SENTIENT TIMES Feb/March 2001

Hannibal
Thomas Harris
Random House/Dell, New York, 1999
ISB: 0-440-22467-5

Reviewed by Gerry Cavanaugh

Hannibal, Thomas Harris's fascinating and larger-than-life creation, will soon make his star appearance in the local cineplex. It will be interesting to see how Scott Ridley, the director, manages the transition to the flat screen of this rich and nuanced character, and, for that matter, of the heroine, Clarice Starling who, at the end of the book, is Hannibal's equal or superior in every important way.

Those familiar with Harris's previous work, the truly scary novel and film, The Silence of the Lambs, know about "Hannibal the Cannibal" and his ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with FBI agent Starling, or, as Hannibal calls her, "the Warrior." In this sequel, the development of that relationship into something strange and wonderful and exactly right is one of the surprises of the book. I hope that the film remains true to the author's design in this regard.

In the book there is a generous portion enough of sadism, torture, and blood to satisfy the most jaded tastes. As Harris writes, "Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slabs the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?" Harris shows that he knows the answer to that question.

But what I fear may happen to the film is that choices will be made that excise the essential message from the story, namely, Harris's demolition of the moral, political, and economic bases of modern society. This demolition or subversion or, fancily put, this "transvaluation" of all values, occurs at many levels. For starters, sensible readers, understandably ambivalent when it comes to homicide, nonetheless end up rooting for the truly heroic Hannibal. And this is only partly because, in the scale and intensity of things today, Hannibal is restrained and temperate in the harm he does. He is an atheist, of course, but he recognizes early on "how his own modest depredations paled beside those of God who is in his irony matchless and in wanton malice beyond measure."

Harris points out that, as the world is, God must be assisted by mere mortals who, being religious, advance God's depredations for their own coincidental needs and purposes. This is exemplified in the person of Mason Verger, the sadistic scion of a brutal slaughterhouse dynasty, the monster who has devoted his life and fortune to capturing and killing Hannibal. Mason stands as the avatar of capitalist excess and absolute power, forces which so corrupt our institutions and dominate our life and times.

As a believer, Mason understands that he is entitled to lend God a more discriminating hand, which he does, joyously, sadistically, and without guilt. It is nice to have God on your side, the best available license to kill. And in this, as in so many other pathologies, America is a world leader. This is a place, Harris writes, "of acquisitiveness and ambition, where every such influence is felt more quickly, including the death of Jehovah and the incumbency of Mammon." In this world, even money-loving Orestes, the hardened murderer and child pornographer, hired by Mason Verger to film the torture and death of Hannibal, "is ever amazed at what money can buy."

Harris unfolds his story in a social context within which Hannibal is relatively noble and certainly restrained in his sins, but he is surrounded by amateur and professional practitioners of murder, sadism, treachery, corruption and wholesale slaughter, this last usually decked out in a fig leaf of claimed economic necessity, national security, patriotism or self-defense—as in the willing slaughter Iraqi children. In a world without God, with no intrinsic meaning to human life, a world of "Chaos," as Hannibal puts it, only a Nietzschean acrobat can see what end is momentarily up—which acrobat we must all attempt to be if we want to construct any sense at all of this modern, disenchanted, irrational world.

And, speaking of irrationalities, take the "War on Drugs," please. In the book, Clarice Starling herself finally recognizes her own direct and homicidal complicity in that madness. That recognition is her first liberating step on the path that is closed to those who remain inert and unconscious in their acceptance of the brutal processes of oppression and death we call "The New Global World Order." As Edward Deak writes, "The policies of the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse—the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and their multinational owners—are destituting and killing more people on a daily basis than did two world wars, and all the death camps of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao together, and in the name of the Almighty Money God who Liveth in Computers."

Harris is aware of this context. In this world system, we witness the ongoing destruction of entire cultures and ecosystems, the death and degradation of whole peoples, the subversion of hitherto honored institutions and professions—while still trusting in the integrity of, for example, the FBI and the Supreme Court. All while experiencing the ever-increasing subjection of all workers, the breakdown of the family, the corruption of our food supply, the banality of organized bureaucratic slaughter, corporate and political brutality and ruthlessness on a grand scale, and all of it accompanied by a savage mass media purveying a "popular culture" reeking with violence and pornography.

In such a context, and like his namesake, Hannibal stands as a heroic, profound and memorable outsider. Whatever Scott Ridley's motion picture does with all this, Thomas Harris has written a contemporary morality play that deserves to be read with care, with a full awareness of both the banal and the extraordinary evils that encompass us all.

Gerry Cavanaugh, a resident of Ashland, Oregon, is a retired professor of history and social theory.

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