Fissuras Cotidianas: O entrelugar da experiência, do mito e do espaço em Deuses Americanos, de Neil Gaiman

Abstract

American Gods (2016), by Neil Gaiman, unveils the mythical wisdom that reason has obscured over the last few centuries by making room for gods in the age of technology. Published in 2001, Gaiman (2016) proposes another relation between men and their deities: these entities would be materializations of human beliefs, fed through the sacred force we devote to them. From ancient gods, long worshiped by ancestral cultures, to Media and Internet deities, Gaiman seeks to re-signify our relationship with the pragmatic reality that we live in, exponentially enhanced in one of the countries most devoted to the forces of reason: United States. Thus, presupposing myth as a phenomenon of the spirit, whose first appearance occurs in a moment of excitement of human sensibilities (CASSIRER, 1992, p. 34), in a mental space that precedes reason – a space that we call, with Benjamin 1987) and Larrosa (2015), experience – we seek to understand Gaiman's mythical bias by bringing mythological entities from antiquity to the contemporary context, as well as the emergence of current gods and their relationship with technology. We propose, therefore, to think of Gaiman's premise as a literary reflection about myth, considering the relation between the materiality of the gods, experience and the mythical proposal of Cassirer (1992). Finally, we will approach the relationship between myth, experience and the narrative space where it operates: North America. In America, as in the mythical era, the supernatural touches daily life and transforms itself, becoming constant and true. Faced with the omnipresence of the impossible, we understand American’s space as the place of the extraordinary, capable of raising the sacred power of the spirit while refusing to worship the deities - after all, as we all know, America is not a good country for gods (GAIMAN, 2016, p. 485).