Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's
NeverwhereAfter many adventures in a magical realm beneath the city of London, Richard Mayhew, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s novel
Neverwhere, is faced with the harrowing ordeal of the key: the possibility that he has actually spent the last week as a crazy homeless person rather than a fantasy hero, and that by realizing this he is now, “starting to edge a little closer to sanity” (243). If he believes in the everyday reality suggested by the phantoms of his real-life friends, then Richard will edge not only closer to “sanity,” but to the suicidal edge of a subway platform. He also has the seemingly impossible choice of believing in the primacy or immediacy of the magical world, and in doing so go on to win the key, complete his quest, and become the greatest warrior in London Below.
At the crux of Richard’s ordeal is the necessity of belief in the magical or otherwise non-real reality in which he’s found himself. This question of belief is also at the heart of the reader’s quest through the book. If we approach the ordeal cold, that is, without already having read and believed in the magical world of
Neverwhere, then we are likely to agree that Richard is mad, and instead side with his friend Gary, who claims of London Above that, “this is reality. Get used to it. It’s all there is” (368). Only the most unimaginatively adult readers seem likely to chose this interpretation of the text, but what allows the rest of us to so willingly believe in this world of angels, warriors, and rat-speakers? By applying certain Romantic and Fantasy theories of belief to the story – Coleridge’s concept of the suspension of disbelief, Tolkien’s thoughts on the consistency of Secondary Worlds, Blake’s Contrary Method, and Todorov’s notion of hesitation in the face of fantastic events – we can see how Gaiman has not only managed to create a compelling magical world in London Below, as well as inclined the reader to identify with his protagonist’s quest of believing in
Neverwhere, but also questioned our belief in the primacy of our everyday reality.
The Willing Suspension of DisbeliefLike most people since the rational Age of Enlightenment, it is unlikely that you live in a world convincingly inhabited by faeries, witches or other creatures of fancy. The new sciences of the Eighteenth Century led to a general disbelief by the educated classes in real supernatural agents, which led to a decline of their use in the poetry and fiction of the period. The Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose focus on the powers of the imagination made him one of the forefathers of the genre of fantasy, struggled with this question of how to include non-realistic elements in his and his contemporaries’ writings. How could he convince readers to overlook the implausibility of such fantastic narratives, as with the undead sailors in his
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?In chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, Coleridge suggests that supernatural stories can be framed, “so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief… which constitutes poetic faith.” This ‘suspension of disbelief,’ as the term has found purchase in contemporary culture, also requires for Coleridge: “the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real,” and is the power of imagination that “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (a phrase that echoes the Contrary Method of William Blake, another Romantic poet-philosopher whose ideas we will consider as an undercurrent to the more theoretical mechanics of believability).
While it may be difficult to untangle Coleridge’s centuries-old language it is still possible to apply his ideas to contemporary supernatural fictions such as Gaiman’s
Neverwhere. At heart of our ability to suspend disbelief is the representation of the supernatural, not only as something really happening, but also as containing some relevance to everyday human affairs. At the beginning of the novel, Richard Mayhew is presented as an “everyman,” inhabiting a reality that, like for most of us, consists solely of: “work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life;” a description tempered by the very real question, “is that all there is” (364)? Like many people in the contemporary world, Richard has problems at the office, problems in his relationship, an inability to hold his liquor, and a penchant for material goods (such as mass-produced trolls), “in a vain attempt at injecting a little personality into his working world” (12). By his sheer normalcy it would be impossible not to believe that Richard contains a “semblance of truth;” he represents each of us, more than we might comfortably like to admit.
It is not just Richard Mayhew’s ordinariness that we identify with (if so we could do away with the supernatural altogether and confine ourselves to the social realism of a Charles Dickens novel), but also his uncertainty about the world in which he lives. After being told his fortune in the opening scene, Richard is, true to a realistic emotional response to the situation, “a little unsure how to treat information of this nature” (3). This uncertainty deepens when he moves to the city of London, which Richard at first finds to be “fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map… giving it any semblance of order” (8). Who has not been lost in a new city, or even in a familiar city stumbled upon, as Richard does in a taxi ride home, “an unlikely route involving streets… never before seen” (19)? Richard is uncertain about the world, but that world itself is also uncertain. London’s chaotic history and growth, as narrated by Gaiman, allow an unexpected place for more than just everyday experiences to occur.
But what kind of extraordinary circumstance might a typical man encounter in a presumably real city? If, as Coleridge suggests, the imagination works through the balance of opposites, or, as Blake asserts in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries [there] is no progression,” then the only believable encounter is with a supernaturally powered woman from an assuredly fantastic otherworld. Just as Richard is at his wits end in dealing with the real world, a blank wall opens, and Door appears from London Below. By reacting with true human kindness to the hurt girl at his feet (as opposed to the caricatured blindness of his fiancé Jessica), Richard saves himself from the mundanity of dinner with the boss, and allows the reader to suspend their own disbelief, following our hero into the infinitely more exciting realms of the imagination.
The Inner Consistency of the Secondary World In the century following Coleridge’s concept of the willing suspension of disbelief, supernatural elements once again became more common in literature. Many of these magical worlds however only seemed half-realized, or worse, were merely allegories for real-world events and religious doctrines (for example consider the realm of the seven dimensions in George MacDonald’s
Lilith, which is only fully explicable in light of Biblical narratives). In 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose
The Lord of the Rings stands as the first major work in the fantasy genre, delivered a lecture entitled On Fairy-stories, which attempts to make clearer the mechanics of successful make-believe. Tolkien disagreed that the reader suspends their disbelief in a supernatural world, if so they are merely going along with it for sentiment’s sake. The burden of belief instead resides with the author, who can make “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world” (37). While difficult to achieve, such fantasies require “the inner consistency of reality” (48), that is, there are rules to the way a successful Secondary World operates.
Discovering the rules of a new magical reality is one of the great joys of reading good fantasy, and
Neverwhere is no exception. As an added bonus, Richard Mayhew’s quest is often comprised of this need to discover how the Secondary World works. In his first foray into London Below, Richard “realized that he did not know very much about what went on beneath London” (47), but he will soon discover that his very survival depends on finding out! This paradoxically leads to the first rule of
Neverwhere: the more you learn about London Below the less likely you are of being able to return to the real world of London Above. After he rescues Door she tells Richard it wouldn’t do him any good to know what happened to her, and the Marquis de Carabas forbids Richard not only from asking questions but also tells him not to “even think about what’s happening to you right now” (47). Though these characters are trying to save Richard from getting trapped in their world, Richard (and the reader along with him) can’t help but wonder about the little bits of magic we see, and consequently are drawn deeper into London Below.
The true magic of the novel, and what makes finding out the rules of London Below both an enjoyable and believable experience, is that this Secondary World works through puns and juxtapositions, so that we see familiar elements of our world in an entirely new light. This use of Blake’s Contrary Method is first hinted at in the Prologue to
Neverwhere, when, after looking at a map of the London Underground, “Richard found himself pondering… whether there really was a circus at Oxford Circus” (4). Whenever a Tube station is mentioned it becomes increasingly more obvious that the station’s title will be taken literally: there is a bridge at Knightsbridge, an earl at Earl’s Court, shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush, black friars at Blackfriars. Though not every Tube station is visited in the course of the novel, the inclusion of the map in the front of the book leads the reader to continue filling out the world of London Below in their imagination through application of this rule of the metaphor made literal. Eventually Richard, and the reader, stops questioning the rule: “the longer he was here, the more he took at face value” (161).
It is not just the landscape of London Below that plays off the familiar; the characters and events follow these rules as well. Though the villains Croup and Vandemar “did not look like anything Richard had seen before” (33), their and Door’s clothing calls to Richard’s mind “the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum” (29). Old Bailey’s rooftop lair reminds Richard of a theatrical performance of Robinson Crusoe. The feast served to our heroes by the Earl at Earl’s Court is “Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate,” and an antique goblet “filled with Coca-Cola” (160). We are led to believe that the Secondary World of London Below is internally consistent because, through these juxtapositions with and references to the familiar, we see where the supernatural fits inside of or coexists with our everyday reality. The lack of contradictions to our world makes London Below seem like it could really exist! This is a testament to Gaiman’s powers of sub-creation; like Richard perhaps we too can go “beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are” (307).
Hesitation in the Face of the FantasticThough London Below is presented as a consistent Secondary World where Richard “was at least learning to play the game” (102), in order to believe in
Neverwhere ourselves we must more fully explore the significance of the supernatural events of London Below existing along side the familiar, mundane world. As Coleridge suggests, in order to suspend our disbelief the character must react as if these events were actually happening in the real world. The Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov, in his 1970 book
Inroduction á la littérature fantastique (
The Fantastic), presents what seems to be one of the truest literary responses to a confrontation with the extraordinary: uncertainty or hesitation. “In a world which is indeed our world… there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world… the fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Because “the fantastic implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated,” and so “the character wonders (and the reader with him) whether what is happening to him is real” (31 and 24). The fantastic works through presenting a supernatural event along side a series of potentially rational explanations – drugs, madness, dreams, tricks, illusions, and coincidences (45) – that never quite account for what happened, thus urging the character and reader towards belief in the supernatural.
Throughout
Neverwhere, Richrad Mayhew is essentially characterized by this response of hesitation; he is constantly positing unlikely explanations for the fantastic events he encounters. When Door asks him to apologize to what seems to be a talking rat, Richard considers that “maybe he was the one who was going mad” (42). Our hero has a similar need to rationally account for his sudden invisibility to the real world when he returns from his first encounter with London Below: “whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank” (61). Because nothing he is experiencing makes rational sense, Richard also finds recourse in the possibility that he “walked into a nightmare” (126). The Ordeal itself essentially catalogues Todorov’s explanations, as being potentially a dream, a figment of Richard’s imagination, or a break in his sanity (242). In order to pass the test however, and not consider one of these explanations as real, Richard must already have established a belief in the primacy of the supernatural world of London Below.
At certain key points in the story, Richard and the reader realize that we cannot explain away the marvelous events that seem to be happening. Upon meeting the angel Islington, Richard realizes that “it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name” (197). No rational explanation can account for this direct encounter with the supernatural. On the other hand, after “experiencing the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things” (133), the party reaches British Museum Station, which Richard finds to be “one oddity too many” (164). This turns the hesitant reaction to supernatural events on its head, because it turns out this Tube station really did exist; it seems fantastic merely because Richard does not know everything that exists in the real world of London Above. “He wondered how normal London – his London – would look to an alien” (112). Eventually Richard, and the reader, learn to accept that “the simplest and most likely explanations for what he had seen and experienced recently were the ones that had been offered him – no matter how unlikely they might seem” (201), but without total knowledge of the real world or an objective frame of reference, who is to say what seemingly marvelous events aren’t equally as real?
Belief Beyond the Cavern of the RealThis question of whether or not supernatural events could actually occur seems to be a central concern of Neil Gaiman’s novel. That we feel the need to posit rational explanations for seemingly unreal circumstances merely belies a human preference for the primacy of the everyday world with which we are most familiar. As Blake however suggests in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” When Richard rescues Door at the beginning of
Neverwhere, “a normal, sensible Richard Mayhew… was telling him how ridiculous he was being” (25), or, when returning to what he considers to be the primary reality, Richard believes that “the events of the previous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely” (56). These expectations about what is real form the narrow chinks of Richard’s cavern, which are progressively widened to encompass a much broader worldview. How could something like the fantastic Night’s Bridge exist “beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing” (100)? The answer occurs later when the guests at the museum, exemplary of this realistic mindset, are confronted with the supernatural opening of the Angelus: “ having dealt with something entirely outside their experience, agreed, somehow, without a word, that it had simply never happened” (196). Our belief in the primacy of the everyday reality is merely a social or cultural convention based on a familiarity with what we expect is possible, and is a much more recent modern invention compared to the age-old belief in invisible spirits.
Blake might argue through his Contrary Method that, like good and evil, reality and fantasy necessitate each other. How can we know what is real unless the unreal also exists? In
Neverwhere, we can only really see Richard Mayhew as a real and identifiable character in his interactions with the internally consistent magical reality of London Below. And given a choice between these two realities on his return to London Above, Richard claims that “if [the real world] is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane” (369). At the end of the story, Richard creates a door and chooses to return to the magical world of London Below, clearly favoring his belief in the primacy of the supernatural. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem clear whether or not this last supernatural event occurs (though in our imaginations we can continue the story and “find out”), so it is left up to the reader and our own preferences between reality and the supernatural to choose whether we too believe in
Neverwhere. Works Cited
Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake Digital Text Project. 2003.
University of Georgia. 12 Apr. 2009.
Colerdige, Samuel Taylor. “Biographia Literaria.” Michael Gamer: Home Page.
University of Pennsylvania. 12 Apr. 2009
Gaiman, Neil. “Neverwhere.” Avon Books. New York: 1998
Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” Trans.
Richard Howard. Cornell University Press. Ithaca: 1995
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-stories.” The Tolkien Reader. Ballantine Books. New York:
1971
