Timing Is Everything: Preludes and Nocturnes

This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast.  It is the first in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

“Timing is everything,” some say.  As with most truisms, I believe this one should be taken with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of context.  But as I reflect on my experience with Preludes and Nocturnes, the first collected volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, I must admit to a certain truth hiding within this easy cliché.

As a young comic book reader, awash in super-hero stories, I was captivated by what I read about The Sandman in the comic review magazines I purchased every month.  Here, it seemed, was a story woven more from the fabric of literature and elemental myth than the often confounding and cumbersome continuities of super-hero comics.  Instead of soap-operatic stories of costumed heroes shamelessly emoting while they beat one another up (stories that I loved, and still love, on their own terms), here was an ethereal fantasy full of whimsey and music.  In my late teens, when I finally deemed myself worthy of passing the “Suggested for Mature Readers” disclaimer that appears on the cover of each single issue of the series, I picked up the first volume and attempted to begin the journey into Gaiman’s opus.  I was not ready for what I found.  Here was the Lord of Dreams freed from his long imprisonment full of bitterness and spite, wreaking merciless vengeance upon those who had wronged him regardless of their agency in the crime.  The stories that followed were dark—much darker than anything that I had encountered so far—replete with horror and murder and a certain vindictive spirit that I had no way of mapping onto my own experience of the world.  This was too much for the parameters of my comfortable, fragile life.  And so I put it away.

But timing is everything.  Just a few years later, as I graduated from college, I also found myself for the first time encountering pain and loss in a way that shook me to my core and called into question every cherished belief that I held about the world and about myself.  And, almost by happenstance, I came back to my old discarded copy of Preludes and Nocturnes and found a story that spoke uniquely to this new experience in a way that no other had.  I understood, in a way that I could not before, that the darkness of this volume was the darkness of human pain.  Having come into awareness of my own capacity for the spite and resentment that are born of loss, the Dream King’s cruel gestures of revenge made sense, and this sense made these gestures more chilling than they were when I had no grounds for relating to them.  But it was also this honest and visceral resonance that persuaded me to continue into this narrative.

Gaiman himself, in the afterward to this first volume, confesses that revisiting these stories forces him to admit that he finds many of them “awkward and ungainly,” and I certainly see where this self-critique comes from.  The Sandman is, ultimately, a meditation on the significance of stories and dreams, on how they shape and are shaped by the individual’s attempts to live a coherent and meaningful life, but these opening chapters give few hints at this beautiful and heartbreaking endeavor.  There is a persisting sense that the author hasn’t yet fully decided on the direction or the genre that the project will take.  There is an unmistakable grounding in the DC Comics universe, something that will gradually diminish as the series progresses.  There is also a pervasive atmosphere of somewhat pulpy horror.  This is not completely out of synch with the rest of the series, but it does give some of these stories a grim tone that is more than a bit dissonant with the later chapters.  I have in recent years recommended this series to as many friends as I could, and for each of them who sees it through to the end, there is an equal number who get stalled out in these opening chapters, the opening to a story that is still at this point obscure, disorienting, and more than a little terrifying.  And I understand this.  So much so that I have sometimes suggested skipping this opening volume, replacing it with a synopsis before moving on to the grander offerings that are to come.  But now, as I return to this volume in a similar state of emotional vulnerability and personal darkness, what I see in these pages is something far different.  Something indispensable to the work that is to come. 

This time it is in the darkest corners of this volume that I find the necessary light for moving forward into the series.  In the past I have given potential readers of The Sandman a definitive strategy for navigating Preludes and Nocturnes.  Skip most of it, I would say, and focus instead on issue four, “A Hope in Hell,” and issue eight, “The Sound of Her Wings.”  I would routinely advise squeamish readers to skip over the three-issue arc toward the end of the volume consisting of the stories entitled “Passengers,” “24 Hours,” and “Sound and Fury.”  These stories revolve around Dr. Destiny, or John Dee as he names himself in these pages, a low-grade DC comics super-villain.  At the beginning of these pages Dee is rotting away, forgotten by continuity, in Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum, though he finds the means to break from this prison and wreak upon the world the chaos that his heart desires.  The chapters that detail this reign of terror and its intersection with the Dream King’s journey are horrifying in a way that I have often found gratuitous.  But upon returning this volume again I see in these terrifying entries some of the most important articulations of the themes that Gaiman will carry to brilliant fruition as his epic unfolds. 

In “Passengers,” the first of these three stories, John Dee waxes philosophical on the nature of dreams to a poignantly doomed woman named Rosemary.  “People think dreams aren’t real,” he says, “because they aren’t made of matter, of particles.  Dreams are real, but they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and plans and lost hopes…”  This last entry is key.  As The Sandman unfolds, we will learn that dream is synonymous with story, with the narratives that we use to give our lives meaning and context in a world that resists both of these at every turn.  These stories, Dee holds, are born of the rupture that occurs when hope is lost, when the idealizations of our hopes are dashed against the absurdity of the cosmos in which they play out.  They are, so often, desperate attempts to exert control when we have none. 

In the next chapter of this arc, “24 Hours,” Dee takes over a 24-hour diner and bends its patrons to his sadistic whims.  The waitress on duty, a woman named Bette, harbors a secret life through which she gives meaning to her menial job.  She is a writer.  When her shifts end, she goes home to write stories about the people in her life, the people who visit her diner.  Her great pride is that in these stories she always “makes them happy.”  She takes joy in the fact that she, unlike so many writers, knows where a story should end.  “She’s realized the real problem with stories,” the narrator tells us.  “If you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”  By finding the right place to end the stories, Bette keeps her characters from the necessity of confronting their own inevitable deaths.  Bette’s stories are well-intentioned attempts to give to her patrons what she believes that they need—but these needs always exist according to the mandates of her own ethical framework.  The lesbian couple, in her stories, are married off to nice men who will take care of them.  The marital frustrations of her high-class patrons are washed over by her will to believe that they must, despite all rumor and appearance, be happy.  This is as much an attempt at control as is her pointed refusal of mortality.  Death is Dream’s older sister, and in Gaiman’s story she will not be denied.  When John Dee takes over the diner, systematically forcing each of its patrons to reveal their dirtiest secrets before he compels them to murder one another, he is in effect exercising this same will to control, only bent toward darkness.  The reader is left to wonder how fine the line is between these two approaches to shaping the world through which we move.   

Although Dream, the titular Sandman, is portrayed throughout this arc as a struggling monarch vying for control of his own realm, this very question of narrative control will become the engine of his character arc throughout the series.  This arc comes into sharp relief in issue eight, “The Sound of Her Wings,” when Dream encounters the figure whose presence Bette’s stories would seek to deny—his older sister Death.  The Sandman is ultimately a postmodern allegory centered on a family who personifies the most primal of human experiences (Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Destruction, and Delirium, who was once Delight), and this issue is the first picture the reader is given of this narrative.  The chapter begins with Dream expressing his ennui in the face of his recent experiences to his sister Death.  In this narration, even the early revenge he takes upon his initial captors is figured as cold comfort.  In an effort to provide some fuller comfort, Death invites Dream to go with her for the day on her perennial mission—ushering the souls of those who have died out of life and into what happens next.  During this outing, Dream is reminded of the words by which an old poet praised his sister and her gift to the human race: 

Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.

Death is before me today
Like the odor of myrrh
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today
Like the course of a stream
Like the return of a man from a war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.

In making space for his sister, Dream recognizes what this poet attempts to capture.  He recognizes the inevitability of her presence, and the promise that her gift brings to the mortal.  Langston Hughes states in his ode to Death that “change is thy other name.” This is the reality with which Dream must grapple throughout the remainder of the saga.  The rigidity of control and the harsh idols that we make of our own conceptions of our identities are the forces that keep us locked in the moments of our defeat and despair.  Death’s gift is that she ushers us out of these moments into the terrifying and mysterious liberation of what lies beyond.  If dream becomes synonymous with story in The Sandman, then death becomes synonymous with change.  And Dream’s narrative will be one that leads him to acknowledge that even the best of stories must make a place for change.  He can only rule his domain with integrity if his sister is also welcome there. 

After confessing the awkwardness that he finds in many of these early tales, Gaiman goes on to affirm them as the seeds of the story that will unfold from them.  I think this holds true.  The Sandman is a dark tale, demanding that its readers make space for their own deaths as they follow their protagonist’s attempts to do the same.  It is befitting that such a story begins by showing us why things must change, why the continuation of life is only made possible by the relinquishing of control that is the death of ourselves as we would fashion ourselves.  This is a dark wisdom, but it is the only wisdom that leads to light.  These opening chapters set the stage for a long meditation on improving our stories by letting go and moving on.