Baddies in books: Hannibal Lecter, magnetic and unhinged

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/nov/18/hannibal-lecter-baddies-in-books

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In the novel Hannibal, a now world-weary and disgraced Clarice Starling is sent by corrupt FBI officials on the fool’s errand of attempting to trace the whereabouts of literature’s most famous cannibal. As part of that process, she interviews Mrs Rosenkranz, a guest at the most infamous of Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalistic banquets, who tells her that Lecter “made a girl’s fur crackle”.

Those words are not a little disturbing, but it’s hard to deny that Lecter has a magnetism greater than that of most other villains – just look at all the fan fiction he has inspired. When I was on Mastermind, a few years ago, I took “the Hannibal Lecter novels” as my specialist subject. John Humphrys asked “is Hannibal Lecter the Huggy Bear of criminals?”

In fact, every way that we unpack him, Lecter is contradictory and problematic, right down to the books that house him. Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are tense psychological thrillers with strong doses of procedural, tautly plotted and written in prose that appears to have been carved with a scalpel. Hannibal is a sprawling mess of a masterpiece that defies classification – it could legitimately be labelled horror, guignol, gothic, even romance.

Is the Hannibal who inhabits these airy pages, pacing the grand chambers of his memory palace, the same character who earlier strained at the leather straps for release? Thomas Harris would like us to think so. The violence has, by and large, disappeared, but we are told this is because Lecter is so at home in his new surroundings. It is as though Lecter’s charcoal of “the Duomo, seen from the Belvedere”, sketched from memory in his prison cell, has grown into a hundred pages of arch gothic Florentine narrative.

To look to his physical circumstances for explanation of the change in Lecter is to search in the wrong place. Both the man whom Starling first meets, and his alter ego Dr Fell, encountered by Italian detective Pazzi in the shadows of the Palazzo Vecchio, are epitomised by intense red eyes that swallow light into their black core. Both Lecter in his cell and Lecter in the Palazzo Capponi doodle away at sexualised, religiose images of Starling. Both create erotic electricity through the passing of documents – Buffalo Bill’s case file to Starling, accompanied by that brush of fingers, and a musical score to Signora Pazzi.

The real development happens between Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. In the most chilling scene in Red Dragon, Lecter goes to elaborate lengths to obtain FBI profiler Will Graham’s address and then sends a simple message to the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde: “Kill them all.” His savagery and cruelty are unveneered. Yet in The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice needs to be warned that she must never forget what he is – a monster.

What this later novel adds is a single layer: courtesy. The key moment in understanding Lecter’s development comes at his first meeting with Starling, when his neighbour, Miggs, throws semen in her face. It sends him into a frenzy and triggers his decision to help her. “Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me,” he explains, later praising Starling: “you have been courteous and receptive to courtesy.”

Part of Lecter’s allure is that he looks right through people to tell them the truth about themselves. But whereas his sojourn inside Graham’s mind mutilates him mentally in much the same way as he had earlier mutilated him physically, what Starling learns about herself from Lecter doesn’t break her – it makes her. And that is because it has a framework: if she follows the rules of courtesy, she is safe.

Lecter’s treatment of Starling is not simply a misogynist trope about sexual attraction. That is where Hannibal’s cod psychologist Doemling, who posits Lecter as a classic case of “Doemling’s avunculism” (in which a predator pretends to be concerned for a victim while getting off on their destruction), is woefully simplistic. Lecter’s destruction of Starling certainly is systematic, but it is much more complicated than that and has to do, at first, with seeking to rebuild her in the place of his dead sister.

If anything can explain the breadth of Lecter’s appeal, it is this structure of safety. Danger is always appealing to a part of our psyche. Many of us fantasise about being, or being chosen by, the hyperintelligent outsider who shuns all rules and disposes of enemies at will, while stopping for some Bach and Château D’Yquem on the way.

But such people are usually as dangerous to their friends as to their enemies: they are fundamentally unpredictable. The Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal is not. Be honest and courteous and smart and you know that, all things being equal, you will not only live through the experience of sharing time with Lecter, you may be safer than in your day-to-day life. That gives us a secure mental space in which to conduct our daydreams, and explains why Lecter looms so large there.