306- ] English Literature
Neil Gaiman
Considering
the Fall of Neil Gaiman
January 19, 2025
I would read other
books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there
wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read … C.S. Lewis was the first
person to make me want to be a writer.
(Neil Gaiman, keynote
speech, “Mythcon 35”)
The celebrated
English fantasy author, Neil Gaiman, has been shot out of the sky. In August, a
podcast began to detail allegations of sexual abuse made against him by five
different women. Last week, New York Magazine published a longer and more
horrifically detailed catalogue, partly supported by testimonies from new
victims. The new article is convincing and compelling (also sickening—I
strongly suggest that you don’t read it). Gaiman has tried to respond (“It was
all consensual … I’m still learning”), but nobody is buying it. He is finished.
His film and TV adaptations are being cancelled. At the height of his
professional success, he has fallen from grace.
The man has tried to
respond, but nobody is buying it. He is finished.
There are so many
things that we might talk about in the light of this wretched exposure:
Gaiman’s hypocrisy (eclipsing even that of Joss Whedon); the willingness of
other “right thinking” (I mean impeccably progressive) people to cover for him;
the folly of writer-idolatry and its prevalence in con-culture; the universal
temptation of power to corrupt.
Fantasy and its
Dangers
Others have already
begun with those dissections. My interest in Neil Gaiman at this final moment
in his career is the same as it has been hitherto. Gaiman is a lover of myth,
wonder and the numinous; he was shaped by C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien.
Although I have never ranked him as one of my favourite novelists, I have
always kept an eye on what he is writing. I tend to be interested in the things
he is interested in and often resonate with the things he says.
And that’s why I am
not terribly surprised at where he has ended up. [N.B. Nothing that follows
here is meant to (a) fully explain Gaiman’s actions or, much less, (b) render
them excusable in any sense.]
Back in 2023, I wrote
a blog post (“Narnia Must Die”) warning about how myth and fantasy can go bad
on us if we think they will supply us with ultimate meaning and wonder. That
post drew heavily from C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory and Surprised by Joy. But
in light of these recent developments, it might be worth adding some quotes
from another of Lewis’s works, namely The Pilgrim’s Regress. In this somewhat
allegorical autobiography, Lewis talks about a more specific way the desire for
transcendence might go bad:
I dreamed that I saw
John growing tall and lank till he ceased to be a child and became a boy. The
chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look
through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. Some
days he saw it well enough, especially at first, and heard the music and the
voice. At first he would not look through the window into the wood unless he
had heard the music.
But after a time both
the sight of the Island, and the sounds, became very rare. He would stand
looking through the window for hours, and seeing the wood, but no sea or Island
beyond it, and straining his ears but hearing nothing except the wind in the
leaves. And the yearning for that sight of the Island and the sweet wind blowing
over the water from it, though indeed these themselves had given him only
yearning, became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have
them again soon. He even said to himself, ‘I would break every rule on the card
for them if I could only get them.
The vision of the
island and sea that John so desperately wants to recapture represents what he
elsewhere calls “Joy”—a sense of longing for a true home, a glimpse or brief
encounter with ultimate beauty. Finally, as his encounters with it become few
and farther between, he settles for ecstasies of another kind:
There in the grass
beside him sat a laughing brown girl of about his own age, and she had no
clothes on.
“It was me you
wanted,” said the brown girl. “I am better than your silly Islands.”
And John rose and
caught her, all in haste, and committed fornication with her in the wood.
The girl is described
as “brown”, which is distractingly offensive to modern sensibilities, but
signifies sensuality in the lexicon of orientalism. She represents sexual
abandon; noble savagery untamed by Western morality and the norms of
Christendom. Later on, John encounters a bunch of cool cat intellectuals
(“Clevers”) who serve him up the same thing in a more sophisticated form. They
too try to tell him that it is what he has really been looking for. But John
has been burned before:
“No, no,” cried John.
“I know you are wrong there. I grant you, that—that sort of thing—is what I
always get if I think too long about the Island. But it can’t be what I want.”
So goes the
post-Enlightenment West according to Lewis. We reach for heaven and end up in
the mud; we start out reading about gods and somehow find ourselves pawing
dirty magazines (though sometimes they come with sophisticated titles). Thus
too, we might add, goes the “progress” of the fantasy genre from Lord of the
Rings to Game of Thrones. Or, more to the point, from Narnia to American Gods.
We reach for heaven
and end up in the mud; we start out reading about gods and somehow find
ourselves pawing dirty magazines.
In The Pilgrim’s
Regress, John searches for a distant island and lost sea. There is another
elusive sea in Neil Gaiman’s own (semi-) autobiographical book, The Ocean At
The End Of The Lane: a duckpond that is also, without any real explanation, a
symbol of the lost childhood wonder and the whole world of imagination and
myth.
I don’t know if the
parallel is deliberate. But the differences are significant. For Lewis, the
Island represents a longing so great that it can only be satisfied by Something
Infinitely Good—the Source of all beauty and wonder. For Gaiman the path curves
backwards, vanishing into the weeds of nostalgia and
let’s-pretend-without-really-believing paganism.
Gaiman’s version
doesn’t really work. As Gaiman writes in the prologue of Ocean: “I make art,
sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life.
(Some of them. Not all).” In a 2017 interview with Adam Savage, he put it even
more succinctly: “I’ve been looking for ‘there’ for so long, and every time I
think I reach it just turns out to be another ‘here'”
Unfulfillable
desires—and especially God-shaped holes—have a way of producing bad behaviour.
C.S. Lewis warns of foolish romantics, who “spend their whole lives trotting
from woman to woman … thinking that the latest is ‘the Real Thing’ at last, and
always disappointed.” Maybe that’s what’s going on with Gaiman—though these
allegations make it sound like he has long ago seen through romance, and is now
ruled by much darker urges. It is the curse of the rich and powerful to drink
more deeply from the cup of depravity—and experience the ensuing emptiness in
equal proportion.
Missing the Point
My point, however, is
simply this: Gaiman seems to have missed the central concerns of the great
writer he once adored. Having refused to yield to the great and true Author of
myth he has lost himself in lesser (and sometimes evil) fantasies.
Of course, it might
be even worse than that. He might have actively rejected those warnings. I once
read Gaiman’s fictional response to the “Problem of Susan” (again, don’t read
it) where he made Aslan and The White Witch allies. Its obscenity seemed to me
like an attempt to exorcise himself of Aslan, or at least (and more hopefully)
like Edmund drawing spectacles on the stone lion.
I have noticed other,
more disturbing, Lewis echoes in Gaiman. In Ocean, he has his childhood alter
ego saying things that sound disturbingly like the demoniac villain of
Perelandra. For example:
I saw the world I had
walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was
a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and
nightmares and hunger. (Ocean)
All the things you
like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for
instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are
merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness,
worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink. (Perelandra)
And again:
I thought I was
looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a
country church, made of gray and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm
wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and
ripped by time. And then it turned and I saw its face, and I heard something
make a whimpering sound, like a dog that had been kicked, and I realized that
the thing that was whimpering was me. (Ocean)
I dreamed I was lying
dead—you know, nicely laid out in the ward in a nursing home with my face
settled by the undertaker and big lilies in the room. And then a sort of a
person who was all falling to bits—like a tramp, you know, only it was himself
not his clothes that was coming to pieces. (Perelandra)
I don’t know if these
similarities are intentional, unconscious or simply coincidental, but it is
worrying that Gaiman uses the same images for himself as a despairing revenant
temporarily released from hell. Has the boy who loved Lewis so much that he
became a writer finally become Edward Weston?
I hope not. I pray
that Neil Gaiman’s story ends like Edmund’s and not Weston’s. His abuse of
women and sex is very very wicked. If all the allegations are all true, it
seems self-evident that he should be sent to prison. But these are also the
sort of thing that Jesus died for.[2] I wish Neil Gaiman would repent; that he
would go back to where he started and find the God of Narnia: the holy God who
forgives sins and changes lives; the God of happy endings; the author of the
good story that goes on and on.
In the same address
quoted at the start of this article, Gaiman speaks of his disappointment on
noticing the “allegorical” elements in Narnia:
I was personally
offended: I felt that an author, whom I had trusted, had had a hidden agenda …
I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a
thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep.
Others have expressed
similar sentiments. But filing Narnia away under “Christian Propaganda” misses
the point. Lewis insists that Narnia is not allegory but a “supposal” of the
Reality who is the Truth behind all truth. His Aslan and Emperor are not simply
cardboard stand-ins for English Anglicanism; they are, for Lewis, the source of
all myths, mystery and beauty. Lewis writes as a pre-eminent scholar of
literature and lover of pre-Christian classics, not just a Christian. Bible
readers love Narnia, but someone who had only read the Bible could never have
written those books.
To anticipate three
objections: (i) If the prison thing is true, it is true whether he repents or
not. Jesus’ dying for our sins before God is not the same as the state excusing
our crimes toward other humans. (ii) Don’t his victims deserve prayer more than
him? Yes. (iii) Am I claiming Christians are immune from this sort of thing?
Absolutely not, but I am asserting that the one who offers to eternally satisfy
our thirst (c.f. John 41-26) gives Christians resources that are not available
otherwise. Whether that is plausible to you, reader, may depend on the particular
Christians you have known; but Jesus himself is the only thoroughly trustworthy
man. Of course, that’s the main point of the religion.\
