American Gothic: Liminality in Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter Novels

Abstract

I Liminality refers primarily to concept of threshold, area between two spaces. And that threshold is predominantly associated with provisionality, instability, intermediate forms; what lies between known and unknown, or other.1 Noel Carroll writes (by way of Mary Douglas) that things that are interstitial, that cross boundaries of deep categories of culture's conceptual scheme, are impure...cognitively threatening.2 And argument that danger lies in such liminal area, where distinctions by which we organise our lives and cultural systems are bought into question, is unsurprising. However, we should remember that, in words of Michael Taussig, a threshold...allows for illumination as well as extinction.3 Promise then, as well as threat, lies in notion of border area, and possibility of crossover and transgression associated with it. Thus Bill Brown refers to the mesmerising power of genuine liminality, where structures of normalcy and everyday security break down.4 In this essay I refer to three novels by Thomas Harris that feature Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999). For reasons of space, I mainly focus on two most recent texts. Harris's novels engage with all kinds of threshold areas, thus providing particularly useful site for an exploration of liminality. Here I briefly describe number of such engagements -though spatial limits of this essay mean that other areas necessarily go untreated.5 I focus my argument, however, around Harris's use of Gothic genre, and follow William Veeder in seeing genre itself as type of liminal space where both foreclosed cultural norms and (at psychological level) repressed desires can be explored and interrogated to powerful effect.6 The boundary crossings that Harris represents in his texts, then, are tied in symbiotic connection to Gothic forms he uses. II Harris, though, also engages thresholds between genres in his texts, and it is at that point that I commence. Harris's novels would normally be categorized as crime fiction. Thus, for instance, The Silence of Lambs comes to be structured round Clarice Starling's successful quest to discover identity and whereabouts of serial killer Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill) before he murders Catherine Baker Martin, woman he has abducted. But Harris's is peculiar type of crime fiction: type of anti-mystery where, and particularly in Red Dragon and The Silence of Lambs, detective seeks to unmask murderer, [but where] killer is known far in advance by reader.7 Though main crimes are successfully solved in these texts, of linearity, individualized character and epistemological authority normally associated with genre are all placed under considerable strain.8 Serial murder (Harris's theme) evacuates much of that sense of affect-that intensity of feeling, emotion and desire, charged density of motivation in close relationship between victim and criminal-of more traditional forms of detective narrative. In consequence, as Barry Taylor describes: The absence of any discernible motivated link between killer and victim...leads to criminological classification of serial murder as motiveless, and so to shattering of links which forge causal and narrative coherence of classic murder. The serial murder is crime about which no recognizable story can be told (and which therefore generates an apparently uncontainable desire for narration)... [Serial murder stands as] sign of threatening randomness, of disappearance of meaningful inter-subjective structures, of demotivated action, of collapse of authoritative models of explanation and interpretation...and of disappearance of subject.9 In Harris, type of causal and narrative links that Taylor discusses are, in case of Francis Dollarhyde (in Red Dragon) and Jame Gumb, still recuperable, though not always by conventional means. …