This is the written transcript of an audio essay recorded for The Cluttered Desk Podcast. It is the second in a series of reflections on Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.
A significant portion of the action in The Doll’s House, the second volume of Neil Gaimain’s The Sandman, takes place at a serial killers’ convention.
This is exactly what it sounds like. It is a professional convention for serial
killers, complete with lectures, panel discussions, and a dance party. The panel discussions are particularly
interesting. In these forums, groups of
serial killers, or “collectors” as they name themselves, discuss the most
relevant issues facing those who practice their trade. In a panel on “Women in Serial Killing,” a
young woman who calls herself Dog Soup champions the need for female collectors
to break with the traditional iconography in which they have traded. There are too many murderous nurses and black
widows, she argues, and serial killing needs more unique and autonomous
personas in order to become properly progressive. At the panel on religion and serial killing,
a mightily bearded man pounds on the table as he declares himself to be a
loving God, freeing his children from their lives of suffering by ending their
mortal journeys. Each of these collectors,
it seems, has a mission and vision that give meaning to their brutal work. All of this takes place at a hotel convention
center, subtly disguised as a “Cereal Convention.” As in what you eat in a bowl, covered with
milk, for breakfast.
This sounds like a strange cross between a horror movie and
a stand-up comedy routine, and that is in many ways how it reads. This is one of the hallmark’s of Gaimain’s
writing, and it begins to flower in this volume of the series. If Preludes
and Nocturnes exhibits an occasional awkwardness in its ambiguity of genre
and tone, those same qualities mature into a skillful and whimsical fluidity in
this second volume. It is a testament to
Gaiman’s abilities as a storyteller that, in this volume, the reader can
simultaneously experience the Cereal convention as both a comedically
ridiculous idea and as a textual space for exploring the darkest and most
unsettling corners of the human mind.
The keynote speaker for this convention is a figure called
The Corinthian. It’s abundantly clear
that the Corinthian is a paramount inspiration for the other collectors, who
speak of him and to him with an admiration that is colored by terrified
awe. What these other killers don’t
know, however, is that the Corinthian is not one of them at all. He is a literal nightmare from the world of
Dream, and he has used his master’s absence (detailed in volume one of the
series) as an opportunity to slip from his domain and satisfy his urges through
the sport of seducing and murdering unsuspecting humans. At first glance, the Corinthian is a tall,
slender man who wears sunglasses day and night, indoors and outdoors. It is when the Corinthian removes his
sunglasses, however, that his nature becomes apparent. Where his eyes should be, the Corinthian has
instead two small, additional mouths lined with vampiric, razor-sharp
teeth. It is through these mouths that
he eats the eyes of those he has killed.
When Dream of the Endless discovers this convention and
makes his presence known, interrupting the Corinthian’s smugly triumphant
keynote address, he chastises his creation before punishing him by unmaking
him. “You were my masterpiece, or so I
thought,” he says. “A nightmare created
to be the darkness and the fear of darkness in every human heart. A black mirror made to reflect about itself
everything that humanity will not confront.”
The Corinthian was created by Dream to embody the worst potentialities
of every human being, those things that must be hidden or erased if we are to
consider ourselves by any conventional definition to be good. In the hungry maws of the Corinthian’s eyes
we were to see the potential by which each of us may objectify others and
consume them, if only metaphorically, for our own pleasure or sense of
well-being. This is meant to be trauma,
an unmaking of our self-conceptions that would help to keep us honest. Instead, the Corinthian has given the
collectors the inspiration of the self-constructed narrative. The collectors place themselves within
stories of their own devising, stories that justify and legitimize the
brutality of their actions. In these
stories, they are messiahs, gods, visionaries, and heroes.
After unmaking the Corinthian, Dream deals with the other
collectors by stripping them of these narratives. He is the Prince of Stories, and he can do
this.
Until now you have all sustained
fantasies in which you are the maltreated heroes of your own stories. Comforting daydreams in which, ultimately,
you are shown to be in the right. No
more. For all of you, the dream is over. I am taking it away. For this is my judgment on you. That you shall know at all times, and
forever, exactly what you are. And you
shall know how little that means.
Dream has learned from his sister the necessity of death,
and he has learned that for time-bound subjects a true estimation of what we
are necessitates the death of what we think that we are. This death, for the collectors, ends in a
dispersal of their horrifying fraternity, a centrifugal event that sends them
out alone into the darkness, never again to step from it in self-assured
cruelty.
Later on in The Doll’s
House, there is a contrasting moment of convergence, a centripetal
gathering of human minds and souls that is cut short in the same way as the
Cereal Convention: By the intervention
of Dream.
Although Dream of the Endless is the titular character and
apparent center of The Sandman’s
narrative, the true protagonist of The
Doll’s House is very certainly human.
Rose Walker, a young woman just entering her twenties, finds her life
submerged in what can only be described as the strangeness of a Neil Gaiman
story. Her grandmother, Unity Kincaid,
has awakened from sleeping for most of the twentieth century (again, a story
detailed in the first volume), ushering Rose into a starkly unexpected
reconfiguration of her family identity.
The search for her missing brother Jed has led her on a journey in which
she has encountered witches, has been accompanied by a person who is actually a
place who is actually also (somehow) the late British novelist G.K. Chesterton,
and has found herself unwittingly staying in the same hotel where a serial
killers’ convention is taking place. As
strange as all of this is, however, the most powerful blow to Rose’s conception
of her identity and her reality comes with the realization that she, while very
much a human being, is also something beyond this. She is a dream vortex.
Dream defines a dream vortex like this: “A mortal who, briefly, becomes… the center
of the dreaming. The vortex, by its
nature, destroys the barriers between dreaming minds; destroys the ordered
chaos of the Dreaming…Until the myriad dreamers are caught in one huge
dream…Until all the dreams are one. Then
the vortex collapses in upon itself.”
When this collapse occurs, Dream goes on to explain, the minds of the
dreamers collapse with it, and the fabric of the Dreaming is damaged beyond
repair. He knows this because once he
failed to stop a dream vortex from reaching its fulfillment, and, in his words,
“a world was lost.” To prevent this,
when a dream vortex arises, Dream must eliminate it. He must kill Rose Walker.
Rose is saved from this fate by the substitutionary
intervention of her grandmother, Unity Kincaid.
But before the issue is resolved according to the exacting demands of
the Dream King, we get to see the initial flowering of the dream vortex, the beginning
of the convergence of disparate dreamers.
It is terrifying and beautiful. As
Rose begins to assume her identity as the dream vortex, the walls between
dreamers begin to break. We see this
process through the dreams of Rose’s housemates. Each is caught in his or her own dream, and
each dream either fulfills or emblemizes the unspoken longings of each of their
lives. Ken has money and power. Barbie is a princess on a quest to save a
magical realm. Chantal is in a
relationship with a sentence. Zelda is a
little girl looking for intimacy and nurture in a haunting gothic
landscape. Hal finds love in the same
relationship where, in waking life, he finds only rejection. As the dream vortex embodied in Rose Walker
becomes active and aware, these dreamers begin to cross over into one another’s
dreams. They begin to see one another in
ways that can only occur when one individual crosses into the dreams of
another. They begin to see one another
as the embodiments of hopes and fears and desires and despairs that none of
them could ever articulate in waking life.
These expressions belong to the surreal, intimate purity of the
dream-life of the individual, and through the action of the dream vortex
something begins to happen that could never happen otherwise. One person may now cross over into the
dreaming of the other person and see them
as they are there. Rose joyously
realizes the wonder of this anomaly and its liberating possibility, and she
poises herself to push it as far as it will go:
“…it would be so simple,” she says, “to create one huge dream…” But then Dream intervenes, and it is all
over.
I want to challenge Dream at this point. Why can there not be one huge dream? Why must the remedy be dispersal or
isolation, as seen at the Cereal Convention?
Why must convergence be avoided? I
am trapped in my own dreams. I cannot
escape the archetypes by which I understand myself, the stories by which I make
sense of my life. I can’t escape my own
dreams. And maybe this in itself is not
so bad, but there is something further. These dreams cannot be articulated. At the last, the vital core of what I call my
own identity is something that no precision of presentation will ever show to
any other person, if indeed I can even see it myself. The dream vortex fixes this, remedying the
loneliness of essential individuation by moving it, miraculously, toward
essential unity. Why can there not be
one huge dream? I know, I heard the
thing that you said about worlds collapsing and all that. But what if this collapse is ok? What if the only thing that is truly
collapsing is a worldview in which we must constantly control, guard, and
treasure our own ideas about who we are?
What if this is what it looks like to let go and take your sister’s
hand?
Ok, so Dream of the Endless isn’t on hand to offer a
response. But from somewhere, probably
from my own head, I hear it anyway. Timing is everything. Or, more precisely, time is everything. Or, even
more precisely still, human beings are
finite. No matter what glimpses we
may get in dreams or, if we are so fortunate, in waking life of the
transcendent, we are limited in space and limited in time. We are locked in the spaces of our own
bodies, the dreamscapes of our own minds and imaginations, and the moments in
which we are situated one after another.
There is only a certain number of places that I can be in one day. There is only a certain selection of words I
may use to give voice to what I am. There
is only a certain number of things that I can be—and this number does not
include you, any more than your
number includes me.
Perhaps there is a tragic loneliness to this
conclusion. But perhaps, also, Dream is
reminding Rose Walker (and, by proxy, the reader) that it is only from within
this essential limitation that the human subject may transcend the particular
limitation of a particular moment. As
T.S. Eliot puts it in his poem “Burnt Norton”:
“Only through time time is conquered.”
A seed can only grow in time. It
is only in time that we may meet Death and take her hand, and it is only in
time that we discover what happens next.
Gaiman’s Sandman is populated
by beings whose narratives are not bound by a conventional sense of time and
space, but it is also filled with human characters who are held fast by these
limitations. After six months of
solitary brooding on the trauma of her experience, Rose Walker goes forth to
rejoin the world with this declaration:
“Six months is long enough to feel sorry for yourself, isn’t it?” The immediate transcendence of the dream
vortex is not allowed, but the experience of finitude allows for its own
gestures of liberation. In time, Rose
may move. And her movement may be motion
forward. Rose Walker stands in for all
of the time-bound readers of The Sandman. A rose that can only grow from one moment to
the next. A walker who makes her way
forward one trudging step at a time.
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