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The (Un)Traditionalist: Clive Barker’s Devil 199ings. The positive and negative aspects are inseparable from each other, thegood and evil blend, and the Devil becomes more human as the play proceeds.This is aptly presented in the actor’s announcement opening the secondact:ACTOR: (To the audience) In law, there are no certainties. Suppose we triedour loved ones? Made a list of offences against us. How long beforewe’d amassed enough resentment to hang them by? Now, we put theEnemy on trial. How long before we find enough reasons to love thePrince of the World? 26The sympathy for the devil goes very far in Barker’s play, but it doesnot settle for a blank acceptance of irremovable evil as a part of “human nature.”Barker’s warning against reading his play in the tradition of moralitiesis here well worth heeding. As the Devil is granted a separate existence andsome individual personality in the play, he also gains an individual destiny:he is not reduced to allegory, even if he carries a heavy burden of symbolismand metaphysical speculation. In the end, the Devil is fated to become atragic character.This aspect is made especially clear in the Easter episode. The trial isprogressing in time to modern days, and the prosecution accuses the Devilof challenging God himself, of making a parody of humanity.THE DEVIL: I made a doll, if that’s what you’re driving at.CATHERINE LAMB: You confess to it then?THE DEVIL: Confess? There is no guilt here; I’m an engineer. I’d read Descartes.One of his heretical papers especially, the “Traite L’Homme”. Init, he makes the analogy between the physical body and a machine: thenerves are pipes, and so on. I myself had seen beautiful hydraulic automatain the royal gardens in Germany: the work of one Solomon deCaus. To a creature such as myself, rejected by all and sundry, what bettersolution than to construct a companion of my own, without will exceptmy word? Twenty years, it took me, building from the marrowoutwards.CATHERINE LAMB: Easter.THE DEVIL: Yes, I called him Easter, after the Resurrection.The “pretended life” of the Devil gains another dimension with thecreation of an artificial human being. The concept of a living doll thickensthe multiplicity of references in Barker’s play. German romanticism, especiallyE.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Fantastic Pieces” are paid homage; “Nutcrackerand Mouse King” (1816), “Automata” (1814), “Sandman” (1816-17) all figureanimated dolls, automatons and demonic metamorphoses. 27 The mechanicalman also invokes the stage tricks and violent puppet plays whichBarker is drawing upon in his own work. The most important single tradi-26 HD, 268.27See Lois Rostow Kuznets’s study When Toys Come Alive (1994).
200Demonic Texts and Textual Demonstion used here is, however, the story of Faust in its different versions. Barkerhas admitted that he repeatedly varies the Faustian theme in his works: TheDamnation Game, Hellraiser and The Last Illusion are all according to himfundamentally Faust stories. 28 In this particular piece Goethe’s Faust (1808-32) with its reference to the alchemists’ dream of making a homunculus (asmall artificial human) is important. 29 Goethe was interested in the “daemonic”spirit of Faust expressed in his ceaseless striving for more knowledge,more experiences, in his pursuit beyond all conventional morality orideas of good or evil. The endless wanderings and experiments of Barker’sDevil follow very much the same imperative. 30 Furthermore, the question oftradition and originality, of machine-like determination and free will, arecentral to both the form and content of the play.Jeffrey Burton Russell calls the figure of Faust “the single most popularcharacter in the history of Western Christian culture” – overtaken only byChrist, Mary and the Devil. 31 This demands quite a liberal interpretation of aliterary “figure” and opens up some problems, especially in a case likeBarker’s play. “The History of the Devil” attributes to the Devil some of theexperimental curiosity that traditionally belongs to the figure of Faust. TheFaustian tradition seems to have gone through a reversal. The original sixteenth-centuryversion of the story was already an important modificationof a medieval legend about the pact with the Devil. Russell cites the followingchanges from the earlier tradition:[Faust’s] story is homocentric. In the medieval tales the tension is betweenthe Devil and the Christ, or the Virgin , or another saint. [...] But inFaust, the tension is between Devil and man [...].Second, this homocentrism is closely tied to individualism. [...] Fausthas no recourse to a community or a communion of saints. [...]Third, the story is pessimistic [...] like the horror films of our own century[...].Fourth, the story reveals a Protestant and modern ambivalence towardknowledge [...].Fifth, the character of Mephistopheles begins a transformation of theDevil’s character: he is at least a little sympathetic with his victim, and heshows some small signs of introspection [...]. The internalization and humanizationof Satan’s character became the main theme in the post-Faustian literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 3228 Ibid., xiii. Cf. Barker - Jones 1991, 113 (“The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus”[1988]).29 Goethe, Faust II (1832/1959, 99-106).30 At one point, for example, the Devil tries to justify his actions during the massacreat Bucephalus (the Greek settlement in India) as an experiment: “If you were givenpower over a species, wouldn’t you want to examine its passions? It was my sentimentaleducation.” (HD, 293.)31 Russell 1986/1992, 58. To reach his conclusion on the dominance of the Faust as aliterary figure Russell is ready to include even the legend of Don Juan “with all its manifestationsfrom Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell” as Faustian (ibid.).32Ibid., 63-64.
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TAMPERE STUDIES INLITERATURE AND TE
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Tampere Studies in Literature and T
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ments, and also such further lines
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IllustrationsCover: “Possessed Re
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The BeginningsAnd Jesus asked him,
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The Beginnings 3mons form an import
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The Beginnings 5negative, demonic a
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The Beginnings 7chapter four), but
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The Beginnings 11that is produced o
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The Beginnings 13The History of the
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The Beginnings 17turalism,” but i
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1. The Ancestry of the DemonicÑH.
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 37The f
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 51tween
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2. The Demonic in the SelfBut ancie
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The Demonic in the Self 61A number
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The Demonic in the Self 69influence
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The Demonic in the Self 71LEADER:Yo
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The Demonic in the Self 73Particula
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The Demonic in the Self 77ing into
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The Demonic in the Self 79Nietzsche
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3. Unravelling the Demonic TextThe
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PART II
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114Demonic Texts and Textual Demons
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BibliographyA note on this bibliogr
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Index2001: A Space Odyssey; 207abje
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