Review of Hannibal [SPOILERS]
Fiona Webster
Derek is apparently obsessed with:
> breast feeding of psychos
<ahem> "Breast feeding" is not an accurate description of that scene,
Derek. Not even close. Let's talk realism now: that is *one* scene
in the book that *is* realistic about how adults behave.
(How old are you anyway? Have you never sucked someone's nipple
since your infant days? Has no woman--or man, for that matter--ever
opened their shirt and presented a nipple to your mouth during
foreplay? With or without chocolate syrup or fine wine on it? <grin>)
DASBABY writes:
> Honestly I didn't read that scene as a breast feeding scene
> but as Clarice giving herself to him - i.e., the first time they
> had sex.
Yes, of course, and what would be a more obvious, not to mention
enticing, way to signal willingness for more sexual intimacy--to a man
who is obsessed with oral pleasures--than to offer your tit to his
mouth? Duh...
--as my girlhood friend Joan used to say, "Some people's children..."
Fiona
P.S. Want my opinion? He should've left out the LSD entirely. I
sense he didn't trust his development of Clarice's character, and
felt the reader would object if she was of sound mind and body for
that scene. I would have liked her to go there *without* the big-time
drug--at least not after the recovery-cum-psychoanalysis phase. She
had it in her. That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
edge to her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman.
Michael S. Morris
Fiona writes:
That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
edge to her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman.
And that's where I object---the inhuman edge isn't
really all that intriguing.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Fiona wrote:
That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
edge to her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman.
I said:
And that's where I object---the inhuman edge isn't
really all that intriguing.
Dinner-time conversation made me realize that I
was being very parabolic with this, and that I
probably owe it to you to elaborate.
I haven't read _Hannibal_, and I'm not sure
that I ever want to. But, I guess I see this Lecter
character as descended from a long line of literary
anti-heros---the monster in Frankenstein and Manfred and
the under-ground man and Gide's Immoralist
and Camus's Stranger, and, most importantly
perhaps, Milton's Satan.
A couple of years back I sat in on a course
on Dante taught by this really neat
fellow over in Butler's history department.
I remember that Scott worked hard to get his class
to appreciate Dante's Satan when we reached the
center of the Inferno. And he began
with a quote from T.S. Eliot about how Milton's
Satan had forever supplanted Dante's, and then
Scott commented that this was not the least of
the reasons he didn't like Eliot. Dante's Satan
is a giant, deformed and ugly, frozen in a
lake made from out of all of the tears of
the world. He has three mouths, and chews
arch-traitors Brutus and Cassius and Judas
in them, gagging thereon and weeping himself
thereby. Milton's Satan, of course, is a dashing
pirate, seductively appealing, and powerful---
"Better to reign in Hell than serve in heaven."
I guess my wonder is whether Hannibal Lecter
isn't the latest reincarnation of Milton's
Satan, a romanticized and (since romanticization
is only the first step) psychologized portrait of
evil. I also wonder whether evil itself---the
dark side, or the bitter edge, or the inhuman---
isn't more like Dante told it: icy, tearful,
impotent, alone, and ugly (banal in short).
How intriguing or interesting is this
slip-sliding into the inhuman? I mean
of course it might be intriguing
or interesting from a personal or academic
point of view, but is *it* really interesting,
or is rather the interest we afford it
and focus on it a literary creation of
our own, of the modern world's---a kind of
denial of the banality of evil, of Dante's
picture of evil? Perhaps by making evil seem
splendid and sexy, we think to excuse our own
seduction?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Clark N. Hobbie
I'm curious why you feel that that Clarice "...has that bitter edge to
her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman." I would say from the
psychoanalysis stuff that comes before and then during the "brain eating
scene" that she has a significant amount of resentment and anger locked
up inside her, but this is a far cry from the deliberate and calculated
cruelty that Lecter so casually tosses out. Is there some scene in one
of Harris's books that you feel illustrates your belief?
Clark
Fiona Webster wrote:
(Stuff about the scene where Clarice & Hannibal have sex deleted)
> P.S. Want my opinion? He should've left out the LSD entirely. I
> sense he didn't trust his development of Clarice's character, and
> felt the reader would object if she was of sound mind and body for
> that scene. I would have liked her to go there *without* the big-time
> drug--at least not after the recovery-cum-psychoanalysis phase. She
> had it in her. That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
Fiona Webster
> That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
> edge to her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman.
Mike Morris replies:
> And that's where I object---the inhuman edge isn't
> really all that intriguing.
Uh, I often have trouble figuring out what exactly your
verbs are pointing to, Mike, and this is a good example
of how I get confused. Do you object to my description of
Clarice Starling, to the notion that Clarice's inhuman edge
is what makes her intriguing, or to the general implication
that an inhuman edge makes someone intriguing? (I'm sure
there are at least a couple of other possibilities there...)
Hey, and now that I think of it, I didn't say anything
about "the inhuman edge." Now I'm *really* confused. What
is *the* inhuman edge, Mike?
--not faking it: I really do get befuddled
by Mike's language sometimes,
Fiona
John Kingdon
>sense he didn't trust his development of Clarice's character, and
>felt the reader would object if she was of sound mind and body for
>that scene. I would have liked her to go there *without* the big-time
>drug--at least not after the recovery-cum-psychoanalysis phase. She
I can't help but disagree. Clarice may have her share of bitterness
and resentment locked up inside (and with good reason), but there's
nothing at all to suggest that it's beyond normal limits.
Clarice is set up in many ways as Lecter's polar opposite. Consider:
1. She's a killer, but in the best possible way. She kills without
hesitation, but also without passion, exercising judgment and
discretion. After, she experiences regret and a certain amount of
self-doubt, but she is the master of both emotions. Lecter, by
contrast, kills with nothing but passion, and without regret or
questioning after.
2. One of Clarice's touchstones, as Harris makes very clear, is that
she cannot abide suffering. She is without cruelty. Lecter may
or may not technically be a sadist, but he is certainly something
very close. He is the embodiment of cruelty.
3. To put it bluntly, she's sane and he isn't, despite both Lecter's
and Harris' attempts to argue otherwise. Sure, she has a tendency
to adopt father figures and then live for their approval. What's
never addressed is the argument that this is an entirely rational
behaviour, provided that one chooses the father figure with care.
Clarice's choice of Crawford is beyond reproach.
It's also clear, from her conversations with Crawford, that she's
under no illusions about Lecter. Insight, she understands, is not
empathy. Given all this, I find it unimaginable that an unbrainwashed
Clarice would become Lecter's mistress.
I thought the ending of the book was a betrayal. Not because it
wasn't happy (*), not because Clarice didn't "get her man" and
thereby win back her rightful place and prestige in the FBI,
but because an enormous amount of buildup went without payoff.
The main source of tension, the central question, is whether Clarice
has matured, or grown, or completed herself sufficiently to face
down Lecter at their inevitable confrontation. Can she retain
certain essential parts of her character without thereby making
herself vulnerable to Lecter's manipulation? The melee at Verger's
was a perfect laboratory for answering this question. And instead,
all we get for the Clarice/Lecter reunion is one exchange, i.e.
"Behave or I'll kill you." "Understood." (paraphrased, obviously).
She is then knocked unconscious, and by the time she is permitted
to fully awaken, Clarice Starling as we knew her no longer exists.
So what is Harris trying to say with this ending? Neo-Clarice is
obviously built from elements present in the old Clarice, so is
he revisiting his old there-is-darkness-within-everyone theme?
If so, it's unnecessary and adds nothing to what he's previously
said on the subject. Is he trying to suggest that neo-Clarice is
somehow a more complete and happy person than the Clarice we knew?
I don't buy that, and I doubt that the original Clarice would
either. Is he saying that Lecter has been healed to some extent
and that the total destruction of Clarice Starling was the price
for that--or alternatively, that Lecter in the act of altering
Clarice was unable to avoid altering himself in the process?
That's the most intriguing choice, and I prefer it, but I'm
unconvinced.
Or is the ending simply what it appears to be: Harris has
given his monster the victory. The man who used to collect
parts of fallen churches has completed his collection with
the wreckage of Clarice Starling. If this is the case, I
find it a bit infantile. I can't help but suspect Harris
of choosing this ending purely to shock his readers, much as
I can't help but suspect him of deliberately writing an
unfilmable-as-written novel in order to annoy Hollywood: "Film
THIS, suckers!"
I should add that having recently watched the entire run of
_Cracker_ (the British originals, of course), Harris' examination
of the evil within us now strikes me as just a little shallow.
The clash between Dr. Fitzgerald and Dr. Lecter can only take
place in my head, but I'm convinced that Fitz would win.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Comments?
JDK
* Not that Harris is incapable of happy endings. I was frankly
amazed that the senator's daughter made it out of _Silence_
not only alive but pretty much unscathed. And Clarice ended
that book with both professional acclaim and the possibility
of romance, both of which Harris was careful to take away at
the beginning of _Hannibal_.
Ray Girvan
> f...@oceanstar.com (Fiona Webster) writes:
>> P.S. Want my opinion? He should've left out the LSD entirely. I
>> sense he didn't trust his development of Clarice's character, and
>> felt the reader would object if she was of sound mind and body for
>> that scene. I would have liked her to go there *without* the big-time
>> drug--at least not after the recovery-cum-psychoanalysis phase.
> Sure, she has a tendency to adopt father figures and then
> live for their approval. What's never addressed is the
> argument that this is an entirely rational behaviour provided
> that one chooses the father figure with care. Clarice's
> choice of Crawford is beyond reproach.
It's no doubt commonplace, but I see it as neurotic rather than
rational (in Transactional Analysis terms, it's seeking out a
Child-Parent relationship). I took Harris to be highlighting the
risk: a trait that makes her latch onto Crawford, who doesn't exploit
the role, equally makes her home in on someone unsuitable like
Lecter, who does.
> It's also clear, from her conversations with Crawford, that she's
> under no illusions about Lecter. Insight, she understands, is not
> empathy. Given all this, I find it unimaginable that an unbrainwashed
> Clarice would become Lecter's mistress.
>
> I thought the ending of the book was a betrayal ...
> She is then knocked unconscious, and by the time she is permitted
> to fully awaken, Clarice Starling as we knew her no longer exists.
What I find most unsatisfying is that it goes against all the
expectations (and conventions) that important characters resolve
their internal conflicts or achieve personality change under their own steam.
OK, conventions are there to be broken, but this seems an
especially weak outcome when Starling has been built up as a strong
personality. Whether she, like Will Graham, learned to adjust to her
dark side, or chose to embrace it, I'd have liked to see it as her
active decision. Switching her to this passive role is total bathos:
"with one bound, Starling was changed".
Ray
--
ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk +++ Technical Author +++ Topsham, Devon, UK
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rgirvan/ +++ The Apothecary's Drawer
paschal
On Sun, 27 Jun 1999, Michael S. Morris wrote:
> icy, tearful, impotent, alone, and ugly (banal in short).
That's what I mean when I say these kinds of
books make me feel as bad for the criminal as for the
victim - it's overwhelmingly sad for me, to think of
someone being so locked-out and locked-away from simple
human pleasures and happiness...to think of all that
they can't have or know, and of how stunted they are
as people...
-P.
Michael S. Morris
Silke says [re Dante's Satan]:
Hm. No inhuman edge there, or what's
your point? Aren't you saying now
that Lecter and Milton's Satan and
Mephistopheles etc. are _too_ human
rather than not human enough?
No. I'm saying that the trend since
Milton has been to portray evil as
increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
wondering aloud whether evil ever
really is either sexy or seductive,
I guess.
Silke:
I think the modern description on
evil is based on the idea of temptation
more than on psychology (that's a bit later, imo).
This seems to me a paraphrase of what I
said, including the evolution from romance
to psychology.
Silke:
Dante's Satan has little to recommend him.
Umm, yes and no. He is not seductive or
tempting, if that is what you mean. But
that was my whole point. And that is what my friend
was suggesting, and I would agree, is artistically
quite deliberate in Dante. And, furthermore, it has
everything to recommend it as a true picture of
evil---tears and loneliness, frozen into a
narcissistic mirror. Nothing sexy or seductive
or tempting or romantic or psychologized
"to make it interesting"---to make it seem
intriguing or potent, when it *is* neither.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Hm. No inhuman edge there, or what's
your point? Aren't you saying now
that Lecter and Milton's Satan and
Mephistopheles etc. are _too_ human
rather than not human enough?
I said:
No. I'm saying that the trend since
Milton has been to portray evil as
increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
wondering aloud whether evil ever
really is either sexy or seductive,
I guess.
Silke:
Sure, but you also said you didn't
find the "inhuman" very interesting and
then proceeded to offer [Dante]'s vastly
inhuman _Satan_ as an alternative.
No, it was that Dante's beast
is not "interesting" or "intriguing".
It is the very opposite of an attempt
to portray him as attractive or
tempting. My point was that this
might tell the truth (about evil)
better than the narcissisistic arc
of the anti-hero in modern fiction
tells it.
Silke:
I think the modern description on
evil is based on the idea of temptation
more than on psychology (that's a bit later, imo).
I said:
This seems to me a paraphrase of what I
said, including the evolution from romance
to psychology.
Silke:
I disagree; it seems that one might
want to explain why evil is being
done, and portraying it as attractive
is a tentative answer that is not
necessarily psychological.
But it is narcissistic, and that seems to
me to lead (has led historically) into
the psychological.
Silke:
Dante's Satan has little to recommend him.
I said:
Umm, yes and no. He is not seductive or
tempting, if that is what you mean. But
that was my whole point. And that is what my friend
was suggesting, and I would agree, is artistically
quite deliberate in Dante.
Silke:
That sounds to me like a rather
ideological reading.
I don't know what you mean here
by "ideological". It strikes me as
an intensely *appreciative* reading
of Dante. It leads to recognizing
resonance after resonance in Dante.
Silke:
A bit like showing an overflowing
ashtray to keep people from smoking.
So, you are taking this as merely a cautionary
kind of tag-ending "moral"? Well, let me put it
this way---someone said that Hannibal at the
anthropophagous feast says "Pity has no place
at this table." I would suggest that pity and
compassion and an immense grief have place in
the 34th Canto.
Silke:
Perhaps effective, but it won't get you to
understand the pleasures of nicotine.
But, do you think we are really deficient
in our understanding of the pleasures of nicotine?
Or of sex? Or of blowing away enemy alien monsters
with a shotgun? Or of exercising cruelty in
bloodthirsty ways? Do you think that dwelling
on the *temptations* involved really helps us
*understand* anything?
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Fiona:
Uh, I often have trouble figuring out what exactly your
verbs are pointing to, Mike, and this is a good example
of how I get confused.
Hopefully, I have elaborated for you what it is
I meant.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
Silke said [re Dante's Satan]:
Hm. No inhuman edge there, or what's
your point? Aren't you saying now
that Lecter and Milton's Satan and
Mephistopheles etc. are _too_ human
rather than not human enough?
I said:
No. I'm saying that the trend since
Milton has been to portray evil as
increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
wondering aloud whether evil ever
really is either sexy or seductive,
I guess.
Silke:
Sure, but you also said you didn't
find the "inhuman" very interesting and
then proceeded to offer [Dante]'s vastly
inhuman _Satan_ as an alternative.
I said:
No, it was that Dante's beast
is not "interesting" or "intriguing".
It is the very opposite of an attempt
to portray him as attractive or
tempting.
Silke:
"Interesting and intriguing" is
not synonymous with "attractive or
tempting," though.
The shift was deliberate. But it
was a shift from deliberately quoted
forms of "interesting" and "intriguing".
In other words, *I* think that it is
the attraction of evil, its temptations,
that is what people find "interesting"
or "intriguing".
I wrote:
My point was that this
might tell the truth (about evil)
better than the narcissisistic arc
of the anti-hero in modern fiction
tells it.
Silke:
And you are sure that Dante's Satan
isn't a selling point in the
_Inferno_?
Huh? I am sure that he is not
attractive or tempting.
Silke:
I think the modern description on
evil is based on the idea of temptation
more than on psychology (that's a bit later, imo).
I said:
This seems to me a paraphrase of what I
said, including the evolution from romance
to psychology.
Silke:
I disagree; it seems that one might
want to explain why evil is being
done, and portraying it as attractive
is a tentative answer that is not
necessarily psychological.
I said:
But it is narcissistic, and that seems to
me to lead (has led historically) into
the psychological.
Silke:
Why is it narcissistic?
It dwells on the self and the self's reasons.
Silke:
If people choose to do evil, they must
do so for a reason -- just possibly the
attractiveness of certain kinds of evil is
that reason.
Possibly. Or, possibly not.
Silke:
Why not allow for that possibility?
I see no reason not "to allow for
that possibility". Still, when the whole
arc of modern literature seems to
admit of no other possibility, one gets
to wondering whether it isn't so much
allowing for such a possibility as
suppressing any other possibility.
Silke:
I do think, before you
get me wrong, that it is
interesting that ancient
literature seems to do pretty
well without horrible villains
of any sort, attractive _or_
unattractive, but once you're
looking at evil (or once you
develop the concept), both the ugly
and the attractive variants seem
important.
I'm arguing that the attractive variant
now seems to dominate the concept, and
that there is a reason for this.
Silke:
Dante's Satan has little to recommend him.
I said:
Umm, yes and no. He is not seductive or
tempting, if that is what you mean. But
that was my whole point. And that is what my friend
was suggesting, and I would agree, is artistically
quite deliberate in Dante.
Silke:
That sounds to me like a rather
ideological reading.
I said:
I don't know what you mean here
by "ideological". It strikes me as
an intensely *appreciative* reading
of Dante. It leads to recognizing
resonance after resonance in Dante.
Silke:
It is unaesthetic, hence ideological
(see Fiona's q-post).
I don't understand the aesthetic to be
divorced from the rational.
Silke:
Perhaps Dante's Satan isn't
attractive people (as paschal
might say), but don't you see
the beauty in the description?
Of course I see beauty in the
description. But I see beauty
especially in the truth conveyed
by that description as well---beauty
in the pity and grief invoked by
that description. Again, I don't
buy your "ideological" here as a valid
dismissal from the aesthetic.
Silke:
A bit like showing an overflowing
ashtray to keep people from smoking.
I asked:
So, you are taking this as
merely a cautionary kind of
tag-ending "moral"?
Silke:
It did come across that way in
your post, yes -- let's make sure
that evil looks ugly.
What about simply telling the truth
about evil? No censorship implied,
just various examples of artistic
success or failure.
I wrote:
Well, let me put it
this way---someone said that Hannibal at the
anthropophagous feast says "Pity has no place
at this table." I would suggest that pity and
compassion and an immense grief have place in
the 34th Canto.
Silke:
Pity and compassion and grief also have a
place in _Hannibal_, so what's your point?
That Hannibal would appear to have generated
a following out of his being superhumanly
*beyond* pity and compassion and grief. You disagree
that his cruelty is what is being admired?
Silke:
Perhaps effective, but it won't get you to
understand the pleasures of nicotine.
I said:
But, do you think we are really deficient
in our understanding of the pleasures of nicotine?
Or of sex? Or of blowing away enemy alien monsters
with a shotgun? Or of exercising cruelty in
bloodthirsty ways?
Silke:
Yes, I do. I mean, I know all about
the pleasures of nicotine, but can't
understand the bloodthirsty shooting
at all.
Hmm. I have no direct experience with
the pleasures of nicotine, but
plenty with the pleasures of shooting at
things (disintegrating clay pigeons
with a shotgun, for example, or
destroying virtual monsters on a pc).
On the other hand, I guess I don't feel
my lack of direct experience with
nicotine means that I am deficient in
understanding a smoking habit.
Silke:
What's sex doing in this
list, btw?
To remind you that it's really the standard
conservative's list of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll
we are talking about. Both literature and films
have gotten more narcissistic about sex over time.
"Body Heat" would have been unthinkable a few
short decades ago. I guess the question I have
is whether something like that somehow makes the
temptation of sex *more understandable* than it was
before?
I asked:
Do you think that dwelling
on the *temptations* involved really helps us
*understand* anything?
Silke:
I think describing anything well helps
us to understand it.
OK, then I must ask what is the thing that
is being described well, and hence understood.
I don't think that it is the evil at all. I think
it is only *our temptations* that
are being described.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael S. Morris
S: Why is it narcissistic?
M: It dwells on the self and the self's reasons.
S: Why is it narcissistic?
There need be no other answer.
S: If people choose to do evil, they must
do so for a reason -- just possibly the
attractiveness of certain kinds of evil is
that reason.
M: Possibly. Or, possibly not.
S: What's your best guess? Counter-phobic behavior?
Counter-phobic behaviour is of course the
other classical answer. But, habit is
a causal explanation different from both
attractiveness---hope of pleasure---and
from counter-phobia---fear of pain. It
can be without immediate reason, because
without immediate choice whatsoever,
although I guess I'd say we probably do most
of what we do out of habit, and probably fear
of the pain or irritation of withdrawal
has more to do with explaining why we
persist than hope of any immediate pleasure.
S: Why not allow for that possibility?
M: I see no reason not "to allow for
that possibility". Still, when the whole
arc of modern literature seems to
admit of no other possibility, one gets
to wondering whether it isn't so much
allowing for such a possibility as
suppressing any other possibility.
S: Are you sure there aren't any ugly
evil people in literature since Milton?
Didn't say that. However, I'm amused that
you would think "ugly" the key word here.
I would have said "impotent" was more
relevant.
S: I do think, before you
get me wrong, that it is
interesting that ancient
literature seems to do pretty
well without horrible villains
of any sort, attractive _or_
unattractive, but once you're
looking at evil (or once you
develop the concept), both the ugly
and the attractive variants seem
important.
M: I'm arguing that the attractive variant
now seems to dominate the concept, and
that there is a reason for this.
S: The reason was, once again?
I believe I started by questioning the
commonplace that this admixture of evil
is all that interesting.
S: I don't think you're right, btw,
certainly not once you're looking
at the discourse on evil on the whole.
Scott certainly brought up Arendt in
the same context of the 34th Canto.
S: Dante's Satan has little to recommend him.
M: Umm, yes and no. He is not seductive or
tempting, if that is what you mean. But
that was my whole point. And that is what my friend
was suggesting, and I would agree, is artistically
quite deliberate in Dante.
S: That sounds to me like a rather
ideological reading.
M: I don't know what you mean here
by "ideological". It strikes me as
an intensely *appreciative* reading
of Dante. It leads to recognizing
resonance after resonance in Dante.
S: It is unaesthetic, hence ideological
(see Fiona's q-post).
M: I don't understand the aesthetic to be
divorced from the rational.
S: Nice line, but it really doesn't
address what I said.
I think it addresses exactly what you said.
You have yet to indicate in what respect
this observation about the quality of Dante's
Satan either is not aesthetic or is ideological.
In other words, like Mama Morton in "Chicago"
(a curiously relevant piece, by the way), I
deserve a lotta tat for what I've got to give.
S: Perhaps Dante's Satan isn't
attractive people (as paschal
might say), but don't you see
the beauty in the description?
M: Of course I see beauty in the
description. But I see beauty
especially in the truth conveyed
by that description as well---beauty
in the pity and grief invoked by
that description.
S: Okay, this is about you. Wish
you'd said that right away.
Not one jot more than "that" is
about you.
M: Again, I don't
buy your "ideological" here as a valid
dismissal from the aesthetic.
S: It's not a dismissal -- it means that
your reading is _centered_ on a
moral you want to be true, i.e. that
evil is ugly.
Whether evil is impotent or not is an open
question (a curious tic, that, that you wish
to center on ugly). But, I'm afraid you
nevertheless have *still* not rescued
your usage of "ideological", as distinct
from aesthetic. Your use of "ideological"
is ideological. My reading of Dante isn't.
My greater interest in what Dante is saying
about evil than what Thomas Harris apparently
is saying about it may in fact be ideological.
But that doesn't make it one jot less aesthetic.
S: A bit like showing an overflowing
ashtray to keep people from smoking.
M: So, you are taking this as
merely a cautionary kind of
tag-ending "moral"?
S: It did come across that way in
your post, yes -- let's make sure
that evil looks ugly.
M: What about simply telling the truth
about evil? No censorship implied,
just various examples of artistic
success or failure.
S: What about it?
Well, did you notice nothergirl
there with "it makes me more grateful
of my own life; and re-affirms in myself
that I am not so bad with my small
idiosyncracies"?
S: Is there one evil, and one truth about it?
Did I say there was?
S: Why not acknowledge the obvious --
evil is attractive if packaged a
certain way.
I thought that that was obvious
and therefore needed no acknowledgement.
S: Otherwise, this discussion wouldn't
have happened.
This discussion happened because I stepped
in questioning how interesting the
dark side really is.
S: If you're simply saying
that _you_ don't like those
packages, okay.
No, I love many of those packages.
I simply question why we dwell on
our seduction by them.
S: I'm not that crazy about most of
them, either, even though Mephisto
is a brilliant character.
So is Milton's Satan, and many another.
There was a guy on the CBC out of Toronto
---Bill something or the other (my memory
is dim)---who would come on in the afternoons
and do book and film reviews and sometimes
lexicographical essays, and I recall a
negative review he gave of "Silence of
the Lambs". He acknowledged technical
excellence, superb acting and directing,
etc, etc, but finally said that none of
this could escape the fact that it was just
more "stroking of the lizard brain", and why
would we want to keep doing that?
Or Mikhail, who seems to worship cruelty,
and has yet to exhibit its service to a
moral end. He likes _Hannibal_. Why?
This Krendler chap gets it, I guess. A Washington
bureaucrat gets his brains eaten and we're
supposed to see something splendid in that?
Why?
M: Well, let me put it
this way---someone said that Hannibal at the
anthropophagous feast says "Pity has no place
at this table." I would suggest that pity and
compassion and an immense grief have place in
the 34th Canto.
S: Pity and compassion and grief also have a
place in _Hannibal_, so what's your point?
M: That Hannibal would appear to have generated
a following out of his being superhumanly
*beyond* pity and compassion and grief. You disagree
that his cruelty is what is being admired?
S: Yes.
We disagree about this.
S: I think it's Harris' creation that's admired.
I've read many of the readers' responses to
the book. What I see is a whole lot of
admiration for cruelty going on.
S: I don't think anybody who likes the
book would want Lecter to marry his
daughter, particularly.
Of course not. But I do see a whole lot
of people who like the book enjoying
its epater le bourgeois.
S: Aren't you the one who usually
insists that people of all ages tell
fiction and bios apart pretty well?
I am well aware of the earlier context,
Silke. But, no, I have not claimed
this at all, there being a distinction
between "can tell" and "do tell". I
usually insist people *can* tell, and
*can* be held responsible for telling.
Whether they empirically do or not is beside
the question.
S: Perhaps effective, but it won't get you to
understand the pleasures of nicotine.
M: But, do you think we are really deficient
in our understanding of the pleasures of nicotine?
Or of sex? Or of blowing away enemy alien monsters
with a shotgun? Or of exercising cruelty in
bloodthirsty ways?
S: Yes, I do. I mean, I know all about
the pleasures of nicotine, but can't
understand the bloodthirsty shooting
at all.
M: Hmm. I have no direct experience with
the pleasures of nicotine, but
plenty with the pleasures of shooting at
things (disintegrating clay pigeons
with a shotgun, for example, or
destroying virtual monsters on a pc).
On the other hand, I guess I don't feel
my lack of direct experience with
nicotine means that I am deficient in
understanding a smoking habit.
S: But your feeling isn't entirely
the yard-stick here. I don't think
anybody who hasn't smoked with pleasure
understands smoking very well.
I guess I doubt that there's all
that much to understand.
S: What's sex doing in this
list, btw?
M: To remind you that it's really the standard
conservative's list of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll
we are talking about. Both literature and films
have gotten more narcissistic about sex over time.
S: Ah. Very little sex in _Hannibal_, at least
of the explicit kind.
The presence or absence of sex in _Hannibal_ seems
irrelevant to the question of literature or
film dwelling on the *temptations* of evil,
and whether depicting those temptations really
leads to understanding or not.
M: "Body Heat" would have been unthinkable a few
short decades ago. I guess the question I have
is whether something like that somehow makes the
temptation of sex *more understandable* than it was
before?
S: I don't know "Body Heat". I know that the
_Story of O_ made certain practices more
understandable to me.
But are you saying evil practices, or no?
"Body Heat" is a film---an actor's duel
between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner---a
sizzlingly sexy film noir in which she
essentially seduces him with sex in order
to get him to kill off her rich hubby for
her. It's an example of *dwelling* on the
seduction and seductiveness of evil. I'm
not convinced we *understand* much more
about either evil or the power of sex at the
end of it than the beginning.
M: Do you think that dwelling
on the *temptations* involved really helps us
*understand* anything?
S: I think describing anything well helps
us to understand it.
M: OK, then I must ask what is the thing that
is being described well, and hence understood.
I don't think that it is the evil at all. I think
it is only *our temptations* that
are being described.
S: But I still maintain that evil wouldn't
exist if it didn't tempt us.
I disagree with this. I just think
most evil isn't that attractive or
tempting. Some probably is.
S: As opposed to the bad (get the garlic
out before Noel appears)
Yeah, even as opposed to the bad, I think
evil isn't necessarily all that tempting,
or interesting. My main point I guess is
that its temptingness is more a literary
creation than a reality being described.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Puss in Boots
> ... I'm saying that the trend since
> Milton has been to portray evil as
> increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
> wondering aloud whether evil ever
> really is either sexy or seductive,
Milton's Satan was preceded by the Old Testament's depiction
of God, for example in the Book of Job. (Yeah, that again.)
He's the cause of great evil -- murders, kidnappings, and torture
in _Job_ alone -- but he's shown as a tremendously powerful
being, and he gives a magnificent speech that supplies the climax
of the story. Not to mention he's an object of worship. So
making evil a good, or even a god, is no modern innovation: it's
an age-old thing.
-- Moggin
Michael S. Morris
And of course the fruit of the garden as
a temptation. I know.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Ray Girvan
> Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> writes:
> <lots of stuff snipped>
Before this gets out of hand, is all this quoting necessary? This is
an interesting topic, but an ever-lengthening recap of the entire
discussion every message is going to piss people off.
Ray Girvan
> Why not allow for that possibility? I do think, before you get
> me wrong, that it is interesting that ancient literature seems
> to do pretty well without horrible villains of any sort,
> attractive _or_ unattractive ...
I'm interested in this point. What literature do you mean? Like
modern literature, some ancient literature has villains; some
doesn't. Examples: Loki in Norse mythology; Satan in the Bible;
Polyphemus and Circe in the _Odyssey_; Sciron, Sinis and Procrustes
in the story of Theseus; Grendel and his mother in _Beowulf_; and
many more. Villains have been part of literature as long as it has existed.
Simona Lewis
>That's why she's so intriguing: she has that bitter
>edge to her, that slip-sliding toward the inhuman.
As do we all. I think that the book points this out rather well. No matter
who you are, how good or incapable of violence you think you are, it is in
you, it is in us all. If it wasn't, things like Kosovo, like the Holocaust,
could never happen.
Hannibal Lecter is in each of us, even without the childhood traumas. If you
think it is not so, ask the cows at Mason Verger's slaughter house.
"Ah," I hear a cry, "but that's different." Is it? Perhaps it is. Perhaps
they don't feel pain as we do, don't feel fear as we do. Perhaps they
deserve to die by the virtue of not being as intelligent as we are.
None of the people Lecter eats are as intelligent as he is. Does this
entitle him to do what he does? Where is the difference between our eating
pleasure and his?
Is he, than, that much worse than we are? And is Clarice betraying her past
associations by joining him? Or is she merely acknowledging a fundamental
existential truth - and if Starling does anything well it is accepting the
truth, no matter how unpleasant - that we all exist on the pain of others?
Can causing pain to others by your very existence be avoided? Probably not.
If it can't be avoided, you have two choices:
Either you seek a moral justification, an absolution of forgiveness, as some
peoples do when slaughtering an animal, with all the hypocrisy that entails.
Or you accept the brutal honesty of it, and, having accepted it, pursue your
own pleasure without conscience or guilt.
We all walk the former path. Its pitfalls and self delusions are most
clearly illustrated by the characters inside the FBI, people like Krendler
or Noonan. Hypocritically, they convince themselves that they are doing the
good work, while in reality, they pursue their own advancement, their own
pleasure, and will destroy anyone who is in their way.
Starling turns away from them because the one thing Starling DOES NOT DO, is
hypocrisy. One thing Lecter DOES NOT DO, is lie. She is drawn to Lecter
because he has chosen the letter path. Its honesty appeals to her.
So there they both are, on top of the food chain - literarly.
I thought this book was about a battle between good and evil, but it is
about something much more fundamental than that. "Hannibal" makes you
question the definitions of good and evil - to the point where the
definitions start losing their meaning.
Is Lecter more evil then Mason Verger? Can such a distinction be even made?
If Verger is more evil than Lecter, why isn't he a fugitive? If Verger's
money buys him influence with the forces of Law and Order, what does it say
about those forces? Is Starling good? She serves those same forces that
protect Verger. How many people has she killed? Does she enjoy lobotomising
Krendler?
The book throws all these questions at you, and the distinction of who is
good and who is evil becomes blurred. You start wondering if there is a
distinction at all. If there isn't, then the terms good and evil are
meaningless.
I believe this is what Harris is trying to get across to us in "Hannibal" -
we look at the laws of nature, the mechanism of the foodchain, and we
mistake its indifference for cruelty and its protagonists for good and evil.
But nature isn't cruel - it is merely indifferent. Good and evil are
human constructs and they play no part. In nature there are only successful
and unsuccessful specimens.
Ray Girvan
> Hannibal Lecter is in each of us, even without the childhood
> traumas ... None of the people Lecter eats are as intelligent
> as he is.
This, I think, is at the heart of Lecter's appeal. With a few
exceptions, his speciality is killing, or otherwise traumatizing,
people who are variously stupid (by his standards), boring, pompous
or impolite. It seems to me he embodies the common fantasy of taking
extreme revenge for small everyday slights, the 'little murders'.
Ray
--
ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk +++ Technical Author +++ Topsham, Devon, UK
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rgirvan/ +++ The Apothecary's Drawer
Ted Samsel
: Monday, the 28th of June, 1999
:
: And of course the fruit of the garden as
: a temptation. I know.
"The best tasting watermelon is one that you stole."
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net (or tbsa...@richmond.infi.net)
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Franklin Harris
Puss in Boots <mog...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:moggin-2806...@user-2ive8uf.dialup.mindspring.com...
Of course, if you are inclined to take a secular view of the Bible -- rather
than one that holds it is the divinely inspired Word of God -- there is
voluminous evidence to indicate that Job is actually a Babylonian story
(with a very Babylonian view of Satan) adopted by the Israelites during
their captivity. Satan as portrayed in Job certainly has more in common with
his Persian contemporaries than he does with the Serpent of Genesis. IIRC,
Job makes no mention of Job's being an Israelite -- or of the Israelites in
general. That's an oddity given that the rest of the Old Testament is the
story of the Jews.
--
Franklin Harris
Pulp Culture Online
www.pulpculture.net
paschal
On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Silke-Maria Weineck wrote:
> I take it to be an attractive metaphor to the foes of big government. It's
> an interesting scene because it is painless to Krendler, and his brain
> functions while it is being eaten, only less and less, naturally. The
> scene is both shallowly and deeply ironic, and perhaps you want to read it
> before you paschal it. I think you assume that this book is too popular to
> have aesthetic dimensions. I know you'll deny it, and perhaps you'll be
> right.
Now come on - everybody who reads chooses not to read certain books.
You don't have to make my name into a verb.
(So somebody's brain gets eaten? Jeez. Now why on earth would
one NOT want to read something so jolly...)
-P.
Ted Samsel
:
But it's a time honored human tradition, from back in the good old
days.
ObDisease: Kuru.
paschal
On 29 Jun 1999, Ted Samsel wrote:
> ObDisease: Kuru.
Yuck. This thread is really grossing me out.
I'm going now to look for some Neil Postman books.
I've just discovered him.
-P.
Don Tuite
>
> "Franklin Harris" <tfha...@hiwaay.net> writes:
>
> > Of course, if you are inclined to take a secular view of the Bible
> > -- rather than one that holds it is the divinely inspired Word of
> > God -- there is voluminous evidence to indicate that Job is actually
> > a Babylonian story (with a very Babylonian view of Satan) adopted by
> > the Israelites during their captivity.
>
> it? I'd read that Job was based on an old folk tale, but I didn't know
> that it was Babylonian. Did they find a Job-like story in Babylonia?
> What was the specifically Babylonian view of Satan?
>
> And how about the character of Yahweh in the book of Job, as opposed
> to the earlier books of the Bible? Does he have a Babylonian influence
> too?
>
> > Satan as portrayed in Job certainly has more in common with his
> > Persian contemporaries than he does with the Serpent of Genesis.
>
> assimilate the Babylonians' Satan after they conquered Babylonia?
>
> And why would one expect the adversary ("ha-satan") in Job to
> correspond to the serpent in Genesis anyway, even if the story had
> come from an Israelite folk tradition? There was still at that time no
> Satan in the Christian sense, hence there'd be no reason to relate the
> adversary in Job to the serpent, right?
>
> > IIRC, Job makes no mention of Job's being an Israelite -- or of the
> > Israelites in general. That's an oddity given that the rest of the
> > Old Testament is the story of the Jews.
>
DejaNews for Job in rab. The Job thread went on for three of four
months last year.
Don
Don Tuite
>
> In rec.arts.books paschal <pas...@wam.umd.edu> wrote:
> :
>
> : On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Silke-Maria Weineck wrote:
>
> : > I take it to be an attractive metaphor to the foes of big government. It's
> : > an interesting scene because it is painless to Krendler, and his brain
> : > functions while it is being eaten, only less and less, naturally. The
> : > scene is both shallowly and deeply ironic, and perhaps you want to read it
> : > before you paschal it. I think you assume that this book is too popular to
> : > have aesthetic dimensions. I know you'll deny it, and perhaps you'll be
> : > right.
>
> : Now come on - everybody who reads chooses not to read certain books.
> : You don't have to make my name into a verb.
>
> : (So somebody's brain gets eaten? Jeez. Now why on earth would
> : one NOT want to read something so jolly...)
>
> But it's a time honored human tradition, from back in the good old
> days.
>
> ObDisease: Kuru.
Does Krendler sing "Daisy Belle" near the end?
Don
John Paul Fullerton
Simona Lewis <sim...@netro.com.au> wrote:
>Where is the difference between our eating
>pleasure and his?
My pleasure in a Big Mac has nothing to do with experiencing the
suffering of any creature. I give thanks for the food; however, I'm
not glad for any suffering that leads to my supper.
It seems that those of us who have been separated from farm life,
may have closer associations with opening lunch packages than
with awareness of the animal that the meat is from. Possibly, more
awareness of reality has its benefit; yet I've never seen a human
being eating flesh with a sense of abasing the source of food.
>One thing Lecter DOES NOT DO, is lie.
In the scene in Italy before he hangs the guy, he promises him that
he will not use his knife, given that the guy tells the truth. During
my reading of the book, it seemed like the guy told the truth and
the promise was not kept.
Have a nice day
John Paul Fullerton
j-ful...@tamu.edu
Bruce McGuffin
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots) writes:
> Milton's Satan was preceded by the Old Testament's depiction
> of God, for example in the Book of Job. (Yeah, that again.)
> He's the cause of great evil -- murders, kidnappings, and torture
> in _Job_ alone -- but he's shown as a tremendously powerful
> being, and he gives a magnificent speech that supplies the climax
> of the story. Not to mention he's an object of worship. So
> making evil a good, or even a god, is no modern innovation: it's
> an age-old thing.
>
> -- Moggin
obheresy: The Albigensian
obbook: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land
of Error (of course)
Franklin Harris
Philistine <aaron+...@bfr.co.il> wrote in message
news:lyzp1jr...@cruella.bfr.co.il...
> "Franklin Harris" <tfha...@hiwaay.net> writes:
>
> > Of course, if you are inclined to take a secular view of the Bible
> > -- rather than one that holds it is the divinely inspired Word of
> > God -- there is voluminous evidence to indicate that Job is actually
> > a Babylonian story (with a very Babylonian view of Satan) adopted by
> > the Israelites during their captivity.
>
> I'd be interested if you could elaborate on that. Any good books about
> it? I'd read that Job was based on an old folk tale, but I didn't know
> that it was Babylonian. Did they find a Job-like story in Babylonia?
> What was the specifically Babylonian view of Satan?
The best and briefest discussion (and the only one I have in the house, so
it'll have to do) is in "Asimov's Guide To the Bible" by Isaac Asimov.
Asimov notes that there is indeed a Babylonian version of the same story,
"and the writer of the Biblical Book of Job includes it as a prose
introduction and a prose ending to the book. In between that beginning and
ending, however, he inserts his own deep poetic probing of the relationship
between God and man...."
> And how about the character of Yahweh in the book of Job, as opposed
> to the earlier books of the Bible? Does he have a Babylonian influence
> too?
I'm unsure about this. Harold Bloom's "The Book of J," however, indicates
that there are great differences in the way Yahweh is portrayed throughout
the OT and even within different strands of Genesis.
> > Satan as portrayed in Job certainly has more in common with his
> > Persian contemporaries than he does with the Serpent of Genesis.
>
> Did you mean to say "Babylonian"? Or did the Persians somehow
> assimilate the Babylonians' Satan after they conquered Babylonia?
I overreached myself with this. I seem to recall similarities between the
Babylonian, Zoroastrian and Book of Job versions of Satan, but I haven't
read anything recently. So, I could be off.
> And why would one expect the adversary ("ha-satan") in Job to
> correspond to the serpent in Genesis anyway, even if the story had
> come from an Israelite folk tradition? There was still at that time no
> Satan in the Christian sense, hence there'd be no reason to relate the
> adversary in Job to the serpent, right?
Well, only a true-believing Christian would expect such a thing. :) Does
anyone know, BTW, when the Genesis serpent first became identified as Satan?
Is this a Christian idea, or a Jewish idea of relatively recent vintage?
> > IIRC, Job makes no mention of Job's being an Israelite -- or of the
> > Israelites in general. That's an oddity given that the rest of the
> > Old Testament is the story of the Jews.
>
> You're right that there was no indication that Job was a Jew.
Right. He doesn't have the standard genealogy to connect him with Israel.
Franklin Harris
Franklin Harris <tfha...@hiwaay.net> wrote in message
news:CUIzySlw#GA....@pet.hiwaay.net...
> I overreached myself with this. I seem to recall similarities between the
> Babylonian, Zoroastrian and Book of Job versions of Satan, but I haven't
> read anything recently. So, I could be off.
But, as I flip though my "Asimov's Guide To the Bible," I see Isaac mentions
the Persians as well re: Satan and God:
"The Persian influence is show in the picture of God as the head of a
numerous court of assisting spirits [Job 1:6]. The difference from the
Persian view rests in the fact that Satan is not the coequal head of a band
of evil spirits but is merely a single spirit, as much subject to God as are
the others."
Also, Job contains the tale of Leviathan, which corresponds to a Babylonian
creation myth, and references to Behemoth, which may be related to the
Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh.
Simona Lewis
>suffering of any creature.
No of course not. I did not for a moment suggest that we delight in the
suffering of those we consume - of course we do not. But we do enjoy the end
result - the meal. This is what I meant by our eating pleasure.
But whether we like it or not, suffering does result, as anyone who has ever
witnesed the slaughtering of livestock will tell you. Pigs, for instance,
are very inteligent. They know what is coming. They are kept in the yards
for hours, waiting. You'd have to see the fear, hear the screaming when they
know they are next - pigs have this shrill, high pitched scream - they sound
like children. That said, I still eat pork. I just don't think about the
screaming.
Lecter does not delight in suffering either. It does not interest him. He is
in it for the same reason we are - for the food. The reason I think he does
not delight in suffering is because he does not torture his victims. With
the exception of Mason Verger and Krendler, they all die quickly. Verger is
given LSD (or whatever it was) and Krendler is anesthesised so neither feels
the pain.
>In the scene in Italy before he hangs the guy, he promises him that
>he will not use his knife, given that the guy tells the truth. During
>my reading of the book, it seemed like the guy told the truth and
>the promise was not kept.
I re-read the scene, but I couldn't find that promise. Lecter promises not
to eat his wife if the guy tells the truth - and he keeps his promise,
despite Pazzi trying to deceive him about the VICAP code.
Simona Lewis
>exceptions, his speciality is killing, or otherwise traumatizing,
>people who are variously stupid (by his standards), boring, pompous
>or impolite. It seems to me he embodies the common fantasy of taking
>extreme revenge for small everyday slights, the 'little murders'.
I haven't thought of that, but of course you are right - thank you for a
very insightful observation.
Robert Teeter
: Philistine <aaron+...@bfr.co.il> wrote in message
: news:lyzp1jr...@cruella.bfr.co.il...
:> "Franklin Harris" <tfha...@hiwaay.net> writes:
:>
:> > Of course, if you are inclined to take a secular view of the Bible
:> > -- rather than one that holds it is the divinely inspired Word of
:> > God -- there is voluminous evidence to indicate that Job is actually
:> > a Babylonian story (with a very Babylonian view of Satan) adopted by
:> > the Israelites during their captivity.
:>
:> I'd be interested if you could elaborate on that. Any good books about
:> it? I'd read that Job was based on an old folk tale, but I didn't know
:> that it was Babylonian. Did they find a Job-like story in Babylonia?
:> What was the specifically Babylonian view of Satan?
<snip>
: Harold Bloom's "The Book of J," however, indicates
: that there are great differences in the way Yahweh is portrayed throughout
: the OT and even within different strands of Genesis.
<snip>
: Well, only a true-believing Christian would expect such a thing. :) Does
: anyone know, BTW, when the Genesis serpent first became identified as Satan?
: Is this a Christian idea, or a Jewish idea of relatively recent vintage?
I'm reading _Jewish Myths_ by Robert Graves and Raphael
Patai. It covers the major stories in Genesis and relates them to
the mythology of neighboring countries (especially Babylon) and
brings in the relevant Midrash (post-Biblical Jewish explications
of the Bible).
Wrt the serpent, they write:
"The serpent is widely regarded [i.e., in other cultures?] as an
enemy of man, and of woman. ..."
"Some say the Serpent of Eden was Satan in disguise: namely the
Archangel Samael." [Their source for this is _Vita Adae et Evae_, a 1st C
BCE apocryphal Jewish work, "extant in Greek, Latin, and old Slavonic
versions," as well as the NT books of Hebrews and Revelation.] ...
"Some say that Samael disguised himself as the Serpent and, after
vengefully persuading man to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, fathered Cain
upon Eve...." [Their source for this is the Midrash _Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer_,
attributed to a 1st C CE rabbi, "but actually written during the eighth or
early ninth century in Palestine."]
Another connection between Genesis and Job is that monsters like
Leviathan and Behemoth turn up both places.
--
Bob Teeter (rte...@netcom.com) | http://www.wco.com/~rteeter/
"I can't have information I know would be of
interest to someone and not share it."
-- Sanford Berman, activist librarian
Puss in Boots
>>> ... I'm saying that the trend since
>>> Milton has been to portray evil as
>>> increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
>>> wondering aloud whether evil ever
>>> really is either sexy or seductive,
Puss in Boots <mog...@mindspring.com>:
>> Milton's Satan was preceded by the Old Testament's depiction
>> of God, for example in the Book of Job. (Yeah, that again.)
>> He's the cause of great evil -- murders, kidnappings, and torture
>> in _Job_ alone -- but he's shown as a tremendously powerful
>> being, and he gives a magnificent speech that supplies the climax
>> of the story. Not to mention he's an object of worship. So
>> making evil a good, or even a god, is no modern innovation: it's
>> an age-old thing.
Mike:
> And of course the fruit of the garden as a temptation. I know.
Not quite the same. The apple is tempting, alright, but the
temptation -- at least the part that gets all the attention --
is knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil. I don't have to
tell you that's not the modern notion of evil. Just the
opposite -- discriminating evil from good is now considered to be
the basis of morality.
But God in Job is the epitome of evil, even by modern
standards: as I said, he's responsible for murders, torture, and
kidnappings. And how is he portrayed? He's highly powerful:
he created the world and rules over it. And he's glorified -- at
least he gets a glorious speech, and nobody contradicts it.
He's even worshipped as God. All this in the Old Testament -- it
was ancient before Milton was born.
-- Moggin
Puss in Boots
>> Milton's Satan was preceded by the Old Testament's depiction
>> of God, for example in the Book of Job. (Yeah, that again.)
>> He's the cause of great evil -- murders, kidnappings, and torture
>> in _Job_ alone -- but he's shown as a tremendously powerful
>> being, and he gives a magnificent speech that supplies the climax
>> of the story. Not to mention he's an object of worship. So
>> making evil a good, or even a god, is no modern innovation: it's
>> an age-old thing.
Bruce McGuffin <mcgu...@ll.mit.edu:
>obheresy: The Albigensian
You're on the mark, although the Cathari were probably (it's
a bit muddy, historically speaking) a late resurgence of the
heresy-of-heresies, Gnosticism, routed thru the Paulicans and the
Bogomils. ObHeretic: Marcion.
-- Moggin
GoldCat
news:is_d3.24$Tr6.4...@news0.optus.net.au...
>
> I thought this book was about a battle between good and evil, but it is
> about something much more fundamental than that. "Hannibal" makes you
> question the definitions of good and evil - to the point where the
> definitions start losing their meaning.
>
> Is Lecter more evil then Mason Verger? Can such a distinction be even
made?
> If Verger is more evil than Lecter, why isn't he a fugitive? If Verger's
> money buys him influence with the forces of Law and Order, what does it
say
> about those forces? Is Starling good? She serves those same forces that
> protect Verger. How many people has she killed? Does she enjoy
lobotomising
> Krendler?
>
> The book throws all these questions at you, and the distinction of who is
> good and who is evil becomes blurred. You start wondering if there is a
> distinction at all. If there isn't, then the terms good and evil are
> meaningless.
Part of my ease in discerning the characters' *relative* goodness and evil
is maybe in my being a product of my pop-culture generation. I guess my
point being, I didn't get a big shock out of Starling partaking in the
cannibalizing of Krendler - for me the transition was so subtle, and I
suppose I was more transfixed on the release of her emotional demons and her
transcendence from the tethers and psych-baggage that bound her to civil
service, Daddy, yadda yadda.... the shock value of her participation in
anything other than a really exotic dinner with a heretofore sinister
cannibal just escaped me, as I'm sure I was just anticipating all
this...*gasp* I'm desensitized! ;) All sorts of peril must certainly await
someone of my obvious moral vacancy.
Okay, anyway:
The other factor is that I lean toward Taoist ideas that we are inherently
*both* good and evil, although 'evil' isn't really an issue the way it is in
Christianity. For me it always breaks down into lesser evils/greater evils
vs virtues. Not good Christian virtues so much. Maybe moreso the
consistencies of characters to be depended on for certain things. The
component of 'good' being that we can trust certain characters to behave
just so, in every instance...'evil' being the act of a character that we
could not predict.
If Lecter can be capable of good then Clarice can certainly be capable of
evil, as we term it.
We trust Lecter to never lie, we trusted Clarice to do what *we thought* was
right, although it turns out that she's less about doing 'right' than she is
about actually just coping or appeasing inner pain. The tethers released
from these apparent 'virtues', and she arrives at free will where Lecter
awaits with an otherwise reeeeeeeeally nice dinner planned.
Those of us who saw her as 'good' were shocked and dismayed, those of us who
saw her as tormented and compelled by career burdens and bureaucractic
naughty-types, essentially cheered her new liberation and then partaking in
the dinner seemed like a just entitlement, as did Lecter. Our boy is all
about poetic justice.
> I believe this is what Harris is trying to get across to us in
"Hannibal" -
> we look at the laws of nature, the mechanism of the foodchain, and we
> mistake its indifference for cruelty and its protagonists for good and
evil.
> But nature isn't cruel - it is merely indifferent. Good and evil are
> human constructs and they play no part. In nature there are only
successful
> and unsuccessful specimens.
I guess that's where I find Lecter: not so much 'evil' as he is more of just
a superior predator with a really *mean* sense of humor, for that matter a
mean-spirited sense of justice...and justice can be both good and evil, the
balance resting with whosoever's dispensing it. Clarice/Mischa, his only
apparent virtues. For them he is capable of doing both good and evil as
called for, and we know he is capable of at *least* affection, if not love.
I saw Lecter delivering Starling from her emotional turmoil as an act of
unique kindness, others interpreted it as a dominance mechanism; a valid
argument also.
All in all, I found balance in the fate of each of the characters,
regardless of their dispositions. And *that's* what I enjoyed most.
--GoldCat
Ray Girvan
> Lecter does not delight in suffering either. It does not interest
> him. He is in it for the same reason we are - for the food. The
> reason I think he does not delight in suffering is because he
> does not torture his victims.
I think there has been a certain amount of reinvention of Lecter
between incarnations. "Red Dragon" suggests he does: remember the
victim who gave Will Graham the clue, hung up on a pegboard with
multiple injuries like a mediaeval Wound Man illustration?
But I have seen an analysis - the website is gone,
unfortunately - that convincingly argues that Lecter is an
'act-focused' murderer, who may well enjoy the act of killing but
doesn't need to prolong it. (This is according to the Holmes and
DeBurger 1998 classification that proposes a division between
'act-focused' and 'process-focused' serial murderers).
Ray Girvan
> Ray Girvan <ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk>
Thanks! I've been thinking a bit more about this, and believe it
gives a clue to what Lecter *is*.
At first I just thought that it was an authorial ploy to make
Lecter more sympathetic by pointing him at unsympathetic characters:
e.g. in SotL, we feel Chilton deserves to have Lecter hunting him
down. But I think it goes deeper than that: Lecter seems to have
strong similarities to the description of 'schizoid personality
disorder' in Anthony Storr's book, _Human Aggression_.
According to Storr, this a personality type with extreme
difficulties in disposing of aggression. He mentions typical
characteristics such as (I skim briefly) a tendency to retreat into
isolation and to avidly pursue intellectual hobbies ... a mask of
superior detachment ... little interest in relationships ... male
sufferers typically adopting a gentlemanly persona based on good
manners and consideration ... a tendency to 'bite the hand that feeds
you' ... thinking of the general run of humanity as trash ... and an
extreme and vindictive inner rage at everyday criticism or slights.
It fits so well that I wonder if this is what Harris had in mind.
Simona Lewis
>temptation -- at least the part that gets all the attention --
>is knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil. I don't have to
>tell you that's not the modern notion of evil. Just the
>opposite -- discriminating evil from good is now considered to be
>the basis of morality.
I've always interpreted the tree of knowledge thing differently. I thought
it meant that only the ignorant can live in paradise. Because only in
ignorance can one find certainty and hence contentment. But as soon as you
eat from the tree of knowledge, your inner self is filled with questions and
doubts. The more you know, the less certain you are of anything.
Ray Girvan
> Clarice/Mischa, his only apparent virtues. For them [Lecter]
> is capable of doing both good and evil as called for, and we
> know he is capable of at *least* affection, if not love. I saw
> Lecter delivering Starling from her emotional turmoil as an act
> of unique kindness, others interpreted it as a dominance
> mechanism; a valid argument also.
For me, it fits into the interpretation of schizoid personality
disorder I mentioned earlier. Fear of relationships was one of the
other distinguishing factors Storr mentioned: rejection by the loved
one being probably the thing a schizoid fears most. So I read it as
both an act of kindness and a dominance mechanism: Lecter can feel
love, but only reworking Starling's personality to make her utterly
sympatico makes their relationship safe to him.
Simona Lewis
>between incarnations. "Red Dragon" suggests he does: remember the
>victim who gave Will Graham the clue, hung up on a pegboard with
>multiple injuries like a mediaeval Wound Man illustration?
I thought that was done after he was alredy dead, but I'm not sure, I
haven't got a copy of Red Dragon handy
Ray Girvan
> Mike:
>> And of course the fruit of the garden as a temptation. I know.
> Not quite the same. The apple is tempting, alright, but the
> temptation -- at least the part that gets all the attention --
> is knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil. I don't have to
> tell you that's not the modern notion of evil. Just the
> opposite -- discriminating evil from good is now considered to be
> the basis of morality.
>
> But God in Job is the epitome of evil, even by modern
> standards: as I said, he's responsible for murders, torture, and
> kidnappings. And how is he portrayed? He's highly powerful:
> he created the world and rules over it. And he's glorified -- at
> least he gets a glorious speech, and nobody contradicts it.
The issue in both Genesis and Job can be read entirely in terms of
power rather than good vs. evil. God comes across simply as an
entity with absolute power who doesn't want anyone else getting a
slice. Both the serpent and God are agreed that the problem with the
Tree of Knowledge is its ability to make Adam and Eve "be as gods" /
"be as one of us". In Job, his only answer to "Why are you doing
this?" is a great intimidating rant about being vastly more clever
and powerful than the questioner. The casting down of Satan for
questioning his role in the hierarchy fits into the same picture.
Franklin Harris
Robert Teeter <rte...@netcom17.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:7lc7h9$m...@dfw-ixnews6.ix.netcom.com...
> I'm reading _Jewish Myths_ by Robert Graves and Raphael
> Patai. It covers the major stories in Genesis and relates them to
> the mythology of neighboring countries (especially Babylon) and
> brings in the relevant Midrash (post-Biblical Jewish explications
> of the Bible).
Thanks. I'll have to check that out. The sources I have on hand are either
more specialized ("The Book of J") or far, far more general ("Asimov's Guide
to the Bible").
(O, how I miss the college library...)
Ray Girvan
> Ray Girvan <ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk> writes:
>> "Red Dragon" suggests he does [torture his victims]:
>> remember the victim who gave Will Graham the clue, hung
>> up on a pegboard with multiple injuries like a mediaeval
>> Wound Man illustration?
> I thought that was done after he was already dead, but I'm not
> sure, I haven't got a copy of Red Dragon handy.
Hmm ... you may be right. I don't have the book at present either,
but I've just found a transcript of that section at:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/5985/lectercaught.htm
It doesn't say if the injuries were done post-mortem. It could
equally be interpreted as the victim restrained by being laced to the
pegboard first; or that this was only necessary to set up the corpse
as the Wound Man, who in the woodcuts is always depicted standing up.
Jim Collier
>
> Robert Teeter <rte...@netcom17.netcom.com> writes:
>
> > I'm reading _Jewish Myths_ by Robert Graves and Raphael
> > Patai. It covers the major stories in Genesis and relates them to
>
> I wonder why they would concentrate on Babylonian myths? Do they claim
> that the stories in Genesis (J and E) were written after the return
> from the exile?
I think his thesis is that pre-Exile writers copied Babylonian
mythology which was known all over the Middle East. Certainly Noah
was taken from them, and the Babylonians took Gilgamesh from
earlier Sumerians.
> If so, I think that goes against the scholarly
> consensus. And if not, why would the Babylonians have had more
> influence than other peoples (e.g., Canaanites) on the Israelite
> stories?
The Babylonians were warriors and colonists. They spread the word
more.
JC
Michael S. Morris
I said:
And of course the fruit of the garden
as a temptation. I know.
Moggin:
Not quite the same.
Hmm. Mine was an acknowledgment directed at Silke.
The point is that the apple symbolically links
evil and sensual pleasure as a temptation. Milton
is perhaps at his finest painting the sensual
temptation of that selfsame apple. But of course,
he *dwells* on the temptation in a way Genesis does
not.
As for God in Job, look, you really don't have
to argue to me he's a murderous beast. I guess
I figured that out for myself---for the God of
both the Old and New Testaments, by the way---a
long time ago (though of course in Job he is
a more tightly drawn literary character). You
may be trolling here for who will bite, and I
applaud that in fact, but given that you repeated
yourself on this, I will engage one point seriously---
I do not think the example of God in Job is *like*
the example of Satan in Milton. Glorification
per se has nothing to do with what I was saying.
We are not literarily *tempted* to emulate God
in Job. Worship him, yes. Be awed by his power
and be reduced to utter incomprehension of why it is
he does what he does, yes. But he is not romanticized
and being like him is not made tempting in any way.
Milton's Satan *is* romanticized. "Better to reign in
hell" seduces and attracts and tempts. We are
literarily *meant* to feel this, meant to be
tempted, meant to be tempted to emulate. (Of course,
we are also meant to resist and reject this
temptation---the apple does not end up tasting like
it seems it will taste.) In this sense of
evil as attractive and tempting, of dwelling
on its temptation in fact, there seems to me to
be a sea change between Job and Milton.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Fiona Webster
> This discussion happened because I stepped in questioning
> how interesting the dark side really is.
I still don't get your original point, then. I can understand
your wanting to explain, from your own point of view, why you
find the dark side uninteresting. But are you also questioning
the general phenomenon that people are interested in the dark
side? If not, why include that implication of objectivity in
your statement, as if "the dark side is not interesting" were
something that anyone could possibly refute?
Silke writes:
> You find Dante's very dark Satan interesting, so we're back at
> the beginning again where you first denied that evil was intriguing.
> If you had made a more modest point, you might have gotten away
> with it, of course. The aesthetic history of evil is interesting,
> just as the aesthetics of nausea (starting with Lessing).
Righto. I presume, then, that Mike is slip-sliding his way into
a separate point.
In another part of this conversation, Mike says:
> Hannibal would appear to have generated a following out of his
> being superhumanly *beyond* pity and compassion and grief. You
> disagree that his cruelty is what is being admired?
Silke:
> Yes.
Mike:
> We disagree about this.
Silke:
> Perhaps some admire his cruelty, some admire the writing? I
> cannot for the life of me admire Achilles, for instance, whose
> strength isn't earned, who has a nasty temper, seems none too
> smart and rather vindictive. That doesn't mean I can't
> admire the character Achilles as a literary triumph. [...]
> I think it's Harris' creation that's admired.
I agree with Silke that it's mostly the creation being admired.
But even if some people do admire Hannibal as a "person," it's
way too simplistic to say that they admire his cruelty. They
admire many things about him: his intelligence, his physical
prowess, his wit, his aesthetic standards, his ironic code of
etiquette, and above all, I think, his superhuman *cool*.
Mike:
> I've read many of the readers' responses to the book.
> What I see is a whole lot of admiration for cruelty going on.
Mere cruelty without finesse? Bah...I'm sure I've read many more
fan responses to the 3 novels by Thomas Harris that feature
Lecter as a character, and I've seen *no* admiration for his
cruelty in isolation from his other characteristics. Even the
most wacko (technical term <smile>) of horror fans don't admire
cruelty that lacks style.
Mike also says:
> I do see a whole lot of people who like the book enjoying
> its epater le bourgeois.
Huh? I can see claiming that people like Lecter for bucking
social mores, or for mocking the rules of society, but what in
Harris's _Hannibal_ (have you read it?) espouses "épater le
bourgeois"? I'm under the impression that in order to "épater
le bourgeois" you have to be thumbing your nose at material
wealth in some way. Hannibal is very much a model capitalist
consumer: he loves money for what it can buy him, and his
appetite for material goods is large--that's the flaw in his
coolness, in fact, the flaw that allows Clarice Starling to
track him down. American Express would be tickled to give this
man a Platinum card. That's pretty darn bourgeois, isn't it?
--Fiona
Franklin Harris
> By the way, I haven't read Asimov's book, and I don't know anything
> about it one way or the other, but I was just wondering -- is it
> reliable? I mean, Isaac Asimov?
He is a popularizer. I don't think any of the interpretations in his book
are original with him. (Or course, I could be wrong!) I quoted Asimov
because his book it what I have on hand, but I've seen the same
interpretations elsewhere.
Alas, I'm 100 miles removed from a decent research library. ;-)
> Anyway, there's at least some Phoenician or Canaanite influence in the
> part about Job and Yahweh, as opposed to Yahweh and the adversary.
> Could there have been a Phoenician or Canaanite version of the
> Yahweh-Adversary framework as well?
It wouldn't surprise me.
Ted Samsel
And they had lots of degrees.
--
Ted Samsel....tejas@infi.net (or tbsa...@richmond.infi.net)
"do the boogie woogie in the South American way"
Rhumba Boogie- Hank Snow (1955)
Michael S. Morris
S: Why is it narcissistic?
M: It dwells on the self and the self's reasons.
S: Why is it narcissistic?
M: There need be no other answer.
S: Sure there needs to be another answer.
Postulating that every text that "dwells
on the self" is therefore narcissistic
strikes me as pretty stupid. Much of
philosophy does nothing else. Narcissism
is a pathology, and even in colloquial use,
the term is derogatory.
narcissism: self-love and admiration that find
emotional satisfaction in self-contemplation [OED]
Actually, postulating that there could be *any*
text which "dwells on the self" that isn't
narcissistic strikes me as pretty obtuse.
S: If people choose to do evil, they must
do so for a reason -- just possibly the
attractiveness of certain kinds of evil is
that reason.
M: Possibly. Or, possibly not.
S: What's your best guess? Counter-phobic behavior?
M: Counter-phobic behaviour is of course the
other classical answer.
S: It is? I thought it was a joke.
Apparently it was a joke. In any event,
my point was that people choose to do
evil for two main classes of reasons:
hope of pleasure and fear of pain. I
figured you must have meant the latter,
since it was the natural contrast with
the only thing that was on the table,
namely pleasure.
M: But, habit is a causal explanation
different from both attractiveness---
hope of pleasure---and from counter-phobia---
fear of pain.
S: Counter-phobia isn't "fear of pain."
It's rather fear of fear.
Yes, and it was a joke anyway, so let's
forget it and get back to hope of pleasure,
fear of pain, and habit. Do you agree on such
a categorization, or do you see there to be
some significantly different other human reason
for doing evil, or do you wish to include
"habit" under the other two, or "habit and
fear of pain" both under an appropriate
generalization of the pleasure principle?
M: It can be without immediate reason, because
without immediate choice whatsoever,
although I guess I'd say we probably do most
of what we do out of habit, and probably fear
of the pain or irritation of withdrawal
has more to do with explaining why we
persist than hope of any immediate pleasure.
S: Habit? Is that the best you can do?
Actually, I think habit is a way
undervalued and misunderstood phenomenon.
We run on a kind of moral auto-pilot most
of the time. This is the reason those
correlative studies work in the marginal
way that they do.
S: Where does the habit originate?
What's funny is that you think *origin*
relevant. Let me summarize the paradigm:
Probably most behaviour is habit. Possibly
much evil behaviour is habit as well.
Habits originate in choices made and
patterns of behaviour entered into at
earlier times. When habits are evil,
possibly the choice to do that particular
evil was made at the inception of the
habit. But also possibly the evil
was an unintended consequence of
the habit. "Why are habits sustained?"
seems to me the more relevant question.
Is it more out of temptation (hope of
pleasure) or more out of fear of pain?
I would guess probably it is more often
out of fear of pain---in that it is normally
irritating to break a habit.
S: Why not allow for that possibility?
M: I see no reason not "to allow for
that possibility". Still, when the whole
arc of modern literature seems to
admit of no other possibility, one gets
to wondering whether it isn't so much
allowing for such a possibility as
suppressing any other possibility.
S: Are you sure there aren't any ugly
evil people in literature since Milton?
M: Didn't say that. However, I'm amused that
you would think "ugly" the key word here.
I would have said "impotent" was more
relevant.
S: Dante's Satan is impotent?
Yes, that is Dante's meaning.
S: He acquired quite an empire...
Do you think so?
S: Ugly was your term, earlier on.
Among a list of terms which informed what
I might have meant by it.
S: Btw, there's an ugly evil non-attractive guy in
_Hannibal_, Verner (sp?). And, of course, he
tortures children and raped his sister when she
was a kid (see below).
The Verger chap people have been talking about?
No doubt his physical repulsiveness justifies
what happens to him? This question hinges on the
contrast between Lecter and Verger and the question
of whether there really is a separation possible
between aesthetic and moral judgment.
S: I do think, before you
get me wrong, that it is
interesting that ancient
literature seems to do pretty
well without horrible villains
of any sort, attractive _or_
unattractive, but once you're
looking at evil (or once you
develop the concept), both the ugly
and the attractive variants seem
important.
M: I'm arguing that the attractive variant
now seems to dominate the concept, and
that there is a reason for this.
S: The reason was, once again?
M: I believe I started by questioning the
commonplace that this admixture of evil
is all that interesting.
S: Sure, but that's not a reason. What's the
reason?
The reason is that it is a commonplace
that this admixture of evil is interesting.
I paused at that, since it occurred to me
that there was a time when evil wasn't
considered interesting, when evil was not
considered powerful or even substantive with
a Zoroastrian or Manichean separate-but-equal
empire in our world, and such times seem to
me to correlate with when people wouldn't go
about asserting as indisputable fact the idea
that after all we are all latent serial killers
at heart. I sort of took it from there.
S: I don't think you're right, btw,
certainly not once you're looking
at the discourse on evil on the whole.
M: Scott certainly brought up Arendt in
the same context of the 34th Canto.
S: So? I think the most popular evil
right now is sexual child abuse.
Hmm. That seems to me to be about
ten years out of date. Sexual child
abuse was real popular back in the
mid-80's. Right now, it's "going postal".
S: Do you see it glorified?
Not particularly, although I have
no doubt that it could be and would be
did it loom larger on the social consciousness
than I think it does. Of course, "going postal"
*has* been glorified in various ways.
S: It's been noted that _Hannibal'_s Lecter
seems to kill mostly assholes, btw.
I saw that this was stated to be the case---
kind of like Anne Rice's Lestat. Nevertheless,
I also saw a reply to that statement which gave
a long list of apparently more innocent victims
of Lecter's attentions. But, no doubt at least
the assholes got what they so richly deserved?
S: Dante's Satan has little to recommend him.
M: Umm, yes and no. He is not seductive or
tempting, if that is what you mean. But
that was my whole point. And that is what
my friend was suggesting, and I would agree,
is artistically quite deliberate in Dante.
S: That sounds to me like a rather
ideological reading.
M: I don't know what you mean here
by "ideological". It strikes me as
an intensely *appreciative* reading
of Dante. It leads to recognizing
resonance after resonance in Dante.
S: It is unaesthetic, hence ideological
(see Fiona's q-post).
M: I don't understand the aesthetic to be
divorced from the rational.
S: Nice line, but it really doesn't
address what I said.
M: I think it addresses exactly what you said.
You have yet to indicate in what respect
this observation about the quality of Dante's
Satan either is not aesthetic or is ideological.
S: Because it doesn't say anything about aesthetics.
Seems sufficient.
So, you understand aesthetic judgments to be
those judgments in which the word "aesthetics"
has been spoken or written?
I, on the other hand, understand judgments about Beauty
to be intertwined with judgments about Truth and the
Good. I therefore understand that what Canto 34 says
is at least as important as the quality of its description.
And I understand that the combination of the two knocks
that pitch right over the fence behind second base,
which is an aesthetic and ethical and rational judgment
rolled into one.
S: The larger issue is that there are various ways
in which to make evil attractive, and writing about
it beautifully is one of them. The attraction of evil
is evident in Dante as well as in Harris, even though
the write about it differently. Besides, recall who
all dwells in hell.
Mainly I recall that many of Lecter's victims
will dwell there, and that, in Dante, these evoke
pity, compassion, and grief. I'm not convinced
that such an evocation is what is aimed at
in Harris, though I am judging by what has
been apparently evoked in others, not
what might be evoked in me were I to read it.
S: Perhaps Dante's Satan isn't
attractive people (as paschal
might say), but don't you see
the beauty in the description?
M: Of course I see beauty in the
description. But I see beauty
especially in the truth conveyed
by that description as well---beauty
in the pity and grief invoked by
that description.
S: Okay, this is about you. Wish
you'd said that right away.
M: Not one jot more than "that" is
about you.
S: Sorry, your argument keeps
coming down to "that's what
I feel when I read x, y, or z."
Sorry, but no, it doesn't. *Your
argument*, however, keeps coming
down to an asserted absolutism of
aesthetics coexistent with an
asserted relativism of ethics, and
there being a clear distinction
in *your* mind between the two. The
problem with this is that the two
go together, are not separate
at all.
S: That's interesting, and I'm sure
you have fine reasons, but it won't
cut it as a guide to all of literature
since Milton.
Oh, lay off the crap. No one offered it
as "a guide to all of literature since
Milton".
M: Again, I don't buy your "ideological"
here as a valid dismissal from the aesthetic.
S: It's not a dismissal -- it means that
your reading is _centered_ on a
moral you want to be true, i.e. that
evil is ugly.
M: Whether evil is impotent or not is an open
question (a curious tic, that, that you wish
to center on ugly).
S: Again, ugly is your term.
Yes, but please try and use it in the same
way.
S: I use it as a counter-point to attractive.
Quicker to type than unattractive. I'm also
trying to move this towards aesthetic
considerations, hence 'ugly' is apt.
Fair enough. In art of course there are
distinct layers upon which such judgments
might apply---a beautiful painting of an
ugly object, for example. But also, with
respect to *evil* there is a distinction
to be maintained between evil itself
and how evil seems to us. *Dwelling* on
the seeming beauty of evil, its attractiveness,
our hope for its pleasures, etc., is
what I am calling narcissistic---it seems
more about stroking our own temptations and
excusing our succumbing to them, encouraging
us to be content with them, than about
evil. Evil itself is another thing entirely
than our temptations to do it. If you want
to use "ugly" as unattractive with this
resonance for "attraction", sure.
M: But, I'm afraid you
nevertheless have *still* not rescued
your usage of "ideological", as distinct
from aesthetic. Your use of "ideological"
is ideological. My reading of Dante isn't.
S: It's moralistic to the bone.
Yes, but *therefore* aesthetic to the bone.
S: Only it doesn't have any bones.
You speak nonsense here. It has every
bone, especially in Dante. The kind
of aesthetism you are invoking is
in fact utterly inadequate with which
to even approach reading Dante. It comes
from a different universe. As Boccaccio
understood perfectly well, by the
way.
M: My greater interest in what Dante is saying
about evil than what Thomas Harris apparently
is saying about it may in fact be ideological.
S: Actually, I think that's an aesthetic
consideration, and one I share.
I agree that it is aesthetic, too.
S: It did come across that way in
your post, yes -- let's make sure
that evil looks ugly.
M: What about simply telling the truth
about evil? No censorship implied,
just various examples of artistic
success or failure.
S: What about it?
M: Well, did you notice nothergirl
there with "it makes me more grateful
of my own life; and re-affirms in myself
that I am not so bad with my small
idiosyncracies"?
S: What about it?
Seems narcissistic to me. Great, don't
you think, to find matter for spiritual
uplift in that we are not so bad as serial
killers?
S: You seemed to imply that there is
one way of "telling the truth about
evil," and that it's Dante's way.
No. I rather said that Dante got
something right about evil which we
moderns tend to get wrong. Doesn't mean
that everything that has been
said since about evil or its
temptations is wrong.
S: You seem to imply that a tale in
which a form of evil is attractive
is not "telling the truth about
evil." If I'm mistaken, what was
your point?
It's not so much that any tale in which
evil is attractive is false, but that a
tale which dwells upon the attractiveness
of evil, which strokes that attractiveness
in order to relativize that evil is missing
something about evil in favour of something
about the self. It's a tale which confuses
that attractiveness---the aesthetic
allure of strength or pitilessness, say---
for the evil itself.
S: Is there one evil, and one truth about it?
M: Did I say there was?
S: You seem to suggest that evil is
never attractive, and you didn't modify
with "for me."
I thought I suggested that it is often
not attractive, that it is often performed
out of fear of pain or out of habit, neither
of which can be identified strictly with
temptation to pleasure or with attractiveness.
S: Why not acknowledge the obvious --
evil is attractive if packaged a
certain way.
M: I thought that that was obvious
and therefore needed no acknowledgement.
S: Ah. It seemed to be what you were debating.
I thought I entered debate by asserting that
this attractiveness isn't interesting.
S: Your posts don't make it as
literary history -- the point about
Milton's Satan and the beginning of
all-attractive evil has been made so
many times that it has been refuted
just as many times.
Your post is not making it as
reading. I never offered Milton's
Satan as an original take on literary
history. In fact, I said that I was
adopting Milton's Satan as a symbol
from a quote by T.S. Eliot. It would
be foolish of you to get so enamoured
of all those refutations as to fail to
recognize its suitability as a symbol,
especially given that Dante and not Milton
was where I went with it.
S: Otherwise, this discussion wouldn't
have happened.
M: This discussion happened because I stepped
in questioning how interesting the
dark side really is.
S: You find Dante's very dark Satan interesting,
No, this gets it exactly wrong. I find
that Dante depicts *evil* as not interesting,
not attractive, not tempting. I find that
he takes great care to do it thus. I find it
aesthetically and ethically interesting that
he does it that way, yes, and interesting that
this seems to be so much in contrast with
the mode of depicting evil as tempting. I
also find it interesting that Dante's way seems
to evoke more pity, compassion, and grief.
As for your calling Dante's Satan "very dark",
I don't understand what you mean by that.
S: so we're back at the beginning again
Only by means of a sophistical stretch.
S: where you first denied that evil was intriguing.
Where I denied that the admixture of evil
in a character necessarily makes her more
interesting.
S: If you had made a more modest point,
you might have gotten away with it, of
course.
I don't see that you have made any refutation
of my point at all, though I think it was
in fact fairly modest.
S: The aesthetic history of evil is interesting,
just as the aesthetics of nausea (starting with
Lessing).
So is the ethical history of evil.
S: If you're simply saying
that _you_ don't like those
packages, okay.
M: No, I love many of those packages.
I simply question why we dwell on
our seduction by them.
S: Because they make better narrative.
Check any newspaper.
I am unconvinced that they do "make better
narrative". Maybe yes, maybe no. Seems
to me some fine narrative exists without
dwelling on the seductive power of evil.
Seems to me in fact that that is some
of the finest narrative going. Other
fine narrative also exists which does
dwell on the seduction. But better?
M: Or Mikhail, who seems to worship cruelty,
and has yet to exhibit its service to a
moral end. He likes _Hannibal_. Why?
This Krendler chap gets it, I guess. A Washington
bureaucrat gets his brains eaten and we're
supposed to see something splendid in that?
Why?
S: I take it to be an attractive metaphor to
the foes of big government. It's an
interesting scene because it is painless
to Krendler, and his brain functions while
it is being eaten, only less and less, naturally.
The scene is both shallowly and deeply ironic,
and perhaps you want to read it before you
paschal it.
I think that I am quite carefully not
paschaling it. I also think that the
irony came through to me loud and clear
already in various descriptions. Nevertheless
I will add that irony alone will not
rescue it from complicity with the
target of its irony.
S: I think you assume that this book
is too popular to have aesthetic
dimensions. I know you'll deny it,
and perhaps you'll be right.
I will deny it, since it isn't true.
I've read Thomas Harris' _Black Sunday_
longtime ago. I remember it as a fun
police v. terrorist thriller in the
standard potboiler sort of way and I
don't think there was much in the way
of aesthetic dimension to it. That would
lead me to expect not very much from
his later horror novels, but all that is
is an expectation. Mikhail's rec, however,
of _Hannibal_, and especially Eugen Weber's
review have rather upped my expectations
of it by several grades. In terms of
deciding whether to read it or not,
however, I have the added consideration
that I couldn't just read it without
reading _Red Dragon_ and _SotL_ and then
watching "SotL" first. Anal of me, I know,
but there you have it. In any event, the
apparent allusive presence of Poe and Baudelaire
and Dante and Hannibal the Carthaginian at this
cannibal feast all contribute to rather higher
expectations for it than I otherwise might have
carried.
I'm also rather intrigued by the
somebody's early post about
horror slipping into black comedy.
That strikes me a little like
similar problems about epic sliding
into romance and fantasy into dream
and tragedy into pathos and comedy
into farce.
M: Well, let me put it
this way---someone said that Hannibal at the
anthropophagous feast says "Pity has no place
at this table." I would suggest that pity and
compassion and an immense grief have place in
the 34th Canto.
S: Pity and compassion and grief also have a
place in _Hannibal_, so what's your point?
M: That Hannibal would appear to have generated
a following out of his being superhumanly
*beyond* pity and compassion and grief. You disagree
that his cruelty is what is being admired?
S: Yes.
M: We disagree about this.
S: Perhaps some admire his cruelty, some admire the
writing?
Oh, yes, some and some, sure.
S: I cannot for the life of me admire Achilles,
for instance, whose strength isn't earned,
who has a nasty temper, seems none too smart
and rather vindictive.
Hmm, I guess for me the thing to admire about
him is that in the middle of all it, he *thinks*
about what it is he is doing. Of course, this
pause is muchly thrust upon him, and it will
have terrible consequences, to his enemies,
to his friends, and to himself, but his pause to
think is where it all is.
S: That doesn't mean I can't admire the
character Achilles as a literary triumph.
I understood this distinction the
first time. Or long prior to the first time.
S: I think it's Harris' creation that's admired.
M: I've read many of the readers' responses to
the book. What I see is a whole lot of
admiration for cruelty going on.
S: Did anybody actually say this, or are you
playing psychologist to the posting masses?
Take a read over at Simona Lewis' little Nietzschean
sermon (sans N.'s irony and insinuation) and
ask me again.
S: Did you think Dahmer was admired
in the same way, for instance?
I didn't say Dahmer was. However, I would
say that a whole lot of admiration for being
*beyond* good and evil (in our own petty ways)
is happening.
S: I don't think anybody who likes the
book would want Lecter to marry his
daughter, particularly.
M: Of course not. But I do see a whole lot
of people who like the book enjoying
its epater le bourgeois.
S: Huh? The only book that epater's the
bourgeois is the one that threatens
to take their money away.
Bullshit.
S: Who do you think reads this
book? Aristocrats? Dirt-poor
socialists?
Reads this book or reads it well?
I think many people seem to admire
Lecter for his cruelty, as I said.
S: Aren't you the one who usually
insists that people of all ages tell
fiction and bios apart pretty well?
M: I am well aware of the earlier context,
Silke. But, no, I have not claimed
this at all, there being a distinction
between "can tell" and "do tell". I
usually insist people *can* tell, and
*can* be held responsible for telling.
Whether they empirically do or not is beside
the question.
S: But you just admitted that they do,
re the daughter.
Whether they empirically do or not
is beside the question.
And, let's just understand this a moment:
No, the daughter example does *not* constitute
an admission that they empirically do.
The outcomes are not limited to sainthood
v. becoming or worshipping serial killers.
It may well amount to no more than excusing
adultery or shoplifting or any other forbidden
pleasure in the name of the strength of
being beyond ethics. It may be no more
than thinking some assholes richly deserve
to be cannibalized.
S: But your feeling isn't entirely
the yard-stick here. I don't think
anybody who hasn't smoked with pleasure
understands smoking very well.
M: I guess I doubt that there's all
that much to understand.
S: Yup, I thought that's what you would
guess. How do you understand them?
As partakers in an ancient pleasurable
habit who have now become targets for the
usual crusades.
M: To remind you that it's really the standard
conservative's list of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll
we are talking about. Both literature and films
have gotten more narcissistic about sex over time.
S: Ah. Very little sex in _Hannibal_, at least
of the explicit kind.
M: The presence or absence of sex in _Hannibal_ seems
irrelevant to the question of literature or
film dwelling on the *temptations* of evil,
and whether depicting those temptations really
leads to understanding or not.
S: Sure, but not as irrelevant as your
introduction of the theme.
Sorry, I find your claim of irrelevance itself
much more irrelevant. It tells me you don't
understand the generality of my point.
M: "Body Heat" would have been unthinkable a few
short decades ago. I guess the question I have
is whether something like that somehow makes the
temptation of sex *more understandable* than it was
before?
S: I don't know "Body Heat". I know that the
_Story of O_ made certain practices more
understandable to me.
M: But are you saying evil practices, or no?
S: That's not under debate right now.
Yes, it most certainly is. I'm
not asking whether you think this
or that practice in _The Story of O_
is evil. I'm saying that my context
was the context of not just any temptation,
but a temptation to do evil. Where the
focus in the book or film is on the temptation,
or the process of temptation itself. I
am arguing that dwelling on the temptation
of sex in "Body Heat" is a way of erasing
consideration of the grief which will
be found later on. I am arguing that
I really didn't learn anything about the
temptation of sex thereby, or in fact
about murder.
S: You asked whether temptations can be
rendered intelligible by books. I'd
say yes.
OK, sure, books *can* render some temptations
intelligible that were not previously
intelligible. But surely you do not think
that's what most books or films that focus
on the temptation are doing?
M: "Body Heat" is a film---an actor's duel
between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner---a
sizzlingly sexy film noir in which she
essentially seduces him with sex in order
to get him to kill off her rich hubby for
her. It's an example of *dwelling* on the
seduction and seductiveness of evil. I'm
not convinced we *understand* much more
about either evil or the power of sex at the
end of it than the beginning.
S: Perhaps it's a bad film.
I think it's a very good film. I just
think its focus is rather different
than Dante's.
M: Do you think that dwelling
on the *temptations* involved really helps us
*understand* anything?
S: I think describing anything well helps
us to understand it.
M: OK, then I must ask what is the thing that
is being described well, and hence understood.
I don't think that it is the evil at all. I think
it is only *our temptations* that
are being described.
S: But I still maintain that evil wouldn't
exist if it didn't tempt us.
M: I disagree with this. I just think
most evil isn't that attractive or
tempting. Some probably is.
S: "Most evil" isn't in _Hannibal_ either, before we
lose sight of the topic here. Some of the attractive
subsets are. Some of the unattractive ones as
well.
Fair enough. But, the topic isn't _Hannibal_,
which I haven't read (remember). The topic is rather
the commonplace about this admixture of evil
being interesting.
S: As opposed to the bad (get the garlic
out before Noel appears)
M: Yeah, even as opposed to the bad, I think
evil isn't necessarily all that tempting,
or interesting. My main point I guess is
that its temptingness is more a literary
creation than a reality being described.
S: But we are talking about literature, and
it was literature to which you objected.
Again we see before us the question
of the blend of Beauty with either
Truth or the Good. I say evil isn't
necessarily all that tempting, meaning in
reality. You say evil is depicted as
tempting in literature. I say if
literature gets this wrong, its a failing
of literature. You say that's an ideological
judgment. I say it's an aesthetic judgment.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Richard Harter
>I agree with Silke that it's mostly the creation being admired.
>But even if some people do admire Hannibal as a "person," it's
>way too simplistic to say that they admire his cruelty. They
>admire many things about him: his intelligence, his physical
>prowess, his wit, his aesthetic standards, his ironic code of
>etiquette, and above all, I think, his superhuman *cool*.
It seems you would be saying that cruelty is an aristocratic grace and a
vice in commoners. In real life a duke may be a fat, balding, timid man
who shies at loud noises. In the Myth, though, his grace has grace.
His sins have style. Grace graces his Grace's crimes. It not just the
style we admire nor is it just the cruelty. It is the annointment that
justifies and awes.
Would you be saying something like that?
>Huh? I can see claiming that people like Lecter for bucking
>social mores, or for mocking the rules of society, but what in
>Harris's _Hannibal_ (have you read it?) espouses "épater le
>bourgeois"? I'm under the impression that in order to "épater
>le bourgeois" you have to be thumbing your nose at material
>wealth in some way. Hannibal is very much a model capitalist
>consumer: he loves money for what it can buy him, and his
>appetite for material goods is large--that's the flaw in his
>coolness, in fact, the flaw that allows Clarice Starling to
>track him down. American Express would be tickled to give this
>man a Platinum card. That's pretty darn bourgeois, isn't it?
But no, it is not bourgeois. Conspicuous consumption by the bourgeois
is in imitation of that by the aristocrat.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-978-369-3911
"A tool, such as human sacrifice, is ethically neutral.
Some tools are better left unused." - MRD
Fiona Webster
> narcissism: self-love and admiration that find
> emotional satisfaction in self-contemplation [OED]
>
> Actually, postulating that there could be *any*
> text which "dwells on the self" that isn't
> narcissistic strikes me as pretty obtuse.
Oh Mike, surely you don't really think that. On a silly
level, of course a *text* cannot be narcissistic.
But I'll take it that you mean the author of the text is
supposedly narcissistic. Surely you're aware that the self,
as a construct, has long been the subject of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and psychology books. The authors of those
books cannot be said to be either narcissists or non-
narcissists, because they are not writing about *themselves*,
but about the self as a construct. Saying that an author
who writes about the self finds emotional satisfaction in self-
loving, is like saying that an author who writes about
toilets...well anyway, you get my point.
Mike is right, though, that narcissism is not necessarily
pathological. Narcissism is the most normal thing in the
world: health people *do* find emotional satisfaction in
loving themselves. When a psychiatrist diagnoses someone as
having Narcissistic Peronsality Disorder, what they really
mean is that the person is *overly* narcissistic, that they
have a pathological hypertrophy of a normal psychic mechanism.
But Silke is right as well, that until it's clarified in the
context of a given dialogue, the word "narcissism" usually
has a negative and/or pathological connotation. At least
these days.
In another part of this thread, Silke writes:
> Ugly was your term, earlier on. [...]Btw, there's
> an ugly evil non-attractive guy in
> _Hannibal_, Verner (sp?). And, of course, he
> tortures children and raped his sister when she
> was a kid (see below).
Mike replies:
> The Verger chap people have been talking about?
> No doubt his physical repulsiveness justifies
> what happens to him? This question hinges on the
> contrast between Lecter and Verger and the question
> of whether there really is a separation possible
> between aesthetic and moral judgment.
<ahem> If y'all are going to talk about the characters of
this book, and use them in arguments, shouldn't y'all
get the details right? Mason Verger wasn't ugly before
Hannibal Lecter made him tear his face off. He was an
ordinary, even handsome, guy, and he still has very
beautiful hair. His *psyche* could well be said to be
aesthetically repulsive--I think the reader is supposed
to think that--but his physical repulsiveness is not the
main point. He could look exactly the same way and be
a beautiful person; or he could be gorgeous, and still be
the repulsive, unattractive person he is.
I must confess that I'm not following this moral vs.
aesthetic judgment thing, though, because I've never
thought the primary attraction of evil is *either* in the
temptations it offers *or* in how aesthetically it's
portrayed. Sure, an aesthetic portrayal (either in the
words used or in the image presented) adds to the appeal
of an evil character, but for me the *attraction*--in the
sense of why I want to read about this character--is in
how the author constructs such a being. In other words,
it's *interesting* to me; the notion of an evil character
piques my intellectual curiosity.
By the way, and I'm sure this is a huge _non sequitur_ to
the conversation Silke and Mike are having, I don't think that
real living people are *ever* evil. They are sad, sick, limited,
abnormal, damaged, etc., but not in and of themselves evil.
I guess that's part of what it takes to be a psychiatrist--that
deep unwillingness to pronounce moral judgment against any being,
ever (as opposed to seeing their deeds as immoral, which is not
the same thing). Or at least what it takes to be a psychiatrist
who works with murderers and mutilators, cannibals and child
molesters, which I have done.
Elsewhere, Mike writes:
> Hmm. That seems to me to be about ten years out
> of date. Sexual child abuse was real popular back in
> the mid-80's. Right now, it's "going postal".
You're wrong, but it's not worth arguing about. Read
the newsgroups devoted to various mental illnesses and
to psychology and psychotherapy, you'll see almost nothing
but child abuse, child abuse, child abuse--and very little
about going postal. Going postal is way rare, statistically
speaking, compared to child abuse. Littleton, Colorado, may
put it on the evening news for a month or a year, but child
abuse is a day-in, day-out *obsession* in the chat rooms and
chat-room equivalents of this country. Everyone knows someone
who was, or thinks they were, sexually abused as a child.
If they don't, they've been trying not to hear about it.
And later on, Mike writes:
> I've read Thomas Harris' _Black Sunday_
> longtime ago. I remember it as a fun
> police v. terrorist thriller in the
> standard potboiler sort of way and I
> don't think there was much in the way
> of aesthetic dimension to it. That would
> lead me to expect not very much from
> his later horror novels, but all that is
> is an expectation.
All the critics agree: Harris went through a quantum leap in
writing skill between his first novel, _Black Sunday_, and
his second, _Red Dragon_. As Stephen King wrote recently in
the _New York Times_, _Black Sunday_ "seems to have been
written before the author himself clearly understood what
he was up to."
And, for what it's worth, you don't need to be anal
about reading the books in order. It helps to have
read _Silence of the Lambs_ before reading _Hannibal_,
but _Red Dragon_ is a separate story, and stands on
its own. Almost all the exposition about Lecter's
background and character that's given in _Red Dragon_
is repeated in _Silence of the Lambs_, almost word for
word. And you definitely don't need to see the movie.
I suggest reading _Red Dragon_: it's brilliant, and
doesn't get talked about enough, for my money. And you
won't have to cope with all your preconceptions about
the story, because I doubt you've heard it. If you think
_Red Dragon_ is enough of a cut above the usual thriller
fare that you really enjoy it, then go on to the others.
If not...
> I'm also rather intrigued by the somebody's early post
> about horror slipping into black comedy.
Almost *all* good horror slips into black comedy. Horror
writers who either avoid comedy, or deny that it's relevant,
are usually dull and second-rate. The best of them--Stephen
King, Thomas Ligotti, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.--know darn well
that the macabre is funny, and they use humor to heighten
the effects, vary the emotional tone, etc.
I'm always surprised when people don't know this about horror.
Last summer, for example, a friend and I borrowed my sister-in-
law's husband's laser disc player to play the LD version of a
favorite horror movie. She (my sis-in-law) can't stand horror,
so she stayed on a separate floor in the house during the
showing. Afterwards, she said she was amazed at all the raucous
laughter she kept hearing: "I though it was a really gory and
really scary *horror* movie."
"Yes it is," we replied, "but really *funny*, too." And in the
case of that particular movie (_Evil Dead 2_), the humor is very
much intentional.
At any rate, I don't mean to interfere with y'all's conversation
about ugliness and evil and such, which I'm reading with interest
but not entirely comprehending. Just consider these some comments
from the peanut gallery...
--Fiona
Fiona Webster
> I agree with Silke that it's mostly the creation being admired.
> But even if some people do admire Hannibal as a "person," it's
> way too simplistic to say that they admire his cruelty. They
> admire many things about him: his intelligence, his physical
> prowess, his wit, his aesthetic standards, his ironic code of
> etiquette, and above all, I think, his superhuman *cool*.
Richard Harter says:
> It seems you would be saying that cruelty is an aristocratic grace and a
> vice in commoners. In real life a duke may be a fat, balding, timid man
> who shies at loud noises. In the Myth, though, his grace has grace.
> His sins have style. Grace graces his Grace's crimes. It not just the
> style we admire nor is it just the cruelty. It is the annointment that
> justifies and awes.
>
> Would you be saying something like that?
No, not really. I don't see Hannibal as an aristocrat. He may
*fancy* himself to be that, but socially speaking, he's just an
American doctor. I don't think of anything of those things I
mentioned--intelligence, physical prowess, wit, aesthetic
standards, etiquette, coolness--as necessarily aristocratic.
A street dude in the ghetto can possess all of those traits--with
or without Hannibal's accompanying cruelty.
But then, I'm deep-down American enough to have never really
understood what "aristocratic" means. I can look at the concept
from the outside, when I read about this history of Europe. And I
recognize that there are definite class distinctions in the
United States (and being a psychiatrist, as Dr. Lecter was before
he became a criminal, is by no means at the top of the ladder).
But even having gone to a prep school and an Ivy League college
myself, I still don't "get it" about what an aristocrat would be,
if there were such a thing, in the late 20th century.
I wrote:
> Huh? I can see claiming that people like Lecter for bucking
> social mores, or for mocking the rules of society, but what in
> Harris's _Hannibal_ (have you read it?) espouses "épater le
> bourgeois"? I'm under the impression that in order to "épater
> le bourgeois" you have to be thumbing your nose at material
> wealth in some way. Hannibal is very much a model capitalist
> consumer: he loves money for what it can buy him, and his
> appetite for material goods is large--that's the flaw in his
> coolness, in fact, the flaw that allows Clarice Starling to
> track him down. American Express would be tickled to give this
> man a Platinum card. That's pretty darn bourgeois, isn't it?
Richard writes:
> But no, it is not bourgeois. Conspicuous consumption by the
> bourgeois is in imitation of that by the aristocrat.
Your second sentence just proved my point. Hannibal Lecter's
conspicuous consumption is in imitation of that by the European
aristocrats he appears to admire. It's especially obvious in the
chapter set in Italy, where Lecter is so *desperately* aspiring,
with every ounce of intellectual talent he can muster, to the
ranks of the storied Italian aristocrats of yore. It's because
he's trying so hard, and making such a huge fuss about his
accomplishments and refined tastes, that he strikes me as
bourgeois. Real aristocrats have nothing to prove, n'est-ce
pas?
--Fiona
Michael Zeleny
And yet Hannibal Lecter is clearly identified as an aristocrat, most
likely even a titled one in the manner of his cousin Balthus, and at
least potentially landed owing to the post-1989 property restitution
process. Having shared a schooling similar to yours, I am at a loss
divining your reasons for presuming "a prep school and an Ivy League
college" to be a moral equivalent of nobility.
Indeed. That must be the reason why they developed the code duello.
Cordially -- Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu * M...@ptyx.com ** www.ptyx.com
God: "Sum id quod sum." ** 7576 Willow Glen Road, Los Angeles, CA 90046
Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum." * 323.876.8234 (fon) * 323.876.8054 (fax)
Popeye: "Sum id quod sum et id totum est quod sum." **** www.alonzo.org
established on 2.26.1958 ** itinerant philosopher * will think for food
tejas
Back in the '70s, The Texas Department of Public Health got a new
appointed chief. He was an M.D. and was a Regular Army lifer. He
made the agency a living hell. The reason given was that both M.D.s
and Army officers feel that they are anointed by God and he was
dually so.
--
TBSa...@richmond.infi.net (also te...@infi.net)
'Do the boogie woogie in the South American way'
Hank Snow THE RHUMBA BOOGIE
Michael S. Morris
Fiona:
[...]
But I'll take it that you
mean the author of the text is
supposedly narcissistic.
No. I mean that the reader is
invited by the author into
a narcissism (ala nothergirl's
display of same). Not every reader,
mind you, and I don't think the
good ones, but the invitation
seems to me to be there.
Fiona:
[...]
In other words, it's *interesting* to
me; the notion of an evil character
piques my intellectual curiosity.
Your saying something like this was
where I entered this thread, and I
never responded to yours about the
objectivity of this *interesting*.
I guess I feel *of course* it is
intellectually interesting to you---
this would seem to go with your
profession. But I guess also I find
that objectively (i.e. outside the
specific instance of F.W., psychiatrist,
whom I have come to expect to have
thought through things) this is a
commonplace, not particularly thought
through. As such, I think it tends to
conceptualize evil as substantive, as
somehow equipotent to good (and hence
we get it turned into we are all just
cannibals at heart ala Simona Lewis).
At that point, I think it helpful to
remember there are other ways to conceptualize
evil, which at least to me seem more
alive to the grief which evil may cause.
Fiona (on non-judgment):
[...]
I guess that's part of what it takes to
be a psychiatrist--that deep unwillingness
to pronounce moral judgment against any being,
ever (as opposed to seeing their deeds as immoral,
which is not the same thing).
I don't trust this unwillingness as
either moral or necessarily therapeutic,
but I recognize that I can't clearly
hand you anything better, either.
I said:
Hmm. That seems to me to be about ten years out
of date. Sexual child abuse was real popular back in
the mid-80's. Right now, it's "going postal".
Fiona:
You're wrong, [...]
I don't think so. The chat rooms and the statitical
insignificance of the death at Littleton are irrelevant.
The point is that child abuse had its 15 minutes.
When was the McMartin Pre-School case? That was kicking
around when we were out in California in the mid-80's.
It turned out to be 99% witch hunt. Heck, even
False Memory Syndrome is passe stuff by now.
Fiona:
Everyone knows someone who was, or thinks
they were, sexually abused as a child.
If they don't, they've been trying not
to hear about it.
Nonsense.
It looks like reading them in order
would be best.
With the black humour, wouldn't it
be a challenge *not* to let it become
funny? It seems to me that gory scenes in
films which were once scary to me now
are not scary. That is because they are mild
by comparison with gore that is commonly
depicted now. So, it seems to me there's a
natural process by which gore gets succeeded
by gorier. It ought to be relatively easy
to just go so very far with it as to be funny,
but the edge of gory enough to scare, but
not so much as to be taken as over-the-top
must be very hard.
I take it that the suspense kind of
scary ages differently.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Fiona Webster
> But then, I'm deep-down American enough to have never really
> understood what "aristocratic" means. I can look at the concept
> from the outside, when I read about this history of Europe. And I
> recognize that there are definite class distinctions in the
> United States (and being a psychiatrist, as Dr. Lecter was before
> he became a criminal, is by no means at the top of the ladder).
> But even having gone to a prep school and an Ivy League college
> myself, I still don't "get it" about what an aristocrat would be,
> if there were such a thing, in the late 20th century.
Mikhail replies:
> And yet Hannibal Lecter is clearly identified as an aristocrat, most
> likely even a titled one in the manner of his cousin Balthus, and at
> least potentially landed owing to the post-1989 property restitution
> process.
Oops--'guess I was readin' too fast and missed that. I thought
Harris was referring to Balthus the artist, whose work I'm seen
reproductions of. I recall that he's French, married to a
Japanese woman, that's about it. Is he a noble of some kind?
I wasn't aware. Harris probably mentioned it, and I just breezed
by. More of my blindness to the whole subject, I guess.
> Having shared a schooling similar to yours, I am at a loss
> divining your reasons for presuming "a prep school and an Ivy League
> college" to be a moral equivalent of nobility.
Whoa--I didn't mean that it was, Misha! All I meant is that I
went to *school* with people who were, in terms of their wealth
and family connections, as close to aristocrats as I know how to
identify. Children of world leaders, American old money, that
sort of stuff. I meant that I had met and even made friends with
such people, not that I had any such thoughts about myself.
<laughing at the thought...given my background>
--Fiona
Robert Teeter
: Robert Teeter <rte...@netcom17.netcom.com> writes:
:> I'm reading _Jewish Myths_ by Robert Graves and Raphael
:> Patai. It covers the major stories in Genesis and relates them to
:> the mythology of neighboring countries (especially Babylon)....
: I wonder why they would concentrate on Babylonian myths?
It's my impression that they refer more to Babylonian
myths than those of other countries. I haven't finished the book
and I haven't done a formal count. They do mention most of the
Eastern Mediterranean cultures at one point or another --
Canaanite, Philistine, Sumerian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek.
: Do they claim
: that the stories in Genesis (J and E) were written after the return
: from the exile?
No.
: If so, I think that goes against the scholarly
: consensus. And if not, why would the Babylonians have had more
: influence than other peoples (e.g., Canaanites) on the Israelite
: stories?
I don't think they're even claiming influence, just
drawing parallels.
mt
: Yes, and it was a joke anyway, so let's
: forget it and get back to hope of pleasure,
: fear of pain, and habit. Do you agree on such
: a categorization, or do you see there to be
: some significantly different other human reason
: for doing evil, or do you wish to include
: "habit" under the other two, or "habit and
: fear of pain" both under an appropriate
: generalization of the pleasure principle?
Man, you don't need to say anything else to convince me; this paragraph
alone suffices to put me to sleep. G'nite!
Regards,
mt
Richard Harter
>Michael Morris:
>
>: Yes, and it was a joke anyway, so let's
>: forget it and get back to hope of pleasure,
>: fear of pain, and habit. Do you agree on such
>: a categorization, or do you see there to be
>: some significantly different other human reason
>: for doing evil, or do you wish to include
>: "habit" under the other two, or "habit and
>: fear of pain" both under an appropriate
>: generalization of the pleasure principle?
>
>Man, you don't need to say anything else to convince me; this paragraph
>alone suffices to put me to sleep. G'nite!
See how useful it is. The nifty thing is that you can irritate people
on the cheap.
Puss in Boots
>>>>> ... I'm saying that the trend since
>>>>> Milton has been to portray evil as
>>>>> increasingly sexy and seductive. I am
>>>>> wondering aloud whether evil ever
>>>>> really is either sexy or seductive,
Puss in Boots <mog...@mindspring.com>:
>>>> Milton's Satan was preceded by the Old Testament's depiction
>>>> of God, for example in the Book of Job. (Yeah, that again.)
>>>> He's the cause of great evil -- murders, kidnappings, and torture
>>>> in _Job_ alone -- but he's shown as a tremendously powerful
>>>> being, and he gives a magnificent speech that supplies the climax
>>>> of the story. Not to mention he's an object of worship. So
>>>> making evil a good, or even a god, is no modern innovation: it's
>>>> an age-old thing.
Mike:
>>> And of course the fruit of the garden as a temptation. I know.
Moggin:
>> Not quite the same. The apple is tempting, alright, but the
>> temptation -- at least the part that gets all the attention --
>> is knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil. I don't have to
>> tell you that's not the modern notion of evil. Just the
>> opposite -- discriminating evil from good is now considered to be
>> the basis of morality.
Mike:
> Hmm. Mine was an acknowledgment directed at Silke.
Yet it read exactly like a reply to my last post. And by
some strange coincedence, my post was the latest item that turned
up on your References line. Funny world, ain't it?
> The point is that the apple symbolically links
> evil and sensual pleasure as a temptation. Milton
> is perhaps at his finest painting the sensual
> temptation of that selfsame apple. But of course,
> he *dwells* on the temptation in a way Genesis does
> not.
Genesis barely mentions it -- the main thing about the apple
is that it offers knowledge of good and evil. And that it's
forbidden, of course -- Yahweh doesn't wanna share the info about
good and evil.
> As for God in Job, look, you really don't have
> to argue to me he's a murderous beast. I guess
> I figured that out for myself---for the God of
> both the Old and New Testaments, by the way---a
> long time ago (though of course in Job he is
> a more tightly drawn literary character).
We agreed about the OT God during the last round on Job, and
regardless of when you figured it out. I didn't think you
needed any persuasion on that score -- I'm just pointing out that
the OT treats evil in the ways you seem to be describing as a
modern innovation. You're talking about about romanticizing evil:
the OT literally deifies it.
Moggin:
>> But God in Job is the epitome of evil, even by modern
>> standards: as I said, he's responsible for murders, torture, and
>> kidnappings. And how is he portrayed? He's highly powerful:
>> he created the world and rules over it. And he's glorified -- at
>> least he gets a glorious speech, and nobody contradicts it.
>> He's even worshipped as God. All this in the Old Testament -- it
>> was ancient before Milton was born.
Mike:
> You may be trolling here for who will bite, and I
> applaud that in fact, but given that you repeated
> yourself on this, I will engage one point seriously---
> I do not think the example of God in Job is *like*
> the example of Satan in Milton. Glorification
> per se has nothing to do with what I was saying.
> We are not literarily *tempted* to emulate God
> in Job. Worship him, yes. Be awed by his power
> and be reduced to utter incomprehension of why it is
> he does what he does, yes. But he is not romanticized
> and being like him is not made tempting in any way.
> Milton's Satan *is* romanticized. "Better to reign in
> hell" seduces and attracts and tempts. We are
> literarily *meant* to feel this, meant to be
> tempted, meant to be tempted to emulate. (Of course,
> we are also meant to resist and reject this
> temptation---the apple does not end up tasting like
> it seems it will taste.) In this sense of
> evil as attractive and tempting, of dwelling
> on its temptation in fact, there seems to me to
> be a sea change between Job and Milton.
You stressed the importance of impotence -- that was central,
you said, to your praise of Dante's Satan. But Yahweh is both
evil and potent as can be -- he created the world and rules it as
Lord. So that's nothing new.
You also complained about relativizing evil. I agree that's
not in _Job_. Relativizing is a half-measure: _Job_ makes
evil into an absolute. It stands beyond questioning; even beyond
acceptance. It's simply to be worshipped and obeyed.
Same place you brought up relativism, you criticized stories
that dwell on the attractiveness of evil. Like I said, Yahweh
is given a beautiful speech: nobody else in _Job_ talks with his
kind of poetry. He includes significant references to "the
goodly wings" of the peacocks and -- Jeff's favorite -- the horse
with its neck clothed in thunder: evil's pretty gifts.
I could probably find more correspondences, but I'm lazy and
I think that's enough to make my point: the depiction of evil
you assign to modern times was already there in the Old Testament.
If you want to talk Romanticism, in specific, there's a case
that Yahweh is _the_ Romantic figure. Think about it: he's
distinguished by his creative powers (he created the world, which
puts him top-of-the-list in that category), he speaks with a
poet's voice, and he exercises his creativity without any respect
for bourgeois proprieties. From one point of view, that's
exactly what _Job_ is all about: the supremacy of the unfettered
creative impulse, especially in respect to moral norms.
-- Moggin
Puss in Boots
>> Not quite the same. The apple is tempting, alright, but the
>> temptation -- at least the part that gets all the attention --
>> is knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil. I don't have to
>> tell you that's not the modern notion of evil. Just the
>> opposite -- discriminating evil from good is now considered to be
>> the basis of morality.
"Simona Lewis" <sim...@netro.com.au>:
> I've always interpreted the tree of knowledge thing differently. I thought
> it meant that only the ignorant can live in paradise. Because only in
> ignorance can one find certainty and hence contentment. But as soon as you
> eat from the tree of knowledge, your inner self is filled with questions and
> doubts. The more you know, the less certain you are of anything.
The details are interesting. Why does Yahweh (the Elohim, I
know -- don't bug me) make the fruit forbidden? The serpent
tells Eve that "your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil." And it seems he's right: a little
while later Y says, "Behold, the man is become as one of us."
He doesn't sound pleased -- appparently that's what he was trying
to prevent.
Another thing: why does Yahweh kick Adam and Eve out of the
Garden? Because they ate the fruit, sure: but more
specifically so that they won't be able to "take also of the tree
of life, and eat, and live for ever." As it turns out, the
fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is fatal, but the
fruit of the tree of life is an antidote -- one that Yahweh
wants to keep from Adam and Eve. That's the reason he gives them
the boot.
-- Moggin
Michael Zeleny
unsupported by any demonstration of its service to a proper moral end,
in connection with inquiring into my reasons for liking Thomas Harris'
_Hannibal_, encapsulating his prejudicial distaste thereof by citing
Dr. Lecter's proemial exhortation to his guest at the anthropophagous
feast of freshly harvested brains of a Washington bureaucrat, that
"Pity has no place at this table." By way of contrast, Mike suggests
that "pity and compassion and an immense grief have place in the 34th
Canto."
However the appropriate reference point here is Vergil's paradoxical
injunction in Inferno XX: "Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta". As
the reader will readily recall, in this fourth bolgia of the eighth
circle of Hell, reside the fortune tellers whose punishment for having
knowingly and wilfully usurped divine prerogatives through the sin of
divination, is wearing their heads permanently twisted so as to face
backwards. Overwhelmed by this sight, Dante's pilgrim is unable to
refrain from shedding compassionate tears on behalf of our image so
distorted; Whereupon his guide harshly rebukes him for his sentiment,
defines the proper subsistence of pity in Hell, where it consists in
pitilessness, and concludes his rebuke with another fierce question,
impugning those who, like the condemned diviners, attempt to render
the divine will inactive through frivolous and blasphemous compassion:
Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto
di tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso
com'io potea tener lo viso asciutto,
quando la nostra imagine di presso
vidi sì torta, che 'l pianto de li occhi
le natiche bagnava per lo fesso.
Certo io piangea, poggiato a un de' rocchi
del duro scoglio, sì che la mia scorta
mi disse: «Ancor se' tu de li altri sciocchi?
Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta;
chi è più scellerato che colui
che al giudicio divin passion comporta? [...]"
Mandelbaum translates it thusly:
May God so let you, reader, gather fruit
from what you read; and now think for yourself
how I could ever keep my own face dry
when I beheld our image so nearby
and so awry that tears, down from the eyes,
bathed the buttocks, running down the cleft.
Of course I wept, leaning against a rock
along that rugged ridge, so that my guide
told me: "Are you as foolish as the rest?
Here pity only lives when it is dead:
for who can be more impious than he
who links God's judgment to passivity? [...]"
Longfellow's rendition is more accurate if less literal:
Here pity lives when it is wholly dead;
Who is a greater reprobate than he
Who feels compassion at the doom divine ?
However Thomas Harris has acknowledged using Ciardi's translation,
which simplifies Dante's enigma of infernal pietà to a straightforward
denial: "There is no place for pity here." Whence Dr. Hannibal Lecter,
the addressee of Dante's apostrophe, telling lovely Clarice Starling:
"Pity has no place at this table."
And what about the Holy Scripture? In Deuteronomy 7:16 we have the
apposite admonition: "And thou shalt consume all the people which the
LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon
them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare
unto thee." A similar condition attaches to the formulation of lex
talionis at Deuteronomy 19:21. And finally, thus speaketh Jaazaniah
the son of Shaphan, on the LORD's own behalf, through Ezekiel 8:18:
"Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither
will I have pity: and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice,
yet will I not hear them." I call this MORALITY WRIT LARGE.
http://complit.rutgers.edu/mwatts/silence.html
http://www.hti.umich.edu/relig/kjv/index.html
http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/projects/dante/index.html
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~scoggins/world/inferno/inferno.html
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/LD/numbers/04/barolini.html
In article <377A70...@netdirect.net>,
Cordially -- Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu * M...@ptyx.com ** www.ptyx.com
Simona Lewis
nice guy, though. Too authoritarian, if you ask me.
Puss in Boots wrote in message ...
Michael S. Morris
Mikhail:
Mike Morris takes me to task for my
appreciation of cruelty, allegedly
unsupported by any demonstration of
its service to a proper moral end,
A single example would suffice.
Mikhail:
in connection with inquiring into
my reasons for liking Thomas Harris'
_Hannibal_, encapsulating his prejudicial
distaste thereof
His recognition that cruelty practiced
by a human being is in every instance
that he can think of a usurpation of the
role of God.
Mikhail:
by citing Dr. Lecter's proemial
exhortation to his guest at the anthropophagous
feast of freshly harvested brains of a Washington
bureaucrat, that "Pity has no place at this table."
By way of contrast, Mike suggests that "pity and
compassion and an immense grief have place in the 34th
Canto."
Mikhail points Vergil's rebuke of
Dante's pity in Canto XX. I think
readers of Harris can do nothing but
applaud his tracing of this pivotal allusion.
Nevertheless, readers of Dante will know that
Vergil's understanding is limited by Vergil
himself, and that this is marked both by his
God-given station within the First Circle, and by
his failure to see anything beyond the boundaries of
Purgatory. It in any event remains obvious,
as I said, that pity and compassion and grief
have every place at the table in the Inferno,
even at the moment of reason's famous rebuke in
the Twentieth Canto. The taste at this cannibal
feast is a bitter one.
Mikhail also cites
Deut. 7:16, 19:21 and Exekiel 8:18 and
concludes (magnificently, I note):
I call this MORALITY WRIT LARGE.
What I think is that God alone
writes this morality and God alone
exercises it. It is one of the
reasons I find this God to be a
murderous beast.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
maryr...@my-deja.com
> >No, not really. I don't see Hannibal as an aristocrat. He may
> >*fancy* himself to be that, but socially speaking, he's just an
> >American doctor. I don't think of anything of those things I
> >mentioned--intelligence, physical prowess, wit, aesthetic
> >standards, etiquette, coolness--as necessarily aristocratic.
> >A street dude in the ghetto can possess all of those traits--with
> >or without Hannibal's accompanying cruelty.
> >
> >But then, I'm deep-down American enough to have never really
> >understood what "aristocratic" means. I can look at the concept
> >from the outside, when I read about this history of Europe. And I
> >recognize that there are definite class distinctions in the
> >United States (and being a psychiatrist, as Dr. Lecter was before
> >he became a criminal, is by no means at the top of the ladder).
> >But even having gone to a prep school and an Ivy League college
> >myself, I still don't "get it" about what an aristocrat would be
>
Lecter's supposed to be a European exiled to the US. Like all
exiles/expats (I know being one myself), you never feel completely
connected to your new country. You're torn between the two and you
have a tendency to think local customs don't apply to you (ask any
transplanted Brit to learn French!). But, as you get older and your
childhood starts to haunt you, you begin to want to surround yourself
with things that were familiar then. I think Lecter's going back to his
mother's country is completely understandable.
As for your considering that psychiatrists are (socially) low down on
the social scale.. compared to what ? junk bond dealers ? real estate
agents turned mogul ?
If you don't "get" the European aristocracy, maybe you should have spent
a "junior year abroad". It still very much exists over here.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Richard Harter
>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>: f...@oceanstar.com (Fiona Webster) wrote:
>
>
>:>I agree with Silke that it's mostly the creation being admired.
>:>But even if some people do admire Hannibal as a "person," it's
>:>way too simplistic to say that they admire his cruelty. They
>:>admire many things about him: his intelligence, his physical
>:>prowess, his wit, his aesthetic standards, his ironic code of
>:>etiquette, and above all, I think, his superhuman *cool*.
>
>: It seems you would be saying that cruelty is an aristocratic grace and a
>: vice in commoners.
>
>I think Fiona and I are saying that _Hannibal_ reflects on the genre of
>horror itself -- if attractively packaged, cruelty is attractive, at least
>in fiction; if unattractively packaged, as in Verger, it's unattractive.
Er, yes, I thought that was already clear. I was enquiring into the
nature of that packaging. The cool cruel have grace, albeit not a
Christian grace. The cool cruel are creatures of myth. I was enquiring
into the nature and origin of that myth.
I was merely struck by the way in which the litany of features and the
terms used resembles the stock description of the bad duke, who is a
stock character in romance.
I haven't read _Hannibal_ yet (I am content to wait for the paperback)
but I gather he has observed the convention that The Bad Duke is
redeemed by the Love Of A Good Woman and added his own twist.
Horror as a genre may have its own avatars and its own myths but it is
scarcely free from those of other genres.
Michael S. Morris
Me: And of course the fruit of the garden as
a temptation. I know.
Mo: Not quite the same. The apple is tempting,
alright, but the temptation -- at least
the part that gets all the attention -- is
knowledge, namely knowledge of good and evil.
I don't have to tell you that's not the modern
notion of evil. Just the opposite -- discriminating
evil from good is now considered to be the basis
of morality.
Me: Hmm. Mine was an acknowledgment directed at Silke.
Mo: Yet it read exactly like a reply to my last post.
And by some strange coincedence, my post was the
latest item that turned up on your References line.
Funny world, ain't it?
It's queer indeed, the wanderings of intelligence.
Me: The point is that the apple symbolically links
evil and sensual pleasure as a temptation. Milton
is perhaps at his finest painting the sensual
temptation of that selfsame apple. But of course,
he *dwells* on the temptation in a way Genesis does
not.
Mo: Genesis barely mentions it --
But the important thing in the context of
*temptation* is that it is a fruit---already
without *dwelling* on the process of temptation
this is a sensual temptation being used as a symbol
for evil. That cuts against what I was arguing
to Silke.
Mo: the main thing about the apple is
that it offers knowledge
of good and evil.
This is one no doubt important thing
about it, but it is hardly the thing
contextually relevant to temptation.
Mo: And that it's forbidden, of course --
Yahweh doesn't wanna share the info
about good and evil.
What Yahweh wants or no is another question
entirely.
Me: As for God in Job, look, you really don't have
to argue to me he's a murderous beast. I guess
I figured that out for myself---for the God of
both the Old and New Testaments, by the way---a
long time ago (though of course in Job he is
a more tightly drawn literary character).
Mo: We agreed about the OT God during the last
round on Job, and regardless of when you
figured it out.
I don't recall you and I particularly
discussing Job at any point, I mean except
by way of agreeing roughly about it tangential
to other topics. I was never in on the discussion
you had with Jeff. As for when I figured it
out, of course the temptation would be for
me to say something catty like when you were
in diapers or lose the hair or whatever one says
when being catty. Anyway, and since we are piling
irrelevancy on top of irrlevancy, your remark
prompted me to try and think about when I came
to that formulation, and I was kind of
surprised that I can't remember. The earliest
I can be sure about is the first few months of
1988, when I know I read the Bible cover-to-cover
for the first time. But I think reading Camus and
Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary_ predated that,
and I am sure they did something towards predisposing
me.
Mo: I didn't think you needed any persuasion
on that score -- I'm just pointing out that
the OT treats evil in the ways you seem to
be describing as a modern innovation.
And I have decided I am disagreeing about
that, then.
Mo: You're talking about about romanticizing evil:
the OT literally deifies it.
What I think is that in this context,
romanticizing and deifying are 180-degree
opposites, so maybe we have something here
to discuss.
Mo: But God in Job is the epitome of evil, even
by modern standards: as I said, he's responsible
for murders, torture, and kidnappings. And how is
he portrayed? He's highly powerful: he created the
world and rules over it. And he's glorified -- at
least he gets a glorious speech, and nobody contradicts
it. He's even worshipped as God. All this in the Old
Testament -- it was ancient before Milton was born.
Me: You may be trolling here for who will bite, and I
applaud that in fact, but given that you repeated
yourself on this, I will engage one point seriously---
I do not think the example of God in Job is *like*
the example of Satan in Milton. Glorification
per se has nothing to do with what I was saying.
We are not literarily *tempted* to emulate God
in Job. Worship him, yes. Be awed by his power
and be reduced to utter incomprehension of why it is
he does what he does, yes. But he is not romanticized
and being like him is not made tempting in any way.
Milton's Satan *is* romanticized. "Better to reign in
hell" seduces and attracts and tempts. We are
literarily *meant* to feel this, meant to be
tempted, meant to be tempted to emulate. (Of course,
we are also meant to resist and reject this
temptation---the apple does not end up tasting like
it seems it will taste.) In this sense of
evil as attractive and tempting, of dwelling
on its temptation in fact, there seems to me to
be a sea change between Job and Milton.
Mo: You stressed the importance of impotence -- that
was central, you said, to your praise of Dante's
Satan.
Of Dante's depiction of Satan, yes.
Mo: But Yahweh is both evil and potent as can
be -- he created the world and rules it as
Lord. So that's nothing new.
What is nothing new? Potent evil is not new. Tempting
potent evil, however, seems to me to be new. It's
where the potency tempts us to emulate it is the
key to the difference.
Mo: You also complained about relativizing
evil. I agree that's not in _Job_.
Relativizing is a half-measure: _Job_
makes evil into an absolute. It stands
beyond questioning; even beyond acceptance.
It's simply to be worshipped and obeyed.
This is where you seem to me not to understand
the half of Job. Job asserts a separation between
God and man. The law applies to man, not to God,
who makes the law for man in the first place. The
speech from out of the whirlwind is precisely about
God commanding our obedience and God asserting His being beyond
the human level. We are to worship and obey. What
there *isn't* in Job is one jot of temptation offered
to us to be like---to emulate---God. He certainly
is not telling us to behave like Him. And the
writer certainly doesn't tempt us to even fantasize
about what that would be like. I don't even think
we *could* fantasize about that, the separation
in scale between the human and the divine is so
great. I would go so far as to say we are literarily
*denied* the possibility of any such temptation by
the Book of Job.
Mo: Same place you brought up relativism,
you criticized stories that dwell on the
attractiveness of evil. Like I said, Yahweh
is given a beautiful speech: nobody else in
_Job_ talks with his kind of poetry. He includes
significant references to "the goodly wings" of
the peacocks and -- Jeff's favorite -- the horse
with its neck clothed in thunder: evil's
pretty gifts.
He is dressed in an awesome beauty, I agree.
But His is a beauty to be awed by, not to
fantasize that it is humanly possible to
attain to. It therefore doesn't attract us
to emulate His same evil. It doesn't make destroying
a man's estate and family and physical person
tempting to us. It doesn't suggest to us that
we, too, could exercise such power, that we
are all little Yahwehs like that at heart.
Now, you could argue that it corrupts us
in a different way. I wouldn't deny that it
might, depending on where you took it. But I
don't see that it seduces like Milton's Satan
seduces. "Better to reign in hell" is
immediate, and human.
Mo: I could probably find more
correspondences, but I'm lazy and
I think that's enough to make my
point: the depiction of evil you
assign to modern times was already
there in the Old Testament.
I don't think you have made quite that
point yet. I think there is a huge difference
with respect to the *temptation to do evil*
between the Old Testament and Milton.
Mo: If you want to talk Romanticism, in
specific, there's a case that Yahweh is
_the_ Romantic figure. Think about it:
he's distinguished by his creative powers
(he created the world, which puts him
top-of-the-list in that category), he
speaks with a poet's voice, and he exercises
his creativity without any respect for
bourgeois proprieties. From one point of
view, that's exactly what _Job_ is all about:
the supremacy of the unfettered creative
impulse, especially in respect to moral norms.
Except for the fact that every Romantic figure
is human, or just-a-little-above-human. In
other words, Romantic figures---Milton's
Satan, Medea, Prometheus, Manfred, Frankenstein's
monster, the vampire Lestat, possibly Hannibal Lecter
(I don't know)---attract us, tempt us, seduce us to
be like them, or at least to imagine ourselves being
like them. That's the one thing Yahweh cannot do, the
monotheistic separation of man and God being crucial
to the OT. There is a vast distinction between a
superman and God. (Notice I did not say "a superman
and a god"---sometimes a literary god is more like a
superman than a deity.)
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael Kagalenko
] Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto
I like Babelfish's translation:
If God leaves you, lettor, to take fruit of your lesson, or I think for you
same
com' potea to hold the dry ace, when our imagine of near I saw yes cake, that'l
I plant de them eyes the buttocks bathed for the cleaved one. Sure piangea
I, rested to a de' rocchi of the hard one scoglio, yes that my supply said to
me:
" Still se' you de others shock them? Here the mercy lives quand' very is died;
who more is scellerato that the one who that to the giudicio divin passion
involves? "
Michael Zeleny
moral end. Just as my elaboration of Vergil's admonition to Dante's
pilgrim was owed to the discovery of that line reported on the Thomas
Harris fan site that I cited in my previous message, so this account
of well-known historical facts owes much of its substance and force to
the generous elenctic instruction by RAB's own Tom Chance. My first
example of cruelty practiced by a human being is certainly tantamount
to an usurpation of the role of God; moreover, and worse than that,
the God in question cannot rightly be dismissed as the supreme moral
exemplar on the account of His being a murderous beast. Thus witness
Plato's treatment of the sophists, which redounds to History's most
comprehensive case of man extirpating an entire body of ideas. In so
far as the permanent loss of all consequence to that Athenian school
of argument, enormously influential among its contemporaries, can be
credited to the founder of the Academy, he can be properly identified
as the perpetrator of the most illiberal, and hence the most cruel,
transgression against the idea of historical Progress of thought and
culture. I shall leave the reckoning of its ultimate moral worth to
my readers. However there is no doubt in my mind that Plato construed
the goal of his pitiless ridicule of Gorgias & Co. as supremely moral.
Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, consider my seven-year
harassment of Mike Godwin the would-be duelist. You will recall Mike
taking umbrage at certain opinions I had expressed in this forum and
attempting to expose my alleged reluctance to act upon my promise of
standing up on their behalf. Perceiving my adversary to be bereft of
courage, honor, and principle, yet thoroughly dedicated to the service
of pride and profit -- in short, a consummate lawyer -- I undertook a
lengthy campaign of intense befuddlement and relentless persecution,
painstakingly designed to instill moral humiliation and physical fear
in my adversary without involving any violent threat on my side. Once
again, you remain free to dismiss this modest exercise as self-serving
exhibition of hormonally motivated vanity. However I remain confident
in having improved the Usenet ecosystem through causing dire pain to a
flabby sophist.
As Herakleites taught us, man's only way to truth lies through strife.
Hence the liberal thinkers and politicians who aim to mitigate strife,
cannot but suppress our only source of truth. My humble contributions
to this medium are meant to countervail this trend.
Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>Thursday, the 1st of July, 1999
>
>Mikhail:
> Mike Morris takes me to task for my
> appreciation of cruelty, allegedly
> unsupported by any demonstration of
> its service to a proper moral end,
>
>A single example would suffice.
>
>Mikhail:
> in connection with inquiring into
> my reasons for liking Thomas Harris'
> _Hannibal_, encapsulating his prejudicial
> distaste thereof
>
>His recognition that cruelty practiced
>by a human being is in every instance
>that he can think of a usurpation of the
>role of God.
>
>Mikhail:
> by citing Dr. Lecter's proemial
> exhortation to his guest at the anthropophagous
> feast of freshly harvested brains of a Washington
> bureaucrat, that "Pity has no place at this table."
> By way of contrast, Mike suggests that "pity and
> compassion and an immense grief have place in the 34th
> Canto."
>
>Mikhail points Vergil's rebuke of
>Dante's pity in Canto XX. I think
>readers of Harris can do nothing but
>applaud his tracing of this pivotal allusion.
>Nevertheless, readers of Dante will know that
>Vergil's understanding is limited by Vergil
>himself, and that this is marked both by his
>God-given station within the First Circle, and by
>his failure to see anything beyond the boundaries of
>Purgatory. It in any event remains obvious,
>as I said, that pity and compassion and grief
>have every place at the table in the Inferno,
>even at the moment of reason's famous rebuke in
>the Twentieth Canto. The taste at this cannibal
>feast is a bitter one.
>
>Mikhail also cites
>Deut. 7:16, 19:21 and Exekiel 8:18 and
>concludes (magnificently, I note):
> I call this MORALITY WRIT LARGE.
>
>What I think is that God alone
>writes this morality and God alone
>exercises it. It is one of the
>reasons I find this God to be a
>murderous beast.
>
> Mike Morris
> (msmo...@netdirect.net)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,rec.arts.horror.written
Subject: Re: Review of Hannibal [SPOILERS]
Summary:
Expires:
References: <19990624171915...@ng-da1.aol.com> <377804...@netdirect.net> <E4Ud3.395$ce5....@news.itd.umich.edu> <377A70...@netdirect.net>
Sender:
Followup-To:
Distribution:
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal
Keywords:
Cc: zeleny,ku...@math.brown.edu,nik...@fas.harvard.edu,thch...@mother.com,roo...@oxy.edu
http://www.hti.umich.edu/relig/kjv/index.html
Puss in Boots
"Michael S. Morris":
>> The point is that the apple symbolically links
>> evil and sensual pleasure as a temptation. Milton
>> is perhaps at his finest painting the sensual
>> temptation of that selfsame apple. But of course,
>> he *dwells* on the temptation in a way Genesis does
>> not.
Moggin:
>> Genesis barely mentions it -- the main thing about the apple
>> there is that it offers knowledge of good and evil. And that
>> it's forbidden, obviously: Yahweh doesn't want to share the info.
Mike:
> But the important thing in the context of
> *temptation* is that it is a fruit---already
> without *dwelling* on the process of temptation
> this is a sensual temptation being used as a symbol
> for evil. That cuts against what I was arguing
> to Silke.
In context of temptation, the knowledge the fruit carries is
at least as important as the fact that it's a fruit. I'd even
say more so. The verse that describes the temptation lists three
things: the apple is good eating (it's not plain how Eve is
supposed to know that, seeing as how she's never eaten one), it's
nice to look at, and it make makes you wise. The first two
items are all there is on the apple as "sensual temptation." The
rest concerns the apple as knowledge.
> This is one no doubt important thing
> about it, but it is hardly the thing
> contextually relevant to temptation.
Are you kidding? It's highly relevant in that context. The
snake doesn't say, "Try this, Eve -- tastes good." He says
"Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil." That's what Yahweh is concerned about, too.
> What Yahweh wants or no is another question entirely.
It's all tied in. If Yahweh didn't forbid Adam and Eve from
eating the apple, it couldn't serve as a temptation: it would
just be another fruit for them to eat. And like I said to Simona,
he makes the apple into forbidden fruit because it has the
potential to make Adam and Eve like gods -- something he wants to
avoid.
Mike:
>>> As for God in Job, look, you really don't have
>>> to argue to me he's a murderous beast. I guess
>>> I figured that out for myself---for the God of
>>> both the Old and New Testaments, by the way---a
>>> long time ago (though of course in Job he is
>>> a more tightly drawn literary character).
Moggin:
>> We agreed about the OT God during the last round on Job, and
>> regardless of when you figured it out. I didn't think you
>> needed any persuasion on that score --
Mike:
> I don't recall you and I particularly
> discussing Job at any point, I mean except
> by way of agreeing roughly about it tangential
> to other topics. I was never in on the discussion
> you had with Jeff.
O.k. I knew we agreed about it, and I figured it was during
the round-robin on _Job_, but I've forgotten all the details.
If you say that wasn't it, then I believe you. Must have come up
in some other conversation. Oh, I know -- the subject was
Nietzsche, and we were in one of our periodic go-rounds with Noel.
[...]
Moggin:
>> -- I'm just pointing out that
>> the OT treats evil in the ways you seem to be describing as a
>> modern innovation.
Mike:
> And I have decided I am disagreeing about that, then.
You are and you're not. You don't have any room to disagree
on the points I've brought up, like potency, beauty, and the
status of evil. (That's not a fiat -- I'll discuss them with you
below.) Your disagreement takes the form 'Yes, but..." where
the "but..." expands to, "But I can still think of something else
to say," and the "something else" turns out to be emulation:
you argue that Yahweh isn't a role model. Maybe he isn't (that's
another thing I'll get to below). But he still possesses all
the other features that you assigned -- exclusively, it seemed to
me -- to the modern portrait of evil.
Moggin:
>> You're talking about about romanticizing evil:
>> the OT literally deifies it.
Mike:
> What I think is that in this context,
> romanticizing and deifying are 180-degree
> opposites, so maybe we have something here
> to discuss.
If they _were_ opposites, you wouldn't be raising objections
to the romanticization of evil: you'd be cheering it on. But
they're not, especially since the deification that occurs in _Job_
has what we would now call romantic features. (I already
explained what I meant, so I won't repeat -- my argument is still
below.)
Moggin:
>>>> But God in Job is the epitome of evil, even by modern
>>>> standards: as I said, he's responsible for murders, torture, and
>>>> kidnappings. And how is he portrayed? He's highly powerful:
>>>> he created the world and rules over it. And he's glorified -- at
>>>> least he gets a glorious speech, and nobody contradicts it.
>>>> He's even worshipped as God. All this in the Old Testament -- it
>>>> was ancient before Milton was born.
Mike:
>>> You may be trolling here for who will bite, and I
>>> applaud that in fact, but given that you repeated
>>> yourself on this, I will engage one point seriously---
>>> I do not think the example of God in Job is *like*
>>> the example of Satan in Milton. Glorification
>>> per se has nothing to do with what I was saying.
>>> We are not literarily *tempted* to emulate God
>>> in Job. Worship him, yes. Be awed by his power
>>> and be reduced to utter incomprehension of why it is
>>> he does what he does, yes. But he is not romanticized
>>> and being like him is not made tempting in any way.
>>> Milton's Satan *is* romanticized. "Better to reign in
>>> hell" seduces and attracts and tempts. We are
>>> literarily *meant* to feel this, meant to be
>>> tempted, meant to be tempted to emulate. (Of course,
>>> we are also meant to resist and reject this
>>> temptation---the apple does not end up tasting like
>>> it seems it will taste.) In this sense of
>>> evil as attractive and tempting, of dwelling
>>> on its temptation in fact, there seems to me to
>>> be a sea change between Job and Milton.
Moggin:
>> You stressed the importance of impotence -- that was central,
>> you said, to your praise of Dante's Satan. But Yahweh is both
>> evil and potent as can be -- he created the world and rules it as
>> Lord. So that's nothing new.
Mike:
> What is nothing new? Potent evil is not new.
Right. Same goes for depictions of evil as potent -- that's
an ancient thing, not a feature unique to modern times, as
demonstrated by Yahweh, who's both very evil and greatly powerful.
> Tempting potent evil, however, seems to me to be new. It's
> where the potency tempts us to emulate it is the key to the
> difference.
First the key seemed to be attractiveness. But when pressed
you said no -- relativism and potency were the keys. Now I
point out a few things about _them_ and you say no again: now it
turns out the key is really emulation.
Moggin:
>> You also complained about relativizing evil. I agree that's
>> not in _Job_. Relativizing is a half-measure: _Job_ makes
>> evil into an absolute. It stands beyond questioning; even beyond
>> acceptance. It's simply to be worshipped and obeyed.
Mike:
> This is where you seem to me not to understand
> the half of Job. Job asserts a separation between
> God and man. The law applies to man, not to God,
> who makes the law for man in the first place. The
> speech from out of the whirlwind is precisely about
> God commanding our obedience and God asserting His being beyond
> the human level. We are to worship and obey. What
> there *isn't* in Job is one jot of temptation offered
> to us to be like---to emulate---God. He certainly
> is not telling us to behave like Him.
That depends who you are. He's telling some of us to behave
exactly like him, insofar as he's the "murderous beast" you
referred to elsewhere. Some of his crimes are acts of God in the
usual sense: "...there came a great wind from the wilderness
and smote the four corners of the house..." (That would actually
be an act of Satan performed with God's blessing -- same
difference.) But others are carried out by us: it's the Sabeans
and the Chaldeans who steal Job's animals and murder his
servants. God is working his will thru us, the people who commit
his crimes.
Anyway, you've skipped over my point. You said relativizing
evil is a hallmark of the modern attitude -- but in Job, evil
isn't merely relativized, it's worshipped as an absolute standing
beyond both questioning and acceptance. Relativising is a
half-measure by comparison.
> And the
> writer certainly doesn't tempt us to even fantasize
> about what that would be like. I don't even think
> we *could* fantasize about that, the separation
> in scale between the human and the divine is so
> great. I would go so far as to say we are literarily
> *denied* the possibility of any such temptation by
> the Book of Job.
In _A Clockwork Orange_, Alex -- a sadistic, hedonistic thug
-- discovers the pleasures of the Old Testament. I can't
remember if he reads _Job_ in particular, but he doesn't have any
trouble fantasizing about the rapes and killings -- many
performed at Yahweh's command.
Moggin:
>> Same place you brought up relativism, you criticized stories
>> that dwell on the attractiveness of evil. Like I said, Yahweh
>> is given a beautiful speech: nobody else in _Job_ talks with his
>> kind of poetry. He includes significant references to "the
>> goodly wings" of the peacocks and -- Jeff's favorite -- the horse
>> with its neck clothed in thunder: evil's pretty gifts.
Mike:
> He is dressed in an awesome beauty, I agree.
> But His is a beauty to be awed by, not to
> fantasize that it is humanly possible to
> attain to. It therefore doesn't attract us
> to emulate His same evil. It doesn't make destroying
> a man's estate and family and physical person
> tempting to us. It doesn't suggest to us that
> we, too, could exercise such power, that we
> are all little Yahwehs like that at heart.
As you explained things to Silke, "It's not so much that any
tale in which evil is attractive is false" -- the impression
created by your earlier comments -- "but that a tale which dwells
upon the attractiveness of evil, which strokes that
attractiveness in order to relativize that evil" misses something.
_Job_ is a tale which dwells upon the attractiveness of evil,
like I was saying above. And it doesn't merely _relativize_ evil:
it makes evil the Almighty.
> Now, you could argue that it corrupts us
> in a different way. I wouldn't deny that it
> might, depending on where you took it. But I
> don't see that it seduces like Milton's Satan
> seduces. "Better to reign in hell" is
> immediate, and human.
I'm not arguing that _Job_ is corrupting: I'm arguing that
it possesses the features you assigned exclusively to the
modern depiction of evil. And I've made my case. I do have one
question, tho: if your main concern here is with the
corrupting qualities of art, wasn't Silke right in saying you're
taking a moralistic perspective?
Moggin:
>> I could probably find more correspondences, but I'm lazy and
>> I think that's enough to make my point: the depiction of evil
>> you assign to modern times was already there in the Old Testament.
Mike:
> I don't think you have made quite that point yet.
I have, tho: I showed that Job matched the description you
gave of 'modern evil.' (My phrase, not yours.)
> I think there is a huge difference
> with respect to the *temptation to do evil*
> between the Old Testament and Milton.
It's great that you're thinking out loud, figuring out what
you believe, etc. But apparently the thought-process is so
consuming that it leaves you unable to recall what you thought a
day before, even when your words are in front of you.
Moggin:
>> If you want to talk Romanticism, in specific, there's a case
>> that Yahweh is _the_ Romantic figure. Think about it: he's
>> distinguished by his creative powers (he created the world, which
>> puts him top-of-the-list in that category), he speaks with a
>> poet's voice, and he exercises his creativity without any respect
>> for bourgeois proprieties. From one point of view, that's
>> exactly what _Job_ is all about: the supremacy of the unfettered
>> creative impulse, especially in respect to moral norms.
Mike:
> Except for the fact that every Romantic figure
> is human, or just-a-little-above-human. In
> other words, Romantic figures---Milton's
> Satan, Medea, Prometheus, Manfred, Frankenstein's
> monster, the vampire Lestat, possibly Hannibal Lecter
> (I don't know)---attract us, tempt us, seduce us to
> be like them, or at least to imagine ourselves being
> like them.
Are you sure Frankenstein's monster goes on that list? How
is he an attractive, tempting, seductive figure? Agreed that
we, or at least some of us can imagine being him; but that's not
because we think we're such hot numbers. Anyway, you're
skipping the point again. You say _Job_ isn't romanticizing. I
just described some characteristics that make God in _Job_
awfully similiar to the archtypical Romantic figure -- offering
one exception doesn't make them go away.
It's a questionable exception, too. I dunno. Maybe you're
just not able to feel tempted by creative powers. That's
certainly possible -- maybe supreme creativity just doesn't lure
you. Or knowledge: from what you said about the Garden, the
idea of knowledge as tempting is foreign to you. And you've put
Frankenstein's monster on your list, but Dr. F and the Dr.'s
Faustus are conspicuous by their absence.
> That's the one thing Yahweh cannot do, the
> monotheistic separation of man and God being crucial
> to the OT.
It may be crucial to you, or to somebody (probably not you,
come to think of it), but the OT makes a poor basis for it.
Yahweh is human, all-too-human: he's given to fits of jealousy,
he falls into violent rages, he's vain, he's vengeful, he's
autocratic -- he's got more human traits than you could shake a
stick at. He's also not separated from man -- he takes an
up-close and personal interest in human affairs, and he meddles
in them regularly.
> There is a vast distinction between a
> superman and God. (Notice I did not say "a superman
> and a god"---sometimes a literary god is more like a
> superman than a deity.)
Maybe so -- but Yahweh is more like a superman than like a
God separate and apart from the human. He transcends the
human only in the way the ubermensch is said to do -- he claims
to be beyond good and evil.
-- Moggin
Michael Zeleny
>I said:
>>But then, I'm deep-down American enough to have never really
>>understood what "aristocratic" means. I can look at the concept
>>from the outside, when I read about this history of Europe. And I
>>recognize that there are definite class distinctions in the
>>United States (and being a psychiatrist, as Dr. Lecter was before
>>he became a criminal, is by no means at the top of the ladder).
>>But even having gone to a prep school and an Ivy League college
>>myself, I still don't "get it" about what an aristocrat would be,
>>if there were such a thing, in the late 20th century.
>Mikhail replies:
>>And yet Hannibal Lecter is clearly identified as an aristocrat, most
>>likely even a titled one in the manner of his cousin Balthus, and at
>>least potentially landed owing to the post-1989 property restitution
>>process.
>Oops--'guess I was readin' too fast and missed that. I thought Harris
>was referring to Balthus the artist, whose work I'm seen
>reproductions of. I recall that he's French, married to a Japanese
>woman, that's about it. Is he a noble of some kind? I wasn't
>aware. Harris probably mentioned it, and I just breezed by. More of
>my blindness to the whole subject, I guess.
To repeat myself, being a cousin of count Balthazar Klossowski de
Rola, better known as Balthus, Hannibal Lecter must partake of Polish,
German, and Russian aristocratic bloodlines, along with an obdurately
suppressed sarmentum of Jewish lineage. In fact, since Balthus is
known to sue people who reveal his matrilinear Yiddishkeit, I would be
surprised if Harris failed to clear his name-dropping with its bearer.
>>Having shared a schooling similar to yours, I am at a loss divining
>>your reasons for presuming "a prep school and an Ivy League college"
>>to be a moral equivalent of nobility.
>Whoa--I didn't mean that it was, Misha! All I meant is that I went to
>*school* with people who were, in terms of their wealth and family
>connections, as close to aristocrats as I know how to identify.
>Children of world leaders, American old money, that sort of stuff.
>I meant that I had met and even made friends with such people, not
>that I had any such thoughts about myself. <laughing at the
>thought...given my background>
But most world leaders and bearers of old money are of pure plebeian
stock. Aristocracy has been diverging from property ownership since
the XVIth century, and political power since the XVIIIth. Besides,
how would you know a noble if you met him? " -- Say, are you named
after a quaint chateau?" No offense, but I doubt that you know enough
European history to identify an old family name -- and it's not like
their bearers wear their genealogies on their sleeves.
paschal
On 2 Jul 1999, Michael Zeleny wrote:
> But most world leaders and bearers of old money are of pure plebeian
> stock. Aristocracy has been diverging from property ownership since
> the XVIth century, and political power since the XVIIIth. Besides,
> how would you know a noble if you met him? " -- Say, are you named
> after a quaint chateau?" No offense, but I doubt that you know enough
> European history to identify an old family name -- and it's not like
> their bearers wear their genealogies on their sleeves.
I've always thought it was sort of nutty to make a big deal out of
genealogy. All it really is for sure, is a bunch of names on a piece
of paper - because you can't ever know if all those women were chaste
and faithful, and all those children legitimate :-0
-P.
Jeff Inman
> "Michael S. Morris":
[...]
[Say the magic word and the duck appears.]
I think there's more of a trick to reading _Job_ than you allow.
I know we disagree about this, so don't think of this as an
argument meant to persuade so much as an artifact of rhetorical
nemesis.
The judgement that you make about Yaweh's evil is indeed
easy to make. It appears that you and Mike both agree about
that as being beneath discussion. But it seems to me it is
just the interesting catch in the story. The way I read it,
one pressing possibility in the story is that we aren't in
a position to evaluate what "evil" really means. Or,
contrariwise, "evil" is a term that is already relativised
by its contingence on human experience.
The whirlwind is an "answer" that changes the terms of the
question.
[...]
> Anyway, you're
> skipping the point again. You say _Job_ isn't romanticizing. I
> just described some characteristics that make God in _Job_
> awfully similiar to the archtypical Romantic figure -- offering
> one exception doesn't make them go away.
I think you'd get more mileage out of examining Job as a
prototype of the mystic of esoterica. I'd bet there are
interesting connections with stories about the processes of
medieval alchemy, for example, in which the prima materia
is "tortured" in the crucible en route to a mysterious
perfecting.
> It's a questionable exception, too. I dunno. Maybe you're
> just not able to feel tempted by creative powers. That's
> certainly possible -- maybe supreme creativity just doesn't lure
> you. Or knowledge: from what you said about the Garden, the
> idea of knowledge as tempting is foreign to you. And you've put
> Frankenstein's monster on your list, but Dr. F and the Dr.'s
> Faustus are conspicuous by their absence.
Yes, Faust. Another good example.
David J. Loftus
: In rec.arts.books Jim Collier <ct...@home.com> wrote:
: : The Babylonians were warriors and colonists. They spread the word
: : more.
: And they had lots of degrees.
But it was their predecessors that invented writing that used "wedgies."
David Loftus
ObSong: In the Good Old Sumer Time
Richard Harter
>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>: Silke-Maria Weineck <sm...@umich.edu> wrote:
>
>:>Richard Harter <c...@tiac.net> wrote:
>:>: f...@oceanstar.com (Fiona Webster) wrote:
>:>
>:>
>:>:>I agree with Silke that it's mostly the creation being admired.
>:>:>But even if some people do admire Hannibal as a "person," it's
>:>:>way too simplistic to say that they admire his cruelty. They
>:>:>admire many things about him: his intelligence, his physical
>:>:>prowess, his wit, his aesthetic standards, his ironic code of
>:>:>etiquette, and above all, I think, his superhuman *cool*.
>:>
>:>: It seems you would be saying that cruelty is an aristocratic grace and a
>:>: vice in commoners.
>:>
>:>I think Fiona and I are saying that _Hannibal_ reflects on the genre of
>:>horror itself -- if attractively packaged, cruelty is attractive, at least
>:>in fiction; if unattractively packaged, as in Verger, it's unattractive.
>
>: Er, yes, I thought that was already clear. I was enquiring into the
>: nature of that packaging. The cool cruel have grace, albeit not a
>: Christian grace. The cool cruel are creatures of myth. I was enquiring
>: into the nature and origin of that myth.
>
>Well, there I think Mike's Milton theory will get you places.
There's a family relationship, to be sure. It's been ages since I 've
read Milton but my impression is that cruelty as a virtue, an artform,
and a grace are not central to Lucifer - merely pride. Be that as it
may could it not be the other way around? Milton was, after all, who he
was and the bad duke as real rather mythic creature was part of his list
of enemies. Could it not be that Satan is an aristocrat writ large
rather than the bad duke merely being Satan writ small.
>: I was merely struck by the way in which the litany of features and the
>: terms used resembles the stock description of the bad duke, who is a
>: stock character in romance.
>
>Sure, but smooth cads aren't creatures of myth.
Myth strips out the downside.
>: I haven't read _Hannibal_ yet (I am content to wait for the paperback)
>: but I gather he has observed the convention that The Bad Duke is
>: redeemed by the Love Of A Good Woman and added his own twist.
>
>Yeah, and that's actually quite tedious, even though I object to it less
>than to the dime-story psychoanalysis Lecter gets.
The dime-store is nearly extinct. It's stock of psychoanalysis has been
remaindered on usenet.
>: Horror as a genre may have its own avatars and its own myths but it is
>: scarcely free from those of other genres.
>
>Perish the thought.
The idea of doing a genre political vision piece as a work of horror is
intriguing. Unfortunately it is done routinely but nobody notices.
Except Ron Hardin, of course.
Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net, The Concord Research Institute
URL = http://www.tiac.net/users/cri, phone = 1-978-369-3911
My goals in life are to bring small wisdom to small minds
and to bring everyone a bit closer to the Twilight Zone
Puss in Boots
> I think there's more of a trick to reading _Job_ than you allow.
Agreed, sorta: I think you get up to tricks in your reading.
> I know we disagree about this, so don't think of this as an
> argument meant to persuade so much as an artifact of rhetorical
> nemesis.
Cool.
> The judgement that you make about Yaweh's evil is indeed
> easy to make. It appears that you and Mike both agree about
> that as being beneath discussion.
I'm happy to discuss it. It's just that Mike and I agree on
it -- one of the few things we _do_ agree on -- and being
disputatious sorts, we pass over the agreement and move on to the
places we part ways.
How easy do you think it is? It _can_ be easy, but how many
people are able to make it? Yahweh has managed to attract an
awful lot of followers over the years. Easy or not, there's been
alot of resistance to judging against him.
You've speculated before about why Christian Gnosticism lost
out, historically. Here's one possible answer: the Gnostics
represented the judgment against Yahweh. The winning faction was
Yahwist, and made Christianity back into a Yahwist sect.
The stakes are high -- judging against Yahweh means to judge
against life. That's exactly what Job does. (And where the
Gnostics follow him.) It's also the only place in the story that
rivals Yahweh's big speech for poetry. But that's not a
judgment most people find easy to make -- hell, most people won't
even rebel against the authority Yahweh also represents. A
judgement against Yahweh judges the powers-that-be in every sense
of the term -- that's something you don't see everyday.
> But it seems to me it is just the interesting catch in the story.
Not the catch but the premise. A story about a good God who
does good things for good people would lack interest. _Job_
addresses the question of evil. For that, it requires the notion
evil exists.
> The way I read it,
> one pressing possibility in the story is that we aren't in
> a position to evaluate what "evil" really means.
What do you mean by "really means"? _Job_ does suggest that
we aren't in a position to evaluate Yahweh. At least it has
Yahweh say that. He makes it considerably more than a suggestion.
> Or contrariwise, "evil" is a term that is already relativised
> by its contingence on human experience.
Also on human judgement -- if you judge that murder, disease,
and kidnapping are good, then you won't have any reason to
conclude that Yahweh is evil. But if you judge against them, you
have reason to believe that he is.
Presumably you would argue that Yahweh completely transcends
human judgement. Old ground. There's no evidence which
suggests that he does. As I said to Mike, Yahweh comes across as
human, all-too-human. He's a bully, first and last.
> The whirlwind is an "answer" that changes the terms of the
> question.
Yahweh speaks out of the whirlwind. His answer doesn't even
address the question: he rejects it as _lese majeste_. Job
immediately repents, but Yahweh keeps going for I forget how many
more verses.
> I think you'd get more mileage out of examining Job as a
> prototype of the mystic of esoterica.
I am: it's just my esoterica differs from yours. You don't
have a lock on the esoteric, y'know. (Nobody can even keep
their own locked up, anymore -- esoterica has turned into exotica
everywhere you look. As an aside to an aside, I've seen it
argued that Christianity was esoterica for the masses: something
new at the time.)
> I'd bet there are
> interesting connections with stories about the processes of
> medieval alchemy, for example, in which the prima materia
> is "tortured" in the crucible en route to a mysterious
> perfecting.
I bet not. Job is tortured, alright, but he's not traveling
toward perfection: that's where he begins. More old ground.
The first verse of the story says that Job is perfect and upright.
A short while later Yahweh makes the same judgement -- then
Satan tempts him into torturing Job. That's what the story's all
about: the punishment Yahweh inflicts on an "perfect and
upright man." It shows how Job and his friends respond, then how
Yahweh responds to _them_.
-- Moggin
Fiona Webster
> To repeat myself, being a cousin of count Balthazar Klossowski de
> Rola, better known as Balthus, Hannibal Lecter must partake of Polish,
> German, and Russian aristocratic bloodlines, along with an obdurately
> suppressed sarmentum of Jewish lineage. In fact, since Balthus is
> known to sue people who reveal his matrilinear Yiddishkeit, I would be
> surprised if Harris failed to clear his name-dropping with its bearer.
I appreciate your educating me about this. And belatedly, I
acknowledge that Richard Harter's point about Lecter resembling a
evil Duke is well-taken.
I wrote:
> All I meant is that I went to
> *school* with people who were, in terms of their wealth and family
> connections, as close to aristocrats as I know how to identify.
> Children of world leaders, American old money, that sort of stuff.
Mikhail again:
> But most world leaders and bearers of old money are of pure plebeian
> stock. Aristocracy has been diverging from property ownership since
> the XVIth century, and political power since the XVIIIth. Besides,
> how would you know a noble if you met him? " -- Say, are you named
> after a quaint chateau?" No offense, but I doubt that you know enough
> European history to identify an old family name -- and it's not like
> their bearers wear their genealogies on their sleeves.
You're right, of course. I'll quit while I'm behind.
--thinking of Wilde's line about how "ignorance is like a
delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone,"
Fiona
Jim Collier
>
> I like Babelfish's translation:
>
> If God leaves you, lettor, to take fruit of your lesson, or I think for you
> same
> com' potea to hold the dry ace, when our imagine of near I saw yes cake, that'l
> I plant de them eyes the buttocks bathed for the cleaved one. Sure piangea
> I, rested to a de' rocchi of the hard one scoglio, yes that my supply said to
> me:
> " Still se' you de others shock them? Here the mercy lives quand' very is died;
> who more is scellerato that the one who that to the giudicio divin passion
> involves? "
Continuing:
"He has not been a cathodophoretic ship.
He has not been the pleural resemble.
You worried minus launched after we were unofficially wielded,
and every derangement except me counteracted highly
friendlier. Excepting a credit before every dope no upward
pistachio delighted an autopsy spite no language, plus
opposite this signified an everyday motor sowbelly - every enough,
every color, whatever they had inspected upon no historicism spite
no renovation amid every decor."
JC
Michael Kagalenko
Parts of what follows below were actually painful to write. However,
because of the ongoing misinformation campaigns launched by James
"Dumkopf" Collier V and his henchmen, I feel it is my duty to write this.
And that's why I feel compelled to say something about phlegmatic
mischievous low-lifes. There's a little-known truth that isn't readily
acknowledged by the worst kinds of tendentious boneheads there are: His
practices represent a calculated assault on diversity within our
community. Granted, creating needed understanding is best achieved in a
calm, rational environment. But "anthropomorphization" is sometimes
narrowly defined by mudslinging loathsome twits. Thus, in summing up, we
can establish the following: 1) We must publicly distance ourselves from
savage worrywarts, and 2) I don't care to share the same planet as what I
call improvident punks.
Michael S. Morris
Well, I broke down. Last Thursday evening, I
mean, I was in need of a Chapman's manual. Bev's
last full day at Morris Machine was Friday, and she
and Terry are "retiring" to Gulf Shores, Alabama.
To their condo and with both of their boats, the
ski boat and the Chris-Craft. They plan to live
muchly off rents, build a house at a ski lake,
and both of them want to put time into training for
nationally competitive waterskiing, and long term
plan to have a bigger boat and cruise the Caribbean.
I figured the latest Chapman's manual would be just
the thing, and with a card wishing "Bonnes voyages".
I figured right. Anyway, I also figured Borders
would be my best bet finding it, and, since
Bloomington was a smidge closer, I called them. Yep,
they had it and could hold it for me. Were open to 11.
Of course the kids wanted to go, too (the rule being
they get to pick out a book or a CD of their own
each time we go in a bookstore). It's maybe 25 miles
and we were down there post dinner and post piano
practicing by about 9 o'clock. The called-in book
would be held for me behind the front check-out
counter, so I sent the kids off and walked past the
30% discount display table of bestsellers to the
Music section in back. First, I made a stop by
the shelf of musical scores. I already had the Dover
score to Symphonies 8 and 9, but they had no Dvorak
whatsoever (Dvorak being our "Composer of the Year"
next year by the kids' request). They did have
Sibelius 1 and 2, and I thought that we have season
tix next year to the symphony, and the ISO is doing
all of the Sibelius symphonies, so this is a desideratum,
but I gave it a pass this time. On to the CD's. After
some purposeless browsing in Classical I had picked
out a Delius---tone poems, but I can't say I was too
enthusiastic about it, you know. So I wandered over
to Jazz, picked out an Art Farmer I was a little more
interested in, but there I also noticed Ella just next
door and there were a couple of boxed sets I immediately
just had to have---the 2-CD Cole Porter and the 3-CD
Duke Ellington Songbooks. But see, I wanted
exactly six discs---my CD-changer in the, umm, vehicle
held six, and I was done listening to the last six.
Back went the Delius for another time and another mood.
I came out of Music, you see, pretty well satisfied.
I thought of that display table again, but veered right
to Videos. The kids really enjoyed "The Blues Brothers 2000",
we had a copy, but I wanted a copy of the first movie.
Found it, got it, and a short video as well of
Blues Brothers Saturday Night Live skits. Again, the
display table. OK, I decided I'd give it a chance, but
both of his earlier books had to be there, or I wouldn't.
Where would they be? I thought about it for a minute and
wandered over to Literature. Harris wasn't in Literature.
Neither did I find a copy of _Dracula_, which I would've
gotten if there was one. There ought to be a law against
not having a book like that. Horror? I can't recall
that Borders had Horror section. Ahh, Mystery maybe.
I tried that, and, yes, there were paperback copies of
both _Red Dragon_ and _Silence of the Lambs_ on the shelf.
Got 'em, which meant I next went over to that display table
and got _Hannibal_, too. I went back to the Children's
section and found both Zan and Helen sitting there on
the little amphitheatre. Helen had chosen a Junie
B. Jones book about a wedding (we had just taken
Helen to her first wedding last weekend), and Zan had a
Fox Trot comic-strip collection. So, we took everything
to the checkout counter and picked up the reserved
Chapman's manual, too. I think it was then I noticed I
had been sweating profusely. "It's very hot in here,
isn't it?" I said to the clerk. "Air conditioner's out,"
she said. In retrospect, paying for it with American
Express would've been apropos, wouldn't it, but I'm
just not that kind of cool and my card of choice
that evening was a Visa debit card.
It's now early Monday afternoon, and I've just finished
_Hannibal_. Tell you what I think later. Now, lunch.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Milton Jay Perlmuter
Collier's pranks, and I know that any letter on the subject will almost
certainly cause someone to vandalize our neighborhoods. Still, Jimmi's
perceptions of a vast conspiracy lead him to inappropriate assessments
of even the most innocent interactions with lawless pickpockets. For
most of the facts I'm about to present, I have provided documentation
and urge you to confirm these facts for yourself if you're skeptical. He
has figuratively enclosed himself in a secure elitist ghetto. Nice try
to cultivate the purest breed of irresponsibility, Jimmi. Outrage
pounded in my temples when I first realized that he wants to destroy any
resistance by channeling it into ineffective paths. Only true-blue
appalling twits or those who are thoroughly clueless about antagonism
could claim otherwise.
It will be objected, to be sure, that he doesn't honestly want to divert
us from proclaiming what in our innermost conviction is absolutely
necessary. At first glance, this may seem to be true, but when you think
about it further, you'll unhesitatingly conclude that it's really hard
to take someone as mad as Jimmi very seriously. For the purpose of this
discussion, let's say that as soon as our backs are turned, his
ramblings will trick academics into abandoning the principles of
scientific inquiry. Nearly all of the assumptions and statements made by
Jimmi and his operatives are completely, absolutely, and totally wrong.
Let me explain. As soon as Jimmi's lackeys grasp at straws, trying to
find increasingly loquacious ways to stigmatize any and all attempts to
discuss the relationship between three converging and ever-growing
factions -- pugnacious flag burners, sick reprobates, and presumptuous
lackluster rabble-rousers -- their recommendations will cease to debate
the efficacy of Jimmi's incoherent propositions and instead will paint
people of different races and cultures as besotted alien forces
undermining the coherent national will.
If one needs a sign that he is dangerous, consider that he is unable to
see any issue in a broad perspective or from more than one side. I
certainly reject Jimmi's demands. And if that seems like a modest claim,
I disagree. It's the most radical claim of all. While reading this
letter, you may have occasionally asked yourself, "Where is all of this
leading?" and, "What is the point exactly?" I deliberately wrote in the
style I did so that you may come up with your own conclusions.
Therefore, I leave you with only the following: Failure to define our
terms more clearly will lead to a deluge of complaints by Prof. Jimmi
"Skunk" Collier's buddies.
Cordially,
Milt "One T" Perlmuter
Michael S. Morris
OK, random responses. I don't buy the
"quantum leap" to _Red Dragon_ stuff.
_RD_ is a taut thriller, and compared
with _Black Sunday_, it's scarier, because
of the serial-killer plausibility. But I
was reminded of nothing so much as _Black Sunday_
reading it. The same plot development---protagonist
and antagonist in intertwining parallel, with the
bad guy starting out seemingly impossibly far
ahead, the good guy proceeding by tiny, tiny bits
of forensic evidence. Of the Hannibal trilogy,
I think it's the best sustained suspense novel---
the most scary. I'd rank it far above Stephen
King. Still, I don't think that it's all that
ambitious. And I'm not sure that it even has
the depth that it claims to have. The Will-empathizing-
with-the-killer-fear-of-his-own-dark-side stuff I
guess I find pretty cliche.
I was expecting to be more scared by _SotL_ than I
was. In the sense that I knew what to expect from
Lecter's escape, I guess much of the first two-thirds
of the book felt less personally threatening. Even
in the sequences with Catherine, it somehow seemed
my real concern was supposed to be with Clarice,
and she really didn't get into the thick of it
until stumbling on it at the end. Well, the interior
monologue of Jame Gumb was pretty creepy, especially
the way he thought of Catherine as "it" and harvesting
"it" for "its hide". I thought of Alice in Wonderland
more than once---most especially during the conversation
Clarice has with the two chess-playing entomologists
at the Smithsonian. Is this something
maybe you, Fiona, once remarked? Anyway, maybe I
read it somewhere. I like the ethical dimension
in _SotL_. Harris a couple of times insists on
*evil*. Not psychopathology, but evil. Once is when
Clarice first brings him the questionnaire, and Lecter
disdains being measured by such. Another is towards the
end where Harris tells us some psych journals attributed
Jame Gumb's depredations to childhood trauma or somesuch,
and he specifically tells us that the words "crazy"
and "evil" were not used by such journals.
_Hannibal_ was a riot and a romp and what I *would*
call a quantum leap from the foregoing. It is done
on the level of image and symbol and allegorical significance.
Baudelaire is just right, Mikhail. A seduction of the reader,
and then accusation of the reader for having been seduced
(exactly what happens to Clarice). Florence was perfectly right.
It had to be Florence, it only could be Florence. More than
once the image of watching, reading, feeding off of other
people's suffering---the tears that Verger drinks, Lecter
watching the crowd at the torture exhibit, the whole _Inferno_
motif in the first place, the crucifixions, Verger's cinematic
plans for Lecter. Two problems that have been touched on
here before: Clarice on drugs for her seduction and Lecter's
own childhood trauma. I would have said at the end of _SotL_
that it *wasn't* in Clarice, Fiona. Oh, a fantasy, yes, to drill
a bullet through Krendler's brain, but no more than that.
Harris, it seems to me did everything he could to make that
transition, but knew he just could not at the end without the
drugs. I see some integrity, some condescension to reality
and the really possible in that. Same with Lecter's childhood
memories. Harris has got to sacrifice both characters to
each other. He's got to give up both Lecter's perfect
guiltiness and Clarice's perfect innocence. Does Lecter
seduce? Yes, I think so. I think for me it was the scene
with the rude family in coach on the transatlantic flight.
Harris brought us to the edge of expecting Lecter to
do something spectacular with them. That is where Harris'
"J'accuse" is placed. The seduction is twofold: (1) There are
rude or tasteless or unintelligent people, of which I am
not one, and (2) Those people deserve the worst that can befall
them. I guess I feel Harris saw that seduction happen with
many readers of _SotL_ and viewers of "SotL". My bet is
he turned against the reader (in a sense) at that point.
I think he set out in _Hannibal_ to subvert that, to blame
readers for liking Lecter so much. The humor then becomes like
the Lord High Executioner's song in The Mikado---"As
some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I've
got a little list, I've got a little list." Lecter kills
assholes, yes, but he's killed many who just get in his
way, or even whom he finds it would be convenient to
kill. The assholery of his victims is emphasized more in
_Hannibal_ than in the other two books. Also, the shift
to second person when we enter the palazzo and at the
end (well, first person plural) are there to point
the accusation.
I'm angry with Harris for the sentence where he disses
the Republicans for Clinton's impeachment. They deserve
all the dissing he can diss, but he manages to dismiss it
as hypocritical moralizing character assassination on
their part against a minor sin on Clinton's. In fact,
Clinton and the Democrats were in the front ranks of
the hypocritical moralizing character assassination from the
very beginning of the scandal. Harris should not be forgiven
his partisanship on that count.
N.B. "epater le bourgeois" from _I Always Look
Up the Word "Egregious": A Vocabulary Book for People
Who Don't Need One_ by Maxwell Nurnberg:
The document issues from a cabaret
spirit, one strand of which has been
an impulse to epater le bourgeois. But
beneath the mockery a great deal is
revealed about the subject.
epater le bourgeois---to shock the middle class
Bourgeois is an epithet which the riff-raff
apply to what is respectable, and the
aristocracy to what is decent.
Anthony Hope (1863-1933), _The Dolly Dialogues_
(The amusement known as epater le bourgeois, so
popular with the "lost Generation" in the twenties,
is revived whenever youth is moved to shock the prevalent
mores.)
p. 162
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Jim Collier
There is currently a lot of controversy about Skunk pranks, and I
will almost certainly vandalize neighborhoods.
He has not been the pleural resemble.
Still, perceptions of a vast conspiracy lead to inappropriate
interactions with pickpockets.
Excepting a credit before purchasing dope, no upward pistachio
delighted an autopsy spite no language, aposite this signified an
everyday sowbelly - every color, whatever they had inspected upon
every decor.
As soon as lackeys grasp at straws, trying to find increasingly
loquacious ways to stigmatize attempts to discuss the relationship
among ever-growing factions -- burners, reprobates, and the
lackluster -- their recommendations will cease to debate the
delicacy of incoherent propositions and instead will paint besotted
alien forces undermining will.
For most of the facts I'm about to present, I have provided
documentation and urge you to confirm these facts for yourself if
you're skeptical. Outrage pounded in my temples. I disagree.
He has not been a cathodophoretic trip.
Always check for Paraquat first, Milt.
JC
Michael Kagalenko
While there are probably a lot of people out there who would be quite
content never to read another letter about Jar Jar Collier, under the
guise of stimulating debate and illuminating diverse perspectives, Jar
Jar's shell games actually cure the evil of discrimination with more
discrimination. I assume you already know that Jar Jar is up to no good,
but I have something more important to tell you. It's about time the
public realized that they are being duped by him and his yes-men.
Detestable swindlers have no business here. So, what am I doing about
that? I'm educating. I'm trying to plant markers that define the limits of
what is malicious and what is not.
Because "anticonfederationist" is a word that can be interpreted in many
ways, we must make it clear that Jar Jar is the picture of the insane
person on the street, babbling to a tree, a wall, or a cloud, which cannot
and does not respond to his expositions. For your edification, I should
point out that this is a proscribed thought vs. free inquiry issue, an
anti-democracy vs. democracy issue, and yes, a police state vs. free
society issue. Should you think I'm saying too much, please note that
things that you or I might regard as lawless or immature might be
considered by Jar Jar's acolytes as an article of faith, a philosophical
conviction, a political opinion, or even an innocuous form of
entertainment. I wish I could say this nicely, but I don't have much
tolerance for nugatory fugitives: Jar Jar's promise of equality is a false
one. Does Jar Jar have trouble living with himself, knowing that there are
besotted louts in our midst? It is high time for someone to carve
solutions that are neither annoying nor lazy. Will that someone be you?
Michael Zeleny
learn that my recommendation of Hannibal has been of value. Herewith
some random responses. I find the knee-jerk Republican defensiveness
ill displayed, being that the political leitmotif of Harris' book is
the pervasive corruption of social order that is attendant upon power
and money acquired and dispensed irrespectively of party affiliation.
In this connection, it is relevant to note that Dr. Hannibal Lecter,
despite arrogating his divine prerogative of merciless gratification
of desire, is supremely scrupulous in eschewing the bourgeois sins of
prevarication and hypocrisy. His painstaking seduction of Clarice
Starling is made plausible by the congruence of trauma of their past
lives, which shapes their characters, but is made possible by her own
lapse in course of their acquaintance, of lying in order to motivate
and secure his cooperation. In relinquishing her credibility, Clarice
gives Dr. Lecter the opportunity to gain high moral ground by the time
her personal and institutional complicity in senseness slaughter puts
her on an even footing with the anthropophagous monster. Regarding
the use of drugs, I do not take it to be morally essential to bringing
out the latent urges of Dr. Lecter's victims. Recall that in the two
earlier cases of induced cannibalism, only one involves any chemical
manipulation of the self-devouring patient. Hannibal's therapeutic
skill lies in his ability to align the outward appearances with the
inner reality of his patient; in Mike's preferred vernacular, he makes
the punishment fit the crime; in his own words, the looks are earned.
Any substantial tools he applies to this end are incidental to the
salient application of his mind. Metamorphosis is the main theme of
Harris' trilogy; and of all its varieties, rebirth is the one most
relevant to his character' transformations. And in the rebirth of
Clarice, Hannibal for the first time assumes his proper dialectical
role, that of a midwife.
In article <378130...@netdirect.net>,
Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
Cordially -- Mikhail Zel...@math.ucla.edu * M...@ptyx.com ** www.ptyx.com
Michael S. Morris
I find the knee-jerk Republican defensiveness
ill displayed, being that the political leitmotif
of Harris' book is the pervasive corruption of
social order that is attendant upon power and
money acquired and dispensed irrespectively of
party affiliation.
I am well aware that this was the political
leitmotif. I nevertheless accuse Harris that that
sentence was an unmistakably partisan betrayal
of his moral claims for that leitmotif. I do
not for one instant make this accusation in any
sort of mistaken notion that to be fair, one
must accuse equally on both political "sides"
of the aisle. But I do make it in the firm
conviction that the President's behaviour was
not just some "sex sin", but in fact as corrupt
and as dishonest and hypocritical and self-serving
and personally destructive of others
as corruption of the political now gets.
Mikhail:
In this connection, it is relevant to note
that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, despite arrogating
his divine prerogative of merciless gratification
of desire, is supremely scrupulous in eschewing
the bourgeois sins of prevarication and hypocrisy.
Not at all the case, in fact. Every false identity
he uses is a lie. So are little things like telling
the crossbow salesman he is buying the weapon for a
one-armed brother. Or in the first book, where he
prevaricates over the telephone just a little, and
this results in Dolarhyde's being handed Will Graham's
home address. Lecter can be brutally honest---honest
in such a way that it flouts bourgeois convention---when
it serves him of course, and, yes, some of his murders
are designed as poetic justice. But not all of them,
of course.
Mikhail:
His painstaking seduction of Clarice
Starling is made plausible by the
congruence of trauma of their past
lives, which shapes their characters,
but is made possible by her own
lapse in course of their acquaintance, of
lying in order to motivate and secure his
cooperation.
I think the ending becomes allegoric and
phantasmagoric tableau. I do not agree
that her transformation is as well-motivated
as you seem to think it is.
Mikhail:
In relinquishing her credibility, Clarice
gives Dr. Lecter the opportunity to gain
high moral ground by the time her personal
and institutional complicity in senseness
slaughter puts her on an even footing with
the anthropophagous monster.
Most of us are fallible and even stupid at times.
On an even footing with anthropophagous monsters,
however, I think not.
[...]
The point about the drugs is why Harris,
the novelist, would insert them at all.
That is I sort of imagine the ending without
them, just the seduction of speech, exorcising
the ghost of her father. And then think of the
drugs as an insertion or overlay on the basic
plot. I think that without the drugs the ending
just becomes too big a leap---too wierd---to
maintain any continuity of verisimilitude. I
mean, at the point of the final dinner, she'd
theretofore committed a traffic violation, max.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael Zeleny
Lecter's parrhesia and philaletheia by pointing out his many casual
prevarications, both tactical, undertaken in course of disguising his
identity and purpose, and strategic, deployed as a weapon against his
adversary. Nevertheless it is useful to inquire why these expedients
fail to contaminate his seductive interaction with Clarice Starling.
After all, the classical form of seduction of virtue by evil involves
deceit writ large, which is decidedly not the case here. Instead, the
good doctor seduces his victim in the modern fashion, by exploiting
her complicity with the force that drives his depredations. It is
supremely beside the point, if not outright disingenuous, to insist
that, "theretofore [Clarice had] committed a traffic violation, max,"
given that the narrative of Clarice's fall from institutional grace is
explicitly based on her excellence in the service of law enforcement
agencies known for gratuitous assassination of breastfeeding mothers
and promiscuous immolation of extended families. The fact that Harris
drives home this point so forcefully gives the lie to Mike's complaint
about his partisan take on the impeachment proceedings. But I hasten
to add that the purview of Dr. Lecter's biting contempt far surpasses
the compliant throngs of the free-range rude herded and thinned by the
corrupt badge-bearers. As a supremely accomplished participant in the
social contract instituted and maintained to safeguard the legitimate
depredation of the have-nots by the haves, he takes the principles of
conspicuous waste to their logical acme. Whence his didactic interest
in agent Starling, a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste,
as evidenced in her good bag and her cheap shoes. Harris' trilogy of
metamorphoses, which commences and continues with two tales of aborted
transformation of solitary freaks, culminates with a Bildungsroman of
capitalist consumer accomplishment congruent with painstaking relief
and absolution from complicity in the systemic evil, as orchestrated,
nurtured, and mated by that quintessential noble savage, Dr. Hannibal
Lecter. Think of it as Eucharist contraposed.
Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>Mikhail:
> I find the knee-jerk Republican defensiveness
> ill displayed, being that the political leitmotif
> of Harris' book is the pervasive corruption of
> social order that is attendant upon power and
> money acquired and dispensed irrespectively of
> party affiliation.
>
>I am well aware that this was the political
>leitmotif. I nevertheless accuse Harris that that
>sentence was an unmistakably partisan betrayal
>of his moral claims for that leitmotif. I do
>not for one instant make this accusation in any
>sort of mistaken notion that to be fair, one
>must accuse equally on both political "sides"
>of the aisle. But I do make it in the firm
>conviction that the President's behaviour was
>not just some "sex sin", but in fact as corrupt
>and as dishonest and hypocritical and self-serving
>and personally destructive of others
>as corruption of the political now gets.
>
>Mikhail:
> In this connection, it is relevant to note
> that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, despite arrogating
> his divine prerogative of merciless gratification
> of desire, is supremely scrupulous in eschewing
> the bourgeois sins of prevarication and hypocrisy.
>
>Not at all the case, in fact. Every false identity
>he uses is a lie. So are little things like telling
>the crossbow salesman he is buying the weapon for a
>one-armed brother. Or in the first book, where he
>prevaricates over the telephone just a little, and
>this results in Dolarhyde's being handed Will Graham's
>home address. Lecter can be brutally honest---honest
>in such a way that it flouts bourgeois convention---when
>it serves him of course, and, yes, some of his murders
>are designed as poetic justice. But not all of them,
>of course.
>
>Mikhail:
> His painstaking seduction of Clarice
> Starling is made plausible by the
> congruence of trauma of their past
> lives, which shapes their characters,
> but is made possible by her own
> lapse in course of their acquaintance, of
> lying in order to motivate and secure his
> cooperation.
>
>I think the ending becomes allegoric and
>phantasmagoric tableau. I do not agree
>that her transformation is as well-motivated
>as you seem to think it is.
>
>Mikhail:
> In relinquishing her credibility, Clarice
> gives Dr. Lecter the opportunity to gain
> high moral ground by the time her personal
> and institutional complicity in senseness
> slaughter puts her on an even footing with
> the anthropophagous monster.
>
>Most of us are fallible and even stupid at times.
>On an even footing with anthropophagous monsters,
>however, I think not.
>
>[...]
>
>The point about the drugs is why Harris,
>the novelist, would insert them at all.
>That is I sort of imagine the ending without
>them, just the seduction of speech, exorcising
>the ghost of her father. And then think of the
>drugs as an insertion or overlay on the basic
>plot. I think that without the drugs the ending
>just becomes too big a leap---too wierd---to
>maintain any continuity of verisimilitude. I
>mean, at the point of the final dinner, she'd
>theretofore committed a traffic violation, max.
>
>
Jeff Inman
[...]
> > The judgement that you make about Yaweh's evil is indeed
> > easy to make. It appears that you and Mike both agree about
> > that as being beneath discussion.
[...]
> How easy do you think it is? It _can_ be easy, but how many
> people are able to make it? Yahweh has managed to attract an
> awful lot of followers over the years. Easy or not, there's been
> alot of resistance to judging against him.
I suspect there are others who feel that what makes the story
interesting is its ambiguity -- its apparent fostering of
both sides in a tense conflict. (I know you are not one of
these. That's fine.) It offers a challenge to instinctive
judgements, as I see it.
> You've speculated before about why Christian Gnosticism lost
> out, historically. Here's one possible answer: the Gnostics
> represented the judgment against Yahweh. The winning faction was
> Yahwist, and made Christianity back into a Yahwist sect.
You know far more than I do about many things, including
Gnosticism. The impression I got from Pagels' books was
that the early gnostics were not anti-Yahwist, but rather
were "esoteric" in the sense that they valued an individual
struggle with the texts and symbols. By nature, this is
not something that can be packaged for mass consumption.
Hence, the more dogmatic and formalized school, Catholicism,
evenutally won out.
> The stakes are high -- judging against Yahweh means to judge
> against life. That's exactly what Job does. (And where the
> Gnostics follow him.) It's also the only place in the story that
> rivals Yahweh's big speech for poetry. But that's not a
> judgment most people find easy to make -- hell, most people won't
> even rebel against the authority Yahweh also represents. A
> judgement against Yahweh judges the powers-that-be in every sense
> of the term -- that's something you don't see everyday.
I'll have to think about this. On the one hand, clearly
Job has no alternative and since Yahweh might be discribed
as a symbol of the foundations of being -- the conditions
of life -- a judgement against him would be a judgement
against life. One the other hand, if Job represents the
instinctive responses of one of us contingent beings, then
a judgement against Yahweh, even if it is apparently a
rejection of life, wishing never to have been born, etc,
is still an affirmation of life. Or rather, it is an
affirmation of the stubborn devotion to un-truth that
you-know-who says is characteristic of life.
[...]
> > Or contrariwise, "evil" is a term that is already relativised
> > by its contingence on human experience.
>
> Also on human judgement -- if you judge that murder, disease,
> and kidnapping are good, then you won't have any reason to
> conclude that Yahweh is evil. But if you judge against them, you
> have reason to believe that he is.
Your polarization seems to me to miss a depper alternative
reading, regardless of which pole is being emphasized.
Perhaps I am driven to wonder about the root of my judgements
about murder, disease and kidnapping. If I have a moment of
insight in which they seem not "good", but rather ambuguously
and mysteriously entwined with things that are more easily
appreciated, which side have I taken in the story?
> Presumably you would argue that Yahweh completely transcends
> human judgement. Old ground. There's no evidence which
> suggests that he does. As I said to Mike, Yahweh comes across as
> human, all-too-human. He's a bully, first and last.
And when something "evil" happens, say someone is killed,
there is no possibility in your experience for an ambiguous
thought about the "morality" of that event? Sheer outrage
is your experience of all moments in experience that seem
initially negative?
[...]
> > I think you'd get more mileage out of examining Job as a
> > prototype of the mystic of esoterica.
>
> I am: it's just my esoterica differs from yours. You don't
> have a lock on the esoteric, y'know. (Nobody can even keep
> their own locked up, anymore -- esoterica has turned into exotica
> everywhere you look. As an aside to an aside, I've seen it
> argued that Christianity was esoterica for the masses: something
> new at the time.)
[I was sort of addressing this, in my earlier comments about
esoterica, its relationship with early Christianity.]
> > I'd bet there are
> > interesting connections with stories about the processes of
> > medieval alchemy, for example, in which the prima materia
> > is "tortured" in the crucible en route to a mysterious
> > perfecting.
>
> I bet not. Job is tortured, alright, but he's not traveling
> toward perfection: that's where he begins. More old ground.
> The first verse of the story says that Job is perfect and upright.
> A short while later Yahweh makes the same judgement -- then
> Satan tempts him into torturing Job. That's what the story's all
> about: the punishment Yahweh inflicts on an "perfect and
> upright man." It shows how Job and his friends respond, then how
> Yahweh responds to _them_.
Yet it seems to me that he may be understood to have been
refined in the fire, regardless of what judgements are
offered about him early on. Christ was supposedly perfect,
too, and he, too, was apparently not thereby relieved of
the need to suffer.
Puss in Boots
>>> The judgement that you make about Yaweh's evil is indeed
>>> easy to make. ...
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> How easy do you think it is? It _can_ be easy, but how many
>> people are able to make it? Yahweh has managed to attract an
>> awful lot of followers over the years. Easy or not, there's been
>> alot of resistance to judging against him.
Jeff:
> I suspect there are others who feel that what makes the story
> interesting is its ambiguity -- its apparent fostering of
> both sides in a tense conflict. (I know you are not one of
> these. That's fine.)
You know wrong. I've agreed with you before -- even in this
thread, possibly -- that the story doesn't hand its vote to
either God or Job. It offers a narrative and it gives everyone a
chance to talk, but it doesn't make an endorsement. _I'm_
taking sides -- that should be obvious. But I'm not arguing that
the story does, too.
> It offers a challenge to instinctive judgements, as I see it.
I agree; but then you oughta find it more challenging, since
you make the instinctual decision in favor of life. _Job_
deeply questions that choice, and Job personally rejects it in no
uncertain terms. That makes Yahweh challenge _him_, in turn,
but Yahweh attacks Job's considered judgement: not his immediate
or instinctual reaction to keep faith. More below.
Moggin:
>> You've speculated before about why Christian Gnosticism lost
>> out, historically. Here's one possible answer: the Gnostics
>> represented the judgment against Yahweh. The winning faction was
>> Yahwist, and made Christianity back into a Yahwist sect.
Jeff:
> You know far more than I do about many things, including
> Gnosticism. The impression I got from Pagels' books was
> that the early gnostics were not anti-Yahwist, but rather
> were "esoteric" in the sense that they valued an individual
> struggle with the texts and symbols. By nature, this is
> not something that can be packaged for mass consumption.
> Hence, the more dogmatic and formalized school, Catholicism,
> evenutally won out.
It's always dangerous to generalize about Gnosticism: those
Gnostics were an unruly bunch, and no two of them thought
exactly alike. But questioning Yahweh -- sometimes called Samael,
Sakla, or Yaldabaoth -- is a defining feature of Gnosticism.
Pagels devotes a chapter of _The Gnostic Gospels to it. See "One
God, One Bishop: The Politics of Monotheism" (28-47).
Incidentally, _The Gnostic Gospels_ isn't a great intro
because that's what not Pagels wrote: she was analyzing politics
in the early Church, and she gives just enough background to
make her argument comprehensible. That must be why the political
angle looms so large for you.
Moggin:
>> The stakes are high -- judging against Yahweh means to judge
>> against life. That's exactly what Job does. (And where the
>> Gnostics follow him.) It's also the only place in the story that
>> rivals Yahweh's big speech for poetry. But that's not a
>> judgment most people find easy to make -- hell, most people won't
>> even rebel against the authority Yahweh also represents. A
>> judgement against Yahweh judges the powers-that-be in every sense
>> of the term -- that's something you don't see everyday.
Jeff:
> I'll have to think about this. On the one hand, clearly
> Job has no alternative and since Yahweh might be discribed
> as a symbol of the foundations of being -- the conditions
> of life -- a judgement against him would be a judgement
> against life. One the other hand, if Job represents the
> instinctive responses of one of us contingent beings, then
> a judgement against Yahweh, even if it is apparently a
> rejection of life, wishing never to have been born, etc,
> is still an affirmation of life. Or rather, it is an
> affirmation of the stubborn devotion to un-truth that
> you-know-who says is characteristic of life.
No, that's what you seem to be demonstrating. Job goes thru
a couple different responses -- two, at least. First off he
maintains faith and refuses to curse or question God -- he sticks
with Yahweh while his children are killed, his servants are
murdered and kidnapped, and even his animals are stolen and
murdered.. Round two, you'll recall, is the boils. After a week
of them Job says says, roughly, "Enough already!"
I always thought that was significant. Job isn't pleased by
the death and misfortune -- he pulls his hair and gnashes his
teeth -- but it doesn't make him ask any questions and it doesn't
put him in despair. For _those_ things to happen, he has to
suffer in his own skin: quite literally, since he's afflicted by
that case of boils.
Anyway, his immediate, you could even say instinctual
reaction is to keep faith with Yahweh: on our reading, with life
and being. He doesn't question the conditions of life, still
less judge against them. He suffers, but he doesn't think. It's
only later, in round two, after a full week of boils, that he
finally questions Yahweh and curses life. That's not an
instinctive response -- it's a considered and reflective one. It
certainly isn't life-affirming. The opposite. Job wants to
erase the day of his birth and the night of his conception. That
isn't the un-truth necessary to life. Again, exactly the
opposite: it's a example of the relation between truth and death.
Jeff:
>>> Or contrariwise, "evil" is a term that is already relativised
>>> by its contingence on human experience.
Moggin:
>> Also on human judgement -- if you judge that murder, disease,
>> and kidnapping are good, then you won't have any reason to
>> conclude that Yahweh is evil. But if you judge against them, you
>> have reason to believe that he is.
Jeff:
> Your polarization seems to me to miss a depper alternative
> reading, regardless of which pole is being emphasized.
> Perhaps I am driven to wonder about the root of my judgements
> about murder, disease and kidnapping. If I have a moment of
> insight in which they seem not "good", but rather ambuguously
> and mysteriously entwined with things that are more easily
> appreciated, which side have I taken in the story?
Yahweh's.
Moggin:
>> Presumably you would argue that Yahweh completely transcends
>> human judgement. Old ground. There's no evidence which
>> suggests that he does. As I said to Mike, Yahweh comes across as
>> human, all-too-human. He's a bully, first and last.
Jeff:
> And when something "evil" happens, say someone is killed,
> there is no possibility in your experience for an ambiguous
> thought about the "morality" of that event? Sheer outrage
> is your experience of all moments in experience that seem
> initially negative?
Death is negative precisely as the negation of life. That's
a point in its favor, considering what living can be like. So
yes, of course it's ambiguous -- its meaning depends how who dies
and under what circumstances. "Someone is killed" tells me
nothing without a context. Take Job's case: he's upset when his
children die, but soon he's wishing to die.
[...]
Jeff:
>>> I'd bet there are
>>> interesting connections with stories about the processes of
>>> medieval alchemy, for example, in which the prima materia
>>> is "tortured" in the crucible en route to a mysterious
>>> perfecting.
Moggin:
>> I bet not. Job is tortured, alright, but he's not traveling
>> toward perfection: that's where he begins. More old ground.
>> The first verse of the story says that Job is perfect and upright.
>> A short while later Yahweh makes the same judgement -- then
>> Satan tempts him into torturing Job. That's what the story's all
>> about: the punishment Yahweh inflicts on an "perfect and
>> upright man." It shows how Job and his friends respond, then how
>> Yahweh responds to _them_.
Jeff:
> Yet it seems to me that he may be understood to have been
> refined in the fire, regardless of what judgements are
> offered about him early on. Christ was supposedly perfect,
> too, and he, too, was apparently not thereby relieved of
> the need to suffer.
Jesus wasn't more perfect after than before -- ditto for Job.
There's no refining process in either case, unless you're
willing to count Job's newly-discovered ability to curse life and
question God -- and that's gone by the end of the story.
-- Moggin
Michael S. Morris
Mikhail:
It is supremely beside the point, if not
outright disingenuous, to insist that,
"theretofore [Clarice had] committed a
traffic violation, max," given that the
narrative of Clarice's fall from institutional
grace is explicitly based on her excellence in
the service of law enforcement agencies known
for gratuitous assassination of breastfeeding
mothers and promiscuous immolation of extended
families.
I think not. In the first place, I think
Harris does not begin to convey the opening
shoot-out as a "gratuitous assassination of
breastfeeding mothers". She used the baby as
a shield to hide her gun, with which she killed.
The fuck-up and waste was not so much the
raid, but the tip-off that led to Brigham's
death. Clarice, at the point where she goes
to rescue Lecter, is still acting on the side
of the angels. She figures she will rescue him
from murder only to bring him to custody. It is
a huge leap from there to where she ends up a few
short pages later. I just think that had he left
the drugs out, that leap would have been too
much---I think as a device that the writer could
use or no, it smoothed the transition to the surreal.
Mikhail:
The fact that Harris drives home this point
so forcefully gives the lie to Mike's complaint
about his partisan take on the impeachment proceedings.
Not at all. Harris's driving of this point is
aimed even-handedly at all institutions, until
that one point where he plainly characterizes
President Clinton's behaviour as a sex peccadillo
versus the full blown hypocrisy of the opposition. The
blatant partisanship in such an interpretation
of the impeachment crisis colors *the whole* of
Harris's own moralizing, writ small or writ large.
He knew it, too, which is why it's just a single
muted sentence, Clinton is or the Republicans are not
named, etc..
Mikhail:
But I hasten to add that the purview of Dr. Lecter's
biting contempt far surpasses the compliant throngs
of the free-range rude herded and thinned by the
corrupt badge-bearers.
And I hasten to add that there is a whopping
simplistic dichotomy about this book. Not between
good and evil, but between the ressentiment of this
free-range rude and the biting contempt of the
self-appointed aristocrat. The seduction of this book
will serve no moral purpose at all unless we feel
the bite of its accusation against our claim to and for
that selfsame contempt equally as we feel the force
of its etiquette instructions for the parents of
small children in coach class on transatlantic
flights.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael Zeleny
the opening shoot-out as a "gratuitous assassination of breastfeeding
mothers". Of course not: the opening scene is written to evoke the
deliberate killing of Randy Weaver's wife by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi
at the Ruby Ridge siege, as referenced in the book. Similarly, the
media tip-off responsible for the death of BATF agent John Brigham is
the counterpart of the holocaust-inducing BATF Waco compound assault,
likewise alluded to in the following narrative. Clarice Starling's
unrepentant institutional complicity with these murders gives the lie
to Mike's blithe insistence upon placing her "on the side of the
angels" prior to the Krendler's brain repast.
To repeat myself once again, being a cousin (and conformant with the
European usage, the first cousin) of count Balthazar Klossowski de
Rola, better known as Balthus, Hannibal Lecter must partake of Polish,
German, and Russian aristocratic bloodlines, along with an obdurately
suppressed sarmentum of Jewish lineage. If there be a sense in which
his aristocracy is self-appointed, it must originate from his native
intelligence and painstakingly acquired learning. The fact that these
considerable entitlements fail to bind their fortunate bearer to the
rules of conventional morality comprises the core of the book's moral
accusation against the reader's instinctive revulsion at Dr. Hannibal
Lecter's depredations. The fact that the book ends in a place unfit
for dispensing the dismissive labels of "crazy" and "evil" upon its
protagonists comprises the core of its moral challenge to the reader.
It behooves the self-appointed beneficiaries of the state order that
sustains the market economy, to explain the moral difference between
their partaking of its material deliverances, as underwritten by the
pursuit of private vices, and the cannibal's unapologetic consumption
of his prey, without relying on the institutional mythology of consent
validating the necessity of contractual coercion of man as a social
and economic being.
Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>Thursday, the 8th of July, 1999
>
>
>Mikhail:
> It is supremely beside the point, if not
> outright disingenuous, to insist that,
> "theretofore [Clarice had] committed a
> traffic violation, max," given that the
> narrative of Clarice's fall from institutional
> grace is explicitly based on her excellence in
> the service of law enforcement agencies known
> for gratuitous assassination of breastfeeding
> mothers and promiscuous immolation of extended
> families.
>
>I think not. In the first place, I think
>Harris does not begin to convey the opening
>shoot-out as a "gratuitous assassination of
>breastfeeding mothers". She used the baby as
>a shield to hide her gun, with which she killed.
>The fuck-up and waste was not so much the
>raid, but the tip-off that led to Brigham's
>death. Clarice, at the point where she goes
>to rescue Lecter, is still acting on the side
>of the angels. She figures she will rescue him
>from murder only to bring him to custody. It is
>a huge leap from there to where she ends up a few
>short pages later. I just think that had he left
>the drugs out, that leap would have been too
>much---I think as a device that the writer could
>use or no, it smoothed the transition to the surreal.
>
>Mikhail:
> The fact that Harris drives home this point
> so forcefully gives the lie to Mike's complaint
> about his partisan take on the impeachment proceedings.
>
>Not at all. Harris's driving of this point is
>aimed even-handedly at all institutions, until
>that one point where he plainly characterizes
>President Clinton's behaviour as a sex peccadillo
>versus the full blown hypocrisy of the opposition. The
>blatant partisanship in such an interpretation
>of the impeachment crisis colors *the whole* of
>Harris's own moralizing, writ small or writ large.
>He knew it, too, which is why it's just a single
>muted sentence, Clinton is or the Republicans are not
>named, etc..
>
>Mikhail:
> But I hasten to add that the purview of Dr. Lecter's
> biting contempt far surpasses the compliant throngs
> of the free-range rude herded and thinned by the
> corrupt badge-bearers.
>
>And I hasten to add that there is a whopping
>simplistic dichotomy about this book. Not between
>good and evil, but between the ressentiment of this
>free-range rude and the biting contempt of the
>self-appointed aristocrat. The seduction of this book
>will serve no moral purpose at all unless we feel
>the bite of its accusation against our claim to and for
>that selfsame contempt equally as we feel the force
>of its etiquette instructions for the parents of
>small children in coach class on transatlantic
>flights.
>
Michael S. Morris
Mikhail thinks Harris uses Hannibal as
a mirror for anyone "complicit in the system".
I think it goes deeper than that. It's
the cheapest thing in the world to imagine
one's self separate and above and different
and smarter than "the system". (There is no one,
when confronted with the Frost poem, who imagines
that *he* has taken the road everyone else takes.)
_Hannibal_ seduces the reader towards *admiring*
aristocratic "biting" contempt. And it shows
him what that contempt really is.
As for Waco and Ruby Ridge being there, Mikhail,
I saw them, too, but what I saw of them was consistent
with my theory that Harris sees them as internal
fuck-ups that got some good field agents killed
or tarnished some reputations, not as governmental
usurpations of powers morally denied to government.
Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)
Michael Zeleny
critique of "complicity in the system". Nothing could be further from
my presentation. The moral equivalency urged by the text is between
the social prerogative customarily manifested in conspicuous waste,
and the predator's proud perch atop the food chain, which takes this
conspicuity to a further level by wasting subjects morally presumed to
transcend their nutritional value. Why this transition should be so
offensive to the categorical construal of morality irrespectively of
its involvement in the socioeconomic order, is a question Mike is yet
to address, let alone answer.
Incidentally, Harris uses the technique of estrangement in good stead
by decorating the ritual scene of cephalophagia with the accouterments
of pecuniary emulation. (This technique is exploited in a different
but equally effective way in Denis Johnson's deadpan satire of the
Northern California resident extraterrestrials, _Already Dead_.) As
for the possibility of good agents subaltern to evil bureaucrats, the
only such character in the book is last seen dying of a broken heart.
Michael S. Morris <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>Thursday, the 8th of July, 1999
>
>
Chris Bolton
Chris A. Bolton
www.fade-to-black.com
Ray Girvan
> Ah, fuck it. I'll wait for the movie.
I don't quite understand. You mean your exasperation at the
sesquipedalian nature of the discourse leaves a monosyllabic
expletive as the only appropriate response, and you prefer to await
with anticipation this work's potential transmogrification into the
cinematographic medium?
Ray
--
ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk +++ Technical Author +++ Topsham, Devon, UK
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rgirvan/ +++ The Apothecary's Drawer
Chris Bolton
Ray Girvan wrote in message <199907101...@zetnet.co.uk>...
>I don't quite understand. You mean your exasperation at the
>sesquipedalian nature of the discourse leaves a monosyllabic
>expletive as the only appropriate response, and you prefer to await
>with anticipation this work's potential transmogrification into the
>cinematographic medium?
Yes.
Chris A. Bolton
www.fade-to-black.com
David J. Loftus
Organization:
In rec.arts.books Ray Girvan <ray.g...@zetnet.co.uk> wrote:
: Chris Bolton <chris...@worldnet.att.net> write:
:> Ah, fuck it. I'll wait for the movie.
: I don't quite understand. You mean your exasperation at the
: sesquipedalian nature of the discourse leaves a monosyllabic
: expletive as the only appropriate response, and you prefer to await
: with anticipation this work's potential transmogrification into the
: cinematographic medium?
Shit yeah.