"Fearful Symmetry:" Clive Barker Discusses the Art of Fantasy

ALAN Review, Winter 2005 by Blasingame, James

An artfully dressed man with a youthful countenance (is he thirty-five or maybe fortyfive?) seems to be hosting two people for coffee in the Omni Severin Hotel coffee shop at the 2004 NCTE Convention in Indianapolis. He opens doors for his two guests, smiles, stops to pick up the water bottle dropped by a twenty-something elementary teacher in the hotel lobby ("Miss, I think this is yours.") His comfortable, colorful clothing (decorated denim jacket and jeans, pastel cotton shirt with artwork) suggests he might be a studio artist who left fame and fortune behind (the commercial world can go to hell!) and turned high school art teacher, or he might be one of those actors who has reached a point of success where all pretension has been abandoned as unneeded. An accent that says, "London, maybe," places his origin nowhere near Indiana, and the gravel in his voice suggests iron under the art.

"Hello, I'm Clive."

Clive Barker: featured speaker at the 2004 ALAN Workshop, thanks to Michael Cart, ALAN president, and Josette Kurey of HarperCollins, among others.

By sheer volume alone, Clive Barker's accomplishments are mammoth, to say nothing of the genius and passion he has poured into each project, projects even Michelangelo might have found daunting in scope: multi-dimensional marathons-starting in Clive's powerful imagination, moving through sketches to larger-than-life paintings, moving on to text and often arriving on the movie screen. Since founding a small theater group in London as a young man, Mr. Barker has gone on to write and produce some of the most successful and artful horror movies of modern times, as well as a seemingly inexhaustible stream of fantasy novels and stories for young and old alike which continue to translate to the cinema.

Playwright, painter, horror novelist, graphic novelist, fantasy novelist, movie director, short story author, dog lover, husband and father, Clive Barker is a remarkable man who can quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and William Wordsworth, as well as Peter Pan, as he carries on a conversation that plumbs the depths of the human subconscious, quantum physics and how fantasy fiction touches the human psyche.

Photos of Clive on his website, many of which were taken by his partner, David Armstrong, show, among other things, the creator of Pinhead and the other Cenubites himself laughing and covered up in a pile of large, friendly dogs, residents of the Barker household, and a loving and devoted father talking and laughing with his daughter, Nicole.

Clive's young adult projects, such as Thief of Always (which Publishers Weekly describes as a "tale that manages to be both cute and horrifying") and the four volumes in the Abarat series (about which, Booklist reviewer Sally Estes says, "The multilayered adventure story not only embraces the lands of Oz, Wonderland, and Narnia but also offers a wink and a nod to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. More than 100 full-color paintings by Barker are appropriately quirky, grotesque, and campy, effectively capturing and expanding on the nuances of the tale"), might better be categorized as fantasy appropriate for readers of all ages, and although he is obviously not a secondary English teacher trained in the Louise Rosenblatt school, he intuitively recognizes that the age and experience of the reader of a book or the viewer of a play provide for diverse experiences with the text. Professional reviews, as well as online reader comments about these books, provide comparisons to a nearly canonical list of authors, including but not limited to Poe, Tolkein, Alduous Huxley, Blake, Coleridge, as well as cinematic geniuses like Ridley Scott and Alfred Hitchcock. In the following interview, Mr. Barker provides his own remarkable insights into the operation of fantasy in the human imagination.

JB: Your work, set in a modern context, of course, quite possibly resembles the work of William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge more than it resembles the work of your contemporaries. Like Blake and Coleridge, you delve deeply into the subconscious, the spiritual and the scientific, but it's the kind of science that we speculate on, like quantum physics. The kind of science in which all the rules we know are violated . . . and it's kind of scary.

CB: Yes, true, right.

JB: Does it take a certain kind of mind in the reader or the viewer to understand your work or do you think it just hits the psyche like a ton of bricks and you can't help it.

CB: That's a big question. My feeling is the kind of fiction we're both interested in, whether it's for young people or adults, is the kind of fiction that works on lots of levels. The first piece of Blake I ever read was "Tiger, Tiger." "Tiger, tiger burning bright/ In the forest of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry." I didn't have a clue what that meant when I first heard it. But its music was immensely eloquent. I had it by heart, you know, and I've had it by heart ever since-I'm 52 years old now, so that's 44 years. What has happened is that I have decoded those lines different ways as I've grown older. I think the great thing about "the fantastic" is that it provides you with a kind of fiction which means one thing when you're one age and something perhaps completely different when you grow older.