American Gods Part Three: Gaiman’s Mendicant Gods

I said I had been writing up a storm. This post emerges from a little epiphany I had in the middle of class discussion on Thursday. Because I wanted to get it done before we move on to Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I’m putting it up without doing anything more than the most cursory research into its main premise, namely, that Gaiman’s old gods comprise an interesting retread of a classic figure in American literature and popular culture: the drifter, the vagabond, the hobo. Actually, I’m pretty confident of that assertion–what I’m less confident of is how I historicize that figure. What I say feels right, but as I tell my students, that’s usually when you tend to drive your argument off a cliff. So know I’m totally prepared to be completely wrong on certain points.

While some of the gods Shadow meets are sedentary, like Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jaquel in their Cairo, Illinois funeral home, or Czernobog and the Three Sisters in Chicago, the novel itself is decidedly peripatetic and conveys a powerful sense of rootlessness. To be certain, this perambulatory quality is predominantly communicated by Shadow’s constant movement, crisscrossing the continent in Mr. Wednesday’s tow. But between his constant road-tripping and the depiction of the various old gods as marginal and forgotten, eking out an existence on what they can beg, scrape, swindle, or steal, the novel reimagines a common pre-WWII trope in American literature and popular culture: the romanticized figure of the drifter, the vagabond, the hobo.

I’ve only had this idea in my head for about forty-eight hours, and so haven’t devoted any real research to it yet, but it seems to me that the drifter—the sort who rode the rails during the depression, or “lit out for the territories” during frontier days, or for that matter literally drifted on a raft down the Mississippi River—met his end as an American staple after WWII. The world war was a pivot-point for America, transforming it from a middling world power with isolationist tendencies into a superpower that assumed the mantle of global cop, and whose intact manufacturing sector transitioned seamlessly from building tanks and jeeps to building Buicks and refrigerators. The single greatest building project in U.S. history, the construction of the massive interstate highway system, took place under Eisenhower’s presidency; this era similarly saw the growth of suburban sprawl into thousands of formerly rural areas.

When I say that the figure of the hobo or drifter has been romanticized or sentimentalized, I mean that even Norman Rockwell saw fit to make him a piece of nostalgic Americana.

The drifter did not disappear per se; rather, he settled behind the wheel of a car in On the Road or on a motorcycle in Easy Rider, or into the low-rent bohemias of big cities. But the rail-riding hobo, the Tom Joad-esque leftist agitator, or the roving loner who just needs to escape the stultifying conventions if civilization? They effectively disappeared. And though I have no doubt that there are any number of instances I’m not thinking of that contradict this notion, I would still argue that the postwar drifters are different in kind, bounded by an America that has coloured in what Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe called “the white spaces of the map.” It’s telling that in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s search for the “real America” ultimately takes them to Mexico, as their blinkered conception of American “authenticity” can no longer reside within its borders.

But what does this have to do with American Gods? Honestly, still working that one out. But it strikes me that if we look at Mr. Wednesday et al in this context, they appear as degraded, disaffected manifestations of the drifter—not the hopeful, romantic sentiment giving voice to “This Land is Your Land,” but figures long alienated by the very newness of a land not amenable to their kind (as discussed in my last post). That America’s “newness,” as compared to their Old World stomping grounds, is part of the problem, reads in this context as vaguely ironic, as it was the putative newness of America that inspired the loners seeking empty landscapes and “that ribbon of highway” that leads off Pete Seeger’s anthem; and it was that “newness” that romanticized their wanderlust.

If the transformation of the U.S. from a frontierland into urban/exurban sprawls interspersed with farmland industrialized by agribusiness have comparably transformed the drifter into an alienated figure seeking escape, Gaiman’s gods appear to us always already alienated by a land that marginalizes and forgets them almost immediately. Indeed, have more in common with the alienation of the Beats, echoing the lost and forgotten human detritus littering the landscape of Allen Ginserg’s “Howl,” the “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” As Mr. Wednesday says to the assembled old gods when trying to persuade them to take up arms against the new,

This land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scarred and dispossessed, to get by on what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could.

So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching too closely.

We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.

It is difficult not to read American Gods in the present moment without having in mind the systematic depredations of neoliberalism—the gutting of manufacturing, destruction of unions, erosion of the social safety net, diminution of the middle class, and dramatic increase in income inequality—that have brought the U.S. to a point of such radical disaffection that Donald Trump actually seems like a viable candidate to 40% of voters. While Gaiman’s gods serve to allegorize this disaffection and alienation, the novel also depicts the decline of opportunity and community in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, such as the declining town of Cairo, Illinois (a town that has, since the publication of American Gods, been effectively abandoned).

Nowhere does the novel depict this declination more than in contrast, with the literally preternatural Lakeside: an idyllic, perfect little berg that is prosperous, friendly, and optimistic, free of the scourges of rampant drug use and crime. As noted in my previous post, Shadow realizes that this unusually perfect town can only be so by way of human sacrifice. When Shadow confronts him, Hinzelmann says defiantly, “This town … I care for it. Nothing happens here that I don’t want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes here that I don’t want to come here.” When Shadow asks if anyone else knows how he maintains the town’s protection, he replies, “They know that they live in a good place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that.” When the Sherriff overhears them and kills Hinzelmann, Shadow tells him, “this town is going to change now. It’s not going to be the only good town in a depressed region any more. It’s going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. There’s going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down.”

These glimpses of America in decline are not central to American Gods, but nor are they incidental to the map Gaiman draws. On returning to this novel yet again, I am impressed anew by the richness of its critique: as I said in my previous post, we can read it both as an indictment of modernity’s (and especially postmodernity’s) capacity to run roughshod over cultural idiosyncrasies and assimilate them into a monolithic culture industry, and as a guarded endorsement of American Exceptionalism and the United States’ capacity to make good on the promise of blank slates. At the same time, it functions as a critique of the country’s inherent tendency to alienate certain populations and obviate the possibilities for the very dream associated with its most prominent national myth.

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It’s something of a shame we really do have to move on—I feel like I’m just getting started here. Tune in tomorrow when we shift gears and talk zombies.

(though I will probably put up a post mid-week that started out as a discussion of American Gods but ended up focusing more on Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These things happen when you live in my mind).