Secure Your Own Mask Before Helping Others

By Marie BrennanJune 13, 2015

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

THE TITLE OF Neil Gaiman’s third collection comes from the growing practice of labeling blog posts with content some readers might find upsetting. A survivor of abuse, for example, might have a very unpleasant reaction to reading about similar experiences; a “trigger warning” at the beginning of the post gives that person a chance to avoid such content, or at least to be prepared for what lies ahead.


Trigger warnings can be a contentious practice. On the one hand, they seem like simple courtesy: the psychological equivalent of allergen labels on food. On the other hand, where does one draw the line? What kind of content merits a trigger warning, and what does not? The MPAA rates films for violence, sexual content, drug use, and profanity — but a movie can contain none of these things and still be a work of such profound emotional cruelty that no child (and perhaps no adult) ought to suffer through it. We cannot label every potential trigger; while some are common, many are idiosyncratic and impossible to predict in advance unless the audience is very familiar, such as a close friend or a family member. Some people would even say trigger warnings are misguided from the start: they are the equivalent of cotton wool, cocooning readers in a vain attempt to protect them from the sharp edges of the world.


The practice does not end with blog posts, either, although this is where they are most common. Some comics already carry advisories stating that they are Suggested for Mature Readers, and newscasters occasionally warn viewers that graphic or disturbing images lie ahead; the step from this to more specific content notices is not a long one. In his introduction to this collection, Gaiman mentions that some colleges have considered placing trigger warnings on literature; he does not call any schools out by name, however, leaving the reader to wonder how serious such plans have been, or whether they are merely rumor. In some ways it does not matter. The prospect of labeling stories in this manner was enough to make Gaiman ask two provocative questions: Are fictions safe places? and Should they be safe places?


Unsurprisingly, his answer to both of these questions is no. Conflict lies at the heart of most stories, after all, and conflict is by its very nature not safe. Gaiman writes eloquently of his own experience:


There are stories I read as a child I wished, once I had read them, that I had never encountered, because I was not ready for them and they upset me: stories which contained helplessness, in which people were embarrassed, or mutilated, in which adults were made vulnerable and parents could be of no assistance. They troubled me and haunted my nightmares and my daydreams, worried and upset me on profound levels, but they also taught me that, if I was going to read fiction, sometimes I would only know what my comfort zone was by leaving it; and now, as an adult, I would not erase the experience of having read them if I could.


A person may hope to get through life without encountering mutilation, but to escape all helplessness, embarrassment, or vulnerability would be nothing short of a miracle. And, although Gaiman does not say this, it is safer to encounter troubling ideas and events in a story than in reality. Fiction exposes us to new experiences and gives us a chance to process those experiences in a controlled fashion, with fewer consequences. To encounter such things with no warning whatsoever, not on the page but in daily life, is far more dangerous.


Knowing that Gaiman organized his collection around this concept and filled it with things that (by his own admission) might upset the reader may be alarming to some. It is easy for that sort of thing to tip over the line into authorial sadism, or the pursuit of shock and horror for their own sake. Fans of the horror genre may enjoy such an experience, but a great many others do not. Fortunately, Gaiman is not that kind of writer. A sense of empathy pervades his work, and although the overall tone of this collection is dark, it is not vicious. He states up front that “there is death and pain in here, tears and discomfort, violence of all kinds, cruelty, even abuse” — but then he goes on to say that “there is kindness, too […] Even a handful of happy endings. (Few stories end unhappily for all participants, after all.)” His focus is on


images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming. Our hearts skip a ratatat drumbeat in our chests, and we fight for breath. Blood retreats from our faces and our fingers, leaving us pale and gasping and shocked.


How successful he is in evoking that reaction will likely vary from reader to reader. After all, triggers are idiosyncratic: one person’s trapdoor is another person’s non-event. And, one could argue, the stories in this volume would achieve their unsettling effect more strongly if they were not contained in a collection themed around that idea. A trapdoor is most alarming when you don’t see it; knowing the floor might give way at any moment allows you to brace yourself for the fall. Which is, of course, the point of a trigger warning.


Apart from that theme, the collection is a diverse one. It contains, as is usual for Gaiman, both short stories and poetry; some of the former are very brief, while others might be long enough to qualify as novelettes instead. There are pieces based on fairy tales (“Diamonds and Pearls,” “Observing the Formalities,” and “The Sleeper and the Spindle,” the last of which is arguably less horrifying than his earlier work “Snow, Glass, Apple”), a Doctor Who tie-in story (“Nothing O’Clock”), a story about Sherlock Holmes (“The Case of Death and Honey”), and a poem about assembling furniture (“Making a Chair”). Gaiman has never been the sort of author who likes to confine himself to a single topic or mode, and Trigger Warning reflects this tendency.


His eclecticism possibly reaches the status of bug rather than feature when it comes to his more experimental works. “A Calendar of Tales” arose out of a social media partnership with Blackberry; Gaiman’s introductory notes explain that he tweeted a set of 12 questions, one for each month, and chose one reply to each question to use as the basis for a brief piece of fiction. He names and thanks the 12 Twitter users whose responses he chose, but he gives only three examples of questions (“Why is January dangerous?,” “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen in July?,” and “What would you like to see again in December?”) and only a single example of an answer (“An igloo made of books,” in response to the July question). Without that context, the vignettes which make up “A Calendar of Tales” often seem random and surreal. Presumably this was the intent, but it leaves the reader feeling as if they’ve missed half of the conversation.


Furthermore, some of the experimental works were not originally designed to be text alone. Gaiman mentions that “five short films were made about the process” of writing the stories that make up “A Calendar of Tales,” but those films are absent from this collection. “Diamonds and Pearls: A Fairy Tale” was written to accompany a book of photographs, which in turn was created to accompany the album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? — Gaiman wrote several stories for that book, and he admits that most of them “don’t work when separated from their photographs.” “Diamonds and Pearls” works acceptably well, but might have been enhanced by the inclusion of the image that inspired it. (He does not say whether licensing concerns, the hassles of production, or simple disinterest kept it from being printed here.) And although “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains …” was written to be stand-alone prose, it was performed several times around the world as a multimedia piece, with Gaiman reading the story aloud to accompaniment by the string quartet FourPlay and a series of projected images by artist Eddie Campbell. There is an illustrated edition of the story, but apparently none that includes the music, and the version included in Trigger Warning is the original bare text. It still works well, but Gaiman’s description of the live performance may leave the reader feeling as if they missed out on the real thing.


Of course, not all readers will bother with the introduction or the story notes he gives there. For those who enjoy additional detail, however, Gaiman’s notes are a pleasure, a glimpse into the inspiration and development of each tale. In one instance they even give a hint of the future; the notes for “Black Dog” (a story connected to his novel American Gods) indicate that Gaiman has one more adventure in store for his protagonist Shadow Moon.


Like Gaiman’s previous collections, Trigger Warning is a good reflection of his nature as a writer. This is true not only in the sense of its broad range and unpredictable focus, but also in the message with which he closes his introduction. Having digressed previously on the topic of flight safety, he ends with this admonition: “Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.”


¤


Marie Brennan is the author of nine novels, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, and Voyage of the Basilisk).

LARB Contributor

Marie Brennan is the author of nine novels, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons, The Tropic of Serpents, and Voyage of the Basilisk), as well as more than 40 short stories. More information can be found at swantower.com.

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