SOURCE: Badley, Linda. “Clive Barker Writing (from) the Body.” In Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice, pp. 73-104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

With Books of Blood, an obscure playwright and illustrator named Clive Barker launched the “post-King era of horror fiction,” as William Gibson has called it (“Introduction” xv). “You read him with book in one hand and an airsick bag in the other,” King joked in 1986, adding “That man is not fooling around” (qtd. in Kanfer 83). Perhaps more importantly, Barker was as intellectual and politically subversive as King was not.

Barker challenged the modern horror genre as King had exemplified and defined it. “A lot of horror is written to reassure people the values they bring to the book are … correct,” Barker said in 1990, with King in mind, adding, “I'm not writing horror to reassure people” (Booe). King's “white soul” domesticated and mainstreamed horror; Barker privileged the different or marginal. His protagonists were people on the fringes: actors, gays, prostitutes, small-time crooks, women, and often the monsters themselves. King's horror stories were the product of a brilliant stereotypography and overstatement in which clichés are lived out fully. Barker claimed to “deromanticize” and “renew” the genre, “stripping” it of “knee-jerk conventions” (Strauss 92). Beyond that, “I like to think there's a kind of ‘celebration of perversity’ in Books of Blood,” he said in 1986, “that's a response, simply, to normality” (Wiater, “Catching” 46).

Douglas Winter's term “anti-horror” points out this subversive element in Barker's work. Anti-horror inverts “the typical horror story … on itself,” asking the reader to “view the traditional images in a new way” (Nutman, “Douglas E. Winter”). As King had reinvented the horror novel, Barker revitalized the tale of terror, relocating it in the iconic, the grotesque, and the ironic. For he also made it a vehicle for ideas, forcing a “reactionary” genre to take on taboos and open up to controversial issues: the politics of gender, feminism, male violence against women, homosexuality, AIDS, urban blight, Marxism, violence in the media, pornography, and censorship. Using a title that promised blood to attract hard-core fans to a form they did not usually read, Barker turned “splatter” into an iconography of confrontation and paradox. He enhanced horror's capacity to disturb with techniques adapted from theatre, literature, and visual arts. Like King, Barker realized that horror could reach a mass audience with ideas they might not otherwise entertain. “I'm trying my damnedest,” Barker has explained, to address “quite complex and elaborate ideas,” and if “you give people a chance, if they want it, they'll get it” (qtd. in Burke 72).

Barker's early literary career as a playwright explains a great deal. He was the center of The Dog Company, a marginal theater group that specialized in mime, improvisation, anti-theatre, and Grand Guignol. Their sketches often depicted the miscegenation of fantasy and reality, of image and word. The plays, most of which Barker wrote and directed, provide glimpses of the later writer. Poe, an early one-act mime play, presented the author's dream life in a series of images and vignettes. Dangerous World (1981), which (according to the program notes) followed poet/painter William Blake from his deathbed into the “garden of his imagination,” presented such delights as “the blood-sipping Ghost of a Flea,” “the epic allegorical figure of London,” and the marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dangerous World program notes). Colossus was an improvisational piece about Barker's favorite artist Goya. Books of Blood would extend this cross-referencing of visual and literary arts. In The Secret Life of Cartoons (1983), an anarchic comic strip rabbit entered the lives of real people.

It was The Dog Company, with its roots in the absurd and various theatres of cruelty, that seems to have inspired much of Barker's anti-horror.¹ He carried over the same perverse anti-theatricality, spectacle, shock, and emotional ambivalence. He mixed comedy, the erotic, the disgusting, and the pathetic, maintaining an exhilarating tension in the modulation from one emotion into the next.

But before he was a playwright or student, Barker was an illustrator, and probably the most obvious characteristic of his early work was his visual imagination. For Barker, writing seems to be another kind of iconography, and he refuses to make distinctions between painters like Goya and Bosch and “visionary” writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Two heroes are William Blake and Jean Cocteau, for whom any genre was subordinate to “inner vision” (Burke 19-20). Barker envisions his concepts, often sketching them first and only later articulating them as words. Visiting his studio in 1989, Stanley Wiater found drawings scattered over the floor, “Midnight sketches, done feverishly,” which became “a starting place for something” the next morning (“Clive Barker” 11). Everything he does is by hand to maintain the connection of hand, eye, and word.

As “powerfully visionary” in the larger sense “as he is gruesome” according to Ramsey Campbell (xi), he practices a politics of subversion that originated in the act of reading and writing from the body. A collection of his drawings entitled Clive Barker, Illustrator (1990), and ranging from early expressionistic brushwork pieces to elaborate color illustrations for Books of Blood, reveals the extent to which his iconography is based in the human figure. Because writing is imaging, Barker feels an almost moral imperative to show precisely what others think should in all decency be covered. He says he owes as much to Mapplethorpe as to Poe:

The kind of horror fiction I write is primarily interested in tearing away the veil. Confrontation with the image, seen clearly. I'm trying to see what the wound means. And the only way … is to look at the wound.

(qtd. in Gracey-Whitman and Melia 418)

Monique Wittig has written that the “fascination for writing what was never previously written and the fascination for the unattained body proceed from the same desire” (10). Barker uses the metaphor of the literalized body to express in flesh and blood that which Freud, Lacan, Barthes,, Kristeva, and Foucault have merely discoursed of. The Books of Blood were a perverse “recitation” of the body as a text—a dissection, an “exploratory probe,” as William Gibson says. Each “reading” presumes the metaphor in which the literal body stands for the real and transgresses the law of the symbolic order. In this metaphor, “opening” the body means reading our deepest (pre-Oedipal) selves. Biological images are metaphors for ideas. Flesh becomes word, text becomes wound, part becomes whole, and cliché is embodied, often painfully. The titles alone are multivalenced with word play: paradoxes (“The Life of Death”), puns (“In the Flesh,” “The Skins of the Father”), metonymies (“The Body Politic”), oxymorons (“The Confessions of a Pornographer's Shroud”), inversions (“The Inhuman Condition”), allegories (“The Age of Desire”), allusions (“Son of Celluloid”), and ironically twisted clichés (“Human Remains”).

In Barker's ink brush piece entitled Minds at War (in Burke 3), two male figures in profile square off belligerently, reenacting some archaic antagonism, as from their heads just the smoking ruins of ancient cities. “In the Hills, the Cities” (in Books of Blood, Volume I) works with a similar visual concept of power and conflict: the people of the Yugoslavian city Popolac join together in a network of straps and harnesses to construct a colossus and march out to perform ritual battle with their twin city Podujevo. The colossus is “the body of the state,” explains Vaslav. “It is the shape of our lives” (“In the Hills,” 201). As a citizen, he has watched it form, “a living proverb,” “a spectacular reality” beyond ideology. It is “the head [literally] in the clouds.” From the perspective of two English tourists, however, it is a terrifying negation of the human subject, its legs taking “strides half a mile long,” each man, woman, and child “sightless” and (they thought) “deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength” (197).

Popolac is a revision of the science fiction cliché of society as machine by way of Michel Foucault's vision of power embodied and harnessed through a network of forces and relations, economic, social, and political. The description of Popolac, recalling Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), suggests

a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or, rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to the breaking point, their bones close to snapping.

(“In the Hills” 206)

Terror leads to horror with the breakdown of structure: someone “buried in the weak flank” of Podujevo dies of the strain, beginning “a chain of decay in the system. One man loosed his neighbor and that neighbor loosed his, spreading a cancer of chaos through the city” (187-88). When Podujevo falls, creating a river of blood clogged with human corpses, Popolac goes mad with confusion.

“In the Hills, the Cities” is also a study in structural contrasts: between order and chaos, between the collective and the individual, the citizens that are the city and the English tourists who are threatened by its fall. Mick, a shallow clothes designer, and Judd, a political journalist, are a homosexual couple touring Yugoslavia who have discovered that they are temperamentally and politically incompatible. When making love, however, they are a miracle of movement: “They locked together, limb around limb, tongue around tongue, in a knot only orgasm could untie, their backs alternately scorched and scratched as they rolled around exchanging blows and kisses” (177). Like the people in the city they are choreographed into a thing of grotesque beauty. Realizing the meaninglessness of their relationship and his life up to glimpsing this miracle, Mick catches on to the giant's foot as it leaves the ground and is swept up, the earth “gone from beneath him … a hitchhiker with a god” (209).

Barker has explained that the colossal image was directly inspired by two paintings by Goya (The Colossus and Saturn Devouring His Children) and more generally the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which defamiliarize common concepts by literalizing them in marvelous images and events. The grotesque elements of the scene are matched by terror and moments of revulsion by the awe that terror generates; what political position or which set of emotions prevails is left up to the reader. The story is typical only in demonstrating Barker's ambivalence—his qualification of one issue with another one that bears on it, and a complementary technique of reversing emotions midway through a story and putting a spin on the conclusion.

“In the Hills, the Cities” is a metonymy, a literalization of the idea of the state by way of a Foucauldian metaphor of bio-power. “The Body Politic” from The Inhuman Condition (1986, originally Books of Blood, Volume IV) depicts a paradigm shift in which the stable ego and centered identity, the self enthroned in the head and defined by the parameters and functions of “its” body, is overthrown by a revolt of hands. The right hand, a synecdoche and a Messiah, a temporary protagonist, severs the left from the wrist of Charlie George, a packager whose hands ordinarily work for him all day long. The freed limb, dragging a hatchet, liberates other hands and limbs, leading to a bloody revolution of the body from “the body.”

As we have seen, part of the fun in “The Body Politic” comes from witnessing a Dionysian dismemberment of the Freudian ego. Charlie's psychoanalyst Dr. Jeudwinde is discredited early on, when he attempts to interpret Charlie's dreams: “Usually the penis predominated in his patients' dreams, he explained, to which Charlie replied that hands had always seemed more important than private parts. After all, they could change the world, couldn‘t they?” (65). Dr. Jeudwinde's faith in the Freudian ego breaks down under overwhelming evidence of “Charlie,” a body with several minds of its own. He wonders whether attempting to be rational about the human mind is a contradiction in terms (86). “Mind” as the self's center or unity is negated and revealed as a construct of language. As Charlie tries to put his thoughts into words, he finds metaphors insufficient:

The hands were everywhere, hundreds of them, chattering away like a manual parliament as they debated their tactics. All shades and shapes, scampering up and down the swaying branches. Seeing them gathered like this the metaphors collapsed. They were what they were: human hands. That was the horror. (97-98)

Language betrays us in the most common figures of speech, as Barker's sight gags demonstrate: “her nails, her pride and joy, found her eyes, and the miracle of sight became muck on her cheek” (149). Charlie learns that the unity he has considered himself is a figure of speech. After a struggle in which he uses the (attached) Left to lure the Right, he is followed by its mob of revolutionaries up a fire escape. As he jumps to their collective death, the revolution of hands is defeated. But Charlie's martyrdom is ambivalent, ending in his euphoric contemplation of the koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (88).

Barker has in mind several schools of postmodern psychology that view the individual as changeable and multiple rather than stable and singular. “The Body Politic” ends with the meditations of a doubtful identity named Boswell, who has spent his life “going wherever his legs would take him” (89). After colliding with a train, he wakes in intensive care and encounters his amputated legs, tagged for the incinerator but livelier for the separation. “Having made their presence known to him they left him where he lay, content to be free” (102).

And did his eyes envy their liberty, … was his tongue eager to be out of his mouth and away, and was every part of him, … preparing to forsake them? He was an alliance … held together by the most tenuous of truces. … [H]ow long before the next uprising? Minutes? Years? He waited, heart in mouth, for the fall of Empire.

(102)

The Marxist themes of “The Body Politic” are real enough, as in “In the Hills”: the story is set in the drab, aimless oppression of the working classes of the Thatcher era, and the hands seek and find masses of homeless brothers, beginning with the YMCA on Monmouth Street. But the Marxism comes by way of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, which opposes psychoanalysis with ego breakdowns and “breakthroughs.” Against the “oedipalized territorialities (Family, Church, School, Nation, Party), and especially the territoriality of the individual, Anti-Oedipus seeks to discover the ‘deterritorialized’ flows of desire” and to escape the established codes, celebrating the dissolution of the self (Seem, Introduction xvii). In “The Body Politic,” Barker's stroke of genius is to take the Freudian Body literally and depict its trauma in graphic terms. Even more to the point is “The Age of Desire,” from the same volume, which uses schizoanalysis against phallocentrism. Jerome Tredgold, a test subject at the [David] Hume Institute, succumbs to a “chemically induced state of compulsive sexuality” (Meyer and Van Hise 116). The experiment is part of Dr. Welles's plan to initiate an “Age of Desire”: “the Dream of Casanova,” of “Sex without end, without compromise or apology.” “The World had seen so many Ages: the Age of Enlightenment; of Reformation; of Reason. Now, at last, the Age of Desire. And after this, an end to Ages, perhaps to everything” (“Age” 200). Like the citizens of Popolac and Podujevo, Jerome is the ordinary man “deployed” as bio-power.

At first, his erotically enhanced vision merely shows him that as Deleuze and Guattari explain, “sexuality is everywhere” and that capitalism is an economy of desire (293) dominated by a specular-phallic economy of signs: “on advertising billboards and cinema marquees, … the body as merchandise. Where flesh was not being used to market artifacts of steel and stone, those artifacts were taking on its properties. … [B]uildings beleaguered him with sexual puns” (“Age” 201). Jerome is eventually consumed by a fire somehow fueled by the “beady eye at his groin” (“Age” 200), the phallic gaze. He becomes

just a plinth for that singular monument, his prick. Head was nothing; mind was nothing. His arms were simply made to bring love close, his legs to carry the demanding rod any place where it might find satisfaction. He pictured himself as a walking erection, the world gaping on every side. Flesh, brick, steel, he didn't care—he would ravish it all.

(206)

Thus the gaze is linked with sexual violence. (The experiment is coyly named Project Blind Boy in honor of Eros and his misplaced arrows.) Jerome visualizes clichés from romantic songs—metaphors of “paradise, of hearts on fire; of birds, bells, journeys, sunsets; of passion as lunacy, as flight, as unimaginable treasure” (186), and his lust culminates in grotesque literalizations of romance. “Give me your heart,” he croons to Officer Boyle (191) before tearing out and physically possessing that organ. In this phallic-specular economy, Jerome fetishizes whatever he sees and is compelled to pry open and make visible, to possess and “feminize” whatever is “hidden.”

But Jerome's phallocentrism is transcended in an important shift of emphasis. He becomes an embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machine, which calls into question the established order of the society that creates it. From a more Foucauldian perspective one might say that an “implantation of perversions” in Jerome confuses his sexuality. Rather than opening, penetrating, and possessing, he begins filling holes—any holes—figuratively healing wounds and intermingling with the natural world. The serial rapist becomes polymorphously perverse and at one point has sex with a wall: “The sun had fallen full upon it, and it was warm; the bricks smelled ambrosial. He laid kisses on their gritty faces, his hands exploring every nook and cranny. Murmuring sweet nothings, he … found an accommodating niche, and filled it” (194). As his body changes, Jerome regresses to pre-Oedipal empathy with the world and comes “alive to the flux and flow of the world around him”—the paving stones seem to catch fire from him and then burn with their own flames. The world thus fantastically eroticized, his mind is “running with liquid pictures: mingled anatomies, male and female in one indistinguishable congress,” a “marriage of his seed with the paving stone” (194-95). In the final scenes, he merges with “all the suffering world” (215), and in an affirmation of life, revolts, like Sisyphus, against all death. He confronts his creator Dr. Welles, who is burning records and killing monkeys, and pleads for their lives.

“The Age of Desire” concludes in one of Barker's perversely “happy” endings. Engineered in every sense of the term by the Hume Institute, the metabolic chaos that Jerome becomes is perversely liberating, and like Frankenstein's creature or Robocop, the monster as victim, Jerome has a radical innocence that destroys his makers. He becomes the revolutionary “desire machine” that wreaks havoc within the System, the machine of coercion. Most of his victims are associated with the Hume Institute or the law, and the majority of them are men. Jerome comes to represent, in addition to compulsory sexuality under late capitalism or a Freudian dream of castration denial, the transcendence of the body through the body. He experiences a terror and ecstasy that transcends conventional pleasure and unitary standards of value.

The story of Jerome transgresses liberal-Marxist political correctness also, however, and manages to please no one completely. It disturbs idea mongers with its sexual violence and it disturbs gore hounds with its radical sexual openness. Barker frequently refers to his breaking the taboo in which horror's sexual subtext must remain hidden to “work” and says that he consciously brings “that subtext into the more prominent position of text” (Strauss 92). He refers to a need to address not only “the issue of sexuality in horror” but also “the issue of many kinds of sexuality in horror.”² In his fiction, there are sex scenes of every sort, between men, between women, “there are orgies, there are people fucking walls—there is just a sense that we are sexual beings and that … horror fiction is about the body—which over and over again it is” (qtd. in Hughes 391). It is therefore not surprising when Barker's comments on fantasy refer to postmodern psychology and social theory. In addition to Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Lacan, his ideas draw heavily on feminist psychoanalysts (such as Cixous and Kristeva) and object relations psychologists (Chodorow) who emphasize the pre-Oedipal relationship with the Mother. Collectively, Barker's comments cohere as a theory of fantasy as a subversive art. Like Rosemary Jackson, Barker thinks that fantasy subverts the norm by presenting alternative realities. The fantastic provides a vicarious regression to unstructured pre-Oedipal experience in which possibilities seem infinite, where the world is “full of tactile and potential sensual experiences, which are at root sexual, but also about pleasure in all its diversities. … Then … we get educated out of that. … We get told we have to be this way or that and preferably this!” (Barker, qtd. in Dair 393). Fantasy constructs scenarios in which “those barriers are broken down again. So many of the monsters … are about appetite and the fears of appetite” and the need to “tame” appetite. “And yet it stays with us as a possibility” (Barker, qtd. in Dair 393-94). For Barker horror or abjection, as in Kristeva, is the darker aspect of our recognition of what we desire, the experience of the “bisexual” Mother. By awakening the powers of horror, the fantastic brings us back to an infant's openness to possibility, in which life and death are relative states of metamorphosis, of changing shape at will, talking with the animals. There, like the transforming Jerome, we encounter our fears and desires as potentialities and are open to new experience.

The fantastic therefore becomes “usefully dangerous” in providing images for “socially subversive” ideas, says Barker (Gracey-Whitman and Melia 404). These images enter the dream lives of readers, making them receptive to change:

Our fears and hopes for our bodies, our ongoing anxiety about the decay that begins at eighteen. Our sense of ourselves as sexually whole; the part of us that remains polymorphously perverse. … [P]eople will accept those kinds of images and ideas in a fiction in a way that they … [wouldn't in a] psychoanalytic treatise. Or … through their analyst.

(qtd. in Gracey-Whitman and Melia 406)

Dark fantasy reconnects readers to the body experienced in childhood as a radical openness to experience, and so becomes politically subversive. In a similar way, Barthes, Kristeva, and Cixous intend to subvert the symbolic order by “writing” from the body.

BOOKS OF BLOOD AND ÉCRITURE FéMININE

Working in the genre that (outside of pornography) is most readily equated with misogyny, especially in film, Barker walks a fine line. On the one hand, he condemns the mass media's exploitation of women (Dair 394), indicting horror film as “the last refuge of the chauvinist” (Women of Horror). At the same time, Books of Blood advertised itself as the equivalent of splatter film in prose and courted hard-core horror fans. Barker's “tear[ing] away the veil” is problematic when the very act of looking at the body as an object, according to some feminist theory, means dehumanizing the subject.

French feminist Monique Wittig ran into a similar problem in Le corps lesbien, which subverts language as part of her effort to reclaim the female body for women. Her preface foregrounds the issue. There she stresses that she is violating not the female body but the symbolic order's construction of it as an object of male desire. It is the logos that she disrupts, voicing the unvoiced, unpreferred parts and celebrating natural processes. Violating taboos rather than bodies, Wittig nevertheless produces a physically disturbing text.

Barker, who often announces his intention to disrupt, works similarly. He foregrounds his text in semiotics and French feminist psychoanalysis. He cultivates ambivalence and openly “celebrates” perversity. From the start, in the outrageous (but semiotically accurate) title, Books of Blood, he employs “anti-horror” against conventional horror's misogyny. Taking on biological taboos “with a directness worthy of … David Cronenberg” (Campbell xii), Barker makes the wound his text's central metaphor and, through puns and ambiguities, its central issue. The issue becomes more problematic the longer we study it. Horror's victimization of women, epitomized in Alice Cooper's “Only Women Bleed,” is revised by Barker in the Books epigraph to “Everybody is a book of blood” [my italics]. According to the pun in the last line, reading (and writing) the body (as horror fiction does) means wounding (opening) it, just as wounding it inscribes it; “Wherever we're opened, we're red” (Books 1: ix). By bringing horror's psychoanalytic subtext (the female “wound”) into the prominent position of text and the body, Barker changes the violent act of reading and writing the (female) body into the central problem of the series. Barker advertises the sadism of the text at the same time as he stresses its diagnostic necessity. Thus he makes his fictions “usefully dangerous” and useful for women. In their diagnosis of gender distress as well as their radical sexual openness Barker's Books of Blood had less in common with Stephen King or splatter film than with contemporary Female Gothic writers who used he popular Gothic as a mode for expressing, in slightly disguised form, subversive ideas.

From 1982 through 1984, when he was writing the first three volumes of Books of Blood, slasher film violence against women was a primary issue in mass media and sexual politics. Barker kept the issue at the center of Books of Blood as he used the metaphor of the body as text to explore technologies of gender and desire. Barker's stories often position the reader as a woman; imagine female subjectivity with remarkable, if varying, degrees of success; and attempt to overturn misogynistic horror clichés, especially the “woman in peril” motif. His women are neither “mouthpieces for outraged feminism or cowering pretty things,” Craig Burns remarks. They are, for example, “chubby cynics who work in rundown movie theaters trying (and failing) to imagine a better life” (101). In Books of Blood, Carrie, with her female power in the blood, grows up.

Burns describes Birdy, the protagonist of “Son of Celluloid” (Books of Blood, Volume III, 1984), a haunted theater story that satirizes horror and Hollywood film stereotypes. Birdy is a savvy version of Moers's persecuted victim-heroine who in facing down the monster, the male gaze, confronts her own fear of self. This fear is grounding in her ambivalent relationship with female body images. Like most of Barker's protagonists, Birdy is unconventional to begin with: she is intellectual but also resourceful; she is strong and overweight and agile.

Literally a tumor, the “Son of Celluloid” feeds on emotions invested in movies and seduces its victims by impersonating dead movie stars and clichés. To Lindi Lee, whom the Son assesses as “easy meat,” it assumes the sentimental form of a Disney rabbit. The Son is also brilliant as John Wayne (male violence) and quickly dispatches Lindi's boyfriend Dean. But for the pseudo-intellectual, bisexual theater manager Ricky, who knows Wayne to be a “handful of lethal lies—about the glory of America's frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes” (16), it must provide more potent seductions. As Marilyn Monroe the monster can tap directly into the male gaze. “I want you,” she says, “I need your loving looks. I can't live without them” (26). Ricky is seduced by the scene from The Seven-Year Itch, in which Marilyn's dress billows up above her waist. He looks at “the dream of millions,” at “the part of Marilyn he had never seen. … There was blood there. … As her muscles moved the bloody eyes she'd buried in her body shifted, and came to rest on him” (27). His glimpse of “monstrous” female subjectivity breaks the spell and almost saves him. But as a “pill-freak” and film buff, Ricky prefers the deadly, virtual Marilyn over real women, allowing the tumor to invade his body.

“Son of Celluloid” is like Videodrome in its attacks against the same visual pleasure that it exploits: the male gaze whose projection represents an elision of the female body. Assuming the form of a “single vast eye” that fills the doorway, or the male gaze and projection in one metaphor, the Son attempts to rape Birdy. Blinking “huge and wet and lazy, scanning the doll in front of it with the insolence of the One True God, the maker of celluloid Earth and celluloid Heaven” it jeers, “Here's looking at you, kid” (“Son” 30). Birdy weighs 225 pounds, and when it assaults her, she rolls over on it. Real flesh, unpreferred parts, and “good weight” triumph over body image, the literal and the feminine over the male symbolic.

Barker draws on his fringe theater experience here, interjecting farce—a bad fat-lady joke—into the scene in which Birdy rolls on the Son of Celluloid. The scene's ambivalence is strategic. The joke is positioned in a crucial way: while it stands on its own as a joke, on the one hand, it also is shown from Birdy's perspective as a heroic act (however mediated by her strong sense of irony). It is her joke rather than a joke on her. (In an earlier moment, her only weak one, Birdy relaxes her defenses in self-pity when images of Disney's Dumbo remind her of a cruel nickname from childhood.) Ultimately the Son forces her to confront her image of herself as abject, a “filthy thing, a tumor grown fat on wasted passion,” bringing to mind “something aborted, a bucket case” (“Son” 35). In looking directly at the body, however, she recovers her own strength.

Instead of her prized weapon, a pipe wrench she calls Motherfucker, Birdy recovers the power of her body, reclaiming it from negative inscription. In the final section, titled “Censored Scenes,” Birdy completes this process by tracking down Lindi Lee. Lindi is perhaps the ultimate literalization of the concept of the mass media stereotype—in her the Son of Celluloid has been born again, the celluloid Word Made Bimbo. The real tumor is the false ideal of female beauty projected by the heterosexual male gaze. In a parodic reversal of the Phantom of the Opera, Birdy pours acid on “tumor and human limb alike” (38). In this act, by creating a gap that the stereotype Lindi Lee once filled, Birdy also creates a space for herself. Her job done, she steps out into the street, confident in her “planning to live long after the credits for this particular comedy had rolled” (38).

The gaze and its images, hallucinations that we project or consent to, are the issues of “The Son of Celluloid,” and the particular targets are mass media images of women. Birdy is in the female Gothic tradition of the persecuted victim who becomes a heroine by using her intelligence and sense of reality to hold her ground.

The protagonist of “Revelations” (Volume V, The Inhuman Condition), Virginia Gyer, is not only a persecuted victim-heroine but also the Female Gothic madwoman. From the beginning, however, the narrator shares Virginia's vision of ghosts in her room in the Cottonwood Motel, presenting that vision, together with the ghosts' point of view, in a broadly humorous deadpan. Clearly in Barker's world the psychics, psychotics, and women (including the ghost Sadie, electrocuted for killing her oafishly philandering husband Buck) are sane. Barker juxtaposes this perspective against the horrifically fantastic prophecies of the Book of Revelations, which Virginia's evangelist husband John (like Carrie White's mother) declaims every night in a frenzied and oppressive ritual: “he rose on a spiral of ever more awesome metaphor: from angels to dragons and thence to Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast” (118). As Sadie first tells Virginia, these are “comic book terrors, fit to scare children with.” The word of God is in turn “revealed” to be a misogynistic fantasy of doomsday violence. Sadie becomes Virginia's demonic advisor, assuming also the role of the perverse double. The ghost and the world of comic violence Sadie brings with her provide a sort of Bertha Mason to Virginia's Jane Eyre. Sadie speaks directly for Virginia's buried rage; moreover, her life's definitive act of shooting her husband (and remaining glad she did it) prefigures Virginia's final act. Reverend Gyer, who stands for patriarchy and logos, falls “like a toppled statue” (156). The story ends in high humor as Sadie counsels Virginia to plead insanity, counseling that “‘you'll be notorious. That's worth living for, isn't it?’ Virginia hadn't thought of that. The ghost of a smile illuminated her face” (156). Later, gazing at the moon, which represents the feminine as well as madness, and “putting on the craziest smile she could muster,” Virginia tells the assembled crowd, “The Devil made me do it” (157).

The sensitive and muted “Coming to Grief,” a story collected in Douglas Winter's anthology Prime Evil (1988),³ focuses on the central issue of the modern Female Gothic, the female body as maternal legacy. Barker's protagonist Miriam Blessed, married and with a daughter long ago disconnected herself from her mother in what seems to have been an act of disavowal. Miriam has been desperate not to be like her innocuous mother. Returning at her mother's death, Miriam must separate from the mother's body and experience the primary loss that is a biological and psychic necessity (Kristeva, Black Sun 79). In Kristeva's scenario, this means “coming to grief” in the sense of assuming the daughter's inheritance.

Miriam performs her funeral duties and feels very little: she returns to her mother's house, sorts through her things, views the body, reunites with a female friend, and visits the “Bogey Walk,” the site of her childhood fear centering on a huge quarry haunted by a Bogeyman. And in one sense there is a real Bogeyman. A vine covered wall conceals a gap where the bricks are crumbling and which, at her weakest point, after the funeral, draws Miriam forward and invites her to stop to look down among the shadows.

Barker has made several statements about his refusal to exploit the “woman in peril” scenario. The Bogey, Miriam realizes, is no man. It is rather the absence of anything so patriarchal or simple: no “hook-handed men and secret lovers slaughtered in the act of love” (83), no hell, no heaven, no haunting. In his/its place Miriam finds her mother's ordinary face in death. The Bogey is the daughter's matricidal rage both projected and internalized. It has been displaced onto a mythical “man” and also swallowed, preserved within herself as anger against herself and as self-devouring inner emptiness: “Stone. Cold stone. Thinking about absence, about the disguise required by a thing that wished not to be seen, she turned into her mother's road” (85).

In the end, the death-bearing, devouring mother has an other side in “Judy's voice, Judy's hands” (104). Judy, her childhood friend, finds her, calls her back, and heals her with her presence. Having survived more drastic separations—the death of her father, a divorce, and a choice of lesbianism—Judy comforts Miriam through the night, and the next day Miriam returns to her husband and daughter.

“Coming to Grief” is a sign of Barker's considerable range. More characteristically, however, Barker's texts expose the wound, confronting readers with its potency, analyzing it as an unstable sign, and transposing it into a sign of female power. Thus he asks readers to reconstruct their perceptions of the monstrous feminine. “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” “The Madonna,” and The Hellbound Heart reconfigure the fatal woman archetype. In “Jacqueline Ess” (Books of Blood, Volume II), the lawyer and archetypal lover Oliver Vassi provides a testimony as a third of the text: “She was no lamia, no succubus. … She didn't bewitch me; that's a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. … I'd lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of Law, and I was tired of it” (“Ess” 87).

Barker is drawing on the French feminist program that advocates a kind of feminist terrorism: the hysteric fully possesses her body and attains the power of the sorceress, Goddess, or Amazon. He uses the metaphor of the literal body to “realize” the feminine within the text as “absence” violently “striving to become a presence” (Gilbert, “Introduction” xviii). Cixous tells women they should write in literal milk or blood. Cixous, Wittig, and Du Plessis write marginal, polymorphous forms: prose poems, crosses between novel and essay, lyric and epic. In this way they reverse the equation in which the male word is made female flesh and so transcend the linear and inscribed to achieve a “no where into which we can fly in a tarantella of rage and desire … where the part of ourselves that longs to be free … can dream, can invent new worlds” (Gilbert, “Introduction” xviii). Subverting logos, French feminists celebrate the body perverse, the body as a book of blood.

Anne Sexton's poem “Consorting with Angels” comes close to projecting such a semiotic utopia. Tired of being a woman, the speaker has an ecstatic vision of transcending gender through a grotesque transformation—of being opened, made “all one skin, like a fish” (l. 39)—rendered in the cadences of the Song of Solomon. Barker's women often triumph through similar transformations of the flesh, reinventing themselves. They are also the powerful agents of male transformation. Jacqueline Ess, who finds herself powerless in the patriarchal world of Law, lacking access to the Word, reconfigures the male body in a quest for female power and identity. The text “Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament,” is a study of repressed anger and sexual power politics. It begins in the Cixousian myth of the hysteric who discovers the transforming rage of the sorceress within her body. Like Virginia Gyer (and Anne Sexton), Jacqueline is at first a mad housewife. Oppressed by “the boredom, the drudgery, the frustration” (75) of living as a woman, she attempts to succeed and fails. But precisely then, “from the deep trenches of her nature, faculties she had never known existed” swim up to the surface of her mind “like fish” up to the light.

She recovers these “faculties” through Medusan rage. Like the speaker in Adrienne Rich's “Phenomenology of Anger” (1968), who trains her hysteria into an image of pure “white acetylene” (57, line 59), Jacqueline first turns her hatred on her supercilious psychoanalyst Dr. Blandish, who refers to her “woman's problems” like an “All-knowing, all-seeing Father” (77). Feminism notwithstanding, Barker's special effects are derived from Brian De Palma (Carrie, The Fury) and Cronenberg (Scanners) as Jacqueline discovers her power to transform men's bodies. “Be a woman,” she thinks, willing “his manly chest into making breasts” until the skin bursts and his pelvis expands until it fractures at the center (78). Dry mouthed with shock, Dr. Blandish loses the power to speak except from the body: “it was from between his legs that all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood … on the carpet” (78).

Jacqueline next trains her mind on that relation between speech, power, and violence, specifically her husband's speeches that turn into justifications that become accusations, “assaults on her character,” speeches that steal her space to be. Once again, she literalizes what we discover to be a violent metaphor. “Shut up,” she thinks, telescoping him “into smaller and smaller space” until, when he is “shut up into a space the size of one of his fine leather suitcases,” she thinks, “My God … this can't be my husband. He's never been as tidy as that” (81).

Jacqueline hopes to find freedom from male domination, female identity, and a voice in her newly born power. To learn mastery, she apprentices herself to Titus Pettifer, a crime boss, but discovers that such power can be another form of slavery. When Pettifer, who can neither live with her nor without her, begs her to kill him, calling her monster to inspire her rage, she turns him into a beast of “indeterminate species. Perhaps a crab, perhaps a dog, perhaps even a man. Whatever it was it had no power over itself” (109), not even the power to die. She moves from destroying men who pain her to using them as instruments for pleasure, but is unable to satisfy or even define her desire. “She'd gone through her life, it seemed, looking for a sign of herself, only able to define her nature by the look in others' eyes. Now she wanted an end to that” (98).

Jacqueline turns to several feminist fables of identity with ambivalent results. She writes her memoirs, but leaves off when she reaches her ninth year, “with the first realization of on-coming puberty” (103). But something shifts when she turns from the man and embraces her own monstrosity (“Monster he calls me: monster I am” [187]) by “writing” from her body. She finds that she can “will her body to ripple like the surface of a lake.” Without sex, her body becomes “a mystery to her again,” and she realizes the lesson of Our Bodies, Ourselves, “that physical love had been an exploration of that most intimate, and yet most unknown region of her being: her flesh” (102).

Then, however, Jacqueline finds that she must recover herself in relation to the Other. In Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin, women experience ego boundaries as fluid, in what Benjamin calls an “intersubjective space” (92). And so Jacqueline “understood herself best by embracing someone else; seen her own substance clearly only when another's lips were laid on it, adoring and gentle” (102). Conversely, in the language of power, destroying the Other means destroying herself.

By this time, engorged with power, Jacqueline concludes that she will be completely herself only when she destroys all witnesses to her power and becomes a whore who annihilates her clients. When Vassi, her one lover, comes to her in the conclusion, the story ends turning on a terrible paradox of human sexual dependence: Hell is Other People, especially people of the other sex; I am incomplete without the Other, and yet when completed in the Other, I am dead.

Jacqueline Ess's “Will and Testament” is a disturbing legacy. Its pessimism turns on problems raised in earlier Female Gothic narratives, many of which ended in death (George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and the lives of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton). Barker's narrative ends in a fiery love-death in which the masculine and feminine powers cancel each other out. At the same time, because it is composed of two texts, Jacqueline's story and Vassi's “Testimony,” it is an ongoing dialogue, an open text.

If Books of Blood demonstrate and even celebrate body as a source of female subjectivity and power, they also, like Cronenberg's films, depict men encountering the feminine. Barker's texts similarly “instruct” male readers in the pleasure and pain of embodiment, regendering them. Vassi sees himself as a man speaking (testifying) to men about the truth of female power. “We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. … The power must be in male hands, god-given. That's what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are” (87). In “The Madonna,” from Volume V of Books of Blood, entitled In the Flesh (1986), two men witness the power of parthenogenesis and undergo a literal sexual metamorphosis. Jerry Coloqhoun, a small-time grifter (who turns out to be the protagonist), interests an investor, Ezra Garvey, in renovating an abandoned bath-house. The obscure structure mystifies them both and they become separated in its darkness. In separate instances Jerry and Garvey, who has always been afraid of water and feels more comfortable within walls of institutions, are lured into the center of the pool complex by a naked girl. She teaches them a hard lesson: “The body does not need the mind. It has procedures aplenty, lungs to be filled and emptied, blood to be pumped and food profited from—none of which require the authority of thought.” After fainting, Jerry becomes “aware of his body” as never before: “Its fragility was a trap; its shape, its size, its very gender was a trap. And there was no flying out of it; he was shackled to, or in, this wretchedness” (“Madonna” 167).

But Jerry's horror is just the beginning. As in “Jacqueline Ess,” “Skins of the Fathers,” and “Rawhead Rex,” men who encounter the Anima or Mother undergo a sea-change in which they are released from the false consciousness of gender. Garvey and Jerry (subjectivized by the narrator's increasing use of his androgynous first name) have very different perceptions of the experience, both of which the reader is asked to consider. When Garvey finds himself changing, he blames Jerry and persecutes him in a display of retaliatory bravado. We follow his transformation through a subplot bearing on conflicts that develop between him and his lover Carole. In the beginning, mystified by the pools' architecture, Jerry shows a map to Carole, who sees that they are constructed on the principle of a labyrinth or spiral, which represents the intricate irrationalities of the feminine as perceived by the “linear” masculine mind. Then Jerry and Carole argue hotly over the merits of a French film that seems to Jerry “completely lacking in plot … a series of dialogues between characters discussing their traumas and their aspirations. … It left him feeling torpid” (150). When Jerry later finds his apartment vandalized by Garvey's thugs, he feels that his body has been invaded. To escape feelings of vulnerability, he forces himself on Carole and subsequently experiences paroxysms of guilt.

Barker makes the test of character a radical openness to the experience of the body, and in this story, that experience means literally turning into a woman. Garvey is horrified at the monstrosities he sees sprouting above and below his waist: “the bitches had worked this rapture upon him,” he thinks as he slashes hysterically at the offending parts. Jerry is neither afraid nor “jubilant” but he learns to enjoy being a girl. He turns “his hands over to admire their newfound fineness, running his palms across his breasts.” This biological transformation brings with it a spiritual one; Jerry is born again into pre-Oedipal innocence (and politically correct polymorphous perversity), accepting “this fait accompli as a baby accepts its condition” (178). In contrast to Garvey, Jerry experiences the revelations of the body fantastic: “There were miracles in the world! Forces that could turn flesh inside out without drawing blood; that could topple the tyranny of the real and make play in its rubble” (178).

The reader's experience, like Jerry's, involves a gradual (spiral-like) acceptance of the Madonna as Garvey, and even Carole (who is disgusted by the new Jerry), fall away, victims to their gendered preconceptions. Barker describes the Madonna at first in terms of her beautiful, naked “daughters,” who at first seem to be conventional bathing beauties, then mermaids, and finally take on attributes of lamias, nursing strange, tentacled children—representing the prospect, under a matriarchy, of asexual reproduction. The Madonna herself, or the “eternal feminine,” when finally revealed and demystified, is a vast fleshy mountain, a womb turned inside out. The narrator's description runs up and down the evolutionary ladder:

As the ripples of luminescence moved through the creature's physique, it revealed with every fresh pulsation some new and phenomenal configuration. … Mother? Jerry mouthed. … [S]wollen flesh was opening; liquid light gushing. … The slit spasmed and delivered the child—something between a squid and a shorn lamb—onto the tiles.

(168-69)

This fleshy revelation leaves Garvey paranoid and sick with confusion. But by the end of the story, the narrator has transposed the terms and the emotions associated with the abject mother into an evocation of the sublime. As the whirlpool catches him, and like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych (at the moment of his death) or John Barth's spermatozoan on his erotic “Night-Sea Journey,” Jerry swims toward the light at the end of the tunnel. From this new inner space, a womb's eye view,

Death was no more certain than the dream of masculinity he'd lived these years. Terms of description fit only to be turned up and over and inside out. The earth was bright, wasn't it, and probably full of stars. He opened his mouth and shouted into the whirlpool, as the light grew and grew, an anthem in praise of paradox.

(181)

The worship of the Madonna means not matriarchy but a “utopian dream of a monstrous world without gender,” such as Donna Haraway recommends (223), a world open to change. Like Vassi (“Jacqueline Ess”), Jerry, having lived his life on shore, in “the solid world,” is tired of it. The Madonna is “a sea” and he must learn to swim in her element. Also similar is the way “The Madonna” ends in one of Barker's reversals of the emotional dominant, which is usually horror, into its opposite.

In all the stories previously mentioned, Barker offers a happy ending that is also profoundly disturbing, or he establishes a tone of optimism in the presence of uncertainty. Such shifts deny conventional pleasure and conventional pain and are consequently provocative. As in absurdist theater, the point is to disrupt our normal categories for processing experience. Barker contrasts his position on physicality with David Cronenberg's: “There is an argument that he's being repulsed by the flesh he's writing [sic] about, whereas I tend to be having a good time with it. ‘Long Live the New Flesh’ would be a cry that would come from both our lips” (Barker, “Tearing” 269). “Having a good time with it” means using fantasy to shift aesthetic, moral, and political values lent to body images and so changing the way we construct ourselves. The stories also destabilize conventional emotional resonances and move the reader to experience gender in different terms.

In the several stories that explore the conflict of male and female principles, the spectrum of issues and dialogue of perspectives invites the reader to participate. The titillation and semantic play lead to a more serious form of play in which images of gender are transposed and reconstructed. Barker often exposes orthodox belief systems, the church, the law, and psychology in particular for handing down misogynistic mythologies of the body. “Rawhead Rex” (Books of Blood, Volume III), is a splatter-movie version of the walking erection in “The Age of Desire” and another deconstruction of Lacan's Phallus, the Law of the Father. Rex is a monstrous materialization of the phallus running rampant, making its bloody way through the Welsh town of Zeal. The battle of Good and Evil as configured between Christ and the Anti-Christ is referred back to a much older allegorical struggle of masculine and feminine principles.

In the religious allegory, Rawhead Rex is the last of a race of child-devouring Titans that owned the land “Before Christ. Before civilization” (57) and that is uncovered from centuries of sleep by a farmer removing a huge stone in a field. Rex recalls perhaps the “rough beast” or Anti-Christ Yeats predicted in “The Second Coming.” The spineless verger at the local Anglican church plays his John the Baptist, bowing to a “Lord of the Hardon” whose demands would be “plain, and real.” “Raw Head. The name was an imperative. It evoked a skinned head. Its defenses peeled back, a thing close to bursting, no telling if it was pain or pleasure” (6). Rex acknowledges the verger's apostleship by urinating copiously on him. Orthodox zealots, Barker thereby suggests, are really motivated by the physiology of sex, and most especially pleasure in the hydraulics of ejaculation.

The most striking reversal is of the symbolism of blood, associated in the Church with the crucifixion and the power of resurrection into spiritual life. Like Anne Rice, Barker deconstructs the Judeo-Christian myths of blood, recovering its origins in more ancient fertility rites, cannibalism, and menstruation taboos. In the latter, the woman who was “born to bleed” but did not die was both abject victim and immortal monster. The Christian totem of the cross has suppressed the pagan taboo (and the taboo has elided female power) to the extent that the subject of menstruation was rarely broached in horror or any literature until Anne Sexton's “Menstruation at Forty.”

In “Rawhead Rex,” one of Barker's most violent stories, images associated traditionally with the female “abject” are reconfigured as symbols of life. Rather than eliding or exploiting the taboo, as Hanson has accused Stephen King of doing in Carrie, Barker allegorizes the issue. At first, Gwen's period comes on as a biological defense reflex: she “didn't see the giant, but her innards churned. Damn periods, she thought, rubbing her lower belly in a slow circle. … This month she'd come on a day early” (49). The body language comes from Rex's perspective as well: there was

no way [Rex] could bring himself to touch this woman; not today. She had the blood cycle on her, he could taste its tang, and it sickened him. It was taboo, that blood, and he had never taken a woman poisoned by its presence.

(49)

Barker describes menstruation as a horror specifically to the monster Rex, thus foregrounding the issue in the primitive literalism of his perception. He is, after all, an embodiment of the phallus. Our reading of rape is also foregrounded when Rex remembers the good old days when he and his brothers had

taken women into the woods, spread them out, spiked and loosed them again, bleeding but fertile. They would die having the children of those rapes. … That was the only revenge … on the big bellied sex.

(69)

Rex's hypermasculinity masks a terrified womb envy. What finally defeats him is the sign of the taboo raised on high as a totem, a stone icon of Venus, sign of the “bleeding woman, her gaping hole eating seed and spitting children. It was life, that hole, that woman, it was endless fecundity.” It is the power Hélène Cixous has described as the laugh of the Medusa. When neither the police nor the crucifix (the sign of the bleeding man) daunts him, the woman “terrifie[s] him” into submission (87), and he is forced back into the hole from which he last emerged.

“Rawhead Rex” begins as what seems to be a celebration of male sexual violence. But hard-ons don't last. At least half of the story is described through Rex's perspective, to the extent that much of the pleasure of reading it is designed with male action-movie lovers in mind. The narrator delights with Rex in phallic power as he devours the entrails of babies and urinates on the alternatingly groveling and ecstatic verger. But the story increasingly reveals the limitations of this Law of the Father—that he is the last of his breed, dooming his offspring (who kill their mothers as they are born). In Barker's characteristic turn, we learn that Rex has “never been a great thinker,” that he lives in the eternal present of the instinctual (49-50). In the last third of the story, the archeologist Ron Milton loses his son to the phallic principle and becomes a hero when he screams: “The scream had always belonged to the other sex, until that instant. Then, watching the monster stand up and close its jaws around his son's head, there was no sound appropriate but a scream” (78). “Dead sons,” he discovers, “were the crux of the Church after all” (50). Thus “Rawhead Rex” turns the mythology of the Church into myths of gender and images of the body fantastic.

“In none of my fiction,” Barker has said, “will you find any religious solution to a problem. Nobody ever whips out a crucifix and expects to keep a monster at bay with it. Those are old solutions. We have to find new solutions” (qtd. in Castaneda 59). In moving toward new solutions we should recover the artifacts buried under the altars, whose iconography is based in monstrous images of the body. Learning to see into these images, however, is merely the beginning. The goal is to re-imagine them and thereby re-invent ourselves.

Inevitably Barker's fiction returns to the idea of embracing the monstrous feminine in order to be fully human. And because the feminine is the marginal “sex which is not one” (Irigaray), it includes or implies androgyny. Barker's dialogues of gender suggest that within conventional constrictions, we are all misshapen fragments of whole people, or at best halves searching for the missing or possible Other. We are all seeking to re-imagine our present selves. Sexual metamorphosis is often positively self-transcending.

Barker's lively, myth-transforming “splatter prose” should be considered in a context that includes feminist artists Judy Chicago and Robert Mapplethorpe, who (while obviously quite different) have designed images of the body that make space for sexual difference. I am thinking of Chicago's The Dinner Party, a series of dinner plates designed to suggest the female genitalia in metamorphosis or flight and Mapplethorpe's reconstructions of the phallus. “The Madonna” and “Rawhead Rex” venture into revisionist mythmaking.

Feminist subtexts inform the discourses of the body that comprise Barker's six volumes. Books of Blood are fantastic voyages through the gendered body, with the male and female principles represented in images of its inner spaces. They show the extent to which psychoanalysis shifted its base in the mid- 1980s, from the subject's mind-centered emphasis on consciousness to the body-mind or the body fantastic. Books of Blood are also dialogues in which gender may be transposed or transformed; they are re-genderings of the body.

In “Rawhead Rex,” the perspective shifts from a randy phallocentrism toward gynocentrism, and turns from a splatter film into a dialogic text. “Jacqueline Ess” moves from female powerlessness to the monstrous feminine to the paradox of human sexual dependence. This paradox is embodied in a text in which Jacqueline's fatal and female “Will and Testament,” unwritten except in a fragment of a diary and the misshapen fragments of male flesh, is co-authored and made possible by Vassi, whose “Testimony” also represents a significantly revised version of the patriarchal law. Jacqueline's story proper provides a satirical mirror of the Word, and Vassi's passionate lyricism responds to and deflects Jacqueline's rage. Neither text would be complete without the other. The story, like the Books of Blood as a whole, becomes a collaborative text, a dialogue of positions, and a problem thrust on the reader.

As his move toward fantasy indicates, Barker's interest in essentialist concepts, including archetypal and psychoanalytic analysis, is superseded by what must be called his “faith” in change and his war against Blakean “mind-forged manacles.” Barker attacks Freud, for example, in “The Body Politic,” for fitting the mind in “neat classical compartments,” and suggests that his own viewpoint is more Jungian. At the same time, Barker exposes the stereotyping tendencies of archetypal approaches, celebrating variegation.

In presenting a spectrum, Books of Blood are subversive in form as well as content: each story is composed of several counterpointing characters or voices, each volume consists of four to six such tales, each playing off the others, the dialogic play destabilizing the whole, reversing and revising stereotypes. Instead of closure, Barker offers heteroglossia and transformation, which make for humorously black, weirdly optimistic, or triumphantly paradoxical endings. The six volumes provide a Bakhtinian Carnival in which normally suppressed voices are heard “in the flesh” as transformation and intertextuality triumph over patriarchy and logos. At the same time, as violent texts, Books of Blood subvert political correctness itself, sliding into ambivalence.

“CELEBRATIONS OF PERVERSITY”: BARKER'S FILMS

Transformation is the essential element in Barker's visual style, whatever the medium. This theme is perhaps most obvious in his films and screenplays. A case in point is Hellraiser, his enormously successful 1987 directorial debut, and an all-out, perversely dislocating splatter movie.⁴ The film's focus is the deconstruction and gradual reconstruction of Frank Cotton from a bit of slime and ganglia on up.

Based on his novella The Hellbound Heart (1986), Hellraiser cross references Faust, Frankenstein, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and may draw on Barker's early Grand Guignol plays. Frank Cotton wishes to “redefine the parameters of sensation” and to release himself from “the dull round of desire, seduction and disappointment that ha[s] dogged him from late adolescence” (Hellbound Heart 187). By manipulating an exotic puzzle box, Frank summons the Cenobites, described in The Hellbound Heart as “theologians of the Order of the Gash” (187), masters of pleasure and pain and providers of private hells, imagined as a fleshy limbo. In the film these demons are visual puns, metaphors of sadomasochism—a head scored into perfect squares and studded with pins; a face trapped in a prison of flesh that covers all but the mouth and a set of chattering teeth. As Frank discovers, the Cenobites offer jouissance through ultimate sensational experience and physical transformation in exchange for his self. A flood, a “cacophony” of sensations is unleashed and “written on his cortex,” until he feels “close to exploding” (Hellbound Heart 193), as indeed he is. In the film his body is ripped apart in a literalization of deconstruction. However, eternal jouissance is paradoxically a type of entrapment. There is no exit.⁵ Julia, Frank's sister-in-law and lover, feels trapped in a conventional marriage and equally fractured into roles. Divining her lover's presence in the family house, she agrees to resurrect and literally raise him through a bloody ritual in which she seduces, bludgeons, and feeds a series of men to Frank's voracious remains.

In Hellraiser, the central image is Frank's radical dismemberment in the prologue and gradual reconstruction throughout the film in spectacular effects sequences. These reverse the traditional horror movie structure in which the monster is deconstructed and expelled at the end of the movie. The opening sequence concludes as fragments of the organs of his senses are displayed on hooks in artful tableaus in the style of Grand Guignol and Hieronymous Bosch. The reconstruction involves eight stages of clinically detailed effects that suggest the layered transparencies of a medical textbook.

In the transformation of Frank, Barker attempts to recreate the effect of the “very beautiful” sixteenth-century medical illustrations of the anatomist Andreas Vesallius, who portrayed “flayed men and women standing in classical poses or leaning against pillars. The whole atmosphere of these images is cool and elegant. …” With these etchings in mind, Barker and effects designer Bob Keene made Frank and the Cenobites “beautiful and repulsive simultaneously” (Barker, qtd. in Floyd, “Clive Barker” 313).

The resulting film is subversive, as Barker and Bob Keene, the effects technician, intended. Like Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, the effects reverse splatter film violence against the female and (perversely) flay, open up, and “feminize” the male. This skinless and continually “new” Frank is a walking wound, his anatomy his visible destiny. An excruciating reminder of our physiological limits, and thus Frankenstein's monster, Frank is alternately the body in pieces and the body in flux: “the map of his arteries and veins still being drawn anew,” “puls[ing] with stolen life” (Hellbound Heart 238).

Hellraiser is erotic in sexually dislocating ways. At his most rapacious Frank is portrayed as a growing fetus nourished in the chamber of Julia's desire. Like Rawhead Rex, he is a penis—rising from the floorboards with the gasp/roar/cry of a beast/child/orgasm, the mise-en-scène bringing the sights and sounds of birth, predatory violence, and sex into disturbing juxtaposition. In an oddly painful and compelling scene, Frank, newly born from the pool of slime that he was, has a cigarette as he chats with his mistress. Conventional horror “portrays women as more squeamish than men” (Women in Horror), Barker has complained, and he plays against stereotype, generating perverse overtones. As Julia bathes in the blood of her victims and mates with the slime of Frank on the floor of the womblike room—as she embraces villainy and abjection—she becomes paradoxically more beautiful. (In the novella The Hellbound Heart, she also becomes perversely maternal: “she [f]orsak[es] the dregs of her distaste,” touching the hair—“silken, like a baby's—and the shell of his skull beneath” [240]).

Equally dislocating is the film's “relativized morality,” which Nigel Floyd calls a “cruel parody of the old liberal maxim, ‘Everyone has their reasons’” (“Clive Barker” 313). Julia is no “fatal woman” stereotype, and she is especially sympathetic from a Female Gothic point of view. Seduced by Frank before her wedding to the kind but dull Rory, she nurses Frank back to life to give her pleasure. Like Jacqueline Ess, she chooses “masculine” knowledge, power, and creativity over traditional female roles and changes from a neurotic housewife to a woman possessed by desire. “She had made this man, or remade him, used her wit … to give him substance. The thrill she felt, touching this too vulnerable body, was the thrill of ownership,” the novella tells us (Hellbound Heart 240). Julia relishes the Female Gothic experience of “unnatural” authorship (surrogate motherhood) to Shelleyian “hideous progeny.” But as Nigel Floyd explains, viewers are torn between their sympathy for Frank and Julia and their “disorientation at being encouraged to identify with the forces of evil. Refused any single organizing moral point of view, the viewer is kept continually off-balance” (Floyd 318).

Hellraiser subverts the kind of certainty found in bourgeois horror films rooted in the nuclear family, whose purpose is to expel the monstrous. The film additionally tests the limits of the genre, using its conventions to unsettle viewers. Such reversals and paradoxes of Hellraiser defamiliarize splatter conventions and make viewers newly and uncomfortably conscious of the body as a process, as incessant transformation. Barker has explained that such “rearrangements of the flesh,” as he calls them, only show what takes place “on a moment-to-moment basis,” a process that he says is “kind of celebrated” in his fiction. In an interview with Morgan Gerard, Barker describes it in terms of “sitting together, growing old; our flesh minutely changing outside our control; our bodies responding to the alcohol we're taking in; our organs, for all we know, growing tumorous. The flesh can decide to get sick, to get upset, to make us desire” (qtd. in Gerard). Barker's images are confrontations with the wound that reveals change at the heart of things. This recognition Barker celebrates, paradoxically, because it requires (and also can free) us to re-imagine the world. The flux that is the body is ultimately a source of power.

Barker's drawings therefore portray characters who actively recreate themselves. Barker explains that they are “only just holding onto their coherence” (Burke 52), “exploding out of their condition into something else. Becoming” (Burke 38). We are “programmed socially, economically, emotionally, religiously,” but the possibility of “throwing over … self-restrictions” taught by “priests, parents, and psychologists” is always present. “Can we not erupt?” he asks rhetorically. “We re-invent ourselves anyway, day-to-day, friend-to-friend, moment-to-moment—it's just that we don't really perceive that” (qtd. in Burke 44).

This concept of the self in flux Barker expressed early in “The Skins of the Fathers” (Books of Blood II), which re-dressed H. P. Lovecraft's “The Dunwich Horror” in a radical imagery derived from the fantastic painters. In the “cosmic horror” of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, the demons are oozy, huge, and malign. Like many of Poe's horrors, they are “unnameable” and refer to a feminine monstrosity. Barker turns Lovecraft's coding wrong side out by making his equally marginal demons the heroes, the “true” fathers of the human species. When the patriarchs of Welcome, Nebraska, first encounter the demons, they see only a procession of apparent celebrants, a “gorgeous array” of shapes, colors, sizes, wearing “headdresses and masks that [totter] well above human height,” reeling “like drunkards, loping one moment, leaping the next, squirming, some of them, on the ground” (118-19). But these are not costumes, and the demons have reemerged, after several millennia, the last of their species, to celebrate the birth of their changeling son Aaron. Their “extraordinary anatomies, the dreaming spires of heads, the scales, the skirts” (153) and their empathic language (or is it song?) defy the townspeople's categories for body and gender types. (The denizens of Welcome call them “[d]irty, stinking, faceless fuckers” [155].) The demons dismantle biological norms and the larger natural order. When Aaron blossoms into the “soup of shapes” (154) of his/her truer form, an epic battle between authentic and false fathers and a grand apocalypse of a landslide ensues.

Barker explains that the “representatives of society, who, in most horror films, are figures of order and stability,” are in his works “models of moral depravity.” The fathers of Welcome are characterized as “fat white fists hot with guns” (147), and Aaron's human father abuses him for being a “sissy.” In a reversal that few male writers in any genre would attempt, modern patriarchy is portrayed as a violent moment following a golden prehistory in which women had always existed as a “species to themselves,” with the demons. “But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What … a cataclysmic miscalculation. Within mere eons … the women were made slaves, the demons killed or driven underground” (147). The imagery links women further with the demons, associating them together with life-affirming plenitude, freakish diversity, and the Dionysian or Bakhtinian carnival. In the utopia Barker imagines, both “species” are sexually whole and embody a prehistoric version of pre-Oedipal polymorphous perversity. “Skins of the Fathers”: sins, foreskins, forefathers. The demons are all of these. “‘See, them black-eyed sons of bitches don't have no fucking heads,’ Eugene was screaming” (151). Their association with foreskins, reinforced by their appearances and their bisexual apparatus, is Barker's reconstruction of Judeo-Christian law in which the foreskin is considered unclean, tainted with the archaic Mother, and is removed from the son's penis. Aaron, the changeling son, looks like an ordinary boy—slender like the rod that prefigures him—until his real nature erupts in a manner that suggests both an erection and a polymorphous blossoming. In the typology of the symbolic, these skins more properly belong to “stinking, faceless mothers,” to This Sex Which Is Not One, or “male and female in one indistinguishable congress.”

Barker has described the natural world as “relentlessly beautiful, relentlessly inventive, relentlessly complex. And [in this respect] it celebrates the marginal in a way that human structure doesn't. … The Third Reich is the ultimate non-celebration of the marginal” (qtd. in Gracey-Whitman and Melia 412). “The Skins of the Fathers” displaces the phallic signifier here as part of the program to privilege the marginal as consistent with the variegation and transformation in nature. Although several stories tall, the demons cradle and croon to Aaron telepathically, surrounding him with a womb of sound and sensation. Alternately whimsical, exotic, awe inspiring, grotesque, and charming, “The Skins of the Fathers” is a hymn to diversity, asking readers to think about a world uninscribed by gender, culture, or species, and in which the human is disseminated rather than prefigured. As sands cover the demons and the Welcomers alike, the demons' song lingers over the “text” provided by the remnants of the Law: a head, a torso, a nose, and a mouth emerging from the sand. The story ends with a nod to Lovecraftian “cosmic” horror and awe as from the long perspective we view these “trivial forms,” these “[l]ittle dots and commas of human pain” (122).

It is not surprising that Barker was quickly taken up by the adult comic book industry. Epic Comics illustrator McLaurin, who draws the Hellraiser and Nightbreed series, explains: the Hellraiser series is not the kind of horror “you'd expect from an EC comic, where a twist ending bundles up the plot in one bloody package.” Unlike King, who deals in “everyday” horror, “Barker is set apart by his ability to create an entirely believable mythological universe, populating it with a menagerie of the monstrous” (Labbe 41).

After Books of Blood, The Damnation Game (1986), and The Hellbound Heart (in Night Visions series, No. 3, 1986), Barker moved away from splatter fiction and the iconographic toward the fantastique. This mode increasingly emphasizes variegation or creative diversification. Transformation becomes the subversive use of fantasy to re-imagine the self and the world, especially in Weaveworld, his “anti-fantasy” or meta-fantasy of 1988.

In emphasizing the social function of transformation and metamorphosis, Barker is in line not only with feminist revisionists but also with “magic realists” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Louis Borges, and Italo Calvino. Like these writers, Barker believes that the cultural attitudes toward the flesh, toward difference, and toward other species need to change. Like them he celebrates the marginal.

Barker's Bakhtinian vision is overtly presented in his 1989 film Nightbreed, based on his novella Cabal (1988). In its world, as described by Maitland McDonagh, “every day is a carnival … real carnival, a no-holds-barred celebration of the grotesque and the inverse” (60). Nightbreed is not a successful film. It is a nearly incoherent film unless it is viewed in part as meta-film, “read against” horror conventions. The videotape, however, begins with a helpful prologue. Barker is shown sitting dressed in black on a dark sound stage and surrounded by the masks of the Nightbreed monsters. The faces, including Barker's, are bathed in an eerie glow. “I've always loved monsters,” he announces. “A dark corner in all of us … envies their powers, … would love to … fly, or change shape at will.” Monsters are our transgressive desires. Therefore Barker has created Midian, an underground city “peopled with creatures of our darkest fantasies” and where consequently, “we can feel strangely at home.” He invites “you” to join in “flipping all the conventions of the horror movies, plunging you to a world of insanity and miracles, where dead men can be heroes, monsters beautiful, and the only place of refuge is the most forbidding place on earth.”

Like Hellraiser, Nightbreed undermines the categorical thinking behind concepts like sadism, masochism, and necrophilia, and “embraces the monstrous,” but by means of plotting, characterization, and conventions more properly associated with the fantastique. Midian is threatened by the forces of order represented in Eigermann the fascist sheriff, Ashbery the masochistic priest, Decker the sadistic psychoanalyst, and even the hero-enlightener Aaron Boone. The film begins with the twist that would have provided the clincher for the conventional horror movie, one that foregrounds the character of Decker and his cohorts. Dr. Decker has convinced Boone, his patient and scapegoat, that he is a serial murderer, having programmed Boone with his own psychopathic memories. Decker is a type, Barker's satire on psychologists as terrorists of the imagination, so that his hollowness as a character, his lack of authenticity, history, or motivation, is the point. He is also characterized externally through casting and visual metaphor. In the crucial role is horror film director David Cronenberg, directly imported from the fantastic clinicism of Dead Ringers (1989).

Performed with the chilly detachment of one of Cronenberg's doctors, Cronenberg-as-Decker also represents Dead Ringers's theme of “male horror and envy of female reproductive process” (Showalter 242), symbolized in “the breed” and their unruly proliferation of the fantastic. Cronenberg's presence at the extra-diagetic level interacts with the visual metaphor of Decker's alter ego, “The Mask” (as Decker addresses it in the novella), under whose authority he acts as a grim reaper. The Mask links Decker the psychologist unsettlingly with the icon for the teenage slasher movie, Jason's hockey mask. Decker's Mask is the cloth face of a sewing-box doll—“zipper for mouth, buttons for eyes, all sewn on white linen and tied around” With “the teeth … gleaming knives, their blades fine as grass blades” (Cabal 88). With these he accomplishes his mission of “sewing/sowing” culture. The construction of reality means the death of imagination, as represented in Barker's Carnival of shape shifters, freaks, and dark dreamers—the “children of the Moon.”

As a visual metaphor, and as a sign of genre, Decker's mask presents the antithesis to the protagonists, who are fantasy images, grotesques inspired by Goya and Bosch. In an interview with Nigel Floyd, Barker explains that the film contains a “generic collision” between the world “of the fabulist and the world of iconographic images” and representing the larger one between the world of Midian and the world of Law. The latter is represented iconographically by Cronenberg/as Decker/as psychologist/as slasher/as mask and is equated with the modern horror movie at its most conventional. Decker is a “reductionist, cold-hearted and soulless thing” (Floyd, “Frights” 345). Decker portrays the modern horror tradition as being “about throwing the monster out, about the rejection of the marginal” says Barker. Within his metaphorical worlds, however, “it's not possible to throw the monster out and assume that one's house has been purged … because the monster is part of our internal workings” (Floyd, “Clive Barker: Hellraiser” 312).

In the Nightbreed characters, the grotesque is a sign of Dionysian energy, to Barker the equivalent of soul. More specifically, the grotesque represents the self with potential for transformation. The Nightbreed are, as opposed to any one image or type, shape shifters. The visual metaphor of the mask gives the concept of transformation psychological and physiological force. Narcisse, the protagonist's sidekick, is an icon of the “authentic” man-without-a-face. In the beginning, as one of Decker's patients, he is a madman tormented by dreams of utopia (Midian). As a way of seeking admission to the city of his dreams, Narcisse suicidally strips the skin from half of his face, rendering it a mask, thus transforming himself into a dualism and a paradox, a freak “worthy” of such a utopia. Like R. D. Laing and Michel Foucault, Barker sees madness as the name given to those whose vision might subvert the symbolic order. In contrast to Narcisse and thus portraying a different kind of madness, the hero Aaron Boone erupts, smoke pouring from all orifices, and transforms his human face (or public mask) into the powerfully beastlike Cabal, the savior-priest who is also Midian's “undoing.” It is through the same deconstructive logic that Boone can fulfill his destiny only by dying and becoming a “beast,” by losing his heroic name (to the signification “Cabal,” from cabala and signifying magic) and by becoming Midian's unmaking. By causing the destruction of this refuge for Otherness, and however unwittingly, Boone forces Carnival back into the world where it can remain vitally subversive.

As Lisa Tuttle points out, Cabal/Nightbreed is Weaveworld, which she reads as a classic, “even archetypal, fantasy,” in reverse. By “archetypal fantasy” she means

the longed-for Other Place. … This longing—desire—is the engine which drives fantasy, just as in the horror story the engine is fear. But that desire and fear might be inextricably linked is something not usually commented on or explored by writers in either genre. … Perhaps now … artists are interested in exploring the nexus of fear and desire.

(216)

The shape-shifting Children of the Moon, together with Baphomet, their “god and goddess in one body” (Cabal 207), embody that nexus. They represent the possibility inherent in unconstructed—quilled, tentacled, multi-textured, and rainbow-colored—life. In the novella, confronted with the “true Midian” for the first time, the heroine Lori feels a mixture of horror and fascination:

Was it simply disgust that made her stomach flip, seeing the stigmatic in full flood, with sharp-toothed adherents sucking noisily at her wounds? Or excitement, confronting the legend of the vampire in the flesh? And what was she to make of the man whose body broke into birds when he saw her watching? Or the dog-headed painter who turned from his fresco and beckoned her to join his apprentice mixing paint?

(Cabal 112-13)

The Nightbreed are Jungian masks or faces of the unconstructed self, grotesques, and they stand for Barker's concept of transformation. “You call us monsters but when you dream you dream of flying, changing,” one of the Children of the Moon explains to Lori. They also incarnate the modern view of life and death as relative conditions: some are predators (while others are not); some are alive and some are technically dead but “living” in the liminal state that Midian‘s underground space, otherwise signified as carnival, represents. Allusions to the classic film statements on carnival, to Tod Browning's Freaks and Fellini Satyricon, abound. Barker has explained the film as a hymn to variegation and in the fantastique tradition, including the paintings of Bosch, Goya, Blake, and Fuseli. The “generation of fresh imagery” is its purpose (Barker, qtd. in Floyd, “Frights” 343).

In Clive Barker's films, as in his fiction, the imagery of violence and the experience of pain are aspects of his metaphorics of transformation. Like Mapplethorpe's photography or Wittig's writing, his texts do violence to the body, opening it into a text, in order to shift the emphasis we call gender and articulate difference. Stephen King has said that horror “arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment, that things are in the unmaking” (Introd. 22). But when Barker's anti-horror fantasy unmakes the world, he does so in part to open spaces, to appeal to the reader's or viewer's desire to recreate the world. People should “leave the moviehouse or put down the book knowing that they can begin to reinvent this,” he says, tapping an empirical table, “and our relationship to this,” he emphasized recently. “Works of the imagination are finally tools for change” (Strauss, “New King” 94).

Notes

1. See Rockett on horror as Theater of Cruelty.

2. Asked in an interview with G. Dair if he were confident in his own sexuality, Barker answered discreetly: “I'm confident in my own complexity and that really interests me, because of the ambiguities of sexuality, the ambiguities of metaphysics, and the metaphysics of sexuality are things which hugely influence what I write” (393). Unlike Stephen King (who maintains the image of a family man who can make his private life common knowledge and would publish his laundry list if he thought it would sell) or Anne Rice (who has a listed phone number and publishes her sexual fantasies for all the world to see), Barker has until very recently steered clear of the subject of his private life, intellectualizing the issue or referring back to his work. But this past year, after the manuscript of this book was complete, Barker spoke “as an openly gay man for the first time” in Out magazine (“The 1995 Out 100,” Out Dec.-Jan. 1996: 90). Featured in Genre's “Men We Love” section (Dec.-Jan. 1996), he says he is “first and foremost a gay man who imagines. How important the gay part is depends on the medium, but I can't imagine making art without some form of sexual content” (50).

3. “Coming to Grief” was also published in Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1988) in the United Kingdom.

4. Hellraiser won the Grand Prix De La Section Peur at the 16th Annual Avoriaz Fantasy Film Festival in France in 1989 and was the number one box-office hit in Europe in 1988.

5. Lord of Illusions, Barker's 1995 film, was released in October 1995, after I completed the manuscript for this book.

Works Cited

Barker, Clive. “New Fiction by Clive Barker: Animal Life.” USA Weekend 24-26 June 1994: 4-7.

Booe, Martin. “Deliciously Terrifying.” Interview with Clive Barker. USA Weekend 26-28 Jan. 1990: 8.

Campbell, Ramsey. “Introduction.” Barker, Books I xi-xiii.

Castaneda, Laura. “Britain's Clive Barker: Future King of Horror.” The Tennessean Showcase [Nashville] 24 Aug. 1986: 58-59.

Gerard, Morgan. “Clive Barker The Horror!” Graffiti Jan. 1988. Rpt. (as excerpt) in Jones 157.

Hughes, Dave. “Clive Barker in the Flesh.” Skeleton Crew 3-4 (1988). Rpt. in Jones 391.

Jones, Stephen, ed. Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden. Lancaster, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1991.

Morrison, Michael A. “The Delights of Dread: Clive Barker's First Three Books of Blood.” Jones 157-169.

———. “Monster, Miracles, and Revelations: Clive Barker's Tales of Transformation.” Jones 173-83.

—and Stefan Jaworzyn. “Meet Clive Barker.” Fangoria Jan. 1986 Rpt. in Jones, 185-89.

Van Hise, James. Stephen King and Clive Barker: The Illustrated Masters of the Macabre. Las Vegas: Pioneer Books, 1990.

———. “Catching Up with Clive Barker, Part Two.” Fangoria July 1986: 46-49.

———. “Clive Barker.” Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror. New York: Avon, 1990. 9-17.

———. “Horror in Print: Clive Barker.” Fangoria July 1986. Jones 191-97.

———. “Talking Terror With Clive Barker.” Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine June 1987. Rpt. Jones 209-14.