My life in books

The Sandman Papers: An Exploration of the Sandman Mythology, ed. Joe Sanders

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman - taking the entire run of the comic series as a whole - is a remarkable work. The individual stories within the arc of the work are intelligent, entertaining, highly literate examinations of interesting and often powerful themes and ideas. The characters are intriguing, fascinating. The plots are occasionally straightforward, more often intricate and entrancing. Plus it's fun to read and it looks cool.

So it's no wonder that The Sandman has achieved that lofty status which demands that people start writing critical papers about it. Which is where The Sandman Papers comes in.

The critical essays collected in this volume cover a range of topics, and the success of the collection can be seen in the fact that, having read the papers, I now want to go back read The Sandman again so I can "talk back" to the essayists in my mind, and decide whether I agree with their insights and arguments or not.

As with any critical collection, I found some essays of greater interest than others. As one might expect, having a deep appreciation for the works of Shakespeare, I was particularly interested in the essays that focused on Gaiman's use of the Stratford Bard as a character, and riffed on the themes of some of his plays. In choosing to incorporate "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" within the narrative of The Sandman, Gaiman makes possible multiple levels of exploration of the themes of dream and reality, creation and creator, as is made evident in the three Shakespeare-themed essays in this collection:

"Of Stories and Storytellers in Gaiman and Vess's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'" by Joe Sanders
"Prospero Framed in Neil Gaiman's 'The Wake'" by Joan Gordan
"Aether/Ore: The Dreamworld Descends to Earth" by Alan Levitan

I also enjoyed Leonora Soledad a Paula's "Imaginary Places and Fantastic Narratives: Reading Borges Through The Sandman," particularly since she mentions some of the same echoes of Borges' writing that struck me in my reading of The Sandman, such as the resonance between Gaiman's depiction of Destiny's garden in "A Season of Mists" and Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths."

One essay in the collection has left me spinning the wheels in my braincage over something that's also an issue in the Joss Whedon universe - what type of character does the author choose to kill when someone "has to die." In Whedon's buffyverse it was Tara, the wholly good and apparently expendable lesbian. In Gaiman's "A Game of You," it's Wanda, a transwoman, and Maisie, a black woman, and the only black character.

David Bratman devotes a large part of his essay "A Game of You - Yes, You" to countering arguments made by Samuel Delany (in the introduction to "A Game of You") and writer Rachel Pollack that the deaths of Wanda and Maisie raise questions of how queer characters and characters of colour are presented in cultural products. Bratman argues that Wanda has to die because she is the character we are most engaged with, that we experience her struggles all the more intensely by seeing her die, seeing her identity erased in the funeral her family gives her, and then seeing her in Barbie's dream, imaged as a "pretty" and apparently female-bodied woman - a Real Girl at last, but only after she's safely dead. Bratman gives a little space to Maisie's death too, but his only counter to the criticism that here is another Magical Negro who dies to save the white main character is that other characters die too - those other characters being Wanda, the talking animals, and the male villain.

Now, I respect and enjoy Gaiman's work, and in a world where everyone else (especially everyone else writing from a position of serious privilege, such as white and either heterosexual or passing males) wasn't busy killing off the queer, trans and non-white characters in their work, I would have a different reaction. but the problem is that everyone else is killing off those characters, when they write them in at all. So - I disagree strongly with Bratman's arguments in this essay.

But that's why one reads critical essays - to look at arguments, and decide whether you agree with them or not.

There are a number of other interesting essays in the collection as well, exploring all sorts of things, from Orientalism in "Ramadan" and female power in "The Kindly Ones" to the implications of Dream's wardrobe. There's probably something for just about any fan of The Sandman.