Spoiler Alert: Key elements of the plot of Clive Barker’s Imajica are discussed in this post.

In Clive Barker’s Imajica, the five “dominions” are discrete worlds, with the fifth (Earth) separated from the others by a region of formless horror known as the In Ovo. The separate consistency of the fifth dominion is a result of the breaking apart of the Imajica, a continuum sundered by the traumatic violence of the ascendance of one of its inhabitants (“Hapexamendios”, or “the Unbeheld”) to jealous-godhood. Barker glosses the name of his divinity thus:

The name Hapexamendios has three roots. Dios is obviously God; Amen speaks for itself; and Hapax means an event that only happens once. Just thought you’d like to know.

The other word hidden away in there is of course apex, which is where Hapexamendios believes himself to have ascended: the dominions are (erroneously) supposed by the god and his worshippers to be hierarchically ordered. In actual fact the Imajica forms a ring, in which the first and fifth dominions are connected; at the end of the book, the Maestro who has reconciled the dominions passes altogether out of their ambit, ceasing to be in any particular world whatsoever.

The theology of the book is broadly gnostic with a dash of new-agey feminism: the self-creation of the male pretender-god is synonymous with the fall, and coincides with the ubiquitous suppression of female spirituality. The Imajica’s goddesses are watery beings, all fine mists and flows, whereas the Unbeheld fancies himself as an architect and builder of impressive monuments. If we started begrudging fantasy writers their Jungian claptrap, we’d be here all day; still, it would be a welcome novelty if one of these days someone managed to come up with a cosmic vision in which the Eternal Feminine Principle was more about piercing intellectual clarity and systematic rigour and less about leaking all over the place.

One of the talents of the Autarch, the Maestro Sartori’s evil twin, is the drawing of creatures out of the In Ovo: generally horrible things, scraps of physical nonsense animated by an insatiable hunger for being. The larger and more dangerous Oviates are terrible and unstoppable devourers and mutilators: the consequence of one failed attempt to reconcile the fifth dominion with the others was a bloodbath following the irruption of a horde of such creatures into the world.

Hunger for being is a hallmark of the monstrous: the monster slays in order to become more substantial, in order to appear more completely and consistently within a world. In doing so, it unmakes the very world from which it desires sustenance, transforming it to carnage and ruin. Thus, in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for example, this devourer appears as the “looter”: the uncreative, unproductive, welfare-dependent slave-moralist whose mind is without logical consistency (being disconnected from the principle of identity, the “A=A” from which all objectivist philosophy purportedly flows) but whose world is upheld by the very Atlas, the Man of Creative Genius, whose self-certainty and wilful pursuit of his own ends the moralist is determined to thwart and destroy. A similar schema materialises in hysterical right-wing polemics about immigration, where immigrants into the “First World” are portrayed as morally unkempt sub-humans arriving from zones of inconceivable political chaos and undermining the social coherence of their wealthy hosts even as they recklessly (and ungratefully) consume their resources.

Now, for Badiou it is the case that any world at all is a situation: the structured presentation of a consistent multiple. There is more to it than that: a world qua multiple is always constructible from other constructible multiples, for example, such that every world and every multiple in every world can in theory be indexed by some language. (There is more to it even than that; but I’m not going to start talking about topoi and sheaves until I’m fairly confident I know what I’m talking about, which is not likely to be any time soon). The limits of a world are the limits of a language, and vice versa, not because worlds depend on the powers of languages in order to come into being but because the constructibility of a world guarantees its accessibility, in every particular, to some language: for any world there is some language for which nothing in that world is not articulable, and for any language there is some world which contains nothing that is not articulable by that language.

For as long as “there is nothing but bodies and languages” (Badiou’s formula for “Democratic Materialism”), that which appears in the midst of a world without a name can only be an impossible monster, a figure of evil whose tenuous claim on existence threatens to undo the consistency of that world. So it is, roughly speaking, in Imajica: discussing the book in interviews, Barker explicitly rejected Lovecraft’s tendency to indicate “indescribable” realities, in favour of producing a fully fleshed-out cosmos replete with describable entities, such that much of the novel takes the form of a tour of exotic regions, the unfolding of an imaginative synthesis. Even the Oviates often take the forms of identifiable varieties of fauna (“gek-a-gek”s, and so on) when they are summoned by the Autarch.

The really odd thing about Badiou’s “matheme of the Event” is that it designates an illegal (because self-containing, and thus not well-founded) multiple, but not pure inconsistent multiplicity itself: the event is a kind of knotting of structured presentation, a strange loop which the operation of the count cannot traverse without tripping over itself, rather than an unknitting, an irruption of sheer chaotic structurelessness in the middle of an ordered world. Everywhere in Imajica, entities are either woven or unwoven, made or unmade, knitted or unknitted: what never occurs in that continuum is knotting or paradox. The Imajica sees great upheavals and tremendous drama; but what definitively stamps and dates the novel as a postmodern confection is its reliance on the underlying figure of textuality as a model of ontological consistency: for a world to be is simply for its elements to be interwoven, and the greatest threat that can menace such a world is the fraying or unweaving of its texture.