Almost as Sweet

[odditycollector]

So I was thinking about the thing I wrote last night, and it occurred to me that, if I had handed it to her, my high school English teacher would have kicked my ass. Well, not really, but she would have made annoyed comments in the margin, I'm sure. (And no, not just because I wrote it at two in the morning.)



There is a rule for writing that I usually agree with, and that rule is: say who the characters are, and do it as soon as possible (given the narrative purpose, of course). Basically, if it's not supposed to be a puzzle, don't be vague about it.

Of course, sometimes it is supposed to be a puzzle. If the POV character doesn't know the strange man in the bookstore is Methos, and the reader is supposed to figure it out because of what he says, and all but the lazy ones manage it (although the POV might just walk away from the encounter irritated or slightly disconcerted) then the story works. Because it's fandom, and we expect a certain script knowledge of our audience, dramatic irony can be a really fun tool.

I like such puzzles. If I thought they were at all confusable, I might have described the conversation with Andrew in "A Song Stolen." But, if the strange man opened his mouth and nobody could tell if he was Crowley or Aziraphale, I would have been doing something very wrong.

Anyway. The point is, I'm not sure that what I wrote today was supposed to be about guessing the characters. I doubt there's very many people out there who even could, who, assuming I've got her written correctly, know enough about Thessaly to recognize her brand of magic and know who she used it against and know why. And there might be slightly more who know that white and green are the colours of the-Dream-they-call-Daniel-even-though-it's-really-stupid, and that Morpheus seldom stood in the sky. Although maybe the ficlet wouldn't work anyway if you didn't know all these things, so maybe I'm just rambling at nothing.

The weird week stuff doesn't count, but I wrote another Sandman snippet a while ago. It was a drabble actually, about Pharamond, and I never mentioned his name either.



And I got to thinking that there might be a reason to that, and that reason was probably that I'm the world's biggest hypocrite, and I need to work on my story making skills. But it might also have something to do with the difficulty I have imagining some of the characters from Sandman in names. Not all of them, mind you, most of the minor dreams have names (although it's a hell of a coincidence if "Lucien" has been around since before the continents were in their present shapes, even if the Librarian was) and the humans, and the gods. But the Endless?

In Brief Lives, Dream speaks to a little girl on an airplane. Later, the mother, misinterpreting his seeming familiarity for celebrity, asks her what his name is. "I don't think he has one," she says. "That's silly," says her mother. "Everyone has a name."

Those who know him seem often to know him by Morpheus, although he is also Dream and Shaper and, yes, Murphy, and probably others as well that I'm not remembering. And that's just on Earth. It's probably a little more complicated, if you want to do this properly, than saying these are all his names, because it may well be that the being who is His Darkness Dream of the Endless is very slightly different than the Morpheus who answered Rose Walker's call (and saved her, yes, so that he could later destroy her himself). But if each of these names is as fair as any others, it seems that they are either all true, or none.

And I’m with the little girl on this. To call him Dream or Morpheus is to call him by a title, but beneath that title is something that came into existence alongside things that hadn’t yet needed language, that dreamed in smells and emotions, or perhaps in the dancing of hydrogen atoms before the universe tasted helium. (And who knows what things are thoughts. It may well be that there is a mind in an electron cloud, and that protons can dream, and that neutrons can die.) Names are handy things, but I can’t imagine that if you strip away the things aren’t the essential ‘me-ness’ of Dream, what you end up with is something that thinks of itself with a word. And I think that’s true for all the Endless, and I think that’s part of why it’s extremely difficult to write them from the inside. In the comics, they’re pictures and external dialogue. In every single piece of prose that has really worked for me (an admittedly short list), they’re seen through another character.

And this is why the Daniel thing annoys me. Gaiman made it very clear in The Wake that the new dream is not Daniel, he’s just Dream. And you get the sense he’d rather sweep out all that Shaper and L'Zoril and etc. nonsense and be just Dream. But DC stuck with calling him Daniel for some reason, and Daniel is a name, and it is a human name, and this implies that behind all the power and the dreamscape and how he is meant to be both the thing and the personification of the thing, there is a bit of the human child left, looking at the Dream through human eyes.

Morpheus named his successor, after they spoke on that first time he was looking into uncertain death, and there is power in names. Daniel is a biblical name, and it has to do with judgement and mercy, which is odd because the duties of Dream have nothing to do with judgement and mercy, except perhaps that these are merely things people believe should be real. Human things.

And names are important, in any story that believes in magic. You protect your name and you protect your heart, because if your enemy holds either they hold control.

And yes, there is the possibility of this leading into something interesting, or at least, it might have done if Neil Gaiman stepped in (only he would have stopped it, you see), but DC, unless there is something I missed, is mostly using the name as a placeholder. Marking time as After. And yes, this annoys me, because I’m petty like that.

But I didn’t write a story with Dream, I wrote it with Thessaly. And I have the same problem with her, although not to such an extent. It’s likely that she does think of herself with a name, but I don’t know what it would be. Except that it’s not Thessaly or Larissa, and that’s hardly much of a clue. And she’s old, and she’s ruthless, so I imagine that anything that might have tied her to mortality has been long faded with time or washed away with blood. (But mostly I just didn’t know it.)

Pharamond is Pharamond, but he’s a forward moving entity and probably wouldn’t mind exchanging the name for a new one with power. (And I think the reason I didn’t say that it was Pharamond in the drabble was mostly because it was a drabble, and it didn’t really seem to fit anywhere. It is, after all, a long name.)

And this has become something of an essay. It would probably be really interesting to go through the books and talk about the names of each character and how the names are used, but as I don’t have either the time or the books, I don’t think I will.

However, there is one other thing I saw someone mention recently, and it was along the lines of “But why do the Endless always refer to Death as ‘our sister’?” This seemed rather obvious to me, although it may be that I’m completely wrong. It would be for the same reason that none now know Hades’ name, because no one wrote it down or passed it through stories. Names have power both ways. And no one wants to call death onto themselves. (Although sometimes they might invite her into their realms for conversation and, uh, tea, but that’s not quite the same thing.)

Comments

[cereta.livejournal.com]

You know, it's funny, I read your first paragraph about saying who the character as quickly as possible, and the first thing I thought was that drabbles might be the exception to that. Well, that was the second thing, because the first thing that hit me was that in both the drabbles I've written, I didn't use names, and in fact, in the second one, it seemed very, very important not to.

And now I have to go ponder why.

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

I think that maybe, unless you're just telling a very short story, drabbles are mostly a snapshot into a character's head. And if you put the name in, it sort of, um, creates distance. (If that makes sense.) And if you only have 100 words to convince the reader they're in someone else's head, it's a distance you might not be able to afford.

Um.

[avariel-wings.livejournal.com]

I've always thought the reason they avoid calling her "Death" is because that's what she does, yes, of course, but it's not all she does. There's a quote somewhere near the beginning of the Orpheus arc that I'm too lazy to go hunt for now, when Orpheus is talking to Destruction, who says something about how there are three ways to meet her: die, go to her house, or be born.

That kind of implies that her function is to usher souls, beings, whatever, through all their changes of status, but how do you sum that up in a single word? "Death", I think, is just the function that mortals associate her with most strongly.

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

That could be it, actually. In that story she has another name, doesn't she? "God of Boundaries" or suchlike?

And I wonder if that isn't true for all of them, er, that the most obvious of their functions isn't necessarily the whole of them... Hmm.