FBI HQ
FBI HQ
Note: numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in the paperback edition.
Incidentally, a Johnny Burke wrote the words to Swinging on a Star.
Marsha Valentine - Hannibal gave Clarice a "valentine" in SOTL, Klaus's head.
A Yaqui slide is a type of holster designed by Jeff Cooper. It uses a minimal amount of leather, and thus is good for concealed carry, as there is less telltale bulge than with a regular holster. Gun mag article Picture from DeSantis Holster site No relation to the Native American tribe.
Evelda's "Nefertiti neck"
[Note: Earlier I had a link to a Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun, but it was the wrong one. This new link shows the painting that is in the Brooklyn Museum. The movie, Manhunter which was based on Red Dragon, used the wrong one too.]
Lidless implies watchfulness.
I found the pictures in another French book, The Tears of Eros, by George Bataille, translated by Peter Connor. At the risk of darkening the Web's "phosphorescent swamp", I provide one of the pictures here. But be warned, it is nasty. For me, (and for everyone else I imagine), the most difficult thing to see is the look on Fou-Tchou-Li's blissful face. Apparently, in an effort to prolong the torture, the victims are given opium. This ecstacy at one's own destruction is mirrored in both Verger's face peeling and Krendler's "smells great!"
There are a few other interesting connections between Georges Bataille's book and Hannibal. I've scanned in a number of other images and provide them here.
In an interesting twist, Verger takes over the role that Lecter filled in the two previous novels, ie the imprisoned bad guy (Verger in his respirator is as good as in prison - he even has a male nurse to attend him) who teams with the Feds to catch a serial killer, this time, Lecter.
The Susquehanna River. I grew up along the Susquehanna River, on Susquehanna Avenue in fact, in a small historic town in Northeastern Pennsylvania called Forty Fort. Stupid name, I know. You see there was this fort and there were forty people in it defending themselves against Injuns and Pennamites or whatever. On River Street where the old fort stood, there's a big rock with a bronze plaque commemorating these 40 brave pioneers. Forty Fort. I'm used to telling the story because people unfamiliar with the area often miss that last 't' and think I'm saying Forty Four. (I like to think my pronunciation is better than Sammie's.)
Forty Fort is a quiet town of about 6,000. Nothing much ever happens there but in 1972 it was the scene of a gruesome disaster. Hurricane Agnes had been hammering the northeastern seaboard of the US for weeks. It seemed the rain would never stop. Then on June 23, 1972, the Susquehanna River had swelled beyond capacity and burst through the dikes in Forty Fort, at the historic Forty Fort Cemetery where there's a bend in the river. Bodies and caskets were swept from their graves and deposited in trees, yards and houses. Perhaps some of the dead were carried downstream to the Chesapeake.
[60] The new-mown lawns of Muskrat Farm, the riot of lilacs in the wind, smell nothing at all like the stockyard. Lilacs bloom in the spring - La Primavera. There wouldn't be any blooms when Starling arrives at Muskrat Farm. From T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Eliot himself may be alluding to Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, a poem mourning the death of Abraham Lincoln. In both poems, the lilacs remind the poet of the death of a beloved man. In Eliot's case, a homosexual lover who was killed at Gallipoli.
Harris has Clarice quoting T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton and there are a number of other possible allusions to The Waste Land so we just might be onto something here.
Another possible allusion is to Eliot's Portrait of a Lady where the narrator of the poem seems to envy the youth and beauty of a female visitor just as Mason may envy Clarice. [Thanks Gary]
Now that lilacs are in bloom She has a bowl of lilacs in her room And twists one in her fingers while she talks. "Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know What life is, you should hold it in your hands"; (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks) "You let it flow from you, you let it flow, And youth is cruel, and has no remorse And smiles at situations which it cannot see." I smile, of course, And go on drinking tea. "Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful, after all."
In all of these poems about lilacs, the month of the year mentioned or referred to is April. It is interesting to note that the Pazzi Conspiracy occurred in April, as did the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li.
Interestingly, in SOTL, while Starling is on her way to West Virginia and the floater she thinks about Buffalo Bill's other victims. Starling reminded herself that their teeth were not bared in pain, that turtles and fish in the course of feeding had created that expression. [SOTL, p 66]
"That quote is from the second paragraph of chapter 5 of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I suspect that it is due to Shelley's influence on Harris, though it could of course merely be two authors contrasting beauty against ugliness to good effect. "
Today his plaited hair is in a big coil on his chest above the turtle-shell respirator. Human hair beneath the blue-john ruin, the plaits shining like lapping scales. In the D version of Blake's Europe, A Prophecy for which The Ancient of Days is the frontispiece, the title page shows a man cowering abjectly on his elbows and knees with his head morphing into a coiling serpent. According to David V. Erdman in The Illuminated Blake, the man is Blake himself with his head becoming the serpent he had prophesied.
Dionysos had a crown of snakes.
Mason's social security number, 475989823, would be for somebody from Minnesota. A person who got their first social security number in Maryland would have a number with first three digits between 212 - 220.
I had to chuckle over this one a few times. In terms of deeper significance, I can only offer, as yet, a simple connection between Mason's surface Christianity, and his deeper (barbaric?) nature. With the earlier discussion of our being "inured to masks" the shock coming from realizing that his is a real human face, Mason perhaps wears his Christian mask rather poorly in view of the fact that the Bible is replete with many excellent quotations of God pouring out his wrath upon enemies of all sorts. A search of the King James' Bible reveals 117 hits for smite, 243 for destroy, 117 for kill, and 194 for wrath, of which an excellent choice for a "real" Christian in Mason's place might be:
Exodus 22:24
And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless.
or
Psalms 21:9
Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them.
"He [Chilton] was my fiance." Really?
In SOTL, Chilton had only one ticket to Holiday on Ice and Clarice "saw his life", i.e. a lonesome one. If Chilton had had a fiance, he certainly would have taken her to the ice show. [Thanks Shyvven] Not many men would feel comfortable going to an ice show on their own. Also, Chilton would be more than twice Inelle's age. In SOTL, Chilton was 58. In Hannibal, Inelle was only 35. Why does Harris have her tell Clarice she was his fiance?
"We shared a love, a love you don't find everyday." Sounds like the old Righteous Brothers' tune, You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, 1965, "We had a love ... a love ... a love you don't find everyday." Earlier, we learn that Inelle speaks with exaggerated precision to express righteousness or anger.
He [Chilton] was voted Boy of the Year in Canton when he was in high school. Inelle wears her hair long just as she did in high school. It seems Inelle is stuck in a bit of a time warp.
Here's what rw1121 thinks about Inelle:
I also think Chilton would've been one of those men who never marries and doesn't date much because he can't get along with somebody else as their peer and lover; he must be their superior. I also see him as image conscious, and a drab overweight woman, no matter how much younger than he, wouldn't enter into his mind at all.
So I think she had a crush on Chilton and tells people they had a relationship, probably based around superficial encounters with the man in which he was only polite.
What she tells Starling cannot be what really happened, as far as I can tell.
Barney also says that Hannibal is nobody's brother. What about Mischa?
"No," she said to save Barney's feeling, as she recognized for the first time the compliment in the monster's ridicule. Did Hannibal not take Barney seriously? Does Barney not know as much as he thinks he does about Hannibal?
Here's a picture of Roller pigeons.
The Starling pigeon has a crescent on its breast. The crescent phase of the moon is ruled by Artemis.
The dove flew away whistling...Starling heard the surviving mourning dove call from the trees. Mourning Doves are pretty grayish-brown birds that whistle when they fly. Their distinctive call is quite appropriately called a lament. Mourning Doves are very common in my neighborhood. They are game birds.
These sounds are part of the Sounds of Nature website
In the paperback, they have corrected the spelling of Bimmel's name to be the same as in SOTL, ie "Fredrica." It's interesting that they did not change the name to the actual floater's name, Kimberly Emberg.
I have long suspected that Harris deliberately had Clarice get the name wrong. Memory can play tricks.
Harris on the Pig, 1881. Joseph Harris wrote the definitive book on raising pigs which was just published again last year and is available at amazon.com. But according to what I read, its first publication was in 1883, not '81. Incuding a reference like this in a work of fiction is odd.
Ed Dittus points out that Red Dragon was written in 1981 and therefore Harris on the Pig, 1881 is likely a sly reference to Thomas Harris' previous book.
Ron Foster tells me that there is indeed and 1881 version of Harris on the Pig. See here.
