Pagan motifs as the manifestation of anti-modernism in the novels of N. Gaiman “American Gods” and A. Rubanov “Mahogany Man”

Kyrchanoff Maksym Waler'evich ORCID: 0000-0003-3819-3103 Doctor of History Voronezh State University, Associate Professor of the Department of Regional Studies and Economics of Foreign Countries, Faculty of International Relations; Associate Professor of the Department of History of Foreign Countries and Oriental Studies, Faculty of History; ResearcherID: B-8694-2017; Scopus Author ID: 57193934324 394077, Russia, Voronezh region, Voronezh, Pushkinskaya str., 16, office 236 maksymkyrchanoff@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Introduction. The determining factor in the development of modern literature is mass culture and the associated trends in the perception of literary texts as cultural products intended for consumption. In this situation, writers working in the segment of mass literature. They promptly respond to market demands and consumer needs, and their texts, in case of commercial success, become film projects. Therefore, in conjunction with mass literature, modern cinema is also developing. Modern mass literature from a thematic point of view is extremely heterogeneous, and among the topics of texts of modern market-successful authors, despite the trends of secularization, religious topics occupy.

The forms of actualization of religion in modern mass literature are characterized by considerable diversity, and the spectrum of religious manifestations in the literature of consumer society becomes consumer-oriented, which leads to the synthesis of text and visual images. A special place in the literature serving the cultural needs of the consumer society belongs to works designed to satisfy the demand of the modern reader-consumer for texts that to one degree or another actualize the ethnic specifics of religious experience based on a departure from the traditions of monotheism. The number of such texts in modern popular culture is limited and is represented in the English-speaking world by N. Gaiman's novel "American Gods" (2001) ^{[8; 21]}, and in the Russian–speaking space - by A. Rubanov's novel "The Man from Mahogany" (2021) ^[16], but taking into account the successful transformation of the first It cannot be excluded that the number of such works will increase, since the consumer society perceives them relatively positively.

The purpose and objectives of the article. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to analyze the reflections of modern mass literature of consumer society regarding religious experience localized within the pagan paradigm. The objectives of the article include the study of the genesis of such motives in modern mass literature, the analysis of their role in the development of consumer society identities, the consideration of prospects for the development of such topics in literature focused on market demands.

Methodology and terminology. Methodologically, the article is based on an extended interpretation of the theory of the "invention of traditions" proposed by the British historian E. Hobsbawm. Therefore, pagan motives in modern popular culture are perceived as reproducible cultural practices initiated by the intellectual community, reduced in the presented article to market-demanded authors who reproduce various "pagan" narratives within the framework of ethnofuturistic literary discourse ^[9], traditionally associated with the culture of small nations, whose existence is threatened by the very processes of modernization and globalization. Ethnofuturism perceives literature as one of the cultural spaces that make it possible to form such an "ideological and ideological system ... which is based on the idea of the possibility of harmonious modernization of ethnic culture in the modern world on the basis of a traditional worldview" ^[3]. Within the framework of this approach, we can localize the texts of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov mentioned above, although they originated in largely modernized societies, where the religious in popular culture is reduced to various invented traditions that serve projects of alternative identities correlated with modern subcultures, actualized in modern American and Russian mass cultures.

Problems of the genesis of "pagan" motives in modern prose of mass culture. The origins of the appearance of pagan gods as heroes of modern mass literature are diverse. On the one hand, we can identify general cultural prerequisites by localizing their genesis in the spaces of "high" culture and academic historiography. On the other hand, the mass culture of the consumer society itself, which began to develop dynamically in the second half of the twentieth century, became a stimulating factor for the actualization of such issues. As for the "classical" origins of modern mass culture's interest in paganism, they can be represented by the legacy of ancient myth as a cultural phenomenon and romantic European nationalism of the XIX century, whose ideologists were inclined to treat the historical past very freely, often "imagining" and "inventing" non-existent pagan gods. In addition, European literatures have contributed to the actualization of images of pagan gods in popular culture, which to varying degrees inherited its traditions, assimilating and integrating them into its own canon.

The problem of the literary predecessors of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov is debatable, since the representatives of "classical" literature, although they actualized religious subjects, nevertheless, they did not reduce them to the placement of pagan gods in the social and cultural spaces of modern society. The only exception is probably M. Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" ^[5], but there is no pagan component in this text, and the devil as a hero is localized in the Christian coordinate system, although the economic offenses of God Odin in N. Gaiman's "American Gods" are to a certain extent consonant with what Woland did in Moscow, but these parallels are more hypothetical in nature, since it is problematic to find elements of the direct influence of a Russian writer on the texts of his British colleague.

Rare attempts to integrate pagan gods into modern society took place in American fantasy prose, but even there they did not become a system-forming element, and their appearances on the pages of works were so rare and unsystematic that a separate subgenre did not develop. One of the few exceptions is the story of William Tenn (Philip Claes) "The Tenants" ("The Tenants" ^[27]), but even in this text, the characters of Jewish mythology act as deities revived in the modern world, which brings it closer to Christian discourse. Among the texts that could hypothetically inspire N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov could be attributed the novel of the Latvian writer Dzintars Sodums "Lacplesis in exile" ("Lacplesis trimdaa", 1959 ^[26]), where the mythical hero Lacplesis is forced to leave the space of traditional culture and myth, going into exile to North America, but the problem is that the cultural influence of this text is limited to the Latvian space, since both English and Russian writers are unlikely to have read the original text, untranslated into other languages.

The texts discussed above can be perceived as precursors of "American Gods" and "The Mahogany Man" with a significant degree of conditionality, since the novels analyzed in the article by N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov belong to the postmodern discourse. It was postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, according to Bulgarian researcher A. Vacheva, that put forward "a historically defined approach to reading and understanding cultural heritage and tradition, as well as attitudes towards them" ^[7], based on a hierarchy of concepts from historicism to civilization, which allowed postmodern writers to construct multiple realities through the "population" from the gods, which was unlikely within the framework of an earlier literary tradition due to the fact that it had not yet been influenced by secularization.

 In such an intellectual situation, the origins of the appearance of pagan deities from "American Gods" in American reality should be localized within the framework of mass culture. Probably the most powerful "cultural" incentive was the Stargate project (the 1994 film and the original 1997 TV series ^[25]), which turned pagan gods borrowed by authors from ancient mythology (Egyptian, Scandinavian, Indian) into aliens periodically trying to interfere in the history of mankind. The integration of the pagan theme into American popular culture provided for its reduction to the threat and danger of alien invasion fashionable in the pop cult of the 1990s, although N. Gaiman preferred pagan motives in his prose to also reduce to conflict and collision of consumer society culture with ethnic traditional alternatives.

"Pagan" images in the modern world in the novels of A. Gaiman and A. Rubanov. Analyzing the visualization of the pagan layer in the prose of consumer society, it should be taken into account that both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov actually actualized common motives, including 1) the clash of cultures and traditions in modern society; 2) the factor of cultural displacement and violation of previously existing boundaries between identities ^[19], which actually become frontiers; 3) identity crisis in consumer society, as traditional forms of identity turn out to be anachronisms and archaisms in a globalizing world.

If the first and third components of the analyzed texts are recognized by the majority of their researchers, the second, as a rule, is actualized by non-European authors ^[20], who tend to project their negative experience of colonial and postcolonial development on the misadventures of pagan characters in America ^[23], perceiving forgotten gods as victims of colonial imagination assimilated by mass culture and consumer society although the "American gods" actualize the protest of "the old gods in this new godless country... where neither Christ nor the apostles ever got to" ^[8] against stereotypes stimulated by mass consumption, pointing to the importance and need to "learn to think for yourself, and not listen to what they say on the box" ^[8]. In this context, the analyzed texts can be perceived as a form of cultural protest against modernity. According to the Bulgarian researcher A. Alipieva, modernity has formed a cultural hierarchy within which "the national idea is perceived as primordial, and modernism as a cultural discourse is perceived as a derivative" ^{[2, p. 453]}. Both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov stay in their texts entirely within the framework of just such a logic, perceiving archaic the culture of polytheism as a primary category, which turns pagan gods and the saints who inherited them into fundamental categories, reducing the consumer society to a derivative of earlier cultural models.  

Commenting on the peculiarities of the modern literary process, the American philosopher Ihab Hassan emphasizes that "history develops both discretely and continuously... the current dominance of postmodernism, if it really exists, does not mean that the ideas or systems of the past have ceased to model the present... traditions are developing and evolving like biological species ... western consciousness is still permeated with powerful cultural theories... which they are constantly being reformulated otherwise history has repeated itself" ^[17]. Therefore, the projection of pagan experience and heritage reduced to the cultural memory of paganism has become in modern prose another tactic of modeling modernity, where the appeal to the gods in the cultural situation in the consumer society has become a form of consumption. In addition, the gods in the reality described by N. Gaiman have become nothing more than relapses of old memory, when "Irish Americans remember fairies, immigrants from Norway – nis, Greek-Americans – vrykolaks" ^[8] and that is why the old pagan gods are rudimentary, since they are more correlated with traditions, actualizing the connections of archaic society with the earth: "the whole earth is our church. The earth is our faith. The earth, it is wiser and older than the people who walk on it" ^[8]. If N. Gaiman has old gods – phantoms brought in the memory and imagination of European emigrants and materialized in America, then A. Rubanov's gods are nothing more than "wooden people" and "idols", "we should not be. We are phantoms, outcasts, a scanty tribe. There is no place for us in the ordinary world" ^{[16, p. 140, 155]}, although connected to a greater extent not with pagan, but with Orthodox traditions that were not integrated into the canon of the official church ideology in the XVIII century.

The appeal to the past in the current literary tradition of postmodernism, according to D. Krystev, "is the result of the desire for therapeutic correction of the present" ^{[11, p. 427]}, which turns pagan and semi-pagan layers of culture into one of the forms of manipulation with memory in consumer society. In this context, the fates of Odin from the "American Gods" and the wooden saint, who, after the ban on sculptural images of saints for 300 years, survived all the vicissitudes of Russian history – from wars to revolutions ^{[16, p. 142 – 143]}, are largely similar, since both were victims of modernization, although to the modern to society, each of them has adapted to a certain extent, but both American gods, Slavic gods, and Russian saints in the analyzed texts have largely lost their consumers who were inclined to believe in them. Therefore, both "American Gods" and "The Mahogany Man" can be attributed to anti–modernist texts, as they actualize social and cultural skepticism directed against modernization, which "led to radical changes in the social structure and the disappearance of groups – carriers of natural memory ... primarily the peasantry-class-memory par excellence" ^{[10, p. 61]}. The analyzed texts fix largely urbanized imaginary realities, whose inhabitants, having ceased to be peasants (and we practically do not find such in the prose of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov), simultaneously break archaic ties with the earth and old cultural and religious models based, among other things, on its sacralization within paganism. Therefore, Slavic gods are also rudimentary in modern Russia, where one of the former pagan idols states that "so much effort was spent to escape from you" ^{[16, p. 77]}, but the modern world, both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov, turns out to be alien and hostile to the same faith the old gods.

The modern Belarusian philosopher Valyantsin Akudovich, commenting on the peculiarities of the development of historical consciousness in a postmodern society, emphasizes that "history could be a political commodity only in a logocentric society, in a postmodern society history becomes practically unnecessary. There is simply no history in such a system" ^{[1, p. 45]}. Probably, we can transplant this assumption into the contexts of cultural situations modeled in the analyzed novels: the memory of the gods had the functions of a "politically" significant commodity only in traditional or modern society, while in postmodernism, the gods in consciousness mutate to relapses of archaic memory, and the consumer society itself is deprived of the need not only to have old gods, but also to remember them, since their place is occupied by conditionally new gods of consumer society, although the "divine" nature of the latter is minimal and reduced to fetishization of consumption as a process and consumed phenomena of mass culture, which, according to the logic of the same N. Gaiman, took the place previously occupied by the gods of traditional society. This is probably why "American Gods" was almost immediately defined by critics as "a novel that explores the state of America through its beliefs and contradictions, offering the idea that gods walk among us if we only know where to look for them.... A novel that represents a symbol of a carefully written heritage that forms a nation that is proud of its modernity, but is also alarmingly aware of its traditions" ^[22].

Therefore, the ideas of the analyzed texts correlate to a certain extent with the call of the Belarusian philosopher P. Barkovsky, who in the first half of the 2010s pointed out that "today it is necessary to continue deconstructing - criticizing and redefining those meanings that we lose as a result of the depoliticization of the political world, through the deculturalization of culture and the nihilization of thinking in the modern society". ^{[4, p. 94]}. In this context, both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov, once again inhabiting the modern world as the territory of the domination of consumer society by pagan gods, solved the tasks of its secondary sacralization, which also provided for desecularization. Analyzing N. Gaiman's prose, the Russian researcher O.S. Naumchik is probably right, believing that "American Gods" were an attempt to "rethink traditional mythological images" ^{[15, p. 106]}. Another Russian researcher E.V. Lozovik believes that the text of N. Gaiman's novel is not just based on the use of "mythological consciousness", but "puts the myth as the basis of the plot, building the whole narrative on it" ^{[13, p. 126]}, although in this situation it cannot be excluded that this mythological component is used exclusively utilitarian goals for the actualization of anti-modern discourse.

In such a coordinate system, in which the plots of their texts are built by both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov, the conflict between various modifications of faith – faith in the old gods and faith in consumption – becomes virtually inevitable, as indicated by most researchers who tend to interpret such texts as part of the process of identity transformation, pointing out that the crisis of the American model of self-building was described by a British author ^[24]. If in N. Gaiman's "American Gods" the old gods confront the new gods of consumer society, then in the "Mahogany Man" the conflict of the gods is actualized: if some were able to integrate into modern social realities, then others are trying to preserve the traditional way, assuring their more commercially successful brethren that "your jeep in ten years years will rust through, and the wooden woman will remain" ^{[16, p. 85]}.

If in N. Gaiman's text several identities simultaneously coexist with their pagan origins, represented by pagan gods, forgotten people and, therefore, forced to engage in petty fraud, funeral business or even work in a taxi, then in A. Rubanov's prose pagan Slavic gods coexist with Orthodox saints, but both American and Slavic gods in literature mass culture are among the marginal characters, as they are equally rejected by the consumer society. If we perceive the analyzed texts as a set of narratives that actualize the transformation of identities in the context of globalization, then the novels of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov can probably be interpreted as constructs that actualize the conflict between different types of identity, between analog and online models of culture that actually exclude each other: if there is a place in the world for "a black-and-white manuscript with pictures", then it "will not become hypertext" ^[8]. If for the consumer society "religion is an operating system, and prayers are spam" ^[8], then pagan gods in modern America, a country where its citizens, "adopting the American way of life, lose some aspect of their cultural identity" ^[18], relapses of the ethnic memory of the descendants of emigrants who brought the old gods in their imagination.

Slavic idols in provincial Russia in A. Rubanov's novel are also actually hostages of their centuries–old memory, having come to terms with the existence of modern idols - in this situation, the pagan gods who have come to life and survived to the present in "The Mahogany Man" unwittingly become defenders of cultural heritage, equally justifying the existence of sculptures of Orthodox saints and the presence of monuments to V. Lenin on squares of provincial cities ^{[16, p. 65]}. In this cultural coordinate system, "American Gods"  they became an attempt to offer "an answer to the seeming callousness of the technological, saturated media, corporate and complex world" ^[22] of modern mass culture, where the old gods were replaced by new gods of consumption, commerce and television. If, in this context, the analyzed texts are perceived as manifestations of ethno-futurist discourse (albeit not quite typical), then "the ethno-futurism worldview arises precisely in connection with the needs to survive and survive in the conditions of the "breaking" of the former system and the formation of a new information civilization and the global space of culture" ^[12], which is reflected in the texts of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov with the difference that the victim of globalization and mass culture is not a small nation as a community, but a formally dominant majority, which is no less threatened by the erosion of identity. Therefore, the memory of the pagan past and ancient gods in this cultural situation becomes part of the mechanism of adaptation to those transformations of identity that are stimulated by the mass culture of consumer society. 

In the prose of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov, a conflict between the old culture and the cultural preferences of the consumer society is inevitable, which endowed the TV with the functions of an "altar before which the whole family bows" ^[8], and television itself likened to sacrifice, but by reanimating the gods (albeit in different ways), the British and Russian author find themselves in the paradigm of ethnofuturism, if the latter is understood as an attempt to reanimate the archaic in modern culture ^[6]. In this regard, the prose of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov actualizes the dimensions of the modern world as a construct. Neil Gaiman himself, in particular, stated in the novel "American Gods" that "everything rests on people's consciousness, on imagination. People fight only for imaginary things" ^[8], which actually expressed the postmodern credo of modern culture, which tends to operate with categories of constructs. Therefore, another parallel between the "American gods" and the "Mahogany Man" is possible and appropriate: if N. Gaiman's old gods fight with the new gods of consumer society, then A. Rubanov's old gods, forgotten Orthodox saints strive not to fight with secular society, which rejects them, but they prefer to become a part of it themselves, "uniting into one people" ^{[16, p. 246]}, using all the attributes of modern civilization – from passports and registration, to cellular communications and e-mail.

Despite the efforts of the heroes N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov, the old gods and saints turn out to be the losing side, which is unable to resist the new universal values of consumer society. In this situation, it is also noteworthy that the English writer's text successfully fit into the modern canon of a society based on consumption, becoming the basis of the eponymous series – a novel imbued with skepticism and doubt about mass society itself became part of his film industry. The fate of A. Rubanov's text, published in 2021, is not yet entirely clear.

Nevertheless, both texts actualize the anti-modern sentiments of a certain part of the modern intellectual community, which manifest themselves in attempts to revise the culture of consumer society through the visualization of traditional forms of identities, to varying degrees based on various forms of ethnicity, correlated both with individual groups as imaginary communities and their archaic religious experience, perceived as one of invented traditions. The anti–modernism of N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov is anti-modern only from a formal point of view, since the sentiments of "anti-modernity" are organically characteristic of modern and postmodern projects due to the fact that "anti-modernism is not a reaction to modernity, but part of this very definition" ^{[14, p. 381]}. In this regard, both N. Gaiman and A. Rubanov in their texts synthesize archaic with modernity in the form of ethnofuturism. Therefore, the analyzed texts reproduce the ethno-futurist discourse, which differs from the classical ethnofuturism of small nations in the actualization of the ethnicity of the formal majority, the projection of the ethnic on cultural models that are more correlated with the traditions of consumption, rather than the actualization of ethnicity reduced to pagan religious heritage.     

Conclusions. Summing up the article, a number of factors related to the functioning of the conditionally "pagan" discourse in the modern mass culture of consumer society should be taken into account.

Firstly, the origins of the analyzed motives and images in mass literature are heterogeneous, varying, on the one hand, to the integration into the mass-cultural canon of assimilated forms of literary classical heritage ("The Master and Margarita" by M. Bulgakov) to the reanimation of the culture of the consumer society of the 1990s, represented by reflections on projects such as "Stargate", saturated with pagan images. In this regard, the texts analyzed in this article have a secondary character, which is generally characteristic of the modern mass culture of the consumer society, whose functioning, including literature, is based on the integration, assimilation and simplification of cultural heritage, its adaptation to the needs and needs of the reader acting as a consumer. If N. Gaiman's novel "American Gods" is secondary in relation to both Western classical and popular culture, then A. Rubanov's Russian novel is also unoriginal and even tertiary in relation to the general influence of Western mass tradition and the likely direct impact of N. Gaiman's text.    

Secondly, "pagan" images have become part of a broad ethno-futurist discourse associated with identity projects that are more or less alternative to modern mass serial identities. Within the framework of such a perception, the renaissance of "pagan" images in popular culture, on the one hand, can be perceived as a form of intellectual protest against cultural globalization and the serial identities associated with it. On the other hand, "pagan" motives can be interpreted as an attempt to reduce identity to the conventionally ethnic, cultural roots and origins of modern nations, which forces writers working within the canon of mass culture to place archaic heroes in the conditions and realities of modern consumer society.  

Thirdly, pagan images in the mass literature of consumer society do not exist in a state of cultural isolation, but function within the mass cult as a whole, which is manifested in the situation of interdependence of modern literary and cinematic discourses. The most successful example of the integration of the literary and visual components of modern consumer society in this context was the series "American Gods", not only inspired by the book of the same name by N. Gaiman, but also actualizing at the same time the cultural and ethnic diversity of pagan and American experience.   

Taking into account the dynamism characteristic of the functioning of the mass culture of consumer society at the present stage, the interdependence of various spheres of mass cult (from literature to cinema), it is impossible to exclude both the further development of "pagan" themes in literary texts (serialization of successful literary projects, actualization of analyzed images in national literatures) and their mass replication within the framework of the culture of TV series in modern society, which can become a paradigm of its development.

You can simply select and copy link from below text field.