Timing is Everything: Dream Country

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

“Writers are liars.”

This is not an indictment, nor is it a confession, nor is it a statement of personal belief.  This is a quotation from the first chapter of Dream Country, the third collected volume of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.  This is an odd statement for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it’s spoken from one writer to another. But more to the point, Gaiman chose this line as one the volume’s epigraphs.  For a narrative that is self-consciously concerned with the significance of reading and writing to human life, both individual and collective, this is an odd choice for a flagship quotation.  As odd as it is, however, these words from Erasmus Fry (whose name alone should signal his literary profession) bring into focus one of the central tensions of this volume—indeed, one of the central tensions of The Sandman itself:  The often-tortured relationship between fact and truth.

Unlike most volumes of the series, Dream Country collects a handful of stories that do not cohere into a single sub-arc within the larger narrative of The Sandman.  These disparate stories, however, are united by a persisting concern for the tension between the world that we receive through empirical evidence and the world that we perceive through vision, imagination, and dream.  Each of these stories explores in its own way the potential glories and potential pitfalls of engaging with the world of things through the lens of the creative and imaginative.  Although not all of these stories address this tension through direct reference to writers and writing, two of them certainly do. 

The first of these stories, entitled “Calliope,” opens with a premise that is as familiar as it is believable.  The not-quite-sympathetic protagonist, Richard Madoc, is a writer with a predictable problem.  He has published a first novel to great critical and popular success, but he can’t seem to write another one.  If his plight is familiar enough to be cliché, his solution is far from it.  Through finding and trading an obscure occult artifact, he receives from the aging writer Erasmus Fry a boon that promises to free him from his creative agonies.  He comes into possession of a young, blonde-haired woman who, the reader learns, has been held captive by Fry for the years of his greatest success.  But since this is The Sandman, the young woman is of course not a young woman at all—she is Calliope, one of the nine Muses who have served to inspire the art and imagination of the human race since the ages of antiquity.  Through his subjugation of Calliope, Erasmus Fry has been able to direct her power toward the furthering of his own career, and he now promises Richard Madoc that she can do the same for him. 

Calliope’s presence gives Madoc exactly what he desires.  While she is imprisoned in his home, Madoc enjoys a mercurial rise in status and success, becoming the sort of literary celebrity that few writers enjoy during their lifetimes.  However, Madoc’s success has a cost. Rendered in haunting detail by artist Kelley Jones, Calliope’s body is broken, battered, and emaciated.  The muse becomes a mine for the writer to strip and exploit to his own ends, and her tangible human body becomes his sexual plaything.  When Dream of the Endless comes to free Calliope from her servitude to Richard Madoc, the writer asserts his perceived right through the desperate and violent language of possession:  “But you don’t understand—I need her.  If I didn’t have her I wouldn’t be able to write.” 

There is something strangely confessional about this story.  As Madoc rises to fame, the accolades that he receives are strikingly similar to those that Neil Gaiman himself has received throughout his career.  He is a genre writer, trading primarily in fantasy and horror, whose work receives critical acclaim that generally does not go to genre fiction, even achieving the envious status of “transcending genre.”  His work crosses mediums and is universally admired and respected.  This similarity to Gaiman’s own career only serves to make the dark cautionary lesson more poignantly felt.  Madoc’s muse is no ethereal spiritual presence giving rise to powers of pure thought and imagination.  Madoc’s muse is a female human body from which he extracts his cherished ideas through a violence that has no other name than torture.  I read this as Gaiman’s addressing of a dark and unspoken potentiality within the creative endeavor.  The writer encounters the world, and from this encounter fashions his creation.  But this act of fashioning may subject the world to the writer’s own self-serving ends, and there is an inherent violence to this act.  William Carlos Williams has famously stated that the poet should seek “[no] ideas but in things,” but what if these things must be forcibly altered, even twisted, in order to give birth to the elusive idea?  I may write, but in my writing my muse may see herself not as she knows herself, but as a dark reflection cast back through the mirror of my own perception.

This tension of the relation between the writer and the world is revisited in the third issue of the collection, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  The familiarity of this title is no accident, as the writer in question is none other than William Shakespeare, and the subject of the issue is his play of the same name.  Shakespeare, we learn, has struck a deal with Dream of the Endless.  Throughout his career he will devote two plays to the subject of dreams, and in return he will get to become William Shakespeare as we know him—a myth, a household name, and an archetype for all writers in the English language.  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to be the first of these two plays.  In this issue we encounter Shakespeare as a young and ambitious playwright, carefully leading his theater troupe through an impressive and intimidating debut performance of this play.  This performance will be staged in an open field, and the august audience will be none other than Oberon, Titania, and their retinue—the same fairy-court that the play renders through the conventions of dramatic comedy.  The glowing, wispy work of acclaimed fantasy artist Charles Vess, at once ethereal and earthy, perfectly captures the magnitude of this encounter both through the stunning grandiosity of the fairy-court’s entry into a common landscape and through the thinly disguised panic on Shakespeare’s face as he recognizes the weight of this performance. 

As the players give their performance, something astounding happens:  Their audience becomes enraptured.  The impressive power of Shakespeare’s work is perfectly articulated through the wonder of Puck, who is brilliantly rendered by Vess as the demonic hobgoblin that Shakespeare’s text suggests him to be.  “This is magnificent,” the fairy exclaims, “and it is true!  It never happened, yet it is still true.  What magic art is this?”  These beings who are magical in their essential nature become the privileged witnesses of a different kind of magic—the magic of the writer’s ability to portray a type of truth that transcends concrete fact. 

This accolade serves to distinguish William Shakespeare from the opportunistic Richard Madoc, but Gaiman’s treatment of the subject does not neatly exculpate Shakespeare of the darker potentialities of relating to one’s world through the imagination.  Among the actors in Shakespeare’s troupe is his son Hamnet.  In a particularly poignant exchange, Hamnet confesses to his friend Tommy the grief that his father’s professional disposition has caused him.  “He’s distant,” the young man explains.  “He doesn’t seem like he’s really there anymore.  It’s like he’s somewhere else.  Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it.  I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays.”  William Shakespeare has achieved something remarkable—he has entranced an otherworldly audience through the perfectly human medium of storytelling.  The cost of this endeavor, however, is emblemized through the neglect experienced by his son.  Shakespeare has no battered and tortured muse imprisoned in his home, but Hamnet’s pain suggests that the cost of this success may be just as insidious as that of Richard Madoc’s.  Gaiman wisely refuses to resolve this tension, instead letting the ambiguity it presents lend strength to the story’s impact.  Hamnet’s complaint does not diminish the grandeur of the fairy-court’s applause, but neither does this applause erase the boy’s heartbreak.

Though not explicitly about writers, the remaining two stories in this collection address the volume’s central tension from equally unique perspectives.  In “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” an aging female cat implores the others of her species to wake up and see the world in which they live, a world in which they are the subjects and playthings of a tyrannous humanity.  She shares with them a story, told to her by Dream himself, of a time when the roles were reversed and cats were the lords and ladies of the earth, towering in size and power over the human beings who catered to their every whim.  This order, according to the story, was undone when a single human being spread a message grounded in the liberating power of the imagination.  “Dreams,” this visionary declares, “create the world anew every night.  Do not dream the world the way it is now, in thrall to our masters and mistresses.  Dream a new world…”  Cats, she asserts, can now do the same.  This is the language of revolution, and it is met with the same conservative skepticism with which such language is usually received.  In the darkest of these stories, “Façade,” a forgotten DC Comics super-hero called Element Girl is stymied by the perception that her physical deformity cuts her off from communion with other human beings.  This perception is reinforced at every turn by the tacit messages she receives from her culture; messages asserting that beauty, intelligence, success, and connection are the only truly valuable markers of a meaningful life.  In the face of such persisting ideology, Element Girl’s only avenue of escape comes through a chance encounter with Dream’s sister Death, signaling the end of her life as she knows it.  Through these two stories Gaiman simultaneously asserts the liberating potential of the imagination and avoids the naïve belief that this liberation comes easily.  

As episodic as this volume is, it bears witness to a crucial turn in the narrative of The Sandman.  Within these pages, Dream himself begins to undergo the agony of self-reflection and change that growth demands.  Until this point Dream has existed within the narrative as an efficient and vindictive god, intervening in the affairs of mortals to set right what their fallibility has thrown off course.  Throughout these pages, however, there are subtle signals that Dream is beginning to grapple with his own fallibility.  This is most keenly observable in his interactions with William Shakespeare.  Upon meeting with the bard before the performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Dream announces to Shakespeare the death of his friend and fellow-poet Christopher Marlowe.  “Why did you tell this to me now,” a grief-stricken Shakespeare asks.  “This news could have waited.  Marlowe was my friend.”  Dream can only confess that here he is out of his element:  “I did not realize it would hurt you so.”  Will responds with incensed incredulity:  “You did not realize?  No, your kind care not for human lives.  Dark stranger, already I half-regret our bargain.” 

Dream grapples with these words throughout the performance of the play, and he articulates his tortured thoughts to Titania of Faerie.  By the terms of their contract, Shakespeare’s stories “will live for an age of man; and his words will echo down through time.  It is what he wanted.  But he did not understand the price.  Mortals never do.  They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream…But the price of getting what you want,” Dream concludes, “is getting what you once wanted.”  This, it seems, is among the confounding mysteries of the human heart and mind.  If we are bound by the limitations of our spatial and temporal contexts, even the visions and dreams by which we move forward from those limitations may serve as the markers of what will inevitably be left behind.  We may desire and we may achieve, and we may wake one morning to find that those achievements hold us as fast as did the shackles we escaped.  We may renounce and we may let go of what we have and who we are, and we may wake one morning to reckon what we have lost.  Timing is everything, and there is no stopping the flow of time.  We know this, but how could we not? Like many of Shakespeare’s most insightful protagonists, we’ve reckoned time, we know what’s coming for us. The irony, of course, is that Dream, the architect of our stories, doesn’t. But he will. Time, you see, it’s coming for him too.