The "Outsider": Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament more

The “Outsider” ♦ 77 The “Outsider”: Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament Cyril Camus University of Toulouse Neil Gaiman’s educational environment was divided between Jewish family and Anglican schooling. Raised up as a cultural outsider, he has cultivated his detached outlook, moving from England to the United States and depicting the latter from a British perspective in Sandman and American Gods. His cheerful embracement of the position of the “alien” also shows in his use and rewritings of the foundational Judaic text, the Old Testament, in the six scripts he contributed for the British comics-anthology of theological satire Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (Knockabout, 1987), and in his comics-series Sandman (DC, 1988–1996), where the explicit linking of DC characters to their biblical roots, and the use of Midrashic references, operate as a resacralization that counterbalance the desacralization at the core of Outrageous Tales. Neil Gaiman, the Minnesota-based former Englishman who wrote the worldacclaimed DC Comics series Sandman, is a prominent Jewish comics-writer, although his experience of Jewishness is very distinctive. In an interview in which Gaiman tries to articulate a description of his childhood, in regard to the issue of Jewishness, he states: I was brought up Jewish. But I was Jewish and attended High Church of England schools, which is everything you get in Catholic education, without nuns. It was a lovely way of receiving all the religion one ever needed, as an outsider. It was very odd. I was the kid scoring the top marks in religious studies despite the fact that the religious studies would be on the Book of Matthew or whatever and I wasn’t even a Christian, which was a lovely position to be in. One got everything as an outsider.1 1 Robert K. Elder, “Gods and Other Monsters: A Sandman Exit Interview and Philosophical Omnibus,” interview with Neil Gaiman, in Darrell Schweitzer, ed., The Neil Gaiman Reader (Holicong: Wildside Press, 2007), p. 71. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 78 ♦ Cyril Camus His Jewish identity certainly made him an “outsider” in his Anglican educational environment, but being half immersed in another belief-system than his family’s, from an early age on, actually allowed him to put both systems in perspective. As he puts it, “in a sense, it made [him] view everything as myth.”2 So his situation made him more or less an “outsider” to Jewish faith too. Nowadays he describes himself as a believer, but he is unable to name a particular dogma to which he adheres. His comics and other writings often feature pagan gods and mythological beings from many different traditions, interacting with one another. As for “believ[ing] in a biblical god,” he claims: “sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”3 It is as if the spiritual stance he had decided to adopt was the same as Samantha Black Crow’s in his novel American Gods (“I can believe . . . anything”),4 or the child protagonist’s in his semi-autobiographical short story “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” (“a magnificent anarchy of belief ”).5 This is, at least, Bethany Alexander’s reading of his works.6 Gaiman certainly retains a fond but detached outlook on his Jewish roots, which he seems to deal with, in interviews, in the same half respectful, half tongue-in-cheek idiom that he uses, in his fictions, for any religion or myth: “I don’t think I’ve particularly practiced since my bar mitzvah. Then again, I take a certain amount of comfort in the fact that if ever anywhere they institute the camps and they want to start sticking Jews in them again, I’d go in and fry. I don’t think it’s something one particularly stops being because you’ve stopped practicing.”7 2 Interview, in Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion, 2nd ed. (1999, New York: DC Comics Vertigo Books, 2000), p. 105. 3 Elder, “Gods and Other Monsters,” p. 70. 4 Neil Gaiman, American Gods (London: Headline Publishing Group, 2001), p. 421. 5 Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors (London: Headline Publishing Group, 1999), p. 284. 6 See Bethany Alexander, “No Need to Choose: A Magnificent Anarchy of Belief,” in Schweitzer, ed., The Neil Gaiman Reader, pp. 135–139. 7 Elder, “Gods and Other Monsters,” p. 70. Gaiman is probably at his most Jewish when he displays such a wry sense of humor, as when referring to a hypothetical new Holocaust by incongruously claiming to take “a certain amount of comfort” at the idea, trivially expressed, that “[he]’d go in and fry.” Indeed, “Jewish humor” is often construed as “disturbing and upsetting, its phrases dipped in tragedy” (Irving Howe, “The Nature of Jewish laughter” [1951] in Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], p. 19). And yet, as Gaiman’s phrasing illustrates, it does not consist in “imagining that it would be appropriate to seek fulfillment through suffering, to create a mythology out of suffering,” and it is rather used “as much to shrug at adversity Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 79 Being a believer and having, at the same time, an outsider’s outlook on the belief-systems most familiar to him could easily qualify him, making due allowances, as a sort of modern-day Kafka,8 if it were not for his being absolutely not melancholy about his condition. Quite on the contrary, he states, “I actually love feeling like an outsider. For example, I really enjoyed the first six years I spent in the U.S. because everything was so alien. I’m starting to get used to America now, which makes me think it may be time to move somewhere else.”9 This cheerful embracing of the privileged position of the “alien” often shows on a close analysis of his writings. “Part of Sandman’s dynamic stemmed from Neil’s discovery and fascination, as both a European and an Englishman, with America,” if we are to believe Mike Dringenberg, one of Sandman’s pencilers, inkers and co-creators.10 It is even truer with American Gods, as the meditation on American culture is more explicit (hence, the title), and as Gaiman emphasizes the importance of his outlook as an outsider when discussing the book: “I don’t think American Gods could have been written by someone who was American. A lot of that is because, if you’re a goldfish in the water, you don’t go, ‘This water tastes odd.’ You go, ‘This is what water tastes like.’”11 Similarly, instances of Gaiman enjoying the feeling of being an outsider as to bear it” (Robert Alter, “Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth,” in Cohen, ed., Jewish Wry, p. 26). 8 Franz Kafka is usually depicted as the archetypal outsider. His personal friend and first biographer, Max Brod, quotes from Kafka’s diary: “I am often seized with a sad but calm astonishment at my lack of feeling. I am separated from everything by a space to whose limits I can’t even force my way out” (Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography [1937], trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston [Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press: 1995], p. 96). American playwright and essayist David Zane Mairowitz wrote a comicbook biography (illustrated by Robert Crumb), in which he states that “Kafka was alienated from his country, his surroundings, his family,” and that “he was also a stranger in his own body” (David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb, Kafka, ed. Richard Appignanesi [Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2007], p. 37). As for the late Pierre Desproges, a French satirist who admired Kafka’s writings very much, he had this comment about the JewishCzech author: “He had life the way someone has cancer” (Pierre Desproges, Dictionnaire superflu à l’usage de l’élite et des bien nantis [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985], pp. 102–103 [translation mine]). 9 Bender, The Sandman Companion, p. 106. 10 Interview with Mike Dringenberg, in Joseph McCabe, Hanging Out with the Dream King: Interviews with Neil Gaiman and his Collaborators (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004), p. 80. 11 Interview Stephen Bissette/Neil Gaiman, in Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden and Stephen Bissette, Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (New York: St Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 80 ♦ Cyril Camus can easily be traced as far as religion is concerned. A reader who is trying to understand Gaiman’s relationship to the one fundamental text of Jewish faith and culture-the Old Testament-might find two of such instances very telling. And these instances are, namely, the intertextual borrowings from, and rewritings of, the sacred book contained, on the one hand, in Sandman, and on the other hand, in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. The latter (and, chronologically speaking, the first) is an anthology of short, black-and-white graphic narratives that was released in 1987 by the British publishing house Knockabout Comics.12 As the title suggests, all of these narratives are adapted from the Old Testament. Nearly all the contributors are British comics-writers and comics-artists: e.g., Alan Moore wrote “Leviticus”, which was illustrated by Hunt Emerson, and Dave Gibbons wrote and illustrated “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Kim Deitch, who wrote and illustrated “The Story of Job,” is the only American contributor. Gaiman, who still lived in England at the time, contributed not one (as the other writers did), but six different scripts. That might be a good measure of his interest in the project. But what, exactly, was this project about? Obviously, from the title again, it can easily be inferred that it did not consist in faithful and graphically neutral remakes of the biblical texts, of the kind one could have found in Classics Illus- Martin’s Press, 2008), 493. This theory of Gaiman’s concerning the advantages of being an English immigrant is very interesting as Danny Fingeroth, a comics-scholar, teacher and a former editor and writer for Marvel Comics, has exactly the same theory about being a Jewish immigrant. And it explains, to him, the historical predominant presence of scions of Eastern European Jews in the American comics industry, as well as in Hollywood: “It can be argued that the reason immigrants in general, and Jews in particular, thrive in open societies like the United States is because they bring a unique outlook to the party, seeing insight and opportunity where others can’t or don’t, because the values and vagaries of a society are so familiar to its natives as to be invisible. Add to that the feelings of persecution and alienation . . . and you have a perfect group of outsiders ready to reflect a culture back on itself ” (Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero [New York: the Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., 2007], p. 101). 12 Knockabout publications are considered “alternative,” as the firm does not publish straightforwardly entertaining materials such as superhero or adventure/fantasy comics (usually called “mainstream” comics). Instead, they concentrate on intellectual, experimental, and/or satirical comics, in the tradition of underground “comix” from the 1960s and 1970s. They distribute the works of American underground legends such as Robert Crumb in the United Kingdom, and they publish many works by British creators as well. Their best-known and most emblematic publication by locals is probably From Hell, the historical and sociological graphic novel about Jack the Ripper and the Victorian era, by English writer Alan Moore and Scottish artist Eddie Campbell. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 81 trated comics.13 On the contrary, these works of ruthless theological satire take their inspiration, both iconographic and thematic, from the two traditions, in the history of comics, which defined themselves by their offensiveness: underground “comix” and EC Comics horror anthologies. The “iconic”14 visual style that is used in most narratives in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, as well as their humorous, cynical emphasis on violence and sex, are pervasive clues of the comix inspiration of the anthology. As for the debt to EC Comics, it appears more clearly in one particular story (one of Gaiman’s), and we will come back to it a little later. To understand what Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament is all about, it seems particularly relevant to stress that various theoretical works have shown that violence and fear are important aspects of the religious experience. Theologian Rudolf Otto has identified the “tremendum,” i.e. “awe,” inspired by the power of the deity, as a primordial part of the “numinous,” the irrational feeling that lies at the core of the rational concept of the “holy.”15 Philosopher René Girard has touched on this idea of awe at strange, inhuman power, but his interest was not so much in religious psychology as in religious sociology. Therefore, such considerations are meant, above all, to lead him to his point, i.e., how the deep-seated fear of human aggression bears on the founding of a religious community: The sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man increases or seems to increase in proportion to man’s effort to master them. Tempests, forest fires, and plagues, among other phenomena, may be classified as sacred. Far outranking these, however, though in a far less obvious manner, stands human violence-violence seen as something exterior to man and henceforth as a part This famous American line of didactic comics for children used to adapt (in a very stately species of graphic narrative) historical events, tales from the Bible, and great literary classics such as those by Homer, Melville, Shakespeare, etc. It ran discontinuously from 1941 to 1971 and was successively owned by two publishing companies, Gilberton Company and Frawley Corporation. Gilberton publications are discussed and analyzed in Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: the Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), pp. 14–17 and 20–36. 14 I use this adjective in the same meaning as Scott McCloud, who often uses it as a synonym for an “abstract,” or “simple” visual style, and who once parenthetically equates it with “cartoony” (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art [New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993], p. 37). 15 For the respective definitions of the “numinous” and the “tremendum,” see Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (1917, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; reprint, 1958), pp. 5–7 and 13–19. 13 Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 82 ♦ Cyril Camus of all the other outside forces that threaten mankind. Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred.16 Girard understands ritual murder and other sacrificial practices in primitive and ancient religious communities as an implicit model for the way any human community, especially a religious one, builds the integrity and harmony that it needs to preserve in order to thrive. In Girard’s terms, “the sacrificial process prevents the spread of violence” by “polariz[ing] the community’s aggressive impulses” (Girard 18) through the ritualizing of a “unanimous act of violence directed against [a] surrogate victim” (Girard 280) that symbolizes any antagonist whom individual members of the community might have wanted to kill or injure. Instead of “reciprocal violence, the violence that really hurts, setting man against man and threatening the total destruction of the community” (Girard 124–125), this process allows the community to “unite against” (Girard 102) a “scapegoat” (Girard 79), and, by casting it out through ritual assault, “to keep violence outside the community” (Girard 92). These reflections on the mechanisms of social unity allow him to conclude: “The failure of modern man to grasp the nature of religion has served to perpetuate its effects. Our lack of belief serves the same function in our society that religion serves in societies more directly exposed to essential violence. We persist in disregarding the power of violence in human societies; that is why we are reluctant to admit that violence and the sacred are one and the same thing” (Girard 262, emphasis mine). It is that essential link between violence, terror, and religion that the writers and artists of Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament deal with. And the way they choose to deal with it is a peculiar kind of “caricature”-the technique, “in a verbal description” or “in graphic art,” that consists in “exaggerat[ing] or distort[ing], for comic effect, a person’s distinctive physical features or personality traits.”17 Here, the word can be applied both to narrative aspects of the rewritings, and to the graphic style and devices employed by the artists. And the target of the caricature is not so much a person as a mood, the one that can be found in the Old Testament. Caricature is, fundamentally, a humorous emphasis on one single aspect of a reality which is, like all realities, multi-faceted. The trait that is emphasized at the expense of any other is, of 16 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1972, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 31. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text. 17 Meyer Howard Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. (1958, Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1999), p. 28. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 83 course, the essential violence of the Old Testament.18 And this emphasis is made humorous by the way it systematically trivializes Otto’s dramatic notion of “tremendum,” or Girard’s almost lyrical styling of violence as “the heart and secret soul of the sacred.” This trivializing is operated thanks to a variety of choices of cultural hypotexts that downplay the “mysterium” and the “majestas” attached to the “holy,” or the sacred, leaving only a grotesque bloodbath.19 For instance, tremendum-related phrases such as “Wrath of God”20 and “Enormous Boils,” or signifiers linked to Girardian violence such as “Human Sacrifice” and “Murder,” are listed on the cover, ironically suggesting that those bleak topics are to be considered as exciting thematic assets of the narratives contained in the anthology, in a way that is deliberately reminiscent of exploitation movies’ posters21 (Fig. 1). Among Gaiman’s six stories for the anthology, five are adapted from the 18 René Girard wrote specifically about the Bible in his book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. He observes that the Old Testament more than often illustrates the theory developed in Violence and the Sacred: “[I]n all the great scenes of Genesis and Exodus, there is a motif, or a quasi-motif, of expulsion and the founding murder” (René Girard, Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde [Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978], p. 166 [translation mine]). However, Girard sees a striking difference between the sacrificial ethos of primitive and ancient religions and that of the Jewish text: in the latter, the innocence of the surrogate victim, and therefore the arbitrariness and injustice of the founding murder, are systematically proclaimed and denounced, in a way that Girard reads as a foreshadowing of the non-violent, “non-sacrificial” God of the Christian New Testament. Yet, he notes that “a conception of the deity which would be thoroughly foreign to violence is never actually reached in the Old Testament” (Girard 1978, p. 180, translation mine). And, later, he contrasts the deity as described in the “synoptic Gospels” with the “vengeful and retributive conception of which traces remain until the end of the Old Testament” (Girard 1978, 206, translation mine). 19 “Mysterium” and “majestas” are Otto’s concepts. They are, like “tremendum,” aspects of the numinous. The “majestas” or “absolute overpoweringness” of a numinous object (The Idea of the Holy, pp. 19–23), combined with its “mysterium,” i.e., completely alien and incomprehensible nature (The Idea of the Holy, pp. 25–30), are the reasons why it inspires awe. 20 To Otto, the very notion of “ the ‘wrath of Yahweh’ . . . is nothing but the tremendum itself, apprehended and expressed by the aid of a naïve analogy from the domain of natural experience, in this case from the ordinary passional life of men” (The Idea of the Holy, p. 18). 21 An exploitation film is “a cheaply made film which relies on explicit displays of sex . . . , graphic passages of violence or sordid or sensationalist subject matter to reach an audience” (Kevin Jackson, The Language of Cinema [Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 1998], p. 86). The promotion of such movies usually relies on various ways of boasting their outré character, including sensationalist taglines on the posters or in the trailers, and more generally, as Eric Schaefer has it in his study on early exploitation cinema, “bombastic promises Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 84 ♦ Cyril Camus Figure 1. Reprinted from Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. Cover. © Knockabout Comics. All Rights Reserved. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 85 Book of Judges, the second of the Historical Books occurring after the Pentateuch. The first chapters of this Book depict Yahweh’s recurrent punishments against the Israelites, because, as an angel explains: “And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.”22 After that, time and again, Yahweh’s Jewish followers, caught worshipping “strange gods,” are enslaved by other Semitic people with Yahweh’s consent, and then he sends “Judges” to free them. Thus is the reader confronted with an almost iterative passage, peppered with variants of this phrase: “and the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel and he sold them into the hand of . . . ” ( Judges 2:14, 3:8, 4:2, and 6:1). Gaiman and Mike Matthews’s rendering of those chapters is typical of the general desacralizing tactics of the anthology. First, of course, it compresses the “plot,” and simplifies its expression, in order to make as clear as possible the tyrannous absurdity, from the point of view of a modern outsider, of Yahweh’s behavior. Gaiman even puts, in the mouth of one of the Jewish hearers of the angel’s message, the anachronistic comment: “Sounds like divine fascist crap to me.”23 Then, Matthews visually emphasizes the gory aspects of every massacre that he and Gaiman selected. The penultimate panel, notably, shows Shamgar, one of the Judges, standing on top of a mountain of corpses (Fig. 2). The panel would look very much like one from a warlike heroic-fantasy comics-series such as Marvel Comics’ Savage Sword of Conan, if it were not for the iconic style in which it is drawn, and the anachronistic and misspelled colloquialisms printed in Shamgar’s speech balloon, which make him sound like a lampoon of a dumb action hero. That hypotextually rich depiction satirically suggests a purposeful likening of the Old Testament wars to the blood and combat about shocking truths and fearless frankness” (Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 [Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1999], p. 3). The very title of the Knockabout anthology, “Outrageous Tales from,” partakes of that paratextual pastiche of exploitation films’ promotional techniques. 22 Judges 2:2–3. Biblical quotations are from Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, ed., The Bible, Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; reprint, 2008), p. 296. 23 Neil Gaiman et al., Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, ed. Tony Bennett (London: Knockabout Comics, 1987), p. 23. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The comment is not only anachronistic but also highly ironic, as the God of the Hebrews is not accused only of tyranny, but of “fascism,” a historical form of tyranny most famously characterized by antisemitic violence. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 86 ♦ Cyril Camus trances of Conan and other comic-book barbarian heroes. The funniest adaptation, though, is probably the aforementioned reference to EC Comics: Gaiman has given to this biblical passage a visually embodied narrator who is typical of the horror-host tradition launched by EC Comics in the late 1940s Figure 2. Reprinted from Outrageous Tales from the and early 1950s (Fig. 3). The Old Testament. 24. © Knockabout Comics. All Rights character is even named “the Reserved. Bible Keeper” in an obvious allusion to the Crypt Keeper, who was the host of EC’s Tales from the Crypt, and probably the most famous comic-book horror-host ever. By this narrative Figure 3. Reprinted from Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. 23. © Knockabout Comics. All Rights Reserved. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 87 conceit, Gaiman suggests that not only is the Book of Judges a typical barbarian fantasy, but also, in a way, a collection of gruesome horror tales of the kind Dr. Fredric Wertham would have strongly disapproved of. Many other examples of the graphic or verbal desacralization that constitutes the agenda of the anthology could be cited. In Gaiman’s “Journey to Bethlehem,” which corresponds to Chapter 19 of the Book of Judges, something which is expressed with only one short sentence in the Old Testament-“And [the Levite’s] concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father’s house” ( Judges 19:2 )-is fully developed in a six-panel scene (spread through a whole page) in the graphic adaptation. The style used by artist Steve Gibson is even more iconic than Matthews’s, and the crude sex panel that results from the expansion of the passage is typical of the unapologetic obscenity and of the grotesque caricature style usually employed by comix-creators (Fig. 4). The hyperbolic size of the concubine’s bottom and the depiction of the Levite as a scraggy weakling are particularly reminiscent of Figure 4. Reprinted from Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. 39. © Knockabout Comics. All Rights Reserved. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 88 ♦ Cyril Camus some of Robert Crumb’s well-known stylistic quirks, and efficiently contribute to strip the story of any semblance of spiritual dignity. Later in the same story, Gibson’s cartoony art gives a very striking, terrifying, expressionistic edge to the horrible scene where the Benjamites gang-rape the Levite’s concubine. The same can be said of the representation of the Levite’s cold rage, the morning after, while he “divide[s] her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sen[ds] her into all the coasts of Israel” ( Judges 19:29),24 to raise all the other Israelite tribes against the Benjamites. Irish artist Dave McKean’s work, in Gaiman’s “The Prophet Who Came to Dinner,” is far from cartoony, although there is some abstractness to it. In fact, it resembles the art McKean has provided for such early Gaiman graphic novels as Violent Cases or Black Orchid: alternating impressionistic panels depicting landscapes or sheer movement, and hyperrealistic close-ups on human characters. The difference, with those other Gaiman/McKean collaborations, is that this comic is neither painted, nor even inked. It is only penciled, which makes it look like a set of very elaborate sketches. The visual mood clearly stands out from the comix mood that predominates in the anthology. This adaptation of Chapter 13 of the First Book of Kings25 does not look satiric. It looks haunted, in a way which is quite typical of Dave McKean’s visual works, and which does not seem quite devoid of aesthetic equivalents of Rudolf Otto’s majestas and mysterium (Fig. 5). Therefore, the necessary impertinence-or, to put it in a more Jewish manner, the “chutzpah”-of that story lies mostly in the contrast between that visual ambience (which is rather adequate for a serious adaptation of a biblical narrative) and the ambience suggested by Gaiman’s verbal work. The captions and speech balloons throughout the first pages contain mostly excerpts from the original text, and, when Gaiman’s text departs from it, at least the style looks biblical (see Tales, 48–49). But at the bottom of 24 Those scenes, in Gaiman and Gibson’s story, are to be found in Gaiman, Tales, 43– 45. In his previously quoted essay Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud suggests an explanation to the often-noted expressive power of abstract, cartoony drawings: “the cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled” (p. 36). Such a process of identification comes from the fact that detailed realism gives individual concreteness to a drawn character, creating a distance from the reader, whereas a cartoon character looks less like a particular human (other than the reader), and more like the vague, universal idea of a human (which includes any reader). “By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world, in favor of the idea of form,” McCloud argues, “the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without, and through the cartoon, the world within” (Understanding Comics, p. 41). 25 More precisely, 1 Kings 13:1–32. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 89 Figure 5. Reprinted from Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. 51. © Knockabout Comics. All Rights Reserved. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 90 ♦ Cyril Camus page 49, when the prophet from Beth-El is introduced, the language register becomes less historically accurate, as can be seen in the following dialogue: Hello. Hello. I hear you’re a prophet. Yup. You? Yer. Business good? Mustn’t grumble. You? Neh! It’s a living (Tales, 50). The effect of this incongruousness is quite funny, in a way that clearly pertains to desacralization (especially as the condition of a prophet is referred to very casually, as if it were no more than a common trade). Yet, it is, just as clearly, far less offensive than the humor in the rest of the anthology. The conclusion of the story displays the same mild iconoclasm, the same “thrusting downward from the exalted to the workaday,”26 as the captions show the narrator (an impersonal narrative voice, this time, not the “Bible Keeper”) trying and failing to find a moral interpretation to this sad tale of God’s inscrutable ways: “And the moral of this story is . . . never listen to anyone who says God told him what you ought to be doing. Not even a prophet. Or you’ll get eaten by a lion on your way home, or something. Damn. No, that can’t be right” (Tales, 52). Gaiman’s contributions to Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament would probably not be as interesting if they could not be contrasted with his very different approach to the biblical hypotext in Sandman. Those British short comix would merely be a funny study in blasphemous wry, a very extreme version of the “ironic or playful domestication of myth” that Robert Alter finds in most Jewish humor.27 They become a clue to Gaiman’s delight in being a perpetual cultural outsider, as soon as you compare them to Sandman. If Gaiman, as a Jewish writer who understands his own native faith as an outsider, enthusiastically helped to give some cachet to the Knockabout systematic desacralization of the Old Testament’s tremendum and violence, it is a work of resacralization that can be enjoyed, as to the Old Testament characters, in Sandman. And that is one of the many ways in which Gaiman, in what is usually considered his magnum opus, approaches American mainstream comics, and therefore American popular culture, as an outsider. The phrase is borrowed from Mark Shechner, “Dear Mr Einstein: Jewish Humor and the Contradictions of Culture,” in Cohen, ed., Jewish Wry, p. 148. 27 Robert Alter, “Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth,” in Cohen, ed., Jewish Wry, p. 29. 26 Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 91 Contrary to Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, Sandman is a mainstream comics work, which means that it was created under the supervision of (and then published by) a big company whose editorial concerns are resolutely about popular entertainment, and mostly about superheroes. This company is DC Comics, and it is best-known for publishing in monthly comic books the adventures of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Apart from those emblematic figures, it owns the rights of many superheroes and other fictional characters, and employs many writers and artists to run their multiple, interconnected, perpetually ongoing series. Sandman is one such monthly series. But Gaiman was not hired to write a storyline in the endless adventures of a previously-existing DC-property hero. Instead, he created the concept and many of the main characters. He wrote every single issue of the series (from 1988 to 1996). And, contrary to the commercial philosophy of mainstream comics series, he killed the protagonist at the end of his run, and ensured that DC would not try to clumsily resurrect the character under the auspices of another writer. Sandman has an extremely complex plot, which melts together horror/ fantasy, historical fiction, tragedy, intertextuality-based experimental narrative, and mythopoeia. However, it can be roughly summarized by way of two statements. Firstly, it is the story of the Endless, seven siblings who are more than gods; actually, they are the reason why there are gods. Indeed, the seven of them (Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium) are anthropomorphic embodiments of “eternal human traits.”28 Their very existence is the cosmic framework that shapes human imagination, thought, beliefs, and condition. Secondly, the protagonist is one of the Endless: Dream (also known as Morpheus, the Sandman, the Dream-King, the Prince of Stories, or the Lord-Shaper). The Endless have very distinct personalities, and Dream is one of the most cheerless. He is a Byronic, brooding, romantically self-centered character. More importantly, he has a very impersonal, detached and “professional” perception of the humans over whose dreams, hopes, inspiration, and nightmares he presides. Defining himself only by his cosmic responsibilities (contrary to his sister Death, who is a very sympathetic and lively character), he is, most of all, pathologically reluctant to change. The series delineates the way he is forced, by circumstances, to learn human feelings, to change, and how that leads him to the tragic decision to die, leaving his kingdom-the Dreaming-to the rule of a new, less misfit embodiment of the idea of Dream. 28 Marilyn Brahen, “The Thin Line Between,” in Schweitzer, Neil Gaiman Reader, p. 140. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 92 ♦ Cyril Camus Throughout the millennia-encompassing plot, the Endless interact with Norse, Egyptian, Greek, and other gods and mythological beings, with fairy folk, angels and demons, with historical figures such as William Shakespeare, Augustus Caesar, Robespierre, or Joshua Norton, and with ordinary human characters created by Gaiman. But as Sandman is a DC series, it must be noted that it is also part of this fictional microcosm that is referred to as “the DC Universe.” That means that all the DC characters (superheroes and otherwise) exist inside Sandman’s diegesis, and they are therefore likely to be involved in the plot. Characters from Batman, Superman, or members of the Justice League of America (notably the Martian Manhunter) make cameo appearances. However, just as Alan Moore had done a few years earlier in his DC series Swamp Thing, Gaiman preferred to use mostly, in Sandman, less famous DC characters. Cain, Abel, and Eve are such characters. The three of them first appeared as horror-hosts in DC Comics horror anthology series in the EC Comics vein. As Hy Bender explains in his chapter on the “Secret Origins” of Sandman characters, “Cain and Abel were respectively hosts of two highly popular titles [in the 1970s], The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets.”29 From mere heterodiegetic narrators, the two characters had already been made homodiegetic (albeit with a mostly choral function) in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. In Sandman, they are much more involved in the action, as they are identified as dwellers of the Dreaming, and faithful assistants to the Dream-King. So is Eve, a woman who is sometimes young and beautiful, sometimes old, and who spends most of her time in a cave in the Dreaming, alone with a raven. In a piece of interview with Bender in the “Secret Origins” chapter, Gaiman explains where this character comes from: Tom [Peyer]’s research [in the DC archives] unearthed another obscure 1975 series, Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love, that was hosted by a beautiful unnamed woman with a raven. That made me remember a mad crone named Eve who had a raven, and who appeared in several other short-lived DC titles, such as Secrets of Sinister House, Secrets of Haunted House and Plop! It occurred to me that the beautiful woman with a raven and the crazy crone with a raven were aspects of the same character, who was named Eve.30 Of course, Cain and Abel, who were already presented as brothers in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets, were clearly inspired by the eponymous brothers in Genesis. And as for Eve, even if the connection is less obvi- 29 30 Bender, The Sandman Companion, pp. 244–245. Bender, The Sandman Companion, p. 244. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 93 ous, her name, given to such a forlorn and ageless character, cannot but evoke the Eve from Genesis. Yet, the obviously intertextual nature of the characters was never much exploited by the writers who used them before Gaiman. In The House of Mystery, Cain is the caretaker of a Gothic mansion adjoining a cemetery, and he spends his time telling horror stories to the reader. In The House of Secrets, Abel does exactly the same thing, in a house at the other side of the cemetery, and his bully brother Cain sometimes visits him, mostly to scare him or mock him for his supposed silliness and cowardliness. In Moore’s Swamp Thing, the characters’ houses appear to be located in some nonphysical piece of land, overlooking Hell, and which can be visited in dreams. Moore first introduces a vague but identifiable reference to the brothers’ biblical models, in the form of a horror/slapstick routine, consisting in Cain’s recurrently killing Abel, who resuscitates every day, so that he can be killed over again, in a perfect illustration of Henri Bergson’s conception of the comic as “something mechanical in something living.”31 In Sandman, the brothers are very similar to the depiction that is made of them in Swamp Thing, except that the reader encounters them much more often (they appeared only in two issues in Swamp Thing, “Abandoned Houses” and “The End”32). That allows Gaiman to develop their relationships, giving some poignancy to it, by suggesting that Abel hopes beyond hope that he and his brother will make peace some day, or that, secretly, Cain could actually not live without his much-reviled and often-murdered brother. More importantly, those Gothic/slapstick characters are resacralized inasmuch as some passages make very clear that the DC Cain, Abel, and Eve, and the Old Testament Cain, Abel and Eve, are indeed the same. The first of these passages occurs in the issue that serves as “Chapter 1” in the storyline entitled “Season of Mists.” Dream needs to go to Hell and to negotiate something with Lucifer, but the latter bears a grudge to the Dream-King, and a strong sense of diplomacy is required. Before going, Dream decides to send one of his servants to announce his visit, but as Hell is a very dangerous place for anybody who ventures there, Dream chooses to send Cain. When Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1900), in Œuvres, 3rd ed. (1959, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), p. 405 (translation mine; it corresponds to a usual translation of Bergson’s formula “du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant”). 32 Alan Moore et al., Swamp Thing, Vol. 2: Love and Death (1984–1985; collection, New York: DC Comics, 1990), pp. 164–183; and Alan Moore et al., Swamp Thing, Vol. 4: A Murder of Crows (1985–1986; collection, New York: DC Comics, 2001), pp. 165–203. 31 Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 94 ♦ Cyril Camus they meet, Lucifer greets Cain as “the first man born of woman.”33 And then, when some demons offer to destroy Cain after he has delivered his message, Lucifer explains Dream’s choice, partly by quoting from the Old Testament: You cannot hurt him. We may not give you our permission. Cain is under protection of one far greater than the Lord of Dreams. “And the Lord said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold, and the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him . . . .” . . . You’re under his protection. Dream was sensible to send you as his messenger -any other envoy would have been returned with his liver in his mouth (Sandman 2, 45).34 A few pages later, Gaiman continues weaving the explicit link between the DC character and his Old Testament prototype, still through Lucifer’s speech balloons. The Lord of Hell informs Cain of the existence, in the second century A.D., of a Gnostic sect named the Cainites, who believed that “Yahweh was positively evil,” who “revere[d] such rejected figures as Cain . . . , Esau and the Sodomites,” and who thought that “salvation . . . c[ame] only by breaking all the laws of the Old Testament.”35 The information given by Lucifer is more or less that, the main difference being his use of the deictic “you” instead of the name “Cain”: “they believed that you were the persecuted party in that unfortunate affair with your brother” (Sandman 2, 46). Referring to an obscure group in the history of religions helps giving back to the DC character the mysterium that belongs to his biblical roots; such information is not necessarily well-known to the reading public of Sandman. So it can be considered as “esoteric,” in a very literal sense. Some majestas is conferred to the character as well; a few people actually used to revere him. The fact that Gaiman and artist Kelley Jones included the text from Genesis inside a panel actually showing the mark of Cain also has an effect of that kind, both thanks to the natural fascination exerted by graphic symbols whose meaning is unclear, and to the suggestion that we are looking at a physical trace of Yahweh’s majestas, a mere circle on Cain’s flesh, that suffices to prevent anybody from harming him (Fig. 6). Such numinous features can also be found in the issue “A Parliament of Rooks” (part of “Convergence,” a triptych of stories marginal to the main plot). In this narrative pause in Dream’s story, Cain, Abel, and Eve are to be found hav- 33 Neil Gaiman et al., Absolute Sandman, Vol. 2 (1990–1993; collection, New York: DC Comics, 2007), p. 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text. 34 Lucifer’s quotation comes from Genesis 4:15. 35 Encyclopædia Britannica online, “Cainite,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ topic/88487/Cainites (accessed October 12, 2009). Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 95 ing a “tea party” at Abel’s House of Secrets, with a baby dreamer from the waking world, who is to become, later, Dream’s successor. Cain suggests that as “old storytellers” (an intertextual allusion to their editorial past as horrorhosts), they should tell stories to their guest.36 Eve and Abel successively narrate their origin stories, which are easily identifiable as similar to their Genesis counterparts’. Eve’s story is recognizable but strangely different from the best-known Genesis tale. Instead of Adam being made of dust, and having only one wife, Eve, made from his rib while he sleeps, the story starts with a hermaphrodite Adam, whose female part is divided from the male to make Adam’s first wife, Lilith (Sandman 3, 33). As she behaves as Adam’s equal, she is Figure 6. Reprinted from Absolute Sandman Vol. “expelled from Eden,” and a new 2. 45. © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. wife is made. But as Adam could see her creation, “bones first, then internal organs, then flesh” and so on, Adam can’t bear her sight, sees her as “full of secretions and blood” (Sandman 3, 34– 35). So she is also expelled, or destroyed, without even being given a name, and finally God makes Eve, in the aforementioned manner. Actually, this version of the story is not from the Old Testament proper; a caption claims that “that’s what the Midrash states” (Sandman 3, 35).37 Besides, Gaiman explains in an interview: “That’s a story which has haunted me since age twelve, when 36 Neil Gaiman et al., Absolute Sandman, Vol. 3 (1991–1993; collection, New York: DC Comics, 2008), p. 28. Hereafter cited parenthetically within the text. 37 The three adjuncts or interpretations actually come from different texts. Lilith comes from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval compilation of lists of proverbs with haggadic commentary. The unnamed wife and the hermaphrodite Adam come from Genesis Rabbah, Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 96 ♦ Cyril Camus Cantor Meir Lev taught it to me during my bar mitzvah lessons. The cantor happened to be an expert on Jewish Talmudic, Mishnaic and Midrashic apocrypha, and I found it all fascinating and pumped him for information; so by the age of thirteen, I knew more arcane Jewish lore than most adults.”38 And here again, the “esoteric” nature, for most readers, of that Jewish lore, and its use in the embedded story, efficiently confers mysterium to the comicbook character of Eve, while such striking images as the hermaphrodite Adam, or the revealed process of creation of the second wife (quite realistically depicted by artist Jill Thompson-see Fig. 7) have effects that pertain to majestas and tremendum. Eve’s story should be contrasted with Abel’s, in which he tells their infant guest of his biblical troubles with Cain, and then of Dream’s (non-biblical) decision to give asylum to the brothers in the Dreaming. Abel’s version of the story takes the form of an upbeat nursery tale, where all the characters (Dream, Death, Cain, and Abel) are depicted as little children, and where the brothers end up “hugg[ing] each other joyfully” (Gaiman, Sandman 3, 40). Thompson adapts her style to Abel’s idiosyncratic storytelling. In the panels that reflect Abel’s fantasizing, the characters are drawn in a very “cute” and childlike style, with “enormous heads and large eyes, but tiny noses and mouths that appear close to their chins.”39 Gaiman wanted them to look roughly like Sugar and Spike (two baby characters from a DC comics-series for children, created in 1956 by Sheldon Mayer). As Thompson points out, they eventually look a lot like “little Japanese manga figures.”40 The point of this funny rewriting of the Genesis story in the form of a nursery tale is to stress the excessive sweetness and innocence of the Sandman version of Abel. The character’s craving for brotherly love gives a deep poignancy to many of the passages in which he is murdered by Cain. In a way, Sandman takes sides in favor of the sacrificial victim, just as the Old Testament does according to René Girard. Thus, Gaiman adds a very empathetic, human, dimension to the a Midrashic text from the third century that is “haggadic in character” (Watson E. Mills, ed., The Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible [1990; reprint, Cambridge: Mercer University Press, 1994], p. 733). In rabbinic literature, haggadah refers to “nonprescriptive . . . descriptions of historical events, aphorisms, parables, proverbs, legends of biblical or post-biblical heroes, folklore, and other materials . . . used by the rabbis to illustrate moral and ethical duties,” as opposed to halakah which is a “prescription,” “the definition of the precise way in which a commandment of the Torah (Law) was to be performed” (Mills, Lutterworth Dictionary, p. 732). 38 Bender, Sandman Companion, p. 154. 39 Bender, Sandman Companion, p. 153. 40 Bender, Sandman Companion, p. 153. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 97 Figure 7. Reprinted from Absolute Sandman, Vol. 3. 34. © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011 98 ♦ Cyril Camus slapstick routine introduced by Moore in Swamp Thing. That does not prevent the sadness below this wishful story to be as gripping as that which explicitly pervades Eve’s tale. But Abel’s surely has nothing numinous to it. One of the great emotional strengths of the Sandman characters is precisely the way Gaiman alternates depictions of them either as “wholly other,”41 and therefore creating aesthetic echoes of what the numinous may feel like, or as wholly human, and eliciting the reader’s sympathy. In his essay on the history of Jewish comics creators in America, Danny Fingeroth reveals that, when he personally asked him in an e-mail about Jewish content in his writings, Gaiman answered, “I think the stuff in my work that’s definably Jewish is probably the stuff that’s Jewish on the surface-the midrashic . . . stories that crept into Sandman, for example. Beyond that (shrug) it’s anyone’s guess.”42 Unlike Fingeroth’s book, this paper is not dedicated to a psychoanalytic search for implicitly Jewish aspects, or hidden Jewish themes, in superhero or fantasy comics. So it is not meant to go “beyond” what “is Jewish on the surface.” But Gaiman’s approach to explicitly Jewish content is interesting, just as his oblique way of dealing with much of world culture always is. His intimate yet detached knowledge of the Jewish sacred texts and of the Judeo-Christian religious history gave him assets to create some powerful details in his syncretic Sandman mythos. Anybody Christian could have linked Cain, Abel, or Eve to their biblical types, but the idea of including midrashic content probably contributed a lot to the successful aura of mysterium and majestas of Eve’s tale in “A Parliament of Rooks.” Even if his ambivalent religious education “made [him] see everything as myth,” he is thoroughly aware of the value of myths. As to Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament, it is obvious that the main difference between Gaiman and the other writers, apart from the number of scripts he contributed, is that most of the others wrote about very famous stories: Creation, the Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Samson, and Job. Gaiman was one of the few who chose books that are known mostly to people who actually read or studied the Old Testament. Filmmakers like Mel Brooks or the Monty Python have often shown in their careers that there is no better parody than a parody by someone who actually knows the original work fairly well. Gaiman’s “outrageous tales” certainly convey that impression. Fingeroth also wrote about the “Golden Age” of the comic-books in the late 1930s and early 1940s: “As recently deceased Jewish comics writer, Ar- 41 42 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 25. Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 144. Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies The “Outsider” ♦ 99 nold Drake . . . , told me: ‘There was an extraordinary representation of Jews and Italians. The Jews were primarily writers, the Italians were primarily artists, and I saw it being an extension of the two cultures. Jews had always been involved in storytelling going back to the Old Testament. The Italians had been involved with art for centuries and centuries.’”43 As a writer whose works are characterized by recurrent explicit intertextuality, Gaiman always overtly pays his hypertextual debts to his hypotextual creditors. Both as a Jewish author and as a Western popular culture author, he could not have ignored the founding text of the rich Jewish storytelling tradition of which he is part, especially if this text happens to be a founding text for the whole Judeo-Christian Western culture as well. However, as an author who also has the passion of creative retelling, of ever-changing and ever-updating universal narratives—in a nutshell, as someone who believes that “we have the right, or the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories, and they must be told”44—he sometimes pays his debts in quite unexpected ways. Ways that are sideways: an outsider’s ways. Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent, p. 24, emphasis mine. Neil Gaiman, Adventures in the Dream Trade (2002; reprint, Framingham: The NESFA Press, 2007), p. 68. 43 44 Vol. 29, No. 2 ♦ 2011