The Fantastical Experience: The Relationship between History, Fantasy, and Reality in Neil

Gaiman’s Neverwhere

By

Paulo de Tiège
 de Tiège 1

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................. 2
Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter One: Theorising the Medieval .............................................................................................. 10
1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 10
1.2 Medievalism: In Search of the Middle Ages ........................................................................... 11
1.3 An Experience of History ........................................................................................................ 18
1.4 The Bodily Experience of Understanding ............................................................................... 28
1.5 Neomedievalism: Creating the Medieval ................................................................................ 35
Chapter Two: Bridging Fantasy ......................................................................................................... 43
2.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 43
2.2 The Approach of Fantasy ........................................................................................................ 44
2.3 The Worlds of Fantasy............................................................................................................. 53
2.4 Reading Fantasy ...................................................................................................................... 58
2.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 63
Chapter Three: The Properties of Time in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere ............................................. 67
3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 67
3.2 The Survival of Time ............................................................................................................... 74
3.3 The Threat of Time .................................................................................................................. 83
3.4 The Malleability of Time ......................................................................................................... 88
3.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 94
Chapter Four: The Experience of Fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere ......................................... 96
4.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 96
4.2. The Structure of an Alternate World....................................................................................... 99
4.3. The Experience of Alienation ............................................................................................... 107
4.4. The Acceptance of Difference .............................................................................................. 117
4.5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 121
Works Cited...................................................................................................................................... 127
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Acknowledgements

In writing about the relationship between fantasy, history, and play, I

have received aid and encouragement from many people. In particular

I want to extend a word of thanks to dr A.C. Montoya for her supervi-

sion, feedback, and guidance, without whom this thesis would never

have been written. I am also grateful for the invaluable advice and

support of prof S.I. Sobecki, and the guidance of dr J. Flood, both of

whom have made the background research for this thesis possible. I

am no less grateful to my friends and family, who have provided end-

less support and patience, which kept me going in the toughest of

times. In particular, I would like to thank Annemarie Fix, Erik van

Gorp, Joanna Schoonvelde, Lilian Tabois, and Joey Teussink for their

valuable feedback at the final stages of writing this thesis.

 de Tiège 3
Introduction

Fantasy fiction enjoys a great deal of attention in contemporary popular culture. Since the early

2000’s many fantasy franchises have been expanded to include other media such as films, graphic

novels, television series, and both videogames, board games, and role-playing games. Fantasy fic-

tion typically depicts a world reminiscent of medieval Europe, mixing together various medieval

periods and cultures into an amalgam infused with fantastical elements such as monsters and magic.

Typical plots of fantasy fiction follow a lone hero on a quest not unlike those of medieval romances,

where they face a host of strange and unnatural beings and events. In general, fantasy fiction takes

up the admirable and exciting aspects of the medieval period such as knightly values, exciting ad-

ventures, and romantic ideals, while at the same time ignoring the negative sides of medieval life,

such as a strict hierarchical culture, and lack of modern technological advances. Fantasy adopts the

material of the Middle Ages and playfully reworks it into new, modern cultural products. The fanta-

sy genre is thus a meeting place of the modern and the medieval in contemporary culture, as readers

are confronted with modern creations featuring modern characters in settings that resemble medie-

val periods.

Unfortunately, the mixture of actual and fictional history in fantasy has also garnered it criti-

cism. One oft-repeated criticism filed against fantasy is that it is not truly literature but mere escap-

ist pulp fiction. Literary criticism is not devoid of this bias either; for instance, in an insightful re-

view of C.N. Manlove's Modern Fantasy: Five Studies Ronald Curran identifies a line of reasoning

by Manlove that inevitably condemns all modern fantasy (that is to say, twentieth-century fantasy)

to escapism, ironically denying the value of the genre he is attempting to define.1 What, however, if

we were to take fantasy seriously? If we take fantasy to be escapism, then where does the reader

escape to? How does this escape from the real into the fantastic take place? If the worlds created by

fantasy fiction are fleshed out enough with their own histories and mythologies and attempt to cre-

1
Ronald Curran. Rev. of Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, by C.N. Manlove. Books Abroad 50.3 (Summer,
1976): 663-664. Print.
 de Tiège 4
ate a coherent universe into which the reader can escape, then the shape of these fictional worlds

can inform us about the relationship between the real and the fantastic, and explain why these

worlds attract us. Primary among the characteristics of fantasy worlds is their pronounced medieval

flavour: while infused with magic, monsters, and mystical artefacts, their usual level of technology

is roughly medieval and the political and social structures encountered in fantasy use the medieval

as a model. The medieval world, apparently, has a large attraction for the authors of fantasy.

The resurfacing of aspects of the Middle Ages in cultural artefacts of later periods is investi-

gated in the discipline called medievalism. While the exact definition of what medievalism entails is

heavily debated, for the moment it can be roughly defined as the study of both the survival as well

as the revival of medieval texts, practices, and models of the world. Medievalism, strictly speaking,

thus examines only those modern creations which directly refer back to medieval origins. A bur-

geoning young subfield of medievalism, however, called neomedievalism expands its scope to in-

clude contemporary creations of the medieval. This is to say that neomedievalism has taken up an

interest in new creations of the medieval alongside the reception of the Middle Ages through an

intermediary. As a result, neomedievalism has turned its eye to the genre of fantasy as a specific

type of engagement with the medieval. In this way, neomedievalism couples the historical interest

of medievalism with a postmodern acknowledgement that the historical past is lost to us, and in-

stead relishes in the playful creation of imaginative medievalist visions that mix the modern in with

the premodern.

The result of this neomedieval blend of the past, the present, and the fantastic is a world nei-

ther distinctly medieval nor modern but a true mixture of both. The image of the medieval provided

to us in these worlds of fantasy does not match the constructivist historian's model of the Middle

Ages but nevertheless influences the popular perception of these times. Through the familiar (mod-

ern) aspects of fantasy, the reader of a neomedieval text (in the postmodern sense of the word) can

encounter and analyse the distant and strange (medieval) aspects presented to him or her. The meet-

ing of the modern and the medieval creates a space where the two can playfully engage each other,
 de Tiège 5
and through their contrast with each other the reader can judge them both. Getting to know the

Middle Ages through this imaginative dance of the medieval and the modern is made all the more

easy by the playful approach that typifies the neomedieval. Neomedieval contemporary fantasy

tends to incorporate humorous material, playfully altering source material to humorous effect or

otherwise inverting readers’ expectations about medieval tropes, so that they take creative liberties

with the past, reshaping it to suit the needs of the author. As a secondary effect of this, the playful

approach taken to the mix of medieval and modern constructs a carnivalesque space where normal

expectations of, for instance, genre, plot, or historical knowledge are creatively undermined, which

allows for a connection to the medieval without the intervention of the preconceptions of theoretical

constructs.

In this thesis, I will investigate the relationship of contemporary fantasy to the popular per-

ception of history, particularly as mediated by the playful approach of neomedievalist writing. I will

argue that the playful aspects of fantasy create a carnivalesque space wherein the author is free to

take up and change various historical elements and infuse them with fantastical additions that defy

normal reality. The playful space of the fantasy novel relieves the reader of any requirement of

matching the events described within to historical reality, and thus he or she is left free to directly

engage with the presented narrative. In this way, the reader can engage with aspects of the historical

in fantasy fiction and gain a sense of experience of a world normally absent from the present.

Through the medium of the fantasy novel a contemporary reader can discover that the past is not

truly lost to those in the present but rather is directly available to his or her experience. It is of little

concern that the experience of this fictional past does not match that constructed by the constructiv-

ist historian, as this thesis is not concerned with the construction of academic historical knowledge

but rather with the construction of the popular perception of the past.

Chapter one investigates the ability of writing to evoke a historical experience in its reader.

It deals with the fields of medievalism and neomedievalism, and it argues how these relate to theo-

ries of historical experience. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque forms the bridge between the
 de Tiège 6
two fields, and chapter one argues how that allows the reader to directly engage with the past

through the medium of writing. After this, chapter two examines how fantasy fiction can provoke a

historical experience both through its generic aspects as well as its presentations of fantastical

worlds. Chapter three is the first of two chapters that serve as a case study of the theoretical work

presented in the first two chapters. It looks into how Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is intimately con-

cerned with the concept of time, and how it manipulates the concept of time to create an image of a

timeless world. Because of the intimate connection between the real world and the fantasy world in

Neverwhere, it serves as a case study par excellence, and is a prime source for examining the theory

in practice. The final chapter looks into the effect of the timeless world on the protagonist of

Neverwhere, and argues how this forms an extended argument about history throughout the novel.

The thread running through this thesis is that of the experience of the past by a reader of fantasy

fiction, and direction is given to this thread by the continued interest in the playfulness of fantasy.

The sense of freedom provided by the playful approach to history is the expression of the historical

experience in the novel by an author, and it is this that enables the reader to share in that historical

experience by proxy.

While the concept of the historical experience and the availability of the past in the present

has been discussed by such scholars as Johan Huizinga,2 Frank Ankersmit,3 and Eelco Runia,4 as

historians their emphasis lies on an experience of actual history provoked by items from that histo-

ry. This thesis will therefore break new ground by examining how a work of fiction can equally

provoke a historical experience, though from a fictional history from a different world filled with

fantastical elements. Connections between fantasy and history (and particularly the medieval peri-

od) have been researched by such theorists as Michael Drout5 and Helen Young,6 and the influence

2
Johan Huizinga. De Taak der Cultuurgeschiedenis. Edited by W.E. Krul. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij,
1995. Print.
3
Frank Ankersmit. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Print.
4
Eelco Runia “Presence.” History and Theory 45.1 (Feb., 2006): 1-29. Print.
5
Michael D.C. Drout, “The Problem of Transformation: The Use of Medieval Sources in Fantasy Literature,”
 de Tiège 7
that reading fantasy has on its readers by scholars such as Jack Zipes, 7 Jane Yolen,8 and Elisabeth

Rose Gruner.9 To date, however, the relationship between fantasy, understanding, and history has

not been investigated. As such, this thesis will fill a gap in contemporary research on fantasy fiction,

and serve to connect it to the study of history through the investigation of medievalism. A sense of

playfulness will serve as the connecting factor between these theories. Huizinga noted the intense

connection between culture and playfulness, and this thesis will argue that this connection exists

equally between fantasy and history. Thus, a playful approach marks the connection from fantasy,

through history, to culture.

This thesis will delve into hitherto unexplored areas in the research of fantasy as well. Some

of the seminal works on fantasy were written in the seventies and eighties, before the rise of the

popularity of fantasy in mainstream culture.10 Fantasy is typified as “one of fiction’s largest and

fastest growing genres” in a recent publication providing a brief overview of new fantasy litera-

ture,11 yet unfortunately critical scholarship has to date not kept up with this trend. Greg Bechtel

provides an excellent and nearly exhaustive overview of recent publications (he deals predominant-

ly with book-length publications), and rather than needlessly reproducing his work, it will be ex-

plored here to establish the current state of fantasy research. Bechtel divides theories of fantasy into

three major streams, namely ‘the Todorovian, Tolkienian, and Mystic perspectives.” 12 The Todo-

in Literature Compass 1 (2004) ME 101, 1-22. Print.

6
Helen Young, “Approaches to Medievalism: A Consideration of Taxonomy and Methodology through
Fantasy Fiction,” in Parergon 27.1 (2010): 163-179. Print.
7
Jack Zipes, “Why Fantasy Matters Too Much,” in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43.2 (Summer 2009):
77-91. Print.
8
Jane Yolen, “Magic Mirrors: Society Reflected in the Glass of Fantasy,” in Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly, 11.2 (Summer 1986): 88-90. Print.
9
Elisabeth Rose Gruner, “Teach the Children: Education and Knowledge in Recent Children’s Fantasy,” in
Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 216-235. Print.
10
Jack Zipes, for instance, notes that two defining researchers in the field of fantasy scholarship, Tzvetan
Todorov and Rosemary Jackson “might have different notions of fantasy today after writing their seminal
books in 1975 and 1981," in "Why Fantasy Matters Too Much," The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43.2
(Summer 2009). 79. Print.
11
Charlotte Burcher, Neil Hollands, Andre Smith, Barry Trott, and Jessica Zellers. “Core Collections in
Genre Studies: Fantasy Fiction 101.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 48.3 (Spring, 2009): 227. Print.
12
Greg Bechtel. “’There and Back Again’: Progress in the Discourse of Todorovian, Tolkienian and Mystic
Fantasy Theory.” English Studies in Canada 30.4 (Dec., 2004): 141. Print.
 de Tiège 8
rovian perspective he identifies as being “deeply rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis,”13 and while

starting off from a structuralist point of view, Bechtel concludes that it “became a central influence

for several poststructuralist/postmodernist studies of fantasy and the fantastic.”14 While Todorovian

theories focus on the hesitation “on the border between the mimetic and the marvellous,” by con-

trast the “Tolkienian fantasy operates simultaneously on both sides of the mimetic/marvellous bor-

der.”15 Tolkienian theories are interested in how authors of fantasy use a “different type of es-

trangement” that does not alienate but rather produces “wonder (a positive experience.”16 The last

approach Bechtel discusses (and is clearly in favour of), he terms the Mystic approach. This ap-

proach engages with the idea that fantasy hits an essential truth in some undefined and perhaps in-

definable way.17 It contrasts the ideas of factuality and truth, suggesting that there is a type of “in-

tuitive knowledge” present in fantasy literature.18

While the theorists Bechtel lists as having contributed to the theoretical study of fantasy will

be dealt with in more detail in the second chapter, his brief overview is useful in positioning the

current thesis in the larger scope of fantasy research. Firstly, the theory proposed here fits strongly

in the Tolkienian trend of fantasy research, being interested in how fantasy combines reality and

fantasy, and how it does this to enrich its reader rather than (as the Todorovian perspective implies)

provoke an uncanny experience. Furthermore, while the theorists Bechtel discusses deal predomi-

nantly with what the fantasy genre entails, this thesis will engage with the question of what reading

fantasy does to its readers. While the Todorovian theorists suggest fantasy evokes an uncanny expe-

rience, the Tolkienian theorists suggest fantasy evokes wonder, and the Mystic perspective suggests

fantasy informs its readers of essential truths, the current thesis will investigate how a fantasy narra-

tive might do all of the above, and what kind of knowledge might be gained through this process. In

13
Bechtel 143.
14
Bechtel 144.
15
Bechtel 151.
16
Bechtel 154.
17
Bechtel 161.
18
Bechtel 162.
 de Tiège 9
particular, this thesis will attempt to answer the question of how fantasy engages its readers through

its playful interaction with history, and how that enriches its readers.
 de Tiège 10
Chapter One: Theorising the Medieval

1.1 Introduction

In this chapter I will outline the theoretical background underpinning the argument that

contemporary fantasy can supply a modern reader with a sense of history. By explaining how

modern (re-)creations of medieval artefacts, stories, and world views can connect to a sense of the

medieval past—regardless of whether they are accurate representations of that past—I will

demonstrate that a historical experience can be evoked not just directly from historical artefacts,1

which is to mean actual historical objects, but also from modern creations referring to a past. The

experiences provoked by such contemporary artefacts might be considered a historical experience

by proxy, and I will discuss how in the case of fantasy fiction it may be accurate to speak of an

analogous fantastical experience. Such matters of nomenclature are for the moment of secondary

concern, however, next to establishing a coherent line from historical past to actual present through

a fictional past. Crucial to this link is the reader’s experience of a novel, and the notion that while

the events in a novel may be fictional, an individual reader’s reaction to these events will be real.

The second section of this chapter will provide an overview of the field of medievalism,

starting with a brief history before continuing onward to outline its basic concepts. As a burgeoning

and exciting field of study, there is still much debate on the exact limits of the domain of

medievalism, and this section will try to strike a balance between providing an accurate survey of

the field while at the same time maintaining a clear view of the subject. After this, the third section

will delve into Huizinga’s and Ankersmit’s conceptions of the historical experience, and tackle the

problem of how someone might have a historical experience from an object which has no direct

connection to history. The fourth section will then form a bridge between the concept of the

historical experience and the field of medievalism by investigation how a text might provoke a

1
Throughout this thesis, the word “artefact” will be used to identify a created object that can be perceived by
individuals. As such, an artefact might be a monument or a historical item, but may also indicate a contemporary work
of fiction, or a film, or otherwise. Similarly, the phrase “text” will be used in the postmodern sense of the word,
indicating objects that are read by readers, whether those objects are books, music, movies, or events.
 de Tiège
11
historical experience. Through the work of Helmuth Plessner on the relationship of an individual to

his or her body, a connection will be made between an intellectual conception of history and a

personal experience of it. This will lead to the final section which ties the historical experience back

to the concept of medievalism with regards to the concept of playfulness.

As a whole, this chapter provides the theoretical groundwork establishing the relationship

between history and fantasy. This will serve as the basis for the second chapter, which provides a

brief overview of research done into fantasy, and suggests how the historical experience and fantasy

fit may collaborate to produce a fantastical experience. Together, these two chapters will serve as

the theoretical basis that underpins the following two chapters, which work as a case study

exemplifying the theory. Of all chapters, then, this will be the most descriptive and theoretical, as it

provides the basis for all to come. Nevertheless, much like medievalist works do with their source

material, this chapter will strive to engage with abstract concepts and hope to make them come to

life once more, both actively and imaginatively. That is to say, to bring these theories closer to their

readers, so as to make them relevant to everyday experience. As such, the following section will

engage with the challenging problem of how it might be possible to have a direct experience of

something that is fully in the past.

1.2 Medievalism: In Search of the Middle Ages

The field of medievalism was opened up in the 1970s by Leslie J. Workman, who spent several

years laying the groundwork for the modern conception of the term “medievalism”. According to an

article by his wife, Kathleen Verduin, Leslie J. Workman himself dated the inception of

medievalism—that is to say, the start of the modern conception of medievalism, as opposed to (for

instance) the Romantic use of the term—to 1974.2 In contemporary usage, medievalism indicates

both a survival as well as a revival of practices, ideas, or stories from the Middle Ages, implying an

2
Kathleen Verduin. "The Founding and the Founder." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s),
XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. 6. Print.
 12 de Tiège
understanding of the term medieval as a process rather than a description of a period, and

medievalism as an act rather than a style, structure, or genre. One of the first articles that can be

identified with the modern sense of the term followed soon after, in 1975, authored by Workman

and Alice P. Kenney.3 Although the article is not explicitly engaged with medievalism, Verduin

identifies medievalism as “implicit, however, in the essay's promise to examine 'the reciprocal

influence of […] fashionable Gothic genres and historical knowledge of the Middle Ages'.”4

However, Workman dates the establishment of medievalism as an academic subject back to a

session at the Tenth International Congress on Medieval Studies in 1976.5 Considering that

medievalism as a field is interested in tracing the medieval origins of postmedieval cultural

productions, it is ironic though perhaps fitting that its own origin is so difficult to pin down.

Due to the overwhelmingly interdisciplinary perspective of medievalism, it is equally

difficult to find a comfortable place for the field within the academic world. Workman once

commented that “the trouble with medievalism […] is that it doesn't belong anywhere in the

academic world, and people interested in it might come from almost any field,” typifying it as a

“new kind of interdisciplinary subject.”6 Part of the problem lies in the fact that the definition of

medievalism itself is not set in stone. Furthermore, medievalism tends to take its inspiration from

cultural objects that are not commonly examined by traditional academic work, such as popular

literature and movies, or board and video games. Its variety of approaches combined with its wide-

ranging subject matter has resulted in the term “medievalism” being subject to a plethora of

definitions. Even a brief survey of work done in the field will quickly result in list of broadly

diverging types of medievalism. The Medievally Speaking website, an online medievalist book

review blog maintained by Richard Utz, lists seventeen definitions7 and four more definitions can

3
Verduin 6.
4
Verduin 6.
5
Verduin 6.
6
Qtd. in Verduin 7-8.
7
Richard Utz. "What is Medievalism?" Medievally Speaking. January 1 2009. Web. Accessed 26 October
2011.
 13de Tiège
easily be added to this from the MEMO website, which is an online community of scholars of

neomedievalism maintained by Carol L. Robinson.8 To complicate matters further, Verduin noted

that medievalism “can be defined, too, as a form of intellectual history, including, however, the

study of material culture and the relations between this and the history of ideas—which is not

intellectual history as generally understood.”9

In a sense, Workman foresaw the difficulties in defining medievalism: his definition of

medievalism is itself a plural concept (inspiring some scholars, like Tom Shippey, to speak of

medievalism(s) rather than a singular medievalism), as each person's perception of the medieval will

be different.10 For Workman, medievalism was not a strictly demarcated theoretical field but rather

a method or a process of an individual's engagement with the medieval.11 While there may be

difficulties in providing a precise definition of the medieval, this at least is the common thread

running between the various definitions; in most cases medievalism is defined as involving an

interest in the medieval. Perhaps the fairest (though as an inevitable result also most general)

definition of medievalism is provided by Tom Shippey, who defined it as “any post-medieval

attempt to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle Ages, for the modern world,

in any of many different media; especially in academic usages, the study of the development and

significance of such attempts.”12 While such a generalised definition might be considered too vague

by some, it nevertheless represents what a truly varied field medievalism is. In Shippey’s definition,

medievalism is a subject that touches a great many contemporary cultural productions. His

description of medievalism fits the postmodern nature of its object of study, both being hard to pin

down yet instantly recognizable. Nevertheless, scholars can still have an intelligible debate on

medievalism in journals and conferences, which begs the question of whether medievalism truly

8
Robinson. "Definitions."
9
Verduin 7.
10
Elizabeth Emery. "Medievalism and the Middle Ages." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s),
XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. 81. Print.
11
Emery 78; Verduin 20.
12
Tom Shippey. "Medievalisms and Why They Matter." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s),
XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brwer, 2009. 45. Print.
 de Tiège 14
needs a singular, limiting definition. It is very likely that a looser definition much like that given by

Shippey will suffice, and indeed might do medievalism more justice than a needlessly restrictive

one.

A flexible definition of medievalism can be provided by examining common traits of cur-

rent theories about the subject. One of the common aspects shared by many definitions of medieval-

ism is the idea of the absence of the Middle Ages. Before the Middle Ages can resurface or be rec-

reated they must first be lost. This concept is thus a prime requisite for any kind of medievalism. A

sense of loss coupled with a nostalgic longing for the past thus infuses most works of medievalism.

It is important to note that the absence of the Middle Ages requires a particular meaning of the word

“lost,” however. The Middle Ages are lost not because they are separated from us by time but rather

because the conventional definition provided by historians is no longer considered to be accurate.

Medievalism recognises that the Middle Ages are “an artificial construct,” and that contemporary

discussions of the period do not work to lift layers of confusion and unveil the truth underneath but

instead add coverings of interpretation to the “palimpsest we now call the Middle Ages” (in the

words of Elizabeth Emery).13 Medievalism challenges the concept of the “Middle Ages,” and en-

courages thinkers to consider how the period is an intellectual construct rather than a historical fact.

Richard R. Glejzer’s engages with the idea that the Middle Ages can never be known in the

historical sense. He suggests that in order to get worthwhile information from the medieval period,

it is more useful to take the Middle Ages as a context for knowledge rather than an object for study

in and of itself.14 As a result, the Middle Ages are placed in a unique position in history, namely

outside of it. By examining the way people think about the medieval period and the effect this has

on representations of it, the Middle Ages extend outward into the future all the way into the present.

In this way, the idea of the Middle Ages becomes more important than the actual medieval period

13
Emery 81.
14
Richard R. Glezjer. "The New Medievalism and the (Im)Possibility of the Middle Ages." Studies in
Medievalism: Medievalism and the academy II, Cultural Studies, X. Edited by David Metzger. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1998. 110-111. Print.
 de Tiège
15
itself. As such, the terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” become synonymous, implying simply a

connection to the idea of the Middle Ages.

Abandoning the concept of the medieval period as a historically distant era separated from

the present by time widens the range of phenomena that can be called medieval. Medievalism thus

not only incorporates the passive reception of the Middle Ages but also the active (re-)creation of

that period. Therefore, not only are the actual texts and artefacts from the medieval period the focus

of the study of medievalism, but, as Lauryn S. Mayer argues, “its every subsequent representation

in any medium” can belong to the medievalist corpus.15 It is not just artefacts that may serve as an

embodiment of the Middle Ages but also ideas about the Middle Ages themselves may represent

them by proxy. A suitable example of this concept is to be found in the history of the word “medie-

valism” itself. In writing about the linguistic history of the word medievalism, Clare A. Simmons

notes how certain terms in English shifted from indicating a historical period to describing a style.

She notes that by the 1820s, the word “Gothic” increasingly came to indicate “an aesthetic rather

than historical category,” with the apogee of this trend being Ruskin's definition of “'Gothic' as a

style and 'medieval' as a state of mind.”16 This shift in meaning illustrates that the term “Middle

Ages” became a less strictly defined term over time. As the idea of the term expanded “medieval”

was no longer purely a concept of a historical period defined by the academia but it had also grown

to encompass a feeling or a belief that could be held by anyone.

Simmons notes that the shift from the word medieval indicating a historical period to indi-

cating a belief coincided with the rise of the notion of “the spirit of an age” that would typify an

era.17 In this process, discovering factual evidence about the past became less important than trying

to understand what a historical period must have been like. This shift in perspective proved to be a

15
Lauryn S. Mayer. "Dark Matters and Slippery Words: Grappling with Neomedievalism(s)." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Neomedievalism(s), XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010.
72. Print.
16
Clare A. Simmons. "Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XVII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. 33.
Print.
17
Simmons 32.
 de Tiège
16
fertile soil for authors of the Romantic era, who rode the wave of “a new interest in the indigenous

past not as a source of embarrassment but as part of Britain's heritage.”18 It must be noted that while

Simmons’s article is focused specifically on the history of the word “medievalism” in Britain, this

process applies equally to English-language writing in general. With historical fact lessening in im-

portance in the popular perception of history, authors became freer to explicitly alter historical fact

to suit their needs than ever before. The past could be washed clean of all that was negative in Brit-

ain’s history, leaving only the positive and admirable elements that could then be taken as being

typical of that period. As with Ruskin’s definitions of “Gothic” and “medieval,” this wave of writ-

ing did not revolve around representing history but rather about using it to influence public percep-

tion of that history. What particularly marks this style of writing is an increased mixing of fact and

fiction, and an interest in active recreation. While this is not a new development (propoganda, to

name but one example, has a long history), it is a notable resurgence of interest in fictional recrea-

tions.

An excellent example of this process can be found in John Simons’s discussion of pre-

industrial popular literature. He indicates a process of medievalism at work in Pre-industrial litera-

ture that removes literature from its original authorship and reworks it to fit a new market. 19 That is

to say that stories from the Middle Ages were rewritten in order to fit the tastes of a new contempo-

rary audience while retaining their medieval core. He examines how Richard Johnson uses medieval

genre conventions in a contemporary setting to provide an extra layer on meaning to his romanc-

es.20 The key was, according to Simons, that the “motifs and incidents of chivalric adventure” were

taken from medieval narratives and woven into fresh narratives in a “world defined primarily by

18
Simmons 30.
John Simons. “Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature.” Studies in
19

Medievalism: Medievalism in England II, VII. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995.
17. Print. It should be noted that Simons’s comments are focused on chapbooks, but that they are indicative
of a larger tendency within popular culture.
20
Simons 10-15.
 de Tiège
17
trade and industry.” This process transplanted stories about nobility and gentry into a world more
21

directly relatable to a poor but literate popular audience. Simons frames this in terms of an almost

political struggle, where medievalism is “a process by which literature is stripped of the personal

ownership of authors,” and implicit with them a wealthy and courtly audience, placing the newly

created product “outside of the privileged economy of the more official book trade.”22 What Simons

here defines as typical of the medievalism in Pre-industrial popular literature can be taken as true

for popular medievalism in general, in that it takes up matter which is normally restricted from

common experience (be it through limitations of class in medieval or Pre-industrial eras or through

familiarity in the contemporary era) and makes it accessible to a popular audience.

Simons describes the use of Middle English texts as “signifiers of desire and necessary ex-

perience to which an otherwise deprived group reasonably aspires.”23 In that perspective, medieval-

ism is a deliberate act on the part of an author to influence his or her readers. In more general terms,

the medieval is used here as a manner of shorthand that indicates those images we aspire to while at

the same time ignoring the less desirable aspects of the Middle Ages. This process of using the me-

dieval period as a shorthand is precisely that which Carol L. Robison and Pamela Clemens define as

being the “matter of medievalism,” consisting of “thousands of collectively owned tropes” associat-

ed with concepts that tease our modern curiosity, expressed with “’archaic’ language [that] also in-

corporates values and value systems assumed to be medieval, such as honor, courtly love, religiosi-

ty.”24 The subtle shift is thus made, starting from a perspective on the medieval period as a histori-

cal concept, moving through a conception of it as expression an essential perspective on the world,

to using the medieval as a toolbox from which an author may select building blocks to inform his or

her reader with.

Medievalism, therefore, is an active and reciprocal process by which we both encounter and

21
Simons 11.
22
Simons 17.
23
Simons 17.
24
Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clemens. “Living with Neomedievalism.” Studies in Medievalism: Defining
Medievalism(s) II, XVIII. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. 62. Print.
 de Tiège
18
define the Middle Ages. In medievalist cultural products we encounter aspects of what we perceive

to be the medieval, which are in a metonymical relationship to a model of the Middle Ages. Equally.

medievalism is a process that works to define our contemporary image of the medieval period. In

our encounters with the medievalist in modern culture, we add these perceptions to our model of the

Middle Ages. This is the image of the Middle Ages as a palimpsest, where the medieval becomes a

fuzzy concept that can be added to by contemporary creations that are obviously not medieval but

still medievalist. This, then, is not the Middle Ages established by the historian, but rather the popu-

lar perception of the Middle Ages. In order to examine how contemporary popular culture works to

shape the popular perception of the medieval, the discussion must first turn to how a reader interacts

with his or her history and the possibilities of having an experience that history.

1.3 An Experience of History

The previous section showed how medievalism can be defined as a process or act. There was,

however, still a gap caused by the question of whose act this is. On the one hand, medievalism is an

aspect of cultural production referring to the medieval; on the other hand, medievalism is a process

that occurs in the mind of a reader upon encountering a medievalist text (in the larger, postmodern

sense of the word "text"). Medievalism is an interstitial concept, and as such it can be said to

"occur" in between text and reader. While medievalist ideas may be located in a text, without that

text being read it simply remains a text; similarly, while medievalism is an attribution made by a

reader, this does require an object to which the medieval can be attributed. As a result of this, an

investigation into medievalism is an investigation into how a reader can experience a text, and by

extension history. Thus, while medievalism may often engage with inaccurate representations of

history, its emphasis on the perception of the past rather than its factual representation mitigates the

issue of its historical validity. Medievalism frees readers to investigate the personal experience of

popular culture in order to understand how it shapes our perception of both the medieval and the

modern.
 19de Tiège
In establishing a theory of how readers experience medievalist (fictional) histories, a

valuable source of help can be found in theories of historical experience. The following section

examines the relationship of the past to the present and the concept that the past is not lost to us. By

combining the theories of historical experience by both Frank Ankersmit and Johan Huizinga

together with theories of the bodily experience and the relationship of body to world as established

by Mikhail Bakhtin and Helmuth Plessner, respectively, a theoretical framework is established of

how a reader can have a personal experience of a fictionalised past. The final section of this chapter

examines the usefulness of these theories for neomedievalism, and lays the groundwork for the

foray into the analysis of the fictional worlds of contemporary popular fantasy fiction. Firstly,

however, this section will investigate the idea that the past is available to a reader in the present, by

indulging in a brief digression on the unique function that historical artefacts and monuments serve

in our perspective on the past, leading into an argument on how fantasy fiction may do the same.

Historical artefacts are specifically separated from a general category of items as being

different in some fashion. For example, the Bayeux Tapestry is explicitly marked as being a unique

item rather than simply being identified as just a piece of embroidered cloth. The weight of

history—or more specifically the observer’s awareness of its historical status—marks it as different

and out of place. Ankersmit discussed this sense of history in Sublime Historical Experience,

emphasizing that an experience of history “does not necessarily require a sudden disappearance of

the dimension of time or some mystical union with the past” but that “the past can properly be said

to be present in the artefacts that it has left us.”25 An artefact from the past is not simply an object

but it is the vehicle for a sensation of the past. As such, Ankersmit proposes that we think of history

not in temporal terms but rather in geographical terms. The crucial difference between the two is

that a temporal separation suggest a distance that cannot be overcome, as we cannot physically

return to a time in the past, whereas a geographical separation implies a distance that can be

25
Frank Ankersmit. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.
115. Print.
 de Tiège
20
overcome. Much like going on holiday to a different country, history is thus still distant from the

present, in a sense, but it is also an area to which an observer could potentially travel. In that

metaphor artefacts from the past become “protuberances, so to say, of the past in the present,”

making the presence of history (through its artefacts) no stranger than “a traveller visiting different

countries and then having an experience of a country that is different from his own.”26

Eelco Runia extends this concept to include monuments as well as historical artefacts. He

argues along similar lines as Ankersmit in noting how monuments are unusual objects of our daily

experience, typifying them as being “Fremdkörper (things that are out of place),” as monuments are

objects of the past available to a contemporary observer.27 It is remarkable that he identifies with

this not only those monuments actually from the past (such as historic landmarks or houses) but

also contemporary monuments created to represent the past. Historic monuments, on the one hand,

are survivals of the past reaching forward in time. These are objects made for normal, everyday use

which have now come to be representative of the past. On the other hand, contemporary monuments

are explicitly created in the present to reach backward in time and connect us to the past. Two

crucial differences between Runia’s and Ankersmit’s work, therefore, are the direction and the

degree of intentionality of the historical awareness. For Runia, the “modern, metonymical

monument” does not give “an account of an event” but is “forcefully ‘presenting an absence’ in the

here and now.”28 Their very presence is a statement on the absence of the past in the present, yet

paradoxically bringing out closer to us by presenting it.29 Much like Ankersmit’s argument, it is not

the actuality of historical connection which is important in presenting an absence but rather it is the

attributed sensation of history by the observer that is important for Runia. A modern, metonymical

monument can thus serve as a connection between the past and the present, and juxtaposes the two

26
Ankermit 115.
27
Eelco Runia. “Presence.” History and Theory. 45.1 (Feb., 2006): 17. Print.
28
Runia 17.
29
Runia 17-22.
 de Tiège 21
30
for the contemporary observer. Runia thus opens up the historical experience to include not only

actual history but also later creations meant to engage with that history.

In both Ankersmit’s and Runia’s arguments, the crucial argument revolves around the

experience of history by an observer. Ankersmit only deals with actual historical artefacts in

considering how the past can be experienced in the present, while Runia expands this idea by

focusing specifically on monuments. The difference between the two types of objects is that

monuments are created objects; a monument is either constructed to present or represent an event

after the fact, or an artefact from the past is explicitly declared a monument. Either way, what then

becomes most crucial is the realisation by the observer that he or she is dealing with a historical

object. The creation of a monument thus demonstrates that a historical experience is not prompted

by the physicality of an object but rather by the elements of it that an observer can somehow

recognise as hearkening back to the past. Why then, would this process be limited only to physical

objects? Could this process not happen just as easily with a text as it might with a book? Equally, if

it is more important that an object has some metonymical relation to the past rather than being itself

directly from the past, could a contemporary text not prompt a historical experience as well? These

questions both depend on a deeper, more crucial question: how can it be possible to have an

experience of the medieval despite it being temporally distant?

The answer to that question depends on Ankersmit’s perspective on experience and its

relation to knowledge. Ankersmit refutes the possibility of obtaining objective knowledge of

experience, referring to Thomas Nagel’s thought experiment in which Nagel attempted to describe

what it was like to be a bat. Ankersmit asserts that describing an experience alien to human

experience would require a language independent of either type of experience in order to be truly

objective.31 As a human language would be intimately based on human experience, describing what

it is like to be a bat in that language would only describe what it is like for a human to be a bat and

30
Runia 17.
31
Ankersmit 72-73.
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22
not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. In essence, attempting to describe a bat’s ability to use

echolocation would require describing its hearing in the context of human sight, such as saying that

a bat uses its ears to see. The use of this type of metaphorical language therefore adds an unwanted

hitchhiker in the use of the metaphor’s vehicle. Experience is by definition a subjective event (it is

always a subject that experiences something else) and putting an experience into language involves

an act of translation. As a result, describing the experience of a bat in English would involve

translating—and thereby changing—the experience.

Ankersmit takes the position that “language is where experience is not, and experience is

where language is not.”32 To claim otherwise, stating that language and experience are intertwined,

would result in denying the possibility of experience in animals, infants, or anyone and anything

else without the ability to use language—such an extreme position would be very difficult to

defend. Ankersmit therefore argues that “experience will necessarily precede language (and

concept).”33 While this may seem innocuous in barring our attempts to describe the life of a bat, it

also has consequences for attempting to objectively describe an experience of the past. According to

this view, the quest for greater objectivity in historical research has ironically resulted in a discipline

which only moves further away from an understanding of a historical past.34 Experience is an

essentially subjective concept, and because an objective approach necessarily cuts out the subject it

misses the point entirely. Ankersmit therefore invites anyone interested in history to think about

personal and direct connections to history, and making use of our subjective experiences rather than

rejecting them in favour of objectivism.

Because experience intervenes between the world itself and subjective knowledge of that

world, an intimate relationship exists between experience, representation, interpretation, and

meaning. Ankersmit argues that meanings “come into being only when we experience the world—

or a text—and then go on to represent the world, or the text, as is suggested by our experience of

32
Ankersmit 79.
33
Ankersmit 73.
34
Ankersmit 72.
 de Tiège
23
it.” What this implies is that meaning can only be created through an interaction between a subject
35

and an object (rather than a meaning being somehow implicit in an object). Ankersmit sketches out

a number of distinct steps in that process, starting with “first, the text we read; second; the

experience of reading; and, third, the representation giving an account of how the historian has read

(experienced the text) and, hence, of what the historian takes to be the text's meaning.”36 This

means that experience does not include interpretation (or, for that matter, vice versa), but that

experience enables interpretation. In other words, experience is the process that enables us to move

from text to meaning; it is the necessary starting point from which a reader can proceed to

knowledge.

The notion of experience as a crucial step on the way to interpretation fruitfully combines

with an interest in the medievalist experience. It establishes how a move from fictional depictions

of the medieval to a model of the Middle Ages is possible. Ankersmit described the process in a

playful metaphor, where “historical experience pulls the faces of past and present together in a short

but ecstatic kiss. Historical experience is, in this way, a 'surface' phenomenon.” 37 What Ankersmit

means by the concept of a surface phenomenon is that the historical experience “takes place on the

surface or interface where the historian and the past meet each other;” 38 by which he means that

historical artefacts are a gateway to the past, they are the contact surface for the contemporary

historian to touch the past. This is in stark contrast to constructivism, which requires an objective

distancing of the historian from the past; Ankersmit, rather, emphasizes and the proximity of the

past to the present and lauds the historian who seeks contact. This difference in epistemology

between Ankersmit’s perspective and traditional constructivism is underlined by a change in the

metaphors used to talk about the past. Whereas understanding is commonly expressed in terms of

vision (such as “seeing the point,” providing “new perspectives,” or “being blind to new ideas”)

35
Ankersmit 96.
36
Ankersmit 96. It is important note here that Ankersmit follows this up by saying that the third phase is "a
representation of the text that was read and not of the experience of reading."
37
Ankersmit 121.
38
Ankersmit 121.
 24 de Tiège
historical experience is expressed by Ankersmit in metaphors of touch. He recalls Aristotle's

account of experience, where “there is a continuity between subject and object that all of the

epistemological tradition since Descartes has always wanted to deny.” 39 Ankersmit's opinion is that

this means of obtaining knowledge provides “a source of truth and authenticity that will never have

its equal in a historical writing carefully respecting the restriction of constructivism,”40 and while

this is a bold claim indeed it must be admitted that the historical experience provides knowledge

which is at least as valid as that produced within constructivist restrictions.

The shape that historical experience takes is eloquently described by Johan Huizinga, whom

Ankersmit credits as being both one of his inspirations and the author of the “best account of

historical experience,”41 which Huizinga termed historical sensation.42 Similar to the definition of

medievalism taken up in this thesis, Huizinga locates the historical sensation between a reader and a

text. While Huizinga specifically writes about history books rather than fiction in general, there is

no reason to limit his argument to only that type of writing. Huizinga attributes the historical

sensation to an act by the reader and, as such, to suggest that this sensation is only possible with

history books would imply some manner of magical properties to these. Therefore, it must be

concluded that a reader might have a historical sensation from any type of writing, as the very same

process might occur in that reader whether or not a text was actually from the past. In Huizinga’s

definition, meaning is not something that an author puts into a text using words, as it “lies behind

and not in the history book,” but rather it is the reader's act “in approach of the author: it is their

response to the author's call.”43

What Huizinga means by meaning lying behind the history book is that meaning is

39
Ankersmit 121.
40
Ankersmit 124.
41
Ankersmit 119.
42
An interesting aspect of the historical sensation, noted by Ankersmit, is that it is not a specific object,
however, and should not be related to the "doings or thoughts of individual human beings" (Ankersmit 121).
In the following section, however, it will be described how, through the theories of Bakhtin and Plessner, the
process can nonetheless occur on an individual level.
43
Johan Huizinga. De Taak der Cultuurgeschiedenis. Edited by W.E. Krul. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij,
1995. 110. Print. All the quotes from Huizinga here are translated from the Dutch by me.
 de Tiège 25
something that starts from the text but is not located within that text; rather, it is an act by the reader

to bridge a gap left by the text and its origin. Thus, while a historical experience is not the author's

doing, it is still evoked by him or her; similarly, while the historical sensation is an act by the

reader, it is impossible to achieve without it being prompted by an author. The model that is implied

in Huizinga’s work (and by extension Ankersmit) is that of a communication between reader and

object, wherein historical experience is a discourse created by the two. This interaction between

reader and text is underscored by Huizinga when he describes the “not entirely traceable contact

with the past” (that is to say, his historical sensation) as “equal to entering into a realm [. . .] moving

outside of oneself.”44 The past is something to be touched in this perspective, and here Huizinga

frames it most explicitly as a movement. The reader of a text must enter into a realm, though the

specific shape, origin, and qualities of that realm are left open. Here we see again the metaphorical

model of time as geography, making temporal distance something that can be crossed. This will

resurface later in the discussion of Bakhtin on the idea of experiencing time as stepping outside of

oneself and entering a place outside of the present.

The origin of Ankersmit's assertion that there is nothing mystical about the historical

experience finds its roots in Huizinga's description of the historical sensation. While Huizinga may

describe it as a different realm that we reach by moving outside of ourselves, he stresses that it is

not a “re-living.”45 When Huizinga or Ankersmit discuss a sense of moving outside of oneself,

neither mean an actual movement, whether physical or spiritual. The concept of movement is used

as a metaphor to indicate a sense of understanding which is not quite fully intellectual but at least in

part also experiential. Huizinga compared it to “an understanding that is closely related to the

understanding of music, or rather understanding the world through music.”46 The difference again is

one of perspective: the metaphor of music emphasises contact, as music enters the ears and brings

44
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110. Ankersmit translated this concept ("een van de vele vormen van buiten
zich zelf treden") as "ekstasis" (Ankersmit 120). While "ekstasis" can be taken to mean "beside/outside of
oneself," in my opinion its connotations make it an unsuitable translation for the concept.
45
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110.
46
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110.
 26de Tiège
itself close to its listeners, as compared to the distance implied by a metaphor involving sight.47

Huizinga makes an interesting remark in that this type of sensation is close to understanding the

world through a piece of music, rather than understanding the music itself. Music becomes the

carrier of meaning—a representation of the world that we can experience, and through that

experience construct knowledge of the world that it originated from. Merely understanding the

music itself would only provide half of the picture; to obtain complete knowledge of this type of

understanding, the subjective experience of music must be included.

Despite the fact that Huizinga indicates that the historical experience can be evoked by the

simplest of objects,48 historical experiences are not readily available to readers at the drop of a hat.

They are subject to a historical inertia, together with a tendency to be locked into the present.

Ankersmit terms this inertia a “thick crust of interpretation,” a weight of history that presses on

artefacts and prevents them from triggering historical experiences.49 The intellectual aspect of a

subjective experiencer prevents the experiential from taking over and allowing us direct contact;

rather, a subject interacts with the theoretical models of history that he or she is aware of. This is

why ordinary objects are more likely to evoke historical experiences than great works of art, as the

latter are covered by the weight of interpretation that functions as a wall between their perceivers

and the past. Ordinary objects (that is to say, artefacts not taken up under the banner of “high

culture”) come with less interpretation attached, and are thus easier to “decontextualize,” in the

words of Ankersmit.50 The task of the reader wishing to have a historical experience is to resist the

interpretation and view the artefact as is. While both Ankersmit and Huizinga describe mainly the

problems that pre-interpreted art pose for the historical experience, they do not engage with the

question of how a reader can overcome such interpretation and decontextualise art in order to have a

47
While, strictly speaking, sight also functions by means of light entering the eye, the object is constructed
away from us in the visual field. Music, on the other hand, surrounds us acoustically, and thus can be
experienced as being much closer to us.
48
Huizinga, Cultuurgeschiedenis 110; Ankersmit 125.
49
Ankersmit 126-127.
50
Ankersmit 126.
 de Tiège
27
historical experience. The solution to that problem comes from a surprising field, to which Huizinga

has also applied his pen: the study of play.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga described play (incorporating, for Huizinga, such diverse forms

of play as playfulness, games, jesting and other such categories) as being an aspect crucial to yet

separate from culture. Common to the theories of historical experience so far is the conception of an

alternate world to which the reader of a text may move, so as to gain an experience. This is no less

true for Huizinga’s conception of play which, according to him, constructs an alternate world that is

unique and orderly, though fragile. Rules determine the shape and boundaries of a unique world of

play, and in the violation of these the playful alternate world would instantly disappear, returning

the players to normal reality.51 Conversely, the rules of normal life have neither hold nor place in

the world of play,52 as play is separate from the normal order of things and belongs within its own

boundaries of time and place. A prime example of this can be found in children playing pretend.

Within the game, there is no question whether or not monsters, heroes, or spaceships could exist,

but they are accepted as a natural part of an alternate reality. As soon as reality intrudes (for instance

in a parent’s call to dinner) the alternate world, having served its purpose, ceases to be. In

Huizinga's words, play “has its course and its meaning to itself.”53 The same argument provided for

historical experience applies in the case of the worlds of play: these are, of course, no mystical

realms but conceptual spaces outside of the normal reckoning of everyday life. In order to establish

that these ahistorical realms are of the type suggested by the historical experience (that place where

a reader moves to, in the sense of being beside ourselves that Huizinga suggested), the relationship

between play and culture that Huizinga indicated will be examined. This will provide a ground from

which an analysis of the influence of play on the historical experience can proceed.

51
Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der Cultuur. Haarlem: H.D.
Tjeenk Willink & Zoon N.V., 1940. 17. Print.
52
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 19.
53
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 14.
 de Tiège 28
54
Huizinga considers play to be separate from but related to culture, as play is its central

testing ground. Firstly, he argues that play is indicative of cultural perspectives, as “the community

expresses her interpretation of life and the world”55 in games. Games and play are, in this sense,

models of reality. These models highlight aspects of culture, and the ways in which they interact in

the alternate world can be indicative of their relationship in the real world. Play is not, however, a

response to culture; in fact, for Huizinga, play is “the primary, objectively observable, concretely

determined fact, while culture is only the qualification that connects our historical judgement to a

given case.”56 With this Huizinga asserts that the world of play is our primary, unimpeded

experience of reality, and that culture is therefore the abstraction of play. This is supported by his

statement that “culture arises in the form of play—which is to say that it is initially played.”57 This

clarifies the relationship of play to historical experience, forming an analogue to Ankersmit's

assertion that great works of art are obscured by layers of interpretation. Indeed, it can be seen that

in Huizinga's view culture forms the layer that obscures the influence of play on life. In that sense,

the return to a state of play mirrors the return to a direct experience of a representation of the past.

In order to examine how this move is possible, attention must now be given to the works of Mikhail

Bakhtin and his conception of the carnivalesque.

1.4 The Bodily Experience of Understanding

The idea of timelessness being connected to laughter and playfulness was established by Mikhail

Bakhtin in his work on François Rabelais and carnivalesque laughter.58 Much like how the historical

experience existing between a reader and a text, Bakhtin conceptualises carnival as existing in the

54
While English translations of Homo Ludens frequently render the title as "A Study of the Play-Element in
Culture" (for example: Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Trans. Kegan
Paul. London: Routledge, 1980) the Dutch title reads "Proeve Eener Bepaling van het Spel-Element der
Cultuur," suggesting it is an element of, not an element in.
55
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
56
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
57
Huizinga, Homo Ludens 68
58
Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Print.
 de Tiège 29
interstitial space between art and life. Specifically, he states that the “basic carnival nucleus of this

[folk] culture [. . .] does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art” but rather to “the

borderline between art and life.”59 Much like Huizinga’s ideas on play, Bakhtin defines carnival as

being “life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play.”60 Bakhtin as well, therefore,

defines playfulness (in his idea of the carnivalesque) as being a true expression of life, and a core

element of the human experience. For Bakhtin, the ahistorical realm of play (which he terms the

second life of the people61) is a universal experience that encompasses all individuals, and is deeply

positive in nature.62 Bakhtin goes as far as saying that carnival is “the utopian realm of community,

freedom, equality, and abundance.”63

This has resulted in Bakhtin being criticised for his ahistorical perspective. Because he was

interested in describing the culture of the Middle Ages as a whole yet placed carnival in an

ahistorical position, he is accused of “re-instating one particular historical form of laughter as

laughter's anthropological and timeless essence.”64 While Bakhtin might be said to fail at providing

an accurate description of laughter in the medieval period, the function his carnivalesque laughter

plays in transporting people to an alternate world of play still stands strong as a point of reference.

In fact, the ahistorical aspect of the carnivalesque play and its association with an alternate world

forms the central focus of the following investigation. Bakhtin’s theory is here not used as a theory

of history or as an account of some medieval reality, but rather as a perspective on history or a

means of engaging with the past. As such, the question of its factual accuracy falls by the wayside.

It is the imaginative power of his vision that informs the investigating into the relationship between

playfulness and history.

In Bakhtin’s perspective, time in and of itself has little meaning. It is only through its

59
Bakhtin, 7
60
Bakhtin 7.
61
Bakhtin 9.
62
Bakhtin 19.
63
Bakhtin 9.
64
Manfred Pfister. Introduction. A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and
Beyond. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). vi. Print.
 de Tiège
30
interaction with culture that time is given shape and becomes a relevant concept to an individual’s

experience. For instance, he suggests that at the “primitive level of development” in culture, time

was viewed as a cyclical process, as it was connected to cycles of natural and biological life. 65

However, as time progressed various historical and social phenomena inserted themselves into the

concept of cyclical time until finally, during the Renaissance, the idea of cyclical time gave way to

(as Bakhtin phrases it) “a mighty awareness of history and historic change.”66 Bakhtin himself was

acutely aware of historic change, as Ken Hirschkop eloquently describes:

He [Bakhtin] saw the passage of time as a mountainside down which flowed, with an
initially erratic and faltering momentum, an ever deepening ever more forceful
current of historical ‘becoming’, which, by the time it struck bottom, had become a
torrent sweeping all before it. History was the focus of his writing not in the sense of
a discipline or a field of problems and concerns, but as the great achievement of
modern European culture, to be protected and cherished by critical and philosophical
thought.67

History, in this perspective, is time given meaning by culture, and is thus something with which

culture can actively and consciously interact. Bakhtin’s role in this interaction demonstrates a

medievalist perspective. He would not have considered himself a medievalist nor would he, given

the time of his writing, be able to fruitfully interact with what is considered medievalism today.

Nevertheless, Bakhtin strongly emphasizes the negative aspects of modernity, 68 stating that

medieval, festive laughter “expresses the point of view of the whole world,” while “the pure satire

of the modern times” causes laughter in which “the wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is

destroyed.”69 Thus, Bakhtin originates the true essence of laughter in the Middle Ages, which

demonstrated a wholeness of comic aspect lacking from his contemporary culture. As such, he

demonstrates a sense of longing and nostalgia together with a wish for a return to an idealised

65
Bakhtin, 25.
66
Bakhtin, 25.
67
Ken Hirschkop, “Mikhail Bakhtin: Historical Becoming in Language, Literature and Culture.” In The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical, and Psychological
Perspectives. Vol 9. Edited by Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. 145. Print.
68
Dominick LaCapra. “Carnival and Carnivalisation.” In Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin. Edited by Caryl
Emerson. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999. 243. Print.
69
Bakhtin 12.
 de Tiège 31
vision of the Middle Ages.

For Bakhtin, then, there are two distinct ideas of time. Firstly, there is the cumulative time,

which is the time that bears down on us from the past and carries with it historical weight; secondly,

there is the ahistorical Carnival, a timeless moment of play that has its prime (and even original)

expression in the medieval period. Much like Huizinga, Bakhtin gives play a place of central

importance to the concept of culture. However, Bakhtin not only identifies Carnival as an abstract

concept of timeless play but also proposes the carnivalesque as its direct expression in culture.

Much like Runia’s and Ankersmit’s past as a protuberance into the present, an instance of the

carnivalesque is a direct expression of Carnival as a whole, and thus stands in a metonymical

relationship to it.70 Just as the carnivalesque is a localised expression of Carnival as a whole, so is

laughter a direct experience of the carnivalesque in writing. Laughter thus becomes similar to

Runia’s fremdkörper or Ankersmit’s traveller to a foreign land, being something that is not the past

itself but which can still provoke an experience of a past. Thus, in order to fully understand how the

concept of play may be vital to an experience of history, the experience of laughter and its

relationship to this process must be examined.

Helmuth Plessner provides an excellent description of the subjective experience of laughter

in his book Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. His analysis of the

experience of laughter centres around the concept of the eccentric position. The eccentric position is

the term that Plessner gives to the specific relation that human beings have to their world,71 which

he typified as “a relation of himself to himself [sich . . . sich] (or, to put it precisely, of him to

himself).”72 The returning issue for Plessner is that human beings have bodies that can be

consciously controlled, but at the same time these bodies are physically included in a larger world

70
Bakhtin 149.
71
Helmuth Plessner. Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. Trans. James Spencer
Churchill and Marjorie Grene. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 36. Print.
72
Plessner 35. The comment in square brackets is from the source.
 de Tiège32
that is mostly out of an individual’s control. 73
The key relationship here is similar to Ankersmit's

mention of Aristotle, in that Plessner argues for a continuity between person, body, and world.

Plessner describes this relation by stating that “here I am separated from the 'outer' world, not by an

immediate layer, which I, as a separate entity, live through and 'comprehend' from within, but as

myself a piece of the external world, somewhere in a room or on the street.” 74 Recurring in his

argument is a tension between separation (humans as intellectual entities locked away in a Cartesian

ivory tower from the physical world) and connection (humans as physical entities inseparably

entrenched in the physical world). His solution to the problem is to reject Cartesian dualism, and to

adopt a position of triadism, where “man's existence in the world is determined by the relation to his

body, that the understanding of human nature is bound to the possibility of expression as a unity of

intellectual, affective, and physical components.”75

In this relationship between person and body, where the person usually controls the body,

both laughing and crying are unique exceptions that alter the relationship momentarily. Of laughing

and crying (though hereafter the focus will be on laughter) Plessner states that in order to

understand these, they must be kept “free from the usual separations into sharply contrasted regions

of physical and psychological objectivity,” as these concern a “matter of human affairs, which take

place in the domain of the human experience of life, of the behaviour of man to man and of man to

world.”76 As a result, this requires that we “proceed from man as a whole, and not some particular

aspect which can be detached from the whole in quasi-independent fashion, like body, soul, mind,

or social unit.”77 This is important to emphasise because in laughter we see the interaction of the

intellectual with the physical. To begin with, laughter requires the intellectual, as it is a response to

the world around the individual78 yet equally laughter is the loss of control, as the physical body

73
Plessner 36-37.
74
Plessner 35-36.
75
Plessner 17.
76
Plessner 16.
77
Plessner 21.
78
Plessner 24-25.
 de Tiège 33
overrules the intellectual mind. Thus, laughter, as the subject’s direct experience of play, forms the
79

link between the intellectual observation of the world and the physical experience of it. It is the

process by which a reader can encounter an artefact and forgo that crust of interpretation that

Ankersmit pointed out in order to experience it in the context of the relation of person to world.

For in what Plessner identifies as “true laughter,' an expression of the person in relation to

an event in the world is encountered.80 As Bakhtin and Huizinga’s theories connected time and

timelessness to play and laughter, so does Plessner’s theory connect play to a realm outside of the

normal order of things, one which is defined by imagination and the escape from reality. 81 The

relationship of person to body, however, he defines as being inextricably linked to the history from

which both spring, as “'man' is not a being who understands himself in the same way among all

peoples and all times; he is historically bound precisely in his original, everyday understanding.”82

For Plessner, language is strongly bound to its originating time, yet the meaning of words can only

be revealed in “living social understanding,” which means that “the analysis of all human

experience remains, despite its historical stamp, directed to 'everyday experience.” 83 Therefore, a

body, its relation to an individual, and its connection to the world exhibit a connection that is

timeless and unique, while an individual’s understanding of those relationships can be highly

culturally specific. Thus by exploring the relationship of person to body to world, the perspective on

time of an individual’s culture can be explored; equally, in the act of laughing, by upending the

relationship between person and body, the relationship between humanity's historically bounded

experience and our intellectual relationship to it must also inevitably be altered.

Plessner’s ideas on laughter demonstrate what Plessner termed humanity’s eccentric

position. Humankind, he suggests, is unique among all animals by being able to step out of itself in

79
Plessner 23, 33.
80
Plessner 24-25.
81
Plessner 76-80.
82
Plessner 18.
83
Plessner 18-19.
 de Tiège
34
84
this manner. Human beings can become ecstatic, both in the sense of being overjoyed as well as in

the sense of problematizing the relationship of individual to body to world by inversing these

relationships. Thus, because of the relationship between laughter, play, history, and the historical

experience, popular humorous literature should be a catalyst of historical experience of exceptional

strength. Our historically bound language works to emphasise both historical distance and

connection. The language a reader encounters functions, in Plessner's words, as “products of

history, deposits of dead religions and metaphysical systems”85 as a reader will read it in his or her

modern understanding of the individual words. During the reading process, a reader enters into a

realm of play that offers a chance at a connection, as suggested by Huizinga, Bakhtin, and Plessner,.

As Plessner's laughter upsets a reader’s normal experience of time he or she shifts to Bakhtin's

ahistorical carnivalesque world, where they can take advantage of the connection between play and

culture that Huizinga established.

This is then the analogue to the historical experience that I term the fantastical experience. It

is located on the meeting place of the intellectual, affective, and physical dimensions of a reader. It

is a historical experience resulting from a conscious approach to the past, and is specifically

designed to evoke a playful attitude in its readers. The fantastical experience unseats readers, and

attempts to remove the weight of interpretation that blocks a direct experience of a text. The playful

and creative approaches taken by a text to its subject material attempt to free up a reader and place

him or her in an ahistorical world. The fantastical experience is therefore a type of historical

experience, and it can be considered a specific means of approaching it. It is specifically an

experience that is provoked not by reasoned argument or a factual discussion of historically

authentic material, but rather one provoked by texts designed to engage the playful nature of its

readers.

Thus, a string of metonymical relationships is uncovered that will link contemporary fantasy

84
Plessner 37-38.
85
Plessner 18-19.
 de Tiège
35
back to the medieval period. Firstly, laughter is taken to be an expression of a carnivalesque aspect

of writing; in turn, the carnivalesque is part of a larger tradition of Carnival, springing from the me-

dieval period. The aspect of Carnival is connected to a timeless representation of the world of play,

and the experience of playfulness in writing is a means of connecting to that world of Carnival.

Thus, the experience of a carnivalesque playfulness in writing is a means of establishing a historical

experience, even though the product causing that experience may have no direct relation to history.

This conception of an experience of a fictional past interacts fruitfully with a subfield of medieval-

ism, named neomedievalism. That field as well is interested in establishing the relationship between

reader and fictional history, as well as fictional history to actual history. In order to further explore

this issue, the following section will provide some background to the field.

1.5 Neomedievalism: Creating the Medieval

The conception of neomedievalism, much like that of medievalism, can be traced back to the early

seventies. Discussions of neomedievalism frequently begin by citing Umberto Eco, who coined the

term neomedievalism in 1973.86 The precise distinction between medievalism and neomedievalism

is not made clear by Eco, however, who defined neomedievalism “in such a way [. . .] as to make it

difficult to distinguish from Leslie Workman's definition.”87 The difficulties in establishing a

specific origin to both medievalism as well as neomedievalism might stand testament to the interest

in absent origins that both disciplines share. Much like their object of interest, the origins of

(neo)medievalism appear to be plural: Domenico Pietropaolo argues that it was unclear whether

Eco was familiar with the conferences hosted by the Studies in Medievalism, though if he was he

certainly never referenced them.88 While the seeds of neomedievalism may have been sown in the

seventies, it was in the nineties that they bore fruit. The relationship between the two appears to be a

86
Carol. L. Robinson. "Definitions." Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organisation. Accessed 26 October
2011. Web.
87
Amy S. Kaufman. "Medieval Unmoored." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Neomedievalism(s), XIX.
Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 9.n2. Print.
88
Domenico Pietropaolo. "Eco on Medievalism." Studies in Medievalism: Medievalism in Europe, V. Edited
by leslie J. Workman. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. 128-129. Print.
 36 de Tiège
subordinate one, particularly when described by Kaufman who suggested that neomedievalism

“despite its seeming ahistoricity, is historically contingent upon both medievalism itself and the

postmodern condition.”89 Neomedievalism may thus be viewed as a specific type of medievalism,

rising to power in the contemporary period.

The specific relationship between medievalism and neomedievalism is currently a hotly

contested topic of debate.90 While an in-depth discussion of this topic is unfortunately beyond the

scope of this current thesis, it is nevertheless important to differentiate between the two. Therefore,

focus will now be given to listing a few aspects that typify neomedievalism in order to position this

work within the field. While any definition of neomedievalism will inevitably contrast itself against

medievalism, whether implicitly or explicitly, this section will construct a conception of

neomedievalism based on its own particularities; it will construct a neomedievalism interested in

the imaginative creation of the medieval, exhibiting a preference for fantastical visions, and having

a tendency towards the playful.. While some theorists will define neomedievalism as intrinsically

linked to modern electronics and technology,91 this thesis will fall in with the position of M.J.

Toswell in asserting that literature can also exemplify the core features of neomedievalism. 92

Though modern technological advances may serve to highlight neomedievalist processes that are

already at work in culture, the neomedievalist tendency of contemporary culture can be found

before the advent of the massively multiplayer online role playing games and other computer-based

role-playing games that form the majority of the corpus of these technologically-minded theorists.

Therefore, rather than defining neomedievalism by its outward forms of expression, the focus of

89
Kaufman 2.
90
Useful resources on this discussion are volumes XVII-XX of Studies in Medievalism, which deal heavily
with definitions of medievalism and neomedievalism.
91
For example: Cory Lowell Grewell. "Neomedievalism: An Eleventh Little Middle Ages." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 34-43.
Print; Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly. "Neomedievalism, Hyperrealism, and Simulation." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 12-24.
Print.
92
Toswell, M.J. "The Simulacrum of Neomedievalism." Studies in Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s),
XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 44-46. Print.
 de Tiège 37
this analysis will be placed on the stance neomedievalism takes towards the medieval.

As noted at the start of this chapter, medievalism focuses on the absence of the Middle Ages

and displays an interest in how to (re)connect with them. Neomedievalism, on the other hand, takes

up a creative approach to connecting with the medieval period. It whole-heartedly takes up the

postmodern lesson that it is impossible to ever know historical “truth” and accepts that “error is

simultaneously impossible and inevitable” in representing the past, so neomedievalism chooses to

actively recreate it.93 Thus, the neomedieval work flaunts its ahistorical status, forgoing any attempt

at authenticity or historical accuracy. Robinson and Clemens contrasts neomedievalism with

medievalism, concluding that the neomedieval perspective involves “restricting medievalism to

historical consciousness by default.”94 A secondary result of this shift in perspective is that the

neomedieval work should no longer be judged according to its accuracy at representing historical

knowledge of the Middle Ages. Gentry and Müller propose that, rather, the neomedieval work

“must be judged according to its own historical context and its own quality,” and while it is

tempting to investigate its relationship to medieval sources, this should not be the focus of

analysis.95 The neomedieval should thus be seen as a conduit to the medieval, and while it connects

to and informs our opinion of that period, it is nevertheless still located firmly within the modern.

The curiously ambiguous temporal position of neomedievalism is thus not to be found

within a cultural object itself, but rather in the direction of its attention. Lesley Coote frames this

concern in the context of a modern/postmodern juxtaposition, in that neomedievalism at once

“embraces both the postmodern emphasis on epistemology, and the possibility of some form of

'reality' that exists behind the construct.”96 Furthermore, Kaufman identifies neomedievalism as

inherently exhibiting a paradoxical tension, described as an “intensified combination of love and

93
Kaufman 4.
94
Robinson and Clemens 65.
95
Francis G. Gentry and Ulrich Müller. "The Reception of the Middle Ages in Germany: An Overview."
Studies in Medievalism: German Medievalism, III.iii-iv. Edited by Leslie J. Workman, Jane Chance, and
Francis G. Gentry. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998.
96
Lesley Coote. "A Short Essay about Neomedievalism." Studies in Medievalism: Defining
Neomedievalism(s), XIX. Edited by Karl Fugelso. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 26. Print.
 de Tiège
38
loathing, its desire for the past torn asunder between the denial of history and a longing for

return.”97 With the creative and fantastical interest of neomedievalism the paradox loses its strength

and becomes easily solved. As Kaufman notes, “neomedievalism finds a way of clinging to the past

by rejecting the 'history,’ the alterity, the time and space that separated it from its desired object and

bringing it into the present.”98 With the rejection of historical authenticity, the neomedieval author is

free to take up history, and fold, spindle, or mutilate it in order to bring it closer to a contemporary

audience.

Similar to Simons’s description of medievalism using Middle English texts as signifiers of

desire, so too does neomedievalism employ distortion of the medieval period in order to affect its

readers. The neomedieval makes the Middle Ages into a commercial item, “assimilating and

consuming it,” in the words of Kaufman.99 Brent and Kevin Moberly, despite their emphasis on the

electronic neomedieval, hit the nail on the head when pointing out the effect of simulating the

medieval in videogames. By producing “a version of the medieval that is more medieval than the

medieval” we encounter “a version of the medieval that can be seen and touched, bought and sold,

and therefore owned.100 In the framework of the “more than medieval,” neomedievalism thus puts a

piece of the Middle Ages into the hands of contemporary consumers, bringing it closer to them.

With the historical Middle Ages lost to contemporary audiences, it can be seen how these

contemporary creations of the medieval period can serve like one of Ankersmit’s protuberances of

the past into the present. Similar to the modern metonymical monuments that Runia discussed,

neomedieval cultural creations are modern creations referring to a past—the crucial difference

being that the neomedieval refers to a past that never was. Thus, the neomedieval can serve to

satisfy a reader’s longing for a past lost to the contemporary observer by offering him or her the

next best thing: an object that can be perceived as medieval.

97
Kaufman 2.
98
Kaufman 3.
99
Kaufman 5.
100
Moberly and Moberly 15.
 de Tiège
39
The neomedieval artefact is thus not an encounter with the medieval itself or, as we might

say of medievalism, an encounter with something of the medieval (that is to say, a contemporary

reception of authentic source material). The neomedieval brings the contemporary observer a

reception of the Middle Ages through an intermediary, a reception of a reception, a type of self-

reflexivity typical of the postmodern origins of neomedievalism.101 What is fascinating about the

process, reminiscent of Baudrillard's simulacra, is the way in which the neomedieval (or perhaps

more appropriate to the argument: the new medieval) has come to replace the actual medieval. By

providing a means of contact with the medieval, the neomedieval becomes a source of knowledge

about the medieval that supplants historical knowledge.102 As a contemporary phenomenon that

rewrites the history on which it is dependant, the neomedieval thus invents a Middle Ages “that will

in turn author itself” resulting in a “New Medievalism [that] cannot point towards how this move

takes places and is thus completely unaware of how agency has been elided with knowledge.” 103 It

becomes an intermediary that takes the place of that which it points to, effectively bringing the past

into the present by, paradoxically, erasing it.

The identification of neomedievalism as being a postmodern phenomenon, and particularly

its interest in self-reflexivity, brings in additional questions surrounding authorship. Robinson and

Clemens, for instance, argue that texts should demonstrate a conscious self-reflexivity in order to be

considered neomedieval. They claim that “it is assumed that the reader, viewer, or player knows that

the 'medieval' world of the work is a construct, and a not necessarily accurate construct at that.”104

This is not as easy as it seems, however. For instance, Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead asserts

in its introduction that it is based on fact, and the discovery that this is not so can come only upon

recognition that the sources quoted in the book are non-existent.105 The assumption that the reader is

aware of the constructed inaccuracy is a large one, and also not necessary for a text to be

101
Kaufman 4; Robinson and Clemens 63; Grewell 40.
102
Glejzer 109.
103
Glejzer 109.
104
Robinson and Clemens, 63.
105
Michael Crichton. Introduction. Eaters of the Dead. London: Arrow Books, 1997. 1-9. Print.
 de Tiège
40
neomedieval. The importance of perception for the process is argued quite elegantly by Nils Holger

Peterson. He suggests that while the concept of the perceived medieval brings with it other

problems, such as “challenges of determining how the past has been seen across vast historical

distances and different degrees of historical consciousness than our own,” perception is nevertheless

the determining factor as “regardless of the intentions or consciousness behind a particular practice

or artefact, it will form part of a general reception in which it may play a part as an element in the

construction or the recreation of the Middle Ages.”106 That is to say that a reader plays at least as

large a role in the assertion of an artefact’s neomedieval status as an author does, if not a larger role.

A second characteristic shared by postmodern and neomedievalist perspectives on

contemporary culture is a sense of playfulness. Coote, for instance, remarks that neomedieval

artefacts are “particularly well suited to satire.”107 Robinson and Clemens as well note that the

“elaborate artifice, its self-conscious remaking of a new 'medieval world'” of neomedievalism

allows for “different, sometimes opposite, ideologies to play.”108 The interplay of opposite

ideologies in a single construction is similar to Bakhtin’s description of the carnivalesque space,

where opposing hierarchies and power structures can playfully interact with each other, allowing for

a re-evaluation by (and of) all parties involved. Equally, this perspective is to be found in

Huizinga’s connection between play and culture, where culture is expressed in terms of play. It is in

particular the playful aspect of rewriting and thereby fictionalising various historical periods that

enables neomedievalist writing to critically engage with not only history itself but also historical

writing.

Thus the Middle Ages no longer function as a historical category, but rather they become a

field of knowledge or a collection of ideas. Emery notes that “'neomedievalism' has already gained

cultural currency as a way of describing visions of the Middle Ages driven more by fantasy than by

106
Nils Holger Peterson. "Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question." Studies in
Medievalism: Defining Medievalism(s), XVII. Edited by Karl Fulgeos. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009. 40-
42. Print.
107
Coote 26.
108
Robinson and Clemens 64.
 de Tiège 41
historical reality.” 109
The effect of neomedievalism on the idea of the Middle Ages can be seen by

the way in which “for most Western European audiences the term 'Middle Ages' refers less to

specific historical reality than to a received set of historical and literary figures, events, places,

practices, and monuments.”110 While the replacement of the Middle Ages with a contemporary

fantasy about that time might cause medievalists despair, there is no serious harm here, however, as

this concerns purely the popular perception of the medieval period. In fact, in sparking the popular

interest in the period (fictionalised or not), neomedievalism only serves to increase the general

interest in the Middle Ages. Glejzer notes that in this way, “we can begin to see the Middle Ages as

not only an object of knowledge but as a cause of knowledge: in 'knowing' the Middle Ages we are

further propelled to know more.”111

In the use of the Middle Ages as a context, the purpose of bringing the Middle Ages to the

contemporary world can be seen. The medieval period can function as a lens through which a

contemporary audience can examine its own time.112 This is what Grewell notes as “one of its

[neomedievalism's] strikingly definitive facets and one worthy of scholarly exploration.”113 He

outlines such concerns as “multi-culturalism and contemporary socio-political issues (such as

gender and race)” mixing with “quasi-medieval fantasy universes characterized by the struggle

between good and evil” as the way in which neomedievalism engages with contemporary culture.114

For Grewell, neomedievalism is a response to postmodern relativity, offering a clear-cut vision of

good versus evil.115 Utz takes this perspective to a meta level, suggesting that neomedievalism can

also function as a response to modern scholarship and the way in which it strictly separates the

modern from the medieval.116 This is akin to Ankersmit's notion of the historical experience as a

109
Emery 84.
110
Emery 80.
111
Glejzer 111.
112
Grewell 39; Simons 5; Robinson and Clemens 61.
113
Grewell 40.
114
Grewell 40.
115
Grewell 38.
116
Utz 36.
 de Tiège 42
response to constructivist histories and the demands of objectivist scholarship. In this case, it is the

text directly which bridges the gap, as the past is brought to bear on the present. To bring back

Plessner's comment on language, a contemporary author will inevitable leave his or her modern

fingerprint on any image of the medieval he or she wishes to construct, making a neomedieval text

at once a connection to the past, as well as a comment on both historical and contemporary culture.

In order to bring these theories into focus, the following chapter will investigate a specific

genre that is commonly associated with neomedievalism, namely fantasy fiction. If neomedievalism

is to be considered the academic approach of the fictional Middle Ages, then fantasy fiction can be

considered a popular application of that approach. Fantasy is a typical example of what could be

seen as the neomedieval version of Runia’s modern metonymical monument, being a contemporary

creation of a fictional past. Much like a metonymical monument, fantasy fiction hints at a larger

world left undescribed, a world which connects to our own by virtue of its readers who interpret its

texts. It takes elements from actual history and implants them into a wholly fantastical world,

creating new histories that are reminiscent of yet remain separate from our reality. Fantasy is thus

the surprisingly fertile soil in which these theories have taken root, and the following will examine

the fruits that the genre can offer the academic world.
 de Tiège 43
Chapter Two: Bridging Fantasy

2.1. Introduction

This chapter will demonstrate why the fantasy genre is particularly well suited to provoking a

historical experience in its readers. Fantasy fiction typically presents the reader with fictional

worlds that relate to our actual world to some degree. Fantastical worlds range from being wholly

different in all aspects from the real world (that is to say, the representation of our reality in the

fantasy fiction) to being a fictional real world with a single occurrence of the supernatural, or any

degree of fantastic elements in between the two extremes. Whichever the case may be, all of these

fantastical worlds invariably relate to our own world, and therefore they cannot escape relation to it

even if only by virtue of being written in this world and read by a reader from this world,. This

chapter will outline the relationship of fantasy worlds to our actual world, and delve into the

relationship of reader to fantasy fiction.

The first step in this process will be providing a definition of fantasy and positioning that

term in respect to other definitions. I will argue that fantasy denotes a perspective or interest, and

that the genre is defined by its approach rather than its content. Furthermore, the fantastic approach

will be typified by its interest in the concept of time. In the next section, the unique worlds of fanta-

sy will be examined. Starting with the most fantastic worlds (that is to say, the most different from

the fictional real world) and ending with the least fantastic, I will show that each of these worlds

relate to our actual world to some degree. This will lead into a discussion of the general relationship

of fantasy to reality in the following section. I will argue that authors actively construct a reality (or

a deviation from a reality) in fantasy with the intent of providing a realistic work of fiction for a

reader despite its fantastical elements. This action by the author positions the fictional reality in

between the book and the reader, by virtue of being only half a reality, which requires a reader to

close the gaps in the text. The final section of this chapter will then round out the argument by ex-

amining the reader's role in this process, and the influence that this can have on the reader of fanta-
 de Tiège 44
sy.

Thus, this chapter will supplement the theoretical framework provided in the first chapter,

by suggesting a prime source for the fictional historical experience—fantasy fiction. Furthermore,

by providing an overview and definition of fantasy fiction, it provides its own framework for the

discussion of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere in the following two chapters. Hence, this chapter is titled

“Bridging Fantasy,” by virtue of being a bridge between theory and practice, made of fantastical

material and leading to fantasy. This discussion is necessary to further establish the foundation for

the theory and the resulting analysis. Through the analysis of what the concept of fantasy means,

how it is used, and what effect it has on the reader, I will demonstrate that this is the prime fiction in

which to examine the historical experience.

2.2 The Approach of Fantasy

Traditionally, fantasy can be defined along three avenues, being either defined by its relationship to

rationality, its relationship to reality, or by virtue of being a genre that evokes wonder. While the

first of these categories, the criterion of rationality, is not frequently used to define fantasy, it is

nevertheless interesting in its focus on perception. This definition suggests that “works in which

events occur, or places or creatures exist, that could not occur or exist according to rational

standards” are typical of fantasy,1 and even goes as far as to claim that “the presence of nonrational

phenomena . . . is the principle criterion for distinguishing fantasy from history or from other types

of literature.”2 Crucial to this definition, then, is the concept of rational standards. While a work can

be defined as fantasy by the presence of the non-rational, it is the reader that defines the rational. In

practice, the definition by rationality is a variation on the most common definition of fantasy

through its relationship to reality. In their introduction to Writing and Fantasy, Ceri Sullivan and

Barbara White eloquently outline this approach in stating that “the fantastic is a paradoxical mode:

1
Marshall B. Tymn, Kenneth J. Zahorski, and Robert H. Boyer. Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and
Reference Guide. New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1979. 3. Print.
2
Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer 4.
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45
it depends for its existence on an inverse relationship with what is perceived to be real.” This is to
3

say that fantasy is defined, simply put, by not being reality (and thus the definition by rationality

only adds the element of reality being constructed). This definition of fantasy (while the details may

differ between theorists) is the generally accepted starting ground for most contemporary

definitions.4

While the first two avenues defining fantasy focus on aspects of fantasy literature itself, the

third main route towards defining it focuses on the reader of fantasy. The first such formulation (and

one which is still frequently quoted) is that of Tzvetan Todorov. His definition of the fantastic5

positions the concept firmly with the reader, as it is “that hesitation experienced by a person who

knows only the laws of the natural, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”6 While Todorov's

fantastic may be prompted by a work of literature, it is thus a reader's experience that is the essence

of the fantastic. This, according to Robert A. Collins, is where the problem with defining fantasy

lies, as “the difficulties of establishing a definition of fantasy-as-genre can be traced in large part to

the problems of defining the real.”7 Therefore, while the broadly recognised definitions of fantasy

involve the opposition of real and non-real, this opposition often leads to problems. Rather, the

fantastic should be seen as the reader’s experience, who needs to make a judgement about the status

of the text and its relation to reality. This creates difficulties in establishing a firm, stable definition,

3
Ceri Sullivan, and Barbara White, eds. Introduction. Writing and Fantasy. London: Longman, 1999. 1.
Print.
4
Robert A. Collins. "'Fantasy and Forestructures': The effect of Philosophical Climate Upon Perceptions of
the Fantastic." In Bridges to Fantasy. Edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. 110. Print; W.R. Irwin. The Game of
the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Illinous: University of Illinois Press, 1976. 4. Print; Gary K. Wolfe.
"The Encounter with Fantasy." In The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art. Edited by Robin C. Schlobin.
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. 2. Print; Kathryn Hume. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to
Reality in Western Literature. London: Methuen, 1984. 21. Print.
5
It is important to note that Todorov specifically discusses the fantastic, rather than what would be termed
fantasy in contemporary literature. Todorov engages with Romantic literature and its survival into later
periods, yet contemporary theoretical discussions of fantasy still appropriate his writing for use in discussing
fantasy.
6
Tvetan Todorov. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. New
York: Cornell University Press, 1975. 25. Print.
7
Collins 119.
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46
of the term “fantasy”, as “one man's 'world,' then, may be another man's fantasy.” Definitions of
8

fantasy that define it as a reaction by the reader often suggest that the purpose of fantasy is “to

amaze and shock,”9 to “evoke wonder,”10 or otherwise simply refer to “a quality of astonishment

that we feel.”11

Fantasy can thus be said to be located primarily with the reader. What about the literary

work that produces such an experience in a reader, however? What role does it play in fantasy?

Diana Waggoner engages with this question, and also takes the position that “fantasy . . . is not

primarily about the material it uses,” by which she means “the symbols and dream-stuff, myths and

images, which are the flesh and blood on its skeleton of rationality.”12 Rather, what defines fantasy

is “the treatment of this mythopoetic material,” particularly how fantasy “places the material in a

fictional framework within which it is treated as empirical data.”13 Rather than attempting to define

a work of fantasy by its content, the literary counterpart to the reader's experience of fantasy should

thus be examined. What would mark a work as fantasy should not only be the reader's experience of

a novel as a fantasy, but also the constructions in the novel designed to elicit this experience. W.R.

Irwin as well states that “to define a genre by its material or content alone is a mistake, and this

mistake repeatedly occurs in discussions of fantasy.”14 His premise is that fantasy is, in fact, a

manner of rhetorical device, and a means of convincing the reader. 15 Equally, Ursula K. Le Guin

remarks that fantasy “is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending

and coping with existence.”16 All this is to say that fantasy is a means of engaging with reality, it is

8
Collins 119.
9
Michael Moorcock. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Victor Gollancz LTD,
1987. 22. Print.
10
Richard Mathews. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2002. 2. Print. C.N.
Manlove. "On the Nature of Fantasy." In The Aesthetics of Fantasy in Literature and Art. Edited by Roger C.
Schlobin. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. 17. Print.
11
Eric S. Rabkin. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press,1977. 41. Print.
12
Diana Waggoner. The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy. New York: Atheneum, 1978. 3. Print.
13
Waggoner 4.
14
Irwin 8.
15
Irwin 9-10.
16
Ursula K. Le Guin. "From Elfland to Pouchkeepsie." In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and
Science Fiction. Edited by Susan Wood. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979. 84. Print.
 de Tiège 47
a communication between author and reader.

The form that the rhetoric of fantasy takes towards its subject matter is often a playful one.

As source material from history or reality is taken up, it is creatively and playfully altered to fit into

a new fantastical framework. One example of a theorist who supports this perspective on fantasy is

W.R. Irwin, who is a strong proponent of viewing fantasy as being inherently playful and typifies it

as being the game of the impossible. Much in line with the current perspective of this thesis on

fantasy as lying between book and reader, Irwin suggests that in fantasy “writer and reader

knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness, that is, upon a game.”17 While the

term “subversiveness” may carry too many connotations to be used lightly (particularly in the

Bakhtinian context) the term, together with “conspiracy,” highlights a personal and private

collaboration between writer and reader through the medium of a book. He goes on to state that

“this game, led by the writer prompting participation by the reader, must be continuous and

coherent.”18 Being continuous and coherent is required for fantasy to work as a genre, as otherwise

fantasy would only be a brief interval in an otherwise altogether different narrative. Nevertheless,

fantasy must also always relate to non-fantasy, as it “relies on dominant but not total logic, on play

that is free but not isolated.”19 The reason for this is that if fantasy were to be pure defiance of

reality and rationality, it would become outright nonsense. Fantasy must have its own logic and

reality but the reader must be able to relate to these, or otherwise fantasy would stand in

epistemological isolation, wholly incapable of being understood.

Humour in fantasy (much like, in fact, fantasy itself) relies on this delicate balance between

the rational and the irrational, the real and the unreal, the logical and the nonsensical. Waggoner, for

instance, notes that humour in fantasy actually derives directly from the opposition of the two, from

“a display of the contradictions between the powers of the magical and human understanding of

17
Irwin 9.
18
Irwin 9.
19
Irwin 22.
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48
them.” Yet in order for the reader to be able to relate to the humorous fantasy, it must still “contain
20

a basic sense of seriousness: it must be presented as 'true.'”21 Humorous fantasy revolves around

observing the non-real in fantasy from the perspective of the real. This is precisely what Irwin

indicates as crucial about fantasy as a whole, in that fantasy novels “directly challenge some

established formulation. Thus play, for all its assertion of independence, becomes dependent on the

established for incitement.”22 Marking play as being specifically “separate from the ordinary,”

noting that it “temporarily rejects the ordinary and labors to replace it,”23 and having already

defined fantasy as being playful, Irwin implicitly places fantasy within the camp of the Bakhtinian

carnivalesque. It is important to note that while not all fantasy is therefore inherently humorous nor

designed to make us laugh, it does nevertheless suggest that all fantasy is meant to be a playful

approach to our conceptualisation of reality. Fantasy becomes a literal as well as literary secondary

world to Bakhtin's theoretical, abstract second life; it matches Huizinga's conception of play as a

temporary suspension of the normal rules of reality, by explicitly replacing them with new ones.

Where does this playful compact lead the reader of fantasy? Huizinga indicated that play is

an exploration of reality, in a sense a look into the breeding ground of culture. Similarly, Bakhtin's

Carnival as expressed in the carnivalesque is an evaluation of contemporary culture.24 Considering

fantasy, Irwin models the function of play in fantasy as an educational process. The process of

intellectual play that takes place in reading fantasy is the same as that which occurs between teacher

and student, with the only difference being a delay in the transmission from teacher to student.25

Whereas Bakhtin and Huizinga focused on the state of play itself, Irwin's focus lies on the moment

of transference between the fantasy world and the real world:

When the developed play is ended, one of two things occurs: either the reader returns

20
Waggoner 51.
21
Waggoner 10.
22
Irwin 27.
23
Irwin 27.
24
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. "[From The Politics and Poetics of Transgression]." In Critical Essays
on Mikhail Bakhtin. Edited by Caryl Emerson. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1999. 248. Print.
25
Irwin 28-29.
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49
to his acceptance of the challenged norms with a sense of simply having been
entertained by the departure or (what I believe happens most frequently) he returns
with his understanding modified.26

In line with the title of this chapter, this moment forms the bridge between fantasy and reality,

where the fantasy can be seen for what it is and related intelligently to the reader’s perception of

reality. In the playful struggle between the unreal and the human understanding of it, one of the two

must be the victor. While this struggle may be fictional, the victory is decided upon by the reader,

who is the stable entity that survives the transfer from fantasy play to reality.

Michael Moorcock takes this perspective one step further, and states that humour is that

aspect of fantasy that makes us able to relate to it realistically in the first place. He argues that

comedy,27 like fantasy, is typified by two elements. Firstly, paradox, and specifically “the

juxtaposition of disparate images and elements,”28 which he indicates is demanded equally both by

comedy and fantasy. Secondly, he suggests that both comedy and fantasy are at their best “when

making the greatest possible exaggerations,”29 unlike tragedy, which only suffers under that

influence. While fantasy “is real life exaggerated, more colourful, and, perhaps, simpler,” given

form through magic and monsters, in comedy “the vicissitudes of life are represented, in farce at

least, by a pratfall or a custard pie, an embarrassing misunderstanding, and the losing of one's

trousers at a formal function.”30 In a reciprocal relationship between fantasy and humour, fantasy

would be the departure from reality whereas comedy constitutes the return to it. For Moorcock, the

very function of humour is “to remind readers that . . . one is still writing about reality,” 31 despite

being fantastical, “to emphasize the implications of its [fantasy's] subject matter, to humanize its

characters, clarify its issues and intensify its narrative.”32 While Moorcock is a rather idiosyncratic

26
Irwin 27.
27
Moorcock mixes the use of the terms "comedy," "comic," and "humorous," though it becomes clear in his
writing that he uses the three as synonyms for what is strictly termed "humour" in this thesis.
28
Moorcock 105.
29
Moorcock 105.
30
Moorcock 114.
31
Moorcock 119.
32
Moorcock 108.
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50
writer and his Wizardry and Wild Romance is, in part, written as prescriptivist advice for aspiring

writers, he indicates quite accurately in this case the effect of fantasy. Bakhtin as well typified

humour as being more akin to what he considered real life than overly civilised culture. Similarly,

echoes of Huizinga can be read here in Moorcock’s suggestion that humour reveals an elementary

truth in the simplicity of life.

For all his inspired remarks, however, Moorcock also has his diatribes as to the definition of

fantasy. Throughout Wizardry and Wild Romance, he needlessly restricts fantasy to only those

writings that evolved from the Romantic Revival,33 despite setting out to define all of epic fantasy.

Nevertheless, he is correct in suggesting that fantasy shares with the late eighteenth century “a

relish for what is old, ruined, time-worn.”34 For aside from its close connections to humour, fantasy

is also marked by a strong interest in the concept of time. Kathryn Hume goes as far as to say that

“we know we are dealing with a form of fantasy if the rhetoric of the text places the dragonfight

[sic] somewhere else or once upon a time,” as for her it is these very “distance and time markers”

that “commonly denote an awareness of fantasy.”35 This may be too strong a claim, as setting a

work in the far future might be more common of science fiction rather than fantasy, although it must

be said that such a well-known work of science fiction as the Star Wars films actually takes place in

the past. Manlove suggests rather that “the dynamic of time is present, but in the form of what is

lost of the old rather than of what is gained of the new.”36 Fantasy indeed has a strong interest in

time, with a particular orientation towards the past. Rather than settling fully for Manlove's

definition, which suggests that the past is lost, fantasy appears to be a means to bridge the temporal

distance and bring the fictional past back to the reader, however temporarily.

Richard Mathews focuses on the temporal aspect of fantasy in Fantasy: The Liberation of

Imagination, suggesting that “time travel is an archetypal impulse inextricably woven into the

33
Moorcock 14.
34
Moorcock 67.
35
Hume 21.
36
Manlove 24.
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51
inspiration and essence of modern fantasy.” As a more viable alternative to Moorcock's claim that
37

fantasy is interested in time because of its alleged eighteenth-century roots, Mathews explains this

impulse by suggesting that “the sciences of archeology, anthropology, and philology (especially the

translation of ancient texts) were of great importance to the formation of the genre.”38 Tolkien, who

can easily be called the father of modern fantasy, was, in fact, a philologist. It is therefore not

surprising that a love for the Anglo-Saxon past can be read throughout Tolkien’s works. The theme

of the recovery of the past might be the result of the imitation of his style by later writers of fantasy.

Mathews indicates a secondary origin of the temporal interest of fantasy, by calling it “the successor

to the literary tradition primarily directed toward connecting finite existence with the infinite.”39

Here he subtly refers to medieval allegorical writing, suggesting that contemporary fantasy might

follow a tradition of Christian writing, albeit with the religion removed. Manlove as well notes that

“fantasy often draws spiritual nourishment from the past [. . .] particularly from a medieval and/or

Christian world order,” with the perspective on time being “circular or static where in science

fiction it is generally evolutionary or dynamic.”40 Contemporary fantasy might be the secular,

postmodern answer to a desire for permanence and continuity.

The idea of a parallel existing between fantasy and religious literature is described more

fully by Northrop Frye in his work The Secular Scripture. Frye identifies two types of stories

existing in the verbal culture of a society, namely the myth and the fabulous.41 He notes that these

terms, although generally used, have a specific meaning in his argument,42 and points out that the

distinction between the two “overlaps a good deal with the distinction between the sacred and the

secular.”43 Moreover, the two differ only in “authority and social function, not in structure,”44 with

37
Mathews 26.
38
Mathews 26.
39
Mathews 16.
40
Manlove 23.
41
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1976. 7. Print.
42
Frye 7.
43
Frye 8.
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52
the difference in function being that myths inform “culture what it is and how it came to be” while
45

the fabulous story “are told to meet the imaginative needs of the community.”46 What is of

particular interest here is that Frye suggests that the two types of stories are so similar in structure

that they can actually take each other’s place, with myth losing a place of authority and becoming

fabulous or fabulous stories becoming so dominant that they take on characteristics of myth. 47 It

should then be of little surprise that the two types of fiction are so similar and share similar origins.

Their relationship is akin to using a single tool for two different purposes, while put to different

uses its general qualities will remain the same. The specific shared origin that Frye notes, namely

the romance, will return in the final chapter in the discussion on the connection between fantasy and

neomedievalism.

To return to the matter of what needs fantasy literature might meet (whether or not it meets

these needs), the profound interest in time that can be seen in the fantasy genre is what makes it

such an invaluable source for investigation of neomedievalism. Michael Drout goes as far as

claiming that it is, in fact, “the major interaction with medieval materials for a great many readers in

England and America.”48 It should be noted that fantasy fiction does “not engage directly with the

medieval past,” but that it is “shaped by the conventions of the present and intermediate years.”49

This is typical of neomedieval works, however, and can be seen as an intellectual time-travel in its

own right, transposing certain elements of the present into the past and vice versa. In the process of

representing elements of the past, fantasy is “less concerned with real individual characters and

situations than with embodying philosophical, intellectual, moral, and social discourse.” 50 In

fantasy, the past is the shape given to the present, the outward form of our contemporary world.

Moorcock speaks from the position of a fantasy author in reminding us that this is done out of

44
Frye 8.
45
Frye 9.
46
Frye 6.
47
Frye 11-12.
48
Michael D.C. Drout. "The Problem of Transformation: The Use of medieval Sources in Fantasy Literature."
Literature Compass 1.1 (2004): 4. Print.
49
Young 164.
50
Mathews 16.
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commercial interest, as the fantasy author shapes the past “to the demands of fashion” as long as it

“pleases their specific audience.”51 If the contemporary medieval author is the conscious re-shaper

of the past to suit contemporary needs, what exactly is this shape? This is the question that the

following section will deal with, by analysing the types of worlds with which fantasy presents us.

2.3 The Worlds of Fantasy

As discussed in the previous section on defining fantasy in relation to reality, most definitions either

examine it as being removed from reality or otherwise adding the nonreal to reality.52 However, it

must be clear by now that the status of being non-real or untrue is not enough to call a literary work

a fantasy.53 Fantasy, rather, is an experience of the reader that is provoked by the author. This

section will focus on the latter part of that relationship, examining how the author sets up the

potential for fantasy. It is important to note, however, that this does not constitute fantasy itself—

fantasy remains an experience by the reader. Rather, it is the text which has the potential to provoke

fantasy in the reader. This is what causes such problems for most definitions of fantasy, for they

focus on their external characteristics that accompany fantasy though are not fantasy themselves.

This problem is easily seen in a description Mathews provides of fantasy, saying that “Carter

articulates a defining characteristic of fantasy as a pure distinct genre: it depicts adventures in a

coherent and real fantasy world.”54 A definition, of course, cannot use the word it is defining in its

definition without becoming a circular argument and losing all meaning. It does, however, note an

important characteristic accompanying fantasy, what Irwin calls a “central formal requisite,” in

noting that a literary work must contain its own literary world, described by him as “the persuasive

establishment and development of an impossibility, an arbitrary construct of the mind with all under

the control of logic and rhetoric.”55

51
Moorcock 22-23.
52
Irwin 5.
53
Wolfe 5.
54
Mathews 21.
55
Irwin 9.
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54
Waggoner supports this idea, arguing that this more than anything establishes the potential

of fantasy, as “a fantasy that fails to establish a credibly numinous universe fails not only in a

formal sense, but fails entirely, regardless of the quality of the writing or the artistic goals of the

author.”56 Interesting to note is the idea that a literary work may in fact be of high quality (which

she leaves undefined, but one can assume means well crafted and pleasant to read) yet “fail” in

being a fantasy, suggesting again that fantasy lies beyond the literary text and between text and

reader. Her prime criterion is that “the fantasist [i.e. the writer] must convince us that his creation is

not only plausible but necessary; that it follows not only logically, but desirably, from its

premises.”57 While she places the responsibility with the writer, it is clear from her argumentation

that the true work of fantasy suggests a whole word existing beyond the particular text. This

becomes clear in her discussion of fantasy protagonists, whom she also suggests must be believable.

The way in which they become believable, according to Waggoner, is that “they must have a

history; it may not be actually written down in the book, but it must have existed.”58 Although it is

the role of the writer to construct a character that evokes the possibility of this history, it is the

reader who, in the act of reading, supplies the history and thereby creates the world that fits this

history.

The worlds of fantasy hinted at by writers can vary wildly in their representations, from

being completely unique and alien worlds to being our own actual world with just a single

difference in it. The former category is often called high fantasy, in which the reader is faced with

secondary worlds that “manifest a consistent order that is explainable in terms of the supernatural [.

. .] or in terms of the less definable (but still recognizable) magical powers of faërie.” 59 The latter

category is sometimes indicated by low fantasy, or more frequently the fantastical. The concept of

the fantastical is most frequently associated with Tzvetan Todorov, and he provides the best

56
Waggoner 10.
57
Waggoner 26.
58
Waggoner 11.
59
Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer 5.
 de Tiège 55
definition of it in writing that “in a world which is indeed our world, the one we know [. . .] there

occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world.” 60 It is

important to note that, for Todorov, the fantastical was the complete extent of what he considered to

be fantasy. When theorists discuss contemporary fantasy finding its origin in the Romantic period, it

is most likely based on Todorov's discussion of the term and his needlessly restrictive definition of

it. What constitutes the type of literature capable of evoking fantasy, however, can lie anywhere

between Todorov's supernatural in the normal world to the normal in a supernatural world of high

fantasy.

The most useful typology for fantasy worlds can be found in Kenneth J. Zahorski and

Robert H. Boyer's “The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy,” firstly, because they separate the

concepts of secondary worlds and fantasy and, secondly, because they focus on the relationship

between the primary and secondary world. As they provide an extensive and accurate index of the

different types of fantasy authors creating worlds, it is reproduced here in full, though with

intervening sections of the list removed:

Some have created remote secondary worlds; others have created juxtaposed primary
and secondary worlds with magical portals serving as gateways between them; and
still others have created worlds-within-worlds [. . .] The first category consists of
works set in secondary worlds vaguely defined in terms of their relationship to our
world and to our time [. . .] The invented worlds of the second category are those
clearly set in the primary world of the very distant past [. . .] The works in the third
category bear some similarity to those in the second in that they too are set in our
world, but instead of being set in the past, they are set at a time in the very distant
future.61

Rather than being bogged down by either too strictly exclusive definitions (like Todorov) or too

broadly inclusive definitions (like Eric S. Rabkin), they simply describe the worlds a reader can

encounter in fantasy. Particularly interesting to note here is that they order the worlds by their

increasing similarity to our world. Fantasy worlds are either wholly distant, parallel, or contained

60
Todorov 25.
61
Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer. "The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy." In The Aesthetics of
Fantasy Literature and Art. Edited by Roger C. Schlobin. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
59-60. Print.
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56
within our world. There is, however, a final category which they uncomfortably list afterwards: “the

fourth, and final, category contains works featuring pseudomedieval settings.”62 They unfortunately

fit uncomfortably because, on the one hand, they are wholly different and imagined (and therefore

fit the first category) but, on the other hand, they are also our world though merely in another time

(and therefore fit the third category). While these categories therefore do not perfectly fit all fantasy

worlds, it is a useful model to keep in mind even if only for its emphasis on the idea that the

secondary worlds of fantasy must always somehow relate to our own world.

The primary worlds of fantasy (identified before as “fantastical” or “low fantasy”) are

easiest to connect to our own world. In fantasies of this type, “the world of low fantasy is the

primary world—this real world we live in,” where the reader can directly relate to the setting, which

is “explainable in terms of natural law (which excludes the supernatural and the magical—for the

most part).”63 The presence of fantasy in these worlds is exceptional, which is the prompt for

Todorov's hesitation between the natural and the supernatural, as the entire world tends towards the

natural. An alternative to this construction, though practically similar, is fiction where our

contemporary world is the naturally accepted world, except for the fact that “the powers of Faërie or

the gods are dormant, though just on the threshold of awakening.”64 Ironically, the presence of

fantasy in these types of narratives is all the more explicit by virtue of its occurrence in a “normal,”

rational world. This “unforeseen intrusion,” as David Clayton terms it, in the “convincing realistic

facade [sic]” of the normal world, in the end, “seems far more disturbing than it would in a world

governed entirely by fantasy.”65 Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer similarly note that it is this opposition

between a wholly realistic setting and an intrusion of fantasy that “accounts for its ability to shock

62
Zahorski and Boyer 61.
63
Tymn, Zahorski and Boyer 5.
64
Zahorski and Boyer 78-79.
65
David Clayton. "On Realistic and Fantastic Discourse." In Bridges to Fantasy. Edited by George E. Slusser,
Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
66. Print.
 de Tiège57
or surprise the reader into horror or laughter.” 66
Even more than with high fantasy worlds, low

fantasy offers the reader the challenge to merge the fantastical and the normal, to figure out in what

way the two could co-exist. Thus, low fantasy, because of its natural setting, focuses strongly on the

relationship between fantasy and reality.

While the relationship between fantasy and reality is most explicit in low fantasy, all of

fantasy is inherently complicit in a reciprocal relationship between the two. Not only are fantasy

worlds set “in some sort of more direct relationship to the primary world” so that fantasy authors

may “define their secondary worlds by comparisons with this one,”67 they also in return define our

own world. Waggoner suggests that “fantasy restores our own world to us,”68 Sullivan and White

state that “allowing the primary world to be interrogated by the secondary” is in fact “a central

characteristic of the fantastic,”69 and John H. Timmerman notes that “there is always this

reciprocating action in fantasy, on interchange between two worlds” by which he means that fantasy

worlds are “a world in which we live.”70 The idea of the interaction between the two worlds of

fantasy and reality has wide support in contemporary theories of fantasy, but how precisely does

this work? Drout provides a first hint in his suggestion that fantasy always serves two different

functions: not only does it “develop the conceit of the 'secondary world' or alternate history” but it

also “develop[s] an argument about the source material that [it] transform[s].”71 As fantasy is a

conscious transformation of source material by an author, the changes made to reality in fantasy

must support a structure that the author intended to establish. Rabkin echoes the popular conception

of fantasy as escapist literature, and then takes escape as a tool, as “the means of exploration of an

unknown land, a land which is the underside of the mind of man.”72

66
Tymn, Zahorski, and Boyer 6.
67
Zahorski and Boyer 63.
68
Waggoner 27.
69
Sullivan and White 3.
70
John H. Timmerman. Other Worlds: The Fantastic Genre. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1983. 1. Print.
71
Drout 4.
72
Rabkin 45.
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58
Rabkin's most poetic phrasing of fantasy as a tool is that fantasy “offers a 'medium' for

portraying the 'truth of the human heart.'”73 Central to this position is his connection between

fantasy and knowledge, as Rabkin claims that “the very nature of ground rules, how we know

things, on what basis we make assumptions, in short, the problem of human knowing infects

Fantasies at all levels.”74 Frye suggested this as well of myths, which inform culture “in their own

mythical terms.”75 While for Frye this applied only to myths, this thesis extends this idea to include

fantasy in general. That is to say, fantasy engages with, as Rabkin said, the problem of human

knowing, but does so using a specifically fantastical vocabulary. Furthermore, if fantasy literature

constructs an argument, as Drout suggests, then it is a means of convincing a reader; if fantasy is a

means to explore the human mind, then it is the reader that goes on this exploration. The

relationship of fantasy to reality is constructed both by the author, in connecting a world closely

enough to our world so that the reader can relate to it, as well as by the reader seeking meaning in

the text. This thread will be followed in the next section, which will survey the reader's direct

experience of fantasy.

2.4 Reading Fantasy

Fantasy is not just a depiction of that which is not real, but also a conscious reshaping of the real.76

This assertion underlies the idea that fantasy involves a compact between writer and reader. The

conscious deviation from reality may serve different purposes, as it can “hint at a clarity underlying

existence,”77 “transgress the ascending social group's portrayal of the world as a secular and

objective totality” or “portray taboos that haunted it,”78 as well as “confront more openly and

73
Rabkin 37.
74
Rabkin 37.
75
Frye 9.
76
Wolfe 3-4; Waggoner 3.
77
Le Guin 87-88.
78
Marta E. Sánchez. "A View From Inside the Fishbowl: Julio Cortázar's 'Axolotl'." In Bridges to Fantasy.
Edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1982. 40. Print.
 de Tiège
59
daringly a spiritual reality too often ignored in our world of system and fact.” The key to linking
79

these ideas to the reader is how fantasy deals with these issues. Irwin makes the challenging and

highly useful statement that fantasy is “governed by the requirements and devices of rhetoric, much

more than of art.”80 For Irwin, the purpose of fantasy rhetoric is “to persuade the reader through

narrative that an invention contrary to known or presumed fact is existentially valid.” 81 That is to

say, his typification of fantasy as an act of persuasion is mainly intended to define it as genre.

However, when taken together with the purposes of the fantastic deviation, it can be seen that the

rhetorical aspects of fantasy also serve to engage and convince the reader of a fantasy author's

vision.

Not only does fantasy construct a new reality which is deemed possible, it also temporarily

replaces our own.82 For the duration of reading a fantasy novel, that is the only world that matters,

until the reader is finished and normal life resumes once more. During that time of reading, the

characters in the fantasy novel come alive as “men and women like ourselves, who live in their

reality as we do in ours.”83 They may be fantasy characters in a fantasy world, but they behave like

human beings (whether or not they actually are) and thus belong in their world. The attribution of

reality to these literary figures is made possible by the fact that fantasy already requires the reader

to take a step back from objective reality, requiring as it does a “suspension of the judgement of

existence.”84 Having already accepted the possibility that an entire fantasy world is possible, the

acceptance that a few literary characters might be real is an easy step to take. Fantasy thus takes the

impossible and gives it life, fictional as it may be, and places it temporarily on an equal footing to

our reality.85 If presented all the more convincingly (all the more rhetorically) “it can produce an

imprint on our imaginations deep enough to give it a measure of truth and reality,” as Manlove puts

79
Timmerman 49.
80
Irwin 58.
81
Irwin 60.
82
Irwin 59.
83
Waggoner 4.
84
Clayton 60.
85
Waggoner 4,9; Irwin 9; Manlove 19.
 de Tiège 60
it, “however much that truth is unverifiable.” 86

By accepting first the fantasy world and then the fantasy characters both as real, the reader

imaginatively extends the fictional world, creating an abstract concept which extends beyond a

single novel. J.R.R. Tolkien termed this extra-literary fictional world “Faërie,”87 and Le Guin called

it “Elfland.”88 Waggoner elaborates on the concept by asserting that the reader of fantasy must

“assume that their [fantasy characters’] whole universe and the power that created it could exist.”89

The result is that fantasy fiction becomes fantasy reality, as “taking a realistic approach to the

materials of myth, romance, legend, and folklore means giving them a history, actualizing what was

only imagined before;” the interesting result of this approach is that fantasy fiction is no longer just

pure imagination, but rather “reporting on a reality.”90 The reader of fantasy thus fills in the gaps in

the fiction, providing histories and cultures as needed, and creates a fantasy world which is larger

than the actual text provides.

What makes fantasy a unique type of literature is that it demands an integration of the reader

into the fiction. Todorov remarked of the fantastic that it “implies an integration of the reader into

the world of the characters,” which is “defined by the reader's own ambiguous perception of the

events narrated.”91 He hastens to add that he does not mean an actual reader, but merely the “role of

the reader implicit in the text.”92 Clearly, the literal integration of reader into story would be a

fantasy in and of itself (it is in fact the plot of The Neverending Story), though it is more than

Todorov gives it credit for. The actual reader must place him or herself imaginatively into the

fantasy world, filling the gaps in the text, which causes him or her “to cross the threshold to it in our

86
Manlove 18.
87
Qtd. in Richard L. Purtill. J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1984. 19. Print.
88
Le Guin 86.
89
Waggoner 10.
90
Waggoner 26.
91
Todorov 31.
92
Todorov 31.
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61
minds.” 93
Waggoner explains this as a result of viewing fantasy as escapism, which requires the

possibility “to experience it [the fantasy world] as a consistent reality as well as a vision.”94 It is the

task of the writer to “make it possible for the reader [. . .] to live in it to their fullest extent. It must

provide another life,”95 and if the fantasy world does not make this possible, it “fails formally as

well as artistically. It is unable to sustain literary belief and to allow the reader to enter fully in the

newly created world.”96 Thus, ironically, the commonly used dismissal of fantasy (it being mere

escapism97) actually becomes its most valuable and fascinating aspect.

Fantasy demands much of its reader, more so than any other type of fiction, but in return

offers the most intellectual exercise.98 The extra work that a reader must put into reading a work of

fantasy providing belief to the events and concepts presented constitutes an investment that serves

to intensify the effects that fantasy may have on him or her. “Belief,” Gary K. Wolfe argues, “is

what enables genuine emotions to be aroused from impossible circumstances,”99 and so the initial

investment made by the reader in believing both the world and the events may exist results in a

more direct personal connection to the events in a fantasy novel. While fantasy itself may not be

real, the emotions evoked by it are certainly so, and they become a constant between fantasy and

reality as they persist once the reader stops reading the fantasy. Various theorists have suggested

that fantasy provides a function similar to Victor Shklovsky's estrangement (ostranenie) or Bertolt

Brecht's verfremdung,100 making the normal unfamiliar to the reader. The emotion that a reader of

fantasy feels is the bridging of the gap between the fantastically unfamiliar and the familiarly

human. This is why Waggoner claims that a fantasy fails if the reader cannot escape into the fantasy

93
Timmerman 50.
94
Waggoner 25.
95
Waggoner 27.
96
Waggoner 25.
97
Rabkin 43.
98
Waggoner 6, 9, 26; Mathews 3; Collins 117
99
Wolfe 11.
100
Hume 16; Clayton 70; John Gerlach. "The Logic of Wings: García Márquez, Todorov, and the Endless
Resources of Fantasy." In Bridges to Fantasy. Edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert
Scholes. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. 129. Print.
 de Tiège
62
world—the reader is then unable to relate to the unfamiliar and supernatural and as a result there

can be no genuine emotion evoked by the fantasy world.

The ability of the reader to step inside the fantasy world and experience genuine emotion

because of it is crucial for fantasy to have an effect on the reader. The reason why fantasy is often

accused of being mere escapism results from the assumption that escapism offers nothing to the

reader. Clearly, there is no such thing as “mere” escapism involved in fantasy, as the investment by

the reader of fantasy shows. Escape into fantasy also offers benefits to the daily life of the reader,

however. The worlds of fantasy are always reflections of our actual world, and so the problems that

characters of fantasy novels encounter are similar to the ones the reader might encounter. Moorcock

takes up this issue and suggests that “we also wish when we read, to be informed, to try to

understand how we may deal with these problems and how we may respond positively, without

cynicism, to the injustices and frustrations which constantly hamper the needs of the spirit.”101

Moorcock's fantasy is didactic, almost therapeutic in its intent, perhaps overly so. John Timmerman

takes a more cautious approach and suggests that the goal of fantasy is not to convince us that the

nonreal is real, but rather “to lead us through the struggles of this other world to a better

understanding of our own.”102 He nevertheless identifies a similar dissatisfaction, though more

implicit in his argument than in Moorcock's, as Timmerman as well suggests that “the reader longs

to stand apart for a time, not to escape but to rejoin earth's 'pathless wood' with a clearer sense of

direction.”103

Reading fantasy is not a one-way street, however, where the reader merely flees into a

fantasy world for a time. C.S. Lewis provided a most eloquent description of the effect that fantasy

may have on a perceptive and willing reader:

It would be much truer to say that fairyland arouses a longing for he knows not what.

It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of

101
Moorcock 113.
102
Timmerman 55.
103
Timmerman 1.
 de Tiège
63
something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world,

gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has

read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all woods a little enchanted.104

Lewis was certainly not alone in this proposal, and Hume names several other theorists, such as

Tolkien and Rosemary Jackson,105 and to this list can be added Timmerman (“if there is such a thing

as extrapolation in fantasy, it is from the fantasy world to our own”)106 and Robert A. Collins (“the

philosophical climate of the reader whose empathy is truly engaged in this narrative may be

radically altered”).107 Thus, while a good number of theorists have pointed out that fantasy can also

affect the reader, few unfortunately engage the question of what form this interaction takes. It

should be clear that what traverses the gap between fictional fantasy and actual reality are the

thoughts and emotions of the reader. Equally, it has been argued that this constitutes a vehicle for

the transmission of knowledge, experience, or belief from the fantasy world to the real world. The

final section of this chapter will now combine the first two chapters to establish that fantasy evokes

a form of historical experience, a form of contact that the reader can form with a history that never

actually existed.

2.5 Conclusion

The historical experience involves gaining a personal contact with the past through the medium of

an object in the present. For Huizinga this was the actual history book, for Ankersmit this might be

any historical object (though in particular a piece of art), and Runia added onto this the idea that a

contemporary monument might equally constitute the presence of the past in the present. The

neomedievalist perspective on history involves a loss of what might be called “authentic” history,

which opens up the door for new creations which stand in direct relationship to history by virtue of

104
C.S. Lewis. "On Three ways of Writing for Children." In Of This and Other Worlds. Edited by Walter
Hooper. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1982. 64-65. Print.
105
Hume 16-17.
106
Timmerman 51.
107
Collins 117.
 64 de Tiège
its absence. These new “historical” creations would function in a similar way to Runia's

descriptions of monuments, being embodiments of a past that never was. This is why fantasy fiction

is a typically neomedieval genre, being a reworking of a concept of the past which may or may not

be an accurate representation of medieval history and might be set in the past, present, future, or

wholly alternative world altogether. The combination of these two, historical experience and

fantasy, creates the fascinating question: “is it possible to have a “historical” experience of

something that never was?”

The concept of metonymy is crucial to the historical experience, because it establishes that

an object of the past represents that past in a pars-pro-toto relationship. The historical experience

can equally occur with fantasy fiction, as the individual fantasy novel must enable the reader to

believe in a credible universe that extends outside of a single novel (that is to say, simply put, it

must be believable). The means to achieve this by the reader are, in fact, the exact same as the

means to achieve a historical experience. This is not to say that the historical experience is therefore

a fictional process, nor inversely that all fantasy fiction can therefore be historical objects in their

own right, but rather that the constant between the two, the reader of a text (in the larger,

postmodern sense of the word) applies the same process to historical objects as to fantastical ones.

The reader seeks and establishes contact with a history, be that our history or not. The fantasy novel

becomes similar to Runia's monument, being a creation of relatively contemporary times yet

standing in conceptual contact with the past, thereby forming a conduit for the reader to establish

and share that same contact.

The close connection between the historical experience and concept of play enables a reader

to be removed from contemporary restraints. Ankersmit points out the difficulties of gaining a

historical experience from oft-analysed and well-known works of art because of layers of

interpretation blocking perception of the object itself. The carnivalesque and playfulness, as

modelled by Bakhtin and Plessner, help to override the intellectual distance of the reader and allows

a direct connection to that which makes us laugh in a playful, timeless atmosphere. Fantasy fiction
 65de Tiège
is inherently playful in its connections to reality and history, and humorous fantasy fiction

especially emphasizes the connection between fantasy and reality. Fantasy fiction thus brings the

reader into the perfect situation for a historical experience, already aided by its requirement to

suspend disbelief and the critical demands of objective truth. Bakhtin's playful laughter,

furthermore, allows the reader a critical evaluation of the relationship between the secondary and

the primary world after reading. In the strict case of his carnivalesque this was the time of carnival

and the bleak oppression of the medieval Church, respectively, but in the case of fantasy this

transposes mutatis mutandis to the relationship between the fantasy world and our own reality.

Both the historical experience and fantasy fiction ask the reader to relate to a world which is

practically lost. In the case of historical experience this is because the past is distant in time, and in

the case of fantasy this is because the world is distant in reality (by virtue, of course, of not actually

existing). The process of closing this gap is nevertheless the same for the individual having a

historical experience as well as the reader of fantasy. In both cases it involves the reader providing

the lost information in approaching the artistic object, to fill the gap between the experience and

that which is experienced. The exact origin of the artistic object and, together with this, the specific

reason for its distance thus becomes irrelevant. What is crucial is the act of the reader and the

process of bridging the gap. For in each case it involves the suspension of the idea that another

place and time is unavailable to the reader, and the acceptance that gaining objective, empirical

knowledge in order to create a constructivist model is not the point of the exercise.

Similarly, for both the historical experience and the experience of fantasy what matters is the

reciprocal relationship between reader and text. Not only is it important how the reader can get in

contact with another realm but also what can be brought back into the present from it. For the

historical experience this involves the feeling of continuity and history, an idea of what a past might

have felt like. For the experience of fantasy this involves not just the imagined experience of

another realm, but the physical ownership of artefacts from that realm. Each serves to enrich the

contemporary experience of the reader, as the other time and place become a means by which the
 de Tiège 66
present can be evaluated and experienced. The other, be it another time or another realm, serves as a

model for contemporary life, making it possible to understand it better and deal with its hardships.

For Moorcock this was a directly educational and therapeutic process in fantasy, and the same may

equally be said for historical documents. Both the historical and fantastical experience lay emphasis

on the value of personal experience, and the importance of direct contact for the enrichment of the

reader.
 de Tiège 67

Chapter Three: The Properties of Time in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

3.1 Introduction

This chapter is the first of two that will look at the fantastical experience as provoked by Neil

Gaiman’s Neverwhere. I will demonstrate how the concept of time informs the novel at all levels, as

its characters, locations, and objects are infused with both historical and pseudo-historical

significance. In the novel, time is stretched out, condensed, jumbled around, and historical facts are

mixed with fiction. The first section will demonstrate the general interest of Neverwhere in the

concept of time; the following section looks at the connection between time and threats,

investigating both how history is threatened by characters and in return how the passage of time

threatens characters; the third section examines how time is represented in the novel, and suggests

how this informs the novel’s perspective on time. The guiding thread through this chapter is the

connection between time and fantasy, and leads into the fourth and final chapter which argues that

the novel’s treatment of time serves to bring the reader into a world of fantasy.

Neil Gaiman is an author whose work has to date unfortunately not received much critical

attention. While his graphic novels have recently received some attention,1 his other novels have

hardly been examined in scholarly works, or otherwise interest is given more to him as an author

rather than to his works.2 The few mentions of Neverwhere occur either as an epigraph to a study on

perceptions of the London Underground3 or added as an afterthought in a one-and-a-half page

footnote in a study comparing contemporary legends of the wild beast in the sewer to their ancient

1
Cyril Camus. “The ‘Outsider’: Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Jewish Studies 29.2 (Winter 2011): 77-99. Print; Katherine T. Butcher and M. Lee Manning. “Bringing
Graphic Novels into a School’s Curriculum.” The Cleaning House 78.2 (Nov.—Dec., 2004): 67-72. Print.
2
For example, in: Margaret R. Yocom. Rev. of Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men of Fairy Tales.
Edited by Kate Bernheimer. in Marvels & Tales 23.2 (2009): 413-416. Print.
3
Janet Vertes. “Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users’ Representations of Urban Space.”
Social Studies of Science 38.1 (Feb., 2008): 7-33. Print.
 68 de Tiège
analogues. While the latter work identifies the protagonist’s name as “a wink at Henry Mayhew, no
4

doubt”5 and connects the origin of the monster in Neverwhere’s sewers (Fleet Ditch) with other

monster analogues,6 the analysis remains brief and superficial. While this is understandable, given

that Ingemark’s article examines the survival of the legend and not its representation in literature, it

is nevertheless indicative of the lack of academic attention provided to Neverwhere. However, it

assuredly deserves more critical analysis because of its deeply-layered narrative, its playfully

metafictional approach to source material, and its intricate interweaving of historical references into

an otherwise fantastical world. The following two chapters will establish what Neverwhere has to

offer to the critical community.

As Neverwhere is currently under-examined, the critical context for the analysis of

Neverwhere consists of general work done on Gaiman. As such, the following will form a brief

diversion from an analysis of Neverwhere proper, though it serves as a frame in which to place that

analysis. The most sizeable publication on Gaiman’s work is The Neil Gaiman Reader, a book that,

unfortunately, is introductory and therefore by necessity remains superficial throughout. While the

articles within The Gaiman Reader are generally too short to provide any real depth, they

nevertheless outline analytical trends supported by other academic works. For instance, one article

suggests that Gaiman, as an author, tends to highlight metafictionality, and “holds up a mirror to the

storytelling process.”7 It argues that Gaiman’s frequent use of a story-within-a-story motif

problematizes the relationship of author to audience.8 Furthermore, another of the articles suggests

that Gaiman’s work in general is typified by an opposition of what is real versus what is not real,9

though unfortunately it only notes the stories in which this occurs and does not continue to develop

4
Camilla Asplund Ingemark. “The Octopus in the Sewers: An Ancient Legend Analogue.” Journal of
Folklore Research. 45.2 (May—Aug., 2008): 145-170. Print.
5
Ingemark, 165, n. 3..
6
Ingemark, 166, n. 3.
7
Chris Dowd. “An Autopsy of Storelling: Metafiction and Neil Gaiman.” The Neil Gaiman Reader. Edited by Darrell
Schweitzer. Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2007. 103-114. Print.
8
Dowd 111.
9
Marilyn Brahen. “The Thin Line Between.” The Neil Gaiman Reader. Edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Rockville,
Maryland, 2007. 140-148. Print.
 69 de Tiège
any argument from this premise. Sadly, however, the works contained within The Neil Gaiman

Reader provide only a cursory glance at his works, and can provide nothing more than a stepping

stone from which to engage with his works.

More fruitful in establishing the academic context of Gaiman criticism can fortunately be

found in the analysis of his novel Coraline. This work has predominantly attracted attention from

psychoanalytical theorists,10 who generally focus on the construction of identity for the eponymous

protagonist.11 As a result, while some of these theorists do engage with the concept of fantasy in

their work, they refer mostly to the Freudian concept rather than the genre. For example, while

Elizabeth Parsons et al. compare Coraline to “many other literary works of fantasy,”12 they

confound the term with other uses of “fantasy.” They argue that “what appears to be a feminist

agenda in these texts, then, is also a fantasy,”13 refer to “the fantasy of the Lacanian ‘real’,”14 and

discuss “Helena’s anxious fantasy,”15 each of which are different fantasies, and none of them is

connected to the genre of fantasy. The major aim of the article by Parson et al., in the end, is to

establish that Gaiman does not offer an acceptable postfeminist view of female empowerment,

making sexual maturity the ultimate goal of the young girls in the novels discussed. As such, its

treatment of fantasy in the novel misses the point, and the article ends up being an analysis of Neil

Gaiman himself rather than of his writing.

Of these psychoanalytical perspectives on Coraline, only Richard Gooding’s article engages

with its genre, when he states that it exhibits a “decidedly unsettling handling of a narrative form

10
Kara K. Keeling, and Scott Pollard. “The Key is in the Mouth: Food and Orality in Coraline.” Children’s
Literature 40 (2012): 1-27. Print.
11
Karen Coats. “Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic.” The
Gothic in Children’s Literature. Ed. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGilliss. New York:
Routledge, 2008. Print; David Rudd. “An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity.”
Children’s Literature in Education 39.3 (2008): 159-168. Print; Mike Ashley. “Coraline—A Quest for
Identity.” The Neil Gaiman Reader. Edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press,
2007. 171-174. Print.
12
Elizabaeth Parsons, Naarah Sawers, and Kate McInally. “The Other Mother: Neil Gaiman’s Postfeminist
Fairytales.”Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39.4 (Winter, 2008): 371-389. Print.
13
Parsons, Sawers, and McInally 372.
14
Parsons, Sawers, and McInally 373.
15
Parsons, Sawers, and McInally 374.
 de Tiège 70
that has traditionally offered comfort and closure to fantasy.” 16
His article investigates how the

sense of the uncanny in Coraline works to undermine fantasy’s “border between real and fantasy

worlds” as “Gaiman begins to blur these boundaries almost immediately.” 17 Though Gooding

engages with the Freudian concept of fantasy as well, he clearly separates the differing concepts of

fantasy. He links Todorov’s work (which argued that the fantastic can become uncanny when

explained by the madness of a subject) to Freud’s theories on internalised rules of reality and the

struggle between Id and Ego.18 His conclusion is that fantasy is used in Coraline as a means of

repression, a stage in the psychological development of Coraline herself, and it is suspended once

she achieves closure.19 This article interweaves the genre of the novel with the actions of the

characters within it, providing an interesting view on its protagonist. However, it unfortunately also

heavily relies on Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, dismissing it as only a temporary escape from

reality rather than as a concept in its own right.

Gaiman is frequently described as a heavily intertextual writer, often playfully adapting and

altering his sources. Stephen Rauch, for instance, has written about the relationship between

Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell’s work on myths20 as an expansion of his work in The

Gaiman Reader.21 Unfortunately, however, much like his earlier article in The Gaiman Reader, this

publication remains only an introductory work and lacks critical depth.22 More informative is

Annalisa Castaldo’s article describing Gaiman’s incorporation of Shakespeare (the man) in The

Sandman. She asserts that Gaiman “uses Shakespeare to explore the idea that genius itself is a

16
Richard Gooding. “’Something Very Old and Very Slow’: Coraline, Uncanniness, and Narrative Form.”
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33.4 (Winter, 2008): 391-392. Print.
17
Gooding 393.
18
Gooding 393.
19
Gooding 404.
20
Stephen Rauch. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth.
Holicong, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press, 2003. Print.
21
Darrell Schweitzer. Introduction. The Neil Gaiman Rreader. Rockville, Maryland: 2007. 7. Print.
Marhsall Fishwick. Rev. of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern
22

Myth. Stephen Rauch. Holicong, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press, 2003. In The Journal of American Culture
27.2 (June 2004): 247-248. Print.
 de Tiège 71
responsibility” which “reflects both the modern view of genius and the life of Gaiman.” 23
She

suggests that Gaiman represents Shakespeare as a fallible figure so that young artists can easily

relate to the character.24 Similarly, Christine Robertson notes the degree of intertextuality between

Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.25 Again, intertextuality

serves to make the story more accessible to contemporary readers, as “Gaiman never directly refers

to Kipling or to the Jungle Books” so that “reading Kipling is not required in order to be able to

follow Gaiman’s book.”26 Gaiman’s work “mak[es] him [Kipling] more readable for a twenty-first-

century audience” while “renegotiating his imperialist politics.”27 These articles on Gaiman’s

intertextuality therefore underline its use in making distant texts more accessible to new audiences.

Young’s consideration of the relationship between fantasy and medievalism underscores the

importance of Gaiman’s intertextuality as well. Much like Robertson, she notes that Gaiman’s short

story “The Monarch of the Glen” may “be read without knowledge of the specific sources that are

discussed; from a reader’s point of view, its self-reflexivity is not essential.”28 Again, much like

Robertson, Young argues that Gaiman’s intertextuality serves the purpose of social commentary,

which “challenges the validity of dichotomies of self and other that underpin not only archetypal

narratives, but human society.”29 Similarly, she argues that Gaiman’s short story “Chivalry” is about

“accepting difference, of making the alien familiar and comfortable without irredeemably altering

its original status or meaning.”30 What the articles of Young, Robertson, and Castaldo illustrate is

that Gaiman employs intertextuality as a device to bring his subject matter closer to its readers. This

chapter will demonstrate a similar process of approaching the reader at work in Gaiman’s treatment

23
Annalisa Castaldo. “’No More Yielding than a Dream”: The Construction of Shakespeare in ‘The
Sandman’.” College Literature 31.4 (Fall, 2004): 98. Print.
24
Castaldo 100.
25
Christine Robertson. “’I want to be like you’: Riffs on Kipling in Neil Gaiman’s The Gradeyard Book.”
Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 36.2 (Summer 2011): 164-189. Print.
26
Robertson 166.
27
Robertson 164-165.
28
Young 174.
29
Young 178.
30
Young 172-173.
 72 de Tiège
of time in the novel Neverwhere, where he, much like with “Chivalry” or The Graveyard Book,

intertwines the familiar with the unfamiliar to create a text where a reader can encounter the

unfamiliar on familiar grounds.

Neverwhere originated as a television series written by Gaiman for the BBC in 1996.

Gaiman frequently had to adapt the script to fit the various demands of the studio, and the story

changed to such an extent that by the time the series was being filmed Gaiman started writing the

novel in order to tell the story he had wanted to tell.31 There are various versions of the novel, but in

2005 the author compiled from all notes, drafts, and versions a definitive version that was published

with the subtitle The Author’s Preferred Text.32 The story revolves around Richard Mayhew, a

Scotsman who moves to London to start a new job. While in the city one night, Richard encounters

a young girl, Door, bleeding on the street. He takes her into his home to help her, and she sends him

on a quick, though mysterious errand to find help. After he has helped Door, Richard’s girlfriend

breaks up with him, he loses his job, and is evicted from his apartment, all because nobody seems to

notice that he exists anymore. His only recourse is to track down Door and find out why this is the

case. This leads Richard through London Below, a mirror-world of London where all manner of

fairytale and mythological creatures exist. Unwittingly, Richard is drawn into a plot surrounding

Door, as he is hunted by Croup and Vandemar, two thugs sent by the deranged angel Islington to

kidnap Door. Throughout the story, Richard’s only wish is to return to his own London, though after

experiencing many adventures with Door, he discovers that he belongs more in London Below than

he does to London Above.

Gaiman has stated that he wrote Neverwhere specifically to “do for adults what the books I

had loved when younger, books like Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia books, or The Wizard of Oz,

did for me as a kid.”33 Neverwhere shares the major plot of an individual from our reality travelling

31
Neil Gaiman. Introduction. Neverwhere: Author’s Preferred Text. Introduction. London: Headline
Publishing Group, 2005. Print.
32
Gaiman, Introduction.
33
Gaiman, Introduction.
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into another—more magical—world. In these stories, the protagonist is the vehicle for the reader to

experience wonder at the fantastical world, though the major difference between the stories Gaiman

cites as his inspiration and Neverwhere is that the latter involves a mature individual with real-world

responsibilities rather than a child. In the introduction Gaiman helpfully identifies the work as a

fantasy novel and also provides his own definition of its use, saying that he uses “the mirror of

fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at

all, for the very first time.”34 The proximity of the fantasy world of Neverwhere to our own is

another major difference between it and its inspirations. Whereas novels such as Alice in

Wonderland offers us our world reflected metaphorically, allegorically, or otherwise in a wholly

separate world, Neverwhere places its fantastic allegory within (though separate from) our own

world, emphasizing its relationship to it.

The primary way in which Neverwhere connects to our world (and thereby its readers) is by

its adaptation of our history. Throughout the novel both characters and locations are related to

historical periods, and these periods are mixed and matched to create a new tapestry of its fictional

world. By intertwining the familiar and the unfamiliar in such a manner, the world of Neverwhere

seems similar to ours by its use of historical elements from our world, but at the same time

disconcertingly alien by the unusual combination of those elements. Through the novel’s emphasis

on time, paradoxically both on how it separates us from the past as well as how we are connected to

that past, Neverwhere brings time and history to the forefront of the reader’s experience. The locales

presented in the novel provide a static perspective on time, as they are direct objects of the past

surviving in the present. The characters of Neverwhere, by contrast, demonstrate a very fluid

concept of time—their perception of time is experiential, as they often reminisce about the past or

dream about the future. Similarly, their perception of time stretches out in times of crisis or passion,

so that short moments appear to last ages; conversely, narration of history cuts huge swaths through

time and directly connects the present narrative to histories long gone.

34
Gaiman, Introduction.
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3.2 The Survival of Time

While the world of London Below is a bric-à-brac of historical curiosities, its framework is most

decidedly medievalist. The people who live in London Below are structured into a feudal system,

by which any newcomer is identified. When Door first meets Richards in London Above (that is to

say, our London), her first concern is to check this status: “’Whose barony is this?’ asked the girl.

‘Whose fiefdom?’”35 The same happens when Richard meets Old Bailey (his name itself a reference

to London’s courthouse and its medieval origins) who, even before asking Richard’s name, wants to

know to which barony he gives fealty (51). Each individual belongs to a fiefdom and owes fealty to

mostly unnamed lords, bar a select few. Door, for instance, is not part of a barony. When Richard

asks about her position, she is identified as “the Lady Door,” not belonging to any barony but rather

to “the House of the Arch,” who “used to be very important” (92). While the definition of the House

of the Arch—or, when it comes to that, the baronies—is never provided, how people are identified

(fealty first, name second) indicates the prime importance feudal status and a medievalist sense of

identity has in London Below.

In Neverwhere, the feudal structure functions as a shorthand to introduce new and minor

characters. For instance, near the middle of the novel, upon meeting a Dominican monk in the

sewers below London, the very mention that he wore the robes of a monk is enough to establish his

character (231). All of the monks (excepting the Abbot) are flat characters, and the two named friars

(“monk” and “friar” are used synonymously in the novel) Sable and Fuliginous are only named as

puns on the colour black. Similarly, the character Serpentine has a “wasp-waisted major-domo” in

her employ (338), though she serves little actual purpose in the story. Rather, her character is

defined fully by the position of major-domo. In this way, all characters are defined to some degree

or another by their relationship to the feudal structure. By contrast, at the start of the novel, a simple

mention of the Marquis de Carabas (40) works to combine the feudal structure with a sense of

Neil Gaiman. Neverwhere: Author’s Preferred Text. Introduction. London: Headline Publishing Group,
35

2005. 31. Print. Subsequent page references to this novel are provided in the text.
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magic and fairy tale (being a reference to the story of Puss In Boots). Over the course of the novel,

however, the Marquis is described more as he takes a central role as a major character. Minor

characters in Neverwhere, thus, are fully dependent on the medieval hierarchy for identity, while the

major characters all hold some manner of title (Marquis, Abbot, Lady, to name but a few) and

therefore control the hierarchy, allowing them more individuality.

Interestingly, the feudal structure dominates not only the people of London Below but also

the locales of London, both Above and Below. The ruler of the Underground section of London

Below is the Earl, who has established his court in the Earl’s Court Line (a first example of the type

of humorous allusion used throughout Neverwhere). Richard describes it as if “someone had taken a

small medieval court and put it, as best they could, in one carriage of an Underground train” (150).

The Earl himself is a figure rich in medieval allusions as well. Upon hearing of Door’s quest, the

Earl celebrates his guests in “basso profundo [sic]” alliterative verse, reciting “Brave the battling

blade, flashes the furious fire, steel sword sheathed in hated heart, the crimsons the . . . the . . .

something. Yes.” (156). This allusion to Anglo-Saxon culture is strengthened by the names of the

courtiers: the man-at-arms Halvard, the Earl’s steward Dagvard, and his jester called Tooley. The

Earl is contrasted to the poverty of most other characters in the novel, who must scrounge around

for food. He provides Richard with drink in “a large silver goblet, ornamented around the rim with

what appeared to Richard to be sapphires” (159). The drink, incidentally, is Coca-Cola, which the

Earl disparages, noting that: “’In the old days,’ said Halvard dismally, after sipping his Coke, ‘we

had wine. I prefer wine. It’s not as sticky.’” (159). The Earl’s wealth results from the fact that his

position gives him power over the world around him. When Richard asks Dagvard why the vending

machines of the Underground produce food on command, he is told that “they listen to the Earl,

y’see. He rules the Underground. The bit with the trains. He’s lord of the Central, the Circle, the

Jubilee, the Victorious, the Bakerloo – well, all of them except the Underside Line” (159).

The integration of Richard into the world of London Below is also framed within this

medievalist system. After meeting Door for the first time, Richard is sent to meet the Marquis de
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Carabas. Here, he is told that they “have a damsel to undistress” (48). That becomes Richard’s quest

throughout the novel as he constantly seeks to protect Door, though he only ever lags behind current

events. It is only at the end of the novel, once he has defeated the mythical Beast beneath London

and battled the Angel Islington that he is acknowledged by other characters as part of the feudal

system. In this, Neverwhere matches the structure of medieval romance, where the chivalric hero

has to first overcome various challenges before he can truly be accepted as a knight. Richard is, in

fact, knighted by the Earl, and given “the freedom of the Underside” to “walk freely, without let or

hindrance” (347); furthermore, he is titled by the Abbot of the Black Friars, when he commands of

Brother Fuliginous to “bring me the Warrior’s trousers” (343); and finally, he is serenaded by the

Earl, again in alliterative verse: “Crimson the cuts in the carcass, Fast falls the foe, Dauntless

devout defender, Bravest of boys . . .” though he then corrects himself by noticing that Richard is

“not really a boy any more, though, is he, Tooley?” (347). In this moment, Richard’s integration into

London Below is equated to growing up, and equally to taking his place in the feudal system. Like

the Earl, Richard, at this time, gains control over his surroundings by virtue of his position. At the

end of the novel, after having returned to London Above Richard realises that he no longer belongs

there, and manages to create a door into London Below by scratching its outline in a wall (371-

372). While it is not made explicit that it is through his own abilities that he creates a portal into

London Below, he is unique among the inhabitants of London Above by being able to consciously

choose to return to London Below.

This ability is quite remarkable, as London Below is normally hidden within the world of

London Above. The entryways into London Below are located in places such as a “narrow

alleyway” (45), “a small, cobbled alley” (289), and “a hundred other little courts and mews and

alleys” (79). Most of these entryways are small, cramped, and squeezed in between other parts of

London Above. These are both literally and figuratively interstitial spaces, being leftover areas of

forgotten time. They are referenced as “tiny spurs of old-time, unchanged for three hundred years.

Even the smell of piss here was the same as it had been in Pepys’s time, three hundred years before”
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(79). They embody the leftover space from the modern constructions of London, and are inhabited

by those individuals who do not (or no longer) fit into the structure of London Above. These spaces

are both the continual survival as well as the abandonment of the past at the same time. They are

accessible to us in the present but are mostly forgotten and ignored. Most of these points of entry

into London Below are signalled by antiquated furnishings, such as being lit by “a sputtering gas-

jet” (45) or by descriptions such as “gaslights burned and sputtered on the [alleyways’] walls”

(289).

The areas within London Below are even older than the entryways into that realm. The

deeper tunnels of the London sewers are stated to “have been dug in the early days of the Second

World War” (93); furthermore, the entryways into London Below with their gas-lit fixtures allude to

the Victorian era; on top of this, Door mentions that she encountered “some Roman soldiers camped

out by the Kilburn river” (89); moreover, when they reach the deepest parts of London Below,

Richard and Door encounter “deep tunnels hacked from the limestone that to Richard felt almost

prehistoric” (262). In the world of London Below, distance is measured in both time and space at

the same time—to move farther away from the central point of London is to move farther back in

time. Richard vocalises as much when confronted with the British Museum station, which is closed

off to his contemporary London but still preserved in London Below: “’How bizarre,’ said Richard.

It was like walking through history” (169). Whereas its entryways are examples of Victorian

architecture, the farther one gets into London Below, the more fantastical the world becomes (such

as Roman soldiers still being alive). The House Without Doors (where Door’s family lived) is

constructed out of separate, unconnected rooms spread out all over London Above, through which

they travel between using magic. Door wonders about the relationship of these rooms, wondering

about one room whether “perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been

destroyed and forgotten” (80). Constructing time on a geographical rather than a temporal

dimension allows the past to be a place to visit, akin to Ankersmit’s image of a traveller visiting

different counties and bringing back an experience. In this case, it is Richard who gains a historical
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experience, as he walks through history.

In London Above, on the other hand, history is lost to the present; only the remnants of

history are left to the modern observer. London contains elements of the “very old and the

awkwardly new” that struggle with each other “not uncomfortably, but without respect” (9). The

city is home to “ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces,” and the only thing in its

description at the start of the novel which truly links it to the past is a complaint about the low

speed of transportation within the city limits (9). Old Bailey also remarks on how London has

changed throughout the years by comparing it to the state of St Paul’s. He notes that while it was

built from white stone, turned black from soot, and once cleaned again, it still remains St Paul’s, but

“he was not sure the same could be said for the rest of the City of London” (165). Interestingly,

while St Paul’s contains some ineffable core identity which remains unchanged, the city itself has

lost its identity. While the reader is informed of the personal history of the London Wall upon first

encountering it (Gaiman suggests it was built because the mother of the Constantine the Great was

sick of all the other potentates’ bragging), it is unfortunately only “one of the last remnants of the

London Wall” (280-81). In London Above, intact history is limited to the British Museum, itself a

“high white Victorian building” (177). It is described as a “repository of so many of the world’s

treasures” which are “looted and found and rescued and donated” but never owned or used (177).

History, in London Above, is locked away out of reach.

There are, then, a few buildings in London Above that thrust forward in time, much like

Runia’s metonymical monuments. Their temporal nature is literally a part of their construction, as

the British Museum is specifically a Victorian building, for instance, and the stones of St Paul’s

remain the same, though once dirtied and cleaned after. The crucial difference between these

survivals of the past and the city is that the latter is considered a living entity in the novel. London

is described as not just “noisy” and “dirty,” but also as “cheerful” and “troubled;” it is described as

some sort of malevolent animal is it “fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them” (9). London

is an image of oppression not only for Richard, who is constantly plagued by anxiety attacks in his
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everyday life, but also as described in general. For while London is “a good place, and a fine city,”

the reader is reminded that “there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good

places have to pay” (9). London thus becomes a grotesque image of a city, almost an actual

monstrosity that devours the people who visit it. It is a city that can be both cheerful and troubled at

the same time, needing and despising its own food. It is no surprise that as a grotesque figure, the

city embodies change and impermanence. As a result, unlike the British Museum or St Paul’s,

which store history in themselves, London is in a constant struggle with its inhabitants and thus is

never truly stable.

The concept of the past being out of reach is emphasized by Door’s remarks on the British

Museum. Upon entering it, she perceives the room and the artefacts on display as being “some kind

of storage space or something” (174). In her experience there is no separation between the past and

the present, so she does not see the museum as a place that preserves. Her first response as an

inhabitant of London Below is to make contact with the artefacts, and she “reached up to touch the

fabric of a suit of antique clothing, displayed on a wax dummy” (174). In her experience, the past is

close and tangible, and the suit is something to be used and worn. Door is, paradoxically, incapable

of a historical experience whilst at the same time serving as the embodiment of it. For her, there is

no difference between the past and the present, so there is no relevant experience of the past. She

has no qualms or reservations about using objects from the past, incorporating them seamlessly into

her contemporary experience. Unlike Richard, who notices something “strange and special about

the quality of this junk” stating that it is “magnificent, rare, strange and expensive junk” (173),

Door makes no observation on the artefacts’ status at all. As a character, she is thus perfectly

balanced between the past and the present.

For Richard, on the other hand, time is something that ticks away on a clock and can only

separate him from his past. This theme for his character is foreshadowed at the start by his

forgetting to confirm a reservation at a restaurant. He learns that “a table for tonight was

impossible,” because “a table for tonight should certainly have been booked years before, perhaps,
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it was implied, by Richard’s parents” (16). Time, in Richard’s experience, is separated from him, as

even the present should be planned out until far in the future, leaving no time for the current

moment. Thus, in his experience, the present can only be the future of the past but never a moment

in the “now.” The error of this way of looking at time is revealed later by the Abbot of the Black

Friars, reflecting on his own use of time: “So the day became one of waiting, which was, he [the

Abbot] knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced, waiting was a sin against both the time that

was still to come, and against the moments one was currently disregarding” (230). In Neverwhere,

time is to be used actively and objects from the past embody that time, so therefore they should be

objects of use as well. At the start of the novel, however, Richard can only construct time on a

temporal dimension, resulting in it being irrevocably lost to him. It is only later, through actual

contact with historical objects (and people), that Richard can recover an experience of the past.

The use of objects from the past is exactly what the reader encounters in the world of

London Below. Characters use old-fashioned lighting sources, such as “an old railwayman’s lamp [.

. .] casting slightly less light than the match had” (69) and the alleyways are gas-lit, as mentioned

before. Antique items also spring to life for those in tune with London Below. Croup and Vandemar,

for instance, hide away “the cellar of a Victorian hospital, closed down ten years earlier” (71). Yet

when called by the angel Islington, they answer the call with “an antique, two-part telephone,

unused in the hospital since the 1920s” (73). While this telephone should surely not have been

functional in the present, the mere presence of these figured from London Below infuses it with

functionality. Similarly, in a display of grotesque imagery by Gaiman, Vandemar employs a

handkerchief that “had originally belonged to a rather overweight snuff-dealer in the 1820s;”

despite being “buried with his handkerchief” Vandemar had gotten his hands on it, though he “still

occasionally found fragments of snuff-merchant in it” (309). Here again, the past is directly present

as an object for use in the present time, and the constant recovery by Vandemar of the “fragments of

snuff-merchant” keeps the past repeatedly in contact with the present. Though Croup and Vandemar

certainly are not the most respectful individuals towards the past (as will be discussed further in the
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next section), this does indicate a practical application of the Abbot’s lesson. The best way to

honour antiques is to keep them in use, because to merely observe them or think about them is to

make them distant, and that might by extension be considered an offense against the past.

The metonymical relationship between objects of the past and the past itself is not merely an

extension of the Abbot’s philosophy, however. When items are introduced in Neverwhere, they are

often accompanied by a brief overview of their history. For instance, when Door and Richard are

offered a glass of wine by the angel Islington, he notes that “This wine [. . .] is the last bottle of its

kind. I was given a dozen bottles by one of your ancestors” (199). Similarly, the lair of The Golden

(ancient rats) is made in a pile of bones that “had once belonged to a woolly mammoth, back in the

cold times when the great hairy beasts walked across the snowy tundra of the South of England”

(266-267). Both a T’ang Dynasty figurine that the Marquis de Carabas offers Croup and Vandemar

(206) as well as the HMS Belfast (273) are introduced in sweeping descriptions that link the past to

the present. The origin is given for each of the two objects, as well as a brief description of its

appearance, and also a story about what happened to it most recently. Through this type of

description, Neverwhere creates a line directly from past to present, making objects stand out as

both unusual and rich in history.

Nowhere in the novel is this more starkly presented than in the presentation of the Angelus

(a door to a medieval cathedral that offers access to the angel Islington): “carved into the wood of

the door, and painted with red and white and gold-leaf, was an extraordinary angel. It stared out at

the world with blank mediaeval eyes” (194). The angel is the subject in the sentence, and it actively

stares out into the world, thus making the Middle Ages a living presence in the present. One

character from the novel even says of the angelic figure that “it was like it knew what I was

thinking” (193). However, quite illustratively, before it was restored to a presentable condition, it

had “decayed, fell apart under the stresses and strains of modern times. Went rotten. Went bad”

(194). On one level this is mere foreshadowing of the revelation of the angel Islington as the main

antagonist. On a deeper level, however, it also comments on the relationship between contemporary
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and medieval culture. It is not the ravages of time, neglect, or abuse that caused the door to decay,

but rather it is the strains of modern life that ruined this piece of the medieval religious artefact. The

door becomes a tragic figure of an angel that weeps and suffers when gazing upon modern life, and

can only shine again in “a moment of pure magic” when Door opens the “enormous cathedral door”

(195).

The most literal and living presence of the past in the present in Neverwhere is the angel

Islington itself (in Neverwhere, angels have no gender). While its age is never explicitly stated (no

character has a definite age in Neverwhere, adding to the overall sense of timelessness), it is implied

that Islington is an ancient creature. Repeatedly, he is said to be thousands of years old (132-33;

309), and has been locked in his prison for so long that “it followed patterns, as it walked, smooth

channels its bare feet had worn, over the centuries, in the rock” (258). Islington even claims to have

been guardian of Atlantis, (200-201), which is suggested to have been so long ago that it has been

lost to human history altogether. It is interesting to note that the prose describing his actions is

frequently interspersed with commas, slowing down its reading as if it was told haltingly by the

narrator. As a result, passages involving Islington’s actions come across as more slowly paced than

the rest of the novel. This is no surprise considering the prison that Islington is in. The angel has

been isolated in a place where it can do nothing but wait (even though Islington contacts Mr Croup

and Mr Vandemar through the telephone during the novel, it is never explained how the angel

managed this). Islington has nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in, which makes the

angel the antithesis of the Abbot and his credo of acting in the present. In essence, the lack of any

point of reference in Islington’s everyday experience results in time losing meaning for it, as there is

nothing that separates one day from another. In essence, Islington survives in its own timeless,

personal hell.

Having been isolated from the present for such a large expanse of time has left Islington

extremely unstable. The plot is fuelled by Islington’s quest for revenge, as he has had Door’s family

murdered, hired Croup and Vandemar, and seeks to conquer heaven (324-326), a clear variation on
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the theme of a fallen angel, though Islington’s sin was the neglect of Atlantis rather than pride.

While a long stretch of isolated confinement would be enough to make anyone unstable, it

nevertheless fits the message of Neverwhere that the separation of past and present is a dangerous

thing. This is particularly poignant when compared to another long-lived character in Neverwhere,

namely Old Bailey, who has at the very least been alive since the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral

(Gaiman 165). Old Bailey, while being somewhat of an eccentric, is an active participant in the

society of London Below, by running, for instance, a stall at the Floating Market (113), and is a

generally helpful character. While this difference might be attributed to idiosyncratic differences

between the two characters, it is nevertheless an aspect of the larger interest of Neverwhere in the

treatment of time and history. More crucially, Old Bailey is continually active in his contemporary

world. Comparing the representation of the two characters to the representation of objects, it can be

seen that Islington is like the unused item from the past whereas Old Bailey is the historical item

that is still in use. These two figures physically embody two contrasting perspectives on time by

virtue of being extremely long-lived, if not timeless. In these two characters Neverwhere’s position

towards past and present as well as what to do with time is once more presented.

3.3 The Threat of Time

Aside from the angel Islington, the two major antagonists of the novel are Mr Croup and Mr

Vandemar, two mercenaries sent to capture Door. Unlike Islington, who is described as being very

similar to a human, these two figures are continually emphasized as being different from humans.

When Richard first describes the pair to Door as “Croup and um, Vanderbilt,” Door is taken aback

for a moment and only after reflection agrees that “I suppose you could call them men, yes. Two

legs, two arms, a head each” (42). Richard, after having been in London Below for a while, equally

recognises their non-natural nature. Upon encountering them in the British Museum he associates

their appearance with an earlier exhibition of modern art that displayed exhumed cadavers (174).

The celebration of dead bodies, and its association with the much alive Croup and Vandemar set the
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grotesque tone for the rest of the exchange between the duos. Croup and Vandemar are constructed

as unnatural figures of terror and decidedly alien to humanity. They find difficulty even in

emulating basic human emotion, such as when “Mr Vandemar showed them his teeth,

demonstrating his sunny and delightful disposition,” which for Richard “was unquestionably the

most horrible thing that Richard had ever seen” (175). This is an example of Gaiman’s grotesque

humour, inverting a toothy smile to mean only horror rather than kindness. It is reminiscent of

Bakhtin’s comment on the true laughter being lost to modernity, where modern satire can only

scathe and harm. There is no sense of playful joy in the smiles of Croup and Vandemar,

unfortunately. While most inhabitants of London Below are more like St Paul’s Cathedral—perhaps

different on the outside, but still essentially recognisable as human—Croup and Vandemar are more

similar to modern London City—having the appearance of contemporary humanity, but being

essentially different and removed from the present.

The alien nature of Croup and Vandemar is underlined by their association with grotesque

and violent imagery. While they do exhibit a playful nature, it is a violent and destructive one.

When Islington commands the duo to simply scare Door and Richard, Vandemar complains that it

would have scared Door “’lots more if I’d pulled his head off while she wasn’t looking, then put my

hand up through his throat and wriggled my fingers about. They always scream,’ he confided,

‘when the eyeballs fall out.’ He demonstrated with his right hand, stabbing up with his fingers, and

then wriggling them about” (179). The combination of the childlike sense of play with the violent

and visceral image of grisly puppetry makes Vandemar both understandable as a person and horrible

as a monster at the same time. His odd child-like nature also resurfaces when describing their

mission to Door, suggesting that it is best not to think of them as murderers but rather as “’[. . .] an

escort service.’ ‘Only without the bosoms,’ said Mr Vandemar. He sounded ever-so-slightly

embarrassed” (229). Croup is more strongly divorced from humanity than Vandemar, lacking this

essential element of playfulness. He can remark “chirpily, ‘Can’t make an omelette without killing a

few people’” (322) upon hearing of the death of Hunter, a companion of Door and Richard. He is
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devoid of any compassion or empathy, and as a result he is fundamentally alien. Even his laugh is

“like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers”(205). Rather

than just simply sounding like nails on a chalkboard, his laugh is a grotesque inversion of normal

human experience and expression.

Croup provides an overview of the duo’s job description when answering the phone,

introducing himself as “the Old Firm. Obstacles obliterated, nuisances eradicated, bothersome limbs

removed and tutelary dentistry”(73). The obstacles and nuisances mentioned by Croup turn out to

be events of historical significance, for when Croup argues to Islington that they are “utterly

professional,” the examples he lists of their qualifications are tragedies such as having “burned

down the City of Troy,” “brought the Black Plague to Flanders,” “assassinated a dozen kings, five

popes, half a hundred heroes, and two accredited gods,” and “the torturing to death of an entire

monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany” (145). The latter misdeed is particularly illustrative, found

in the additional prologue at the end of the novel (itself an interesting position in the timeline of the

novel). While watching the monastery burn, Vandemar asks of Croup what their next job is, to

which Croup replies that it is “’about four hundred years from now,’ he said. ‘London Below.’”36

While they are never said to be time-travellers or to have precognitive powers, knowing that their

next assignment lies four hundred years in the future suggests that Croup and Vandemar have a

unique relationship to time that somehow transcends normal linearity.

Croup certainly seems uniquely interested in time, and for him it is a mix between

fascination, addiction, and consumption. It is best illustrated by the passage following an interaction

between the Marquis de Carabas and the duo, where the former hands over a T’ang dynasty figurine

as a bribe:

Mr Croup examined the figurine minutely, turning it over and over in his hands, a
Dickensian curator of the Museum of the Damned contemplating a prize exhibit. His
tongue flicked out, from time to time, like a snake’s. A perceptible flush appeared on
his pallid cheeks. ‘Oh, fine, fine.’ he whispered. ‘T’ang dynasty indeed. Twelve

Gaiman, An Altogether Different Prologue, Four Hundred Years Earlier. Neverwhere: The Author’s
36

Preferred Text. London: Headline Publishing Group, 2005. Print.

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hundred years old, the finest pottery figurines ever made on this earth. This was
created by kai Lung, finest of potters: there is not a twin to it in existence. Examine
the colour of the glaze; the sense of proportion; the life . . .’ He was smiling now like
a baby; the innocent smile looked lost and confused on the shady terrain of Mr
Croup’s face. ‘It adds a little wonder and beauty to the world.’
And then he grinned, too widely, and lowered his face to the figurine, and
crushed its head in his teeth, chomping and chewing wildly, swallowing in lumps.
His teeth ground the china to a fine powder which dusted the lower part of his face.
He gloried in its destruction, throwing himself into it with the strange
madness and uncontrolled blood-lust of a fox in a hen-house. And then, when the
statue was nothing but dust, he turned to Mr Vandemar. He seemed strangely mellow,
almost languid. (209)

Here too, we see an example of child-like innocence immediately followed by terrible violence. For

a brief moment, Croup is like a baby, though the innocence can only spread as far as his smile. Here

we see the stark contrast between an awareness of a historical object, and the (literally) crushing

immediacy of the moment when Croup consumes the object. The consumption of such a historical

object coupled with the awareness of its historical significance (which Croup eloquently outlines

the very paragraph before) produce a narcotic effect on him. Throughout the passage, his bestial

nature is emphasised as he is both like a snake as well as like a fox in a hen-house. The combination

of the awareness of the figurine’s historical significance with the grotesque description of Croup

serves to underline the horror of the situation. Croup is a terrifying figure because his grotesque

consumption of the figurine is not truly a carnivalesque act, as there is no sense of joy or renewal to

be found here. Croup and Vandemar, are set apart from the normal passage of time, and work as

professional mercenaries who destroy history wherever they travel (as demonstrated by Croup’s

verbal résumé) and either take the remains with them or literally consume them. The description of

Croup in the passage makes him appear like a drug addict, unstable and terrible, designed to make

the reader revolt at the act.

Time, however, is not a powerless victim in this struggle. As time passes, threats grow larger

and stronger, until they turn on humanity. Each large city with a fantastical city below also houses a

mythical beast, which has grown strong over time. Hunter describes the beast that lived under

Berlin as having killed “a thousand men, and his claws were stained brown and black from the dried
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blood of a hundred years [. . .] he whispered words in a human tongue as he died” (228). Similarly,

Old Bailey describes the origin of the Beast beneath London Below as a creature that escaped from

a butcher in the first half of the seventeenth century. Hiding in the sewers, it fed on whatever it

found there, and “it grew, and it grew. And it got meaner, and nastier,” and while de Carabas

believes “it must have died three hundred years ago,” Old Bailey corrects him by saying that

“things like that, they’re too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty” (168). Somewhere, these

beasts make the transition from normal animal to fantastical member of the world Below, and once

there time increases their power. Even the darkness itself has become alive and dangerous in

London Below. When Richard and Hunter have to cross Night’s Bridge (parallel to Knightsbridge

in London), Hunter explains why the journey is so dangerous. “Darkness is happening,” she notes,

“Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave

times, when we huddled together in fear for safety and for warmth are happening [. . .] now is the

time to be afraid of the dark” (102). Time-strengthened threats such as nightmares from the cave

times to now, much like Bakhtin’s perspective on time, are cumulative in nature—the longer

something survives, the worse it gets.

Aside from increasing threats already available to London Below, time also directly affects

its inhabitants. Not only Islington suffers under the passage of time in his isolated citadel but, for

example, Door’s father feels the effects of time as well. Upon seeing a recording of her father, Door

notes that he still “has an easy smile, which she remembers, but which time had diminished as the

years went on” (215). Time is accompanied by events that weigh heavily on the individual,

particularly as moderated by his or her situation. Hunter relates the story of a man who broke

Market Truce (the accord that there is to be no violence during a Floating Market), though leaves

his punishment vague. In the dialogue, Richard learns that long life is not necessarily a good thing:

“’What happened to him? Was he killed?’ Hunter shook her head. ‘Quite the opposite. He still

wishes he had been the one to have died.’ ‘He’s still alive?’ Hunter pursed her lips. ‘Ish,’ she said,

after a while. ‘Alive-ish’” (276-277). Richard is no stranger to the idea that time is not on his side,
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noting that “events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and

leap out at him all at once” (13). He also sees the ravages in time in the figure of the Earl, too old

even to remember his desire for revenge (154), and when imagining the Earl in his prime, he could

see “the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad”

(161). Time is thus as dangerous as it is sacred. Over time, bad turns to worse, and what is good

only becomes less so. This, again, shows the dominance of the present in Neverwhere, being the

unique moment where one can act directly. The image of the Earl and the man who broke Market

Truce send a clear message to Richard: act now, but make sure it is the right action.

3.4 The Malleability of Time

The repeated emphasis on the importance of the present in the novel has an intriguing effect on its

representation. As hinted at before, time is certainly not a linear concept in London Below, as past

and present are intertwined into a timeless moment. The novel does not only deal with the real past,

however. Only two characters in London Below actually admit to this, and only one ever in public.

While Richard, Door, and Hunter are the guests of Serpentine’s household (one of the Seven Sisters,

who are left wholly unexplained and undefined in the novel) Serpentine places Richard in a

Romance framework, calling him Door’s “hero” (220). Yet when Door addresses Serpentine as

“Lady Serpentine,” she is immediately admonished by her host, who has “no time for silly

honorifics and imaginary titles” (221). What is curious here is that, apparently, the title of Lady for

Serpentine would be imaginary, while the appellation of hero for Richard is a valid one. The

Marquis de Carabas also notes the fictional nature of the world Below when he considers that “the

world, Above or Below, was a place that wished to be deceived,” and therefore he “had named

himself from a lie in a fairy tale, and created himself – his clothes, his manner, his carriage – as a

grand joke” (238-239). While Serpentine removes herself from the society of London Below—Door

considers her as much as a bogeyman (224)—the Marquis actively takes up its fictionality and uses

it to his advantage. The Marquis is thus, quite unlike Croup and Vandemar, written in a
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carnivalesque spirit. He adopts a high title for himself, subverting the traditional feudal structure of

London Below as a joke. He actively uses fiction and folk tale to intermingle truth and reality, and

the reader is in on the joke.

Richard, as well, notices an aspect of fictionality in every person he meets in London Below.

He contrasts other characters to the clothing they are wearing, noting often that the person

underneath the clothing seems modern to some degree, while his or her clothing appear to be pale

imitations of historical outfits. His first impression of Door after noting her wounds, for instance, is

of her clothing, which looked “as if she’d done a midnight raid on the History of Fashion section of

the Victoria and Albert museum, and was still wearing everything she’d taken” (30). Similarly, he

encounters people who “looked like they had escaped from a historical reenactment society” (111);

furthermore, he describes The Fop With No Name (a minor character) as looking “somewhat like an

early eighteenth-century rake, one who hadn’t been able to find real rake clothes and had had to

make do with what he could find at the Oxfam shop” (115);and he also encounters a “short, grey,

elderly man-at-arms” who looks “like a recently retired civil servant who had, somewhat against his

will, been dragooned into his local amateur dramatic society where he had been forced to play a

man-at-arms” (149). Richard only once notes that someone actually looks like they belong in a

different time: the Earl’s jester, who “looked like he had fled from a life as an all-round entertainer

near the bottom of the bill on the Victorian music halls a hundred years before” (150). Consistently,

Richard places the emphasis on clothing, and describes the humans underneath as modern people

who simply wear clothing that looks historical. Thus, his emphasis is on history (represented

metonymically here by historical clothing) as a layer on top of an essential human nature, as well as

on London Below as a place of imitation rather than authenticity.

The perception of time is a recurring theme in Neverwhere, as Richard frequently comments

on the passage of time in times of crisis. When in danger, time stretched out for Richard and

“paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heartbeats” (313), or he describes a

“fraction of a second that becomes a tiny forever” (217). When faced with his fear of heights,
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Richard shuts his eyes and loses track of time, as he “opened them, thirty seconds, or an hour, or a

day later” (248). In Richard’s experience, time is often stretched out, particularly when comparing

the world of London Below to Above. When traversing small distances in London Above, he notes

that “it was daylight (how was it daylight? a tiny voice asked, in the back of his head. It had been

almost night when he entered the alley, what, an hour ago?” (49) and similarly later on he can tell

that “it was still night – or perhaps it was night once more. He was unsure how long they had been

walking through the underplaces and the dark” (85). The effect of these reports on perceptions of

time is that it is made elusive. It is never clear what time it is in Neverwhere, or exactly what the

relationship of London Above and Below is when time is concerned. Time is divorced from our

perception of reality, and as a result Richard is left only with an everlasting moment of the present.

Time is not just manipulated in Richard’s perception but also in how locations are

introduced to the reader. Much like the introduction of objects, the introduction of new locations in

Neverwhere is also accompanied by a description of their history. Large swaths of history are

surveyed in these overviews, which provide the sensation of immediacy coupled with timelessness.

The establishment of London, for instance, is described like the growth of an organism, as in one

paragraph the description moves from its founding as a “small Celtic village” to its absorption of all

the villages and hamlets surrounding it (10). Often, the past is placed right by the side of the

present, for instance when after describing the Embankment that replaced “the stinking mud-flats

that had festered along the banks of the Thames for the previous five hundred years,” the narrative

immediately continues with the declaration that “it was still night” (85). Thus, the reader is

constantly jarred from past to present, and the sweeping temporal vistas serve to remove any sense

of linearity in the perception of time in Neverwhere.

Another large jump akin to the description of the Embankment the one is made in describing

the sewers, which in one paragraph move from their original state as “rivers and streams” to “the

thousands of miles of sewers that were built,” describing the journey of waste throughout the ages,

immediately followed by the statement that “it was this journey that the body of the late Marquis de
 91 de Tiège
Carabas was making” (264). The equating of a human body to physical waste is reminiscent of the

description of the birth of Gargantua in Gargantua and Pantagruel, where after the first pangs of

childbirth Gargamelle “began to groan and wail and shout,” and when the midwives come to her

aid, “feeling her underneath found some rather ill-smelling excrescences, which they thought were

the child; but it was her fundament slipping out.”37 It is from Rabelais’s work that Bakhtin work on

the grotesque originated, and the incident of the Marquis’s dead body floating in the sewer (only to

be resurrected later) is a perfect example of such grotesque imagery. Like much of Gaiman’s other

writings, the passage is understandable and enjoyable in its playful transition without the reader

being aware of the literary reference, though knowledge of the literary heritage of the image greatly

increases the playfulness of the grotesquery.

The relationship between architecture and time sparks the only discussion in the novel on

the actual temporal relationship between London Above and Below. Richard asks Door to explain

why it is that London Below still has nineteenth-century fogs floating around when they have not

occurred in London Above for so long. As Door explains it, “there are little bubbles of old time in

London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber [. . .] There’s a lot of time in

London, and it has to go somewhere – it doesn’t get used up at once” (229). Instances of old time

happening in the now of London Below are compared to “echoes,” (229) which fits in with the

general image of London Below being not quite historical, though certainly not contemporary. This

provides an interesting contrast between the people and the architecture of London Below. Whereas

people can only wear artefacts from the past (or recreations of them), the architecture of London

Below is actually invested with old time. This creates a large source of potential confusion for the

reader, as when a piece of historical architecture is encountered it must be real, though when an

individual is encountered in historical dress they need not be from that period yet still might be.

Much like all of Neverwhere, it is the uncertainty of time that dominates the status of any person or

place—the question of its authenticity must always remain a mystery. In this way, Neverwhere

37
François Rabelais. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. London: Penguin Books, 1955. 52. Print.
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92
decontextualizes history for its readers. No longer can a reader assume a sense of linearity and the

dominance of the present, but for each person and object encountered in the book a reader must

wonder whence it originates.

The surroundings of London Below take advantage of the feeling of timelessness, and

become all the more remarkable for their intimate mixture of different historical periods. The Earl’s

court, for instance, is located within an Underground carriage, though one with “straw scattered on

the floor. There was an open log fire, sputtering and blazing in a large fireplace. There were a few

chickens, strutting and pecking on the floor. There were seats with hand-embroidered cushions on

them, and there were tapestries covering the windows and the doors” (149). Here there is no remark

on imitation or the impossibility of a fireplace in an Underground carriage; here the reader finds

only the flat description of elements from different historical periods within the same surrounding.

A similar description occurs later in the novel, when Richard finds primitive paintings in “russets

and ochres and siennas” on cave walls, first outlining “charging boars and fleeing gazelles, woolly

mastodons and giant sloths” which makes Richard believe that “the paintings had to be thousands of

years old, but then they turned a corner, and he noticed that, in the same style there were lorries,

house-cats, cars and [. . .] aeroplanes” (262). Nowhere is this made more explicit than in the

labyrinth beneath London Below. It is literally built of “lost fragments of London Above: alleys and

roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over millennia,” where once again

light fixtures work to indicate historical periods as Door, Vandemar, and Croup “walked through

daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes

and links” (208).

While the outfits of individuals are subjected to doubt, nowhere is Richard reported to doubt

the authenticity of his surroundings. Even though Richard may doubt the possibility of having a

library on a train (160), he never describes his surroundings using the same “it was as if” phrasing

he uses for people wearing historical outfits. When characters in Neverwhere wear historical outfits,

it is the person wearing the outfit that is the modern component of the mix while the clothing forms
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the historical aspect. In the case of the surroundings of London Below, the mixture is found within

the architecture itself. The Earl’s court is within an Underground carriage and the carriage is

integrated into the court: tapestries are hung on its walls, the seats are embellished with

embroidered cushions, and a fireplace is constructed within it. Locations, therefore, provide a way

in which visions of different historical periods can be intricately mixed. Richard’s frequent

confusion concerning time and the passage of time open the door to a more playful approach to

historical periods, and eventually to his resigned acceptance that London Below simply is the way it

is.

The crack that is opened in the door between real and unreal (and equally the historical and

ahistorical) by the continued acceptance of these small confusions is what opens the door for the

fantastical. Slowly, throughout the novel, the normal becomes more fantastical. On encountering the

first bridge in the novel, the Albert Bridge, it is remarked that it appears like “a fairytale bridge

hung with thousands of tiny white lights” (87). This is merely a normal bridge, tinged with the

fantastical. However, when Richard finally encounters the Night’s Bridge (the London Below

mirror of Knightsbridge) some time later, he encounters a thoroughly fantastical bridge:

It could have been one of the bridges over the Thames, five hundred years ago,
thought Richard; a huge stone bridge spanning out over a vast black chasm, into the
night. But there was no sky above it, no water below. It rose into darkness. Richard
wondered who built it, and when. He wondered how something like this could exist,
beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing. He felt a sinking feeling in
the pit of his stomach. He was, he realised, deeply, pathetically scared of the bridge
itself. (99)

This bridge, unlike the Albert Bridge, has no relation to our reality any more. It is accompanied for

Richard by an utter darkness that preys upon his imagination, and his terrors are intensified as “the

sounds were nastier, hungrier. Richard imagined he could hear voices: a horde of huge, misshapen

trolls, beneath the bridge . . .” (102). Though while this is described as his imagination while

crossing the bridge, he discovers on the other side that his suspicions were absolutely true, and

some of the people crossing the bridge were lost (104). This is a clever trick by Gaiman, hinting that

what might at first appear to be imaginary is all too real in the world of London Below.
 94de Tiège
The farther Richard progresses in the world of London Below, the more fantastical the

locations he encounters become. At first, he looks upon the lights of the city of London reflected in

the water and simply describes it as “it’s fairyland,” (85) in hyperbole or metaphor. At the end of the

novel, however, Richard has lost all need for metaphor, as the locations he describes truly are

fantastical. He encounters a “vast Cyclopean gateway” that makes Richard believe that “giants built

that gate,” remembering “tales of long-dead kings of mythical London churning in his head, tales of

King Bran and of the giants Gog and Magog, with hands the size of oak trees, and severed heads as

big as hills” (306). Given the mythical nature of the labyrinth he is travelling in, it becomes quite

likely that these creatures actually did build that gate. It is notable that Richard also no longer

questions the possibility of it, as he does question other aspects of London Below at the start of

Neverwhere. By now, biblical tales (of Gog and Magog) as well as Welsh myth (of King Bran) have

become fact for Richard. Finally, upon leaving London Below for London above, Richard reaches a

place that is beyond both reality and mythology. He reaches a station that “seemed neither

abandoned, like British Museum, nor real, like Blackfriars: instead it was a ghoststation, an

imaginary place, forgotten and strange” (345) His travels started at a place Richard considered to be

reality, continuing through the world of London Below which is reality with an added touch of the

fantastical, to finally reach a place of pure fantasy that can lead him back to the reality he knew.

3.5 Conclusion

Neverwhere is a novel thoroughly invested and interested in the concept of time. Both in its

description of places, people, and objects, it engages with history, whether real, imitated, or

imagined. Richard quickly discovers that “time in London Below had only a passing acquaintance

with the kind of time he was used to” (108). Time is spindled, folded, and mutilated in the world of

London Below until the authenticity both of the past and of historical objects is left unrecognisable.

The lack of knowledge concerning the date or time of the diegetic present, coupled with the lack of

information on the ages of the characters or the actual passage of time, makes Neverwhere a
 de Tiège 95
timeless novel in the literal sense of the world. Without a central point of reference to hang on to, it

becomes more and more difficult for the reader to contrast the fantastical elements encountered in

the novel to a sense of reality. The historical and ahistorical curiosities presented in the novel thus

slip under the radar of critical attention, as they are just one more detail in a swarm of descriptions.

With the waning of Richard’s own critical commentary on the reality of his situation, the novel

slowly lures its reader into a fantastical world outside of time.

The methods examined so far are mostly narrative techniques, that is to say, ways in which

the description of the world of London Below and its inhabitants present a world outside of time.

The argument will now turn to investigate the major vehicle by which the reader encounters the

London Below: Richard Mayhew himself. With Neverwhere’s fascination with time thoroughly

outlined, attention can finally be given to the effect this presentation has on the reader. For while the

novel’s treatment of time serves to disorient Richard in order to integrate him into London Below,

the reader goes through a parallel process in reading Neverwhere. The following section will

examine the effect of Richard’s experience of the fantastical aspects of London Below on the reader,

and the manner in which time and fantasy truly become intertwined to present a wholly new

experience of the world. The following chapter will thus investigate the claim made by Gaiman in

the prologue of the novel: does Neverwhere really show us things anew that we have seen so often

before using the mirror of fantasy?

 de Tiège 96
Chapter Four: The Experience of Fantasy in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

4.1. Introduction

As Gaiman claimed in the introduction to Neverwhere, it was his intention to do for the reader of

the novel what stories such as Alice in Wonderland had done for him. He leaves the actual goal im-

plicit, as he continues by arguing that he wanted to talk about the dispossessed using the mirror of

fantasy. This chapter looks into Gaiman’s implicit goal, and argues that Neverwhere attempts to

construct a believable fantasy world for the reader and invites him or her to accept it as such. This

combines the approaches from the first two chapters, looking into how Gaiman plays with both his-

tory and fantasy in order to remake these into a novel world. This chapter pairs together with the

previous one, which already established that Neverwhere has a strong interest in time, as this one

will further investigate its interest in the world of fantasy. The first section will investigate the prop-

erties of the alternate fantasy world, looking at the relationship of London Above to London Below.

As argued in the previous chapter, London Below is pieced together from bits of history from Lon-

don Above, and this section will demonstrate how London Below has become a new entity all of its

own. London Below is related to but unable to directly relate to London Above. This leads directly

into the next section, which discusses the process by which Richard, as the reader’s medium to the

literary world of Neverwhere, comes to accept the strange fantasy world. Argumentatively, it fol-

lows Richard’s journey from London Above to London Below, ending in a discussion of Richard’s

Ordeal—the crucial point in the story where Richard truly moves from being a member of London

Above to being one of the society of London Below.

In all likelihood, while it was not Gaiman’s intention to make each and every reader dissatis-

fied with their own lives, it was nevertheless likely that his intent was to enrich their experience of

the normal world through the fantasy world. The conclusion will focus on this aspect of Never-

where, tying together this and the previous chapter and firmly establishing them as a case study of

the theory presented in the first two. It argues that by presenting so many familiar sights in a differ-
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ent light and adding an element of history to them (whether authentic or not), Neverwhere adds an

element of the fantastic to the reader’s life. Whether or not people are acutely aware that the Night’s

Bridge as described in Neverwhere could never be found in the district of Knightsbridge in London,

for example, the story added to it by Neverwhere will add a little bit more magic to it. By placing an

average office cubicle worker in a medievalist quest, it provides an accessible window into an expe-

rience of history. This creates not the sensation of what the actual history of London is, but rather of

what the experience of being a hero in such a world must have been like. Before embarking on this

quest, however, this other world needs to be described to see where the quest will end up.

Neverwhere is a particularly fascinating novel in which to investigate the workings of fanta-

sy because, paradoxically, it is not a typical fantasy novel. Rather, it highlights aspects of the fanta-

sy genre and actively plays with them. The fantasy world of Neverwhere, for instance, is a marked

departure from the usual worlds of fantasy. As London Below is located within our own world, it is

not a wholly separate world like one would expect to see in high fantasy. Yet unlike a fantastical

novel, it does present a world separated from ours even though it is located within our world. Todo-

rov defined the fantastic (which, in the definition this essay corresponds to “fantasy”) as existing in

an overlap between the uncanny and the marvellous.1 The uncanny is that genre of writing that pro-

vides a rational explanation for the unusual events in the text, while the marvellous takes unusual

events as being normal. Neverwhere, interestingly, does both. The novel takes a character wholly

ignorant of any supernatural or magical forces (much like the fantastical presents) yet puts him in a

world where a set of fantastical rules govern which are taken as completely normal by its inhabit-

ants (as with high fantasy). The clash of a fantastically (in the sense of belonging to fantasy) igno-

rant character with an inherently fantastical world provides an excellent inlet to an examination of

what fantasy itself does to a reader.

Richard Mayhew, the protagonist, is an everyman, being a simple office worker who is not

particularly happy or unhappy with his life, has a relationship which is neither particularly exciting

1
Todorov 44.
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nor disappointing, and has no particular goals left to achieve. In all ways, Richard Mayhew is an

average and unremarkable person. Equally, the London he inhabits is a boring, simple London—a

plain backdrop for a man with a plain life. Everything about life in the world of London Above is

plain, generic, and generally unremarkable. Just as the everyman represented the general medieval

public, so does Richard Mayhew represent his contemporary readership. He is particularly bland of

character barring a fear of heights and expressions of confusion, frustration, and finally acceptance

of the fantastical world in which he finds himself. Much like in the case of the medieval everyman,

this allows for an easy identification of the reader with Richard, as he or she can read him or herself

into the character. Richard thus forms the baseline of experience that represents the reality with

which the reader is familiar. Like many other stories where the protagonist travels into another, fan-

tastical world (such as Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, some of the examples listed by

Gaiman), the ordinary world is a bland and boring place that serves predominantly to contrast itself

against an exciting and alternative world.

Through the character of Richard Mayhew, Neverwhere can straddle the fence between fan-

tasy and the fantastical. Richard is the reader of the fantasy world around him, commenting upon it

at any chance he gets. Neverwhere thus creates a layered metafiction, where the reader can identify

with Richard’s surprise and wonder when faced with the fantastical events, individuals, and objects

around him, but he or she can also engage critically with Richard himself. How Richard reacts to

the fantastical as well as how he relates it to the normal informs us not just of the relationship be-

tween normal and fantastical but also about how we as readers construct this difference. Therefore,

it is exactly because Neverwhere is not a typical fantasy novel that it can be so informative about

the genre. Much like Bakhtin’s statement that the playful carnivalesque attitude serves to evaluate

culture, Neverwhere’s playful approach to the fantasy genre can open it up for evaluation. The fol-

lowing sections will relate Richard’s experience of the fantastical world to the real world in order to

examine how exactly Neverwhere achieves this effect.

 de Tiège 99
4.2. The Structure of an Alternate World

The worlds of London Above and London Below are mutually exclusive, which is to say that an

individual can only belong to one of the two. Even though London Below (unlike its counterpart) is

aware of London Above, once somebody has entered into the world of London Below, return is im-

possible. This is similar to the general trope of fairytale worlds in medieval literature, where return

was also impossible. Particularly in the Celtic tradition, which later filtered into Middle English

writing (as, for example, in Sir Orfeo), the Otherworld of the fairies was a place existing next to but

separate from normal life.2The crucial factor preventing return Celtic Otherworlds is that time func-

tions differently in them, “so that one year or even one day might the same as 100 or 300 years in

the lives of mortals.”3 This places the relationship between London Above and Below in a tradition

of fairytale Otherworlds stretching back to at least the medieval period. In London Below too, as

discussed in the previous chapter, time functions differently to the world of London Above, much

like in the Celtic Otherworlds. Although Neverwhere does not explain exactly why it is impossible

to return (and, in fact, Richard in the end does manage to return), the original construction of the

relationship between the two worlds clearly belongs in a tradition of fairytale worlds.

According to de Carabas’s description, the two worlds Above and Below are paralleled into

“two Londons. There’s London Above – that’s where you lived – and then there’s London Below –

the Underside” (125-126). De Carabas thus defines the two as being part of the same entity of Lon-

don, though on opposing sides of it. Equally, he defines the direction of the relationship when he

explains that London Below is “inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world”

(126). London Above is given primacy, being defined as the world. Following this up, he immedi-

ately explains to Richard that he “can’t go back to your old home or your old job or your old life [. .

.] None of those things exist. Up there, you don’t exist” (126). The relationship between London

Above and Below is thereby framed in an ontological context. It is not simply the case that Richard

2
“Otherworld.” A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. James McKillop. Oxford Univerity Press, 1998. Oxford
Reference Online. http://www.oxfordreference.com. 18 July 2012. Web.
3
McKillop.
 de Tiège100
has moved from Above to Below or that he is lost to Above but he has in fact fully ceased to exist in

London Above.

One of the problems that Richard experiences in Neverwhere is that, unlike the characters in

London Below, he constructs the difference between London Above and Below to be based on dis-

tance and not ontology. Summing up recent events in a mental diary, Richard remarks that he has

“no fiancée, no home, no job, and I’m walking around under the streets of London with the project-

ed life expectancy of a suicidal mayfly.” (135). Only gradually does he shift his perspective from

geographical to ontological distance. The world of London Below makes him realise that “normal”

and “boring” really are “wonderful” (204) compared to the unusual threats he experiences in Lon-

don Below, and he starts to mix geographical and ontological distance when realising that the safety

of his bed “was another life away” (220). It is only late in the novel that he fully constructs the dif-

ference between London Above and Below as depending on a measure of reality, stating his goal to

be “trying to get back to the real London, and my old life” (227). Finally, near the end of the novel,

he no longer expresses his own location in London Below as a geographical distance from Above,

but rather he expresses it as alternate worlds. In deciding whether or not to stay in London Below

with Door, he realises that “I don’t belong in this world. In my London . . . well, the most dangerous

thing you ever have to watch out for is a taxi in a bit of a hurry [. . .] I have to go home” (351). The

lesson that Richard learns over the course of the novel, therefore, is to accept the fantastical world

as an alternate reality, rather than trying to fit it in with the normal world.

Richard is certainly correct in accepting the two worlds of Above and Below as being sepa-

rate, and this is frequently hinted to him at the start of Neverwhere. In the prologue, when Richard is

still in Scotland, he encounters a strange woman who (accurately, though cryptically) tells him his

fortune (2-4). She tells him that he has “a long way to go,” and when Richard informs her he is go-

ing to London, she remarks that he is bound for “not just London . . .’ the old woman paused. ‘Not

any London I know’” (3). One of the first lessons Richard learns about London is that “the Tube

map was a handy fiction that made life easier, but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of
 de Tiège101
the city above” (10). While this is a literal statement for Richard, involving the actual London Un-

derground, it takes on extra significance as a foreshadowing of the interaction to come between

London Above and Below, as the map corresponds more strongly to the world of London Below

than Above. In fact it serves a function not unlike that of the medieval mappa mundi, which served

not as a guide to travel as much as to describe and define the world. While they might have ap-

peared “detached from the ‘reality’” they were to describe, they “responded to precise functions.”4

The mappa mundi could serve “to understand concepts or theories,” “to locate placenames men-

tioned by ancient authors,” as “the basis of teaching,” or even “to place oneself.” 5 Much like the

mappa mundi, the Underground map Richard has is not to accurately describe what it looks like, but

rather what it essentially is.

When Richard has just entered the reality of London Below and learned that his normal

means of interacting with the world of London Above (such as using public transport, working at

his job, or getting money from an ATM) no longer work, he offers his cash card to a homeless per-

son in resigned exasperation. The reply to his offer is telling, as the homeless person quips: “thanks

a bunch. That and sixty pence’ll get me a nice cup of coffee” (68). Little by little, Richard gets in-

troduced to the idea that the objects and structures he knows from London Above simply do not

apply to London Below. Not only does the Underground map not correspond to any idea he has of

what his world look like, but even his means of payment simply does not match that of the world

Below. At the start of the novel, however, these are still only small mentions that work to foreshad-

ow the more massive transition to come.

The move from London Above to Below is not only associated with loss, however, as the

world of London Below offers its own attractions. When de Carabas examines the study of Door’s

father in the House Without Doors he encounters a room with “maps on the walls, of lands and cit-

ies de Carabas had never heard of” (89). While this may just be a sign of de Carabas’s ignorance,

4
Patrick Gautièr Dalché. “map, mappa mundi.” Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Ed. André Vauchez.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.om (17 July 2012). Web.
5
Dalché.
 de Tiège102
the mystical locations already hinted at in the novel up until then suggest a world which is still

largely unsurveyed. Furthermore, the pockets of time that exist in London Below allow it to pre-

serve sights that have long been lost to the world above. The Beast at the bottom of London Below

is claimed to be “extinct in the world above” though, as typical of all descriptions in Neverwhere, its

exact origin is left vague as it is described to bear “a similar relationship to the mink, and to the

weasel, to that which a timber wolf bears to a Yorkshire Terrier” (214). Being only so vaguely de-

scribed leaves the creature wholly open to the reader’s imagination, who has nothing more to go on

than the knowledge that it “weighs almost three hundred pounds, and is a little over fifteen feet

long, from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail” (214). The enormous creature, according to the

tale of Old Bailey, was supposed to have grown from something escaped from a butchery, further

adding to the impossibility of clearly identifying it. This leads to a sense that the world of London

Below adds an unidentifiable “something” to the world—it is impossible to pin down exactly what

it adds, but what it does add is mythical, alien, yet strangely alluring. Yet at the same time it also

connects, as argued by Ingemark and discussed at the start of the previous chapter, to a larger tradi-

tion of myths about creatures inhabiting the sewers stretching back through the Victorian and medi-

eval eras into the Classical period.

Of all characters in the novel, Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar are most poetical in their admira-

tion of the world of London Below, and they clearly describe it as being a world of beauty. In a brief

moment of non-violent clarity, the duo gaze around the sewers they traverse and express a sense of

pity that London Below is an isolated world. Mr Croup remarks that “it is saddening to reflect [. . .]

that there are folk walking the streets above who will never know the beauty of these sewers,” going

as far as describing them to be “red-brick cathedrals beneath their feet” (261). Their focus, as em-

phasized by Mr Vandemar, is the “craftsmanship” with which they are constructed (261). Their all-

too-brief moment of aesthetic consideration is the explicit formulation of a sense of longing that is

present throughout the book—a sense of longing for a way of life long gone, and an attention to

craft and admiration for architecture that is unmatched by the new buildings of London Above. With
 de Tiège103
that ever-present sense of nostalgia, Neverwhere uses a traditional aspect of the Romance genre.

Romance is “often marked by a persistent nostalgia for some other time (or one might add, place),

which can “pose a significant challenge to the present.”6 Here, the Mr Croup’s implication is clear,

in that there was a sense of craftsmanship present in the Victorian era which is sadly lacking from

contemporary workers. It is particularly ironic that the most destructive duo of the novel (particular-

ly considering Mr Croup’s literal consumption of a historical artefact) at this moment expresses the

most overt admiration of the past.

As hinted at by the remark of Mr Croup that people from London Above will never know

the beauty of London Below, the relationship between the two worlds is uni-directional. It is impos-

sible to move something from the world Above to Below, even though Below reflects Above. Rich-

ard repeatedly encounters this problem while trying to understand the world Below using the mental

constructions he is familiar with from the world Above. At the start of the novel, for instance, Rich-

ard’s guide Anaesthesia fearfully informs him that they are to travel through one of the most dan-

gerous parts of London Below. Richard’s response is telling: “’Knightsbridge,’ repeated Richard,

and he began to chuckle, gently” (92). Unlike the well-to-do district of London Above, however, the

Night’s Bridge of London Below indeed turns out to be a place of terror where Anaesthesia loses

her life and Richard truly learns that the world Below is a place of real danger. Particularly in the

case of Underground stations, Richard is reluctant to accept the structure of London Below over

London Above. When in Islington Station in search of the angel Islington, Richard notes that while

“he knew very little about angels [. . .] he was almost certain that Islington’s Tube stop was named

after a pub, or a landmark” (138). In equal defiance, he asserts that “there are no shepherds in Shep-

herd’s Bush. I’ve been there. It’s just houses and stores and roads and the BBC” (137). Yet in each

case (though the reader never actually encounters Shepherd’s Bush) the opposite is found to be true,

as the world Below does indeed reflect its names in a literal sense. Curiously, the reason for this is

left wholly unexplained. While London Below is explained to be a reflection or echo of London

6
Fuchs, Barbara. Romance. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7. Print.
 de Tiège104
Above, the names of London Above nevertheless apply more aptly to the world Below.

The concept of names carrying special meaning is a common one in fantasy literature. Tom

Shippey, for instance, argues that Tolkien made use of place-names in order to “form yet another

connection with antiquity in which Tolkien took strong personal interest.”7 He argues that of all

words names carry the most direct relationship to an object, as names “weight a narrative with the

suggestion of reality.”8 Shippey argues that Tolkien’s use of place-names was indicative not just of

an interest in the history of names but also of a particular “interest in locality.”9 Gaiman playfully

engages with this idea in Neverwhere, giving the place-names of London a literal reality, with sher-

pherds in Shepherd’s Bush, and the Earl holding court in Earl’s Court. Rather than construct wholly

new fantasy locales within London, Gaiman explicitly uses existing locales but gives them a fantas-

tical twist. In doing this, he works to similar goals as Tolkien, focusing on the locality of the story

and grounding it firmly in London. By using actual place-names, Gaiman creates the impression

that the world of London Below, while being very fantastical and different, is nevertheless just

around the corner, perhaps even in the literal sense.

The reflection of Above in the world Below is not a perfect one-to-one copy, however. The

way London Below mirrors Above is always tinged with a sense of wrongness. In passing the

Night’s Bridge, Richard appears to clue in on the literal nature of the names of Below, asking

whether there is “anything, really, to be scared of,” and reacts to the reply (“Only the night on the

bridge”) from the perspective of an Above Londoner: “The kind in armour?” (101). Richard re-

mains insistent on the Above spelling of Knightsbridge, though soon after learns that the Below

version of Night’s Bridge is far more terrifying than any knight could be. This humorous inversion

typifies the carnivalesque atmosphere that is present within the novel. Not only does this express

the type of carnivalesque inversion found in the relationship between Above and Below, where

London Below exhibits the true meaning of place-names, but it also manages to subvert the expec-

7
Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien Author of the Century. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001. 57. Print.
8
Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien 57.
9
Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien 59.
 de Tiège105
tations of the reader. Here, Richard expresses the expectation of the reader, that the place-name of

Knightsbridge versus Night’s Bridge should somehow involve a type of pun involving medieval

allusions. However, Neverwhere playfully inverts this expectation by setting the reader up for yet

another change. Here, the medieval aspect of the fantasy world is explicitly removed, highlighting it

in its absence. Richard, representing the reader, is playfully turned around once again and prevented

from incorporating the fantastical change into an expected structure.

A similar sense of displacement is described when Richard observes a violent duel that

serves as a job interview for the position of Door’s bodyguard. Upon the painful sight of someone

being kneed in the genitals, Richard notes that “there was a murmur of appreciation” which “was

the kind of restrained and deeply unenthusiastic applause one normally only hears in England on

sleepy Sunday afternoons, at village cricket matches” (117). The sense of normalcy that is attributed

to violent and lethal combat mark it as being almost (though not quite) our own real world. This is

once more reminiscent of the structure of the romance genre, which features “all the trappings of

contemporary court and chivalric culture, so that, for example, Greek and Roman ‘knights’ skirmish

in patently medieval tournaments.”10 In this case, a lethal combat held between challengers for the

right of protecting the young Lady Door, while in a market in Harrods. In this moment, the medie-

val is transported and interwoven into contemporary life, creating a timeless present where a knight-

ly duel can be like a village cricket match. At the end of Neverwhere, when Richard has truly be-

come comfortable with the world of London Below, he can spot this aspect as typical of the world

Below. He ends up in a place that “was not an Underground station. It was above ground, and it

reminded Richard a little of St Pancras Station – there was something similarly oversized and mock-

Gothic about the architecture. But there was also a wrongness that somehow marked it as part of

London Below” (348). By this time, the source of the world around him is truly lost, as the station

can only be described as not being an Underground station while at the same time being similar to

one.

10
Fuchs 39.
 de Tiège106
The structures from London Above cannot accurately describe the world of London Below

because the world Above is too concerned with reality and accuracy. The world of London Below,

rather, is a fictional world in more than one sense of the word. Much like the names of London Be-

low having literal significance (as if it were an allegorical tale), the world itself and its people often

reflect the stories of Above rather than its scientific constructions. One of the first full exposures

Richard gets to the world Below is an impression of people moving towards the Floating Market.

The sight reminds him of “documentary films he had seen of schools of fish, glittering and darting

through the ocean . . . Deep water, inhabited by things that had lost the use of their eyes” (107). Ra-

ther than reflect his knowledge of the world, the sight reminds him of something that Richard had

seen on television. Lamia (a vampire-like companion, much like her name suggests) relates the plot

of Neverwhere to the story of The Wizard of Oz in reply to Richard’s description of his goal. When

Richard states that Islington will “tell Door about her family, and he’ll tell me how to get home,”

Lamia jokes to Hunter that “he can give you brains [. . .] and me a heart” (287). Perhaps most illus-

trative of this tendency is Richard’s description of the approach to angel Islington’s prison:

Richard looked out of the open lift door. They were hanging in the air, at the top of
someting that reminded Richard of a painting he had once seen of the Tower of Ba-
bel, or rather of how the Tower of Babel in the painting might have looked like were
it inside out: it was an enormous and ornate spiral path, carved out of rock, which
went down and down around a central well. (291)

Reminiscent both of the Tower of Babel as well as the description of hell in Dante’s Inferno, it un-

derlines both the break-up in communication that has occurred within the group (through a recent

argument between Richard, Hunter, and Door) and foreshadows the revelation of the angel Islington

as the primary antagonist (being at the bottom of this Dante-esque maze).

The world of London Below thus strongly infuses Neverwhere with a fantastical component.

Central to the opposition of London Above and Below is the question of reality, and the applicabil-

ity of rational structures to a fantastical world. The worlds Above and Below are clearly related, and

intimately so. Nevertheless, they are also in conflict as the structures of either world cannot be di-

rectly applied to the other. Rather, the world of London Below applies to Above in an allegorical
 de Tiège107
sense, as it represents the fictions of the world Above, and the names of Above take on unique sig-

nificance in the world Below. The sense of wrongness that is tied to the world of Below only arises,

therefore, when one insists on applying the rational criteria of the world Above to it. Once the fic-

tional and fantastical nature of Below is accepted and it is recognised as a storybook world (both in

the sense of it being fiction as well as it being like a fairytale), London Below becomes a new and

alternative measure for what is to be called normal. This discussion will now turn to this shift from

the realistic normal to the fantastical normal, and examine the role that Richard plays in it.

4.3. The Experience of Alienation

Just after being transported to the world of London Below for the first time and realising that he is

firmly stuck in that world, Richard continually opposes the worlds of Above and Below on a dimen-

sion of normalcy. Trying to give himself the confidence he needs to enter the Floating Market,

Richard wonders how “normal London – his London – would look to an alien” (112). Rather than

being strange or foreign, the world Below is called alien as compared to normal London, clearly

placing the preference with London Above. When Richard briefly finds himself geographically in a

location in London Above (yet fundamentally still within the world of London Below) he identifies

London Above with three telling adjectives: “it all seemed so normal, so quiet, so sane” (125). Lon-

don Below, in comparison, is like Richard has “walked into a nightmare,” as “last week everything

made sense, and now nothing makes sense” (125). The striking thing about this description is that

the world Below is not just the clear opposite of Above (strange, loud, and insane) but nightmarish.

The use of the word nightmare implies a sense of irrationality and fictionality, particularly when

opposed to Richard’s London.

It is telling, however, that for all of Richard’s emphasis on normalcy and reality, that his ex-

perience of reality throughout the novel is always very fleeting. In the prologue of Neverwhere,

when Richard thinks about his move from somewhere in Scotland to London, his appreciation of

normalcy is only “the sense that he was leaving somewhere small and sensible that made sense for
 de Tiège108
somewhere huge and old that didn’t” (5). Reality, for Richard, is something that must be infused

with immediacy. Only a day after he leaves Door in the care of de Carabas, “the events of the previ-

ous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely” (58). In the middle of the novel,

when Richard must travel through the British Museum to reach the angel Islington, he has “an in-

tense feeling of déjà vu, before realizing that, yes, of course this felt familiar: it was how he had

spent his weekends in the Jessica days, which were starting to seem, already, like things that had

happened to someone else a long, long time ago” (180). Richard’s experiences with Door already

started to fade after a day had passed, and with his “Jessica days” perhaps over a week passed they

had already become part of a history long past, and not even his own at that. This strong sense of a

connection between reality and immediacy remains even after his experiences in London Below

that, not long after being back in London Above, “did not seem very likely, now he came to think of

it” (359). A sense of directness must be a strong component of reality, in order to be recognised as

being reality. Both in memory and in thought the feeling of reality quickly fades for Richard, and

becomes distant and strange. This is a message that returns in various places throughout the book,

one that serves as a reminder for the reader. The message is a means to encourage the reader to ac-

cept what is presented to him or her, as reality is determined by immediacy, rather than a sense of

rationality.

The reason that reality must have a sense of immediacy is that sensory perception is a pri-

mary factor in determining a sense of reality in Neverwhere. At the start of the novel, it is the smell

of a splash of Dettol in a sink that “seemed so utterly sensible and medicinal” that it acts as “a rem-

edy for the oddness of his situation, and the visitor” (32). Equally, during his Ordeal (Richard’s cru-

cial test to see whether he is a worthy hero for the quest he is on), the choice he must make between

his reality and London Below is represented by a toy troll that he had on his desk at his job. It be-

comes “the only fragment he had of his real life,” and thus the key to his reality, for “if he could

only get the troll back, perhaps he could get everything back” (249). In the case of the troll, it would

be the touch of it that would be the crucial element allowing him to return to reality. While items
 de Tiège109
from the world Above initially provide a sensory experience of reality, at the end of the novel they

can only serve as a marker of artificiality. When Richard has returned to reality and has been given

everything he once thought he wanted, he notices his office has “a large green plant, with huge

waxy leaves, of the kind that looks artificial but isn’t” (357). At this juncture, reality is no longer a

singular concept for Richard, and an object from London Above cannot restore a direct sense of

reality to him. Rather, its appearance is simply artificial, while its essence is real.

The dominance of sensory perception in testing for reality does not only apply to objects,

however, as Richard experiences his own detachment from London Above primarily through others

not perceiving him. Richard describes this as being a “kind of non person” (62) while trying to go

into the Underground, comparing his experience to a nightmare where “no matter how much noise

he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all” (59). Door explains that once

“you’re part of London Below [. . .] they [people from London Above] normally don’t even notice

you exist unless you stop and talk to them. And even then, they forget you pretty quickly” (187).

The information provided earlier in the novel by Anaesthesia supplements this, when Richard notes

that “yesterday . . . it was like I didn’t exist any more, to anybody up here,” she notes that “that’s

‘cos you don’t” (86). Clearly, then, being noticed by people from London Above constitutes more

than simply ignoring somebody; Richard not being noticed is equated to him simply not existing at

all in the world Above.

This does not only apply to Richard, however, as every aspect of London Below is actively

not noticed by the inhabitants of London Above. When Dagvard, one of the Earl’s Court, steps out

of an Underground train to get food from the vending machines, “Richard watched the people on

the platform. No one came into their carriage. No one seemed to notice that anything was at all odd,

or in any way unusual” (156). During an encounter where the existence of London Below is made

explicitly clear (a magical door to the angel Islington is opened in front of a large crowd) between

Richard, Door, and inhabitants of London Above, it is suggested that not noticing the world of Lon-

don Below is an active (though subconscious) act on the part of the inhabitants of London Above.
 de Tiège110
After the spectacle, “the guests, and guards, and serving staff blinked, shook their respective heads,

and having dealt with something entirely outside of their experience, agreed, somehow, without a

word, that it had simply never happened” (196). While London Below is directly in the presence of

London Above, however, a sense of reality tends to trickle through. Jessica, when faced with Rich-

ard and Door almost recognizes them from when Richard still existed in her world. However, she is

unable to fully remember, as “she could no more pin it down than she could put her finger on a bead

of mercury,” (183) and later remarking that “there was something familiar about them both: it was

like a trickle at the back of her head, impossible to place, utterly irritating” (190). The rule of reality

presence applies here, however, and very soon after Richard and Door are out of her sight, she has

already forgotten about their very existence once more.

Just as the world of London Above is attributed normalcy by Richard, he equally condemns

the world of London Below for being irrational. He often refers to the world of London Below as

“nonsense,” (45) “madness,” (63) and “utterly unreal” (141). Richard’s experience of London Be-

low is akin to experiencing madness, exemplified at his reaction to the suggestion of finding an an-

gel beneath London; when told that they must go to Islington to find the eponymous angel, Richard

begins laughing hysterically due to “the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to

believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper

breakfast” (131), which, incidentally, is a clear reference to Alice in Wonderland. At other times,

Richard ascribes the madness to the world around him, feeling “like the only sensible person in a

madhouse” (316). His entire experience of London below leaves him unstable, which is suggested

by his co-worker Gary who tells Richard that “for a while you went a little crazy. Then you got bet-

ter” (368). As a sign of Richard’s unstable personality at that time, he replies: “You know what

scares me? I think you could be right” (369). This, however, is only a short-lived doubt for Richard,

as he soon after decides to move to London Below permanently.

What causes such a drastic shift in Richard that he comes to consider London Below a place

he wishes to return to even though he first considered it madness? Despite his frequent protesting
 de Tiège 111
that London Below is a place of madness, Richard very quickly latches on to whatever measure of

familiarity he can find in London Below. After initially mocking Door’s use of a messenger rat to

communicate with de Carabas, (42-43) the very next time he encounters that rat Richard already

feels he is a familiar and normal sight amidst the other strange sights (77). His companions also

correct his assertions about the rationality of London Below. For example, when Richard feels that

the existence of the British Museum station is “going too far” and argues that “there isn’t a British

Museum station,” the Earl quickly puts him down with a quip: “’There isn’t?’ boomed the Earl.

‘Then, mm, then you must be very careful as you get off the train’” (162). Afterwards, Richard is

left silent as the Earl and his jester laugh about the interaction, firmly putting them as the dominant

figures in this humorous exchange. Richard quickly comes to accept strangeness at its face value,

rather than attempt to integrate it into his London Above world structure. As an example, when

Richard encounters a set of wall paintings that appear almost prehistoric in style, he wonders “if the

painters were a race of subterranean Neanderthal Pygmies. It was as likely as anything else in this

strange world” (262-263). The epitome of this shift is when Richard ceases to consider himself the

judge of rationality, accepting that the people from the second Floating Market he visits “were no

less strange than at the last Floating Market; but, he supposed, he was every bit as strange to them,

wasn’t he?” (274).

The key moment in Richard’s shift from rejecting to accepting London Below comes during

his Ordeal to obtain the key to the angel Islington. This is not surprising if Neverwhere is once again

considered as demonstrating a form of romance. In this case, Richard goes through a literal ordeal,

as his value is tested. In romance, the knight’s ordeal establishes a “heroic identity” for the protago-

nist, which often “leads to an actual position at court, thereby reinforcing the feudal system.” 11 In

the case of Richard, his ordeal involves the acceptance of the fantastical world he is in. His ordeal,

in essence, is the acceptance of the feudal world itself. In the ordeal, all of the preconceptions that

Richard carries concerning London Above become inverted, changing his perception of reality.

11
Fuchs 40.
 de Tiège112
Whereas before the Ordeal Richard constructed the reality of London Above as positive, during the

Ordeal his former reality becomes intensely negative. The very second Richard enters the Ordeal he

recognises his surroundings as real, declaring that “this was no dream. Wherever he was, was real;”

this is a realisation that is tinged with negative emotions, as Richard “felt odd: detached and de-

pressed, and horribly, strangely saddened” (244). During his Ordeal, visions of reality strike “him

like a bottle across the face,” (246). His contemporary life becomes an oppressive force, an almost

physical antagonist against which Richard has little to no defence. Yet he nevertheless ends up tri-

umphant by rejecting a return to reality and accepting the fantasy world. Richard thus wins his Or-

deal simply by accepting and preferring his feudal fantasy over the oppression of modernity.

In the Ordeal, Richard is visited by the figure of Gary (who claims to be Richard’s own

mind speaking to himself), who repeatedly puts Richard down, criticizing him by arguing that his

“life’s a joyless, loveless, empty sham” (249). Much unlike the Earl’s jesting there is no humour or

joy in Gary’s discussion of reality. Here only joyless laughter reigns, as “Richard started to laugh

too. It was all too horrible: there was nothing else to do but laugh” (249). This laughter is a literal

example of Bakhtin’s modern, satirical laughter, which does not celebrate but rather destroys what it

mocks. Gary, being Richard’s co-worker, is representative of the oppressive culture, the dominant

hierarchy which cannot be carnivalesque, and cannot celebrate. Thus, Richard’s laughter is more

similar to his hysterical laughter upon first encountering the idiosyncrasies of London Below than it

is to joyful realisation that he is returned to reality. During the Ordeal, it is the reality of London

Above that becomes too crazy for Richard to consider.

Similarly, in the Ordeal the construction of reality as a geographical distance away from

Richard makes a return, though by this time Richard has lost this conception of reality. The argu-

ment that the image of Gary tries to use to convince Richard that he is crazy is wholly focused on

their surroundings. Gary suggests that Richard has to “look at this place, try to see the people, try to

see the truth” in order to recognise that he is crazy, telling Richard that he’s “already the closest that

you’ve been in a week to reality” (246). While at the start of the novel Richard used a similar meta-
 de Tiège113
phor of distance to understand his relation to reality, by the time of the Ordeal this conception has

left him altogether. Now, rather than bring him closer to the Above conception of reality, this sug-

gestion by the image of Gary only serves to confuse him more: “you people keep saying, the closest

to reality, the closest to sanity. I don’t know what you . . .” (247). His confusion is reflected by his

surroundings, as reality becomes the most malleable it has been up to this point in Neverwhere.

When attempting to interact with an image of Jessica, trying to comfort her, reality “slid and twisted

and changed . . .” (248). The frequent use of ellipses in the descriptions of the Ordeal provoke a

sense of waiting, and the suggest an idea of unfinished work as few sentences are coherently con-

structed.

Matching the flexibility of the reality around him, the Ordeal also has grand consequences

for Richard’s conception of self. His identity is fractured as he speaks with visions of himself, who

tell him that they are “whatever’s left of your sanity” (245). Yet despite being a figure separate from

Richard, the image of Gary (and Jessica, at times) speak with his own voice, his “true voice, the

voice he heard in his head when he spoke, resonant and real” (245). Reality, here, becomes closely

linked to Richard’s own sense of identity, and particularly in the matter of his voice. Ironically, the

image of Jessica accuses Richard of being “like [. . .] a different person,” in the reality of London

Above, before he descended into London Below (247). Thus, both by stealing his voice and sug-

gesting that Richard was never himself, his identity is stolen from him.

At the final moment, just before Richard considers suicide as a way out of his situation, he

hears the girl Anaesthesia (whom he lost on the Night’s Bridge) speak to him. What prompts him

hearing her voice is a moment where touch and memory are strongly related to each other. In this

brief passage, Richard has a historical experience that calls the voice of Anaesthesa to him:

There was something in his pocket. He felt it with his fingers: something smooth and
hard and roughly spherical. He pulled it out of his pocket, and examined it: a quartz
bead. He remembered picking it up, then. He had been on the far side of Night’s
Bridge. The bead had been part of Anaesthesia’s necklace.
And from somewhere, in his head or out of it, he thought he heard the rat-girl
say, ‘Richard. Hold on.’ (251)
 de Tiège114
This other voice Richard suspects is him “truly, talking to himself. That this was the real him speak-

ing and he was, finally, listening” (251). This voice is the only one in the Ordeal that indeed tries to

help Richard, and it is ironic that the only voice which is not his own is at the same time his true

voice. His escape from the Ordeal coincides with a total loss of identity, as “Richard had no idea

who he was, any more; no idea what was or what was not true; nor whether he was brace or cow-

ardly, mad or sane, but he knew the next thing he had to do” (252). Thus, his success during the

Ordeal is predicated on him having an intense historical experience, remembering the first moment

he truly realised that London Below was real. At that moment, his past becomes real to him as he

hears Anaesthesia once again talking to him and helping him out. His historical experience allows

him to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and provides him a clean slate to choose which he

prefers, and his decision is clearly fantasy.

Making the decision to join in the world of London Below has a greater effect than just sur-

viving the Ordeal, however. Accepting a world where immediacy of experience reigns, he has also

accepted the relationship of his mind to his body, which causes him great anxiety. His fear of

heights, for instance, actually resides in a fear of loss of control and a distrust of his own actions.

Richard describes this as a “stark, utter, silently screaming terror,” which he defines as what would

happen “if he got too close to the edge, then something would take over, and he would find himself

walking to the edge of a clifftop and then he would just step off into space. It was as if he could not

entirely trust himself, and that scared Richard more than the simple fear of falling ever could” (50).

While he tries to convince himself he is not scared of falling (but rather of ending that fall rather

suddenly and lethally) he is forced to admit to himself that “it was the fall he was scared of – afraid

of flailing and tumbling helplessly through the air [. . .] knowing that there was nothing he could do

to save himself” (293). His essential fear revolves around the connection of man to body, and in

particular his own disconnect from his body. Just before entering the labyrinth of Islington, Richard

is forced to deal with this disconnect when he has to traverse a small plank functioning as a bridge

over a large gap. Richard “noticed after a while that he did not seem to be starting to walk across
 de Tiège115
the wooden plank, despite any ‘walk!’ commands he sent to his legs” (292)/ It is not until his Ordeal

that Richard truly resolves this essential identity crisis.

Richard’s fear and the disconnect between his mental commands and what his body actually

performs is typical of Plessner’s concept of the eccentric position of human beings. We are minds in

bodies, and are always faced with connecting the two. Plessner points out that when doing things

we are not accustomed to that we experience the disconnect between mind and body most strong-

ly.12 This is exactly what Richard faces in his fear of heights, as his body refuses to follow the lead

of his mind. Here, he is directly forced to confront a separation of mind and body. Plessner makes

an interesting remark about animals in this regard, suggesting that “the fact of an animal’s being a

body does not cut it off from its having one. It does indeed live in this separation.”13 What Plessner

means by this is that animals have no difficulties with the relation between mind and body, and ef-

fortlessly switch between the two.14 To match this idea, the inhabitants of London Below, who cer-

tainly do not have Richard’s difficulties in living there, are described in animalistic terms. De Care-

bas’s name refers to that of a cat, Serpentine’s name itself is a reference to an animal, and the

Ratspeakers are generally described as rat-like (69). To live in London Below, then, requires facing

Plessner’s gap between mind and body, and to, in essence, become more akin to an animal, at least

to a certain degree.

Resolving this split between his mind and his body leaves Richard incapable of truly be-

longing to London Above, however. While first waking from the final confrontation with the angel

Islington, Richard relives his experience of identity loss, reinforcing the positive aspects of it:

For a moment, upon waking, he had no idea at all who he was. It was a tremendously
liberating feeling, as if he were free to be whatever he wanted to be: he could be an-
yone at all – able to try on any identity; he could be a man or a woman, a rat or a
bird, a monster or a god. And then someone made a rustling noise, and he woke up
the rest of the way, and in waking he found that he was Richard Mayhew, whoever
that was, whatever that meant. (339)

12
Plessner 37.
13
Plessner 37.
14
Plessner 37-38.
 de Tiège116
His sense of identity has expanded to include the fantastical, as he not only could be a man or wom-

an but also even a monster or god. This is the direct result of his experiences in London Below, as

he had “gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile, into the place of things that are, and it was

changing him” (311). Here, he truly embodies a pre-linguistic experience, experiencing the world

without a crust of interpretation (in the words of Ankersmit). The change he experiences, however,

makes him more a part of the world Below than of the world Above. Once he has returned to Lon-

don Above at the end of the novel, he notices that he is no longer truly interested in it. When out in

a pub with his co-workers, “he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was say-

ing, and, which was worse, that he was not interested in any of the bits he was able to hear” (365).

His desires no longer lie in what London Above can offer. Here again the reader can see a negative

image of what the modern world offers its inhabitants, alongside a strong sense of nostalgia for the

fantastical world of London Below.

Through his adventures in London Below, Richard has truly integrated into that fantastical

world. Because he passed the Ordeal, he was “One of Them,” remaking himself in primitive terms

and taking care of the women in his group as a primitive hunter: “He would Go, and he would

Bring Back Food” (276). The reforging of Richard as a primitive hunter is made complete by his

slaying of the Beast beneath London Below. Hunter instructs him in a ritual involving the blood of

his slain prey, and at that time Richard notices that it is no longer strange to him; rather, when he

“touched his hand to his tongue, tasting the salt of the creature’s blood: it did not, to his surprise,

revolt him. It tasted utterly natural, like tasting an ocean” (319). In this act, he has slain a mighty

beast, halfway fulfilling his role as Door’s hero, and chivalric knight on a quest. After slaying his

proverbial dragon, however, he still has to rescue the Lady Door. Nevertheless, Richard’s experi-

ence of the world becomes more direct and from this moment to the end of the novel he is no longer

interested in the structures of the world of London Above. Once he is back in the world Above, “he

soon found that he had stopped buying newspapers to read on his journey in the morning and even-

ing,” preferring rather to “scan the faces of the other people on the train, faces of every kind and
 de Tiège117
colour, and wonder if they were all from London Above, wonder what went on behind their eyes”

(362). In this mannerism, he becomes more like the image of the Abbot of the Black Friars, being

interested less in stories of what happens all over London Above and preferring to focus on the

moment at hand.

4.4. The Acceptance of Difference

In the introduction to Neverwhere, Gaiman makes the claim that he wrote the novel for a specific

purpose, to do for the reader what the fantastical works of his youth had done for him while read-

ing. Having now examined the interest in time that is prevalent throughout Neverwhere as well as

the questions it raises about the relationship between reality and fantasy, the purpose that Gaiman

hinted at can finally be deduced. The key to discovering Gaiman’s goal lies in the protagonist of his

novel. Richard undergoes many ordeals in Neverwhere, including a literal Ordeal. Up until this

point, parallels have been pointed out to the romance genre, as Richard fares out into the world not

unlike a chivalric knight. He journeys away from his homeland of London Above and visits courts

such as Lord Ratspeaker’s (69) and the Earl’s Court (151), undergoes a test of character in his Or-

deal (243-252), and slays a beast (317). Though he does not get to save the noble Lady Door (Door

actually saves herself), he nevertheless has gone on a mighty quest to do so (332). In this, the fanta-

sy world of Neverwhere shares a great deal with the world in the romance tradition of writing.

However, Gaiman does not limit himself to appropriating elements from only that genre of

medieval writing. While the narrative of Neverwhere lends its exciting aspects from the romance

genre, taking from it a sense of adventure, it takes its power to potentially teach its readers from the

medieval genre of the dream vision. Traditionally, a dream vision begins with a dreaming falling

asleep while “wrestling with some problem or vexation” to awaken in a “symbolic landscape.”15

This is exactly what happens to Richard, who falls asleep while brooding over his problems with

15
Amy Amendt-Raduege. “Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies 3
(2006): 44-45. Print.
 de Tiège118
Jessica, imagining a future where “everything would be all right” (58). The next morning, he starts

off on his long quest in the strange world of London Below. Throughout the novel, the reader en-

counters many traditional aspects of dream visions, such as an “emphasis on the visual experience

of the dreamer” in Richard’s descriptions of people and places; as well as landscapes which are

“highly developed” and “have symbolic significance,” such as the various underground stations and

their symbolic names; all of which essentially serving “as a means by which the dreamer attains

knowledge which he or she would otherwise lack.”16 In this case, the knowledge attained by Rich-

ard is an increased perspective on the relationship between reality and fantasy. The following sec-

tion will be a brief look at what effect viewing Richard as an everyman knight having a dream vi-

sion has on the way we read the novel, before leading on to the conclusion of this chapter, which

will bring the argument back to an evaluation of the theory and an examination of the case study in

light of that theory.

As suggested above, Richard is the conduit by which the reader encounters an alternative,

fantastical world. Being from a world similar to ours and not having any uniquely identifying char-

acteristics (other than a fear of falling, which is hardly uncommon), the reader is free to fill in the

blank slate that is his character. Throughout the novel, Richard is the character closest to the experi-

ence of the reader, and gives voice to the objections any person would have upon encountering, for

instance, the non-existent British Museum station. As the novel progresses, however, Richard asks

fewer and fewer questions, and eventually Richard’s acceptance of the world of London Below

means that the reader who identifies with Richard must, by proxy, also accept the rationality-

defying sights in Neverwhere. Equally, though, Richard remains a fictional character, and therefore

the reader can enjoy a measure of ironic distance. Upon facing the Night’s Bridge, the reader can

enjoy his ignorance by being able to read the difference between Knightsbridge and Night’s Bridge,

whereas Richard is still fooled by the homonym. The reader can thus have the best of both worlds,

identifying with Richard when he is admirable or interesting, yet being an amused observer when

16
Amendt-Raduege 45.
 de Tiège119
he is a figure of ridicule.

Richard is a safe space for exploring the fantastical strangeness of London Below. In as

much as he is like the reader, he or she can identify with Richard; in as much as Richard fails to live

up to expectations, he can remain an object for the reader’s enjoyment, be it through dramatic irony

or the enjoyment of a position of superior knowledge. Equally, the world of London Below is a safe

area of a playful nature. While it most certainly has its dangerous elements, such as a lethal duel

functioning as a job interview, these are treated as lightly as a Sunday cricket match. The direct

threats that are encountered in London Below are fantastical in nature, alien enough to reality to be

confined to that alternative world by definition. Furthermore, the truly fantastical threats in the

world of London Below are not described. It is unclear what exactly happened to Anaesthesia on the

Night’s Bridge, only that she is no longer with Richard after crossing; equally, the Beast beneath

London Below is never actually described—there is only the sense that it is massive, old, and terri-

ble. The only true and understandable threats are Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, though the duo never

actually does much beyond threaten people throughout the novel. Much like other threats in Never-

where, their terror is only referenced, but never directly observed.

The true magic of Neverwhere is found in its intricate mixture of fantasy, reality, and history

to create an everlasting present that provides access to each of these three aspects at the same time.

Through the development of Richard as the story progresses, Neverwhere subtly imparts the mes-

sage that reality is a relative concept determined predominantly by perception. As Richard slowly

ceases to doubt the fantastical and wonderful sights that he is faced with, he equally comes to accept

that the past is directly available to individuals in the present. The start of the novel presents the

reader with descriptions of modern people in historical dress, whereas the latter part of the novel

speaks of a tacit acknowledgement of the authenticity of its historical surroundings—at no point in

the novel is it doubted that the individual historical components of the maze beneath London could

be inauthentic. Through Richard, the reader is presented with the choice between London Above

and Below, and Richard clearly chooses the world Below. Where once the plainness of the world
 de Tiège120
Above was a merit in Richard’s eyes, at the end of the novel it is too dull and uninteresting to keep

his attention. The excitement of the fantastical, the ever-present now moment that London Below

offers is too appealing to Richard to remain in the world Above any longer.

What sets Neverwhere apart from most other fantasy works is that its fantastical world is not

a place wholly set apart from the world its readers live in: it is neither a distant, alien world such as

seen in A Voyage to Arcturus, nor is it a world in the distant past of Earth such as Tolkien’s Middle-

Earth. Neverwhere, rather, presents the reader with a world that is a dream vision of the very world

we live in. It uses the names and locations of places that can be found in the world outside of the

book, and represents them in part realistically and in part fantastically. As a result, it imprints the

world outside of the novel with a sense of the fantastical. The repeated suggestions that the world of

London Below is constantly around, among, and within the world of London Above (though hidden

from normal vision) suggests that the fantastical worlds Below might be present in our immediate

surroundings. The engaged reader travelling through the Earl’s Court line may wonder about the

Earl’s Court of London Below, much like C.S. Lewis’ assertion that reading of enchanted woods

makes the woods of our own reality seem more magical.17

Aside from making reality appear more fantastical, Neverwhere also makes its readers more

aware of the presence of history. The frequent passages in the novel introducing new parts of Lon-

don are always accompanied by a brief historical description. Whether or not these are accurate

(often, they are not) they nevertheless infuse the architecture of London with the sense of historical

weight. Equally, in his description of the cultures of London Below, Gaiman links contemporary

cultural trends such as Gothic fashion (in the form of the Velvets) or Steampunk (in the descriptions

of Door and her house) to periods such as the Victorian era. The repeated emphasis of Neverwhere

is on the presence of history in the present and historical objects not as artefacts to be isolated but as

objects for use. It therefore develops and sustains the conceit that the present in which the reader

17
C.S. Lewis. "On Three ways of Writing for Children." In Of This and Other Worlds. Edited by Walter
Hooper. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1982. 64-65. Print.
 de Tiège121
lives is deeper and richer than only the current moment. Rather, the present is the summation of all

time up until that moment, as history lives on, whether this is literally in the bubbles of old time in

London Below, or through the survival of historical objects in the present.

What Gaiman thus intended Neverwhere to do for the reader is to enrich his or her experi-

ence of the present reality. Neverwhere is a novel-length invitation for the reader to look at his or

her own world in a wholly new and fantastical light. Through the eyes of Richard, the reader can

directly experience a world of wonder, which is so closely allied to his or her own world that for all

intents and purposes it might as well be. Through the eyes of Richard, the reader can engage with an

angel older than recorded history, and experience Richard’s cathartic recreation of self in his Ordeal.

But most importantly, through the eyes of Richard, the reader can embark on a modern quest to save

a damsel in distress and discover that one need not be a character in a medieval Romance in order to

experience a sense of heroism. Neverwhere takes equally from the present and the past, to inter-

twine the two into a new tapestry where fiction and reality intermingle to a point where the differ-

ence between the two is no longer relevant.

4.5. Conclusion

Throughout Neverwhere, the reader is presented with a fantastical world that mixes together modern

characters with premodern and mythical characters and creatures. Not only is the narrative of

Neverwhere reminiscent of both medieval romance and a medieval dream vision, the story itself

presents its readers with a feudal class structure and feudal characters, up to the point where the

protagonist is integrated into that system by virtue of being knighted. The novel features characters

who are extremely long-lived, and who clothe themselves according to fashions of multiple differ-

ent time periods. Not only that, but the locales in which the characters find themselves are infused

with history, and some have even been part of history. Moreover, the world of London Below in

Neverwhere contains pockets of old time, stored away through some unexplained phenomenon,

which affects time in wholly fantastical ways. In short, time and temporality are topics which are
 de Tiège122
highlighted in Neverwhere.

Of all the different time periods presented in Neverwhere, there are two that particularly

stand out as being privileged, namely the Victorian era and the medieval period. For instance, the

sewers that Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar appreciated greatly are constructions of a Victorian past.

Similarly, as mentioned above, many locations are gas-lit, hearkening back to Victorian street

scenes. Moreover, certain characters clothe themselves in Victorian fashion, such as Door’s per-

ceived raid on the Victoria and Albert Museum. However, interestingly enough, while on first

glance the Victorian era appears privileged in the novel it is, in fact, only a reflection of a deeper

nostalgia that infuses Neverwhere. For while the outward appearance of London Below might be

Victorian, the core of the world Below is undoubtedly medieval.

Firstly, the characters in Neverwhere are organised in a feudal system, with various Lords

and different houses, and they inhabit a number of courts present in the novel. Secondly, Richard’s

journey as a protagonist is only complete not once he has been integrated in the feudal structure but

only after he has made the conscious decision to take up permanent residence in it at the end of the

novel. Thirdly, the Abbot, the one character from the book who explicitly offers a philosophy of

how to treat time, is clearly modelled after a medieval Dominican monk. Finally, the structure of the

story itself is modelled on medieval narratives, with Richard as the hero protagonist off on a quest

to “undistress” his damsel, Door, as he travels across an unknown land, battles and defeats a vicious

beast, and wins his rightful place among the courts. The core of Neverwhere is thus deeply engaged

with the medieval period on all levels, and the appearance of its Victorian shell can be seen as a

reflection of that core through the interest in the medieval period during the Victorian era.

What, then, is the major perspective that Neverwhere has on the medieval period? As men-

tioned, the novel is infused with a deep nostalgia for the past in general. However, the medieval

period in particular is attributed high praise. The most illustrative example of this is Richard’s re-

ward at the end of the novel. After having defeated the beast beneath London Below, and being con-

sidered crucial to the defeat of Islington, Richard is rewarded by being knighted by the Earl. Clear-
 de Tiège123
ly, belonging to this feudal system is the ultimate good that can be offered to a hero. Not only that,

however, but the medievalist world of London Below is also constructed as experientially superior

to that of London Above. Richard’s anxieties are caused by events in the world Above, and eventu-

ally even just by his mere presence there. The fact that Richard is more at ease in the medievalist

world Below suggests that a medieval structure is simply more natural for Richard. Finally, and

perhaps most crucially, is the status of the worlds Above and Below. London Below is filled by the

people who fall through the cracks of the world Above. This implies that London Below is a more

inclusive world than the London Above, as those who do not fit Above will always be able to find a

place Below. Thus, the relationship might be plotted in Bakhtinian terms, where London Above is

the official culture—a constructed hierarchy that oppresses its inhabitants—while London Below is

a carnivalesque popular culture, a place where everyone is accepted equally.

As the protagonist of the novel, Richard is the vehicle through which this positive attitude

towards the medieval period is conveyed to the reader. By virtue of him being an everyman figure,

he is a blank slate into which any reader may imagine him or herself. Richard constantly and con-

sistently questions the fantastical world around him, and nearly each and every time he is corrected

in his assumptions by those around him. As Richard is being taught the value of the world of Lon-

don Below, so too through him is the reader instructed on the merits of this fantastical world. This

strong identification is made possible because Richard is so inherently of the reader’s own reality,

being an average working man. Yet nevertheless the reader is reminded that Richard’s reality is only

slightly removed from the fantastical world which he has been a part of throughout most of the

book.

Richard’s normal reality is made the more magical once he has learned that the world Below

is built not just below, but in, around, and above his normal experience of life. After returning to

London Above, Richard scans the faces of the people around him, wondering “if they were all from

London Above, wonder what went on behind their eyes” (362). The aspect of the fantastical being

just behind someone’s eyes is the core lesson that Richard has learned in his journey. This is how
 de Tiège124
Gaiman intended to achieve the goal he outlined in the prologue, of doing for his reader what sto-

ries such as Alice in Wonderland had once done for him. Neverwhere constructs the idea that there

is a magical world just out of reach of the reader’s normal perception of reality. By tying the story

so intimately to the city of London, the reader of Neverwhere will have gained a host of associations

with various locales around the city after finishing the novel. The interweaving of the real world

with the fantastical world in Neverwhere opens the door for similar associations between the world

outside the novel with that inside it. As a result, the actual district of Knightsbridge in London is

conceptually linked to Knightsbridge in the novel, and by association the Night’s Bridge. Similar to

C.S. Lewis’ assertion quoted above that reading of a magical forest in a story will make a reader’s

experience of actual forests more magical, so does a reading of Neverwhere make an experience of

actual London more fantastical.

Not only does a reading of Neverwhere make for a more fantastical experience of London,

but it also increases the historical weight of that experience. As the fantastical world of London Be-

low is so heavily intertwined with the past in general and the Middle Ages specifically, an fantasti-

cal experience of everyday London is therefore also infused with historical illusion. Whether or not

there is truth in the idea that the London Wall was built purely in response to the nagging of Con-

stantine the Great’s mother, its presence in actual London is connected to this personal history

through the window of Neverwhere. Whether or not the Earl’s Court Station was named because it

was the location of an actual Earl’s court, the reader of Neverwhere will remember it as the location

of a medieval court located within a train car. Particularly the affirmation that the world of London

Below and its denizens is generally ignored by the inhabitants of London Above forms a self-

affirming bias strengthening the illusion, as a failure to detect any truth in these allusions in real life

only fits all too well into the fiction.

The key, then, to Neverwhere’s ability to evoke a fantastical experience in its readers akin to

Ankersmit’s historical experience is the proximity of the novel’s setting to the reader’s reality. By

virtue of its interweaving of reality and fiction, Neverwhere blurs the boundaries between the real
 de Tiège125
and the fantastical. As a result, the fantastical histories presented in the novel become tied to reality,

and this forms a reciprocal conceptual bond. Firstly, the novel gains a measure of credibility, as the

reader can recognise its settings from real life; conversely, the reader’s reality becomes filled with

fantastical illusions, as the fantastical has become interwoven with the real. Neverwhere is particu-

larly effective in this regard because it foregrounds Richard as a reader of his own surroundings.

The reader of Neverwhere is constantly confronted with Richard’s attempts to understand London

Below and to relate it to London Above. Neverwhere is, in this regard, a story about how Richard

understands the boundaries between reality and fiction as well as between reality and fantasy. As a

result, a reader reads not just a story about a fantastical version of London, but also a story about

how to come to grips with that world.

It is ironic that the thing which sets Neverwhere apart as an atypical fantasy, namely its curi-

ous fantasy world separated from but also, paradoxically, a part of our world, is also the aspect of

the novel that makes it so suited to conveying the fantastical experience. It forms the intersection of

many of the concepts mentioned in the theoretical section of this thesis: firstly, it is a carnivalesque

world, showing its reader an inversion of his or her normal reality full of playful irreverence and

alterations; secondly, it is heavily infused with a sense of longing and nostalgia, creatively bringing

to life a medievalist past and presenting it once more as actively in everyday experience; finally, it

functions not unlike a metonymical monument, although in this case it extends not from the histori-

cal past into the present but from a fantastical fiction into reality. The novel displays a postmodern

self-reflexivity, as it is itself an artefact capable of provoking a fantastical experience, as well as

being an artefact about provoking such an experience, demonstrating it in its protagonist.

What, then, can be concluded based on Neverwhere as a case study? On the one hand, it ex-

emplifies the theory, being an artefact capable of provoking a fantastical experience par excellence,

suggesting the viability of the theory; on the other hand, its status as an atypical work of fantasy

means that unfortunately the theory cannot be confirmed for the fantasy genre in general as of yet.

While there is certainly a strong link between fantasy and neomedievalism, demonstrating a link
 de Tiège126
between popular representations of the Middle Ages and the popular idea of the medieval period,

and fantasy worlds frequently exhibit a carnivalesque approach towards reality, their specific ability

to evoke a fantastical experience similar to a historical experience must still be mediated through

the type of world presented to its readers. Therefore, before the concept of a historical experience

provoked by fantasy can be fully acknowledged, this approach much first be applied to more varied

fantasy worlds. Specifically, if Neverwhere serves as an example of those fantasy worlds which are

very closely aligned to the real world, then two more types of fantasy worlds remain, namely the

fantasy world which is wholly different but still essentially a symbolic reflection of our reality, and

the world which is constructed as wholly alien to our reality.

However, much like Neverwhere opens the door to a new fantastical world where history is

allowed to intermingle with the present, so does this case study open the door towards a new per-

spective on the fantasy genre. It is the hope of this author that by examining how a work of fantasy

might provoke in its readers a type of historical experience of a history that never was, the study of

fantasy literature might be given a new impulse. Equally, it can enrich the field of neomedievalism

by providing an outline of how a literary work can construct an image of the Middle Ages. Fantasy

fiction is located in prime position on the intersection where theories on carnivalesque play, histori-

cal knowledge, and neomedieval playful creations of the Middle Ages meet. Particularly given the

enormous rise of interest in fantasy in popular literature, the time seems right to join in on this fan-

tastic play on time.

 de Tiège127
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