Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

by Joseph Westfall

  That one I do remember. Alexandre Dumas’s Great Dictionary of Cuisine, a favorite of Dr. Lecter’s that remained his companion throughout his incarceration. In all the discordance between the doctor and various legal authorities, only Starling recognized good taste as one of his defining characteristics.

  “Taste in all things was a constant between Dr. Lecter’s lives in America and Europe, between his life as a successful medical practitioner and fugitive monster” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 225).

  At the mention of Dumas, I wonder if The Man in the Iron Mask was another favorite. I take a seat opposite the doctor and envision the mask from the asylum, the metallic guard over his man-eating mandible.

  We’re in a traditional restaurant at the end of Nyhavn. It is cozy and smells of the sea, very Danish. When I see the menu I fear it’s too inexpensive to suit Dr. Lecter’s tastes. But he is gracious, and we decide on caviar with an assortment of herring. The atmosphere is congenial. I find myself saying, perhaps unwisely, “Dumas also says that cannibalism is a form of gluttony.”

  “He’s referring to the Roman god who devoured his own children. So ravenous that he overlooked his son Jupiter, whom the Greeks call Zeus.”

  Sigh of relief: references to cannibalism in ancient art and myths fascinate Dr. Lecter, who once served as a curator at the Uffizi Museum in Florence. He reminds me of the lecture he delivered there, where he reviewed anthropophagy as a theme in Dante’s poetry. “For Dante, as for the Greeks and Romans, it was a symbol of terrible, almost unimaginable betrayal,” he says. “A figure for the worst possible thing that could ever happen to anyone or that anyone could ever dream of doing.”

  We still have that ancient outlook. Eating human flesh remains unthinkable. Inhuman. Monstrous.

  “Wherever I go, that word echoes after me,” sighs the doctor, “often trailing a thoughtful and respectful silence.”

  He means the word monster. It’s what people say when they can’t think of any way to describe him that stands a chance of being accurate. Will Graham used that word; Jack Crawford used it. The popular press. Even to his so-called “peers in psychiatry, many of whom fear his acid pen,” Dr. Lecter was “something entirely Other” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 137). They too called him monster. It gave people an excuse to hunt him down like an animal, believing they could do to him whatever they wanted. “Our freedom is worth more than the monster’s life. Our happiness is more important than his suffering” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 174). Thus proclaimed Rinaldo Pazzi as he stormed the Uffizi. Such a bad idea.

  Well, Dr. Lecter may have cooked eleven people (that we know of), but he did it in style, the kind of style that anyone would envy. Sure, he’s a man-eating beast, and maybe monster looks good on him. But he’s also unmistakably civilized, a man of impeccable taste. The eminent Frederick Chilton called him “sophisticated,” “perceptive,” “not insensitive” (Harris, Dragon, p. 57). I have it on good authority that Dr. Lecter is “known for the excellence of his table” (Harris, Silence, p. 25). An “extraordinarily charming man, absolutely singular,” said a reputable lady who once knew him well: “Sort of made a girl’s fur crackle, if you know what I mean” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 300).

  Dr. Lecter is an inhuman monster. But at the same time, if you pretend he’s not just the kind of human being you want to be, you’re probably lying to yourself. And I promise it will hurt when the doctor shows you the truth. He’s everything we fear and everything we want to be. Human and inhuman and the shifting face of the shadowy threshold in between. He is both and neither, Us and Them.

  I say, “How in the world do you manage?”

  Inhuman Humans

  Strictly speaking, a monster isn’t human. (Can you imagine Godzilla and Smaug garnishing bantam egg pizza with arugula?) The word monster is also a metaphor for people who conduct themselves like wild beasts. Mothers-in-law. Serial killers like “the monster of Florence.” Frankenstein’s monster is a tricky one. Looks sort of human, acts not quite human. The press enjoys linking Dr. Lecter to Frankenstein’s creature.

  “Can you really be human and not human at the same time?”

  He replies, “Why didn’t you visit when I lived in Baltimore?”

  Meaning he won’t answer my question.

  Meaning the answer’s really yes, and Dr. Lecter thinks it should be obvious.

  We all have animals inside us. Monkeys’ genes, fishes’ genes. We have things inside us too, blunt objects like kidneys, livers, brains, which may be separated from the rest and eaten. A philosopher might propose that the nature of humanity is duality, two-sided: every human is both human and nonhuman. Not all philosophers believe this. Some find it hard to swallow. Others realize that being has way more than two sides to it. Like Dr. Lecter. He believes in chaos.

  He’s a perfect example of a nonhuman human. One side of him is a man-eating beast who follows his nose, listens like a bat, and pounces in silence. The other side is the civilized, disarming human being of boundless talent and epicurean taste. Dr. Lecter lives on the threshold of both sides: he is neither one of them, yet he exceeds the sum of both. This earns him several adoring fans. It also makes a lot of people want to lock him up and throw away the key.

  Those who hate him envy his extreme humanity. Or they find his inhumanity too bright a mirror.

  Elaborations of Carbon

  With the herring we have chopped red onions, pork rinds, and baby potatoes, and we plan on aquavit.

  “When the Renaissance explorers discussed anthropophagy,” says Dr. Lecter, “they saw in it a sort of threshold between the civilized and the beastly. They also made a distinction between sacrificial and nutritious flesh-eating. Once you start making distinctions, you find it hard to stop, you see. Just look at Aristotle.”

  I will spare you our debate on whether Aristotle thought up too many categories to describe reality. Suffice it to say that Dr. Lecter wins.

  Having creamed Aristotle, Dr. Lecter expounds on Renaissance thinkers’ distinction between eating human flesh as part of some religious ritual and adding it to the dinner menu.

  “The sacramental decapitation and some might say quasi-Eucharistic ingestion of a sacrificial victim is one thing, frying someone’s brain in crumbs of brioche quite another. What you give your god is valuable. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. The ingredients of an entrée, things you buy at the store—flour, butter, watercress—such things have no greater value than anything else. The worthy cuisinier can create a delectable experience out of whatever he happens to find in the nearest pantry.”

  A person eaten for dinner amounts to a chicken or a fava bean. The human being served with fava beans has no greater value than the fava beans. At least, consumed in sacrifice, we’d preserve the dignity of a well-intentioned gift. On Dr. Lecter’s table in tiny pieces with croutons, well . . .

  Do you hear that sound? Like a giant, angry bee next to your ear, dissonant enough to make you ill? That’s the sound of the philosophical autopsy saw. “We are nothing but elaborations of carbon,” says the doctor, and his tone implies that it doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

  Of course it doesn’t. He wrote it. “We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet” (Harris, Hannibal, p. 31).

  He means that we are nothing more. For now we’re alive and human, but all that is temporary, and anyway it’s nothing special. Genetically speaking, our bodies are almost indistinguishable from plants and animals. Humans’ contribution to our world is no more valuable than that of invasive weeds. The ability to recognize this humiliating fact is central to Dr. Lecter’s outlook. It’s what enables him to eat people with the same lack of concern with which the rest of us sink our teeth into cows and artichokes.

  The Red Dragon knew. “Lecter was capable of understanding that blood and breath were only . . . fuel,” he believed (Harris, Dragon, p. 89).

  Philosophers call it de-anthropocentrism: the idea that the human species is not
—and never was—the central, most important species on earth.

  This idea is gaining popularity but not without resistance, for the last thing anyone wants to be is one of those pathetic, comatose, shriveled batteries that all humans become in the Matrix films. Things that are technically alive but relate to the world as nothing more than lifeless ingredients and tools. In Dr. Lecter’s kitchen, that’s precisely what we are . . . right alongside the cucumbers. Being killed for food is an unsacred, meaningless death; which means that being fattened up for someone’s skillet is a meaningless life. For many people, meaningless death and enslavement are worse than death itself.

  “People hate you because you proved that dignity is meaningless.”

  “No one needs to prove it. Everyone knows already. They just pretend not to.”

  The blade of the saw offers bright and sharp reflections. Dr. Lecter is frightening because he’s everything we’d love to be and the face of the worst thing that could happen to anyone. As I sit with him, thinking, savoring the eggs of Scandinavian trout, I realize that the worst possible thing is happening everywhere. We are all cannibals and the bare life at the mercy of other cannibals.

  Bare Life

  Bare life is a philosopher’s term for a living thing that’s been abandoned by the group (or society) that it was supposed to depend on. The killing of bare life is never a crime or a sacrifice.

  Think of a horse living out its life in a slaughterhouse, unable to graze but fattened up on slops. She doesn’t have a name, she’s an ingredient for glue. Think of a human body, brain-dead, kept breathing till the doctors can harvest its organs. Or a prisoner at Guantánamo, stripped of his human rights.

  Anyone who killed such a being wouldn’t be punished. These things are alive, but their lives are forfeit. Physically, they live, but they lack the trappings that would make their lives worth fighting for (such as “human rights”). They are stripped bare of everything except their bodies, which anyone may treat as though they were soulless things—mere elaborations of carbon—maybe even turn them into some kind of fuel.

  For Dr. Lecter, Paul Krendler was bare life. Donnie Barber, Benjamin Raspail. This is how the rest of us treat all our food sources. In fact, in everyday human life, all nonhuman beings—as well as humans who are deemed unworthy of the species—are treated as bare life.

  A Philosophical Problem

  “Allow me to pose a philosophical conundrum,” Dr. Lecter says over smoked herring and raw yolk. “It’s a true story. British sailors lost at sea run out of food. They kill and eat one another. Substitute the sailors for American prospectors stranded in the mountains, and the story remains true. These people acquire the taste for man-flesh. They feel entitled to it. And when those who are left find their way back to civilization, not a single one of them is convicted of murder. If anyone stands trial, he is instantly acquitted. Why? Don’t look to the law, which is nothing but a colander. Only think of what we have discussed.”

  “That was an exception,” I say.

  “They were not savages. Their victims were people they knew. They were Christians. There was no sacrificial altar. Just a campfire if they were lucky . . . and whatever they could do for seasoning. By the way, the prospector discovered that the breasts of his male companions came with their own sweet tang, no marinade required.”

  “The situation was exceptional.”

  “Was it? These people weren’t insane.”

  “As I said, this was an extreme situation.”

  “And who made that decision, hmmm? Who decided that certain lives were worth more than certain others? Who decides when to strip a man down to his animal body so that he has no more worth than a tomato?”

  “Well, I mean . . . how do you decide?”

  Retorts don’t trouble Dr. Lecter. He’s not excited, simply laying out a problem like a lecturer at the front of a class.

  “Convenience,” he replies. “If someone is uncivil, I might do the world a favor. Then again, I may not. The world has never been so courteous to me.”

  In other words (I keep this to myself), his decision’s arbitrary.

  The point is Dr. Lecter’s “conundrum” has no morally good answer. Who does get to decide when a living thing is just a thing? Anyone. Anytime. Most of the time, our reasoning is far from airtight.

  You’d like to think you’re above that sort of behavior, wouldn’t you? Hmmm?

  But Dr. Lecter murmurs, “Upon such dread foundations reposes life as we know it.”

  I look at my herring and potatoes. The fishes’ little eyes are black and frozen open. The potatoes are only baby ones.

  Sovereign Foundations

  There’s a philosopher at work in Italy. His name is Giorgio Agamben, and I bring his name into our conversation because he studies political arrangements throughout history—all the different ways that earthlings try to coexist and preserve their favorite ways of life—and everywhere he looks, he finds someone who’s placed another in the position of bare life.

  The ones in the position of power: Agamben calls them sovereign. This word doesn’t just apply to kings and queens. Sovereigns are people who take it on themselves to decide that their own lives and perspectives are worth more than those of others. In other words, the term sovereign applies to anyone who decides that another living being is just bare life, something that it’s not a crime or a sacrifice to kill. For every bare life, there’s a sovereign that has made it so.

  Cosmopolitan Cannibals

  A man decides to kill a cow for food, kill a weed because it’s ugly, or kill a marlin for fun. The man is sovereign. So is the society that condones killing animals and plants. The animals and plants are just things: bare life.

  A group of people called “the justice system” decides that if one man kills another, the killer forfeits his life. Those who kill him can’t be punished. The condemned is bare life.

  A man named Hitler decides he only likes Christians. Jewish people are rounded up and shot, marched to the gas chamber, and variously tortured. All of it is legal. Hitler and the Nazis are sovereign, Jews bare life.

  The US military deploys drones to the Middle East, killing thousands of civilians while aiming at a few people who just might wish harm to the United States. No one will be punished for the deaths of those civilians. Compared to the belief that someone among them just might wish harm to the United States, those people’s lives have the value of ants’.

  When Dr. Lecter devours a man or woman, the doctor is sovereign, the victim bare life. In fact, from his point of view, everyone is bare life. That’s why he can eat people without (in his own auspicious opinion) endangering his good taste or entirely sane notions of right and wrong. But the rest of society has other ideas. Most people think Raspail and Krendler are worth more than mere ingredients, so whoever deprives them of their valuable existence deserves to be punished. That individual is the one who legally counts as bare life. No one would go to jail for killing Hannibal the Cannibal.

  Agamben finds this distinction in almost every political structure: wherever there are human beings interacting with other beings, there’s someone who’s decided that he, she, or they are sovereign and everything else bare life. Sovereigns consider themselves civilized, cultured, human—worthy of survival. Bare life is the opposite: monstrous, ignorant, inhuman—unworthy of the protection that society promises to those who live in it.

  Anyone can be a sovereign. Any sovereign can become bare life on the turn of a whim. Just because the wind changes.

  The Black Diamond

  Agamben says that the distinction between bare life, whose death is not a crime, and sovereigns, who decide when it’s all right for things to die that way, amounts to the distinction between the nonhuman and the human. That distinction is the foundation of contemporary politics. We choose random places in the sand and draw the line over and over. This side needs protection, so the Other side will have to die. Humans are always on This side. Nonhumans are always on the Other. Unworthy h
umans get thrown in with the nonhumans, with the rats and invasive bugs.

  But didn’t we just figure out—you and I, here in Copenhagen’s bright, chill noon—didn’t we just learn that the difference between human and nonhuman is never guaranteed? Didn’t Dr. Lecter show us that every human being is also and already nonhuman?

  Being human means being both human and nonhuman—in constant battle with oneself. Each of us takes that battle out into the world. We take it out on other people. The battle between the human and the inhuman within ourselves is the foundation of our relationships with other people, other species, and things on small and massive scales alike.

  You’re not up for dessert, are you? I’m not either. The aquavit and then we walk. We come to the ocean.

  We stand before the Black Diamond, the black-granite extension to Copenhagen’s Royal Library. It is a giant, gleaming mirror with sharp angles, black as death. Inside are the manuscripts of some of the world’s greatest philosophers.

  Dr. Lecter seems at first to enjoy our discussion of Agamben (who, by the way, writes most intelligently on werewolves).

  “And what do you think?” he says.

  “I think people like watching you going through the same struggle.”

  “Because we all secretly want to eat each other? How refreshing.”

  “No. Well. I can’t speak for other people.”

  “This Italian. You find his ideas humbling, even humiliating. You think that is somehow good for you. How magnanimous,” he says and loses interest altogether.

  Muzzled and strapped to a dolly like furniture or a crate of potatoes, Dr. Lecter may be nothing but bare life to agents of “the law”—but here, free and relaxed in this vibrant city, there’s no doubt that he is sovereign. So I’d just as soon not press him. It wouldn’t do to try his patience.

  2

  I, Cannibal

  JOSEPH WESTFALL