Moved Permanently

As the author of works such as Coraline, Stardust, American Gods, and the Sandman series of graphic novels, Neil Gaiman seems firmly situated in the fantasy genre. These works contain mythological and supernatural figures, including the Norse god Odin and goth-girl Death, and some utilize tropes associated with fantasy and fairy tales – all of which contribute to the assessment that Neil Gaiman writes fantasy. Gaiman's publishers reinforce this idea in their promotion of his work. A quote from Philip Pullman, author of the popular fantasy series His Dark Materials, appears on the front of the mass market paperback edition of Coraline. A review from the Chicago Tribune appears on the back of one of the paperback editions of Stardust, calling it a "wondrous tale full of magic." And the description on the back of the 1996 HarperCollins paperback edition of Neverwhere says that this novel tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a man "with a good heart" who "is propelled into a world he never dreamed existed." Descriptions and endorsements such as these make it clear that both readers and publishers associate Neil Gaiman with fantasy literature.

The problem with the strong association of Gaiman's work with the fantasy genre, however, is that it makes it easy to overlook the elements of his fiction that do not fit the fantasy mold – and consequently, to overlook the ways in which his work challenges boundaries not only between genres, but also between fiction and reality. One possible solution to this problem is to read Gaiman's work as an example of interstitiality – a term that describes a state of being in "intervening space[s]... small or narrow space[s] between things or the parts of the body" (OED). As it pertains to literature and art, however, the idea of interstitiality extends past the dictionary definition of simply existing in-between. In particular, interstitial art is art "that flourishes in the borderlands between different disciplines, mediums, and cultures" (IAF); it is art that exists in border spaces not just by chance, but because these spaces provide it with the freedom and interactivity needed to develop.

The project The Great Wall of Los Angeles, started in 1976 and directed by Judith Baca, is an example of an interstitial space that exists on the border between art and history, and as a result, has the capacity to bring together hundreds of people and give voice to those that have been historically marginalized. As Lambert Zuidervaart describes,

hundreds of teenagers have been hired and taught over many summers to create one of the world's largest murals in a flood control channel of the Los Angeles River. The mural provides an alternative history of California, portraying the struggles and contributions of people who are often left on the margins of official histories: indigenous peoples, immigrant minorities and women. (Zuidervaart 211)

As this example demonstrates, interstitial art is art that exists in the movement in between spaces – in between genres, in between disciplines, and in this case, in between the controlled space of the city and the untamed space of nature – ignoring boundaries and drawing from multiple sources to realize a work that brings the unexpected together. In addition to thematizing the movement in-between that defines interstitiality, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere highlights two additional features of interstitial art: namely its ability to create new meaning and its capacity to engage the reader in the issues of the novel, thus blurring the line between fiction and reality. As a result, even though interstitial literature is a category of literature with no fixed boundaries and few defining works, the effects of this category on both literature and society are long-lasting, even permanent.

The movement in between places, ideas, and genres provides the foundation for interstitial art, and this movement is a key theme in Neverwhere, particularly in the way the novel focuses on boundary crossing and the juxtaposition of dissimilar elements. Neverwhere tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a young man living in London who encounters an alternate world called London Below that is hidden beneath and within the city itself. A girl named Door is instrumental in introducing Richard to this strange world; he first meets her when she is running from would-be assassins, and he later learns that she possesses the skill of "locating doors, both obvious and otherwise" (Gaiman 90). Over the course of the novel, we learn that Door is not only able to unlock many doors without a key, but she is also able to create doors where none existed, and, most importantly, between places not adjacent to each other. The centrality of Door to the novel as a whole emphasizes the importance of movement in between places; as Darrell Schweitzer writes, "So much of what [Gaiman] writes about concerns people crossing boundaries between the everyday and some fantastic realm. In Neverwhere it is an alternative London that exists right alongside (or underneath) the familiar city" (119). Door's key role in moving between places, as well as the larger theme of moving between worlds, immediately points to the importance of interstitiality in Neverwhere.

The centrality of interstitiality in Neverwhere is reinforced by the way in which modes and avenues of transportation function as the primary setting of the novel. So much of the novel takes place in subway stations, sewer tunnels, and even subway trains themselves – all settings that emphasize the importance of movement in between different locations. Alice Jenkins argues that the "tunnel spatiality" in Neverwhere emphasizes the movement between London Above and London Below, and keeps "the two worlds of surface and depth, official reality and fantastical alternative, in dialogue with one another. The characters may choose or be forced to inhabit one rather than the other, but the reader is made emphatically aware that both worlds exist simultaneously" (29). The emphasis on modes of transportation throughout the text calls attention to the dialogue between the two worlds of London Above and London Below, and highlights how such movement creates a unique interstitial space.

The narrative style of Neverwhere mirrors this movement between London Above and London below, thus demonstrating the centrality of interstitiality not only to the story and themes of the novel, but to the very way in which it is told, as well. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Richard is following the Marquis de Carabas, an enigmatic character who is on his way to help Door, and "he was holding onto a metal ladder that ran up the outside of a very high building (but a few seconds ago he was climbing up the same ladder, and he had been inside, hadn't he?), and below him, he could see... London" (Gaiman 48-49). This excerpt is one of several moments where brief passages of free indirect discourse slip into what is otherwise a straightforward third-person narrative. The movement of the narration between the third-person perspective and the parenthetical free indirect speech of Richard's thoughts mirrors the movement that Richard himself is making between London Above and London Below. A similar effect is achieved by the quick cutting between scenes at the end of Chapter 13, where the marquis is dead, but Door and Richard still believe he is alive. The rapid movement back and forth between several threads of the narrative reflects the tension between the marquis' death and Door and Richard's expectations of his help and expertise, as well as the way in which the marquis' death in and of itself is an interstitial state, since he returns to life later in the novel. In all of these cases, the emphasis is on the state in-between – in between life and death, in between narratives, in between London Above and London Below – which reinforces the importance of interstitiality, rather than resolution, throughout the narrative.

Interstitiality can also be found in Neverwhere in the movement between the world of waking and the world of dreams, a movement that highlights the creative potential of such interstitial spaces. One key scene appears after Richard Mayhew rescues Door from her would-be assassins and collapses in exhaustion. When he wakes up, he finds the boundary between sleep and wakefulness to be exhilarating: "For a moment, upon waking, he had no idea at all who he was. It was a tremendously liberating feeling, as if he were free to be whatever he wanted to be: he could be anyone at all" (Gaiman 335). Here, interstitiality is represented as an ideal state in which there is freedom to be whatever or do whatever one wants. The interstitial space between waking and dreaming provides a place where Richard can flourish, rather than simply exist. And the uncertainty of such a space intensifies Richard's emotions, as seen in words such as "tremendously liberating," thus making his experience that much more meaningful. Furthermore, the use of the word "liberating," together with the phrase "he could be anyone at all," emphasizes that a key aspect of Richard's flourishing in this interstitial space has to do with freedom and his capacity to recreate his identity, which points to another key aspect of interstitiality and interstitial literature – creativity.

Interstitiality, then, is more than just existence or even movement in between spaces, places, or ideas – such movement contains a creative element because of the way it brings together the spaces it connects, thus creating new meaning based on the interchange of ideas between these spaces. For example, Gloria Anzladúa's groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), which explores her identity as a queer Chicana woman, moves between poetry, memoir, and history; not only does this movement challenge existing categories of race, gender, sexuality, and literary genre, but it provides a space for the creation of new ideas – in this case, la mestiza, a person who exists in border spaces and embraces, rather than rejects, contradictory elements of her identity, as well as a whole branch of critical theory focusing on boundaries and borders, particularly as they pertain to race, ethnicity, and culture.

In Neverwhere, London Above and London Below have a formative impact on each other through the movement in between these cities, providing an example of how the movement in interstitial spaces carries creative power. Not only do the geography, landscape, and physical structures of London Above help to define London Below, but some of the magic and secretiveness of London Below seeps back into London Above as a result of the movement in between the cities as well. As Marilyn Brahen notes, "the works of Neil Gaiman and of authors like him seem to imply that there is a bit of magic in the mundane, that Elfland can flow into the borders of our own world" (147). This can be seen most notably in the way the Underground stations of London Above take their names from elements of London Below. When Richard and his friends visit the court of the ruler of the London Underground, he realizes where the Underground station must have originally gotten its name: "Earl's Court, thought Richard. Of course. And then he began to wonder whether there was a baron in Baron's Court Tube station, or a Raven in Ravenscourt" (Gaiman 151-152). While the geography and underground structures of London Above are key in defining the shape of London Below, the inhabitants of London Below shape the way the residents of London Above view the world. In the case of the Earl's Court Tube station, the physical space is provided by London Above, while the inspiration for the name is provided by London Below – a circular chain of influence that emphasizes the interdependence between the two places. Such examples, then, show that the movement between London Above and London Below is two-way movement, with both creatively influencing the other. As someone who is positioned between these worlds, Richard is uniquely able to witness these interactions, and perhaps even more importantly, to serve as eyes through which the reader can view this interstitial creativity.

The creativity found in the interstitial movement within Neverwhere points to the creative benefits of thinking of interstitiality outside of Neverwhere as well, for it suggests that new ways of reading and thinking about specific works and even literature as a whole can be created by the movement in between seemingly disparate texts. While Neverwhere is often thought of as a work of fantasy literature, and even more specifically a work of urban fantasy, reading it in conversation with texts outside of this genre can produce creative new ways of understanding the novel. For example, while Gaiman's Neverwhere initially seems quite different from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, both novels tell the story of young men who are displaced from their homes, without a community, and on quests to find a way to live fully in society. Pairing these two novels together can result in a productive discussion about the nature of the hero – a discussion that can be helpful in determining whether Richard himself is a hero, or just the character who happens to be at the center of the novel.

Furthermore, such conversations have the possibility of opening up creative spaces in between categories of literature that are often kept separate – in this case, Native American literature and fantasy literature – where both the differences and similarities between texts can be considered. In the case of Ceremony and Neverwhere, for instance, while the two texts are coming from very different cultural contexts, reading them in conversation with each other would facilitate a reading that not only considers the narrative function of the supernatural in Ceremony, but also examines the spiritual and mythical significance of the fantastic in Neverwhere. Certainly, these lines of thinking are possible when reading each text individually, but the movement in the interstitial spaces in between these texts and genres makes such conversations easier and more fruitful. Additionally, such readings could even open up questions about the definitions of genres, the nature of genre itself, and perhaps even the validity of literary categories in general. The interstitial space created by the movement between novels such as Neverwhere and Ceremony reinforces the idea that interstitial literature "can bind two or more genres together" (IAF), and provides a possible example of the creativity that can result from such an interstitial interaction.

Another example in Neverwhere of the creative potential of interstitial spaces takes place in the sewers in London Below and shows that interstitiality provides space not only for intellectual creativity, but for emotional engagement as well. Early in the novel, Richard finds Door and the Marquis de Carabas after he has fallen through the cracks into London Below. He follows them down into the sewers, where the marquis tells him in no uncertain terms that he is doomed to an interstitial existence – the marquis will not allow him to come on their adventure in London Below, but now that Richard has seen London Below, he has begun to fade from existence in London Above. Most interesting, however, is the location of this conversation: "They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together" (Gaiman 127). Only in this liminal space does Richard recognize the radical implications of what has happened to him: "Richard leaned against a wall and listened to their footsteps, echoing away, and to the rush of the water running past on its way to the pumping stations of East London, and the sewage works. 'Shit,' he said" (Gaiman 128). Given his location, Richard's outburst can be seen as dark humor, but the description of his thought process leading up to that statement also suggests that the movement in the interstitial space of the tunnel leads him to the realization that he himself is like the waste in the pipes – always moving, never stopping to rest, and never fully in one place or another. Additionally, this intellectual realization is accompanied by an emotional response as well: "for the first time since his father died, alone in the dark, Richard Mayhew began to cry" (Gaiman 128). This response demonstrates how interstitial spaces are not just sites of intellectual stimulation and creativity, but emotional engagement as well. The physical interstitiality of the tunnel junction, both as a method of transportation as well as a meeting point of several tunnels, helps Richard understand his own existential interstitiality on both an intellectual and emotional level and suggests to the reader the importance of in-between spaces as sites that create meaning in a multiplicity of possibilities.

Perhaps the most important aspect of interstitiality, however, is the way in which interstitial spaces are able to introduce hesitation and uncertainty into a text, thus providing the means to engage the reader in these interstitial spaces as well. Tzvetan Todorov's description of the fantastic is helpful here; he argues that the fantastic "seems to be located on the frontier of two genres, the marvelous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre" (Todorov 41) – in other words, it exists in the interstitial space between two genres. Because it exists interstitially, the fantastic only "occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre" (Todorov 25). Lucie Armitt emphasizes the significance of the fantastic as existing in between genres, noting that "the fantastic functions as a borderline phenomenon," and as such, "becomes a site of hesitancy, uncertainty and disquieting ambivalence" (Armitt 31-32). Just as the fantastic creates hesitation and uncertainty because of its position in-between, interstitiality achieves the same effect through its unpredictable movements in the in-between spaces.

The hesitation created by interstitiality can be seen in Richard's experiences near the beginning of Neverwhere. After he rescues Door and helps her find the marquis, Richard slips out of the world he knows and becomes invisible to it – new people move into his apartment, his desk at work is cleared out, and his ex-fiancée no longer recognizes him. Richard becomes increasingly frantic, and the language of the narrative at this point perfectly captures the uncertainty of his in-between existence: "As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn't there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him; he was buffeted by the crowd, pushed this way and that by commuters getting off, by others getting on" (Gaiman 58). Richard is still alive, but he no longer belongs to the world he used to; he exists in between worlds, thus making the nature of his very existence uncertain. The setting of the crowd in the above passage is particularly interesting because of the pairs of words that describe its movement – "this way and that" and "off... [and] on." Richard exists in between these paired words, and as a result, the movement of the crowd serves to reinforce the idea of Richard's movement between worlds. As Door's father Lord Portico describes it, Richard is now one of the "dispossessed, we who live below and between, who live in the cracks" (Gaiman 97). While Lord Portico's description of such an existence is not explicitly negative, the words he does use – "below" rather than "above," for example, as well the negative prefix of "dispossessed" – cast an unsettling pall on the image of what such a life must be like. Richard no longer can fully participate in the London he knew, but his memories and desire to return to his former life prevent him from fully being a member of London Below, either.

Richard's initial experiences existing in between London Above and London Below demonstrate how Todorov and Armitt's conceptualizations of the fantastic are helpful in describing how uncertainty and ambiguity are a key part of interstitiality, but further exploration of this idea demonstrates how the interstitiality of a text can have effects outside of the text as well. The hesitation within a text provides a space in which the reader can become an active part of the text. Instead of simply reading the narrative as it is presented, the reader becomes actively involved in shaping the story, thus giving it more power to interact with other texts and even real-world issues. Furthermore, as Farah Mendlesohn's discussion of transliminality suggests, this hesitation and uncertainty underscores certain emotional reactions as well: "The transliminal moment, which brings us up to the liminal point then refuses the threshold, has much greater potential to generate fear, awe and confusion" (181). As a result, the uncertainty and hesitation inherent in interstitial spaces provide the means for readers to become not only intellectually engaged with a text, but emotionally invested as well.

The most powerful source of hesitation in Neverwhere can be seen in the possibility of Richard's insanity throughout the novel. Tzvetan Todorov posits in The Fantastic that madness is an interstitial state because it embodies the dissolution of the boundary between the real world and the interior world of the mind. He writes, "It is curious to note here that such a collapse of the limits between matter and mind was considered, especially in the nineteenth century, as the first characteristic of madness" (Todorov 115). The dissolution of this boundary between mind and matter bears similarities to Richard's mental state throughout Neverwhere. When Richard first realizes that people no longer see him, he goes to see Jessica, his ex-fiancée, to validate his identity. He tells her, "Listen, I think I'm going mad or something. It started when I couldn't get a taxi this morning, and the office and the Tube and-" (Gaiman 61). Jessica does not affirm or reject his claim of madness; instead, she ignores it entirely and asks him politely if he could remind her who he was. As a result, the question of Richard's sanity is left unanswered, and the potential for him to be insane lingers throughout the novel. Near the end of the novel, this question of sanity explicitly reappears; after Richard has returned to London Above, he tells his friend Gary about his whole experience in London Below, and Gary responds, "I think maybe you got some kind of blow on the head. Or maybe some kind of shock when Jessica chucked you. For a while you went a little crazy. Then you got better." Richard replies, "You know what scares me? I think you could be right" (Gaiman 366). As these examples demonstrate, Richard's mental state throughout the novel is liminally positioned between madness and sanity. Even more importantly, these conversations are presented without any actual resolution. The possibility of madness is raised, but not confirmed, thus creating an interstitial space in which the reader wonders what is real and what is imagined.

As a result, this theme of insanity causes the reader to hesitate – Is Richard insane? Is this all a dream? What exactly is going on in his mind? And in this moment of hesitation, there is the potential for a hesitation of even greater significance. The possibility of Richard's insanity points to the more powerful, meaningful reading of the novel that could be achieved if the novel itself were positioned between genres. Because the novel is marketed as fantasy, there is never a question in the mind of the reader that the world of London Below actually exists. Travel in between worlds is a given, monsters exist, and magic is real. On the other hand, if Neverwhere were taken out of its generic context, the trappings of fantasy literature would fall away and a reading of the novel would become much more complicated. Readers would no longer automatically assume that Richard's experiences were real, and the question of his sanity would become a much more provocative one. As a result, readers would be challenged to think critically about alternate worlds, the reality of dreams, and even the nature of sanity in a way that they are not when the novel is marketed simply as fantasy. Additionally, a reading of the residents of London Below as mentally ill, rather than just colorful elements of a fantasy world, would be much more available when viewed through the lens of interstitiality, thus giving the novel greater potential to affect real-world change.

Reading Neverwhere through the lens of interstitiality has a similar effect on the theme of homelessness throughout the novel, as well. Richard first encounters Door as he is on his way to an important business dinner with Jessica; he shows concern that Door looks hurt, but Jessica just sees Door as another homeless person. She says, "If you pay them any attention, Richard, they'll walk all over you. They all have homes, really. Once she's slept it off, I'm sure she'll be fine" (Gaiman 24). Because Neverwhere is marketed as a fantasy novel, and Door's role as damsel-in-distress is therefore firmly established, Richard's response of ignoring Jessica and taking Door back to his house seems like the natural and expected thing to do. He is simply fulfilling the generic expectations for the male protagonist. If the novel is read as an interstitial text, however, it becomes much easier to think of Door as an actual homeless person, rather than as filling an expected role, in which case Richard's response becomes that much more remarkable. While Stefan Ekman is correct in his observation that "by using the way homeless people are treated in the actual world... [Gaiman] draw[s] attention to how unfortunate members of our society are treated" (72), reading the text through the lens of interstitiality makes this effect much more pronounced. Instead of being able to think of Door and the other residents of London Below as residents of an exciting fantasy world, readers are forced to recognize that these characters are often very poor, hungry, and without a permanent home. This interstitial reading also highlights Richard's response to this homelessness, making his actions genuinely heroic, rather than just the expected response of a fantasy protagonist. As a result, readers are challenged to respond in a similar way by giving their own money and dirtying their own shirts, just as Richard does, rather than thinking, like Jessica, "Someone else will help her" (Gaiman 24). In this way, reading Neverwhere as an interstitial novel provides a much more powerful, challenging, and thought-provoking experience for the reader, pushing the reader to become not only intellectually and emotionally engaged with the text, but to take action as well.

Just as the blurring of the line between London Below and London Above caused Richard hesitation, discomfort, and even pain, this blurring of the line between the world of the novel and the real world can feel uncertain and perhaps even dangerous. But of the interstitial spaces examined in this essay – those within the story of Neverwhere, and those between different novels or literary genres – this space between fiction and reality has perhaps the greatest potential to create significant change. As Veronica Schanoes suggests, as literature that is defined by continuous movement between other texts, interstitial literature is difficult to pin down (243). The specific works that constitute interstitial literature are always changing and evolving – if they could even be identified in the first place. But the effects of such works can be identified, and even more importantly, can have long-term impact. The conversations about art, genre, and literature as a whole that are inspired by works of interstitial literature can affect the trajectory of certain genres or our thoughts about what matters in literature. And even more importantly, as Neverwhere demonstrates, reading works of fiction through the lens of interstitiality can be instrumental in calling attention to problems in our society such as homelessness, discrimination, and untreated mental illness – and because of the creativity inherent in these interstitial spaces, provide hope for solutions as well.