Neil Gaiman, known for his surreal tales that bend ideas of space and time, transformed the comic book world with his first episode of Preludes and Nocturnes from The Sandman series. Throughout his career, his stories explore the interrelationship between rationality and irrationality, especially in conjunction with dreams. In his 1999 essay “Reflections on Myth,” Gaiman meditates on the nature of mythology and its connection to dreaming, stating that the new mythologies of magic and science and numbers and fame […] have their function, all the ways we try to make sense of the world we inhabit, a world in which there are few, if any, easy answers. Every day we attempt to understand it. And every night we close our eyes and go to sleep, and
…show more content…
The insight that people try to make sense of their experiences in the madness of dreams seems to reflect the mind’s need to construct consistent, sequential experiences and thought processes. Gaiman’s graphic novel implies that without organizing one’s experience, a person might go mad in a Heinrothian sense. To develop an understanding of madness in Delirium (one of the primary characters in Brief Lives), I use German psychologist Johann Christian August Heinroth’s definition of being “obscure, aquatic, [of or with a] dark disorder, a moving chaos, and the seed of death of all things, which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability” (qtd. in Foucault, …show more content…
In terms of confinement, however, it denotes “an undifferentiated region of disorder—a disorder of the spirit, or a disordered way of life, a whole obscure region of menacing rage that did not yet form grounds for a possible condemnation” (Foucault, “Experience” 109). While Delirium is not confined in a prison or mental institution, she lives in such disorder, and when Dream travels through her realm, the reader experiences with him chaos that might be interpreted and madness (see Fig. 3-5). Delirium’s realm in chapter six embodies the way in which she is filled with dark despair: cutout words and phrases drift: “EDUCTION ,” “mediocre,” and “wasn’t good enough” float with cutout images of a man’s face connected to a butterfly’s body, a dogface with a human arm and butterfly’s body, and floating crustaceans and a Barbie head. This disorder is a moving chaos, frenzied. The narration boxes recount smells of a hospital, clinical; dark rooms with formless people, unripe mind apples, a dance being an alley where babies die to name a few. In the center of this: a sundial named Tempus Frangit stopped, breaking time (22; ch. 6). This view is consistent with Michel Foucault’s theory that a fragmented sense of time “reveal[s] a major disturbance in temporality; time no longer projects itself or flows; the past piles up; and the future,
The insight that people try to make sense of their experiences in the madness of dreams seems to reflect the mind’s need to construct consistent, sequential experiences and thought processes. Gaiman’s graphic novel implies that without organizing one’s experience, a person might go mad in a Heinrothian sense. To develop an understanding of madness in Delirium (one of the primary characters in Brief Lives), I use German psychologist Johann Christian August Heinroth’s definition of being “obscure, aquatic, [of or with a] dark disorder, a moving chaos, and the seed of death of all things, which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability” (qtd. in Foucault, …show more content…
In terms of confinement, however, it denotes “an undifferentiated region of disorder—a disorder of the spirit, or a disordered way of life, a whole obscure region of menacing rage that did not yet form grounds for a possible condemnation” (Foucault, “Experience” 109). While Delirium is not confined in a prison or mental institution, she lives in such disorder, and when Dream travels through her realm, the reader experiences with him chaos that might be interpreted and madness (see Fig. 3-5). Delirium’s realm in chapter six embodies the way in which she is filled with dark despair: cutout words and phrases drift: “EDUCTION ,” “mediocre,” and “wasn’t good enough” float with cutout images of a man’s face connected to a butterfly’s body, a dogface with a human arm and butterfly’s body, and floating crustaceans and a Barbie head. This disorder is a moving chaos, frenzied. The narration boxes recount smells of a hospital, clinical; dark rooms with formless people, unripe mind apples, a dance being an alley where babies die to name a few. In the center of this: a sundial named Tempus Frangit stopped, breaking time (22; ch. 6). This view is consistent with Michel Foucault’s theory that a fragmented sense of time “reveal[s] a major disturbance in temporality; time no longer projects itself or flows; the past piles up; and the future,