GARY. C. MOORE:

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, initially, as the beginning of a projected trilogy further 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, resembleds a typical villain, it seems, and, as the book proceed, developes more and more while leaving imbedded inconsistencies behind. Lecter’s sense of whimsy and revenge is more petty toward Will Graham than seems necessary 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.

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 simple theme of identity between Will Graham and Dr. Lecter for developing the possibility of the psychotic Dolarhyde deliberately forcing a conscious free will 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. 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.

A great writer I am finally 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 far 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 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.

Chapter 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. Inn 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

GCM: 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. (revise 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 whom 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 makes Lecter into an 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 which, however, 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.

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 third year medical student does everything including both emergency room and surgery even if they are specializing in psychiatry.]

[Dell 71] "If you don't believe me, what the f * * * did you ask me for?"

“I didn’t hear that”

“Good. I didn’t mean to say it.” Graham has a flashback to his capture of Dr. Lecter. [One should]recall that fear sometimes made Graham rude (Pentaone).

Chapter 7:

[Dell 83] “I thought you might be curious to find out if you’re smarter than the person I am looking for.”

“Then, by implication, you think you are smarter than I am, since you caught me.’

“No. I know I’m not smarter than you are.”

“Then how did you catch me, Will?”

“You had disadvantages.”

“What disadvantages?”

“Passion. And you’re insane.”

“You’re very tan Will.’

Graham did not answer.

“Your hands are rough. They don’t look like a cop’s hands anymore. That shaving lotion is something a child would select. It has a ship on the bottle doesn’t it?” Dr. Lecter seldom holds his head upright. He tilts it as he asks a question, as though he were screwing an auger of curiosity into your face.

GARY C MOORE: Here is the rudeness Lecter revenges himself on Graham when he bluntly, and incorrectly by his own thinking, calls him insane (“Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy.”). The “passion” I need to think more about. In general Dr. Lecter has “passion” about every thing and goes about the whole of life with what in another style of more acceptable living would be considered a ‘healthy jest’. “Crazy people” are fundamentally unhappy whereas “normal people” merely have unhappy episodes in their life that they have overcome and put aside.

[Dell 86] “Do you know how you caught me?”

Graham was out of Lecter’s sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.

“The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike” was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him. He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness . . . He had the absurd feeling Lecter had walked out with him. He stopped outside the entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.

From a car across the street, his long lens propped on the window sill, Freddy Lounds got a nice profile shot of Graham in the doorway and the words in stone above him: “Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

As it turned out, The National Tattler cropped the picture to just Graham’s face and the last two words in the stone.

GARY C. MOORE: Read at one level, this is far too simplistic view. But Thomas Harris actually does much more. He not only delineates that Graham fears Lecter is right, but demonstrates the external world also views Will Graham as a freak. What is actually made clear in other places in the book [ ], similar things may happen to people, but they make different choices and do not turn out to be “monsters” even though circumstances of upbringing and human nature itself are alike.

Chapter8:

[Dell 87-89] “Lecter sat up. The man might have been civil. His thoughts had the warm brass smell of an electric clock . . . He turned up the lights and wrote a note to Chilton asking for a telephone to call his counsel. Lecter was entitled by law to speak with his lawyer in privacy and he hadn’t abused the right. Since Chilton would never allow him to go to the telephone, the telephone was brought to him. [Lecter by deception gets Will Graham’s phone number and address.] Lecter felt better. He thought he might surprise Graham with a call sometime, or if the man couldn’t be civil, he might have a hospital supply house mail Graham a colostomy bag for old times’ sake.”

GARY C. MOORE: Something more drastic comes of this than what is stated. Does this refdlect a changing character for Dr. Lecter on Harris’ part?

78-79 [91] “Dolarhyde never said “yes,” as he had trouble with the sibilant /s/.” Pentaone says, “A sibilant is a synonym for a frictive. They mean the same thing . . . Why mentions both sibilants and fricatives is strange. In Hannibal, Mason Verger also has trouble with fricatives.”

Chapter 11:

Freddy Lounds writes, “Federal manhunters . . . have turned to the most savage killer in captivity for help . . . Dr. Hannibal Lecter . . . was consulted this week in his maximum-security asylum cell by ace investigator William (Will) Graham . . . What went on in this bizarre meeting of two mortal enemies? What was Graham after? “It takes one to catch one,” a high federal official told this reporter. He was referring to Lecter, known as “Hannibal the Cannibal,” who is both a psychiatrist and a mass murderer. OR WAS HE REFERING TO GRAHAM???”

GARY C MOORE: Lounds goes on to say Graham himself “was once confined to a mental institution for four weeks” . . . “after he killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs, the “Minnesota Shrike”. Pentaone here, to some people, may have seemingly and inexplicably referred to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote LEVIATHAN. But Hobbes’ view of human nature as “innately selfish” as “a natural right” is very, very relevant to Thomas Harris and Doctor Hannibal Lecter. What I have said so far should make that obvious. But there is much more to it than that, and this is relevant also to Francis Dolarhyde. For Hobbes also says, that being in this situation of “natural right” and wholly free expression of selfish desire leads to “a war of all against all” where each and every person, if they even survive, are miserably unhappy as in Hobbes’ famous

[8] Hereby, it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. And therefore, the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance of the contrary. All other time is Peace. [9] Whatever is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require great force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. LEVIATHAN, chapter xiii.

This is a portrayal, on the one hand, of the most extreme form of warfare, that which is actually conducted in one’s own heartland, killing the heart. Or, it is a description of what people actually endure in the midst of it. It is an ideological description of the English Civil War. But as such it is a description of war itself as endured by those on the spot, not on the sidelines observing as we Americans have so often done. As such it is also a description of human nature reduced to its fundamentals, without any law except the natural law of tooth and claw. That is what we are Hobbes says. We are nothing, absolutely nothing without the crushing force of the authority of law. Only force can answer force.

[10] . . .Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse man’s nature in it. The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them—which till laws be made they cannot know. Nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it. [The Latin version of 1668 adds: But why try to demonstrate to learned men what even dogs know, who bark at visitors, sometimes, indeed, only at those who are unknown, but in the night at everyone?]

But war is still the nature of man with natural right, laws are inventions, fictions to curb that destructive nature.

[13] To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body, nor mind. If they were, they would be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not solitude.

Therefore we have here the pre-cursor of existentialism and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov saying, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” Or Jacques Derrida saying,

I believe the force and the necessity (and therefore in a certain irreversibility) of the act by which Heidegger substitutes a certain concept of Dasein for a concept of subject still too marked by the traits of the being as vorhanden (occuredness, presence at hand), and hence by an interpretation of time, and insufficiently questioned in its ontological structure . . . The time and place of this displacement opened a gap, marked a gap, they left fragile, or recalled the essential ontological fragility of the ethical, juridicial, and political foundations of democracy and of every discourse one can oppose to National Socialism in all of its forms (the ‘worst” ones, or those that Heidegger and others might have thought of opposing to them). These foundations were and remain essentially sealed within a philosophy of the subject. One might quickly perceive the question, which might also be the task: can one take into account the necessity of the existential analytic and what it shatters in the subject and turn toward an ethics, a politics (are those words still appriopriate?), indeed an “other” democracy (would it still be a democracy?), in any case toward another type of responsibility that safeguards against what a moment ago I very quickly called the “worst”? POINTS . . . Interviews 1974-1994, Stanford, 1995, page 266

Appropriately enough this is from an interview entitled “Eating Well’, and goes very well to show us, along with Hobbes (for what he is discussing is precisely ontological), what Thomas Harris is doing with Doctor Hannibal Lecter. And, after reading Hobbes and Derrida, one can see there is even a more terrible person than Francis Dolarhyde, Doctor Lecter, or Jame Gumb. And that person Thomas Hobbes would immediately point out to be Paul Krendler, the man who perverts, and destroys, the law to such an extent that Clarice Starling can no longer find ‘law’ within the government or F. B. I., and which then logically releases her from all obligation to an absolutely dead letter. Krendler shows the limit where corruption in government and law can and cannot be tolerated, the past point where they become nothing, ceasing to even be the fictions they initially were. If law and government no longer protect your life and property, you no longer owe it any loyalty whatsoever. All you can do is hide like Barney, like Clarice, like Lecter. There is only death out there in the open waiting for you.

Another British philosopher I shall just touch on here, but necessarily so, is David Hume. He shares Hobbes’ view of human nature, which seems only to be seen externally, but shows, ‘innocently’, that this same “war of all against all” is also the internal nature of human nature, the core of so-called ‘identity’, ‘self’, ‘soul’, etc. A person can only govern oneself as a parliament of voices. And there must be one person given supreme, but far from absolute power. Hobbes “nature of man” lives within just as it lives without. Identity changes from moment to moment. It is merely a convention, a legal fiction that we are the same person we were born. Even common sense says that is utterly ridiculous. And Hume’s project is to A) find what a human mind actually knows – which is next to nothing, and B) how humanity works in society. Regardless of one’s situation, one finds oneself ‘agreeing’ with what most other people say out of political necessity even when one knows it is logically questionable or even downright wrong. Things that are unbearable to live with much be amended politically. Which means the members of parliament, internal and external, must have civil discourse that permits the “other” to express their views. This is Hannibal Lecter’s politeness, an open space for proper and unobtrusive expression, emotionally appropriate and acknowledging the “other’s” feelings, a universally recognized standard of good taste that tastes good. Or else wise not.

[Dell 119] “Across the first page, in large letters he had illuminated himself, were the words from Revelation: ‘And There Came a Great Red dragon Also . . .’”

“Pages between the clipping were covered with Dolarhyde’s writing – black ink in a fine copperplate script not unlike William Blake’s own handwriting.”

[Dell 120] In Dolarhyde’s mind, Lecter’s likeness should be the dark portrait of a Renaissance Prince.”

Cesare Borgia by Bembo in Galleria dell' Accademia Carrara

[Dell 121] “Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of the people who die to help you in these things—understood that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of colr busting. That they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

Lecter was capable of understanding that blood and breath were only elements undergoing change to fuel his Radiance. Just as the source of light is burning.

He would like to meet Lecter, talk and share with him, rejoice with him in their shared vision, be recognized by him as John the Baptist recognized the One who came after, sit on him as the Dragon sat on 666 in Blake’s Revelation series, and film his death as, dying, he melded with the strength of the Dragon.”

Chapter 12:

[Putnam 106, Dell 129] “Graham knew he was angry at Randy because he feared him.”

[Dell 132] Asian Studies gives analysis of Chinese ideogram Graham found carved on tree in back of the Jacobi’s house on page 92 [111]

Chapter 13:

Putnam 111 [Dell 135] “Crawford put Chilton on hold. He stared at the two winking buttons on his telephone for several seconds without seeing them. Crawford, fisher of men, was watching his cork move against the current. He got Graham again.”

113 [139]: Beverly Katz in Hair and Fiber Section of the FBI Laboratory says of Crawford’s wind blown hair when he leaves, “See you later,” katz said, “Love your hair.” Dr. Lecter says, at the Memphis airport, to Senator Martin, “’Love your suit’, he said as she went out the door,” hardback page 185.

114 [140]: “a pair of hands” – It seems coincidental, all these mentions of Pairs of hands, which have no real connection to Albecht Durer’s etching. However, it is too appealing to ignore either.

Chapter 14:

[Dell 145]: on the Tooth Fairy toilet tissue note: “’It was in the middle of a paragraph full of compliments,’ Graham said. ‘He couldn’t stand to ruin them. That’s why he didn’t throw the whole thing away.’ Again, this seems too petty an observation of Lecter on Graham’s part.

126 [156]: “Dear pilgrim, you honor me. . .”

[157] “Bless you, 666.”

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

145 [183]: Sargeant Stanley Riddle – Samson’s riddle?

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

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 of religious ecstasy as described on pages
120-121. 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 something more and more external to him and, 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 simply 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 David Hume says, if it can be rationally imagined, it is rationally possible.

Pentaone makes the 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—like Dolarhyde—that is, for two supposedly hard-wired insane people that cannot change, through love, they do change—from memory.

“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.”

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 any 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 irrationally megalomaniacal, they are acts of rationally directed artistic creation.

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