The Miracle That Happens When Desire's Dead

Howard Barker's play The Bite of the Night has rarely been performed and is not often studied, but its technique offers a valuable model whereby to analyse his subsequent work. Scenes of violence starkly enacted become focal points for an action that at all other times seems to spin out of control. Through this bizarre method, the play demonstrates the value of an artwork that resembles Helen of Troy - beautiful, desirable, and productive of violence. Through Savage's interaction with Helen, Barker speculates that the purely aesthetic and therefore inviolable core of her person provides the foundation for ethical interaction with a society that threatens to segment humanity through its institutions and desires. Helen exposes Savage's need for what Jacques Lacan terms l'objet petit a, and through her beauty, teaches him to fulfil and thus destroy all of his yearnings, exposing what he lacks in order to discover who he is. The play itself serves a similar purpose for its audience, revealing the "miracle" that "happen[s] when desire's dead" (Bite of the Night 78).