GARY. C. MOORE:

Being rather dull of mind at the moment, trying to get away from the increasing stress at work, I am revising my Thomas Harris notes in atticipation of the supposed publication of his new novel BEHIND THE MASK which has been cancelled several times now though, it seems, they have already started filming the movie [how?]. I am trying to reform it by an Eliminativist point of view, trying to escape implications of free will - except as a verbal object or reflex phrase to be observed and studied as a specimun. I would like ya'll's help in this matter. This is the prelude to the matter. Ciao, Gary

DOCTOR HANNIBAL LECTER’S SURGICAL NOTES.

This heavily relies upon the websites Mary Jo Watts set up, and then deleted or hid, on Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal formally at http://complit.rutgers.edu/mwatts/sol/silence.html as well as Pentaone’s The Hannibal Library available at http://www.pentaone.com/hannibal/redann1.shtml
2-13-2004: A new site with very good annotations, especially on HANNIBAL, http://hannibal.hannotations.com/ Go to the bottom of the page. hannotations@yahoo.com hannotations@yahoo.com.

I: RED DRAGON, printed Putnam hardback 1981, [Dell paperback June 1990]

See picture of Blake’s real RED DRAGON at THE HANNIBAL LIBRARY

Revelations 12:3-4 -- And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. (see page 119 Dell “Across the first page, in large letters he had illuminated himself, were the words from Revelation: ‘And There Came a Great Red Dragon Also . . .’”)

Epigrams to Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind. – Alphonse Bertillon

For a good description of “Bertonage” and “anthropometry” please go to THE HANNIBAL LIBRARY @ http://www.pentaone.com/hannibal/redann1.shtml . Pentaone gives one much more information than one usually needs as, for instance, here where Bertillon’s system has little that I, at least, can see relevant to the quote from him that seems to point altogether toward something philosophical as it stands by itself, rather than what Bertillon may have had it mean in whatever specific context it originally had. There are a number of things Pentaone writes extensively about that has no interest to my pursuit of understanding the philosophy behind the ethical thinking of Doctor Lecter that intrigues me so much. But, on the other hand, it is there to pursue further if I find a relationship of more importance than I originally thought. And this has already happened a number of times. Also, Pentaone points out correspondences that seem to have no importance initially but may very well develop into something more important the further I get into the other novels. I will note these because Thomas Harris has a confusing way of relating things that seem superficially to have no relation at all, yet he went to the trouble to relate them seemingly arbitrarily. This happens throughout the trilogy.]

William Blake . . . . For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.
--------------William Blake, Songs of Innocence [Complete text: Songs 18 The Divine Image To Mercy Pity Peace and Love, All pray in their distress: And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is God our Father dear; And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Is man, His child and care. For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face: And Love, the human form divine, And Peace the human dress. Then every man of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine Love Mercy Pity Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk, or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too. ]

Cruelty has a Human Heart, And Jealousy has a Human Face, Terror the Human Form Divine, And Secrecy the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is Forged Iron, The Human Form a fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal’d, The Human Heart its hungry Gorge.
--------Songs of Experience (A Divine Image)*

*[Thomas Harris’ note] After Blake’s death, the poem was found with prints from the plates of Songs of Experience. It appears only in posthumous editions.

Textual Note by David V. Erdman from THE COMPLETE POETRY & PROSE OF WILLIAM BLAKE, Anchor Books, revised edition, 1988, page 800: This poem, illustrated by a youthful blacksmith hammering a human-faced sun on his anvil, was etched by Blake but found in only one copy printed by him . . . the poem is an “Experience” reversal of the third stanza of “The Divine Image” in Songs of Innocence . . . replaced by “The Human Abstract”, a subtler contrary . . . None of the published Songs of Experience is quite so simply and symmetrically antithetical to its counterpart in Songs of Innocence.

GARY C. MOORE: RED DRAGON does not seem to have been designed as the beginning of a projected trilogy developing the character of Doctor Hannibal Lecter. There are a number of small contradictions between it and the other two books in the series. But, most of all, the character of Doctor Lecter, when Thomas Harris started writing the book, resembles a typical villain, it seems, and, as the book proceeded, develops more and more while leaving inconsistencies with the future volumes behind. Lecter’s sense of whimsy and revenge is more petty toward Will Graham than seems necessary as compared with the more interesting standards of politeness and rudeness of SILENCE and HANNIBAL. Petaone, in THE HANNIBAL LIBRARY though, does a good job of relating Will Graham’s reaction of “rudeness” - which seems relatively slight compared to the other characters Lecter exacts his revenge from - to his fear.

The development of Doctor Hannibal Lecter was possibly at first not to be as extensive as Francis Dolarhyde’s, and only later started taking on a life of his own to the point of overshadowing Dolarhyde. The interpreter becomes more important and dangerous than the interpreted. Dolarhyde is transforming into a deity of sorts, and Lecter, at first, is the master of “monsters” from a distance that diminishes after Lecter betrays him and as he becomes more and more entangled with Will Graham.

[7/13/06::: In the ‘Foreword to a Fatal Interview’ published in the paperback version of RED DRAGON issued contemporaneously with the release of the DVD of the movie version of RED DRAGON, Thomas Harris writes that he started in his reconstructive imagination following Will Graham in his investigation of the victims’ home. I say ‘reconstructive’ because Harris says “You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.” Pg. x Also, there is “I am invisible to my characters when I’m in a room with them and they are deciding their fates with little or no help from me.” One wonders if this is how ‘free will’ is actualized, that is, as a picture or a plot line put together from parts present at hand which would be a predetermined situation like putting a jig-saw puzzle together, that is, everything is already set and one simply watches it unfold so that it seems like a newly created story but, in reality, nothing at all is ‘new’ or chosen in any way.

When Will visits the Baltimore State hospital, Harris follows him in this fashion, observing Will Graham as he goes about his very uncomfortable interview with Doctor Lector. I do not even know if Harris has ever visited a mental hospital, though it certainly seems realistic from my own experience, but Harris says he ‘created’ the sounds of Bedlam from the howls of the local wild dog pack he had more or less befriended in Mississippi that was baying at the full moon as he was writing this part of the novel, “the incidental clashes and howls of an asylum rang on in my head, and on the front porch of my cabin in Rich [Mississippi] thirteen dogs were singing, seated with their eyes closed, faces upturned to the full moon. Most of them crooned their single vowel between O and U, a few just hummed along.” Pg. xii

He says in the foreword that he did not know who was committing the crimes but he knew Will Graham knew whom to ask. After encountering the repulsive Doctor Chilton, “I was enjoying my usual immunity to Graham and the staff, but I was not comfortable in the presence of Dr. Lecter, not sure at all the doctor could not see me. Like Graham, I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming in your thoughts when they X-ray your head. Graham’s interview . . . went quickly . . . me following it, my frantic notes spilling into the margin, and over whatever surface was uppermost on my table. I was worn out when it was over . . .” pg. xi-xii

When writing HANNIBAL, Harris says “Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling decide events according to their natures. There is a certain amount of courtesy involved. As a sultan once said: I do not KEEP falcons – they live with me.” Pg. xiii So maybe ‘free will’ is not a matter at all of our power of choice but simply ‘lives with us’?]

I have noticed that the language changes in the later third of the book. It starts out as a thriller horror story, but even right at the beginning is already rises above the tone and taste of BLACK SUNDAY, which I found unreadable. The characters are far more appreciable and identifiable with, even the ‘monsters’. The language gets more poetic, sharpens its intellectual imagery, and develops greater philosophical, psychological and ethical depth, leaving behind the theme of identity between Will Graham and Dr. Lecter for developing the possibility of the psychotic Dolarhyde deliberately forcing a conscious free will – the very idea of ‘forcing’ free will, of course, gives it over to determining forces - it opposed to his psychosis, which speaks to him in the dominating voice of his grandmother. Dolarhyde realizes the house, with all that is in and associated with it, is the core of the DRAGON persona. He uses his trip to St. Louis to confront the persona with defiance. When he seriously considers suicide as a way to rescue Rachel, he realizes, in the face of at-hand personal and imminent death, that the DRAGON persona no longer speaks from his own desires, is no longer an acceptable last resort against an unacceptable and even more irrational “world” he no longer is merely a response to, that now goes against his deepest desires and his real self interest of which only, at this moment, does he begin to have a clear realization of what they are. Because this is a rational decision within an irrational context imposed by family values one can never completely escape from, I shall be referring to the psychiatric theories of R. D. Laing of whom Sartre, the arch-Cartesian rationalist said, “like you, I think—I regard mental illness as the ‘way out’ that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to be able to live through an intolerable situation,” from REASON AND VIOLENCE: a decade of Sartre’s philosophy 1950-1960 by R. D. Laing and D. G. cooper, Pantheon Books, 1971, page 6. However, the surfacing of Dolarhyde’s conflicts ly shows forces that had always been there because, in the beginning as a child, he was an ordinary human being with ordinary desires before others began to forcibly alter him into something completely different.

A writer I am getting into because of someone’s comparison of Thomas Harris to her is Flannery O’Connor. They are both ‘southern’ writers and both write about grotesques or ‘monsters’. I believe I will find many other things to connect the two writers with, but their approach to religion, even Catholicism, is one of them. Some have found an atheist tendency in Harris. I do not think it is that simple. Both writers concentrate their imagination on seeing, in a way that isfar more literal than metaphorical, what is concrete reality. O’Connor says in her essay, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”, “In the greatest fiction, the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it.” Thomas Harris in “Foreword to a Fatal Interview”, the new preface to RED DRAGON (2000) says, “To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after . . . I could see the investigator Will Graham in the home of the victim family . . . I went the home, the crime scene, in the dark with Will and could see no more and no less than he could see . . . There was no question that something had happened. You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.”

In “The Church and the Fiction Writer”, she writes, “The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that his fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them . . . The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should enlarge not narrow his field of vision . . . What matters for him here is that his faith not become detached from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is . . . The average Catholic reader . . . by separating nature and grace as much as possible . . . has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has become able to analyze nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the later, but the similarity between the two escapes him . . . When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality . . . To look at the worst will be for him no more than act of trust in God; but what is one thing for the writer may be another for the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone . . . A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it.” I think here we have been introduced to uses of the words “supernatural”, “God”, “sin”, and “salvation” wholly new and unfamiliar to us and are savagely unsentimental.

She would have read Thomas Harris’ novels with great appreciation, and would no doubt have been willing to have the ending of “The Fiction Writer” be used as a motto or epigram:

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.



1: Page 13 [Dell paper 2]: He smashes the mirrors and uses the pieces. Mason Verger used the pieces of the mirror smashed by Hannibal (Pentaone).

Page 15 [4]: "Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham’s voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people. Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person's speech patterns. At first Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that it was a gimmick to get the back-and-forth rhythm going. Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn’t."

This is a very common modification of speech known as convergence. The term refers to the processes whereby two or more individuals alter or shift their speech to resemble that of those they are interacting with (Pentaone). Usually this is based on the desire of admiration or ingratiation. In Will Graham’s case, however, it is a losing of his own personality to a dominating other.

Page 17 [ ]: "I'm a forensic specialist..."

Will Graham is often incorrectly referred to as an FBI Special Agent. He of course is not a FBI Agent but a forensic specialist. We also learn that Graham was an instructor at the FBI Academy and was asked by Jack Crawford on two previous occasions to go out in the field to help solve cases. Those cases of course involved Garrett Hobbs and Dr. Hannibal Lecter. For those two previous cases and his the current case his official title is "Special Investigator" (Pentaone).

Chapter 2:

Page 22 [13]: "He [Graham] could see and hear better afraid; he could not speak as concisely, and fear sometimes made him rude."

Chapter 3:

Page 41[42]: "Graham appreciated the fact that Dr. Bloom had never displayed professional interest in him. That was not always the case with psychiatrists."

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Page 48[51]: December 23rd Clarice Starling's birthday is December 23rd (Pentaone).

Chapter 6:

Page 61[68]: "One is on a respirator at a hospital in Baltimore. The other is in a private mental hospital in Denver." We learn in HANNIBAL that the one on the respirator is Mason Verger. Lecter's other surviving victims (the one in Denver and the nurse) seemingly disappear without a trace (Pentaone).

Dell 68-71 [Buddy Springfield, Birmingham, Alabama, chief of detectives talking to Will Graham] Springfield: “You didn’t like it the other day when I asked you about Lecter, but I need to talk to you about it . . . What made him do it, how was he crazy?” . . . “He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.” “What did the psychologists call it—what was wrong with him?” “They say he’s a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign—sadism to animals as a child . . . But he doesn’t have any of the other marks,” Graham said. “He wasn’t a drifter, he had no history of trouble with the law. He wasn’t shallow and exploitative in small things, like most sociopaths are. He’s not insensitive. They don’t know what to call him. His electroencephalograms show some odd patterns, but they haven’t been able to tell much from them.” “What would you call him?” Springfield asked. Graham hesitated. “Just to yourself, what do you call him?” “He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.” “A couple of friends of mine in the chiefs’ association are from Baltimore. I asked them how you spotted Lecter. They said they didn’t know. How did you do it? What was the first indication, the first thing you felt?” “It was a coincidence,” Graham said. “The sixth victim was killed in his workshop. He had woodworking equipment and he kept his hunting stuff out there. He was laced to a pegboard where the tools hung, and he was really torn up, cut and stabbed, and he had arrows in him. The wounds reminded me of something. I couldn’t think of what it was . . . This sixth one had two old scars on his thigh. The pathologist checked with the local hospital and found he had fallen out of a tree blind five years before while he was bow hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg . . . Lecter had treated him first—he was on duty in the emergency room . . . I thought Lecter might remember if anything seemed fishy about the arrow wound, so I went to his office to see him. We were grabbing at anything then. He was practicing psychiatry by that time He had a nice office. Antiques. He said he didn’t remember much about the arrow wound . . . and that was it. “Something bothered me, though. I thought it was something Lecter said, or something in the office . . . So I went back to see him . . . We were talking and he was making a polite effort to help me and I looked up at some very old medical books on the shelf above his head. And I knew it was him. “When I looked at him again, maybe my face changed, I don’t know. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I still couldn’t think of the reason though. I didn’t trust it. I had to figure it out. So I mumbled something and got out of there, into the hall . . . I was talking to the police switchboard when he came out of a service door behind me in his socks . . . I felt his breath was all, and then . . . there was the rest of it.” “How did you know though?” “I think maybe it was a week later . . . It was Wound Man – an illustration they used in a lot of the early medical books like the ones Lecter had. It shows different kinds of battle injuries, all in one figure. I had seen it in a survey course . . . This sixth victim’s position and his injuries were a close match to Wound Man.” “Wound Man, you say? That’s all you had?” “Well, yeah. It was a coincidence that I had seen it. A piece of luck.”

See “Wound Man” at THE HANNIBAL LECTER LIBRARY

GARY. C. MOORE:
There are several important themes here found throughout Harris’ books. Dr. Hannibal Lecter does not fit the profile of a psychopath, that is, a psychiatric terminological pigeon hole. He does not like bow hunters because they cannot usually make clean, instantaneous kills. [Something related happens in HANNIBAL after he sees a bow hunter, Donnie barber, watching a film during a gun show where he is shopping for cooking utensils. He overhears two game wardens wishing they could get him “out of the woods for good”. Barber plays and replays a video of the bow shooting of a mule deer that does not die right away. (pp. 293-5) After they find his body, another game warden says, “He don’t bother to track nothing after he shoots it,” (page 308). Lecter’s whimsy engages him to perform a Norse ritual, the “Bloody Eagle”, on Barber’s body (Norse ritual page 305). “It’s a Norse sacrificial custom,” Starling says. To who is the sacrifice offered? There is only Barber and the mule deer present. Though inconclusive, this would tend to argue very much implicitly against Will Graham’s unconfirmed statement, “He had the first and worst sign—sadism to animals as a child”.

The theme of “monster” develops in contrast to calling Lecter a “sociopath” that will develop throughout the trilogy. At the end of page 6 [hardback 7 paperback] in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Crawford calls Lecter "a monster"- “I know he’s a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure”, which gives Lecter unknown identity. The definition from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is : 1. an imaginary creature, usu. large and frightening, compounded of incongruous elements. 2. an inhumanly cruel or wicked person. 3. a misshapen animal or plant.
4. a large hideous animal or thing (e. g. a building). 5. ("attrib.") huge; extremely large of its kind. (Mary Jo Watts) At this time, Will Graham’s characterization of a “monster’ fits Dolarhyde more closely than Lecter. Graham’s remark, “Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell,” is contradicted by “Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.” “Because he enjoyed them” in and of itself, in the scheme of natural man’s rights where everyone acts upon his natural selfish desires results in “a war of all against all” which makes everyone mutually insecure and come to mutual agreements bound by the external authority of law. But I raise the question what it is exactly Lecter *enjoys* in his undoubtedly and significantly *savage* acts? In RED DRAGON they are ambiguously sadistic although at the same time often practical, but in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and HANNIBAL the tone changes more to revenge, distaste, judgmental, even a kind of justice.

Pentaone remarks, “Cruelty to animals seems beneath Hannibal for some reason.” And I agree with him. Graham, to a degree, contradicts this when he says of Lecter, “He wasn’t shallow and exploitative in small things, like most sociopaths are. He’s not insensitive.” This may be merely a remnant of the initial characterization of Lecter by Harris. Pentaone also says, “It seems a little odd that Lecter was on duty in an emergency room. The psychiatric ward of a hospital would seem to be more appropriate. Although we know Dr. Lecter is skilled at removing the sweetbreads of his victims (and even their craniums), any additional training Dr. Lecter may have had is never mentioned.” But a medical student become *resident* does everything including both emergency room and surgery even if they are specializing in psychiatry.

GARY. C. MOORE:

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

145 [183]: Sergeant Stanley Riddle – Samson’s riddle? A sort of anagram?

[191]: “she tracing eights on the back of his neck with a finger.’ Chicken snake at end of book? Mason Verger’s eel? Sign of infinity? Or just tracing eights?

Chapter 17:

[192] “ Crawford: ‘The cupboard is bare, Doctor.” Dr. Bloom studied Crawford’s simian face and wondered what was coming. Behind Crawford’s grousing and his Alka-Seltzers the doctor saw an intelligence as cold as an X-ray table . . . Bloom: ‘You’ve met Molly?’ Crawford: ‘. . . She’d be glad to see me in hell with my back broken, of course. I’m having to duck her right now.’ Bloom: ‘She thinks you use Will?’ Crawford looked at Dr. Bloom sharply . . . ‘Graham likes you. He doesn’t think you run any mind games on him,’ Crawford said. Bloom’s remark about using Graham stuck in his craw. ‘I don’t. I wouldn’t try,’ Dr. Bloom said. ‘I’m as honest with him as I would be with a patient.’ Crawford: ‘Exactly.’ Bloom: ‘No, I want to be his friend, and I am. Jack, I owe it to my field of study to observe. Remember, though, when you asked me to give you a study on him, I refused.’ Crawford: ‘That was Petersen, upstairs, wanted the study.’ Bloom: ‘You were the one that asked for it. No matter, if I ever did anything on Graham, if there were ever anything that might be of therapeutic benefit to others, I’d abstract it in a form that would be totally unrecognizable. If I ever do anything in a scholarly way, it’ll only be published posthumously.” Crawford: ‘After you or after Graham.’ Dr. Bloom didn’t answer. Crawford: ‘One thing I’ve noticed-I’m curious about this: you’re never alone in a room with Graham, are you? You’re smooth about it, but you’re never one-on-one with him. Why’s that? Do you think he’s physic, is that it?’ Bloom: ‘No. He’s an eideteker—he has a remarkable visual memory—but I don’t think he’s psychic. He wouldn’t let Duke test him—that doesn’t mean anything, though. He hates to be prodded and poked. So do I.’ Crawford: ‘But—‘ Bloom: ‘Will wants to think of this as purely an intellectual exercise, and in the narrow definition of forensics, that’s what it is. He’s good at that, but there are other people just as good, I imagine.’ ‘Not many,’ Crawford said. Bloom: ‘What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,’ Dr. Bloom said. ‘He can assume your point of view, or mine—and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.’ Crawford: ‘Why aren’t you ever alone with him?’ Bloom; ‘Because I have some professional curiosity about him and he’d pick up on that in a hurry. He’s fast.’ Crawford; ‘If he caught you peeking, he’d snatch down the shades.’ Bloom: ‘An unpleasant analogy, but accurate, yes. You’ve had sufficient revenge now, Jack. We can get to the point. I don’t feel very well.’ Crawford: ‘A psychosomatic manifestation, probably,’ Crawford said. Bloom: ‘Actually it’s my gallbladder. What do you want? . . . You’ve decided to stick Graham’s neck out, haven’t you? . . . I don’t want you to misinterpret this, and normally I wouldn’t say it, but you ought to know; what do you think one of Graham’s strongest drives is?’ Crawford shook his head. Bloom: ‘It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear . . . Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.’

GARY C MOORE: I have bypassed for the moment the planning to drive Dolarhyde to suicide or a desperate act that will betray him which is behind all this. Dr. Bloom says here he is not suicidal because he is so careful. He does not want to be caught. He wants to preserve his life. But see pages 362-367. There he wants to preserve Reba McClane’s life too at any cost including his own life. That is not normally to be expected in a serial killer killing for the motive simply of religious ecstasy as described on pages 120-121 and as Flannery O'Connor's villains would [Though Flannery O'Connor is a Christian, what exactly that is to her is complex to say the least. However, as a Catholic Christian well versed in Scholastic and other kinds of philosophy, her observations of Protestant emotional fanaticism is as scathing as an athiest's]. It also provides the grounds for calling this a truly great novel since the struggle to preserve this independent point of view from his dominating psychosis is convincingly and rationally described. The motivation for *voluntarily* subscribing to the psychosis has been brought into extreme questioning and it is no longer Dolarhyde’s, but is something external to his vantage point, and yet, in the locale of the grandmother’s home, still overwhelming.

“Eidetic memory” is synonymous with “photographic memory.” It is NOT just a superior memory. Simple ‘superior’ memory has to do with organizing information. “Eidetic memory” remains in the present tense as an actively projected memory. It is also only temporary. Its detail also differs from person to person. Eidetic memory is terminated by blinking or turning away from the projected image. If not terminated, it fades. It is more common in children. Russian psychologists speculate that adults memorize through the organization of words, and therefore lose eidetic ability, whereas children are more image dependent. Naming may interrupt eidetic memory. Eidetic imagery may be distinguishable from visual imagery. Eidetic images seem to be much more detailed. They are dependent on exterior stimuli whereas visual imagery, mental picturing, is not. However, not even visual imagery is perfectly understood.

For much more, see http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro00/web2/Arnaudo.html -- especially “WWW Sources” at the end.

Note the necessity for projection and immense detail in eidetic memory, which, in turn, can possibly directly translate into Dr. Bloom’s “What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection.” This would mean it is a further projection than usual and not something that is just added on. “Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.” Through eidetic memory, perception takes on the added qualities of empathy and projection on a physical plain. This is involuntary as in the case of Will Graham. He is a fictional character it is true. But it should be obvious that perception is “always already” projective since its automatically implies, either from the configuration of the brain or simply from common sense traditions, an ‘external’ world of which there can be no purely logical or experiential confirmation. You “always already” have the desire to understand other people’s feelings as a matter of ‘common sense’. An “eidetic memory” would etch such qualities into a hardwiring of the brain as with Will Graham. Or, as Hume or Wittgenstein says, if it can be rationally imagined, it is rationally possible.

Pentaone makes a very good point that Dr. Hannibal Lecter is also an eideteker because he can draw Florence and Clarice’s face—two objects he loves or will come to love.

“Suicide was Bloom’s mortal enemy.’ But Dr. Lecter could use it as an acceptable cure for Multiple Miggs per Pentaone.

Chapter 18:

Chapter 19:

166 [211] “With these he offended me.” Where is that from? The Bible?

Chapter 20:

168 [215]: “The Perseid meteor shower was due soon, and he must not miss it. ‘And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them down to the earth . . .’ (Revelation 12:4) His doing in another time. He must see it and remember.

[218, 222]: “ ‘I am not a man. I began as one but by the grace of God and my own Will, I have become Other and More than a man. You say you’re frightened. Do you believe that God is in attendance here, Mr. Lounds? . . . You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much farther than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.’ The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in him now. ‘I am the Dragon and you call me insane? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in
1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime trail back home. ‘Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the afterbirth. ‘It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.’ ”

GARY C MOORE: This is an important passage. This is a clear statement of apotheosis, which, considered as a real change of reality, is irrational. Dolarhyde both ‘sees’ in a projective, creating fashion and is seen as the center and meaning of the universe, hence the meteor showers to record his advent. But what was ‘advented’ in 1054? Also, seeing is very important. The words swarm: the self is particles. Dolarhyde’s acts are primarily committed to endure in the minds of others through time. Though definitely irrational, megalomaniacal, they are acts of rationally directed artistic creation. Drama is what Dolarhyde is performing before the audience of the universe. It is the “high” one gets when one is totally swept up in watching a performance of Shakespeare, for me, Richard Burton in HAMLET.

Remember what I said about “seeing” at the beginning in relation to Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Harris. For Thomas Harris he enacts, performs in his mind the characters of his novels.

On Abhinavagupta's Santa Rasa which, as aesthetic experience in the extreme, resembles Dolarhyde's psychosis-

We enjoy the rasa in a manner different from our enjoyment of direct experience or apprehensions derived from memory. The enjoyment takes the form of melting, expansion, and radiance, and is like the bliss that comes from realizing one’s identity with the highest Brahman . . . It cannot be that rasa is never perceived. We must perceive it, or we should be unable to discuss it. And granted that this perception may be of a different sort from sense perception, we perceive a rasa as belonging to us. It is a supernormal relishing based on an involved sympathy. By this sympathy, one might say, the reader or audience looses its own grief in the larger dimensions of compassion. Abhinava sees rasa not as an object to be enjoyed but as the ongoing process of enjoyment itself. He too uses the word “melting” as one of its characteristics. He too is struck by the similarity of rasa to the relishing of the ultimate Brahman. Aesthetic pleasure is not the result of a meaning; it is the meaning itself. (n 8,
112) [Jeffry Mousaieff Mason]

This means that) in the text, ‘The Blissful Self’ etc., Brahman is refered to as an independent entity by saying, ‘Brahman is the tail that stabilizes.’ This is gathered from the repetition; for the absolute Brahman alone is referred to in the verse: ‘He becomes non-existing’ etc., which is a concluding reaffirmation (of what was started with).” [trans. Gambhirananda]) As Bhattanâyaka puts it:

Prompted by the thirst of these children, The cow of speech Gives forth this rasa as her milk; To which the experience milked by yogis Bears no comparison.

For without the afflatus of this rasa (note3, Mason - freely to the sahrdaya [sensitive reader] or rasika [one inspired by the rasas], as the earth gave her gifts freely to the Himâlaya. Yogis, on the other hand, must withdraw their mind and senses from all objects in order to force their way to their goal. . . . passages bearing on the comparison of aesthetic and mystic bliss . . . . Abhinava is careful to distinguish the two, as we tried to point out in our book on Úânatarasa. One issue we did not deal with was precisely why Abhinava distinguishes yogipratyaksa from rasâsvâda, because the passages in which this was explained remained obscure to us. However we feel that we have now understood what Abhinava wishes to say: Abhinava contrasts the aesthetic experience to a number of other things. Among these is the ecstatic experience of the highest Yogin in which he experiences the undifferentiated bliss of his Self and in which all desire for worldly objects is absent.

Now in giving the reason why this state is different from rasa (in its most natural sense, to mean simply “is different from” and not either that it is inferior to or superior to rasa) . . . . because of the absence of beauty that comes from entrancement by objects. Abhinava’s point is that there can be no bliss where there are no objects, where yogipratyaya (ecstatic experience of the Yogin) is said to be – harsh because of the absence of the entrancement of objects . . . And it is true that while for the âlankârikas
(figures of speech) there is no parallel to rasa in the real world, for the Vedantin, his experience is the only real world. End note 3), what the yogis milk they milk by force.
(pages 120-121)

So what is born here is a rasyamânatâ (a being tasted, a gustation, of beauty), that is, a savoring that eclipses such worldly mental states as the joy that might be produced by reunion with a constant stream of old friends. And for this reason, [viz., because of its super-normal character,] the savoring serves to manifest something, not to inform one of something, as might be done by an established means of knowledge (pramâna). It is not a production such as results from the working of a cause . . . It is proved by our own self-awareness, because savoring is a form of knowledge. (192-193)

The point of this is simple: If people are very willing and eager to kill others for the sake of religion, and if it is true that, according to Abhinavagupta, aesthetics can provide an even more powerful passion than religion – which would automatically bring up the question whether religion is always in each and every case fundamentally an aesthetic phenomenon. If there can be ‘evil’ aesthetics supposedly, then a conscious and deliberate aesthetic religious experience would be an extremely powerful phenomenon indeed, producing what can either be magnificent or grotesque depending on the moral perspective of the observer, a perspective I have already shown to be fundamentally in question. David Hume has shown, and this seems (in a crude version in RED DRAGON) Doctor Hannibal Lecter’s view also, that inherent character , as a fundamental and inescapable starting point, determines one’s initial moral point of view. And each and every person starts out in life thinking they know EXACTLY what good and evil are and also think those values are absolute.

Now, the only thing really “absolute” in moral perspective is pain, first and most important, [and, now, in *reactive disassociation* that also has been brought into question]and pleasure, variable according to tradition, personal history, and context. In extreme limit situations, pain can be questioned as “evil”. But, in “everyday” folk psychology, one can usually pretty securely count on pain being truly “evil” all the time, though it can be classified quite often as ‘necessary’. And “necessary pain”, though much of the time pragmatic, can also be the pathway by which a legion of devils can be let into the soul.

Dolarhyde is an excellent example of all of this. It should be pointed out primarily that, like Dolarhyde, one can truly and deeply hate what one considers “moral” but feels it is necessary to accept because the alternative is impossible to literally live with at all. One can survive this conflict by transforming it, deforming it, as do Dolarhyde – and Nietzsche! The “thrown” family situation of Dolarhyde and Nietzsche are in some ways similar. And they both resolve the problem by transforming it into a generalized universalization applying in one way or another to everybody that is aesthetic, and as “aesthetic” the only pragmatic and endurable way of living life. And Heidegger, in the first volume of his NIETZSCHE lectures, THE WILL TO POWER AS ART.

Why is art of decisive importance for the task of grounding the principle of the new valuation? . . . Because it is a basic character of beings, the task must begin where what is in question shows itself most brightly. For all clarifying must proceed from what is clear to what is obscure, not the other way around . . . We have already taken measure of the framework within which the “artist phenomenon,” is to be conceived, the framework that is to be maintained throughout the coming considerations. We repeat: the being of the artist is the most perspicuous [seeing] mode of life. Life is for us the most familiar form of Being. The innermost essence of Being is will to power. In the being of the artist we encounter the most perspicuous and most familiar mode of will to power. Since it is a matter of illuminating the Being of beings, meditation on art has in this regard decisive priority . . . This is what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it. (Translated by David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins Paperback, 1991, pages 69-70)

So, in a scary sort of way, all these people seem to agree with Francis Dolarhyde. But do they agree with Doctor Hannibal Lecter? That is the true test, is it not? One hint at the answer may be put thus: If you know about Flannery O’Connor, she would have accepted an invitation to tea with Dr. Lecter, knowing who he was, but never with Francis Dolarhyde.

This meeting of minds, the consideration that they could be rationally imagined to favorably consider meeting, presents a need to re-access what Catholicism means to O’Connor. One immediate and very important point to note is, not simply absence of, their definite and strong hostility to sentimentalism (or “false emotion” and all the implicit connotations of that definition). Also, one might gingerly say there is in both of them a reciprocal relation of violence as revealing the nature and necessity of ‘grace’. They would have two different interpretations of “grace’, but would they be so far apart as to have no resemblance? I do not think so. “Manners” has a very high priority for both of them. The “grace” of God in O’Connor would, like Lecter, encompass “grace of movement”, “grace of speech”, “grace of form”, “politeness”, “grace of judgment”, and “grace of artistic creation and appreciation”. “Grace” is inherently revealed in nature itself in O’Connor IN ALL OF ITS ASPECTS, and, although it is given “of course” lip service by all Christian theologians, she views it very seriously and highly important to her work. She would have no difficulty saying that “grace” is revealed in the ‘nature’ of Doctor Hannibal Lecter. It would have been interesting to know how she would have expressed that. “Grace” as revealed in Clarice Starling would have been something she would have had absolutely no reservations about. And Doctor Hannibal Lecter loved Clarice Starling.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann”, an absolutely fascinating piece for a number of different reasons, she writes about Nathaniel Hawthorne:

In Our Old Home, Hawthorne tells about a fastidious gentleman who, while going through a Liverpool workhouse, was followed by a wretched and rheumy child, so awful-looking that he could not decide what sex it was. The child followed him about until it decided to put itself in front of him in a mute appeal to be held. The fastidious gentleman, after a pause that was significant for himself, picked it up and held it. Hawthorne comments upon this:

Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for him to do, he being a person burdened with more than an Englishman’s customary reserve, shy of actual contact with human beings, afflicted with a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, and, furthermore, accustomed to that habit of observation from an insulated standpoint which is said (but I hope erroneously) to have the tendency of putting ice into the blood. So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and am seriously of the opinion that he did a heroic act and effected more than he dreamed of toward his final salvation when he took up the loathsome child and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father.

What Hawthorne neglected to add is that he was the gentleman who did this. His wife, after his death, published his notebooks in which there was this account of the incident:

. . . but its face expressed such perfect confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was impossible not to do it. It was as if God had promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfill the contract . . . I should never have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances.

Rose Hawthorne, Mother Alphonsa in religious life, later wrote that the account of this incident in the Liverpool workhouse seemed to her to contain the greatest words her father ever wrote. O’CONNOR: COLLECTED WORKS, ed. Sally Fitzerald, The Library of America, 1988, pages 824-825.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was far from being a religious fanatic, and many would say he was not Christian or religious at all. But he naturally expressed himself this way as would most of the rest of us if we were not being self-conscious. Doctor Hannibal Lecter denigrates the concept of God quite often as malignant if not incompetent. But this is the God that has taken on the responsibility of interfering in human affairs. As David Hume would put it, A) How can an infinite, all-powerful being do finite acts with finite beings in the first place? And B), if this actually has happened, from the results, we must judge God as a demonic and truly evil being. Flannery O’Connor would have, in part at least, have tentatively accepted these conclusions, but her final judgment would have been that it is a “mystery”, that thing Dostoyevsky so mocked – or was it just the persona of Ivan? – in the Tale of the Grand Inquisitor. However, the context in which Flannery O’Connor uses her concept of “mystery” is this:

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for. But this should not narrow the field of his vision. (“The Church and the Fiction Writer” in Ibid., page 808)

Curious is it not? And I think we should give great weight to the exact way she uses her words. If actual existence is as I have imaged elsewhere, that you have two necessities in self-conception, God as transcendental enabling of linguistic mind, on the one hand. and unique personal identity on the other hand, neither one being concretely real, and bound together realistically by some ‘prism’, then, indeed, there is plenty of room for mysteries.

GARY. C. MOORE:
There are several important themes here found throughout Harris´ books. Dr. Hannibal Lecter does not fit the profile of a psychopath, that is, a psychiatric terminological pigeon hole. He does not like bow hunters because they cannot usually make clean, instantaneous kills. [Something related happens in HANNIBAL after he sees a bow hunter, Donnie barber, watching a film during a gun show where he is shopping for cooking utensils. He overhears two game wardens wishing they could get him "out of the woods for good". Barber plays and replays a video of the bow shooting of a mule deer that does not die right away. (pp. 293-5) After they find his body, another game warden says, "He don´t bother to track nothing after he shoots it," (page 308). Lecter´s whimsy engages him to perform a Norse ritual, the "Bloody Eagle", on Barber´s body (Norse ritual page 305). "It´s a Norse sacrificial custom," Starling says. To who is the sacrifice offered? There is only Barber and the mule deer present. Though inconclusive, this would tend to argue very much implicitly against Will Graham´s unconfirmed statement, "He had the first and worst sign- sadism to animals as a child".

Richard: I do not usually get jazzed about purely fictional characters - real ones are interesting enough - like Jeffery Dahmer.


GARY. C. MOORE:What was interesting about him?

RICHARD: I take into account the philosophical/sociological significance of fictional characters such as Ahab, Lord Jim, Leopold Bloom and Hans Castorp, Oedipus, Hamlet, etc. but on a level that is divorced from relating to them as having anything more than metaphoric importance to me. If I am wise enough I may learn something about myself, since in all such fictional characters, if they are done well, there are bits of common humanness.

GARY. C. MOORE:I am glad you brought in Ahab. You do realize it has been well substantiated by literary scholars that, on several different levels, the While Whale is synonymous with God both to Ahab AND Melville? In many of his far less popular works, Melville also strikes at the nature of his contemporary morality, though on a slightly different slant than did his supreme model [other than Shakespeare] Nathaniel Hawthorne about whom Flannery O'Connor wrote an interesting essay about a daughter of his who became a nun in which the daughter recounts a tender but strange portrait of her father, a man almost as complex as Melville which may have encouraged their friendship which, especially for literary men, lasted for years. The one story about a moral dilemma that did become famous was *Billy Budd*, and deservedly so, and if you ever have the chance to see the movie version directed by Peter Ustinov who also plays the captain you should. He originally leaves in the ending where, after Billy's hanging, the French warship *Le Athiest* fights Ustinov's British warship and kills him in the process. I saw this at the original release in the theatre but it id left out in the VHS version. Interesting, is it not?

I introduce Flannery O'Connor so often because her terrible murderers, more 'acceptable' to the average establishment, though still distasteful, because they are often religious fanatics literally sometimes killing them to *save* them. That is not always the case. She also investigates the perversion of the human heart as to the vulnerability of *strangers* in the American outback of rural Georgia (capital Atlanta, not Tbilisi) as in the story of *The Displaced Person*, a refugee from the terrors of WWII who comes to America, begins to make a good life for him and his family, gains the envy and fear of the local human drop outs and is murdered. *He was not one of their own.* And there are other stories about murderers that are not religious fanatics that show she has a fine psychological grasp of a killer's mind. But it is the religious fanatic killers that either fascinate people or utterly horrify them.

Her *Catholic* point of view? I do not really understand it. It is not standard *Catholic* faire by any means, and she is utterly rejected by ordinary Catholics. She absolutely insists on realism in representing human character. All this is totally unexpected – I find most of her fiction too emotionally violent to read myself – from a frail little woman, eaten up by lupus erythematosus and dying at 43, with the driest but most hilarious sense of humor in her non-fiction prose and letters, rarely if ever found in her fiction. If you simply read some of her fiction by accident, out of the blue, you would think she was tremendously anti-religious – and she does hate ordinary, unthinking religion. She had a three volume treatise at her home by Thomas Aquinas called DE VERITATE of which the little bit I read – the whole thing is absolutely no longer available –impressed me very much.

I set her opposite Thomas Harris because both their *villains* make one think way outside the accepted pathways.

RICHARD:
I admit to only seeing the movie, The Silence of the Lambs, and understand, from Gary's comments that the book is a far better source for info about Dr. Lecter. But as an archetypal/metaphoric character, I see him as what I call [and I rarely use neologisms!] a de-empathoid. There are several kinds of de-empathoids - George Bush being one of them [as a child he blew up frogs by sticking firecrackers in their rectum, and appears to relish the death of thousands in his monstrous hegemonic ambitions] Jeffery Dahmer is another kind, and I guess Dr. Lecter is another kind - selective, intelligent and otherwise quite *normal.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
*De-emphathoid* is an absolutely excellent term! And it does marvelously fit Jeffery Dahmer. His aplomb, his calmness at his trial made him seem not only normal – and made one unable to associate the acts he committed which, if I remember right, he never denied – but even gave him an aire of kindness and gentleness.

I did not know that about Bush. If you wrote it before, I just skimmed over it too fast for it to register. Are you really serious? I mean, that is a major character flaw, not one at all easily changed, and tells a lot about his upbringing – either that or he was born a sociopath as some supposedly are, and the trait has nothing to do with parental education.

Now, as to Lecter, I argue above that Will Graham's comment is inconsistent with the further development of his character. Also there is the problem of how Will Graham knew about this? The source of such information would be extremely suspect in such an off-hand comment. And there is a very good psychiatrist in the FBI Graham can talk with that is good both at his job and good as a person. I do not think that uncharacteristic judgment would have come from that source no matter what. Now, I know this is fiction, but Harris tells us in the later *Preface* to RED DRAGON that he does not create the characters, he just follows them around in his mind. And before he became a novelist, he had been a police reporter for many years, so he had an up front bloody eyed view of crime to take photographs of in his mind.

The characterization of Lecter is, I argue, inconsistent with the later development of the other novels – and yet still there is a terrifying sharpness to his character that begins to fascinate. The sharpness in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS makes, if this is his psychiatric technique, makes it into a surgical process, cutting away all covering over dross to show the real person to the clinical gaze as Michel Foucault phrased it. It is very impressive in its relentless logic and de-construction, *destruction* [as Heidegger would say] of condemned human hiding places. It always gets to fundamentals, to undeniable *first principles*, and I really need to sit down and read Marcus Aurelius' so-called MEDITATIONS which were really just a day book, a kind of notebook diary, purely personal and never meant by Marcus Aurelius to be read by anyone else – which makes it very disjointed and extremely dull. However, it is enormously important in Harris who picks things from it no one else looks for.

RICHARD:
Most people have built in empathy for other humans and even some other animals. De-empathoids are lacking this *gene.* This brings me to the importance we might place on fictional characters as somehow meaningful aspects of our humanity. I can easily see the Wizard of Oz as an archetypal representation of a system of control, based on the illusion of power - an illusion that is accepted by people who have little or no other source of information and control. I can see Hamlet as an archetypal representation of a combination of human traits, indecision and personal doubt being foremost. I can see Ahab as the archetypal representation of pure revenge and so on. But in the case of Dr. Lecter, unless Gary can convinces me otherwise, I see little archetypal substance - other than, perhaps, [possibly] the innate desire to consume that which we wish to conquer - our enemies or our fears - but done in such an horrific way as to seem beyond human.

GARY. C. MOORE:
That is all I ask, Richard, is to state my case, see if it can be related to a Eliminativist psychology if such a thing is possible, and, along the way, strew various tid-bits from other sources I hope are tasteful to all palettes. I think Lecter is an appropriate subject for an Eliminativist psychology precisely because he continuously and drastically destroys human illusions of every sort, for instance, Clarice's living up to her dead father's expectations.

RICHARD:
We have apparently evolved to secure our continued evolution.

GARY. C. MOORE:
I would say *evolution* is just things that have simply happened happentance, some of which might be considered in certain frames of mind fortuitous, others not.

RICHARD:
Nowhere in that long process has cannibalism played anything but a very peripheral part in that process.

GARY. C. MOORE:
The Belgian adventurers with just a handful of European soldiers conquered the huge Congo Free State paying off their black troops not with money but with the dead human bodies on the battlefields. Along with starvation and extremely brutal forced labor, this contributed to the recent estimate the Belgians were responsible for around 8,000, 000 deaths in establishing the Congo Free State as the personal – not Belgian – property of King Leopold.

RICHARD:
The desire to eat another human must be the most rare aberration of all, signifying some personal need that is buried beneath a layer of incomprehensible and innumerable causalities. I find little interesting in this phenomenology, but I can understand why others might..

GARY. C. MOORE:
:I find little appealing in cannibalism myself except I possibly knew a person that may have committed it as a matter of personal survival. And the fact, once addicted to it, it seems, it becomes a habit very hard to stop. This occurs still in Africa in times of turmoil and seems to be endemic in the present day Solomon Islands. Before Western colonizers, cannibalism was common throughout the Pacific Islands including Hawaii. Nelson Rockefeller's anthropologist son was killed and eaten by New Guinea islanders in the 1960s or 70s.

Anyway, that is not my point or purpose or interest. Rather, I just want to state my case and be fairly judged by my arguments.
Chapter 21:

Chapter 22:

Chapter 23:

Chapter 24:

186 [239] “Lecter was reading an actuarial chart at his table and taking notes.”

GARY.C. MOORE:An actuarial chart calculates statistical risks. Why is he doing this? What risk is he calculating? His death? In what sense? Why?

187 [240] “Chilton looked at the actuarial table. Lecter had written his age at the top: forty-one. ‘And what you you have here?’ Chilton asked. ‘Time,’ Dr. Lecter said.”

GARY.C. MOORE:He does not say “My life expectancy” but simply the abstraction “Time”.

[244] “Actually he felt nothing he could name, just cold nausea and an occasional wave of exhilaration that he had not burned to death instead of Lounds. It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years; he had just gotten tired.”

GARY.C. MOORE:What is the connection with Lecter?

192 [248] “Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon. At times, in the breathing silence of the victims’ houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak. Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian

(Etymology: Middle English cotidian, from Middle French, from Latin cotidianus, quotidianus, from cotidie, quotidie each day, daily (from quot as many as, how many + dies day) + -anus -an * more at QUOTE, DEITY - 1 : occurring every day *quotidian fever* 2 : belonging to everyday *quotidian routine* 3 : COMMONPLACE, ORDINARY
*quotidian drabness*)

details of their lives. Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did . . . But to begin to understand the Dragon, to hear the cold drips in his darkness, to watch the world through his red haze, Graham would have had to see things he could never see, and he would have had to fly through time . . . “

All of these quotes from Chapter 24 must be connected. How?

Chapter 25:

Chapter 26:

Chapter 27:

Chapter 28:

220 [285] “For nine years after Grandmother’s death Dolarhyde was untroubled and he troubled no one. His forehead was smooth as a seed. He knew that he was waiting. For what, he didn’t know. One small event, which occurs to everyone, told the seed in his skull it was Time: standing by a north window, examining some film, he noticed aging in his hands. It was as though his hands, holding the film, had suddenly appeared before him and he saw in that good north light that the skin had slackened over the bones and tendons and the hands were creased in diamonds as small as lizard scales.

GARY.C. MOORE:An event of common, usually trivial, humanity triggers the Dragon, except it is not imaged as the Red Dragon until a week later when he sees Blake’s illustration in TIME magazine. Is there any significance he finds this in *TIME* magazine?

221 [286] “He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone, and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties. Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond alone. At a time when other men first see and fear isolation, Dolarhyde’s became understandable to him: he was alone because he was Unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long—cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were—he could Become.

GARY.C. MOORE:This passage has a dual purpose. First, it shows that he has “Become” fundamentally different from other human beings. But, second, being in his forties, he is like Lecter and Graham. Other than Graham’s eideteker based empathy which forces him to be like Lecter and Dolarhyde, I do not know what this means. The resemblance between Lecter and Dolarhyde, at least in RED DRAGON, is small. However, Lecter will also come to love, and because of that come to change from being a Unique Monster to a relatively ‘social’, *polite* human being. Actually, the contrast between RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is startling. This is one of the most important themes in Harris’ novels: We can change. This does not mean *free will* because the elements must all be there beforehand and, in one point of time, *come in place*, recalling from immediately above *For nine years after Grandmother’s death Dolarhyde was untroubled and he troubled no one. His forehead was smooth as a seed. He knew that he was waiting. For what, he didn’t know. One small event, which occurs to everyone, told the seed in his skull it was Time . . . * And it is precisely in one’s forties that, one, one realizes one is in a common rut, and, two, that one is desperate to change before one dies and is trapped as what one is forever. So this desperation is more or less common to everyone

Chapter 29:

Chapter 30: Chapter 31:

236 [308] “Reba McClane, leggy and brave, damned self pity.” She is like Flannery O’Connor.

Chapter 32:

241 [314]: Graham to Crawford: “You made him write ‘assume’ on the blackboard. You took the chalk and started underling and yelling in his face, ‘When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME both,’ that’s what you told him, as I recall.” Crawford: “He needed a boot up his ass to shape up.”

GARY.C. MOORE:Been there. It is very good general intellectual and philosophical principle, though. Taken literally and to extremes, it presents you with whole new worlds. Everyone should recal this from the movie, even, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

Chapter 33:

[321] “ ‘May I touch your face?’ said Miss Reba McClane . . . She must live: he had been seen with her and she was too close to home. He had tried to share with Lecter, and Lecter had betrayed him. Still, he would like to share. He would like to share with her a little, in a way she could survive.”

Chapter 34:

Chapter 35:

253 [330]: “Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.”

GARY.C. MOORE:This is very important. His “Becoming” not only makes him into a monster but it also gives him the possibility to become much more a normal human being. Is this saying something fundamental about human nature?

259 [338]: “With Reba, his only living woman, held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt for the first time that it was all right: it was his life he was releasing, himself past all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet, ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest. Beside her in the dark, he put his hand on her and pressed her together gently to seal the way back. As she slept, Dolarhyde, damned murderer of eleven, listened time and again to her heart. Images. Baroque pearls flying through the friendly dark. A Very pistol he had fired at the moon. A great firework he saw in Hong Kong called ‘The Dragon Sows His Pearls . . . She held him in the dark. When she slept again, he took her hand off his great tattoo and put it on his face.”

[240]: “He knew it was the voice of the Dragon. This new twoness with the Dragon disoriented him. He first felt it when he put his hand on Reba’s heart. The Dragon had never spoken to him before.”

Chapter 36:

266 [348]: “We don’t invent our natures, Will; they’re issued to us along with our lungs and pancreas and everything else. Why fight it?”

GARY.C. MOORE:Determinism?

GARY.C. MOORE:The importance of Thomas Harris is that he shows us, though Lecter’s statement does accurately describe the “thrown” situation of humanity, how and why we change. It is a harsh and dangerous process, but one that can reroute one’s destiny.

“When you were so depressed when you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn’t the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn’t you feel so bad because killing him felt so good? . . . Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God—He does it all the time, and are we not made in his image?”

“The enemy inside Graham agreed with any accusation.”

GARY.C. MOORE:RED DRAGON is the most sad of the three Lecter books because in the end Will Graham is totally defeated while Hannibal Lecter goes on to succeed in a way, ultimately, he could never have expected, and, in turn, receive everything Will Graham wanted and lost. And the same happens to Clarice Starling, the “good” shadow of the ‘evil’ Lecter. Graham gets nothing and looses everything by being good. This is definitely a cautionary tale, and the end quote from ECCLESIASTES terrifyingly accurate. In a way, in his way of many shadows and implications, Lecter is offering Graham truly good but difficult and dangerous advice. Graham needs to change in a way similar to the Dragon with Reba, believe it or not. However, that pathway can now only be speculated upon.

Chapter 37:

[357ff]: “He knew who spoke and he was frightened. From the beginning, he and the Dragon had been one. He was Becoming and the Dragon was his higher self. Their bodies, voices, wills were one. Not now. Not since Reba.”

GARY.C. MOORE:Dolarhyde, as opposed to Lecter, is truly “crazy” now in no longer being in control of his feelings which created his visions, images, and desires to counter a situation impossible to accept except by someone totally erased of self-will which certainly does not apply to Dolarhyde even though his full strength and independence from the Dragon/grandmother only truly come out under Reba’s influence which is defeated by circumstances (discovering that the law was onto him), and even then the Dragon itself had changed in compromise with the love for Reba. Before, there was hatred, fear, and resentment. Now, the fear and the hatred have separated into two different personalities. Remember how Graham’s fear changed his personality? But that was temporal and circumstantial, B follows A. Dolarhyde’s personalities are in direct and simultaneous confrontation. A no longer equals A in the same time and the same place. No wonder this is terrifying. It is torture, and there is a distinct threat of destruction of Dolarhyde’s identity as happens to the victims of torture. BUT DOLARHYDE TO AN UNPRESIDENTED EXTENT SURVIVES AND WINS IN A LOOSE/LOOSE SITUATION! Strangely enough, when one thoroughly understands what is going on, this evolution of personality and strength of self is one of the greatest accomplishments in all of literature!

Chapter 38:

276 [362]: “He put on his dark glasses when he made the turn at the Missouri River bridge and drove into the morning sun. His Styrofoam cooler squeaked as it giggled against the passenger seat. He leaned across and set it on the floor, remembering that he must pick up the dry ice and get the film from . . . Crossing the Missouri channel now, moving water under him. He looked at the whitecaps on the sliding river and suddenly felt that he was sliding and the river was still. A strange, disjointed, collapsing feeling flooded him. He let up on the accelerator. The van slowed in the outside lane and stopped. Traffic behind him was stacking up, honking. He didn’t hear it. He sat, sliding slowly northward over the still river, facing the morning sun. Tears leaked from beneath his sunglasses and fell hot on his forearms.”

GARY.C. MOORE:Something important has happened here, the “sliding”. Everything has come loose in his personality and destiny. That Thomas Harris can describe it so accurately, effectively, and convincingly is extremely eerie.

277 [363]: “Dolarhyde pulled into the parking lot of a big motel near the U. S. 270 interchange. A school bus was parked in the lot, the bell of a tuba leaning against the back window. Dolarhyde wondered if he was suppose to get on the bus with the old people. No, that wasn’t it. He looked around for his mother’s Packard. “Get in. Don’t put your feet on the seat,” his mother said. That wasn’t it either. He was in a motel parking lot on the west side of St. Louis and he wanted to be able to Choose and he couldn’t.”

GARY.C. MOORE:This inability to Choose is NOT a being bound but is its exact opposite, an absolute looseness – no GUIDANCE! All destiny has become unraveled, all guidance to
*choice* has become undone. He is free to make a primal choice. But in such an existential position one has then to choose the predeterminations to make that choice. One must assume one’s presuppositions for action. One is sliding, then, like a car out of control, until ‘something’ makes one seize control again. He is conscious of the Dragon’s commands but they are sliding over him at the moment and not taking hold.

[364]: Reba McClane didn’t know about the Dragon. She thought she was with Francis Dolarhyde . . . Maybe she liked Francis Dolarhyde. That was a perverted, despicable thing for a woman to do. He understood that he should despise her for it, but oh God it was good. Reba McClane was guilty of liking Francis Dolarhyde. Demonstrably guilty.”

GARY.C. MOORE:Good has changed places with evil. Reba likes Francis. Francis likes Reba. And for the first time ever Francis likes Francis. The Dragon has slid from the picture. All things -

“Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
--- Yeats, “Easter 1916”

278 [365]: “Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time. In the heavy calm between the waves, Dolarhyde could think.”

GARY.C. MOORE:Somehow this is related to the “whitecaps” on the Missouri River. The “sliding” continues. Dolarhyde contemplates killing himself to destroy the Dragon like a captain would set off the powder magazine to keep his ship from being taken by the enemy or to keep the Dragon from taking Reba. So this is not really being “suicidal”.

“But how could he be positive that his death would affect the Dragon, now that he and the Dragon were Two?”

GARY.C. MOORE:Note that Harris writes “affect” not “effect”. primal ppppppp

[366]: “But he had never heard the voice of Francis Dolarhyde curse him . . . The voice he heard now had never, ever cursed him . . . He was probably not much of a man, he thought. It occurred to him that he had never really found out about that, and now he was curious. He had one rag of pride that Reba McClane had given him. It told him dying in a bathroom was a sorry end. What else? What other way was there? There was a way and when it came to him it was blasphemy, he knew. But it was a way.”

GARY.C. MOORE:He never had self-respect before, just followed the commands and judgments of others. Now he was *free*, at least for a while as it is in the real world.

Chapter 39:

Chapter 40:

Chapter 41:

[383]: “Look at the woman wrapped in the dragon’s tail. Look. He saw that her hair was the exact color of Reba McClane’s . . . He held in voices.”

294 [386]: He made himself slow down . . . He could choose his pace now. He could choose anything.”

Chapter 42:

Chapter 43:

303 [398]: “’But he didn’t kill anybody.’ ‘Odd,’ Crawford said. ‘He’d been better off to wax them both . . . Behavioral Science called Bloom in the hospital about it. You know what he said? Bloom said maybe he’s trying to stop.’”

Chapter 44:

[399-400]: “He had taken a great risk, and the prize he brought back was the power to choose. He could choose to have Reba McClane alive. He could have her to talk to, and he could have her startling and harmless mobility in his bed. He did not have to dread his house. He had the Dragon in his belly now. He could go into his house, walk up to a copy Dragon on the wall and wad him up if he wanted to. He did not have to worry about feeling Love for Reba. If he felt Love for her, he could toss the Shermans to the Dragon and ease it that way, go back to Reba calm and easy, and treat her well.”

[403]: “No, Graham just knew he had a van. Graham knew because he knew. Graham knew. Graham knew. The son of a bitch was a monster.”

GARY.C. MOORE: Who does this apply to? Who is the monster here? Dorlarhyde? Or Graham?

[403-404]: “ ‘Reba,’ he said aloud. Reba couldn’t save him now. They were closing in on him, and he was nothing but a puny hairli— ‘ARE YOU SORRY NOW YOU BETRAYED ME?’ ‘I didn’t. I just wanted to choose. You called me--’ ” ‘GIVE ME WHAT I WANT AND I’LL SAVE YOU’ ‘No. I’ll run.” ‘GIVE ME WHAT I WANT AND YOU’LL HEAR GRAHAM’S SPINE SNAP’ ‘No.’ ‘I ADMIRE WHAT YOU DID TODAY. WE’RE CLOSE NOW. WE CAN BE ONE AGAIN. DO YOU FEEL ME INSIDE YOU? YOU DO, DON’T YOU? . . . GIVE IT TO ME AND THEN I’LL ALWAYS LET YOU CHOOSE, YOU CAN ALWAYS CHOOSE, AND YOU’LL SPEAK WELL, I WANT YOU TO SPEAK WELL, SLOW DOWN, THAT’S RIGHT, SEE THE SERVICE STATION? PULL OVER THERE AND LET ME TALK TO YOU . . . .’”

GARY.C. MOORE:A reasoning, persuasive, even sly delusion, an “actor” delusion . . . This must be unique.

Chapter 45:

Chapter 46:

[408]: “Seeing Reba kiss Mandy had stabbed Dolarhyde deep. Then the pain left him for good. He still looked and sounded like Francis Dolarhyde—the Dragon was a very good actor; he played Dolarhyde well.”

[411]: “ Dolarhyde: ‘I’ll tell you something. The most important thing you’ll ever hear. Sermon-on-the-Mount important. Ten-Commandments important . . . Two groups of people were changed. Leeds. And Jacobi. The police think were murdered. Do you know now?’ She started to shake her head. Then she did know and slowly nodded . . . ‘Think carefully and answer correctly.’ Reba McClane: ‘It’s the Dragon something. Dragon . . . Red Dragon.’ ‘I AM THE DRAGON.’ Leaping back driven by the volume and terrible timbre of the voice, she slammed against the headboard. ‘The Dragon wants you, Reba. He always has. I didn’t want to give you to Him. I did a thing for you today so He couldn’t have you. And I was wrong.’ This was D., she could talk to D. ‘Please. Please don’t let him have me . . .’ ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. Maybe I can’t help giving you to Him. I don’t know. I’m going to see if you do as I tell you. Will you? Can I depend on you?’”

GARY. C. MOORE: Slyness and deception, the Dragon acting Dolarhyde.

Chapter 47:

Chapter 48:

Chapter 49:

323 [422]: “Crawford leaned between them and sucked at something in his teeth.’

GARY. C. MOORE: This seems trivial, but this theme is brought up again in Chapter 54:

341 [446]: “When Crawford grinned, Graham could see a piece of spinach between his teeth. Odd. Crawford eschewed most vegetables.”

GARY. C. MOORE: Something unusual, but why?

Chapter 50:

[428]: Graham: “you said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That’s what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn’t kill you and he couldn’t watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back.”

Chapter 51:

Chapter 52:

Chapter 53:

Chapter 54:

Hannibal Lecter’s letter: “Here we are, you and I, languishing in our hospitals. You have your pain and I am without my books—the learned Dr. Chilton has seen to that. We live in a primitive time—don’t we Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

GARY. C. MOORE: Think about this. Lecter realizes the RATIONAL response to his acts should be to kill him but he persists in them knowing that. For him, the death penalty is NO retardant at all.

I wish you a speedy convalescence and hope you won’t be very ugly. I think of you often. Hannibal Lecter”

GARY. C. MOORE: In some ways this is like Lecter’s letters to Clarice Starling at the end of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and the beginning of HANNIBAL. They are less cruel than hard and realistic and say as much of Lecter as of whom he is writing to. He may even mean what he says about *a speedy convalescense* and *hope you won't be very ugly*, but that would signal a significant change in Harris' characterization of him, would it not? Is it a graduation to the level of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS? If one wants to read Harris, THAT is the first book you should read, not RED DRAGON. But reading it first might well work also.

346 [453]: “He did drift between memory and dream, but it wasn’t so bad . . . it was a long memory-dream of Shiloh . . . On a soft April day he walked across the asphalt road to Bloody Pond . . . Graham knew what had happened here in April of 1862 . . . Graham saw movement behind it on the road. The car had broken a chicken snake’s back. It slid in endless figure eights across itself in the center of the asphalt road, sometimes showing its black back, sometimes its pale belly.

GARY. C. MOORE: Figure eights again.

Shiloh’s awesome presence hooded him with cold, though he was sweating in the mild spring sun . . . He was light-headed. The snake looped on itself. He stood over it, picked it up by the end of its smooth dry tail, and with a long fluid motion cracked it like a whip. Its brains zinged into the pond . . . He had thought Shiloh haunted, its beauty sinister like flags. Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green machine. The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight . . . In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have over grown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us. Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too. He understood murder uncomfortably well, though. He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against. He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine. Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t haunted—men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.”

ECCLESIASTES 1:17 And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

GARY. C. MOORE: Thomas Harris does not quote the next line 1:18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

There are many things here, including many I have missed. Hume is here with fiction’s law making (“We make mercy . . . There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.” See A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE, Book III. Of Morals, Part II. Of justice and injustice, Section IV. Of the transference of property by consent) and also the indifference:

Is it because human life is of so great importance, that it is a presumption of human prudence to dispose of it? But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. “Of Suicide”

When was Garret Jacob Hobbs, the “Minnesota Shrike”, killed?

Figure eights are the symbol of infinity and also the eternal recurrence of the same.

The snake’s black back and pale belly recalls the oriental balance of “yin” and “yang”. Graham adds to Bloody Pond.

“The loveliness of Shiloh mocked our plight.” Re: “Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming? . . . I won’t be surprised that the answer is yeas and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.” SOTL 337.

“We can only learn so much and live.” HANNIBAL, last sentence, 484.


Also, as we just touched close by *Heart of Darkness*, do ya'll want me to write more about Joseph Conrad?