GREAT ART MADE BY TERRIBLE PEOPLE – SHOULD I STILL READ NEIL GAIMAN'S 'THE SANDMAN'?
From Neil Gaiman to David Foster Wallace to nowhere...
We’ve never gotten over the challenge of separating the art from the artist. The moral caution suggests that we must judge one against the other, where the facts of a life and the lives of a character remain intertwined with the works so two are inseparable.
There are many recent examples where we are forced to confront, consider and (again) reconsider the human beings behind powerful, important and challenging works of art. The imperative of my title is split between whether we ‘can’ or whether we ‘should’ still enjoy the art tainted by association with its creator; and whether should not be forced to splinter away from the objective value of a work.
Following an investigation by Vulture in January of 2024, and the many articles that have followed, Neil Gaiman joins one long line of creative people admired for their work, and not only as great artists, but as one of the ‘good guys’. In this instance for Gaiman’s repeated support for the roles of women artists and characters in his stories, presented as a form stance against discrimination, and ultimately, a defence of all things outsider, subcultural and weird.
Within the nuanced nature of The Sandman series, there are rarely any such straight heroes or villians, simply clashing forces pursuing their own code and desires, even those on the side of the angels are neither wholly good or ungood. Flawed as we all are this doesn’t reach the lows of pure moral relativism; we should live at let live (and forgive?), though it certainly paints a scene where the fragmented and troubled surface of our realities are only held together by beliefs expressed by some affirmative action.
Gaiman is alleged to have coerced several women into sex (amounting to statutory rape) and into non-consensual acts of sado-masochism. That has already significantly damaged his career and public reputation, albeit despite the appeal to innocent until proven guilty, the severity of the charges and the numbers of claims from different women amounts to a damning indictment. (As we saw with MeToo, I’m not of the opinion that this becomes a witch hunt by chorus. We can make a logical argument against guilt-by-numbers, it’s more that the amount of women who now feel able to come forward, where before they were afraid or traumatised to speak-up, and the seriousness of the charges, are utterly damning if true, particularly where we see the abuse as a repeat event.)
I’m not here to dig into ongoing, legally unproven charges. But I am interested in the greater levels of exposure people now face in the light of condemnation by social media and viral news around their alleged crimes, but also the common reaction towards the art / works set against the harsh light of the artists moral failings — in the light of this condemnation, should we still engage with the artist’s work?
I have seen so many people, friends, writers, artists I greatly respect and admire, pop-up and say they will no longer read Gaiman’s books, particularly the graphic novels/comics of Sandman series, perhaps his most significant and prominent work, because of what he, the author, is alleged to have done, charges he flatly denies.
In essence that argument tips upon ‘I do not like that person, on moral, ethical and personal grounds’ and on that basis people reject their work entirely. This aesthetic/ethical/social crisis is at the heart of Claire Dederer’s excellent book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (see an excellent interview with Claire on the Other Ppl podcast) She takes an extremely objective view of the rhetorical situation: for example, should I stop watching Woody Allen movies because he married his adoptive stepdaughter who had first known him as an (older) father for many years?
She balances this very rational enquiry against her personal viewpoint such that the book becomes hinged along with memoir ( a very modern trend). Alongside highly controversial artists including Roman Polanski, Picasso et al, Dededer considers her deep attachment to the films of Woody Allen, and in looking back at the ludicrous age-gap romance between teacher and pupil of Manhattan finds a love letter to a city waylaid by nostalgic and even naive affectations of young lust dragged into middle age such that it quickly becomes exploitative, pretentious and just plain sad.
My from-the-hip response to the Gaiman charges is that I don’t agree. I’ve just been re-reading Sandman for the umpteenth time when I read about the charges. Should I close the book, slam it down, burn it, lest it be passed on to someone else who might be exposed to a bad person’s great writing? A similar case recently occurred when English Literature scholar, Prof Aaron Gwyn said he would no longer pursue writing/study/blog projects on the work of Cormac McCarthy – based upon the many, many revelations of a Vanity Fair piece that exposes a long-hidden (and until McCarthy’s death, private?) relationship that began with illegal sex with a minor (constituting the charge of statutory rape, given that they were under the age of consent when the relationship began).
Firstly, Aaron’s blog on Blood Meridian is excellent, insightful, far-ranging, and carries significant depth of research into McCarthy’s own writing process, so it is a loss to the study of great books that he will now steer clear of writing on McCarthy’s work. As a reader, I respect his moral choice; but I personally question whether we then should, rather, should feel the need, to give up on someone’s work also? As if by not reading the books we are able to actively cancel them, erase them from a kind of public life. I feel that jail, public censure and media blackout are far more harmful and punitive to that individual than their books.
Some people expressed a flat-minded view that the cruelty and harsh realities of relationships between, people, gods, dreams, demons and of course, monsters in The Sandman, thereby confirmed Gaiman’s own disposition towards his alleged crimes. Meaning that you cannot write about S&M, for example, without being a practitioner (makes sense, from a purely knowledge/experience perspective) but that he was obviously a bad guy, now retroactively condemned by his creative work. For me, that doesn’t follow. Where do writers get their ideas from? They make it up! Of course research and experience come into play, but fiction is driven by the choices of the author, their application of imagination grounded in the reality they choose to present – we do not read novels looking for accuracy – we look for versions of the truth.
This is the debate around Nabokov’s curious curiosities in the content of his novel Lolita, no matter that he claims that by exposing paedophiles like Humbert Humbert from within, psychologically speaking, he allows them to be condemned by their own thoughts before being turned into action; hoisted by their own petard in a dance of guilty exposure…surely this all germinates from the seeds of Nabokov’s own sexual leanings and exposes him as a similar monster, or is Humbert simply a shadow of himself, an avatar which embodies private guilt or an exorcism of ‘unhealthy thoughts’?
David Foster Wallace is often portrayed as a victim of his addictions and mental ill-health, a tempting case to make where a person can be absolved of the choices they make as being unwell or under the influence. DFW would author his own version of bad people gone large, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a short story collection presented as a series of anonymous interviews that in the light of DFW’s own actions, becomes a form of hypocritical deflection? Relatively recent (though posthumous) revelations around DFW’s treatment of several women and ex-girlfriends; ranging from harassment, stalking and pushing someone out of a moving car, amount to multiple examples of abuse. It certainly shifts some of the context against the man who preached “This Is Water” mindfulness in his Kenyon University commencement speech, alongside his martyrdom/victimhood as someone who suffered from mental ill-health, can stand as a kind of moral whitewash that trickles into crocodile tears (see also Jordan Peterson’s nihilistic self-pity). But for all of this contrary testimony about Wallace as a person, it does not necessarily stand in relation to his work – Infinite Jest is still dark, funny and very revealing on the nature of addiction, regardless of whether you love/like/loathe David Foster Wallace.
Fundamentally, I think we can reject the individual behind the art for their monstrous acts, but I don’t feel the same compulsion to then ignore the work, or to cancel it and thereby pretend it doesn’t exist. I haven’t read Mein Kampf, but I respect its existence as piece of evidence; an artefact to be explored and for people to sift through the anti-semitic genetic fallacies, and see Hitler for what he was – deluded and deranged. People are far more comfortable to reject an artist’s work simply because they do not like them, they find them annoying/boring/ubiquitous, it becomes a matter of personal taste, but they are much less likely to reject the work on the basis of moral or ethical grandstanding. I respect each reader’s choice, but I don’t feel the need to follow suit. The greatest challenge for me becomes the innate human failings to make bad choices, the expectation that great artist should be good or bad people, I often think we ask, and expect, too much of them, simply because they are ‘great’ in one sphere and deeply flawed/damaged/troubled in real life.
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An addendum — for some, the story of ‘The Author’ and Caliope (a Greek muse) in The Sandman Vol. 3 Dream Country has become something of a metaphor of Gaiman’s situation. Where ‘The Author’ finds himself creatively exhausted and depleted, unable to follow-up on a highly successful first novel because he lacks ideas, takes on Caliope from another author before him who faced the same problem. She becomes his prisoner and sex slave kept in the attic as a hidden sham; despite being the true fount of all his success, crying herself to sleep each night after she is raped.
‘The Author’ has a stellar public career, his work is various in all forms of literature and he is a lauded and highly celebrated public figure. Calliope begs Morpheus (the dream king) a former lover, to help set her free. He does so, under some duress and with little sympathy and in doing so it’s tempting to see Gaiman, again, acting through his alter ego character as the reluctant good guy, a god-like figure who makes mistakes but after apologising tries to make things better, though things are never truly fixed or the wrongs undone.
‘The Author’ is driven mad, cursed with a wealth of endless ideas by Morpheus; delivered the punishment of excess creativity. I don’t think this story implicates Gaiman as a slip of the mask character reference or as a bad person, guilty of similar acts. But perhaps this is a rare case where the writer has incidentally come full circle, from a place of awareness and later corrupted by fame, power an esteem, unwittingly written some aspect of themselves onto the page, that now becomes a vision of a future that was standing right before you.
