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    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!
    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!
    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!
    Ebook267 pages6 hours

    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

    By Tracy L. Bealer and Wayne Yuen

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    Neil Gaiman is the imaginative wizard behind the best-selling novels American Gods (soon to be an HBO series) and The Anansi Boys, the graphic series The Sandman, and popular children’s books like Coraline and The Graveyard Book.
    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy looks at Gaiman’s work through a philosophical lens. How does fantasy interact with reality and what can each tell us about the other? Do we each have other selves who embody different personal qualities? If the unknown influences the known, is the unknown just as real as the known? What makes people truly valuable?

    In Neil Gaiman and Philosophy, eighteen philosophers explore Gaiman’s best-loved and unforgettable worlds:

    The Graveyard Book, a macabre parallel to The Jungle Book, in which the boy Bod is raised by the supernatural inhabitants of a graveyard.
    Coraline, in which a girl neglected by her parents finds another world with an Other Mother who pays her a lot of attention, but then turns out to be evil and won’t let her go.
    Neverwhere, in which a London man discovers a magical parallel city, London Below.
    The Sandman, best-selling comic books in which the Lord of Dreams attempts to rebuild his kingdom after years of imprisonment.
    Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett) treats biblical prophecy, the Antichrist, and the End Times as a hilarious comic tale, filled with sly but good-humored twists and turns.
    MirrorMask, where a young circus girl finds that the pictures she has drawn have given her access to a fantastic world of light and shadow, populated with characters who have designs on her.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Court
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9780812697919
    Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild!

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      Neil Gaiman and Philosophy - Tracy L. Bealer

      Gods

      Behaving

      Badly

      1

      Mr. Wednesday’s Game

      of Chance

      ELIZABETH SWANSTROM

      "It was crooked, said Shadow. All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre."

      Exactly, said Wednesday’s voice from the shadows. It was crooked. But it was the only game in town.

      —NEIL GAIMAN, American Gods

      Meet Mr. Wednesday, the contemporary North-American incarnation of Odin himself, the one-eyed, bloodthirsty Norse god of poetry, wisdom, and prophecy. In American Gods, Odin is a ribald old goat with a black Rolex watch and an ax to grind. His beef? His worshippers have been waning, his sacrifices dwindling, and his popularity as a deity yielding to the newer gods of Media, Technology, and Broadcast—not to mention a rag-tag assortment of African, Asian, and Indo-European gods that have come over on various boats, along with the immigrant people who believed in them, throughout American history. Clearly, there’s not enough worship to go around, so Wednesday needs to take action.

      His plan? By teaming up with his son Loki, and by misleading the other gods into thinking they are enemies, he plans to stir them up to such a frothy outrage that they will fight each other to the death on a battlefield of his choosing. With this plan in place, Mr. Wednesday reckons on causing enough mayhem, enough violence, and enough bloody carnage to revitalize his godhead. And just to make sure there is sufficient chaos and strife, he plans to sweeten the deal with a human sacrifice. The victim? His son Shadow.

      The Sucker

      Meet Shadow, a modern-day incarnation of the Norse god Balder. We don’t know as much about the Norse gods as we do about, say, the gods of ancient Greece, but we do know that Balder, Odin’s son, holds a special place in Norse lore. According to Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (written around A.D. 1220) our richest historical source for the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, Balder is the sweetest-spoken and the most merciful god in the entire Viking mythos (admittedly, this might not be saying much). Unfortunately for Shadow, Balder is also the most gullible, both in the thirteenth century Edda and in Gaiman’s twenty-first-century re-telling.

      In American Gods, Shadow is a muscle-bound convict who likes to do coin tricks. Strong, sweetly naive, and eager to please, he’s exactly what you might think a modern-day Balder should be, save for one important detail: he has no idea of his place in the North-American version of the Norse pantheon, nor that such a pantheon even exists outside of books. At the beginning of the novel, Odin’s gambit—and Odin himself—could not be further from his mind.

      About to be released from prison, Shadow looks forward to reuniting with the love of his life, his wife Laura, who looks equally forward to his release. However, a few days before he’s about to be freed, the warden calls him into his office to let him know that his wife has died in a freak car crash. Stunned, Shadow leaves prison and travels to the funeral. These early events seem merely to conform to the capricious random generator that is fate. Tough break. Bad things happen to good people. We know this. Yet it is shortly after, while Shadow is in transit, that these circumstances begin to emit a causal odor.

      Shadow’s flight keeps getting bumped. He is supposed to fly directly to the funeral home in Eagle Point, but the plane gets re-routed to St. Louis because of bad weather. So he gets put on another flight, runs to make it, only to have it canceled. After running from gate to gate and plane to plane, he begins to feel like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. This is an apt simile, not only because it matches the shuffling momentum Shadow experiences, but also because it foreshadows the revelation that Shadow is, from the very beginning, a hapless component within a larger con. He doesn’t know this yet, however, so he makes one last dash across the airport and gets put on a flight that leaves from the same gate he’d just run from. This flight is full, so, in another (seeming) twist of fate, Shadow gets moved to first class. And it is here, on the only empty seat in the entire plane, that he meets Mr. Wednesday, who taps his finger against his black Rolex and mouths the words, You’re late.

      Now, what’s extraordinary about this chain of events is not that planes get re-routed and flights get canceled. This sort of thing happens with such frequency that a smooth, eventless flight is more of the exception than the rule. What pushes this sequence of events into the philosophically murky territory of causation is the fact that Mr. Wednesday appears to have orchestrated it. Coincidence—the idea that two things can happen simultaneously—is one thing. This is altogether something different. How so? There are at least ten related events that unfold sequentially to create this initial meeting.

      1. There is Laura’s death, which

      2. results in Shadow’s early release from prison, which

      3. puts him on a certain plane, which

      4. gets re-routed, which

      5. results in a re-scheduled flight, which

      6. is cancelled, which

      7. forces him on yet another flight, which

      8. is full, which

      9. means he must take the only open seat on the plane (in First Class, to boot—how often does that happen?), which

      10. puts him right next to Wednesday, who offers him a job.

      At this initial meeting, Shadow rejects the offer for work and leaves Wednesday behind. Yet like an Ace of Spades in a dirty game of poker—drawn firstly to complete a highly unlikely inside straight (the odds are 253.8 to 1), and then secondly an even more unlikely full house (693.2 to 1), and then thirdly to top off a nigh-impossible royal flush (a whopping 649,739 to 1)—Mr. Wednesday keeps turning up.

      Shadow rents a car and, on the (seemingly) chance suggestion of a gas attendant in the town of Nottamun (pop. 1301), stops for a bite to eat at Jack’s Crocodile Bar in the middle of nowhere.¹ And who should be there to greet him? Wednesday, naturally, grinning like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence. And here, again, Mr. Wednesday offers Shadow a job. Tired from Wednesday’s relentless haranguing, Shadow—father’s son that he is, even though he doesn’t know it yet—attempts to con his way out:

      Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking against his finger as it left his hand, giving it a wobble as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.

      Call, he said.

      Why? asked Wednesday.

      I don’t want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call.

      Heads, said Mr. Wednesday.

      Sorry, said Shadow, without even bothering to glance at the quarter. It was tails. I rigged the toss.

      Rigged games are the easiest ones to break, said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. Take another look at it.

      Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face-up.

      I must have fumbled the toss, he said, puzzled.

      You do yourself a disservice, said Wednesday, and he grinned. I’m just a lucky, lucky guy. (p. 34)

      Wednesday’s clearly up to something here. Shadow knows it, we as readers sense it, and Wednesday’s shit-eating grin confirms it. Yet Shadow gets suckered, all the same. But how? While another, less causally savvy god might simply have plucked Shadow from jail and made him get to work through the sheer force of his divine will, Wednesday’s modus operandi is more subtle and smooth, and therefore more effective: he stacks the deck unfairly and deals it against his mark. Faced with such power, Shadow does what many a mortal would do when put in a similar situation: he succumbs. Shadow agrees to work as Odin’s henchman, even sealing the deal with three sips of mead.

      But Shadow is unaware of his role in Wednesday’s greater scheme, or, indeed, that Wednesday has a greater scheme, and it is not until the climactic final moments of American Gods—as Shadow hangs from a Virginian version of the mighty Yggdrasil, the tree of knowledge that connects the nine worlds in Scandinavian mythology—that he realizes that he has been a pawn in a confidence scheme of epic proportions, that he has been thoroughly and utterly duped.

      For Shadow, this realization is crucial, because it allows him, finally, to participate actively in a game he did not even know he was playing. For the reader interested in philosophy, this realization is equally crucial, because it foregrounds how American Gods manages to foil any commonsense understanding of causality.

      Hume’s Pool Cue

      The most common, and common-sense, idea we have about causality is the notion of derivative causality, which we inherited from antiquity. This idea—that every cause has a result, and that, conversely, every event is the result of a cause—is an ancient philosophical premise that dates back to Democritus, to Leucippus, and to Plato, who writes in the Timaeus that everything which becomes must of necessity become owing to some Cause (section 28A). Yet the notion of derivative causality is most forcefully put forward by the Stoic Philosophers of ancient Rome. It is Seneca the Younger, that most Stoic of them all, who puts it most succinctly:

      It is the connection of cause to cause which out of itself produces anything . . . nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about. (On Divination 1.125–26)

      Seneca would know. His knowledge of cause was hardly that of a lofty academic. He got caught in a treacherous and inescapable web of consequence that eventually resulted in his own elaborate and painful suicide, ordered by the mad Emperor Nero.

      The idea that everything derives from an identifiable cause, perhaps not surprisingly, sets off a causal chain of its own. When people start believing that everything that happens had to have happened because it was caused, they begin to doubt that there is such a thing as chance, or such a thing as free will. And this is a threat to traditional religion.

      The concept of derivative causality shifts and re-settles during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but it experiences its most dramatic upheaval in the eighteenth century, with the Scottish philosopher David Hume. A child prodigy, Hume enters the University of Edinburgh at age twelve, ostensibly to study law, but instead becomes obsessed with the philosophy of antiquity and the issue of causality particularly. Hume’s idea of causation is clearly informed by the ancient writing of the Stoics, as well as by the more nuanced understanding of derivation and responsibility that Aristotle articulates, and the theory of flux and flow that the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus outlines. Yet Hume’s novel take on causality distinguishes him from any prior philosopher.

      Hume’s notion is that causality is not, in fact, a physical law that can be proved by experiment. All that we observe is that some things happen together, and if they always happen together, we start to expect one event to occur after the other event. Hume calls this happening together constant conjunction. Consider, he suggests, a simple game of billiards:

      Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any which we know, either by sensation or reflection. Let us therefore examine it. (Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature)

      Hume does just this, and through his examination of these two billiard balls he comes up with three criteria for causation.

      The first criterion is the contiguity of time and place, which means that in order for something to result in something else, the first thing must be in proximity to the second, just as the first billiard ball must be in proximity to the second billiard ball, in order to strike it; secondly, causality requires priority in time, which means that for something to cause something else to happen, it must precede it in time. So far, this conforms well enough to our common-sense idea of cause and effect. It is Hume’s third criterion that shakes things up:

      Let us try any other balls of the same kind in a like situation, and we shall always find that the impulse of the one produces motion in the other. Here, therefore, is a third circumstance, viz., that of a constant conjunction betwixt the cause and effect. Every object like the cause produces always some object like the effect.

      At first glance, this third criterion seems merely to suggest the repetition of the first two. However, Hume goes onto explain that it is this repetition that gives rise to our concept of causality. The causal relation does not emerge from anything inherent in the billiard balls themselves, nor, in fact does any causal association result from the objects that seem to cause them: When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, Hume says, and insists that There is nothing in these objects, abstractly considered, and independent of experience, which leads me to form any such conclusion. Hume’s point is that we never observe causes and effects. Cause and effect is not something that we see in nature, but something we invent.

      Recognizing that we are creatures who tend to associate things in our minds, Hume nails the fact that we become habituated to certain associations, that we learn to accept them as inexorably, causally linked, even though there might not be any necessary relation between them at all. Mr. Wednesday understands the power of association via constant conjunction quite well—so well that he is able to weave a web of causality so dense that its consequences appear to be driven by chance.

      The Two-Man Con

      As we’ve seen, the early moments of American Gods seem to reveal Odin as a master manipulator of chance. Yet it is precisely the opposite that is true. Odin doesn’t manipulate chance. By definition, chance is the absence of cause, independent of derivative laws, and therefore immune to manipulation, even from a divine agent (unless, of course, that divine agent is Chance itself, as we shall see). Instead, Odin’s actions point to a set-up. A good set-up requires that everything be in place from the very beginning, and Odin and Loki construct a very good set-up indeed, a set-up so cleverly fore-grounded that it can only be seen in retrospect.

      To see how it works, we have to go back in time, before the death of Shadow’s wife, before his time in prison, before the death of his mother, who refuses to reveal the name of his father, and all the way back before Shadow was born, even. It all begins here, with the seduction of Shadow’s mom by a smooth-talking, one-eyed con man under the romantic, prismatic light of a dance hall’s disco ball, thirty-three years before the novel begins, on the very night of his conception. Nine months later, a sucker is born.

      Loki and Odin need Shadow to get the battle going. But they have to figure out how to motivate him without letting him know that he’s their sacrificial lamb or calling attention to their larger scam. Wednesday even spells it out for him, later on:

      "I needed you. Yes. My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the country. It took us so long to find you. And when we did find you, you were in prison. We needed to find out what made you tick. What buttons we could press to make you move. Who you were." (p. 534)

      Enter Low Key Lyesmith, a grifter from Minnesota who shares Shadow’s prison cell. Loki gets himself planted in the slammer with Shadow so he can identify Shadow’s weak spot, which turns out to be how much he loves his wife Laura. With this information in hand, Loki leaves so he and Wednesday can refine their plan. By killing Shadow’s wife, they think they will make Shadow their man. It almost works.

      But how so? How are they able to pull off a scheme of such epic proportions, with such a simple plan, which is basically nothing but a two-man con: Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game (p. 532). The answer is misdirection, or the art of distraction. In terms of Hume’s notion of constant conjunction, misdirection takes advantage of the way we form causal connections. Because we make causal inferences based upon associations, misdirection nudges us to form causal links where none exist and, even more disastrously for Shadow and his wife, to ignore the links that actually do.

      It’s Called Misdirection

      Misdirection is named at least twice in the book, first, in an innocent offhand comment made by Shadow, and secondly, by a sinister Odin who reveals he’s been the one doing the misdirecting all along. In the first instance, early on, Shadow’s perfecting a coin flip, and Wednesday compliments him on his skill:

      I’m just learning, said Shadow. I can do a lot of the technical stuff. The hardest part is making people look at the wrong hand.

      Is that so?

      Yes, said Shadow. It’s called misdirection. (p. 104)

      The second time it happens, near the end, Odin is still confident that his scheme is unfolding as planned. He’s so confident, in fact, that he attempts to praise Shadow for the role that he’s played: You did everything you were intended to do, and more. You took everybody’s attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. It’s called misdirection. . . . To tell the truth, I’m proud of you (p. 530).

      Misdirection takes advantage of the mind’s tendency to ascribe causal relations from instances of constant conjunction, but it only works if it is subtly employed, and it takes Shadow the bulk of the novel to hone in on how it’s happened. The instances of misdirection or distraction are almost too numerous to count, but there are a few key moments worth noting.

      Firstly, early in the book, during that fateful evening at Jack’s Crocodile Bar, a very drunk Mad Sweeny, a seven-foot tall leprechaun who loves Southern Comfort, warns Shadow explicitly about Mr. Wednesday. As Wednesday explains to Shadow what his job will be, assuring him that he will be well paid and well cared for, Mad Sweeney butts in:

      He’s hustling you, said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. He’s a hustler.

      Damn straight I’m a hustler, said Wednesday. That why I need someone to look out for my best interests. (p. 37)

      In this classic moment of misdirection, Wednesday, by agreeing to the general truth of Sweeney’s statement, distracts Shadow from the more specific claim. He is being hustled, individually, at this very moment, but because Wednesday admits to general knavery, the other part slides by, even though Shadow’s instincts have already flared up, prompting him to call Wednesday a liar, right to his face. But Wednesday doesn’t blink. Instead, he says, Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet (p. 32). Again, admitting the truth about his general nature obscures the specific treachery, managing to assuage Shadow’s instincts, which are, in fact, dead on the money. Wednesday is a good liar—the best—and he is at this very moment lying to Shadow about the full scope of his job description.

      Another instance, very subtly deployed, comes at the very beginning of the novel. Lowkey has lent Shadow a copy of Herodotus’s Histories, a book chock full of outrageous whoppers and historical curiosities. Yet Shadow hones in on one particular tale that Herodotus tells, the story of Croesus. The reference is fleeting, but it speaks volumes about the causal

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