Abstract
In the first chapter, I wrote of Barker’s characters re-telling and re-experiencing pain, in pseudo-historical ages when the acknowledgement and infliction of pain are two of the few methods of self-definition left. This does not prescribe or endorse sado-masochism (I remain mindful and respectful of individual choice), but involves an imaginative cruelty such as Artaud sketched an artistic need for.
So they did and it backfired.
William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads1
I have restored you to your pain …
The Europeans: Struggles to Love
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Notes
William Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (London: Paladin Overseas edition, 1986) p. 195.
R. D. Laing has attempted to identify the archetypal associations of the maimed figure of Ippolita in D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death in terms relevant to both Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Helen in The Bite of the Night: ‘Once more we have the umbilical pattern — two wrists side by side, bare arms held out, two red fountains gushing from the severed veins of her wrists, the placental woman destined to die, the cervical door, the two wrists chopped through with one stroke, the cut cord’ (Laing, The Voice of Experience (London: Pelican, 1983) p. 139
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© 1989 David Ian Rabey
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Rabey, D.I. (1989). Pain and Breakthrough. In: Howard Barker: Politics and Desire. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19910-5_10
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