of a procession to an ash tree on the hill overlooking the bay, where they put a rope around his neck and hung him high in the wind, their tribute to the All-Father, the gallows lord…” (68). A native war party slaughters these early Vikings in retribution, but the Norsemen have nonetheless transplanted their deities to American soil in their own act of sacrifice; this bloodshed, both at the core of the Norsemen‟s worship and in the resistance to their settlement, strengthens Odin‟s tie to the new land. On Shadow‟s way to Cairo, he picks up hitchhiker Samantha Black Crow, and the two discuss the existence of gods. Samantha shares her “favorite” mythological god story about Odin: There was some Viking king on a Viking ship—this is Viking times, obviously—and they were becalmed, so he says he‟ll sacrifice one of his men to Odin if Odin will send them a wind to get them to land ...they draw lots to figure out who gets sacrificednot hurt him. They take a calf‟s intestines and loop them loosely around the guy‟s—and it‟s the king himself ...they figure out they can hang him in effigy and neck, and they tie the other end to a thin branch, and they take a reed instead of a spear and poke him with it ...As soon as they say Odin‟s name, the reed transforms into a spear and stabs the guy in the side, the calf intestines become a thick rope, thebranch becomes the bough of a tree, and the tree pulls up, and the ground drops
