Separation, Sacrifice and Sainthood

Abstract

The triptych of concepts identified in this chapter title resonate throughout Barker’s works, but are valuably characterized in his essay, ‘Saintliness, Death and the Perfect Family’, which appears only in the 1994 Calder Publications/Royal Court playscript of Hated Nightfall/Wounds to the Face:

If the sign of the saint is sacrifice, it is a sign illuminated by the vehemence with which he repudiates the world. For the saint finds the world lacking, and his desire is focused on what can never be satisfied. His passion can discover no worthwhile object, and the more searching his gaze, the more contamination is revealed. For Dancer [the protagonist of Hated Nightfall], all is transparent, and this transparency is appalling pain, for we require to be deceived, it is the condition of social acceptance. Without deception there is perhaps no hope … the saint is lured by human love only to discover its inadequacy … the saint is first and foremost his own work of art, exhibited primarily to himself. But neither saints nor works of art are socially desired, for they are disruptive to the bourgeois and the collectivist alike.

What you describe as a rebuke to me, is no more or less than my desire

Hated Nightfall (HN 19)