Field Notes - ENGL 817AJ - Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Finally, we get to Neverwhere! I quite liked it, and it was surprisingly my first Gaiman novel. So, for future reads of his novels on my TBR, I hope this is a good indication of more of his writing.

My copy of the novel interestingly did not have a copy of the London Underground in it. It seems most other copies do, so not sure why the version I had didn't. Regardless, my professor was kind enough to scan it and put it up online for use in the class. The image below of that map is not his scan through, I found this one online. Whomever uploaded it seems to have highlighted all the actual stations that are visited in the novel by the characters.

I'm not sure how coherent this post is going to be because I had random thoughts when reading the novel as well as trying think about the questions posed in class that we were to apply to the novel. Perhaps I'll do just little mini sections and not worry about how they transition into one another.

Personification of the Stations

I latched on to the convention of personifying the tube stations in London Below. Blackfriars was actually a collection of monks that were protecting a precious object. Earl's Court was the literal court of an Earl that was held on actual train car. And Richard marvels that there might actually be ravens in Raven's Court. However, Knightsbridge becomes Night's Bridge and is place of fear and disappearance. Not a personification but an inversion of the outcome of what might have been expected with the way elements are named and presented in London Below. The names of the station as known to the Above are lost to history, but in the below, they are real, keep something of the history. The stations become people, things, real and tangible. But they're also barriers. No longer are the stations just a way-through from one place to another, they have to be interacted with to move forward.

The Notion of Being "Lost"

This has come in the class a few times prior, but never has it made quite so much sense to me as it did in Neverwhere. Richard quite literally gets lost when he falls through the cracks of London Above and into London Below. He becomes invisible, lost to those he knew before, but even more unfortunately, no one in the Below wants to help him - at first. Richard has no cognitive map that makes sense to him in the Below because while he was obsessed with the tube map, it doesn't make any sense when he's navigating tunnels and sewers and not the actual train network. He only begins to orient when he starts to recognize the landmarks and tube stations they do pass through on their journey.

I actually think there is a little foreshadowing of this 'lost-ness' and what happens to Richard at the beginning of the novel when he gives away his umbrella that has the tube map on it to the Old Lady. He literally gives away his ability to navigate.

1996 London Underground Map

Authenticity of the Author
Who's surprised this is coming up again? Seems to be a reoccurring theme to me throughout the class and the texts we're reading though. The first map pictured above, the one from Gaiman's novel and the second one above - different authors. But the second official London Underground map influenced Gaiman's novel one. Now, there is no question that Gaiman produced the first map based on the official one, so, in a kind of sense, there are two authors. But, Gaiman adds in old historical information of stations into his map for the book that is not on the official map anymore. And who is Gaiman's map for? If its just for the reader to track and understand London Below, then I see Gaiman is the authoritative author. But if the map is, perhaps, to represent Richard's understanding of the Below based on the knowledge he had previous of the real tube system, then is Gaiman the sole author, or is Richard perhaps the figurative author as well? I made a similar connection/claim with the back-cover map in The Hobbit. 

Other Odds and Ends
These are not fully developed threads, but things that came to me in passing/reading:

• The Floating Market - it moves around and so the inhabitants of London Below pass around the location, but it also needs to be kind of deciphered in order to know where to go and how to get there. For example, the "Belfast" market. Richard seems really confused about where this one might be, same with the reader, that is unless you know about the HMS Belfast museum-ship.
  
  
• Old Bailey - he is a London Belower but he lives in London Above. In fact, he lives above London Above on the roof tops of the city. He is contrary to the contrary. He extends beyond the inversion of London that the below represents.

To leave off this post, I'm going to share a quote from the Foucault article "Of Other Spaces" that stuck out to me:

"To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred."

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We have another week discussing Neverwhere, so this post may get updated with more thoughts, and then after that we still have two more novels before the end of the course: The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald from 1995 and translated from German, and Peng Shephard's 2022 novel  The Cartographers. I'm also hoping to sneak in a field notes post updating my approach and research on Muppet Treasure Island in comparison with Stevenson's Treasure Island.