1. Hannibal: the problem
In Britain, Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal 1 sold 120,000 copies in its first fortnight. Hannibal is the third volume in the trilogy that began with Red Dragon (1981) and continued with The Silence of the Lambs (1989). It was clear even before its author cranked up his word processor that it would be a world-wide best-seller. Few novelists can have worked on a sequel in such an atmosphere - indeed such a stress - of expectation and adulation. Rather as Conan Doyle's readership demanded the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, fans of Harris's earlier books and the hugely successful film of The Silence of the Lambs (1990) demanded the reappearance of Hannibal Lecter. In a sense Hannibal is its readership's book as well as its author's, and it's on account of Harris's treatment of his eponymous central character that it has been received by so many people with such passionate and sometimes resentful disappointment - as if Harris has personally let them down. 2
To ask why he might be thought to have got things wrong is to open up a mare's nest. It involves asking not merely why a serial killer should have captured the popular imagination, but why it should seemingly find him so attractive. That in turn raises the question of the relationship of Hannibal, and of genre fiction of its kind, to the society which produces and consumes it and to wonder what Hannibal might be able to tell us about that society. In a brief essay I can only scratch the surface of these matters, but I hope to suggest some fruitful lines of thought.
In Red Dragon, Lecter played a supporting role. Securely imprisoned, apparently defeated, he nevertheless succeeded in plotting revenge on the man responsible for his incarceration - FBI agent Will Graham. The Silence of the Lambs brought Lecter to the fore. The book traces FBI rookie Clarice Starling's pursuit of the bizarre serial killer Buffalo Bill, but it's also the story of the developing relationship between Starling and Lecter. Lecter trades clues as to Bill's nature and identity for juicy titbits about her psychic life. His escape sets the stage for volume three.
In Dragon and Lambs, Lecter was humanity's worst nightmare. In Hannibal he has ceded the position of person-you'd-least-like-to-meet to a pair of moral grotesques, Mason Verger and Paul Krendler. Verger is a meatpacking millionaire and one of only two Lecter victims to survive - albeit at the literal cost of losing his face and being tied to a respirator for the rest of his life. Krendler, an unscrupulous eminence grise from the FBI's Justice department, is Starling's nemesis: ever since she rejected his sexual advances he has made it his business to hinder her career. When Verger's men fail to capture Lecter in Florence, Krendler and Verger join forces to trap him by using Starling as bait. The plan succeeds; but Starling saves Lecter from the super-hogs reared by Verger to devour him from the feet up only to be struck by an anaesthetic dart; at which point Lecter carries her off in a manner not unlike that in which King Kong carried off Fay Wray.
So to the problematic resolution. Those who read Lambs as a love story featuring Starling and Lecter will not be surprised at what happens at the end of Hannibal. For, instead of killing and eating Starling, Lecter submits her to a course of drug-aided psychotherapy which cements their mutual need. And so, off into the moonlight - or South America, where they're finally glimpsed as a glittering pair of opera-goers. The tiger has discovered his tigress and settled down at last. To readers for whom Lecter represents the ultimate untamable sociopath, this of course is a huge sell-out. Lecter is supposed to eat people, not fall in love with them. The tiger has lost his stripes and become a tabby-cat. But let us look at all this a little more closely...
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2. The philosophy of evil
Harris's trilogy can be read in a variety of ways. His books appeal on an intellectual as well as an action-thriller level. He has an unusually profound interest in abnormal psychology. For many thriller-writers the villain is merely a mechanism, a plot-necessity to be sketched in with as little fuss as possible, then blown away in a staged climax. Harris however takes the unusual step not only of revealing his killers to the reader at a comparatively early point, but of investigating what makes them tick. Of the three serial-killers who feature in his trilogy, Hannibal Lecter is the most interesting. A polymath, he is a trained psychologist and has an IQ off the scale. Whereas Harris's other killers understand themselves imperfectly (Francis Dolarhyde) or not at all (Jame Gumb), Lecter is perfectly equipped to analyse and comprehend himself and is totally self-aware. He has, in fact, what one might call a philosophy of evil. That it is unoriginal is unimportant.
In Book 2 Chapter 6 of The Brothers Karamazov, Miusov reports Ivan Karamazov as saying that there is "no law of nature that man should love mankind". Such love depends on belief in immortality:
if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.
Hannibal Lecter is precisely someone for whom nothing is immoral. And the way he has come to reject Christian teaching is reminiscent of Ivan's. In Book 5 Chapter 4, Ivan denounces the absurdity of the world to his brother Alyosha, telling him that the factor which most strongly moved him to (as he puts it) "give back my entrance ticket" to God is the suffering of children (Hell is no answer to the problem, as torture borne by children can never be undone). Now, as we discover in Hannibal, the defining experience in Lecter's life was the murder of his parents and beloved little sister by army deserters in Lithuania in 1944 when he was six. When that sister was taken from his side, Hannibal prayed that he would see her again. And so he did - he saw some of her bones in "the reeking stool pit his captors used".
Since this partial answer to his prayer, Hannibal Lecter had not been bothered by any considerations of deity, other than to recognise how his own modest predations paled beside those of God, who is in irony matchless, and in wanton malice beyond measure.
Hannibal's God, in short, is Ivan's. It would be a simplification to say that Hannibal eats people because people ate his sister, but it's clear that he too has returned his entrance ticket: the world for him is both savage and absurd, and, as Ivan puts it, "Everything is lawful" 3. When Barney, his onetime jailer, is asked what Dr Lecter believes in, he answers "Chaos". One of Lecter's favourite sources of amusement is collecting church collapses. What better proof of God's love for his worshippers could there be?
In the light of his family history it would be easy for Lecter to see himself as a victim, and repudiate responsibility for his actions. Yet he maintains that there is such a thing as evil, and that he has consciously chosen it. He describes most psychology as "puerile", and behavioural science "as on a level with phrenology". When, on her first visit to his cell, Starling unwisely expresses her interest in "what happened to him", he retorts:
Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviourism, Officer Starling. You've got everybody in moral dignity pants - nothing is ever anybody's fault.
For Lecter it's simply inadequate to view certain human actions as "destructive" (Starling's word) or antisocial. He of course is only alive because society thinks he's insane, and therefore not responsible for his actions. But he maintains that he is responsible: madmen cannot have dignity, and dignity he must have. At the end of Red Dragon he tells Will Graham:
We live in a primitive time. neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.
Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and a whole raft of Shakespearean cynics (Richard III, Iago, Edmund), Lecter has deliberately chosen evil. These men choose evil because they have grasped the fact that there is no natural law, and because they enjoy it. Kurtz is an extremist who is respected by Marlow because of the absoluteness of his choice. A society which refuses to treat Lecter with a clarity and decisiveness matching his own behaviour is, in his view, a society which understands neither him nor itself. Infected by the values he despises, it dithers and temporises. As he, of course, would never do.
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3. Hannibal as gothic
The problems that many readers have with Hannibal stem from a category or genre confusion - albeit one that Thomas Harris has himself encouraged. Deceived by the naturalistic police procedural elements in Dragon and Lambs, they thought were reading realistic fictions. But quietly, in those earlier books, the submerged elements of gothic were budding, and in Hannibal they burst into flower. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that these books are highly literary fictions, and that Hannibal Lecter is made as much of signs as of appetites, some readers have voiced their disappointment in no uncertain terms. And yet, all along, I would contend, it's precisely what's gothic in Dr Lecter that fascinated them.
If we wish to flush out the submerged gothic in the earlier novels we need only glance at Francis Dolarhyde and Jame Gumb. Gumb, who harvests big girls' skins to wear, sews for a leather shop wickedly named "Mr Hide". Dolarhyde. Mr Hide. We are back with Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous creation. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles advanced the suggestive thesis that Jekyll/Hyde encapsulates the psychic duality of the Victorian age. Conrad's Kurtz, the apostle of progress who ended up as an orgiastic cannibal, projects the archetype into the twentieth century, where, for example, it surfaces in the Nazi commandant who can gas Jews all day then go home to his family and listen to Mozart.
But in Harris's fiction it's Hannibal Lecter who most perfectly reformulates Stevenson's split man: Lecter the sensitive polymath - gourmet, musician, mathematician, scholar: and (sitting so tantalizingly on the same sofa) Lecter the murderous cannibal. His very name is oxymoronic, with its yoking of warrior and reader. Lecter, a marriage of monster and Nietzschean superman, thus embodies an extreme version of the dualism within us all. With this crucial and arresting difference: in Lecter the two halves of the split man co-exist in perfect harmony. Lecter is not in the least dysfunctional.
But he is not merely Jekyll and Hyde. He's also Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. In one way or another he recapitulates the pantheon of gothic archetypes: and this, of course, renders him irresistible to an audience steeped in popular culture - particularly when realised on film, which, made of images rather than words, is gothic's quintessential modern medium.
Consider his eyes:
Dr Lecter's eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. (Red Dragon)
Dr Lecter's eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red. Sometimes the points of light seem to fly like sparks to his centre. (Silence of the Lambs)
Harris apparently took the colour of Lecter's eyes from a work on criminal physiognomy by Alphonse Bertillon; nevertheless, no aficionado of Hammer films would fail to associate them, consciously or unconsciously, with Dracula. What, after all, is the difference between drinking someone's blood and eating his liver? - it's only a matter of style. When Starling leaves Lecter after their first interview, she feels "suddenly empty, as though she had given blood". Lecter sips human pain (Will Graham's, Starling's, Senator Martin's), like he sips Chateau Yquem. In Hannibal, a connoisseur of scents and a voyeur of voyeurs, he feeds off the sexual arousal of the crowd at the Atrocious Torture Instruments Exhibition. Women find him mesmerically charismatic and refuse to discuss his sexuality. When in Hannibal we discover that he is the son of a Lithuanian count - Count Lecter, in fact - the game is surely up. What else are vampires but serial killers?
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4. Hannibal and the American dream
Richard Davenport-Hines 4 suggests that gothic, in literature and the other arts, is likely to flourish when two historical conditions pertain. First, it represents a reaction against the belief that through reason humankind can achieve social and moral progress. Second, it fills "the imaginative vacancy left by the death of Satan". Hannibal Lecter is nothing if not rational, but reason has led him to conclude that the world is absurd and progress a chimera. As for Satan, that is precisely who Hannibal is. After looking him in the eye in Florence, the gypsy Romula says: "That is the devil. Shaitan, Son of the Morning, I've seen him now."
In Hannibal, the gothic impulse produces a teasing inversion of values. Justice, represented by Paul Krendler, is corrupt, and the FBI hierarchy is happy to sacrifice Starling, the good cop, in the interests of public relations. In Mason Verger, a born-again Christian, we get a savage symbol of the unholy alliance between religious fundamentalism and ruthless market capitalism. Set over against Krendler and Verger, who are driven by considerations of power and money, Lecter ironically mutates into a classic anti-hero, the cleanser of Augeo-American stables.
Richard Davenport-Hines writes:
Gothic ought to have been reported to the House un-American Activities Committee. It is pessimistic, anti-progressive, reactionary. In its finest manifestations. it is anti-populist. In its funniest forms... it is keenly ironic. By contrast, American culture was puritanical, progressive, optimistic, earnest and ostensibly egalitarian.
One could not, in fact, find a figure more subversive of American values than Hannibal Lecter. As well as being anti-progressive, he is hedonistic, atheistic, aristocratic. He despises the junk food/coca-cola culture and cannot stomach its products. In the film of Silence of the Lambs, the scriptwriter dumbed down Harris's "big Amarone", the wine Lecter chose to complement the hapless census-taker's liver, to "a nice Chianti". Presumably the American audience couldn't be expected to recognise the original, a dry, bitter and potent northern Italian red with which only an oenophile might be familiar. Lecter's cultural values are high European - Bach's music, Dante's poetry, Renaissance painting. His regard for courtesy is reminiscent of an English gentleman's 5 - except that he's inclined to kill those who fail to extend it to him. The philistine "oaf" Paul Krendler, whose sautéed prefrontal lobe he and Starling savour slice by slice, is the perfect embodiment of what he hates. In personal terms he's thus a most unlikely hero for a popular American readership, since he has nothing in common with it.
In America, according to Davenport-Hines, gothic "became family-centred". At its dark heart lies the theme of incest. Now families are few and far between in Hannibal, but the book does offer us two intense brother-sister relationships. Of these, one is incestuous in fact, the other incestuous by extension. As a boy, Mason Verger forced his attentions on his sister Margot; as an adult, she only stays near him because he has promised to give her some of his semen so that she can impregnate her lover with a Verger child, his heir. When, at Lecter's suggestion, she stuffs Verger's pet eel down his throat after forcibly obtaining what she wants with an electric cattle prod, she is symbolically choking him with his own penis, the instrument of her own despoliation and neurosis.
The other intense sibling relationship is that of Hannibal and Mischa, so tragically cut short. The doctor's feelings for Clarice Starling are plainly imprinted with his feelings for his sister, and when at the end of the book Starling sees that her survival might be dependent upon reinforcing this association, she offers herself to him as a sister-surrogate. Their sexual relationship therefore constitutes incest by proxy, and is the positive mirror-image of the negative Verger pairing. (Is eating people for Lecter a form of sexual displacement? Anything is possible in gothic!)
America, then, takes an unholy hammering from Harris in Hannibal. Clarice Starling, the "rube" denied the American dream of virtuous self-advancement through hard work, must look to a multiple murderer for fulfilment, and must leave the U.S.A. with him to find it. Here, at the book's end, gothic merges with myth. Lecter and Starling are not only Dracula and his bride but Beast and Beauty, Prince and Cinderella and Pygmalion and statue-come-to-life. Archetypes tumble over one another. Given Hannibal's scepticism about American values, it may be that we should view Harris's contrivance of a fairytale ending as merely his crowning act of subversion - a flourish that puts the icing on the cake.
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Notes
1 Hannibal is published by William Heinemann at £16.99.
2 See the Amazon.com website on the Internet for a revealing bunch of reader reactions to the book.
3 Aleister Crowley's infamous "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is a variation on Ivan's phrase.
4 In Gothic (Fourth Estate 1998), a book which helped me formulate some of the ideas in this essay.
5 It was appropriate, then, that Lecter should in the film of Silence of the Lambs be played by the non-American (if not English!) Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins interpreted the role as a piece of classic gothic - in sharp contrast to Brian Cox, who in Manhunter (1986, the film of Red Dragon) played Lecter as a deceptively "ordinary" person.
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