Good Omens Annotated Bibliography

by Matt Berrian

Introduction

Reading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman was a slog. This was unfortunate, because I not only selected this book myself but I also had a mountain of work ahead that relied on me actually finishing it. I honestly wished that I had the hindsight to choose a different book but last semester I read Gaiman’s American Gods novel and absolutely loved it, which convinced me that reading another one of Gaiman’s most celebrated works would be a thrill. But instead, I only felt frustrated and tired.

Good Omens is about an angel (Aziraphale) and a demon (Crowley) trying to prevent the Antichrist (an eleven-year old named Adam) from kickstarting the Apocalypse. They want to thwart God’s plan because their several thousand years spent on Earth made them grow very fond of all that the planet and humans have to offer. There’s also some witches, a bumbling young man who can’t operate technology for the life of him, a convent of babbling nuns, green aliens, and all four horsemen of The End Times thrown in there to spice things up for Aziraphale and Crowley. As you can see, any young man would be frothing at the mouth for a chance to read all of this nonsense for a college-level course.

But I resented it.

#1 – Mimesis and Controlling Value

In McKee’s “Structure and Meaning, he defines the “phenomenon” of something he calls “aesthetic emotion” and how this phenomenon relates to art and storytelling (McKee 111). When I first read McKee’s essay, I didn’t have a clue what the hell McKee was talking about; did McKee just smush the words “aesthetic” and “emotion” together and then call it a day? McKee also states that “whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them” (111). Only later would I realize how these concepts related to my experience with Good Omens: if aesthetic emotions were a central aspect to immersing oneself in a text, via the pleasing experience of marrying meaning to emotion, then my difficulty immersing myself in the text could be chalked up to not accessing the emotion that Gaiman and Pratchett planted into the narrative.

Early on in Good Omens Crowley tries to persuade Aziraphale into helping him prevent the Apocalypse from coming to pass. This moment represents no minor stepping stone along the narrative journey — this is the first proposition made that the angel and demon should openly defy their masters and save humanity themselves. Moments such as this tend to establish what McKee calls a “controlling idea” within a narrative — an expression which describes “how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end” (115). Being the third book on my plate for this course, I wanted to be at the ready to point out any sign of a controlling idea while reading the text. What grand statement about the human condition did Gaiman and Pratchett cook up for this scene in Good Omens? Well… it wasn’t what I expected.

In Crowley’s appeal to his angel buddy, he tries to tempt Aziraphale into sabotaging The Great Plan by reminding Aziraphale of everything that the angel loves about Earth. Without Earth, Aziraphale would no longer have “compact discs,” “Albert Hall,” “Proms,” nor any “fascinating little restaurants where they know you,” and especially no more “Daily Telegraph crossword” (Gaiman and Pratchett 41). As far as grand proclamations about the human condition, or even the beginning of one, Crowley’s talking points rang a little hollow. It’s not that I hadn’t picked up on the humor in it: an angel being genuinely beguiled into defying God’s wishes with concerts, crosswords, and chic restaurants is completely contrary to the inscrutable morals often associated with angels in Christian theology. As far as McKee’s concept of aesthetic emotion goes, moments like this were meant to engage the audience through its humor and quirkiness, allowing them to submit to the twists and curves that the writer has planned for them down the line. But I only felt somewhat grifted. It was impossible to submit to this text on the basis that the plot is going to be driven forward by an angel and a demon who only want the world to keep going just because they liked music and puzzle games.

Why? Why were these things better than both Heaven and Hell? If the novel’s premise relied on archetypal figures of good and evil disobeying their commands for personal reasons, then shouldn’t the novel at least explore what qualities that life on Earth has that Aziraphale and Crowley would lose if the world ended? Good Omens seems to consistently be focused on proving again and again that Earth life beats the divine cosmos by a longshot, but never telling its audience why. When writing my group’s first blog for this novel, I was able to easily identify that the text was centered on the “controlling idea” that putting personal ideals above restrictive values passed down from an anonymous plurality was ultimately a good thing. This is rarely contradicted within the novel, and ultimately wins out when (brace yourself) the Apocalypse doesn’t happen! Adam essentially reverses the entire process of Armageddon prep that he and the four horsemen had been setting up throughout the novel. The world as we know it has survived, and our friendly neighborhood angel and demon end their part of the narrative with a reflective stroll through the park (Pratchett, Gaiman 358-361). The journey was convoluted, whacky, and wrapped everything up in a neat bow.

But what on Earth was anyone supposed to feel through all of this? A reader could understand the ins-and-outs of the novel’s thematic messaging as expertly as they want from beginning to end. Finding a reason to care about how these values are affecting the cast of characters is a different beast itself.

#3 – Intertextuality

In terms of this novel’s relationship with outside texts and codes, I suspect that my understanding of Gaiman’s previous works greatly influenced my approach to Good Omens. As previously mentioned, I chose this novel because I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods several months before the beginning of this course, and loved it; which encouraged me to seek out other works by Gaiman. Although it was written before American Gods, I’ve come to understand that I unconsciously assumed that the mimetic and thematic registers from American Gods would be somewhat replicated in Good Omens, being co-authored by Gaiman. I knew that Good Omens was meant to be more lighthearted and comedic than American Gods, but the novel’s premise felt ripe with the potential of delivering the same emotional and thought-provoking blows as Gods did. Each were concerned with divine figures, prophecies, an archetypal Chosen One, and the impending threat of total annihilation. I now believe that my prolonged inability to enter Good Omens’s mimetic register was largely in part to me projecting my experience with American Gods onto Omens without accepting the latter as its own text.

Beyond my prior experiences with Gaiman’s other works, my experience of the novel also became impacted by my attempt to interpret the text via hermeneutic and cultural codes — as defined by Barthes and analyzed by Silverman. How these two codes influenced my reading are dependent on each other, and cannot be discussed as separate factors that contributed to my reading experience. In my reading, the cultural codes that I had associated with angels and demons tacitly nudged me into believing a hermeneutic code was going to be developed through the narrative. Cultural codes “function to not only organize but to naturalize the field — to make it seem timeless and inevitable” (Silverman 274), which, in the case of Good Omens, means that characters such as Crowley, Adam, and Aziraphale all seem to exist within a specific cultural narrative that will define who they are and their development within the narrative.

From the get-go, it’s clear that Aziraphale and Crowley are not going to adhere to the cultural connotations associated with angels and demons respectively. Neither have been able to follow the duties bestowed upon them from literally the beginning of time: Aziraphale gives away his flaming sword to Adam and Eve when they are cast out of Eden “what with the vicious animals out there and the storm coming up … you (Adam and Eve) might be needing this sword, so here it is,” (4) while Crowley asserts that the roles of angels and demons are nothing more than “a pantomime,” and worries if “the apple thing” was actually “the right thing to do” (5). These two beings are much different than what the audience would expect from an angel and a demon, with each casually circumventing the rules or ideology associated with their respective cosmological kingdoms. The subversion of traditional Judeo-Christian archetypes in this way sets up a question that I spent a significant portion of my reading time trying to answer: what about Aziraphale and Crowley makes them so different from others of their kind since nearly the beginning of the Earth?

Now you might be able to see what I meant when I said that the cultural codes prompted me to assume the hermeneutic code was at play within the narrative, only to be disappointed when I realized that I was taking myself down the wrong rabbit hole when it came to this narrative. Projecting my previous experiences with Neil Gaiman’s fiction work onto the text, I picked out Aziraphale and Crowley’s subversive portrayals as enigmas that the text would eventually snake around to resolving before the story ended. Despite repeatedly behaving very un-angelic or un-demonic respectively — Aziraphale urging Shadwell to kill the Antichrist, a small child (165); Crowley choosing to fight The Devil in order to save the cast of human characters (209) — the narrative doesn’t seem concerned with telling the audience why these two supernatural characters differ so greatly from what the audience may expect of them. I felt that I needed to first establish the dead-ends I ran into in my attempt at locating elements of hermeneutic coding within the text before I moved onto my discussion of form and genre, because when I realized that I was actively seeking out stages of the hermeneutic code, it dawned on me what I was actually reading for: I wanted a full mimetic experience that would help me feel connected to the characters.

So, to summarize the trials and tribulations of the prior hundreds of words spread out above:

I wanted Good Omens to be dark and emotional.
I assumed that Pratchett and Gaiman gave flimsy reasons to explain away Crowley and Aziraphale’s rebellious tendencies to delay the reveal of a ‘deeper’ reason that hid underneath their materialism.
These flimsy explanations were meant to set up a hermeneutic series of developments; culminating in a revelation of what actually made them keen on humanity.
The hermeneutic code was not present in this sense.
I was disappointed by what I perceived as a lack of attention given to fleshing out these two fascinating characters.

In actuality, items 3 and 4 were less indicative of Pratchett and Gaiman’s writing quality, but was more related to my unconscious desire to experience Good Omens through a mimetic register, and nothing else.

#2 – Form and Genre

Only through an analysis of Good Omens’s synthetic elements was I able to conclude that Pratchett and Gaiman likely intended their audience to read the book through a thematic register, not mimetic. While the text is sparse with moments that encourage empathy towards the situations of the main characters, instances of satirical irony are abundant. As Dr. Kopp outlined on our course’s Weebly site, irony can be identified through several cues that are relevant to the ironies found in Good Omens:

The ethos of the narrator, who the reader has learned to expect instances of irony.
Shared background of understanding.
The immediate context.

One of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine, is originally introduced as his human alter-ego, Sable. ‘Sable’ owns a world-famous dieting book and is a celebrity nutritionist, convincing millions that restriction is the key to health. At a restaurant, he encounters a fan:

“She (Sable accountant) was interrupted by a skeleton. A skeleton in a Dior dress, with tanned skin stretched almost to snapping point over the delicate bones of the skull. The skeleton had long blond hair and perfectly made-up lips: she looked like the person mothers around the world would point to, muttering, “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t eat your greens”; she looked like a famine-relief poster with style.” (34).

Although Sable’s identity as Famine isn’t explicitly revealed in the text yet, there’s a humorous irony in the fan being compared to a “famine-relief poster”, which lends to the idea that a critical, snarky narrator is the one who is conveying this narrative to readers. Throughout the novel, humorous commentary such as this nearly always takes the place of earnest, heartfelt descriptions of the story. Irony takes on the repetitive form (Burke 125) in this way, as — much like the instances of Aziraphale being shown to care about material things more than his duties — the novel is positioning itself as a work defined by ironic subversions, not an attempt to draw out a sense of ‘realness’ from its cast of characters. Sable taking the form of a lifestyle tycoon who’s been convincing humans to gradually starve themselves into the image of famine itself is not only an ironic moment between his skeletal fan and himself, but also in the broader implication that his human fans have been wasting themselves away entirely of their own volition.

Though skewing towards the gimmer side of things, Sable’s exchange with his fan is still mainly serving the function of humorous social commentary propelled forward by the contextual irony of the scene. Moments such as this use the characters to ‘say’ something indirectly about the situation, rather than using the space to provoke a mimetic sort of empathy for readers to place themselves into. While these moments were definitely funny, I initially resented the narrative for not taking the time to convince me why I should care about the conflicts that these fictional people were going through. My limited view of Sable’s bony fan is somewhat sympathetic in a very general sense, but she is mainly portrayed as a parodic figure, becoming more of a symbol for a person than a ‘real’ person. With Crowley, Aziraphale, this fan, and many others within this novel, it is much more difficult to emotionally reflect oneself onto these characters compared to cataloguing them as ironic symbols. These symbols gradually build up to develop a controlling value of: Divine plots and representatives are the simplistic ones, whereas human nature and the human experience are actually the ones that are more difficult to pin down. In this way, the synthetic register reveals to the reader the thematic messaging interlaced throughout the text, which takes priority over establishing a mimetic connection between the text and those who are reading.

#4: Rhetorical Dimension of Narrative

I’ve been talking a lot about “the audience” or “the reader” and the ever-elusive “narrator” for a while so far, but what lies beyond these vague labels? Firstly, I want to establish that the author (the flesh-and-blood human being who wrote down the words and sent them to a publisher) and the narrator are not the same person, and neither are the reader (you) and the implied audience (Seitz 145). It is important to make these distinctions because Pratchett and Gaiman’s intentions within the narrative are not the exact same as the intentions of their narrator, and each of these two parties have a different audience that they are trying to reach. In terms of Pratchett and Gaiman’s implied audience, I was only able to take a stab at who this nebulous group of people could be through realizing that I was not one of them.

My hyper-fixation on my inability to mimetically engage with the text culminates in this final point where the line is drawn between who Good Omens is hypothetically written for, and who I am as a reader. How I’ve come to see the novel is that Pratchett and Gaiman do not actually intend for their readers to mimetically engage with the text at all. Rather, through the lack of hermeneutic coding implanted within the characters’ development, and the priority of ironic contrasts over the craft of aesthetic emotion, I feel that Good Omens is meant to be engaged on a purely thematic level, where the ideal audience will be expected to worry more about the commentary being made than the fictional figures who are ‘living out’ the narrative.

James Phelan describes narration as “an art of indirection” wherein the author is using the character of the narrator to simultaneously communicate with both “the narrator’s and the author’s” audiences (Phelan 1). As far as I have been able to interpret the implied authorial stance that Pratchett and Gaiman took when writing this novel, it becomes clear that they don’t actually expect their implied audience to care much about the apocalyptic stakes that the plot is centered upon. As the novel is reaching its climactic moment where the Four Horsemen are about to initiate global nuclear halocaust, the narrator opens a new paragraph with the following interjection:

“Afterwards, Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger recalled events at the gate as having happened like this…” (Pratchett Gaiman 189).

Afterwards? The use of this time signifier baffled me when I first read the book. On the eve of total annihilation, the narrator tells their narratee (their own audience within the fiction of the novel) that there will be an “afterwards” to these tense events. The narrator seems to inform both the narratee and the implied audience that the world will not end, because there will be humans left to reflect upon this encounter in the past tense. Relating again to my discussion of the thematic versus mimetic reading methods of this text, being told that the novel will not end in disaster well in advance to the upcoming final confrontation removes dramatic tension from the final stretch of rising action before the climax is reached.

Via Phelan’s interpretation of a narrator’s multi-layered methods of communication, I would hazard to identify this indirect reveal on page 189 as a “disclosure function” between the narrator and the implied audience (Phelan 12). This disclosure essentially tells the audience that everything will be okay, therefore, they should be reading this text for another reason besides just wanting to know what happens next. In John’s and Destiny’s replies to Emma’s second blog post on form and genre, they brought up interesting points that lend further credence to the idea that Good Omens is less about the characters, and more about what these characters represent to the overall thematic structure of the text. John pointed out how:

“The narrator took a certain distance to all of the characters, almost like they didn’t take a particular interest in any one of the characters, but in the story as a whole. By the end of the story, Crowley and Aziraphale have barely affected the events at all, almost as if everything was part of a plan already put into place (one that they couldn’t affect or understand even if they wanted to).”

Destiny’s reply supports this when she separately commented on being surprised that “the main characters of the book (which my group largely assumed were meant to be Crowley and Aziraphale) weren’t around for the duration of the novel.”

This is all true — the novel hops around into many different diversions throughout, not lending an exuberant amount of attention on Adam, Crowley, Aziraphale, Newt, or Anathema (the last two have since gone unmentioned within this Annotated Bibliography because there is too much ground to cover in too little time, but they do share equal amount of page-time with the others). This omniscient narrator — who may likely be God, given the religious contexts that the novel exists within — does not care if their narratee is emotionally impacted by the multitude of individuals who comprise this story. They seem to only want their own audience to enjoy the satire, ironies, and seemingly endless diversions that this story can offer.

Reflection

I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface of what this course has to offer me as a writer. This isn’t to say that I haven’t learned anything at all — the intertextual codes outlined by Silverman and the various readings on rhetorical dimensions of a narrative have firmly planted themselves in my mind. With the second core value of the Writing Arts major in mind, I was able to bring the readings on method three into play when I had to create a graphic narrative for my Topics in Literature course. My graphic narrative relied on the semic associations that my narrator held towards a skull, which allowed me to establish a visual shorthand for conveying dread. Our discussions on method 4, the rhetoric of narrative, also influenced my work in Creative Writing II this semester. While it now seems obvious in my mind, I hadn’t considered before this course how divorced the author and the narrator can truly be, and how the narrator should be treated as a character within the fiction just like the other characters that this narrator is talking about. For a piece of horror flash-fiction, I found it much easier to establish a distinct voice for the piece when I envisioned my narrator as a whole separate entity from myself.

Analyzing the first of the core values is where I feel room for improvement in my understanding of methods one and two, analyzing mimesis and synthetic registers. When reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I struggled to come up with a value graph for the ongoing conversation that Jackson was expressing through this story. Attempting to sift through Merricat’s madcap rhetoric in order to identify the tug-and-pull of values proved difficult, in addition to trying to map out the progresssive forms that shaped her struggle against the outside world. However, despite my personal challenges faced dissecting the text with certain methods, I was able to identify where signs of these craft conventions could be spotted across a graphic novel (Maus), thrillers (We Have Always Lived in the Castle), comedy (Good Omens), and memoir (Tears of the Silenced).

While I still have much to learn about what it really means to read as a writer, my experiences in this course have definitely affected how I perceive nearly all texts. Something funny that I’ve noticed since this course is that I have a hard time thinking a text is ‘bad’ anymore — more often than not, I’ve started approaching texts more through the intent of rhetorical analysis than how I personally have interpreted the text’s quality. When I was watching Joker with one of my roommates earlier this month, I found myself continuously making commentary about how the writers and directors were guiding the narrative through repetitive forms, and how hermeneutic coding was being interspersed throughout the text to tease out the truth of Arthur’s real parentage. Even at this stage of my development as a reader and writer, lifting the curtain on the projections that I’ve cast onto texts have helped me more critically navigate how writing accomplishes its near-infinite amount of effects on the reader. Thankfully, reading has become a much more laborious experience — and I mean this sincerely. The thrill of being able to articulate why a magazine article rubbed me the wrong way, or how a novel’s word choice has impacted my expectations makes the experience of reading a much more engaging and worthwhile process.

Personally written blog posts

Blog 1: Good Omens

Blog 2: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Blog 3: Maus

Blog 4: Tears of the Silenced

Blog Replies for Maus