The one where I gush about Neil Gaiman and think about the rebirth of the author

So if you don't already know that I'm a Neil Gaiman fan, welcome to my blog for the very first time. Those of you that have been here before will understand that when I bought tickets yesterday to seem him in Sydney in August I was BESIDE MYSELF. At work yesterday, I kept saying "I'm going to see Neil Gaiman!" to anyone who would listen (and quite a few people who wouldn't).

I'm not the sort to be star-struck. I think Neil is probably the only person on the planet who could send me into a fluster. I've already started stressing about what I will say if, for some reason, I have the opportunity to shake his hand at one of the events I'm attending. A man as talented as Mr. Gaiman hears strangers tell him how much they appreciate his work all the time.

If you haven't heard of him before, you'll have to take my word for it. His writing talent and his imagination are awe-inspiring, and he has a cult following of over a million fans worldwide. His creativity is matched only by a kind of intellectual rigour rarely found outside academia. When you read a work by Neil Gaiman, you know you are in the presence of a keen awareness of mythology and tales most of us have long forgotten. I think it's telling that a quote from his Sandman comics was recently misattributed to Shakespeare. I'd like to gush some more but I won't, because a.) I would probably bore you and b.) Charlie Orr has already said it anyway.

Instead, I'll just mention that I've been thinking a lot lately about the similarities between William Goldman's The Princess Bride and Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

Neil has said in interviews that Stardust was partly inspired by The Princess Bride- or by a lack of book similar to The Princess Bride. Both are fairy tales sold primarily to an adult audience, and they have a similar humour about them. Both were made into films with plotlines more romanticised than those in the original books.

There is, however, one significant difference: The Princess Bride is metafictional. Goldman continually interrupts the story to say what he thinks of it, and this is part of the story. He talks about his wife and son, their reactions to the text and the process of abridging the original text of The Princess Bride. This is all part of the fiction, though Goldman mixes in enough truth to confuse the reader a little.

I've been thinking about this because I'm writing my Honours thesis on a certain philosophical problem regarding fiction, and I'm using metafiction (specifically The Princess Bride) to illuminate the problem. It occurred to me the other day that while Stardust the text isn't metafictional, it was created in a postmodern world where we have access to authors' opinions of their work. Fans interact with Neil all the time, on Twitter or on his blog. They ask him questions about his work and his life and he answers them (though I've never seen him offer an authoritarian interpretation of one of his works).

It's a joy to read, mostly because it's well-written and he's such a nice guy. And it makes me wonder. There are lots of authors with blogs these days. How does this affect they way we see their work? Roland Barthes famously told us that the author is dead. Could it be that when authors enter our online communities and interact directly with the fans of their work, the author is reborn? Not as a authoritative figure, but as a member of the community discussing the work he happened to create.