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Red Dragon Thomas Harris (1981)

     Red Dragon is a detective/thriller novel featuring Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, a brilliant but deranged psychiatrist who, after committing a series of murders, has been incarcerated at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Will Graham, an investigator formerly employed by the FBI, captured Lecter several years earlier but was both physically and psychically wounded in the process. Graham is lured out of retirement in order to solve another serial killing, this time involving the grisly murders of two families. The case proves difficult, and Graham is forced to rely on Lecter's assistance in order to understand the mind of the killer. He eventually succeeds, capturing a disfigured man named Francis Dolarhyde who calls himself "the Red Dragon" after William Blake's watercolor, "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Rays of the Sun." As Graham discovers, Dolarhyde works at a video transfer company, and has thus gained access to the personal details, as well as the security vulnerabilities, of the families he murders. Though most of the novel is devoted to the respective struggles of Graham and Dolarhyde, Lecter is the story's overwhelming presence and indeed Harris' lasting fictional legacy. The author's next three novels, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and HANNIBAL RISING, continue the story of Lecter's twisted dealings with law enforcement.

     Besides the descriptions of outrageously brutal murders, perhaps the most disturbing element of Harris' work is its insistence on the blurry line separating the law-abiding from the criminal. This troubled boundary is made explicit in the characterization of Graham, who is haunted by the feeling that he is fundamentally very similar to the killers he tracks. A fellow investigator, Jack Crawford, notices that Graham has a tendency to mimic the person he is speaking with, and that this happens "involuntarily," for "sometimes he tried to stop and couldn't" (Harris 4). Graham, according to Crawford, has "Imagination, projection, whatever" (10) an exceptional empathy that makes it possible for him to assume, often without wanting to, the malevolent perspectives of killers. Lecter, who is always sensitive to any opportunity for manipulation, repeatedly tries to unbalance Graham by reminding him of this affinity:

   "Do you know how you caught me?"
   Graham was out of Lecter's sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.
   "The reason you caught me is that we're just alike" was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.  (86)

Late in the novel, Lecter continues his taunting of Graham by insinuating in a letter that they both have taken pleasure in killing (earlier in his career, Graham had gunned down a killer named Hobbs in the line of duty):

   I want to help you, Will, and I'd like to start by asking you this: When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn't the act that got you down, was it?  Really, didn't you feel so bad because killing him felt so good?  (348)

What frightens Graham - and readers - is the difficulty in denying Lecter's claim. The ferocious dark side of the human mind cannot be wholly disowned by the novel's hero, who is also, apparently, the only hope the authorities have for catching those who have fully succumbed to evil.

     Dolarhyde himself is an intriguing mix of dark and light. Though he is detestable for having tortured and murdered whole families, Harris makes clear that the killer has been a victim himself, having suffered appalling childhood abuse. We see Dolarhyde's potential for some kind of redemption in his relationship with Reba McLane, a blind co-worker able to "see" beyond his disfigurement and social awkwardness. The tenuous love Dolarhyde finds with McLane holds the promise of delivering him from his grotesque calling, and he even tries to sever his connection to the lethal "Dragon," the dark power he worships, by gaining access to the Brooklyn Museum and devouring the original Blake watercolor itself. Dolarhyde is, we are to understand, controlled by monstrous urges but still recognizably human and all-too-similar to average people.

     Another key subplot in the novel concerns the sleazy tabloid reporter Freddie Lounds, who is eventually murdered by Dolarhyde for writing unflattering descriptions of him. Harris further explores here the blurry separation of the normal and the deviant, as he points out the dark similarities between serial killing and its serial mediation. The public's fascination with - and trivialization of - the lurid details of violent crime is linked to the killer's own perverse imagination. Just as Graham cannot help watching and re-watching the same videos of the slaughtered families that fascinated Dolarhyde, the public obsessively consumes the lurid details of violent crimes. The difference between ordinary and pathological spectatorship becomes very uncertain here, as all of us, as we read, are implicated in a fascination with the particulars of sadistic acts.

     The problem of this intimacy between the civilized and the barbaric is resolved, if a little uneasily, at the conclusion of the novel, when Graham considers that his own murderous impulses - when acknowledged, controlled, and put in the service of humanity - may be a necessary means for protecting civilized existence:

   Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too.
   He understood murder uncomfortably well, though.
   He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against.
   He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine.  (454) 

By the novel's end, it is this slim hope that Graham must cling to when contemplating his difference from those who give in to evil.

     Lecter, who occupies the imaginative centre of the novel, is a remarkably compelling character. His appeal has much to do with the way he combines extreme viciousness with a finely polished veneer of high-cultural sophistication. Trained as a psychiatrist to penetrate the human psyche, and knowledgeable about a seemingly infinite number of subjects, Lecter represents a sort of parody of the hyper-cultivated human: his murderousness is concealed behind all the markings of a civilized existence. By manipulating others and, when he can, literally consuming them, Lecter pursues his calling as an aesthete, forging an idiosyncratic artistic vision through violently transgressive acts. Even when confined in a heavily secure mental institution, with very limited access to resources, he is able to script a number of bloody dramas in the outside world. The most impressive of these involves his discovery of Graham's home address, and his goading of Dolarhyde into an attack on Graham and his family.

     While Dolarhyde's psychopathology is, to some extent, explained away as the product of an abusive childhood and physical disfigurement, Lecter remains by the novel's end a compelling mystery. Dr. Frederick Chilton, the chief of staff at the state hospital where Lecter is being held, calls his patient "a pure sociopath," though that tag hardly does justice to the complexity of the man. Chilton reveals that he had hoped to study Lecter and gain some insight into his inner workings, but laments that even after years of scrutiny, "I don't think we're any closer to understanding him now than the day he came in"  (77). This unfathomable quality is essential to Lecter's enduring allure. Though physically captured, he is somehow beyond the comprehension of all those who would seek to know what motivates him.

     Dolarhyde idolizes Lecter, and is himself an aspiring aesthete. Shunned by others for his physical disfigurement and social awkwardness, he cultivates a private world of beauty and esoteric wisdom. The name he has chosen for himself, which distinguishes him not just as a powerful figure but as a connoisseur of fine art, as well as his knowledge of technology and Asian languages, separate him from the ordinary mass of men. As Dolarhyde sees it, his personal growth - or "Becoming" - involves exercising his rare powers in a predatory campaign against those who oppose him. The basis of this campaign, which finds its inspiration in Lecter's forbidding example, is the assumption of a radical artistic license:

[…]  In Dolarhyde's mind, Lecter's likeness should be the dark portrait of a Renaissance prince. For Lecter, alone among all men, might have the sensitivity and experience to understand the glory, the majesty of Dolarhyde's Becoming.
   Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of the people who die to help you in these things - understood that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting. That they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrabble after, pleading.
   Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.  (121) 

In such a scheme, the world becomes this dark artist's canvass, its inhabitants mere material for the realization of his grand vision.

     A good deal of Harris' novel is concerned with the techniques used by investigators in tracking down Dolarhyde. Among these are the analysis of tooth marks made by the killer at the crime scenes, fingerprints left on the cornea of a victim, and a psychological profile of the killer delineating his secret psychological motivations. The FBI's massive technological apparatus is ultimately shown to be inferior, however, to the eerie empathy Graham is able to conjure for Dolarhyde. While institutional forces contribute to the capture of the killer, it is a remarkable individual, standing outside the official channels, who proves to be the decisive factor in the case.

     Harris' novel has been adapted into two films: the first, called Manhunter, appeared in 1986; the second, which kept the title Red Dragon, appeared in 2002 and starred Anthony Hopkins and Edward Norton.

 

    - Geoff Hamilton

 

                              Bibliography

 

Harris, Thomas. Hannibal Rising. New York: Delacourt Press, 2006.

---.  Hannibal. New York: Dell Publishing, 2000.

---.  The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martins, 1991.

---. Red Dragon. 1981. New York: Dell Publishing, 1990.

 

 

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