Abstract
Employing the philosophy of Georges Bataille, this chapter examines victimised characters within Clive Barker’s 1980s works The Damnation Game, The Hellbound Heart and Books of Blood short story “Sex, Death and Starshine.” These three works provide arenas for Barker’s main characters—and readers—to experience competitive coexistence of self and other, survival and death, and ecstasy and suffering. The works persuade readers to flirt with Faustian risk and become willing victims through the act of reading. Suffering through the dark fiction, readers engage with Barker’s dialectics by befriending characters (and Barker himself) via the text. The chapter argues that this type of victimhood-friendship contributes to the effectiveness of Barker’s literary rhetoric.
Keywords: literature, The Damnation Game, The Hellbound Heart, friendship, Georges Bataille, transhumanism
Faustian fiction—that is, stories of human characters who negotiate with devils to acquire power and knowledge—have been retold and reshaped throughout the centuries. They are based on an historical sixteenth-century magician, Dr Johann Faustus, who was suspected of consorting with the devil; accordingly, the fiction traces the character of Doctor Faustus/Faust (or a Faust-like character) interacting with a demon character, traditionally named Mephistopheles. Christopher Marlowe’s Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1838) are two foundational versions of Faustian tales that are celebrated in the Western literary canon. Despite their thematic similarities, such as unmoderated desire, the limitations of human knowing and the betrayal of natural order, the two stories significantly diverge: Marlowe’s tale ends with Faust’s eternal damnation, while Goethe’s tale ends with his redemption. Within the sphere of contemporary horror fiction, Clive Barker admits that his long career of writing horror literature remains indebted to these Faustian texts, specifically, Marlowe’s bleaker Doctor Faustus (Barker, Damnation, xiii). The influence is evidenced throughout Barker’s corpus: from his first theatre productions in 1970s London to his 2015 novel The Scarlet Gospels. As a horror writer, Barker preserves the Faustian tradition in his stories but imaginatively develops the darker elements.
Over the decades, Barker’s approach to Faustian fiction aligns with a particular philosophy of storytelling.