Have you ever wondered, little bird, what it must be like to see the world
through the eyes of a God?
Gaiman and McKean[1]
 |
| Neil Gaiman |
The Panopticon is by no means foreign to […] preoccupations,
if one takes account of the chief inspector’s surveillance of his staff and the
constant watch kept over everyone through the windows of the tower, an unbroken
succession of observations recalling the motto: each comrade becomes an overseer.
[…] Yet it’s Bentham who begins by relying on a single power, that of the central
tower. As one reads him one wonders who he is putting in the tower. Is it the eye
of God? (Perraut 1980: 157)
The “Panopticon”
she is referring to, “the infernal model that no one, either the watcher or the
watched, can escape” (Perraut 1980: 156) is a prototype of prison facility that
was designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late XVIII century,
and which is extensively analysed by Foucault himself in his highly influential
essay Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Foucault [1975] 1995). Designed
as a circular structure of cells with a watchtower in the middle,[2]
the Panopticon is considered by Foucault to be a metaphor and sublimation of the
principle of surveillance, which allows the impalpable enforcement of discipline
on the “docile body” (Foucault 1995: 135) of the condemned in modern apparatuses
of power. Thanks to such design, the inmate in the Panopticon “is seen, but he [sic]
does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”
(Foucault 1995: 200). Going back to Perraut’s question, it can be said that her
claim, while being (partially) rejected by herself, and immediately after by Foucault,[3]
quite unintentionally raises an interesting point, i.e. that the modern(ist) concept
of surveillance still shows the signs of a religious and/or metaphysical discourse
focused around the gaze of the divinity. In other words, it could be said that the
underlying idea of control is imbued with two separate but not mutually-exclusive
notions: on the one hand, the eye of the supernatural being which, from a privileged
position, controls and then punishes those who misbehave; on the other hand, the
ethereal and disembodied control imposed by a pervasive, invisible system (i.e.
apparatus) of technological surveillance. Such a system, whose very effectiveness
also relies on removing the need for an identifiable and verifiable watchman, is
devised “not so much to punish wrongdoers as to prevent even the possibility of
wrongdoing, by immersing people in a field of total visibility” (Foucault 1980:
153). The present analysis stems from this
assumption and investigates the ways in which a postmodern and highly sophisticated
graphic novel, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s The Sandman[4]
(1989), manages to appropriate, blend into a single metaphorical figure, and even
challenge (with original modalities and outcomes) the aforementioned narratives
of control, respectively the divine/metaphysical and the panoptical. In particular,
the analysis will focus on the penultimate story arc, titled The Kindly Ones (issues
#57-69). The Sandman, entirely written by British author Neil Gaiman (1960), was
serialized until 1996 under the “mature reader” imprint Vertigo of the American
publisher and corporate giant DC Comics. A modern fantasy bildungsroman, it is one
of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels of all time, having been awarded
26 Eisner Awards; the 19th issue, entitled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is the sole
piece of graphic literature to have ever received the World Fantasy Award. It must
be premised that The Sandman’s discourse concerning the divine eye is not mainly
informed by the Judeo-Christian concept of “all-seeing eye of God”, as one might
be tempted to think. This concept is undoubtedly paramount in western culture, being
repeatedly mentioned in the Holy Bible, and having been represented by a myriad
of artists[5]
over the centuries. Instead, this graphic novel can be said to exploit its own pastiche
nature and especially its tragic structure/motifs (see Bender 2000: 174–175) in
order to analyse, demystify and eventually deconstruct the implicit operations of
scrutiny and control which lie hidden behind the relationship between hubris and
nemesis. Such concepts serve as the backbone for many dramatic narratives, and are
widely present in Greek and Elizabethan tragedies, which can be said to constitute
major sources for The Sandman. As we shall see, the analysis and deconstruction
are carried out through a wide array of representational strategies which exploit
– and to a certain extent re-invent – the specificity of the comic book medium. Speaking of the appropriation and re-use of highbrow
literary sources within mass culture, it must be said that much critical debate
– and therefore many theoretical tools of analysis – still rely heavily upon categories
of signification which revolve around the ideas of closeness and/or fidelity to
the original classics. Other critics, more influenced by materialist critical trends,
are concerned by the(ir) dialectics between emancipation and control, the latter
deriving from the material and structural conditions of the media. For instance,
Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, speaking of televised adaptations of the
Bard’s plays, claims that any translation of Shakespeare into a visually tangible
form “seems inevitably to entail a liberation of the play […] from the fetished
holy writ of the text” (Holderness 1994: 207), but that in the meantime it must
also be acknowledged that popular culture media are “inherently conservative” and
“exercise a despotic ideological control over the spectator’s response […] depriving
the audience of an opportunity to participate in a collaborative construction of
meaning” (Holderness 1994: 208). It is here argued that the aforementioned critical
stance is not productive within a theoretical framework which must necessarily dismiss
the validity of a high culture/low culture debate that considers such categories
as real and objective, and which, in addition, can be accused of reductionism. A
more useful approach should be taken into account, as, for instance, the consideration
of consumption as a creative act, for “buyers become bricoleurs; […] rather than
being inherent in the commodity, meaning and value are constructed through actual
usage” (Barker 2012: 67). Starting from such assumptions, the model of analysis
that seems most suitable is Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model,[6]
which problematizes the traditional sender/receiver model in order to establish
four linked moments (production, distribution, circulation and reproduction) in
which “meaning is embedded” (Barker 2012: 327). In addition, Hall (1980) stresses
that “[the encoding process] can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe or guarantee
[the decoding process], which has its own conditions of existence” (Hall 1980: 125).
It can be therefore argued that graphic novels should be considered as first-stage
decoders, which receive the most disparate cultural suggestions and motifs, and
successively re-produce them for the audience, only to be re-interpreted according
to their own social and cultural resources. It should not be forgotten that from
its very beginnings mainstream graphic narrative has appropriated and popularized
high culture and literature – only to contaminate them with elements from less renowned
cultural strata (see Morrison 2012: 17–26 for an interesting account on Bat-Man’s
creation in 1939). Such interstitial, in-between conceptualization of the genre’s
position within the cultural environment mirrors the hybrid nature of the medium
itself, and moreover configures the graphic novel as a cultural, almost inherently
postmodern third space in which (skilful) authors “deconstruct, manipulate, and
reassemble the forms of tradition and narrative both in literature and comics” (Di
Liddo 2009: 15).
CULTURAL SYNCRETISM, TRAGIC CONTAMINATIONS
Before attempting
to analyse The Sandman and the representational patterns employed by the authors,
several other points should be raised. The first concerns the ways in which the
graphic novel articulates its own nature of literary pastiche; Neil Gaiman, in the
long interview published in The Sandman Companion (Bender 2000), claims that issue
#9, titled Tales of the Sand, should be considered “[his] first attempt in the series
at pure pastiche – that is, openly imitating an established style of storytelling”
(Bender 2000: 50). It must be noted that Gaiman, through the mastery of his narrative
skills, aptly avoids turning the literary device into the aimless game of cross-reference
and intertextuality criticised by Friedric Jameson (1991) as a “neutral practice
of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric
impulse” (Jameson 1991: 16). Within the series, pastiche is used instead as a tool
that allows the author to reflect – amongst other things – on the art of storytelling,
the role and creation of myths within societies and especially the falseness of
the boundaries defining high and low culture[7]
(see Rauch 2003: 135). However, defining
The Sandman a pastiche would seem to be reductive. Compared to other postmodern
works such as V for Vendetta (Moore and Lloyd 1989), the series can be said to elevate
the device to the state-of-the-art, being a true mythopoesis which builds a literary
hyper-reality in which historical figures, comicbook super-heroes, Shakespearean
dramatis personae, personifications of aspects of the universe (the Endless), religious
figures, mythological creatures and normal human beings more or less pacifically
coexist. It can therefore be suggested that Gaiman invests the whole narrative and
character structure with an unusual cultural syncretism which juxtaposes different
cultural and literary heritages and which, in addition, blends different figures
within the same character: for instance, the protagonist, the anthropomorphic personification
of Dream, is shown to be simultaneously the Greek God Oneiros (see 17.23), the Roman
God Morpheus and the European folklore creature Sandman. Apart from the Sandman,
the character that best exemplifies such syncretism is the Triple Goddess, also
known as Three-who-are-One (see Bender 2000: 199), a tripartite figure invariably
composed by a maiden, a mother and a crone which is, often with minor variations,
common to the most different cultures and lores all around the world. Gaiman blends
together the cultural inputs creating an overlapping, unstable figure – which continuously
shifts the appearance of the women and which assumes the appropriate role according
to the situation, thus becoming the Greek Fates, the Irish Morrigan, William Shakespeare’s
Weird Sisters from Macbeth, the Greek Erinyes (also called Furies or Eumenides)
and many more.[8]
The relationship
between the graphic novel and Classic Greek and British Renaissance tragedy can
be demonstrated by several elements. First of all, some explicit and straightforward
references to Aeschylus’s trilogy of the Oresteia can be traced,[9]
especially to the third part entitled The Eumenides, from which The Sandman’s main
antagonists the Furies/Erinyes/Eumenides[10]
are obviously absorbed. While in the graphic novel their purpose is to avenge Dream’s
blood sin with his death,[11]
in the original play these Chthonic deities
are older than Zeus or any of the other Olympians. Their
task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young
to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or
city councils to suppliants – and to punish such crimes by hounding the culprits
relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country. (Graves
1955: 117)
In both texts they fill the role of the chorus
but also, in comic-book terms, of the villain: this is another element that helps
us to consider The Sandman, and especially the already mentioned penultimate story
arc The Kindly Ones (#57-69) as a “tragedy in classical terms” (Rauch 2003: 58),
and moreover a work which does not simply imitate motifs and elements from the classics,
but which appropriates them to exploit its own generic structure and generate new
meanings.
The explicit
references to tragedies are not confined to classical Greek theatre, since Jacobean
and Elizabethan plays are also widely quoted in the series, with deliberate prominence
given to Shakespeare. The Bard himself is an important secondary character, and
two issues are entirely devoted to two separate plays, i.e. A Midsummer Night's
Dream (#19) and The Tempest (#75), in which Shakespeare’s friend and colleague Ben
Jonson also makes a brief cameo appearance. In addition, as mentioned before, the
Triple Goddess occasionally assumes the shape of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters (as in
58.14), with direct quotations from the play.
Another
subtler element which allows us to speak of The Sandman as a tragedy is the series’
focus on (and some characters’ obsession with) the idea of natural order, whose
disruption (often caused by hubris) in tragic narratives normally leads to the anti-hero’s
fall (nemesis). Within Greek culture, the concept is termed dikē, and can mean,
according to Simon Goldhill (1986), “a universal principle, as a cosmologist’s description
of the natural order of things”; the scholar stresses the importance of dikē within
the Oresteia, a play which “dramatises a movement from the sense of dikē as retribution
to the sense of dikē as legal justice” (Goldhill 1986: 37). Consider, for instance,
this short passage from the Eumenides, in which the chorus of the Furies discusses
the consequences that Orestes’s absolution could bring:
if now this matricide prevails,
then newly set divine decrees
will overthrow all order.
Mortals will at once believe
that everything's permitted.
From now on parents can expect
repeated blows of suffering
inflicted by their children –
now and in time yet to come (629-638)
The idea
of the natural order of things is also paramount in English Renaissance drama, articulated
as a Christian providentialist belief variously influenced by a pagan idea of natural
law. Jonathan Dollimore devotes an entire section of his Radical Tragedy (1993)
to an analysis of the traces of such belief – and eventually the ways it is actually
challenged – in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, arguing its importance
as “ideological underpinning for ideas of absolute monarchy and divine right” (Dollimore
1993: 89) which were the basis for the crown of King James I.
Going back
to The Sandman, the concept of the natural order of things is repeatedly addressed
by many characters; its existence and importance are acknowledged by Dream when,
speaking of his realm, he claims, “[...] the gates of horn and ivory. I carved them
myself, when the world was younger, and order needed.” (2.11). Later on, when his
raven friend Matthew asks him the reason why he does not physically eliminate the
threat of the Furies, he replies “[b]ecause there are rules. And because they are
part of something far huger and older than simple goddesses and bound and empowered
by rules, as I am” (68.3). Here Dream is revealing that the order of things is regulated
by “rules”, which “empower” and define it. During another story arc, A Game of You,
the Moon Deities, another facet of the feminine Triple Goddess, tells the witch
Thessaly, “You have disrupted the order of things enough this night, Thessalian.
One day there will be a reckoning” (34.20). At the end of the series, during the
final confrontation, the Eumenides make explicit to Dream what they mean by disruption
of the order, “You have spilled the blood of your family, Morpheus. You killed your
son. That makes you our legitimate prey” (64.19).
REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES, SUBJECTIVE GAZES
It can be suggested
that in The Kindly Ones story-arc Gaiman – and his artists, especially penciller
Marc Hempel – employ specific strategies of representation to conceptualise the
Furies as an anthropomorphic personification of the gaze; to hypostatize the interplay
between crime and punishment; to make explicit the pervasive practices of control
to which the characters in the tragedy are subjected. In addition, it can be argued
that the authors try to achieve a certain degree of identification between the reader
and some specific characters, in order to trigger unpredictable protreptic effects.
The first
representational device to be analysed appears within the very first pages of the
story-arc, i.e. at the beginning of issue #57, during a three-page sequence in which
the Triple Goddess, working as the Fates (or Moirai) comments on the development
of the plot and speculates about the possible outcomes, thus fulfilling the role
of the chorus. Artist Marc Hempel[12]
here never represents the women’s full body, crafting instead a metonymic[13]
representation which focuses on details or closeups of the hands, face, legs, and
even the scissors they are using. It can be speculated that such discontinuous narrative
strategy implies a greater degree of attention – and thus involvement – from the
reader; as Scott McCloud (1994) argues, speaking of what he defines “aspect-to-aspect
transitions”, “the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments”
(McCloud 1994: 79).
The following
pages move instead to Lyta Hall, the woman who is starting to suffer from mental
delusions after Dream’s alleged kidnapping of her son Daniel, and who will consequently
unleash the Eumenides on the Sandman.[14]
It can be speculated that the unclear representation of the Fates in the first few
pages anticipates the sensorial aporia which is bound to invest the woman’s labile
mind after the loss of her beloved son, and which the reader is forced to experience
keenly. The following step in the representation of her progressive derangement
is in fact the use of captions instead of traditional speech balloons: captions
are a device in comics which normally conveys intimacy and closeness to the reader,
and are arguably employed here to express her mental detachment, as in “This is
me walking into the family room” (59.23). She is describing what we – and she –
are actually seeing: Lyta steps outside of her diegetic physicality as character
and reaches the privileged observer position of the reader, who is starting to perceive
the same sensorial uneasiness. The reader-character identification, which started
as a greater degree of involvement due to metonymic representation, grows stronger
page after page. It is worth noting that The Kindly Ones’ strongly cartoonish artistic
style – it is allegedly the least realistically-drawn story arc of the whole series
– can be deemed as another clue to the authors’ intention to stimulate such identification.
McCloud (1994) argues that this process occurs because iconic, stylised images match
our own “awareness of our biological selves [as] simplified conceptualized images”
(McCloud 1994: 39), and therefore “the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity
and awareness are pulled” (McCloud 1994: 36).
After the
meeting between Lytha and the Erinnyes, the narrative focus is shifted towards the
latter; however, before moving to this part of the analysis, it is interesting to
point out the way in which the Erinyes’ house (or at least place of residence) is
represented, namely an isolated cubic bungalow (63.18), lacking furniture and pierced
by large windows. This unassuming building, which heavily contrasts with, for instance,
the opulence of Dream’s palace, is coherent with the panoptic function performed
by the Eumenides, which are supposed to eternally look and seek those who misbehave
in order to punish them. The contrast hence articulates between “an architecture
built simply to be seen (as with the ostentations of palaces)” and one built to
“observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses)” (Foucault 1995: 172).
After the
aforementioned meeting, the Triple Goddess (in the form of the Eumenides) becomes
the core of the narration, and abruptly ceases to be visibly represented: instead,
every time the Eumenides are supposed to appear on the scene, the reader assumes
their own direct point of view, through what can be defined, borrowing a term from
the language of the cinema,[15]
a subjective camera. The process of identification between the reader and the character
– now the Triple Goddess instead of her associate Lyta Hall – becomes complete and
absolute, not without a certain degree of displacement and disorientation, also
caused by the sudden disappearance of the reader’s on-page avatar. This representational
choice, which is not typical in Hollywood movies (see Vallorani 2000: 71), is even
rarer in graphic literature; the reason may be the lack of sound and movement, which
would probably make difficult to understand whose gaze is being employed. Gaiman
and Hempel manage to partially avoid such issues by employing a different kind of
lettering for every character – which allegedly makes them more easily recognisable.
Interestingly
enough, the subjective camera device is also employed for another (villainous) character
earlier in the series, i.e. the anthropomorphic killer-nightmare Corinthian (see
for instance 10:25, 11:20-21), who is gifted with toothed mouths in place of eyes,
and who literally devours other people’s eyeballs for his own pleasure. Penciller
Mike Dringenberg gives an interesting account of the rationale behind the Corinthian’s
subjective-camera panels, “The Corinthian is someone who devours everything he sees”
(Bender 2000: 48). Such a description could be employed, with some distinctions,
for the Eumenides as well, who slaughter everything they see on the path to their
main target, namely Dream (see 65.15-16). This consideration, which adds the explicitly
destructive derive to the identificational process triggered by the already mentioned
graphic devices, can be interpreted through the two different axes of desire which,
according to Sean Nixon (2013) – who draws heavily from S. Freud – organise the
spectatorial subjectivity: “the possessive or proprietorial dimension of object
cathexis and the destructive, assimilating tendency in identification” (Nixon 2013:
313).
It is now
possible to formulate some hypotheses as to the reasons that lie behind these representational
strategies and behind the deconstruction of the traditional gaze perspective/discourse
normally employed in graphic literature. In the first place, it would be easy to
conclude that such strategies serve the purpose of delineating the ontological status
of the Eumenides: they actually exist as abstract, pure “visibility organised entirely
around a dominating, overseeing gaze” (Foucault 1980: 152). An eye that sees but
is not seen: The Sandman’s Eumenides are the anthropomorphic personification of
the gaze which controls and punishes within tragic narratives. The Kindly Ones’
disembodiment could trick us into believing that they incarnate a perfect modern
panoptical power, which “may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal;
and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent
are its effects” (Foucault 1995: 203). However, the extreme, spectacular violence
of their vendetta reminds us of pre-modern forms of torture, and of forms of rule
and domination based on “an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority.
And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength
of the sovereign” (Foucault 1995: 49). The contradiction, as several others found
within The Sandman, is irreconcilable, and it is held together, as we shall to see,
only by a precise ideological stance. In this respect, the subjective-camera identification
can also be considered as a practice of discursive subjectification – in Foucaultian
terms:[16]
the reader is metaphorically forced to assume the subjectposition
which the Eumenides’ discourse on essentialism, duty and responsibility creates,
and to accept (the degree of such acceptance will be analysed in the next section)
their own “regime of truth” (see Hall 2013: 34; Foucault 1980).
the Oresteia […] called on the spectators to judge themselves.
This occurred on several levels. Most obviously, the plays model citizen judgment
and the difficulties it entails in the story itself, presenting individuals in a
variety of scenarios, actively judging and acting in different ways. It is also
reflected in the chorus, ‘the collective and anonymous presence embodied by an official
college of citizens…[whose] role is to express through its fears, hopes, and questions,
and judgment the feelings of the spectators who make up the civic community’. (Markowitz
2009: 428)
Although
it is virtually possible to establish easy links between the characters in the two
works (Drem/Oreste, Lyta/Clytemnestra, etc.), no direct correspondence with the
Athenian Citizens’ chorus can be found in the graphic novel. It can therefore be
supposed that Gaiman’s Eumenides characters aim to recuperate the need for such
intradiegetic involvement:[17]
the text’s receivers are therefore welcomed – or better
invited – to identify with an on-stage character in order to deliver their own judgement
on the moral dilemma which permeates the latter half of The Sandman. In this respect,
the graphic novel appropriates another structural element of classic Greek (but
also English) tragedy: it stimulates a moral/ethical involvement “by taking up the
heroic myths and recasting them in light of the new ways of thinking” (Markovits
2009: 430).
It is however
worth noticing that Aeschylus’s trilogy, in line with the features of the genre(s)
it belongs to, is to be considered a grand narrative[18]
which purports to contain important, ahistorical truths, like the importance of
the shift from a premodern, tribal form of retribution (i.e. vendetta) towards a
more organised and civic form of negotiation (i.e. the trial) – in which nonetheless
the presence of divine legitimisation is sill necessary. The Sandman, while containing
deliberate considerations on meta-concepts such as responsibility and subjectivity,
does, however, focus on intimate and private narratives, which often revolve around
people who are normally marginalized by the official discourses (LGTB people, AIDS
patients, the elderly). Even though the main characters are superhuman, and to a
certain extent more than divine, their (especially Dream’s) experiences are not
meant to be universal and/or metaphorical of the whole of humanity’s condition,
or at least not to the extent myths are normally supposed to be. The Sandman can
be therefore considered – almost oxymoronically – a post-modern tragic myth,[19]
which “embraces local, plural and heterogeneous knowledges” (Barker 2012: 202) in
order to stimulate personal philosophical interrogations (here is the moderate protreptis)
rather than to teach a secure way to make sense of the world.
CHALLENGING THE EYE: SUBJECTIVITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
It has already been
said that many Sandman characters – the protagonist Dream is one of these – promote
and defend the idea of a natural order of things which regulates men’s and gods’
behaviour, the breach of which is to be severely punished. As J. Dollimore demonstrates
in Radical Tragedy (1993), this philosophical concept is heavily and invariably
linked to an essentialist conception of subjectivity, namely the idea that “identity
exists as a universal and timeless core” and that “descriptions of ourselves reflect
an essential underlying identity” (Barker 2012: 221). For instance, for most of
the series, Dream conceptualises his own self-identical subjectivity through the
adherence to his responsibilities towards the world and humanity, responsibilities
which dictate a whole set of rules and duties:
Rules and responsibility: these are the ties that bind
us. We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be
ourselves. I will do what I have to do. And I will do what I must. (Gaiman
and McKean 1989: 67.24)
For him,
“the exercising of free will […] is a catalyst for great angst” (Sharkey 2008: 7),
and the reformulation of his own subjectivity, which slowly starts after his imprisonment
in the very first issue of the series, leads him to an identity crisis which culminates
with his suicide.[20]
Interestingly enough, such sense of duty linked to an idea of personal nature is
the same principle which, in the ultimate analysis, informs the actions of the Erinyes;
immediately before killing Dream, they claim, “We are merely performing our function”
(69.9). It must be pointed out that this claim fits the Erinyes’ self-description
in Aeschylus’s tragedy:
Remorseless Fate gave us this work
to carry on forever, a destiny
spun out for us alone,
to attach ourselves to those
who, overcome with passion,
slaughter blood relatives. (407-412)
They later
add, “These rights are ours from birth” (425). This point is also analysed by Cannizzaro
(2013), who observes how the Furies are bound to their punitive role and are not
allowed to understand any other point of view. As Markovits points out, “[t]he tension
between claims of necessity and responsibility run throughout the Oresteia, alongside
the development of a democratic ethos of intergenerational responsibility” (Markovitz
2009: 434). However, it must be acknowledged that the very relationship between
necessity and responsibility is eventually subverted in The Sandman: while in Aeschylus’s
play the two concepts are clearly opposed,[21]
and the assumption of responsibility is what unveils the fallacious and pernicious
nature of necessity, in The Sandman the dichotomy collapses into an ontological
claim of duty which mystifies the role of agency and the possibility of self-refashioning.
However, within the graphic novel, that possibility is repeatedly demonstrated by
the personal growth experienced by several characters, and in particular of Dream’s
sibling Destruction and of Hell’s ruler Lucifer. As for Destruction, we are shown
that, a long time ago, he opted out of his role as Endless and decided to live as
a cheerful wandering artist. He in fact claims that:
The Endless? The Endless are merely patterns. The Endless
are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The Endless are repeating motifs. The
Endless are echoes of darkness, and nothing more. We have no right to play with
[people’s] lives, to order their dreams and their desires. (48.16)
Lucifer,
on the other hand, decides to relinquish his role as king of Hell[22]
and eventually to become a sophisticated bar pianist in Los Angeles. It can therefore
be concluded that Lucifer and Destruction plant an idea in Dream’s mind, i.e. that
“following the rules is nothing more than a choice” (Rauch 2003: 77), as is complying
with the role everyone is supposed to have within the “order of things”.
There is
another passage from the graphic novel that is worth a brief consideration. In the
A Game of You story-arc (#32-37) we are told the tragic tale of the pre-operative
transsexual woman Wanda, who eventually dies during a storm brought about as indirect
consequence of Dream’s actions in the Dreaming world. Before her funeral, her friend
Barbie hears from Wanda’s conservative relatives from Kansas that “God gives you
a body, it’s your duty to do well by it. He makes you a boy, you dress in blue,
he makes you a girl, you dress in pink. You mustn’t go trying to change things”
(37.14). Later, during Wanda’s funeral ceremony, her mother claims that the hurricane
which killed her “was God’s judgement on a city of sinners.” (37.16). This passage
clearly testifies how the ideas of providentialism (with a strongly religious connotation)
order and essentialism are appropriated and exploited by dominant discourses in
order to validate their own assumptions. In a previous passage of the story-arc,
Wanda’s transsexualism is refused by some elder gods, namely the Moon Deities, who
are not willing to welcome her since “gender isn’t something you pick and choose,
as far as gods are concerned” (35.19). However, as we are shown during the funeral
sequence, other progressive gods,[23]
like Dream’s sister Death are able to accept – and appreciate – Wanda’s feminine
self (37.23). As Gaiman himself points out, “the gods have their point of view;
but in Sandman, those have no more validity than the point of view of anyone else”
(Bender 2000: 121). Neil Gaiman’s emphasis on the “point of view” confirms what
was initially suggested, i.e. that within the (postmodern) tragic narrative of graphic
novel the ideas of order and identity are discursively constructed and sustained
by dominant and hegemonic discourses. Those concepts share the same ontological
status of the Endless as explained by Dream, i.e. that “we of the endless are the
servants of the living – we are NOT their masters. WE exist because they know, deep
inside their hearts, that we exist” (emphasis in the original) (16.23). Order and
nature are ideas that are exploited and simultaneously mystified to sustain power,
hence they can be considered ideological stances concealing the role of personal
agency – and therefore personal responsibility. As Barker points out, ideology
is commonly used to designate the attempt to fix meanings
and world views in support of the powerful. Here ideology is said to be constituted
by maps of meaning that, while they purport to be universal truths, are historically
specific understanding which obscure and maintain the power of social groups. (Barker
2012: 442)
Going back
to the original object of this analysis, such a concept can finally be applied to
the Eumenides; their duty, their need to seek and destroy wrongdoers is not an absolute
and inescapable rule of nature. It is instead part of a discursive formation which
produces a certain knowledge of the self supporting – and supported – by preexisting
power relationships. As Foucault (1980) points out, power and knowledge are strictly
intertwined and mutually reinforcing, as “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation
with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which
it induced and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth.” (Foucault 1980: 133). We can
therefore conclude that The Sandman’s scrutiny of the ways in which it is possible
to negotiate resistance against practices of control and subjugation is not linked
to the material execution of surveillance, but rather – and probably more importantly
– to unveiling the mystifying relations of power which lie behind such practices.
In other words, acknowledging that the presence of an eye which controls, and therefore
the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning
of power” (Foucault 1995, 201) is not a necessary (i.e. natural) state, but a precise
ideological configuration of domination shaped by – and actively shaping – preexisting
disparities like gender, class, power.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artistas convidados: Frank Miller,
George Herriman, Grant Morrison, Katsuhiro Otomo, Max
Andersson, Moebius, Neil Gaiman, Paul Kirchner, Robert
Crumb, Tsuge Yoshiharu
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 140 | Agosto de 2019
editor geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão | FLORIANO
MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
[1] Given the extreme length of the work, and moreover the ludicrous amount
of different editions – with different page numeration – which have been published
for The Sandman, it has been decided to adopt a slightly modified version of S.
Rauch’s (2003) citation style, thus employing the [issue number].[page of the issue]
formula, which is respectful of the original publication form in 75 monthly issues.
[2] The cells should be built with a single window open onto the inner side
of the circle and hence onto the watchtower. Complete designs of Bentham’s project
are attached to virtually every reprint of Foucault’s Birth of the Prison.
[3] She then adds “[...] God is hardly present in the text. […] Then who
is it?” (Focault 1985: 157), while he replies “[In a machine such as the Panopticon]
it’s the place of a person which is determining, not his nature, no reliance can
be placed on a single individual.” (Focault 1985: 158)
[4] A large amount of artists (pencillers, inkers, colorists) have actually
worked upon the graphic novel; however, for the sake of simplicity only the author
and the cover artist (who has worked on every single issue since the beginning)
have been reported.
[5] “For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD,\ and he pondereth
all his goings” (emphasis in the original) (Pr. 5:21 AV). As for western art, see
for instance Jacopo da Pontorno’s Cena in Emmaus (1525)
[6] Later developed as “circuit of culture” (see Hall, Evans, and Nixon 2013:
xviii)
[7] The main character, Dream, is “the personification of story-telling”
(Rauch 2003: 53), and defines himself as the “Prince of Stories” (Rauch 2003: 76:36)
[8] A full account of the references employed by Gaiman can be found in the
Sandman Annotations (Morrow and Goldfarb 2007), freely available online.
[9] The trilogy of the Oresteia was originally performed in Athens in 458
BC. The version employed in this paper is the English version translated by Ian
Johnston (2003) and available online.
[10] The equation between the Erinyes (lit. the Avengers) and the Eumenides
(lit. Kindly Ones) was allegedly borrowed by Aeschylus from an earlier tragedy,
Euripides’s Orestes, composed in 408 BC (see Gantz 1993: 832)
[11] He euthanizes his own son Orpheus in the 49th issue after experiencing
a lengthy process of personal maturation and self-refashioning.
[12] It must be said that Neil Gaiman has learned Alan Moore’s lesson on the
extreme detailedness of his scripts, which contain precise information on the pages’
layout (see Bender 2000: 156).
[13] The notion is borrowed from Nicoletta Vallorani’s Gli Occhi e la Voce
(2000).
[14] She can be therefore considered, to a certain extent, The Sandman’s version
of Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra.
[15] “From a historical and formal point of view, the comic book perspective
used in the pictures of frames (‘panels’) can be described by camera positions (‘zoom,’
‘sequence shot,’ ‘pan shot,’ ‘tilt shot,’ or ‘jump cut’) used in film-making.” (Ahrens
and Meteling 2010: 3).
[16] It is interesting to note that Foucault himself employed the subjective
eye of Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656) to explain the practices of subjectification
(see Hall 2013: 41–42)
[17] It must not be forgotten that they constitute the other (and, to be precise,
the primary) chorus in Aeschylus’s play.
[18] In the meaning outlined by F. Lyotard (see also Barker 2012: 202)
[19] It must also be noted that The Sandman’s relationship with the topoi
of tragedy is ambiguous and to a certain extent productively paradoxical, as Morpheus
ultimately exploits the mechanisms of retribution (i.e. nemesis) to die and reborn
as new facet of the dream, and therefore as the new subjectivity he would never
have been able to shape in his previous life.
[20] The series’ development suggest that the real invisible hand behind the
whole Eumenides’ affair is Dream himself. As his sister Death points out, “The only
reason you’ve got yourself into this mess is because this is where you wanted to
be” (Gaiman and McKean 1989: 69.5).
[21] “Orestes […] contrasted with his parents, who continue the cycle of violence
because of their refusals of responsibility for their actions” (Markovits 2009:
436)
[22] As depicted in Dante’s Inferno and, especially, Milton’s Paradise Lost.
[23] Quite interestingly, the old gods/new gods clash is also a structural
feature of Aeschylus’s trilogy, as “Eumenides repeatedly notes the relationship
between the bearers of the old laws (the Erinyes) and the younger generation of
the Olympian gods” (Markovits 2009: 432)
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