Regan Flieg: Neil and the Numinous

Neil Gaiman is easily one of my favorite authors, and, as such, it is only fitting that I dedicate a blog post to my favorite of his books, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.  This book is simply too full of interesting subject matter for me to include anything near all of it in this blog post, so I want to focus on one element that pertains to our course, and that singular element is the titular ocean.  Now, this ocean isn’t really an ocean in the technical sense at all, but the duck pond at the Hempstocks’ place.  As a young boy, the unnamed narrator visits with Lettie Hempstock who shows him the ocean, and Lettie’s approach to her ocean resonates with the integration of place and the Divine Redick described as a quality of Lewis’s work in his article, “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality.” 

Although in this fantastical novel, only a bucketfull of the water from this pond is able to full submerge the narrator later in the novel and still later the ocean “takes” Lettie when she is badly hurt saving the narrator (Gaiman 254-6, 304), the narrator’s first impression of it prompts him to say, “It’s just a pond, really” (39). Throughout the novel, the reader comes to associate the supernatural and ancient essence of all three of the Hempstocks with the mysteriously simple ocean, and through this process, the reader can hopefully begin to taste the idea of the seemingly simple elements of nature - like the duckpond - point to something greater, prompting the reader, like Lewis, to begin to see “nature as the created world that reflects the numinous and is therefore filled with symbolic potential” (Redick 7).  Clearly, Gaiman already sees what Lewis did, that “nature’s inherent power points to the ultimate power,” and therefore, his fiction too displays powerful settings that evoke mystery, awe, and the idea of the Divine (Redick 7).

Gaiman, Neil. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Illustrated by Elise Hurst, William Morrow, 2019.

Redick, Kip. “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality.”  C.S. Lewis: Views from Wake Forest, edited by Michael Travers, Zossima Press, 2008, pp. 137-157. “Wilderness, Arcadia and Longing: Mythic Landscapes and the Experience of Reality.” Philosophy 451, Fall 2020, Christopher Newport University. Class Handout.