Vulnerable Creatures and the Wounded World-Soul

EARLY ON in his latest novel, The Scarlet Gospels, Clive Barker reveals that his most celebrated character, the Hell Priest Pinhead, has learned the delicate art of origami. For months, the demon secreted himself away in an abandoned corner of Hell, folding hundreds of pieces of paper into magic-imbued birds. These paper animals have a dark and bloody purpose, of course, but Barker describes the moment of their enlivening with a soft, uncanny beauty: “nearly a hundred origami cranes came alive, flapping their paper wings. The only sound they were capable of making was the one they were making now: paper rubbing against paper, fold against fold.” On one level, Pinhead’s origami cranes provide a simple counterpoint to the novel’s many depictions of maimed and tortured bodies, but they do more than that. The strange vulnerability of these paper lives invites us as we read The Scarlet Gospels to become more attentive to the precarity of all lives and all bodies, perhaps especially those made entirely of paper, ink, and imagination.

Like many other Barker enthusiasts, I first met Pinhead almost 30 years ago. It was 1987. I was 12 years old, and it was the first (and only) time I’d ever snuck into a movie theater. The film, of course, was Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and it was rumored to be unlike any other horror film of the late ’80s. From the grainy images highlighted in commercials and magazines, Hellraiser’s monsters promised to deliver something more eloquent and disturbing than their cinematic brethren (masked madmen that stalked the suburbs and waited in the woods to punish hedonistic teenagers). These monsters came from a distant elsewhere and presented themselves with an air of aristocratic detachment. The human world and its petty dramas were almost beneath their attentions. Their very presence, it seemed, was a doorway to another way of seeing, of being.

I simply had to risk it.

I sat alone and waited for that uncanny light from another world to filter its way through the dust-filled dark and project its mysteries onto the screen. The first of those mysteries came in the form of Frank Cotton, a man who had tasted all the intimate pleasures the body had to offer, but whose fascination with them had been dulled through time and repetition. The film opens with Frank at the end of a quest to obtain the holiest of holies: a magic box that promised to satiate his most extreme desires and deliver him into a state of perpetual pleasure and revelation. I watched as Frank sat in a square of burning candles, a cube covered with elaborate decorations resting in his hands. As his thumbs pressed and prodded the box’s surface, a bell tolled in the distance, and a child’s melody tinkled slightly out of tune. Finally, something clicked. The box succumbed under the seductions of Frank’s fingers, and it opened to reveal its inner secrets: a set of thick chains headed with sharpened hooks that threaded their way from some other dimension to seek out Frank’s flesh and tear it apart. Even to my 12-year-old mind, the metaphysical logic was clear: gain the world; lose your soul.

But that was not the film’s final revelation. After Frank’s “pleasures” had ended, a figure entered the abattoir. His black leather vestments wove in and out of his skin, silver nails gridded the entirety of his face and head, and his voice, when it finally came much later in the movie, was calm and full of strange wisdom. He called himself and his colleagues, “explorers in the further regions of experience […] Demons to some. Angels to others.” Perhaps it was his voice or the stillness of his body, but I could not help but sense that behind his philosophical rhetoric, behind his self-wounding body, behind all of these outward signs of excess breathed a simple and immeasurable sadness.

In The Scarlet Gospels, Pinhead’s melancholy takes center stage. This time, instead of playing the part of stoic priest, he assumes the role of the world-wearied hedonist, but unlike Frank Cotton, rather than seeking out new, more intense pleasures, he embarks on a pilgrimage to find Hell’s architect: Lucifer. According to the legends that circulate throughout Hell, Lucifer had vacated his throne. “Depending on which story you chose to believe, Lucifer either had gone mad and perished in the wastelands, escaping Hell entirely, or was walking the streets of Pyratha disguised as a commoner.” After lifetimes of avoiding this enigma, the Hell Priest decides to rebel against his demonic order and journey to Lucifer’s cathedral on the distant island of the Last of All Possibilities, hoping to find his absent lord and master. There, he will either confront Lucifer and demand answers that might mitigate the wounds of his soul, or overthrow the Morning Star and take his place as the new Lord of Hell. All he needs to complete his quest is someone to witness his infernal rebellion and pen a testimony to Hell’s final hours.

He chooses as his witness Barker fan-favorite Harry D’Amour.

Since his introduction in the 1985 short story, “The Last Illusion,” Harry has populated Barker’s fiction as the reluctant private investigator whose destiny seems to be tragically entwined with forces both dark and numinous. His initial role in The Scarlet Gospels is surprisingly conventional — after Pinhead abducts Harry’s friend, the blind medium Norma Paine, as incentive for Harry to write the demon’s testament, D’Amour plays Orpheus and follows them into Hell. However, Harry’s function in the novel is ultimately not to play the hero; rather, it is, as Pinhead insists, to act as witness.

D’Amour turns his sight both inward and outward, sensing in his own past and in the anonymous lives of those around him the traces of uncared-for, sometimes imperceptible, wounds. Earlier, we learn that Harry hates the smell of books because, as a pupil at St. Dominic’s All Boys Catholic School, he was ritualistically raped by a group of older boys in the library. And later, before he descends into the pit to either rescue Norma or give in to Pinhead’s demands, he experiences a moment of clarity about the everyday lives of New Yorkers:

There was no pattern to these men and women, black and white, shoeless and well-heeled, unless it was the fact that tonight they all wished they could cut from their mind’s configuration the part that knew — had always known, since infancy — that the great wound of the world was deepening, day on day, and they had no choice but feel the hurt as if it was their own, which of course in part it was.

Harry’s acts of witnessing allow him to perceive a pattern of pain that connects his internal life with the secret lives of others, including, as it turns out, Pinhead’s.

In the moments before Pinhead steps into Lucifer’s cathedral and learns the truth about the fallen angel’s intentions and history, the Hell Priest

was suddenly agonizingly aware of the nails that had been hammered into his skull, their points pressing into the clotted jelly of his brain. He had always understood that this portion of his anatomy, being nerveless, could not give him pain. But he felt pain now: bleak, meaningless, stupefying pain […] He had cultivated a distance from his own despair over the years, but it met him at this place and would never again be put out of his sight.

Here, Barker shows us a demon who has been obsessed with the body, its pleasures and its torments, discovering that, beneath the surface of his own pursuits of the flesh breathes the insistent ache of absence. If in Hellraiser’s graphic explorations of the body in extremis Barker offers a vocabulary through we might meditate on hedonistic excess and the pleasured and wounded body, in The Scarlet Gospels, he adds a new glossary to that vocabulary, aligning it with a deepening sense of cultural and personal despair. Perhaps this explains why both D’Amour and Pinhead search for patterns, for some evidence of universal truth, for some inspired reason for existence. They hope to escape the possibility of pain without purpose. Yet in The Scarlet Gospels, meaning, purpose, and the possibility of healing all remain elusive.

Near the end of the narrative, Norma confesses a suspicion that haunts the entire body of Barker’s work: “The World-Soul is sick.” She reminds us that, while its plot explores the dreams of demon priests and the exploits of a fiend-fighting private detective, The Scarlet Gospels’s thematic heart pulses to the daily realities of human loss and despair. It tells the story of wounds, the most poignant of which are not physical. When Norma claims that the “World-Soul is sick,” she refers to a type of personal melancholia shared by all characters in the novel (whether human or demon, alive or dead) as well as a type of cultural melancholia, a collective sense of hopelessness and dejection. Such wounds do not heal, the novel seems to suggest, so how are we to respond to such pervasive and insistent hurt?

Perhaps in reading The Scarlet Gospels, we become witnesses to the pain and precarity of others, and perhaps there is something important, maybe even sacred, in such acts of witnessing. It can remind us that we are — like Pinhead’s origami birds — vulnerable creatures. Through witnessing lives of radical vulnerability, even if only in fiction, we might open ourselves to myriad forms of otherness, both within and without, and maybe, simply by learning to see the barely perceptible patterns of our collective affective lives, we can begin to work-through the sickness of the World-Soul and learn to cope with the reality of wounds that refuse to heal.

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Tony M. Vinci is an assistant professor of English at Ohio University-Chillicothe, where he teaches literature, humanities, and creative writing.