"[C]amaraderie, and bonhomie and etiquette and elegance / and the thumbscrews and the guillotine"
Hannibal Discourse
I don’t want to go back to the old world
I don’t want to go back to the arcane
I don’t want to go back to the mysterious, elegant old world
Of camaraderie, and elegance
And love of torture
And love of stuff like thumb screws, and guillotines and stuff
—Jonathan Richman (2016)
There’s a line of Hannibal’s — “Nothing happened to me. I happened” — that is a point of contention among Hannibal people, because some believe him, which is ridiculous. He is explaining his fantasy secret self: immune to the Anxiety of Influence, always the parent and never the child, inventor of all perversions, and so on. Like a fairy tale monster in a way other than the way psychiatrists are fairy tale monsters generally.
but the posture! that is Jane [Eyre]'s posture too, even though she’s not much like him otherwise; the resolution, the absoluteness of self-creation
—the denial of trauma as shaper of [his] character, that’s Hannibal’s self-myth.
he believes that he wants to help his patients express themselves to the fullest extent possible. not health, but unfolding, evolving, fruition is his ideal.
[Previously. Previously. Anyone who reads me almost certainly reads Daniel Lavery’s newsletter too, and therefore has seen those before, but I laid out certain preliminary declarations regarding Hannibal and Jane Eyre in those conversations with him; so if you haven’t read them, there they lie.]
I keep promising expanded Hannibal considerations and not delivering, and part of it is I don’t want to drive away those of you who are moral and good and who don’t care for low subjects or for excavations of television shows you haven’t seen. You must know, before you run, that I haven’t seen it either, or as good as.
I have SEEN it, of course I have seen it, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen everything. but first of all, it was five years ago; and second of all, what of it I watched a second time and more recently was mid-recovery from shoulder surgery when I was full of inadequate opiates and gloom, not forming any short-term memories if I could help it; and third of all, Hannibal is a house of memory and I prefer to write about it as I remember it. The further the Hannibal of my slowly revolving recollection departs from the thing itself, the more delightful. I look up nothing but quotations. Accuracy is a mind-prison!
and so you who have not seen it are very likely closer to me in spirit than you who have; you can take the show as some kind of unfixed polyvalent metaphor as much as its prime subject is one, and I do, and and whether you know my references or not makes no difference, I will teach them to you if you let me. Because look: Cannibalism is all themes in one, as the Cannibal is all archetypes in one plus a new one built up on the top of the pile.
Hannibal is the Vampire, who seduces and insinuates, who consumes you literally and physically; he is the infecting Zombie with an inflexible drive to reduce all mankind to the condition of flesh, for whom the consciousness of others is worth little, but the brain that holds that consciousness is a delicacy; and over it all he is the Psychiatrist, the Expert, the Blank Slate, the five-foot shelf of books, the beribboned Folio Society deluxe edition of the sickly old Classic, the orthodox Western Man, the rotting fruit in the Golden Age still life. She who would see him for what he is must have the eye to see killing Jove in the vicious lovely swan, to understand the little jokes of a man who takes himself for a god, and who, like a god, requires that you laugh at him when he wants you to and at no other time.
Hannibal is all Ego: the I and the Eye, not the Over-I and not the It. To extinguish your bestial drives and to put on all your company clothes consciously every time, even when no-one is there, is to never know a moment’s peace; it is as unnatural and anti-natural as to resolve never to sleep again. If you subscribe to this simple tripartite mental model, false though it be, you will recognize that the superego and the id are fellow shift-workers of the Ego and that no one laborer can work around the clock, day after day with no relief, without something going terribly wrong. Mistakes will be made.
You and I and Will Graham can go into our fugue states or let our rage overwhelm us or be carried away by our passions, but Hannibal will never wake up surrounded by blood, full of bad feeling and hangover, thinking What did I do?* because Hannibal does exactly what he means to do. His consciousness has got nowhere to go; he is an eye without an eyelid that mercifully closes now and then. Hannibal is Humpty Dumpty commanding the alphabet, paying his words extra when they work hard for him. Hannibal’s self-creation myth is the myth of no reasons and no excuses. No excused absences, if you will: no time lost for him, no missing hours; he holds the clock and winds the clock. He, a Drosselmeier only just a little bit worse than the other one, is a clockmaker* with a sideline in fashioning diverting toys for diverting boys.
Will Graham, god love him, is not a special boy, particularly; and this entirely aside from his being a middle-aged man. if Hannibal loved him for his qualities he would soon have been discarded; qualities, you can find anywhere. Rather, Hannibal loves him for the effect Will has on him, Hannibal. How can you not love anyone who has an effect on you! What a novelty, what a great rupture in his life is the impulse to do a thing without knowing why he must do it; to be the affected and the afflicted party at last.
*[This is a good place to mention that Hannibal exists out of time and uneasily beside it; as a show it is about time, and as a sequence of books it is more tightly time-bound in a way that will catch at the innards of fewer and fewer people who read them, as those people become less and less able to remember: young readers are deep fishes whose mouths are grown closed and sealed over to the hooks, though the lures stay as bright and glittering as they ever were. When a hook can’t catch at you anymore, you have to imagine being caught, and that’s harder, and the frustration of wanting to snap at a lure but having no jaws for that reflex to open must be more frustrating still.
Am I one of those mouthless fishes? Not quite. I sort of remember the 1980s, partly for real, partly in a Lamarckian kind of way; my mother, who had to be fully conscious and responsible all through them, is the mouse who had her tail cut off and I am the mouse born with a tail who will never believe it is really there. Is it really right for me to have one? We are all ashamed of having what our parents haven’t got, unless we have the kind of parents who demand that we have more than they had, in which case we are ashamed that we don’t. That last part is a guess.]
As to Cannibalism: I am not an anthropologist or a realist; I am a book-reader and a moralist and a moralizer. I am not, I am absolutely not interested in any of the gruesome facts of life; symbolic violence is the only kind I care to discuss. I am not much more of a philosopher than I am an anthropologist. I think I could have been one, I think if I had been trained in the right way to go as a girl, when I grew older I would not have departed from it. but I did not acquire the habits of mind that make philosophers to hateful to the main bulk of the human race; I have had to learn to be hateful in my own way, and it took me longer.
(Then again why should it take the kind of training I am thinking of, to be a good philosopher? I made myself a book-reader with book-reading, not with English classes; and because I like to think my way is the right way, just like Hannibal does, I have a prejudice against English majors that I have to continually remember is wrong of me. So the conclusion is probably that in my nature I have not got much love of wisdom, or else that love would have found me out, training or no training.)
All this is in the way of preliminaries, and there will be more of them. So subtly will I transition from endless preliminaries into actual theses and discussions that no body will notice the changeover, not even me. But for now I have to tie up some old loose ends, because I have some concern that when I draw parallels between Hannibal and everything on God’s wretched earth I’ve ever read, some doubters might not take me seriously. I mean: might not think I take my own nonsense seriously. but I do. I do, I do, I do.
So, to close out the preliminaries, here are some things I have compared to Hannibal in the fairly recent past, and the reasons why I was right to do it:
I. Cynthia Voigt’s HOMECOMING.
What it is:
A faded ‘70s Polaroid, a bleached pair of faded jeans, a Young Adult Novel. The Young Adult Novel. Nothing less like Hannibal can be imagined, although it was published in 1981, the same year as Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. How about that!
Homecoming is very good and you should read it, especially if you are a no-longer-young Adult, although in that case you likely already have. The parking-lot abandonment sequence is so powerful I remember it as though it happened to me, in the way I remember one or two dreams that I know for a fact were someone else’s.
What I said about it:
“the other Homecoming scene I DID NOT REMEMBER was the cannibal conversation Dicey has with her grandmother at first meeting. almost word-for-word the same one Eddie Izzard has with Mads Mikkelson in the Hannibal S3 flashback. Cynthia Voigt, I hope Bryan Fuller paid you royalties.”
the proof:
Homecoming, 1981:
“You know what I sometimes think?” Her grandmother looked straight at her, her mouth chewing. “I sometimes think people might be good to eat. Cows and chickens eat corn and grass and turn it into good meat. People eat cows and chickens. In people, it might turn into something even better. Do you ever think that?”
Hannibal, 2015:
HANNIBAL: They prefer eating in company. I’ve kept cochlear gardens since I was a young man, fattening snails on herbs and vine leaves. Like all of us, what they eat greatly influences and enhances their flavor.
DR. GIDEON: When I’m not eating myself, you wish me to be eating oysters. Drinking sweet wines, snacking on acorns. All to make me tastier?
HANNIBAL: Oh yes. And you are making them tastier.
DR. GIDEON: And I you. Imagine what you must taste like. Won’t be long before someone takes a bite out of you.
and,
Homecoming, 1981:
“Dicey put her spoon down. She was through eating.
Her grandmother’s mouth twisted. ‘What do you think about death? Don’t be smart with me, girl.’
‘I saw a tombstone. Home is the hunter, home from the hill and the sailor home from the sea: that was what it said. As if’—Dicey tried to explain her thoughts—’that was the quiet place at the end of things.’”
Hannibal, 2015:
HANNIBAL: In those moments, when you can't overcome your surroundings, you can make it all go away.
WILL GRAHAM: Put my head back, close my eyes, wade into the quiet of the stream.
II. C.S. Lewis, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA
What it is:
You know what it is.
What I said:
well, I have said a lot of things so we will have to go slowly and methodically here.
—[Speaking of mice, tails and so on: there’s a scene I dislike very much in Prince Caspian, when Reepicheep is brought in on a bier, all bloody and dying of his disgusting wounds, and Lucy brings out her unguentarium and fixes him right up all except his tail, which is cut off and which even her magic cordial can’t regrow. not enough stem cells in it, needs more collagen peptides, something. This Mouse is so annoying that the Lion is going to just let him live out the rest of his natural life without a tail, to teach him a lesson about consequences. It’s not stated whether he really would have done this or whether he was fucking with the tailless mouse for pleasure, planning all along to relent. The latter is my educated guess, because a show-trial of justice followed by an orgy of mercy is Aslan’s way; mock executions are his stock in trade, his schtick, as elaborate dinner parties are Hannibal’s. They are an activity recognized as torture by the Geneva Conventions, but Narnia is not a signatory to the Geneva agreements. Archenland, very possibly. but we are not in Archenland now.
So here we are, this mouse who for a miracle didn’t lose any other limbs beside his tail, but obviously he needs his TAIL, he is a mouse for crying out loud, you need a tail for balance and for waving around. but Aslan says No, fuck you, I could fix it but I won’t, how do you like them apples.
but THEN
(Reepicheep doesn’t like these apples)
THEN what’s-his-face, second mouse in command, he says Sire, Sire he says, we have all drawn our swords to cut off our own tails because it would shame us to have something our boss mouse hasn’t got. We would rather mutilate ourselves than feel the biting, burning shame of superiority while being, by law of divine kingship and by common consent, inferiors.
Very notable here is that they, having tails, do not act to protect Reepicheep’s tailless shame — he has got none; he is gallant; I hate him, he’s so irritating—, but their own. They are ashamed that the Chain of Being has been jangled around and the link that should be above them now hangs below.
And this is very good, this is very well-done. Very real. The shame of inferiority is nothing, but nothing, to the shame of superiority. I can’t say as I’ve ever had a tail or lost one except in utero, and that I don’t remember; the tail metaphor up top was just a metaphor and I can’t hold to the same one through a whole several paragraphs. Leave it up there and if we find we need it, we will go back for it later. For now I am not a mouse and I have forgotten what I brought Lamarckism in for, but in spite of that I understand the shame of being out of your proper place, though you be innocent of any wrongdoing and know it.
You have a place in the world in your earliest days, and you are either a person who likes and rolls around in it with great satisfaction at having a Place, or a person who hates it and hates being in it and hates the world and scrabbles and scrabbles to climb up the soft and giving dirt walls of her pit, out of her place, no matter how nice or not-nice it may be. (You may say: surely one is less inclined to revolt from a position of comfort and privilege? and in big ways that’s so, but in little ways character will tell through principle, and the principle is the fact of the Place alone.) The principle is
Other people are right to tell me who I am and where to stand, for they know, and what they say is right is right. and what is Right if not what we are told? I haven’t been told the answer to that question yet
versus
I’ll kill them, I’ll tear the hand that hangs from the shoulder that holds the neck where sits the head where lives the brain that thinks it can tell me what I am and what that means.
Under that second view of things, the particular qualities of the position you are in are of no moment. you can be in a velvet robe in a palatial palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal and still be spitting blood about it if someone else has told you that you are the sort of person who belongs in that milieu. How dare they. How dare they tell you what you are like and what your right relation to others might be, and you a child (how do you know you are a child? they Told you) too young to fight them! YOU tell you where you belong.
—Listen! do you hear the echo? do you hear a train coming? that is right, that is the insinuating murmur of Hannibal Lecter, with his Nothing happened to me: I happened. The dream of dreams; just as I said during my sleepless fever-dream the other month, in the Jane Eyre dialogues: Hannibal Lecter is a very particular type of bad dad. The important thing about him here is that, unlike all the rest of us, he never chases after parent figures. He is not a child in the way that we others are all withered children underneath the accretion of adult Growths that cover us over. He will play Mother and Father, but he will not bow down to them, and he will not play that child’s role he was first typecast in and never forgave.
This personality dichotomy I have invented, you can call it the Older Brother/Younger Sister split if you want to, or if you have different baggage from the kind I have you can call it something else. That Hannibal himself was an older brother is the irony of ironies; he has that powerful Little Sister spirit as strongly as anyone, though as he came through the door of power he exchanged resentment for contempt.
But the secret shame of the world is that everybody—everybody except Hannibal, seemingly—has a trace of the submissive and anxious Older Brother about them, looking to be told where to stand and be praised for getting it right, even if they suppress it as soon as consciousness is a flickering flame inside them, like what I did. The best righteous rebels feel a little sick when they see they are better than someone who is supposed to be better than they are. The classic cliche about this is the moment you realize you could probably beat your own mother in a fistfight, but that one doesn’t hold much power for me because that moment didn’t come until my mother was into her seventies (I had the feeling then, but didn’t test her). Shortly after that she died and has not responded to any fistfight challenges ever since, and it’s been five years so I’ll be surprised if I do hear back at this point.
For me the source of the instinctive reversion to Older-Brother type has always been knowing something I wasn’t supposed to know yet; spoiling the surprise of the one who would have taken such pleasure in telling me: these are the moments when I would gladly have cut off my own tail, if I’d had a sword on me. The shame of knowing what someone of your stature is not to know, or surpassing who should have been unsurpassable, is a stain that never washes away, because it is an imperfection of the mind and not the body. And this is but one of many human weaknesses Hannibal Lecter has crumpled up and discarded, burned away by the white flame of his absolute self-centered superiority complex. Hannibal can be disappointed by the ease of his victories, but he can never be shamed by them. And that is but one of many reasons his myth appeals to people who can’t be taken in by any other exaltation of murderous narcissism; why it appeals to people like myself, who not only should know better but do know better.
—I’m sorry, that was a digression. let me start again and do it right this time.
What I said:
“An epiphany about the prettiest art murders in Hannibal: they draw all their power from our collective memory of Uncle Andrew planted like a tree by the puzzled animals of Narnia who only want to see him blossom & bear fruit and will do what it takes to make that happen.
You know when Hannibal installs a beehive in someone's gullyworks or brews beer from his bones or whatever it is? you know that's something a talking Badger would do. Then he'd go boast to a talking Squirrel about how he'd helped another Man reach his full potential. It's true.
Go on, necromance up C.S. Lewis and ask him for his thoughts on Hannibal's many mind-of-god speeches and how well they accord with his own ideas about how only the guilty, the corrupt, and the feminine fear bloodshed and joyous warfare (see: Susan, the Alana Bloom of Narnia).”
the proof:
well it proves itself, doesn’t it! the main part of the argument’s already been made. Regarding Susan, the Alana Bloom of Narnia, I will have to refer you to Me (2020) one more time:
There was then Susan, no more backbone than a bowl of milk, sentimental as every card in the Hallmark aisle…Is there NO way to straighten her spine, Lord? Lord, may she be spared if I induce her to kill just one small thing and feel no pity? Listen, Susan, ‘children are innocent and love justice; adults are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’ That’s paraphrased, which is a sin. Where is your innocence gone? Your brother’s epithet is Just, because mercy washes away with guilt. Every accommodation, every practicality, every tenderness, every shudder, every time you put your hands in water instead of blood you make it worse for yourself. Will you not even observe while I do the cruelty? Observing is participation. Susan, you are in danger.
That’s Alana all over, isn’t it? I am a little bit mean there, maybe, but that’s only in the beginning. Alana changes. Things happen to her, and she adjusts her thinking. For this reason Hannibal can never quite respect her, as he does not understand her.
Am I stopping in the middle of a list that only has two things in it? yes! for now! but only because I judge there is a limit to how much of this anyone can stand at a time. There will be more, I swear it on a stack of bibles. When? soon, soon.
*still less, Did I do that?