Book Six (Cabal), Chapter Two
“How Spoilers Bleed”
We’re now heading down the home stretch; we’re also heading up river–“How Spoilers Bleed” is Clive Barker’s Heart of Darkness. It’s about what happens when avaricious Europeans head into the jungle, though the jungle in this case is found in Brazil rather than the Congo (or Vietnam and Cambodia, for that matter). It’s the the nastiest, angriest story in the collection, and that really is saying something.
This time around, it isn’t the gore that makes the story so nasty (although there are one or two spectacular gore scenes, the first of which is, thanks to its easy understandability, maybe the most brutal in the series). No, this time around it’s the characters who radiate awfulness. All the characters–that’s a first, believe it or not. Greedy, callous, deceitful, despairing, and ultimately genocidal, they’re just plain rotten. And it’s no coincidence that that’s the word that comes to mind–Barker makes rottenness itself the central horrific metaphor in the story, in large part I would guess because these terrible men practically demand it.
The really remarkable thing about the story is the way the rottenness infects the prose as well. Barker’s horror writing generally cuts like a machete, and as appropriate as that might be in a story about the catastrophic exploitation of the rain forests and their inhabitants, here he decides to wield his prose like a blunt instrument instead, crushing decency and beauty any time it threatens to bloom just as easily and viscerally as main character Locke crushes a mosquito between his fingers when we first meet him. Consider Barker’s description of the rain forest itself, generally considered to be one of the most breathtaking environments on Earth:
This burgeoning diversity was a sham, the jungle pretending itself an artless garden. It was not. Where the untutored trespasser saw only a brilliant show of natural splendors, Locke now recognized a subtle conspiracy at work, in which each thing mirrored some other thing. The trees, the river; a blossom, a bird. In a moth’s wing, a monkey’s eye; on a lizard’s back, sunlight on stones. Round and round in a dizzying circle of impersonations, a hall of mirrors which confounded the senses and would, given time, rot reason altogether.
Later:
Their noisy progress, the Jeep engine complaining at every new acrobatic required of it, brought the jungle alive on every side, a repertoire of wails, whoops, and screeches. It was an urgent, hungry place, Locke thought: and for the first time since setting foot on this subcontinent he loathed it with all his heart. There was no room here to make sense of events; the best that could be hoped was that one be allowed a niche to breathe awhile between one squalid flowering and the next.
In Conrad’s time the notion of a corrupting jungle may well have been part and parcel of the Western sense of superiority to the Third World; I wonder if that’s still the case here. By the time of Barker’s writing modern liberalism had transformed even the most squalid “developing” area or brutally inhospitable wilderness into a pre-fallen paradise, simply by virtue of there being no Westerners there to fuck it up yet. Suggesting (even through an odious interlocutor like Locke) that the undeveloped wilderness can be ugly is a transgressive act–as taboo, in its way, as were films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacare, whose visions of the supposedly glorious frontier roots of America answered the likes of Easy Rider‘s “we blew it” with the response “it was already blown long ago.”
The natives in Barker’s story are another integral part of the tale’s unique nastiness. In all likelihood they come across better than those in Conrad’s. For one thing, Barker’s European spoilers do not “go native”–quite the opposite, really. Barker treats the natives as monsters, yes, but of course that means they get treated fairly well: terrible but wonderful, corrupting yet pure in their corruptness. They reflect the jungle itself in this way:
They seemed, in their silence, like another species, as mysterious and unfathomable as mules or birds. Hadn’t somebody in Uxituba told him that many of these people didn’t even give their children proper names, that each was like a limb of the tribe, anonymous and therefore unfixable? He could believe that now, meeting the same dark stare in each pair of eyes, could believe that what they faced here was not three dozen individuals but a fluid system of hatred made flesh. It made him shudder to think of it.
Now, for the first time since their appearance, one of the assembly moved. He was an ancient, fully thirty years older than most of the tribe. He, like the rest, was all but naked. The sagging flesh of his limbs and breasts resembled tanned hide; his step, though the pale eyes suggested blindness, was perfectly confident. Once standing in front of the interlopers he opened his mouth–there were no teeth set in his rotted gums–and spoke. What emerged from his scraggy throat was a language made not of words but only of sound, a potpourri of jungle noises. There was no discernible pattern to the outpouring, it was simply a display–awesome in its way–of impersonations. The man could murmur like a jaguar, screech like a parrot; he could find in his throat the splash of rain on orchids, the howl of monkeys.
The sounds made Stumpf’s gorge rise. The jungle had diseased him, dehydrated him and left him wrung out. Now this rheumy-eyed stickman was vomiting the whole odious place up at him.
What follows owes as least as much to Camus and The Stranger as it does to Conrad and Kurtz. That’s as good a way as any as seguing into the fact that the real monsters here, obviously, are the Europeans, the spoilers. They’re physically diseased, first of all: One has dysentery, another a case of syphilis advanced enough to render his dick an afterthought. (There are worse diseases in store, alas for them.) They are also, of course, murderers, about as cold and unfeeling as you please. Barker goes to great lengths to hammer home their sheer hideousness in virtually every facet of their lives. I mean, what can be said of a sentence like this–
It was one of Locke’s few certain pleasures, and one he never tired of, to watch a local woman, face dead as a cold manioc cake, submit to a dog or a donkey for a few grubby dollar bills.
And when one of Locke’s liasons is about to reach its sordid climax…
The woman with the squint was about to accede to a particular peccadillo of Locke’s–one which she had resolutely refused until drunkenness persuaded her to abandon what little hope of dignity she had…there came a rap on the door.
A little boy has come to tell Locke his colleague is in the hospital, dying.
“Well, let him. Understand me? You go back, and tell him, I won’t come until I’m ready.”
Again, the boy shrugged. “E meu dinheiro?” he said, as Locke went to close the door.
“You go to hell,” Locke replied, and slammed it in the child’s face.
When, two hours and one ungainly act of passionless sex later, Locke unlocked the door, he discovered that the child, by way of revenge, had defecated on the threshold.
Do you see what I mean? Awful, awful. Before it all ends there’s a dead pig that reminds us of Lord of the Flies and an ending that, interestingly, is the closest to the Bradbury–Matheson–King tradition we’ve yet seen. But I think the most striking thing, which is really only registering
with me now, is that what we don’t see is a glimpse of the transcendent, which can usually be found in even the worst of Barker’s horrors. It’s as though the transcendent was rotted right out of this story. It makes me wonder, once I’m able to recover from the reading, who the author was really trying to scare.