Predator/Prey imagery, starring Dr. Lecter

Question 4: The stream of images and associations from the animal and insect world in this novel does not have an intrusive life of its own as Chandler's images do. Chandler's images (think of Carmen's sharp teeth and that weird hiss) grab our attention with their oddity. Harris's are less obvious and more integrated into the novel's flow.

Choose one such image or reference from this week's reading and analyze it, discussing how it works to reinforce the novel's themes or ideas about character.

One of the running images throughout Silence of the Lambs is of the predator/prey dichotomy. The novel opens on Clarice Starling, and already we have our first image that plays to both sides. The name Starling is no accident here; a starling is a common looking bird that itself is both predator and prey. The bird feasts on small insects and pests, yet it is susceptible to being eaten by hawks, owls, snakes, and cats. This is immediately reinforced by our first glimpse of her with “grass in her hair” (1). At her first meeting with Dr. Lecter, he emphasizes this vulnerable aspect of Starling’s character by referring to her regularly by that last name and even adding a “go back to school, little Starling” after he’s told her about eating the liver of a census taker (21). On that same page, he suggests to her that there is the potential for more in her by offering that she should string some “tiger’s eye” among the gold “add-a-beads” that cause her now to feel “less than”. Suggesting she add some tiger to herself shows that Lecter sees in her the potential for some predatory traits.

During a conversation in which Crawford tells Clarice he wants her to go talk to Lecter again, a clever play on words is inserted: “I figure you’re game” (116). In this sense, Clarice is not only prey, but the prey of Lecter. This metaphor is further explored more than once. Early on, when Clarice comes to see Lecter after walking through the rain, she first casts a shadow “on the bars of Dr. Lecter’s cage” (52). There is just a hint of the small bird walking carefully in front of the caged beast. He then politely offers her a towel, but it is not as simple as that. We are told, “Starling jumped when the food carrier rolled out… there was a clean, folded towel… she hadn’t heard him move” (53). Stealthy and quiet, Lecter is able to sneak up on her and startle her. Much later when she visits Lecter, he asks if she has injured herself as she is wearing a fresh band-aid. Clarice realizes that the cut is on her leg and is covered; Lecter cannot see it, but like the hungry predator he is, he can smell the blood (131).

More of this dichotomy shows up specific to Clarice with simple references like “from early life [she] had known much more than she wished to know about meat processing” (25). This demonstrates that she has the knowledge of the predator, but still holds the squeamishness of the prey. Another stronger reference to the predatory aspect of Clarice that Lecter saw immediately comes when she finds the link to the moths. As she is leaving the Smithsonian, Clarice thinks to herself, “I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears” (97). Though it is true she must hunt the moth that lives on tears, this is more a reference to the killer she must hunt who is living on the tears of his victims. This is perhaps the first clear image we see of Clarice as the hunter and not just the vulnerable hunted.

Despite this indication of strength and ferocity in Clarice, it seems her goal in being a predator is entirely to prevent other predators from harming innocent prey. As she explains to Dr. Lecter her recurring nightmare about the lambs screaming as they are being led to slaughter, he asks her if she thinks catching the killer and saving Catherine Martin will silence the lambs. Her immediate response is that yes, it will. The terror she finds in the defenseless, pure lambs being coldly destroyed translates to her feelings of being neglected, abandoned, and hurt as a helpless child. This translates into her need to hunt the predators before they can take any more victims.

Aside from the interesting imagery with Clarice and Lecter, there are many other images that bring to mind a predator/prey relationship. When the investigators realize the killer has a truck or van, it is because the victim they found has a burn “across the back of her calf” (86). The burn could have been anywhere, but Thomas Harris took the chance to put a burn on a calf. It may be part of a leg to some, but it is also a baby cow, and this image evokes a picture of branding the cow, burning its flesh. Later, the moth which is linked to the killer is classified by the specialists at the Smithsonian as an Owlet. Though this seems innocent enough, it is one more subtle way to identify the killer as a predator – specifically a nocturnal predator. This image seems fitting since we later see Jame Gumb walking through his basement in the dark with night vision goggles and staring down at his victim. He looks down at her observing that “the material is lying on her side, curled like a shrimp” (188). Adding to this image of small, helpless food, he thinks of how he will harvest “the hide” from her soon (189). The nocturnal predator angle brings us right back around to Dr. Lecter himself who we are told is awake “at night, always – even when his lights are off” (130).

In a novel about a killer who captures his victims and skins them, a killer who literally feeds on portions of his victims, and the chase of the killer before he can strike again it is no wonder that there is so much strong predator/prey imagery. Harris was obviously very deliberate in the names, images, and specific details he chose to include in the pages of his story. There are no accidents here – Harris intended for the reader to know this book is ultimately a tale about the relationship between predator and prey, the hunter and hunted, and what happens when one person is both.

Silence, Part 3, a shorter response

Question 3: The most influential and wide-ranging set of allusions and metaphors in the entire novel refers to change. Choose one instance from this week's reading and analyze how it works and what it has to do with this theme in the novel.

Walking deep through his extensive memories, Dr. Lecter recalls his last session with Raspail. In this session, Raspail goes into some detail about Jame Gumb and explains how Gumb came to crave change. After a turbulent childhood that including killing his grandparents at the age of twelve, Gumb never quite found himself. Raspail reports “he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill, and so angry” (157). In a moment of utter devastation – having lost his job, his lover, and having just killed someone again – Gumb searches his previous employer’s mail trying to find something he could steal.

Though there was nothing of any monetary value in any of the packages Gumb tosses, he did find a large box from Malaysia full of dead butterflies. This final defeat was almost more than Gumb could handle and “he sat on the bed with his head in his hands, butterfly colors on his hands and face, and he was at the bottom, just as we’ve all been, and he was crying” (158). Of course, when one reaches bottom, the only thing left to do is change; either one climbs back up or falls into a despair so dark they are completely lost. Gumb’s answer came to him as he sat there with tears streaming down his newly colored face.

“He heard a little noise and it was a butterfly in the open suitcase. It was struggling out of a cocoon that had been thrown in with the butterflies” (158). The entire process of the butterfly crawling out of the cocoon is an age old metaphor for change. This is the final stage in the butterfly’s metamorphosis – it was transformed from an ugly, unwanted caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly that is free to fly as far as its wings can carry it. Gumb opened a window and released the butterfly and as it flew into the air, “he felt so light… and he knew what to do” (158).

It was not long after that Gumb took his first piece of flesh from a victim and wore it like clothing. Raspail reported to Dr. Lecter that when Gumb killed Klaus, he made an apron out of him and wore it to try and regain Raspail’s affection. Gumb believed that by wearing someone else’s skin, perhaps he could change into something or someone else. If he could escape his own skin by wearing someone else’s, he could transform just like the butterfly had.

This box of dead butterflies ends up being a Pandora’s Box for Gumb. Everything is let out, everything in the box is dead, and he is left feeling even more despair than before he opened it in the first place. In the end, when he is sure he has reached the bottom of this pit of anger and negative emotion, he sees the newly changed butterfly, and in it, he sees hope for himself.

An evening with Dr. Lecter, part 2

Question 2: One thing of special interest in this novel is that here, finally, we have a female detective who exemplifies law enforcement. Starling isn't Nancy Drew and she's not Rachel Innes; she has all the weight of the FBI and the federal government behind her. Sort of. Harris's book purposely raises many issues about gender.

In any case, Chapter 12 is one of the book's richest chapters, both in how issues about women arise and in the other issues that come up. Please comment substantively on what you find of interest in this chapter. The more details, the better.

The first thing of note in the chapter is where Clarice is sitting in the police cruiser as the party makes its way to the funeral home. We are told she is riding “in the back of a sheriff’s department cruiser, [and] had to lean up close to the prisoner screen to hear the deputy at the wheel as he explained these things to Jack Crawford” (71). Clarice is being disregarded in many ways here; she is being transported like a prisoner and not even given the courtesy of the men trying to speak up so she can get pertinent information.

On the following page, as Clarice makes her way through the deputies that have gathered near the funeral home, we see her treated as little more than an object over which to have conversation. This is not unlike the way Buffalo Bill later talks about his female victims. One of the man casually comments to the other “I’d put her on like a Mark Five gas mask” (72). These are not the type of lewd comments they would make about their male co-workers, and were they not busy being pigs (joke fully intended), they would both realize these types of comments are inappropriate in a professional setting.

Interestingly, this dismissal of Clarice as even being human enough to treat with respect comes on the heels of the narrator allowing us to see that Clarice is nearly as clever as Lecter himself in some ways. She “looked at these men as the cruiser pulled into the lot, and at once she knew about them” (71-2). The paragraph continues detailing the specific details of the men’s lives Clarice could pick up just be looking at them once. She, like Lecter, has a powerful ability to read people in a split second, and this contributes greatly to her abilities as a detective.

Crawford deals a heavy blow to Clarice when he deals with the Sheriff. Rather than discuss the case openly, he tells the Sheriff that due to the nature of the crime, there are some things that would be better left “just between us men” (73). As she deals with her embarrassment, she glances at the picture of Saint Cecilia hanging on the wall. This is apt imagery as Saint Cecilia is listed in the Catholic Encyclopedia online as “virgin and martyr” and is also said to be an only child who sang to God as she was dying. Clarice is both virgin and martyr – virgin because of her youth and inexperience, martyr because she would rather be put through constant tribulation and persecution than give up on the FBI. As she finds herself in the midst of this agony, she simply looks at the image of the Saint and smiles – her own version of singing to God.

When Clarice realizes that if she wants the room cleared out so she can work, she will have to do it herself, she searches within her for a source of strength. What she uncovers is her mother pulling together and being strong after her father’s death. Though Lecter has already accurately pegged Clarice as “desperate not to be like [her] mother” (20), she still finds some comfort in that part of her history. Even after she finds her voice and clears the men out of the room, she is not seen as having any control or power. The way Crawford reflects on the situation shows Clarice as taking on little more role than a servant in the way that so many southern mothers seem to. “Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep watch and when the watch is over, was and dress the country dead” (75). As is said, this role is certainly one that is needful and perhaps even respected some, but it is not powerful.

As three officers arrive at the end of the chapter, Clarice “was interested to see how fast he [Crawford] got them into a male bonding mode” (82). The card passing, hand shaking, smiles all around, “good ol’ boy” routine seemed like nothing more than an exercise in masculine posturing to Clarice until she realized “it worked on her too” (82). It is not long after this realization she is perhaps not set apart from the men as much as she has felt previously that she is able to stand up and confront Crawford about his actions in the funeral home (87).

Oh, my dear, sweet Dr. Lecter - Part 1

We've just begun Silence of the Lambs with my favorite professor, and I simply can't resist posting here about it. I have the biggest nerd crush on Hannibal Lecter. Sure, it could be the cannibalism thing, but I am more inclined to think I find him sexy because of his intellect, the fact that he is "polite to the last" (21), kills people simply for having bad manners, and has a remarkable sense of dignity.

Regardless, it's question and answer time, boys and girls. A little quid pro quo - my teacher gives me something and I give her something back.

Question 1: At the bottom of p. 21 (Ch. 3, if your page numbers differ), Lecter lectures Starling, saying, "You can't reduce me to a set of influences. You've given up good and evil for behaviorism....Can you stand to say I'm evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?"

Why does the answer to this question matter?
What are the implications of choosing "influences" over "evil"?

When Dr. Lecter brings up the concept of evil to Clarice for the first time, he is forcing her to complicate her world view. He sees her as a simple woman with simple thoughts and he wishes to test her – to challenge her. In reply to Lecter’s question of whether or not she believes him to be evil, Clarice says, “I think you’ve been destructive. For me it’s the same thing” (19). He then reminds her that storms, fire, and hail are all destructive, so by her argument, these natural acts of weather must be evil. He further points out an example of a church collapse that killed 65 elderly woman and asks if this was evil, since clearly it was destructive. Lecter asks Clarice, “Was that evil? If so, who did it? If He’s up there, He just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans – it all comes from the same place” (19).

Lecter is Clarice to acknowledge that God (if he exists) has created the things she considers evil just as he has created the things she considers pure. Further, he draws attention to the fact that these things are not so different after all – they are a part of the world’s strange duality; the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the gentle and the violent all have the same origin. The theory that evil and good are somehow completely separate does not work for Lecter, nor should it since they can only be defined as binary opposites to one another. He is especially put off by the fact that Clarice has “everybody in moral dignity panties – nothing is ever anybody’s fault” (19).

This idea of “moral incontinence”, of something happening to Lecter to make him turn out the way he did, implies that behavior can be explained away by the experiences and influences of a person’s life. This would mean nobody was responsible at all for their actions – there is no thinking involved, no need to choose, and that what a person does is not their own, but some predestined outcome decided by their past. Lecter would find this idea insulting as he takes great pride in his intelligence and his skill. He feels that he is doing the world a great service by consciously choosing to rid it of rude people as, after all, “discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to [him]” (22).

The larger problem for Clarice however, is that she is faced with the reality the world is not as clean cut as she has chosen to believe. Things are not black and white or even shades of gray, but have the potential for real color. Up until now, Clarice was able to believe that things are either good or bad, but with Lecter, she has no choice but to reconsider other options.

Whether or not she would like to admit it, Lecter’s message has gotten into Clarice’s subconscious at least a little, because later when she is discussing moths at the Smithsonian, she says “they’re destructive” (96). Though the moth is in some way associated with “evil” since it is being linked directly to Buffalo Bill, it does not seem Clarice thinks of a moth itself as evil although she said initially destructive was the same thing.

More Mumbo Jumbo

And here (and possibly even more confusing), is question number 2 on the end of Mumbo Jumbo:

This final part of the book provides a very detailed (and typically anachronistic) mythology of JG's roots.

So, what interests you in this account? Do you see any connections to earlier parts of the novel? Are any of the underlying issues clarified by this section? Who is the ostensible narrator of the history told here?

Beginning in Chapter 52 of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo there is an odd yet detailed account of the origins of Jes Grew and its destroyers. This story begins with a tale of Egyptian gods Osiris and Set. Osiris is the god of the underworld, but also a giver of life. Set, his brother, is appropriately known as the god of the desert – a dry, barren place. Osiris is, to one degree or another, patient zero in the Jes Grew epidemic. His brother is the initial destroyer of the “disease”. This all makes perfect sense until Reed inserts into the story facts about World War II, the Korean War, and the Indochina War. To complicate matters more, he adds Moses to the story of the Egyptian Gods.

This meshing of entirely different worlds indicates that Reed thinks religious texts are ultimately made up anyway. Moses, who the Atonists and other Christians would believe to have been real, is seen here as only as physically real as figures from Egyptian myth. They co-exist in Reed’s world. If religious texts are simply created from myth and then recorded in a text, they are no different than a fictitious novel. This tears religion down to the level it needs to be before Reed can insinuate that art is religion, or as he alludes on page 168, Rock’n’Roll is religion.

One thread that remains common in the history Papa LaBas is relating throughout these pages is the idea of the more conservative citizens trying to keep the more open-minded down. Set takes such drastic measures to remove this perceived threat that he kills his brother. We then see Moses as a parallel to Hinckle Von Vampton. First, like Von Vampton, Moses secretly sneaks into the places where Jes Grew is thriving. Later, he is recruited by Set to try and bring down the movement and he results to lying and working within Jes Grew to try and stop Jes Grew. It is all very cyclical like the time and plot in the novel, but ultimately, it demonstrates the traditionalists will stop at nothing to protect their power and their “right way”.

The beauty in the idea of Jes Grew is that it “has no end and no beginning… it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left… there is really no end to life, if anything goes it will be death” (204). Jes Grew is life. It is real living – emotion, art, sex, entertainment – something other than just going through the motions every day. This line insinuates that the joy and spark in the people will never die. The political and social hegemony will always have to continue the fight if they want to prevent outbreaks, but in the end, it cannot be stopped. If anything finally disappears, it will be the idea of boring traditional life.