What Are You Reading 2016 - Page 18

He builds up this whole "new gods versus old gods battle" story line and then all of this is just a plot by Wednesday and Loki and finally the whole thing does not even happen. I was beyond annoyed when I finished this. Also the whole horror missing children thing. He builds up the tension really well, and then the main character just leaves the village for a few hundred pages and finally it was the damn Hinzelmann? And he killed one child each year for more than a hundred years and no one thought that there was something fishy going on?

Don't get me wrong: I really like the buildup of most of the story lines, but the conclusion is beyond overwhelming for all of them.

Old Gods, New Gods, but no Christ
Within the first couple hundred pages or so American Gods seems to be pretty straightforward: the new gods (internet, money, tv, media) are displacing the old gods in America. The obvious metaphor being that crass consumerism is driving out religion, and perhaps a sense of the sacred, in the land of the free. Gaiman is somewhat ambivalent on whether this might amount to an agnosticism, but he stretches the major conceit a bit thin in suggesting that technology, like the internet, or the acne-ridden "technical boy," actually functions as a god alongside the host of attention-siphoning technologies and media that have been gamely anthropomorphized for us. How technology might be the same kind of thing as Jesus Christ is maybe superficially interesting, but I think the analogy breaks down upon scrutiny. In the appendix of my version of the book the editor included an apocryphal chapter featuring Jesus, who plays a rather muted role throughout the whole thing despite being the preeminent American god.

Gaiman says:



The appendix here is a good indication that Gaiman doesn't really care about making the anology work, or about having a consistent ontology of belief. The mechanics of how belief functions in this world aren't clearly explained. The selection of gods for inclusion in the story is arbitrary. If anything, belief seems to be functioning more like attention than any of the more commonly understood categories of belief.

The appendix only makes things murkier. In the lost chapter with Jesus talking to Shadow on the tree he mentions "The god of the guns. The god of bombs. All the [new] gods of ignorance and intolerance, of self-righteousness, idiocy, and blame." Admittedly, this is somewhat ambiguous. It is possible Gaiman is referring to the technological gods that have already been discussed: things, networks, ideas that pull attention from mortals (and in the process profanes the old world gods). The technical boy is ignorant, and arguably idiotic. But the more natural rendering of this apocryphal fragment is that "ignorance" or "self-righteousness" themselves, the abstract ideas, function as gods. How this would work is beyond me. Jesus further mystifies the situation when he says, regarding his success, "It has a cost [. . .] Like I said. You have to be all things to all people. Pretty soon, you're spread so thin you're hardly there at all. It's not good." So apparently not all attention is good attention, and maybe not all belief is good belief?

The Role of Belief
It is interesting here to consider the distinction Slavoj Zizek makes between "belief" and "faith." Faith is a "symbolic pact" between two parties, a binding engagement with a dimension beyond simple "belief in." One can believe in ghosts or spirits or demons without having faith in those things. Likewise, the converse of that is that one can have faith in something (i.e. "believe") without actually believing in something. This is the role of the Big Other: we do not have to believe in it in order to believe it. It exerts a powerful pull on us because it structures the symbolic order that we, as subjective human beings, live in.

This way of looking at belief presents a new angle on the apparent conflict within the novel, and perhaps clears up some plausibility hurdles along the way. The "old gods" represent a fading symbolic order that is being displaced by the "new gods" which have reoriented Americans' minds in deep and lasting ways. It's not a simple belief in technology as god. It's a changing of ways of life, values, sensibilities; it's a changing of the set of givens that structures our very thought. When looked at this way, the preposterousness of anyone believing in Odin becomes a non-issue (despite inconsistencies within the narrative, where Gaiman decides he needs to find someone who believes in Odin. In fact, the kind of belief I've been talking about above operates in precisely the opposite fashion: belief is always displaced onto a fictitious subject "supposed to belief," as Zizek would say. There is no need to find some crazy Odin worshiper in North Dakota).

So what to make of the plot twist? The most straight-forward manner of interpreting Odin's/Loki's conspiracy is that they are just bringing about a neo-Ragnarok, fulfilling their role in the cycles of history, and refreshing the symbolic order that they represent. One thing to note is that the book was written right after the dot-com crash of the late 90s and right before 9/11. So the fundamentalist version of belief, terrorism, and the much-discussed "clash of cultures" narrative that have dominated media discourse since 9/11 are mostly absent. There is, further, a relation between the techno-utopianism or trans-humanism beginning to surface at the end of the 20th century in America and gnostic heresy (i.e. the belief in two opposed divinities, secret knowledge, etc.). Increasing immersion into cyberspace and hopes of transcending our natural bodies echo gnostic beliefs in the sacred immaterial soul woefully trapped in abject, fleshy bodies.

And so you get the straightforward metaphor: orthodoxy struggling to eliminate the techno-heresy. But what to make of the Buffalo man and the thunderbirds? What to make of Shadow/Baldr thwarting Odin/Loki? Seen in the light of the dot-com crash, does not Odin, god of fire, gallows lord, and all-father resemble the embodiment of American Capitalism, refreshing the flames of faith through creative destruction? And is not The Land the anthropomorphized pre-capitalist, First-Nations' spirit that Gaiman opposes to it?

Baldr - Love, Peace, Justice
Shadow is eventually revealed to be Baldr, the son of Odin, the god of Love, Peace, and Justice (at least according to wikipedia). He, in the end, comes to oppose the naked aggrandizement of Odin/Loki. The neo-Ragnarok that Odin/Loki have set in motion can be seen as the bloody bottom of a bear market as the new gods of Pets.com and Yahoo wrestle with the old, hopefully leading to a "back to basics" restructuring of the economy and disillusionment with the "new gods". Wednesday and the old gods are Old World intruders on American lands, bringing with them the entrepreneurial spirit and industry of Europe, and function as symbols of a particular way of life. Their plot can be seen as a reaction to the disruptive effects that technology has on modernity, even as America turns away from the Protestant work ethic and towards fetishistic emblems like Western Buddhism and New Age nostrums.
The inconsistent story that Gaiman has been telling about belief, about the battle of the old and the new, is further wrinkled by the introduction of the Land as pseudo-god in its own right. When we first encounter the Buffalo man he "smelled like wet cow" and tells Shadow that, "If you are to survive, you must believe." Believe what? "Everything," roared the Buffalo man.

It is questionable of course whether Shadow can do anything other than believe, given that he is confronted with the existence of gods walking through extra-dimensional planescapes, and that he seems to sleepwalk like a robot on default throughout most of the story, but what the Buffalo man, who says, "I am the land," seems to be telling Shadow is that he must be the "subject supposed to belief." Shadow is the one who "believes in" these anthropomorphized gods that Americans have faith in without necessarily "believing in". He exists as the symbol (god) upon which the rest of the symbolic order hangs. It is a fitting role for the god of justice to occupy, "For it is never reason that decides on the justification of means and the justness of ends: fate-imposed violence decides on the former, and God on the latter."

Because Shadow is the hinge upon which belief is built in the book he has to fulfill a certain destiny. Fate calls to him to complete the cycle and he can only obey:



The story is just rife with this kind of hapless submission, including his willingness to return to the Slavic god of darkness to have his head smashed in. The parallels to the mythological Baldr, bound and passive as the gods hurled axes, spears, and mistletoe at him, are clear. He's all too ready to work as Wednesday's henchman, climb the world tree as a man sentenced to death, and doesn't even end up thwarting the bad guys: Laura (who is a bit of an engima) ends up killing Loki herself.

The Land as Site of Resistance
So Shadow ends up as a cog in what turns out to be an elaborate Rube-Goldberg Machine. A machine that was seemingly constructed not by the allfather, but by the Land. How do they relate? Wednesday knew about Shadow's dreams, and that should have tipped him off that something outside of his Thought and Memory might be happening, but apparently he missed it. The quote above Chapter Twelve can provide some clues:

-Agnes Repplier, Times and Tendencies

America's religion hasn't invested in sound income-paying securities. It is a religion with belief in sound income-paying securities. And Wednesday is here to refresh the fire when the markets slump. Schumpeter's famous maxim, that the "gale of creative destruction" describes the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one" seems also to describe precisely what is at play in the neo-Ragnarok of the novel. Loki (who has taken the pseudonym Mr. World perhaps as a nod towards increasing globalism) and Odin aim to (re)institute a new symbolic order, a reconsolidation of American belief in the American Dream itself.

The Land opposes this because Wednesday seeks a reconsolidation around the core American religion: income-paying securities. The dot-com boom and the subsequent jobless recovery required a restructuring of the economy. Americans at the turn of the millennium increasingly turned to the gnostic beliefs of the cyberspace heresy, or Eastern "mindfulness" practices that convinced them that as long as they focused on what was "really important" that they were not simply reproducing an exploitative system that left them unsatisfied. The faith in the American Dream was waning, and Odin/Loki's power with it. When looked at this way, the Land becomes a site of resistance to this reconsolidation around a failing mythos. The dreams Baldr experiences are the cracks that betray the Real under the shimmering surface of the symbolic imaginary that structures our thoughts. The Land wants Shadow to believe in everything, and that paradoxically includes challenging the hegemonic position of the gods themselves.

Freedoms and Propensities
We are given a Shadow without a history; he comes out of jail with a dead wife and sparse memories and is set on a path. We don't really know who Shadow is until much of the novel has passed. Shadow, on autopilot, manages to fulfill his function while being led by the nose the whole way, and we aren't given much insight into why he is the way he is.

F.W.J. Schelling's notion of the "primordial decision-differentiation", which is an "unconscious atemporal deed by means of which the subject chooses his/her eternal character, which afterwards, within his/her conscious-temporal life, is experienced as the inexorable necessity, as 'the way s/he always was'," is useful in explaining both Shadow's origin and the road that he "must walk [. . .] to the end." It is also useful in relating to the cyber-gnosticism elaborated above, which Gaiman places in opposition to orthodox American religions, including Christianity. To quote Zizek at length:
Does this mean that the primordial decision forever predetermines the contours of our life? Here enters the "good news" of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo this founding decision, to start one's life all over again, from the zero point – in short, to change Eternity itself (what we "always-already are"). Ultimately the "rebirth" of which Christianity speaks (when one joins the community of believers, one is born again) is the name for such a new Beginning. Against the pagan and/or Gnostic Wisdom which celebrates the (re)discovery of one's true Self – the return to it, the realization of its potentials or whatsoever – Christianity calls upon us to thoroughly reinvent ourselves. Kierkegaard was right: the ultimate choice is the one between the Socratic recollection and the Christian repetition: Christianity enjoins us to REPEAT the founding gesture of the primordial choice. One is almost tempted to put it in the terms of the paraphrase of Marx's "thesis 11": "Philosophers have been teaching us only how to discover (remember) our true Self, but the point is to change it." And THIS Christian legacy, often obfuscated, is today more precious than ever.
So the question of Shadow's (non)freedom becomes enmeshed in the brewing battle. He must choose a side, but there is clearly some ambiguity in the book about how much of a choice he really has in the matter. What kind of freedom he must exercise is important. Freedom is polyvalent and includes such potential meanings as "formal freedom" and "actual freedom". Formal freedoms are the typical negative freedoms of liberal thought, which most often means the freedom to play by the rules. Actual freedoms are freedoms that allow one to question the rules, to "posit the presuppositions" of one's activity. The central freedom of American liberal ideology is that increasing insecurity should be looked at as opportunities for new freedoms: the "flexibility" to change jobs often and to move to different cities, relying on short-term contracts, "lifelong learning" as skill acquisition to remain competitive in a hypercompetitive labor pool, the opportunity to choose spending more for healthcare or to take risks, etc.

While Shadow mostly acts as a pawn, it is through him that the Land, and his wife Laura, who ultimately open up possibilities of "actual" freedom, that is, freedom from the hegemonic ideology of Odin/Loki. As the Buffalo man said:
You made peace. You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.

This may be the crux of the conflict. The question is what degree of freedom do the rest of us have? "We can change our minds. And perhaps we will." If that "we" is understood as "we, Americans" the Land is giving voice both to the hope, and to the ambivalence, of the many. It is especially in times of crisis, when the Real itself ruptures our comfortable ways of life and calls into question the symbolic forms that structure our imaginations, that ambivalence about "the way things are" and hope about "the way things could be" present themselves.

To me the central notion of the book is that of misdirection. Essentially, it is all a cheap coin trick that the author plays on us. He points the reader to the cool things like epic battles between gods (neo-Ragnarok as you call it). But all of this is just the 5$ violin that the author sells us for 20k$ as in the end it is all a swindle. It is all just misdirection from the start. The author shows us explicitly what he is doing (coin tricks from the first few pages, Wednesday earning his life by cheap tricks/fraud, even explaining all of this to Shadow and the reader) but he makes us look in the wrong direction like a magician performing a coin trick. So in the end there is no neo-Ragnarok, there is no epic battle of old gods versus new, all there is is a cheap trick and all of the supposedly important things are completely inconsequential.

Of course, an artist is free to play such a trick on the reader. It makes total formal sense as there are these tricks on several levels of the book. But to me it was beyond frustrating: I invested several hundred pages into this just to get the equivalent of a 5$ violin. So no, I really don't like this book.