Sacrament by Clive Barker

When God commanded this hand to write
In the studious hours of deep midnight
He told me the writing I wrote should prove
The Bane of all that on Earth I lovd
—William Blake, "The Grey Monk"

Over the last month or two, I've started and stopped reading dozens of books, many of them clearly quite good, even excellent, but none of them able to hold my interest in amidst busy days of work, life, etc. And then I found myself reading a lot of Clive Barker for the first time in many years. (I don't seem to be alone — see this excellent Weird Studies podcast episode from last last month with Conner Habib discussing The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser.) Barker's short stories and novels have captured my reading with their wild commitment to imagination and their seriousness of intent within popular forms.

Sacrament is both a summation of the first 15 years or so of Barker's concerns and a departure from the overtly horrific and then phantasmagoric work. Some supernatural horror and some fantasy are certainly present in it, but it is a novel far more concerned with the ways of our actual world than of another.

The Tyger

When I was young, Clive Barker was Horror. I came of age as a reader just as he was becoming famous in the mid-1980s. When I started reading adult fiction, Stephen King was already well established (and culturally ubiquitous), but I remember the excitement of Clive Barker's arrival on the scene. I was too young to be allowed to buy Fangoria 51 in 1986 (my mother held out against my pleas for at least another year), but I'm sure I saw it on the newsstand and its cover question: "Clive Barker: Is He the Next Stephen King?" 

I remember the beautiful mass market paperbacks of the Books of Blood when they appeared among the books sold at the grocery store — the store where soon enough I picked up the anthologies Cutting Edge, Prime Evil, and most importantly Night Visions: The Hellbound Heart. (I hated grocery shopping and my mother bribed me with paperbacks or magazines — it was also on these runs that I got to buy issues of Night Cry. I still hate grocery shopping and the store sells barely any books or magazines anymore.) My best friend in 8th grade got obsessed with The Damnation Game and Weaveworld, but I didn't read those until later, as I preferred short stories to novels generally. I remember some of the magazines I read touting Barker as the hottest thing in horror in the late '80s and early '90s. My uncle gave me the hardcover of Imajica for my birthday or Christmas one year. Two of my father's favorite movies were Hellraiser and Hellraiser II, and eventually, once I was deemed ready, we watched the VHS tapes together.

I provide this background because until a few years ago I did not know Barker's 1996 novel Sacrament existed. And I find that both strange and interesting.

It's strange because in some ways this is the Clive Barker novel that feels most written for me — it is his first novel with a gay protagonist, its middle section is concerned with San Francisco during the AIDS era, it has something of an ecological interest, and its pantheistic idea of the universe is one I'm pretty comfortable with. At the time the book came out, I had just stopped my brief stint as an activist with ACT UP and was strongly involved with environmental politics.

I must have noticed the new Barker novel in bookstores. I must have seen a review somewhere. And yet I have no memory of them.

Perhaps it's not surprising that I did not notice Sacrament when it came out. By 1996, I had lost interest in genre fiction generally and Barker in particular. I wanted him to be a horror writer, and after The Damnation Game he was mostly a writer of very long fantasy novels that I didn't, at that time, have any interest in. If I saw Sacrament on a bookstore shelf, I probably thought it was a sequel to Everville, a book I'd read a few pages of and set aside.

The danger of holding an idea of Barker as the boundary-breaking, transgressive Bad New Boy of Horror is that I did not want him to be anything else, and so I could not recognize any virtue in his other books, and his continued interest in fantasy more than horror seemed to me then to be a mistake. By 1996, I'd pretty much given up on him.

Which is maybe for the best. I don't think I would have gotten much from Sacrament back then. I would have found it meandering and dull. It is not really a young person's book. 

No longer a young person, reading it now, I find it gripping and emotionally affecting.

Songs of Experience

Sacrament is a novel of middle age. Barker was in his early 40s when he wrote it and his protagonist, Will Rabjohns, is about the same age. I'm a couple years beyond my early 40s now myself. I'm more than middle-aged now, because though it is biologically possible I could live to be twice my 47 years, if I do so, I will be very unhappy.

Sacrament explores the gravitational power of childhood experience on later life. It also depicts the way life can feel unmoored or even becalmed when you realize youth is now a memory of a memory. In our forties, many of us lose parents and relatives and friends, our bodies become ever less reliable, and we may be decades into a career and realize we don't know why we're doing what we do. All of this is present in the novel.

It's important to remember that when Sacrament came out, big, bestselling novels did not have gay protagonists. While compassion for queer folks had certainly increased through the 1980s and early '90s, and queer culture was having something of a quasi-mainstream renaissance (the New Queer Cinema! Stonewall Inn Editions! Angels in America!), there was still a lot of anxiety in general American culture about Those People. It was all well and good to have gay protagonists in a novel that the publisher paid a small advance for and that was expected to sell maybe a few thousand copies, but in a book expected to be a bestseller? Ummmmmmmm, no. Barker has told the story a few times of the response when his publisher realized this expensive writer was delivering just such a book. It was not a response of joy and celebration. But the book was published without censorship and landed on the bestseller lists for at least a little while.

The portrayal of San Francisco in the middle of Sacrament is some of its most vivid and energetic writing, with Barker's experience writing plays and screenplays showing itself in deftly drawn characters and scenes. He captures an important moment: the year or two before reliable treatment for HIV became available, a decade or so into the crisis. By that point, a lot of people had died. Everyone else was suffering, either from prolonged disease or prolonged fear or prolonged mourning or all of them together. The anger that had first fueled the AIDS movement had been tempered with bitterness and fatalism. It was a bleak time. The US had survived Reagan and Bush only to get the youthful neoliberalism of Bill Clinton hollowing out the last vestiges of the social safety net; Britain had survived Thatcher and then got shackled to John Major.

This was also the time of Earth First!, of the wise use movement, of the timber wars and battles over the Endangered Species Act. Barker gently rhymes these concerns with the AIDS crisis and homophobia. Will Rabjohns is a well-known wildlife photographer famous for his chronicles of dead and dying animals. His primary antagonist is a devilish being obsessed with killing the last of any species of animal. In the novel, critics interpret Will's photographs as commentary on the plague years, not knowing that his interest goes back to a disturbing childhood experience, long before AIDS arrived to kill off so many of his friends. Yet it's clear the critics aren't wrong. Will's photographs may have their origin in his special, supernatural experiences, but he is also undeniably a man living in a community that truly felt itself to be facing extinction. Late in the novel, a friend in England asks him to describe San Francisco:

"I used to think it was paradise," [Will] said. "Of course, it's a different place from when I first arrived."

"Tell me," she said.

The prospect defeated him. "I wouldn't know where to begin."

How can you sum up a city that went from the joy of gay liberation to the agony of mass disease and death? When Will says of course he gestures toward this — she should know, she should understand, the information is out there, does he really need to explain it? But he does need to explain it, because the way the disease wiped out whole communities was (and is) often not visible to people who were not members of those communities.

Auguries of Innocence

The link between the extinctions of animals and the disease and intolerance killing Will's friends, lovers, and neighbors goes beyond a simple thematic parallel. It is not really until the end that we clearly see how a metaphysical vision — a religious vision — unites all the disparate pieces of the book. While it mostly draws on Christian iconography and vocabulary, Sacrament is not ultimately a Christian novel, at least in any nonheretical way. Rather, it presents the universe more as it is found in many types of Daoism and Buddhism (also some of Spinoza's writings). It celebrates the completeness of the universe, the sense that the tiniest thing in existence is connected to, and even part of, everything else. Separation is ultimately an illusion. The only constant is change, and the denial of change is a kind of poison in the mind.

Within the world of the novel, the desire to wipe out rare animal species is also a desire to wipe out humans, to wipe out all life generally. The narration tells us that the species-killing antagonist, Jacob Steep, "wanted to see Creation dwindle, family by family, tribe by tribe, from the vast to the infinitesimal..." He is on this mission for complex reasons, and the reasons he tells himself may not be complete. He is seeking an identity, seeking to know what he long ago forgot: who he is and where he came from. He has settled on an annihilating mission because he thinks that if he silences the world he will then hear the voice of God. It's delusional and not especially convincing. We can see, through his actions and some of what we later learn, that he is quite literally broken, that his birth in this form was a kind of wound, an alienation from a self he needs but does not recognize. There's a little something of Plato's Symposium here (and "The Origin of Love" from Hedwig, a show which was being developed at the time Sacrament was written and published). Jacob's fervent homophobia could be seen as a response to the pain of separation. Fearful rejection of same-sex desire is, in Sacrament, an ignorance of one's own possibilities, a rejection of natural unity, a fear of the universe's fundamental wholeness. It's not that everybody ought to be gay, but rather that it is murderous to deny the vast multiplicity of being and experience that adds up to the whole of reality. Nature is about efflorescence, not minimalism. 

At the end of the novel, Will experiences a sublime vision of that efflorescence. It's a poetic and artistic vision, one present in the lines of Walt Whitman and William Blake, a vision that links art, imagination, perception, and nature. Blake's famous letter to Dr. Trusler from August 1799 could have provided an epigraph: "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees."

Will is a photographer, someone who both creates and preserves sights. His style and subject matter are difficult for many viewers, and some of the reviews Barker creates for his protagonist aren't all that far from critiques of his own work, and of horror fiction generally. The fictive critics recognize Will's skill. "But why, they complained, did he have to be so relentlessly grim? Why did he have to seek out images that evoked despair and death when there was so much beauty in the natural world?" Some of Will's critics see him as doing nothing for what they perceive to be his cause: "The viewer gives up hope in the face of his reports. We watch the extinction with despairing hearts. Well, Mr. Rabjohns, we have dutifully despaired. What now?" (p. 120).

These complaints that Barker writes for his fictional photographer echo complaints familiar not only to anyone who reads horror fiction but also to anyone who reads about ecological crises. The person who points out how doomed we are gets scorned as insufficiently hopeful, a killjoy, a beast of bitterness.

The critics of Will's art do not recognize the pictures for what they are — sacraments. Will himself doesn't recognize this until late in the novel:

Steep had the rage of some Judgmental Father in his eye, but the divinity Will had in him was no less a Lord, though He talked through the mouth of a fox and loved life more than Will had supposed life could be loved. A Lord who'd come before him in innumerable shapes over the years. Some pitiful, to be sure, some triumphant. A blind polar bear on a garbage heap; two children in painted masks; Patrick sleeping; Patrick smiling; Patrick speaking love. Camellias on a windowsill and the sky of Africa. His Lord was there, everywhere, inviting him to see the soul of things. (pp. 479-480)

Will's pictures are disturbing, but they serve a purpose beyond simply evoking despair — they seek, in their own unsparing way, to use disquieting imagery to evoke (or invoke) wonder. Wonder isn't quite the right word, though, because the idea of "the Lord" here is an idea of wholeness within the unceasing flow of moments. We want to grasp the moments, want to cling to them, but that is impossible. Better to appreciate them for what they are: atoms of water in the river of existence.

To see wonder and glory only in beauty — or only in vast landscapes, or only in happy moments, or only in peaceful events — is to misperceive the whole. Even when lingering in the realms of the pleasant, seeing the whole requires recognition that beautiful images must be more complex than their beauty, that beauty is superficial, a choice of angle. Patrick, for instance, is a former boyfriend of Will's, and he is a man dying of AIDS, someone for whom Will feels great affection. Will also feels sorrow as he sees Patrick's health decline. "Patrick sleeping; Patrick smiling" are both moments of beauty, but they contain in them the pain of loss, as well: the loss of a partnered relationship that for one reason or another the two men couldn't sustain, despite their mutual love; the loss of Patrick's youth and health and life; the loss of vibrant communities to merciless disease.

Perhaps we could say that this is a vision of fractal metaphysics. Through connections of ecology and interbeing, each part contains the implication of the whole. To separate is necessary, because we experience the world as separate objects, moments, feelings, concepts ... but the separations are little more than useful illusions, strategies of sense against a reality that can never be perceived because it is so much more vast than we are. In fact, we ourselves are fractal pieces, momentary distinctions in the flow of the universe. Just as the universe beyond us is unimaginably immense, so, too, are there tremendous universes at microscopic scale. Each of our bodies is a galaxy of microorganisms (cf. Fantastic Voyage). No matter what scale we choose, we will see webs of Universe, or what Sacrament calls the Lord.

None of this is philosophically or theologically original — among other sources, you could trace parts of it to Heraclitus or Spinoza, Buddha or Lao Tzu, Theosophy or Deep Ecology. What's lovely in Sacrament is not original concepts but the way the narrative itself weaves elements together through connection and suggestion. The novel itself is a universe, both self-contained (the words on the pages, the pages in the book) and necessarily relying on the universe beyond its bounds (for the sense of words, for the references of imagery). Art, ecology, belief, extinction, queerness, violence, and creation all mingle through the book's story, offering no clear or definitive statement about any of those concepts but rather putting them into play together in a space of their own, producing resonances that we, reading, interpret into harmonies, meanings.

The Sick Rose

There is much in Sacrament about power, too. About how people become empowered or disempowered, how power corrupts, corrodes, reveals, deforms. This is how I think we can understand the most controversial scene in the book. 

It is a scene that was denounced in a brief, anonymous review in Fantasy & Science Fiction when the novel was published, which, with stultifying narrowness of interpretation, states that since the book is not "about" child abuse, "a scene of a prurient nature involving a minor boy and a woman many years his senior" is a ruinous flaw in an otherwise excellent book. The obtuseness here is so obvious I'm not going to bother to analyze it, but the scene does have a gravitational force, it is deeply discomforting, and in today's censorious and puritanical publishing environment I'm pretty sure Barker would be pressured to remove it with even more force than he was pressured in the mid-'90s to straighten his gay protagonist. (It's amusing that the brief review in F&SF begins with an invocation of an idea from Samuel Delany. Delany's own novel The Mad Man, published shortly before Barker wrote Sacrament, would be an interesting text to consider alongside Barker's, and contains vastly more challenging sexual content than anything Barker has ever published. Around the same time, Delany's earlier pornographic novels Hogg and Equinox were either published for the first time [Hogg] or in a new edition [Equinox], and both contain disturbing, graphic depictions of all sorts of behavior that could be construed as child abuse in novels very much not about child abuse. Hogg remains the most repulsive and disturbing novel I have ever read.) The scene in question has repercussions for the child character throughout the rest of his life, so it would be inaccurate to say the events do not have consequence, though the type of consequence is perhaps difficult for F&SF's dismissive reviewer to admit. As many abuse survivors attest, one of the rippling torments of abuse may derive from the fact that feelings for the abuser may not be uncomplicatedly hostile. One of the great terrors abuse delivers is the way it corrodes trust, deforms love, and poisons desire. The depiction of what the creature known as Rosa does to the child Sherwood is ghastly, but it needs to be so, because we need to understand how and why the power she exerts ruins Sherwood's future. Later, as we see the adult Sherwood's tormented yearning, we understand it better than we would if Rosa's actions were presented as somehow less monstrous, and we understand something more about attraction to the monsters than we would otherwise.

It is too easy to say that we ought to align ourselves with monsters against the stultifying conformity of the ordinary, the mainstream, the common. Yes, sometimes what gets called monstrous is benign and ought to be accepted or even celebrated — but part of the attraction of the monstrous is its transgressive, ravaging qualities. And those qualities do not come without pain. At points in Sacrament, we learn to have a certain sympathy for Rosa, but she remains a dangerous and destructive monster, a creature of hungers born of grotesque circumstances. Her own incompleteness and brokenness make her destructive. The same is true for her partner, Jacob Steep. The damaged do damage. Their crimes are enormous. The novel makes this utterly clear. That is what allows its final section to be so powerful, for it is there that the story begins to bring the broken pieces and broken people together in the only thing that will solve the legacy of destruction: transcendence into the wholeness of the world.

In Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, Douglas E. Winter quotes from a 1985 Penthouse interview Neil Gaiman conducted with Barker, who says that "the monsters and creatures, the dark side, need to be invited into the twilight so we can meet them. Horror fiction is a perpetual twilight where we can meet these things, not so we can send them back into the darkness saying, I am cleansed and purged of you! We are not purged of them, and it's not them or us. We should take them on board, they are part of ourselves" (p. 160). Barker's approach may have evolved some in the ten years between that statement and his writing of Sacrament, moving more toward dark fantasy and away from horror, but "they are part of ourselves" could be a credo for the novel, with the they including both monsters and the animals that human life so relentlessly destroys.

Jacob in particular seeks power so as to bend the world to his anger, frustration, bitterness, and self-image. Rosa is less vindictive and less driven, but power runs fiercely through her in the form of desire. She can hardly control it. Barker has always been a great poet of desire, someone who understands its beauty and terror. He is not afraid of the romantic parts of Romanticism, nor does he eschew earnestness. Sacrament seems to have great sympathy for the ways desire courses through Rosa, the ways it allows her destructive power while also fueling her determination to be something other than what Jacob is. 

Throughout his work, Barker plays with the opposition of dark and light, which could lead us to see this as a foundational concept for his metaphysics, a basic dualism, Manichaeistic. The dark/light, good/evil duology is too simple, though, and Barker knows it. He enjoys playing with the binary but does so for deconstructive purposes, as Sacrament ultimately makes clear. Twilight is the place of communication, the fertile realm of creativity and eros, a dangerous place that is also a place of possibility. While we think of it as a visual phenomenon, twilight is also a time, a moment of suspended oppositions. A scene of blending, melding. A chronotope where distinctions get undone. A vantage from which to glimpse the eternal, infinite, and whole.

Earth's Answer

Finally, there is art. Caught up in the thematic and theological implications of this novel, I have neglected one of its most immediate virtues: its artfulness. Barker gained, early in his career, a reputation for luridness, even crudity and obviousness. This reputation was partly a result of the intensity of his vision, but also partly the side-effect of various statements he made in interviews in the '80s about wanting horror to be loud and unambiguous. They were the posturing statements of somebody pounding his stakes into the heart of a vampiric culture industry. With the movies based on his writing and the movies he himself directed, subtlety seemed hard to find. I have always had a love of Hellraiser, and have learned to cherish NIghtbreed and Lord of Illusions, but let us not delude ourselves into thinking there's anything subtle about any of them! Their camp and kitsch are key to an appreciation of what they achieve; best to see them as blockbuster manifestations of Jack Smith's aesthetics than as works of nuanced cinema. (A whole monograph could be written on Jack Smith leading to Barker on one hand and Derek Jarman on the other. But that's a topic for another day...)

Barker deserves more of a reputation as a skilled writer of prose. He can be prolix, no doubt, and none of his novels I've read would be worse off without some trimming, but the same can be said for hundreds of great works. Reading a novel is often about committing yourself to the experience of the extraneous. Letting patterns spread, stretch, lounge, and loll. The novel is the appropriate form for writers who are given to such tendencies. Novels ought to be allowed to be, contra Henry James, "large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary." Though I do love some novels that feel like they would fall apart if even one word were excised, I don't think that's the purpose we ought to celebrate the novel form for. We have short stories and lyric poetry for concision. We need novels to be allowed to meander and sprawl.

Barker's prose can take different forms and tones, and sometimes it's without much character, just there to serve up information and scenery. More often than not, though, there's often real evocative power, especially in the imagery. (He is, after all, a visual artist.) So much of what makes bestselling prose something to be ignored (or endured) more than celebrated remains absent in Sacrament and a lot of his other writing. Look, for instance, to the varying lengths of his paragraphs. You can't flip through the pages of Sacrament without noticing the frequency of substantial paragraphs, sometimes whole pages of a single one. Nowadays especially, but really throughout the last 100 years or longer, popular fiction has tended toward short, punchy paragraphs and short sentences. Small bits that can be munched by readers like popcorn. Popular fiction is designed less to be read than skimmed.

Barker's work allows and sometimes encourages skimming, but for the most part it asks to be read, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. It is a prose of accumulation. Here's a random paragraph of ordinary length from early in Sacrament:

He did not go up the hill the following day to look for Jacob, nor indeed the day following that. He came home to such a firestorm of accusations — his mother in wracking tears, certain he was dead; his father, white with fury, just as certain he wasn't — that he dared not step over the threshold. Hugo wasn't a violent man. He prided himself on his reasonableness. But he made an exception in this case, and beat his son so hard — with a book, of all things — that he reduced them both to tears: Will's of pain, his father's of anguish that he'd lost so much control. (p. 75)

The language is plain, but the sentence structures are not. Twenty words in the first sentence, twice that in the second, then six words, then forty. There's a rhythmic power to a paragraph of that variety, and the shortest sentence stands out, as it should, because it is one that casts ghostly echoes through the rest of the book: Hugo wasn't a violent man. The two longest sentences are broken up by parenthetical statements separated from the main sentence with dashes (the most violent punctuation mark, a slash across the page). Parentheticals suspend our reading. They pause both the sentence and us, while also providing more information. We hold the overall sense of the sentence in mind while also adding this element to it, and by the end of the sentence our job is to suture it all together. We are readers who are also assemblers. The last sentence brings us to a kind of finality with the explanation after the colon. This explanation serves as a separation. Without it, we could have seen the tears as one thing, equal, undivided. But the colon serves to split Will and his father. Their tears are not the same. Unity is broken.

Here's a short, more lyrical paragraph randomly chosen from later in the book:

And in the midst of the blaze, images from the adventures of the day: a sky, a wall, Bethlynn; Drew clothed, Drew naked; the cat, the flowers, the bridge, all unreeling like a fragment of film tossed into the fire in his head, the throbbing white fire that lay at the end of everything. (p. 327)

One-sentence paragraphs are common to popular fiction, but rarely are such one-sentence paragraphs so complex as this. Fifty-four words this time, but instead of violent dashes, we have a colon and semi-colons. The colon serves a common function, introducing a list, but the semi-colons are the most interesting punctuation here, working primarily as rhythmic notation. Read the sentence aloud and pause a little bit longer than you pause with the commas and you will see what Barker is doing here. Punctuation is also a tool for organization. It's why unpunctuated prose is so much harder to read than well-punctuated prose: our minds have to work harder to organize things. This sentence carefully groups things for us. It is a relatively long sentence, but not difficult to read or understand because it is so well put together. The sentence is interesting in its balance, too. The first half is mostly nouns. The second half unreels into simile and metaphor. The sentence begins with lots of concrete items, but its movement is toward abstraction. The abstraction feels earned and comprehensible because of all that leads up to it. The movement of the sentence is toward transcendence.

The pacing of Sacrament is also important to note. This is not a hard novel to read, it is often interesting and sometimes gripping, but as I read I kept feeling it asking me to slow down, to take time with its scenes and characters and images. It is not a book that reveals itself in a headlong rush. We must let ourselves build this novel in our mind rather than having it wash over us, or else we miss everything it offers. Though the mass market paperback is 600 pages of relatively small text, it is not crammed with incident. We could quickly summarize the events of, for instance, the last section (pp. 483-605), but the summary would be entirely wrong about everything that matters. That last section is a careful, slow assembly of all that has gone before. This is what allows the vision of unity, core to the novel's meaning, to resonate.

The last paragraph of Sacrament tells of a journey back into the world. The world is where we, the readers, end up when we close the book, but the gift the story gives to us is different from the gift it gives its characters. We accompanied them on their journey, but now their work is done. Our work begins, the work of continuing to imagine, to reflect, to meditate, to act. The characters at the end of Sacrament get the world, while we, closing the book, get a new vision of the world. That's the glory and wonder of art.

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images by William Blake