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And the World Continues to Spin…: Secularism and Demystification in Good Omens

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Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds

Part of the book series: Critical Approaches to Children's Literature ((CRACL))

Abstract

Pratchett’s narratives tend to portray not only multicultural but also multireligious societies. In contrast to earlier writers of fantasy, however, Pratchett writes from a decidedly atheistic point of view, an issue Daniel Scott explores in depth in this chapter. He argues that co-authors Pratchett and Gaiman use Good Omens to perform what, following Rosemary Jackson’s theory of fantasy literature (1989), is a dual subversion; in using biblical prophecy to hold a mirror up to society, they also show the faults and cracks in the mirror itself, sometimes overtly, but mostly by implication. By reducing it to this level of intertextuality, they strip it of its higher or absolute metaphysical values, therefore denying its applicability to the real world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    J.K. Rowling, unlike the other fantasy authors mentioned here, is a moderate Christian. As such, she falls between the two poles of atheist/humanist authors on the one hand and theist authors on the other. Although her works (esp. Harry Potter) famously garnered criticism from fundamentalist groups for their use of magic, I would position them in the middle of a greater continuum of faith-based writing in fantasy.

  2. 2.

    For an exploration of the fantastic as a form of engaging with existing texts and creating a mirror universe to our own, cf. Gideon Haberkorn’s chapter in this collection.

  3. 3.

    Cf. Colin Manlove, Christian Fantasy (London: Macmillan, 1992), 237–263.

  4. 4.

    British Humanist Association, ‘BHA mourns patron Terry Pratchett’, 12 March 2015, https://humanism.org.uk/2015/03/12/bha-mourns-patron-terry-pratchett/.

  5. 5.

    Cf. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, ‘Afterword’, Good Omens (London: Harper, 1990), 377. All in-text citations refer to the Corgi edition.

  6. 6.

    Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1972 [1970]), 24–57.

  7. 7.

    Christine Brooke-Rose, The Rhetoric of the Unreal. Studies in Narrative & Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge: CUP, 1981).

  8. 8.

    Neill Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic from Gothic to Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 27–41.

  9. 9.

    Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992), 6. For approaches similarly featuring the uses of what if sentences or similar subjunctive utterances, cf. Neill Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic from Gothic to Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 40; Edmund Little, The Fantasts (Amersham: Avebury, 1980), 7–15; Joanna Russ, ‘The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction’, Extrapolation 15, part 1 (Dec. 1973), 52; and Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame UP, 1975).

  10. 10.

    This distinguishes it from genres like realism and science fiction, although the liminal areas remain almost impossible to map, giving rise to hybrid genre classifications like ‘science fantasy’ or ‘space ppera’.

  11. 11.

    Eric Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton UP, 1976), 147.

  12. 12.

    Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (New York: Ardis, 1973), 101–103.

  13. 13.

    Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1981), 15–19. For an expansion and elaboration of this approach also see Colin Manlove, The Fantasy Literature of England (London: Macmillan, 1999), 142–165.

  14. 14.

    Opposition and Parallel are effectively specific instances of fantasy and mimesis (cf. Kathryn Hume’s monograph of the same title). However, since these are both very broad terms, I use the terms Opposition and Parallel for the sake of specificity.

  15. 15.

    This is the modus operandi employed in works like Thomas More’s Utopia, which portray a distinctly different world in order to indirectly critique our own by contrast.

  16. 16.

    Gulliver’s Travels, with its critical simulation of known structures in a fantastic other-realm, would be a classic example of this kind of interaction.

  17. 17.

    Again there is a noticeable kinship to the parallel structure to Genette’s tripart structure of Pastiche, Parody and Travesty (cf. Genette), which Gideon Haberkorn explores in this volume: whereas Pastiche creates a parallel, Parody might be construed as an opposition, whereas travesty is a particular kind of interaction with the real world, which, while opposing its original, also highlights the same. What is true of intertextual references would also seem to apply to the basic form of reference between fantasy and the real world.

  18. 18.

    This is often a staple of more baroque works, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  19. 19.

    The view of God being one (fictitious) mythical being among many others has since become even more closely aligned with the secular-humanist worldview, since it has been used by Richard Dawkins in his public discussions since the mid-2000s. For examples, cf. Richard Dawkins/CNN, ‘Richard Dawkins: If I meet God when I die’, YouTube, 15 September 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6iss-xq2-E, 2:59–3:13, and Richard Dawkins/Fox News, ‘Bill O’Reilly Richard Dawkins Interview’, YouTube, 31 March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5COtGsDL4hQ, 1:26–1:31.

  20. 20.

    This is essentially part of the same process Gideon Haberkorn has called Pratchett’s ‘debugging’, being the method by which especially fantastic irony is used to renegotiate and re-evaluate existing real-world concepts. Cf. Gideon Haberkorn, ‘Debugging the Mind: The Rhetoric of Humor and the Poetics of Fantasy’, in The Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014), 160–188.

  21. 21.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens (London: Corgi, 1991), 40–41.

  22. 22.

    Cf. Farah Mendlesohn, ‘Faith and Ethics’, in Terry Pratchett. Guilty of Literature. Second Edition, eds A. Butler, E. James and F. Mendlesohn (Baltimore, MD: Old Earth, 2004 [2000]), 245.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 41.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 45–47.

  25. 25.

    When Good Omens was published in 1990, the Cold War was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

  26. 26.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens, 49.

  27. 27.

    See Virginie Douglas, ‘Learning Relativism Through Humour, Play and the Shift of Viewpoint in the Truckers Trilogy’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017), xy.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., xy.

  29. 29.

    Good Omens includes its own footnotes which often, as in this case, are used to deliver afterthoughts and punchlines.

  30. 30.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens, 17.

  31. 31.

    The play on the word ineffable continues right up to the final confrontation between the hosts of Heaven and Hell, when Aziraphale convinces Metatron into doubting the necessity of Armageddon by getting him to consider the full meaning of the word ‘ineffable’, 352–353.

  32. 32.

    Such as when Crowley traps the demon Hastur in an answering machine, 247–250.

  33. 33.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens, 206.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 209.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 194–195.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 208.

  37. 37.

    For a detailed overview of millennialist prophecies over the centuries, cf. Damian Thompson, The End of Time: Fear and Faith in the Shadow of the Millennium (London: Vintage, 1999).

  38. 38.

    Agnes’s diction is given in pseudo-seventeenth-century style even in direct speech.

  39. 39.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens, 194.

  40. 40.

    It is likely that this insight also leads Anathema, who has spent her entire life interpreting Agnes’s prophecies, to (as it is implied) forfeit that life of ‘a descendant’ (371) in favour of a new beginning with Newt.

  41. 41.

    As is so often the case, due to his function as the actuator and solution to the plot, Adam is likely not the most interesting or entertaining character in Good Omens. Nevertheless, he is definitely its focus.

  42. 42.

    His name, both for its symbolic and literal meaning (‘human’), is of course particularly telling in this respect; the significance of naming is discussed further on.

  43. 43.

    Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens, 222.

  44. 44.

    See Minwen Huang, ‘Fantasy as Belief and Its Happenings in Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather’, in Shedding the Light Fantastic on Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods, ed. Marion Rana (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2017), xy.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., xy–xy.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., xy.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., xy.

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  1. Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Daniel Scott

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  1. Interjuli, Lorch, Germany

    Marion Rana

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Scott, D. (2018). And the World Continues to Spin…: Secularism and Demystification in Good Omens . In: Rana, M. (eds) Terry Pratchett's Narrative Worlds. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67298-4_5

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