The End of Rhetoric and the Residuum of Pain: Bodying Language in the Theatre of Howard Barker

Language is the setting, the referent, and the subjection of Barker's theatre, an attempt to read experience, to map out — or struggle through — a scaffolding of tropes that can hint at a structure of Being. In the exhaustion of language's moves and countermoves, what remains is the ravaged body, the death mask of a différed humanism — pain. This article essays a close reading of Howard Barker's epic work The Ecstatic Bible, utilizing a strategy of rhetorical mapping following the work of Paul de Man, confronting language with its limit (or perhaps its apotheosis) in the pain-wracked body, whose terrible vulnerability has been explored at length in the work of Elaine Scarry. The Ecstatic Bible stands revealed as a fable of deconstruction worked through, live, before the audience.