That is why “Hannibal” is Thomas Harris’ best novel
Is Ridley Scott a good director? Not everyone. The author of these lines included. But in his cinematic implementation of “Hannibal”, Scott undoubtedly did a lot right. He understood Thomas Harris’ humor. Nobody thinks about the general by name Hannibal. But on the cannibals. This Hannibal has become a pop star. A jetsetter. An adventurer, a hero. “The silence of the lambs” was great, the film adaptation might be even greater. Scott and his lead actor Anthony Hopkins have recognized that they can only surpass the thrill of the “Lämmer” if they Lecter Larger Than Life make.
And they succeeded. Like a James Bond, like an Indiana Jones travels Hannibal. Across America, and initially in Italy. He knows no hurry. From New York he sends exhibition catalogs to his cousin in France, the “famous painter Balthus”. And with this minority in Thomas Harris’ “Hannibal”, we are even aware that there are other lecters in this world.
But Hannibal doesn’t really travel. He is hunted for the first time. Even if that has no influence on its pace. The multimillionaire Mason Verger, his former patient, wants to grab him. The doctor had made him mutilate himself in the drug frenzy and accuse his skin to eat the dogs. Now he is tied to the bed. And everyone who sees him is frightened to death.
Mask of a monster
In the “Hannibal” film, Gary Oldman embodied the perverse tyrant Verger. He has children tears mix in his Martini, the children cry. Previously, the little ones brought into his care was explained that they did not see their parents again. Oldman also demonstrated the meaning of the absurd. He, who in the nineties together with Dennis Hopper the field of Overacting Sovereign, disappeared completely behind the mask of a monster.
The first part of the novel, a secret stay in Florence, starling degradation after a miserable use and the planning of the Häscher Verger, are certainly the most breathtaking, which has put Thomas Harris on paper so far. Hannibal, one of the most wanted criminals in the world, is of course at the destination of his dreams. In the Italian art metropolis. He camouflages himself as a “Doctor Fell”, curator of the Capponi library. The first foreigner to get the job over – murderous – detours, and also an outstanding pianist, whose tones sway through the palace of the living in the night, over the empty cobblestones.
“Here he found his peace that he wants to preserve,” one of the so many great descriptions begins. “He hardly killed someone during his stay in Florence. You can look off from his predecessor.”
Is Dr. Does a person even lecter?
For “Hannibal”, Thomas Harris has no trouble to hide his pride in one of the most famous villains of pop culture. Hannibal, The Superheld: “His ego, as well as his intelligence quotient and the degree of his thinking ability, are eluded by conventional evaluation criteria. Within the analytic guild, there is no agreement on whether Dr. Lecter can be described as a person at all.”
It is easy to imagine how much fun Thomas Harris must have had in his research in Florence. Like him, from a tourist perspective, suspected a romantic murder in every winding alley. We immediately know who “Dr. Fell” recognizes Lecter’s gang, his size, his way of speaking. But Thomas Harris treats himself to the luxury of presenting him as “Dr. Lecter” for the first time on page 157 (German translation).
Hannibal plays with us: All his hunters fail on him, dirty petty criminals, and the top criminals of all things become a Florentine commissioner himself, who uses the dirtyest methods, and which Thomas Harris with the fateful – motivation, which shapes so many of his figures. The desire to become the best of his family tree. A family debt to counteract the inevitability of a certain biographical development.
Sacrifice for Scheitan
Inspector Pazzi So identifies Dr. Fell as Dr. Lecter. But he doesn’t come close to him. Thomas Harris wonderfully uses those associated with Italy around mafia and Catholicism. Pazzi is cursed because he is in debt the death of a thief that he applied on Lecter. The gypsy Esmeralda knows about this guilt. “With eyes as black as Kalamata olives, she looked deep into his eyes. ‘You sacrificed Gnocco Scheitan,’ she said calmly. ‘Gnocco is dead’. Esmeralda bent up to the front, as if she leaned over a chicken on her chopping board, and spat on Pazzis shadow.” A sentence apparently like from a triad novel. Like from a robber history like Karl May and on the wrong continent. And somehow one of the many immortal descriptions in this big fairy tale.
But it’s not really about Pazzi. Who actually masters whom, Hannibal Clarice or Clarice Hannibal? Thomas Harris lets us think aloud in “Hannibal” when he puts the funniest sentence in his mouth to the angry and impatient Mason. The Lecter hunter wants to see results and advises himself with his profiler: “Dr. Doemling, he wants to fuck with her or kill her, or does he want to eat her or what?” Everything that makes the relationship between Killer and Agentin.
But it is a little more complicated than that, there are no simple answers. Hannibal hopes to find his sister Mischa, who died in childhood, in the FBI agent. The girl was eaten in the Russian winter of the Second World War by starving Nazi collaborators, the young lecter could not help her.
Mischa, a main character in the later novel “Hannibal Rising”, occurs here for the first time (which would contradict the rumor that cinema producer Dino de Laurentiis indirectly forced Harris to continue, rather Hannibal’s life story seemed to be interpreted). It is the moments of thoughts to the sister that make Hannibal more human. He watches a rare representation of his feelings, screaming from sleep at night, and “Mischa” is also his only word when the anesthetic arrow of Verger’s Häschern hits him.
How realistic is it that the great analyst Hannibal Lecter tries due to childhood trauma to blame the past by turning Clarice Starling Mischa out of? You have to be able to get involved with such fantasies. Clarice knows that he may only live her alive as long as he hangs this illusion afterwards, and she takes her chance, of which he appeals to an alleged Oedipus complex: “Have you ever had the feeling that you had to leave your sister’s breast? Starling has worked out two advantages over the beast. Unpredictability and independence.
Rumor has it wanted to play Jodie Foster, who embodied Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs” and received an Oscar, not to play in “Hannibal” due to brutal violent scenes. But it may also have been these implications of prohibited sexuality that were uncomfortable.
Turn back
It is a sign of Hannibal’s big weakness, but also an engine of his life: the desire to recall the sister. He studies the string theory and quantum physics, wants the reversal of the time arrow, back to the sewage pit in Lithuania, where the girl’s Mischa girls are shittled. Perhaps you have to be theoretical physicists to understand Lecter’s meaning or nonsense, but let’s trust Harris’ research that at least the theories are only a little more than imagination.
Lecter wants to believe in Stephen Hawking’s idea that the universe could stop and instead developed back that Hannibal can hug his Mischa again because the past returns. Lecter demonstrates this on the cup that is crushed on the ground. Just healing, then crushed into a number of pieces – the “increase in disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future by giving time.”
But it is not just Hannibal and Clarice who, in his-chronological point of view, gives Thomas Harris a duly farewell. The mentor of the FBI agent, Jack Crawford, is often regretted by Clarice together with the cannibal, the oldest figure in the cosmos of the writer, and like Lecter since the “red kite”. Crawford is a thoughtful bureaucrat, puts its light under the bushel, so Starling has to verbalize it again for all of us: Crawford has built up the legendary FBI department for behavioral research (homely at the David Fincher series “Mindhunter”).
Crawford is just a visitor in this horror world full of cannibals, skin overstular and butcher, he does not live in her. He is the man who goes home in the evening. In the end, Crawford has become widower. When he sees his own end, the next heart attack, he makes the touching decision. “Instead of calling an ambulance and going through everything again, he looked for a consolation in the fact that he rolled on the side of the bed where his wife used to be.”
… and Hannibal Lecter does not remain. Why did nobody managed to defeat him? “Indians don’t know any pain,” is the name of the saying, but sometimes the thought of the Palace of Memory, which hides everything. What was discussed in the Feuilleton, even from Harald Schmidt, about this construction at the end of the nineties!
Lecter not only falls back on the memory palace, a mnemotechnology, to access his gigantic knowledge at any time (for it the thought building is as large as the Topkapi Palace), he also helps him to prevent pain. Under the hardest torture, he cools his forehead on the imagined, cool stone of a statue in the palace. His mind defeats the body.