Somaesthetics, the Body and Drugs

Shusterman has stated that ‘Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning’ (Shusterman, 2012: 26). It is my contention that as the characters in Gaiman’s novel fashion their identities and interact with the landscapes and buildings where the action takes place, Gaiman can be seen to choose words and phrases that evoke specific somatic reactions in the characters and perhaps even in his readers. By drawing attention to his characters’ bodies as they come in to contact with and react to (and are constructed by) the various spaces that serve as homes in the novel, Gaiman embeds these connections at the centre of his text. These concerns are deployed in an analysis of the body’s (or soma’s) relationship to architectural space. As the home is one of the key locations where identity is formed it seems crucial to interrogate the special relationship that the soma has to this most important space.

The relationship of the body, or soma as Shusterman prefers, to the home is inherent throughout the history of architecture, so much so in fact that we can see that

the body – as a composite structure through which we live – is itself symbolically understood through tectonic notions. This symbolic connection extends from ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Roman architects like Vitruvius, and early Christian thinkers like St. Paul through Renaissance writers like Henry Wotton, and all the way into modern scientific critics of religion such as Freud (Shusterman, 2012: 223).

This long and varied history of the relationship of the body to the buildings we construct to house and protect them is not confined only to the physical structures but also often cross-pollinates into the imaginary world of the arts and literature. When considering what impact any of this may have had on Gaiman as an author, I will first consider the role of the “technical boy” in American Gods and that character’s relationship to the author William S. Burroughs, a writer who was equally concerned with the body and home (Lydenberg, 1987; Nelson, 1991). The technical boy, who in the fictionalised America created in the text is both the god of and a personification of the internet, has a deeper and more complex role in the story and the connection to Burroughs is revealed in two distinct ways. The first is the essence of the electronic nature of the worship that the technical boy collects. Burroughs noted that ‘Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways,’ suggesting that all drug-induced states and, by extension, spiritual states can be manufactured via the proper stimulation of the electromagnetic signals in the brain (Burroughs & Odier, 1989: 131). If transcendent religious experiences are the product of brain chemistry and electromagnetic signals we can consider the role of brain chemistry in the creation of these experiences. The chemical N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and its role as (potentially) the spirit molecule (responsible for near-death, and religious-like, experiences) is of particular interest because of the presence of sigma-1 receptors in mammalian nervous systems. Indeed, recent research notes that ‘biochemical, physiological, and behavioral experiments indicate that DMT is an endogenous agonist for the sigma-1 receptor’ thus suggesting that human beings are capable of a hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience in response to the presence of DMT in the nervous system simulating transendence (Fontanilla et al., 2009). Additionally, the technical boy is smoking something that Shadow notes is ‘not tobacco … not pot either … It smelled a little like burning electrical parts’ (Gaiman, 2012: 52). The substance is revealed by the technical boy to be, ‘synthetic toad skins’ further adding ‘You know they can synthesise bufotenin now?’ (Gaiman, 2012: 53). Bufotenin is an entheogenic substance closely related to DMT and they are nearly functionally identical. In American Gods the technical boy, via his fluency in Burroughs’ ideas of electro-neuro-chemistry, can be read as a being who gains power by consuming the worship of those who traverse the internet, thus providing a similarly religious-like experience online. This transmutes his home, physically represented by a rolling limousine and sub contextually by the zeros and ones of binary code manifested on screens across the world as bits of data, in to houses of worship. These flickering computer monitors could then activate the pineal gland in ways that trigger the release of DMT or its requisite precursors in accord with Burroughs’ philosophy. Burroughs and his colleagues explored this idea in depth via experimentation with flicker machines and alpha wave stimulation, which are not unlike the flickering computer monitors through which the digital boy collects his strength (Geiger, 2003).

The nod to Burroughs is made explicit when the technical boy tells Shadow to give a message to his employer Mr Wednesday ‘Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and prayers are just so much fucking spam’ (Gaiman, 2012: 53). The phrase that ‘language is a virus’ comes directly from Burroughs’ own personal philosophy on language and thought control. On this topic he states, ‘my basic theory is that the written word is a virus that made the spoken word possible’ and he extends the idea to a scientific conclusion by citing the work of ‘Wilson Smith, a scientist who really thinks about his subject’ (Burroughs & Odier, 1989: 12). The virus, however, is incredibly resourceful in that it is not classified or recognised as such. Quoting a chapter from Smith’s book, Mechanism’s of Virus Infections (1963), he notes that ‘Viruses … are thus wholly dependent on the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize’ as is the technical boy to his followers and users (Burroughs & Odier, 1989: 12). As the new god of the information superhighway, the technical boy’s home is naturally a stretch limousine that is almost constantly in motion like the bits of information that fly over the so-called information superhighway.

The idea of the technical boy as the internet personified, which naturally needs connection and a flow of information in order to function properly, is heightened later in the book. A series of events leads to the need to exchange a dead body, and upon arrival the technical boy is cut off from the conveniences of the modern world. He complains about the location for the meeting saying, ‘This place is such a fucking dump. No Power. Out of wireless range. I mean when you got to be wired, you’re already back in the stone age,’ thus setting up this temporary home as being unsuited to his particular somatic constitution (Gaiman, 2012: 437). After this pronouncement the technical boy joins Shadow (the protagonist) in his room and appears scared by the lack of technology and the general isolation that the location provides. After a moment of conversation the technical boy returns to his room and begins to throw himself against the walls. This act of the somatically personified internet using its body in an attempt to start moving suggests that the information superhighway (or at least the god of it) is only at home while in motion, even if that motion is not essentially productive.

Returning to the connection of somaesthetics to architecture and space Shusterman states that

If architecture involves mass as well as space, then the soma likewise provides our most immediate sense of mass and volume. We feel the solid mass and thickness of our body; we also feel the liquids and gases that move through its volume (Shusterman, 2012: 224).

This idea complicates how a character such as the technical boy can ever “feel at home” since the very material that he would be made of is mostly insubstantial. That is not to say that the material of information on the internet has no mass; in 2007 both Discover magazine and Scholar Russell Seitz produced estimates of the mass of the internet of between the smallest grain of sand (Cass) and two ounces (Seitz). However, these masses are so low that a personified internet, the technical boy, would have a difficult time staying still, thus he chooses to ram himself into the walls of his room. Shusterman further explains that

the architecture of the body (the fact that we are essentially top-heavy – our heavier head, shoulders, and torso resting on our significantly less massive legs) is part of what impels the soma to move because its vertical equilibrium is more easily sustained in motion than in standing still (2012: 225).

Thus, as the internet is personified by the technical boy, it only stands to reason that he might become an exaggerated somatic being so that not only is stillness difficult, but it is nearly impossible.

In Gaiman’s novel, not every character responds negatively to stillness and lack of environmental stability. Where the technical boy’s response can be attributed to his separation from his source of power and in essence his home, other characters are able to adapt to new spaces more calmly and in so doing create new places of stability and power. The main character, Shadow, occupies several different domiciles, a prison cell, a series of motor vehicles, a funeral parlour in Cairo, Illinois, a temporary home in the Idyllic town of Lakeside, Wisconsin and finally in the world tree (yggdrasil). In each of these different homes Shadow has a unique somatic response that not only informs the location but also, in many ways, creates them. We are introduced to Shadow in prison and he is described as ‘big enough’ and in shape in such a way that other inmates did not bother him. The prison of the story seems almost as though it is constructed around Shadow and therefore his responses are linked to this environment. He is somatically aware of a coming storm (both literal and metaphorical) even though he exists in a box with no windows so that ‘the sun went down and he didn’t see it and the sun came up and he didn’t see it’ (Gaiman, 2012: 5). In this way, Gaiman conveys the sense that Shadow’s body mirrors the dense dark walls that make up the prison. The character is also connected to the structure in other ways; his last several weeks of incarceration were plagued with ‘a hollowness in the pit of his stomach … he found himself watching the body language of the guards, of the other inmates, searching for a clue to the bad thing that was going to happen’ (Gaiman, 2012: 7). Here, when Shadow stays silent and waits for the impending storm his body reacts (the hollowness), yet he ignores it due to the somatic training he has endured as a prisoner. In this way Shadow’s body is as Shusterman describes the soma: a ‘docile, malleable site for inscribing social power.’ This, in turn, then ‘reveals the crucial role that the soma can play in political philosophy and social justice’ (2008: 21). This concept of a docile malleable soma is naturally related to Foucault’s ideas of a ‘docile body’ that ‘may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved’ which in turn Foucault developed as an extension of La Mettrie’s ‘Machine Man’ that ‘joins the analysable body to the manipulable body’ (1991: 136). Thus, when provoked by guards, sensing impending doom, or given devastating news, Shadow chooses to stay quiet and keep his head down, just like a model, disciplined inmate.

The second primary home that Shadow occupies is a small apartment in the town of Lakeside. Importantly, the first sense of the apartment that Gaiman conveys is that it is dwarfed by Shadow’s own stature. Everything in the space is described in terms that are diminutive: a tiny kitchen, a small bedroom, and a tinier bathroom and as he falls asleep, Shadow hears the hum of the refrigerator and a radio in the building. Both of these sounds suggest that not only is the apartment smallish but that the building itself is small compared to the heightened sensory perception possessed by the protagonist, which is most likely a by-product of his days as an inmate. His first real experience with the town comes via his body’s response to the cold Wisconsin winter, the cold made him ‘cough, a dry thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs’ his ‘ears and face hurt and then his feet hurt’ (Gaiman, 2012: 262). His body is, therefore, trapped between two biological imperatives: the need for food (that caused him to leave his apartment) and the need for warmth. His journey continues as he catalogues various body parts and their reaction to the conditions ‘froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity’ (Gaiman, 2012: 263). In addition, for the character of Shadow this attention to the extreme of temperature (even if uncomfortable) is instructive in a somaesthetic fashion. As Shusterman notes, ‘attention to bodily movements and feelings can be useful in the learning process’ (Shusterman, 2012: 64). Thus by bringing focus to his somatic condition, Shadow (once he is rescued by a kindly police officer) is able to focus on his body as a way of getting his bearings in the town and as a means by which to subvert the memories of the last time he was in a police cruiser. In this way Shadow is ‘able to monitor the unreflective ways [his] our body performs’ as Shadow is learning to function in his new role as a free man (Shusterman, 2012: 64).

The final home for the protagonist in the text is the tree that Shadow hangs from as a remembrance for Wednesday (who at this point is revealed as an emanation of Odin). This home takes Shadow through various stages of somatic consciousness; day one is filled only with discomfort as his body adjusts to his new home and the idea that he is hanging from a rather large tree. Shadow notes, ‘if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim’ and that ‘the bark of the tree was rough against his back’ (Gaiman, 2012: 457). What Gaiman is doing is writing in a fashion that moves the reader to a point where they can potentially feel some level of these somatic responses. In a sense, Gaiman is using the reader’s visceral cognition (or interoception) as a way to solidify the connection of reader to character. Oliver Cameron describes this sort of interoceptive response as ‘the ability of visceral afferent information to either reach awareness and/or to directly or indirectly affect behaviour’ (2002: 3). As such, with regards to interoception, when the viscera are influenced by external stimuli, their reaction to said stimulation reaches the level of consciousness in the experiencer. Shadow’s body is transformed and reduced in this space from a cognitive sensory object, one that became the sensation as when he ‘no longer felt the cold, or rather, he felt only, but the cold had now become part of himself, it belonged to him and he belonged to it’ (Gaiman, 2012: 459). In this way the cold helps Shadow towards an eventual transcendence since this new relationship with his surroundings challenges some dominant notions of the body, such as when Shusterman suggests that, ‘As an object of care, the body will be representationally exteriorized as a mere physical thing … in contrast to the inner living spirit’ (Shusterman, 2008: 27). Shadow’s body is not simply ‘the dead thing, the ‘corpus’’, but rather has become part of one of the forces of nature and via this transformation, the world tree that he is strapped to eventually gives way to a more interesting realm that is constructed from his pain and sensation (Shusterman, 2008: 27).

Space, Bodies and Gods

Space and place are at the heart of how the characters known as the “old gods” make the transition to their new places of (much reduced) power in Gaiman’s America. When Shadow first travels to meet Mr Ibis and his associate Mr Jaquel (himself modelled on the Egyptian god Anubis) who is rendered at times as a talking black dog with a long snout, we are told that the city called Cairo, IL (pronounced kay-roh) mirrors the river delta structure of Cairo in Egypt (Gaiman, 2012). In addition, Ibis and Jaquel work as funeral home attendants, which is in line with Anubis’ association with mummification and the afterlife and Thoth who is the scribe of the underworld (Gaiman, 2012: 180). In this way these old gods parallel the functions they performed in the old world and thus recontextualise their importance and function in America. Their work with the bodies of the dead is also a clear link to the importance of the soma for Egyptian gods of the underworld and suggests that they must stay close to this trade in order to maintain what little power they have left. The jackal is a renowned hunter and is more famous for its scavenger like behaviour and the eating of carrion. The Ibis’s relationship with scavenging is perhaps a bit more complex. As a bird that feeds on carrion eaters it too is directly dependant on death to sustain life. Thus the corporeal forms of these gods are closely linked with the functions they perform and as these forms are mimicked in their American representations they can be read as closely aligned with these same somatic functions. By having both a body, a job and a home that are connected to the ideas of the afterlife and the preservation and veneration of the dead these old gods are more than simply powerless echoes of their past, they are their own embodied history.

These old gods of Egypt are giving way to a new god from Jerusalem and so it is important to consider the way in which America’s most powerful new god (Jesus) is rendered in the text. Gaiman notes in the Appendix to the revised author’s preferred text that he had been, ‘looking forward to writing the meeting of Shadow and Jesus for most of the book’ but that the task was too grand and ultimately did not fit within the structure of the story. He refers to the scene (which is included in the appendix in the first version of the author’s preferred text but is included in a 2012 reprint merged with the primary text) that takes place while Shadow is hanging in vigil as apocryphal. For this discussion we need only consider how Jesus’ body and his surroundings interact. The now Americanised saviour is dressed in a fashion that is distinctly American (he is wearing a baseball cap) yet the description also evokes images of the Biblical Jesus, ‘tanned, slender, a beard’ but perhaps most striking is the description of Jesus’ hand as ‘one callused hand—the fingers were etched with old chisel scars’ (Gaiman, 2012: 464). The calluses and the chisel scars are clearly designed to be evocative of both his hardscrabble life in ancient Israel and they also seem to solidify the idea that he was a trained carpenter. These details are in keeping with much of the mythos of Christ; his earthly father (Joseph) is referenced as being a simple carpenter and in the traditions of the day Jesus would have followed in his father’s footsteps. What is striking is the omission of the stigmata (or marks from the crucifixion), which would be the most tangible and visible marker of Christ’s identity to be carried by his body. While it is true that, depending on the location of the gods in the world of the novel, nearly all of them can manipulate their bodies and appearances to either standout or blend in, while certain aspects of their physical form seem to be almost unchangeable. For example, the character of Mr Ibis (modelled on the Egyptian god Thoth) is described as a ‘crane-like man’ thus showing how his appearance in the material world of the text mirrors his godlike appearance (Gaiman, 2012: 179). In this way the bodies of the characters are inscribed with elements of their mythologised personae yet they are often softened in order to not generate too much attention in the fictionalised America of the novel. This example seems to make the omission of the stigmata particularly interesting and while Gaiman notes that he had intended to write a much longer piece involving Jesus and Shadow one can not help but understand that a writer of Gaiman’s calibre is an expert at leaving out details as much as he is about including them. The space that Christ inhabits is reminiscent of a late 1990s McMansion a ‘Spanish-style building…adobe corridor…open courtyard…water gardens and the fountains,’ the adobe colour while prominent in the southwest of America hearkens to the arid browns and reds of the middle east (Gaiman, 2012: 464). In addition, the material prosperity that is indicated by this home would be accurate given Christianity’s privileged place in America. The opulent (or at least upper middle-class) home would place the figure of Christ among the group that, ideally, would wield the most power in the United States, thus reflecting the life and homes of his followers.

In American Gods the homes that these beings inhabit are not simply constructed as structures but rather, through the lens of somaesthetics and its connection with architecture, we can see how these bodies-at-home shape and construct their spaces for literary and interoceptive effect. This effect is calculated to make the reader feel, or at least imagine, in a way that might strengthen the message’s transmission but also creates a sense of closeness with the characters in the story. In different places and different structures these characters function in a way that is consistent with the realms of their godly dominion. It is through Gaiman’s constructions and descriptions of their bodies in space that the narrative gets much of it power. While the characters construct spaces that are relevant to how the followers of their respective religions would understand them, they are also cast as completely American, with the ideas of home as a sanctuary, a place of power and in truly American fashion, a place of sovereignty and autonomy over both their surroundings and bodies. This allows the gods (both old and new) to create homes that are comfortable and familiar thus embodying the American dream, while the protagonist constructs his final home in an act of sacrifice that in itself becomes an act of power mediated through his body.

On the surface, American Gods is a tale of migration, assimilation and power, expertly cloaked within the confines of a fantasy novel. While all of this is certainly true it is clear that Gaiman’s text has deeper resonances around the issues of home, identity and the body. A close examination of some of the points of connection between the various factions and characters in this novel reveals specific elements of the American experience, both native and immigrant. Characters in the novel embody many of the archetypal figures found in stories since time immemorial, however, by constructing a character like Shadow Moon, Gaiman gives the reader a figure who is engaged in somatic introspection from his incarceration through to his vigil in yggdrasil. Along his journey Shadow visits many homes and in each one a new physical and mental challenge emerges giving him the opportunity to utilise his docile, malleable body as a vehicle for true spiritual growth. Shadow becomes, by the end of the story, more human than human as he has achieved a level of transcendence that defies a dualistic understanding of the body-mind problem. His hero’s journey is only possible because of the connections between body, mind and place (namely homes) that are clearly evident in American Gods. By using critical methods that are focused on the use and importance of the body for mental and spiritual growth these crucial underlying and subtle points in the text have been examined in order to provide a new perspective on this novel.

Competing Interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.