Thirteen For Halloween 2020: The Jaffe

The Jaffe is therefore horrifying on levels far beyond his portrayal and significance within the story alone, and one of the more trenchantly despairing encapsulations of humanity to be found amongst Barker's bestiaries. 

“A story tends to live or die by its villain.” 

So proclaimeth Clive Barker, and, in that understanding, the man has gone on to imagine one of the most colourful and complex menagerie of monsters, infernalities, demons, evil demi-gods, skewed sorcerers and other-worldly entities in either horror or fantasy. 

From the iconic Cenobites of Hellraiser to the messianic nihilism of Lord of Illusion's Nix, Barker has a penchant for flourishing his antagonists with wit, subversive humanity and more than a mite of sincere understanding. It is rare, rare indeed that his monsters are merely monsters; Barker's visions of evil are far more complex and abiding than that. Whereas contemporaries tend to err more on the side of traditional tropes and templates, Barker takes said templates, tears them up and stitches them back together in fascinating and wholly more ambiguous configurations. 

Nowhere is that more apparent than in The Great and Secret Show's dark demi-god, the man-made-infernal that is The Jaffe. 

Like many of Barker's antagonists, The Jaffe is not one of the initiated, in terms of his origins; he does not come from auspicious beginnings, he is not a child of rite or prophecy. In point of fact, the man Randolph Jaffe is less than nobody; a broken, lonely, vacuous soul whose life only sustains because he lacks sufficient imagination or inclination to end it, he is thrust by circumstance (or possibly the manipulation of far darker interests) into a shamanistic quest across the face of the USA in search of secrets that operate beneath the thin veneer of proscribed and waking life, finding for himself the revelations that alter his state of being, his sense of purpose, until finally meeting his counterpart in the form of disgraced and dreaming scientist, Wesley Fletcher. In an unholy marriage of their respectve disciplines -Jaffe's occultism and esoterica, Fletcher's scientific vision and philosophical understanding-, they concoct a formula which has the potential to speed a human being's evolution not into some ascended physical state, but into a condition of utter abstraction. Simply put, those exposed to the formula -which Fletcher christens The Nuncio- become metaphysical echoes of their own most essential natures. Accidentally exposed to the stuff, Fletcher himself becomes a thing of dust in sunlight; a living dream that has capacities to coax the dreams of others into some semblance of ephemeral being. 

Jaffe, on the other hand, finds that his essential nature derives from his darker impulses; he becomes a shadowy entity of mysteries and occult secrets, a demi-god of fear, forbidden desire and mysterious omens. Just as Fletcher is able to coax entities of fantasy and transcendence from the thoughts of humanity and make them -temporarily- physical, The Jaffe, as he comes to call himself, calls to every sublimated fear, unspoken dread and desire, crafting monstrosities from them that Barker renders in much more exquisite particularity than Fletcher's dreaming hordes. 

The pair embark on a war of antithetical metaphysics across the face of the USA, The Jaffe endlessly attempting to steal and subvert the reality-warping magic known as The Art whilst Fletcher attempts to block his efforts. 

The notion of extremely normal, flawed men becoming semi-divinities is something that crops up again and again in Barker's fiction; he is not interested in some frictionless, “perfect” other-worldly entity, rather human beings who have come to occupy some state of abstraction, and thereby become manifestations and principles of certain human drives. 

The Jaffe is a terrifying entity in and of himself; a thing of elemental horror, whose aspect is one of dread and disturbance, capable of producing insane horrors on a whim and whose ambitions are nothing less than apocalyptic (in every sense of that word). 

However, it is what he represents that is perhaps most troubling: 

The metaphysical war between Fletcher and The Jaffe is Barker's unflattering -arguably misanthropic- assessment of humanity's inner life and spiritual state in the closing decades of the twentieth century, which casts a long and ominous shadow into the eras beyond: 

Whereas Fletcher, the angel of light, healing, transcendence, contemplation, is depicted as an almost impotent, weary thing that can barely hold himself together, The Jaffe, the very reflection of all that is dark, obsessive, narcissistic and destructive in humanity, is rendered as particular, ambitious, strong and certain. He is the one who drives the war between the two, who has plans and intentions for The Art and humanity's dreaming life. 

Likewise, the creatures they craft from humanity's dreams and nightmares -Hallucinogenia and Terrata respectively- are stark and negative judgements on the neglect we have heaped upon our own internal lives, the filth we have allowed to pollute and warp the states of our souls: 

Given the chance to manifest their absolute fantasies, their most beautiful, transcendent imaginings, what do the children of humanity provide Fletcher?; Soap opera characters and game show hosts, movie stars and pop singers and pornography idealisations. The Jaffe coaxes creatures from the psychological muck of humanity that are immense, elaborate and obscenely potent, whereas Fletcher, operating in a garden that has been allowed to wither and actively poisoned by forces of politics, commercialism and cultural proscription, can barely raise enough bodies to use as ablative shields against them. 

In that, Barker provides a fairly on-the-nose and none-too-hopeful commentary on the fundamental condition of humanity: 

We have reached a point where our hopes and dreams cannot fight or even outlive our unspoken dreads and horrors, our obscene desires and self-interest. 

Interestingly, Barker's rendering of The Jaffe is far from judgemental in this regard; if anything, he relishes the monster's company and the atrocities he conjures. Fletcher, by contrast, is often absent and, even when he does occur, portrayed as a distant and ephemeral thing, barely held together, barely able to retain his grip on the world he no longer has any anchorage to. The base and the horrifying holds more fascination for us as a species than that which might foster our transformation or transcendence. Fletcher is the dying soul of 1960s Utopianism, perhaps the last ember of that movement, 

The Jaffe is therefore horrifying on levels far beyond his portrayal and significance within the story alone, and one of the more trenchantly despairing encapsulations of humanity to be found amongst Barker's bestiaries. 

THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN 2020 PART TWO: THE LIX​
​THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE BODY POLITIC
​ THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: THE MAGDALENE (AKA “MAMMA PUS”)