With 14 FBI-confirmed kills (and even more that only readers of Harris's books will know of, though the movie Hannibal really gives us the figure of 21), Hannibal Lecter is not the most prolific serial murderer, but is definitely the most memorable. From a psychological perspective, it's almost a shame he's fictional. Because Dr Lecter was extremely aware of the tricks of psychoanalytic interview (and had perfected a technique of his own, where he attempts to shock and overwhelm the subject with ideas in a "hit or miss" Blitzkrieg interrogation), he could easily mislead or intimidate other psychologists – making him not only nearly impossible to diagnose, but a serious psychological threat to anyone who would try. Nevertheless, we, as readers of Harris's novels, are privy to intimate thoughts on Dr Lecter's part. We are in a unique position to understand Dr Lecter's cannibalism, and that's what I'd like to do in this note. Of course, cannibalism is only one dimension of Dr Lecter's pathology – his hateful superiority and his love of manipulation would occupy me well beyond the modest work I intend to do here.
Anthropophagy is only used as a means of survival when all other alternatives have exhausted themselves. When someone must eat the flesh of another human to survive, it leaves indelible trauma on the soul of the eater. However, it is not necessarily always a means of survival. The act of eating human flesh has been invested with special meaning, usually taboo, in almost every culture in history, with only a handful of exceptions. Strangely, among many of those cultures for whom the idea, if not the act, of anthropophagy is relatively common, eating human flesh is regarded as a funerary honor – from the Catholic holy communion, to the absorption of a captive foe's battle-strength among Polynesian island warriors. Among the cannibalistic mass murderers, from Jeffrey Dahmer to Ed Gein to Albert Fish, flesh-eating is infused with erotic allure. Even when victims are not sexually molested before consumption, sexual intercourse is very often considered an acceptable option, shrewdly eschewed, or an ideal, unfortunately unrealizable.
In any event, it is clear that cannibalism is almost always something very meaningful; the act is pregnant with levels of meaning, whether those meanings are horrifying, or mystical, or erotic. It is nothing like how a predatory animal hunts prey, which is strictly utilitarian – an animal expresses nothing by killing prey. A human killer is almost always expressing something.*
Hannibal Lecter eats human flesh. This, in itself, hardly makes him a unique case. What is special about Dr Lecter's cannibalistic tendencies is that they are utterly devoid of either reverence or sexuality, however perverse or enraged. On the contrary, cannibalism for Dr Lecter is an act of malice against the victim, a cold and calculated spite. What is the constitution of this peculiar semiology of cannibalism in this case? Why does Lecter have such an idiosyncratic sense of the meaning of cannibalism?
Many pathological anthropophages could easily be described as "insane." Is Dr Lecter "insane?" Is he "mad?" He suffers from no delusions; his vocation (psychologist) requires incredible perceptivity, and he is very capable of understanding the consequences of his actions. In fact, he prides himself on having far fewer delusions than your average citizen regarding the natural order of things – he is, at least as far as "moral philosophy" is concerned, a nihilist, and looks down on those who believe in cloying or saccharine casuistry. Lecter suffers from no compulsions, either; he does not kill because he feels he is driven to do so, but rather, he only kills when it is an indulgence. Of those victims he eats (which is not all of them), he does not eat them because he feels he must eat them, but because he enjoys eating them. He slays those who offend his tastes or his pride, but it is not a purification, as it might be for a maniac; for Lecter, the slaughter of those who offend him is a delicious humiliation and a well-savored revenge.
Nor is he altogether antisocial: Lecter's choice targets are specifically those who displease him (the sickeningly bad flautist Benjamin Raspail, the smarmy child molester Mason Verger, the arrogant and antagonistic Dr Chilton), inconvenience him (the corrupt detective Rinaldo Pazzi, who intended to capture Dr Lecter), or those who hurt someone in whom he is interested (Paul Krendler, who harassed Special Agent Starling to no end) – those that Lecter himself considers "antisocial;" these are his "free range rude." Any other kills are incidental casualties in Hannibal's process of self-defence and flight, such as Special Agent Will Graham, the agent who brought Hannibal to justice and one of only two victims, aside from Mason Verger, to survive. Although he goads and gives aid to other murderers (Francis Dolarhyde, Jame Gumb, and maybe even Il Mostro), it is likely that he does this, not so much for perverse glee of mayhem, as for the perverse glee of always being one step ahead of the self-congratulatory "experts" and maintaining his own pride in his abilities. It is also likely he does this for the sake of keeping his analytic senses sharp and maintaining a dialogue with "patients" with whom he has a particular rapport – and less professional pressure to "help" before it's "too late" or before they strike again, an eventuality about which the pitiless Dr Lecter doesn't care. Of course, he has no special sympathy for these killers; he toys with them as ruthlessly as he toys with his captors, and he thinks nothing of using his privileged information to exploit an opportunity.
There is really only one word that can describe Lecter's mode of pathology, and that is malevolence. He is motivated by an ill will toward those too ignorant to realize the scope of their insignificance, and who create inconvenience or discomfort for their natural superiors.
Lecter is a nihilist, but his nihilism is not the cause of his malevolence. Nihilism has no content but the proposition that all abstract moral philosophies have no content themselves, and as a philosophical position it could manifest in real behavior in any number of ways. Lecter's sense of cannibalism, however, is very personal; it is an extremely specific gesture that expresses specific attitudes. Although Lecter's nihilism means that he has no abstract compulsions against killing and desecrating bodies, his philosophy does not specifically permit it or demand it of him. If we are to understand why Dr Lecter is determined to his violence, we must consider his own life, and the events that conspired to recommend cannibalism as an ideal expression of his temperament.
Very little is known about the early life of Hannibal Lecter. One incident, however, is revealed in a dream. In Hannibal, it is made clear that he was born sometime in the late 1930s, to an aristocratic German Lithuanian family. During World War II, when Hannibal was six years old, the Soviet front collapsed. A mixed group of Nazi deserters murdered his parents and locked Hannibal and his sister Mischa in the family barn. It was a harsh winter. Starving, the deserters stole what food they could from the house. When the food in the house ran out, they began hunting the grounds for game. When the game failed to provide for all of them, they took Mischa Lecter from the barn, "to play." When Hannibal finally becomes free (it is unclear whether he escapes or is liberated, or simply left for dead), he finds Mischa's teeth in the deserters' latrine.
It is obvious that Lecter feels an overwhelming resentment for the uncouth and undisciplined, who would inevitably remind him of those barbaric deserters. It is just as obvious that Lecter would see examples of this same primitiveness in all agents of those governments devoted to normalizing, quantifying, regulating and otherwise reducing "citizens" to the lowest common denominator – whether they represent some socialism like the cowardly Nazi soldiers, or the democratic census taker whose liver he eats with fava beans and a "big Amarone" (or a "nice Chianti," depending on which source you prefer). When degenerate child-molesters enjoy the privileges of a powerful family, when clumsy charlatans pass themselves off as cultured artists worthy of the Baltimore Philharmonic, when corrupt detectives think they can cash in on an illegal reward, or when bigotted paper-pushers use their positions to further clandestine agendas, a crime has been committed against Lecter's sensibilities.
It has been suggested that Hannibal is motivated by a need to avenge his sister's death.** This explains his desire to face a strong female counterpart like Clarice Starling. However, it would be too much of a stretch to suggest that every one of his victims is transmogrified by Lecter's fantasy into an icon of the deserters who killed his sister. Each of his victims earns their own special punishment. It is possible that Lecter thinks of Mischa as he delivers this punishment, but she does not seem to have a strong presence in the scenes of Lecter's crimes. Nor, for that matter, do the soldiers who murdered her. It seems more likely that, rather than forming any specific fantasy, Lecter's childhood trauma informed both his hatred of unsophisticates, on the one hand, and the gesture of cannibalism, on the other. In other words, cannibalism does not mean revenge on Mischa's killer, but rather, very specifically, it means only one thing: shame. When he eats his victims, it is not to get revenge on the soldiers who shamed Mischa, but simply to shame this victim; though his cannibalism is inspired or informed by his childhood experience, when he commits it he is not trying to recreate the soldiers or his sister in the scene, as a fantasy-motivated psychopath might.
Lecter does not seem to harbor any fantasy that Mischa will be redeemed or avenged by his actions. On the contrary, what stays with him is not a fantasy but a memory – the memory of Mischa's degradation. The memory is not recollected in times of rage, but in times of rest, which would suggest that it is not immanent to the murders themselves. There is never a sense that Lecter kills so that he can put this memory behind him. It would seem that this memory, rather than fuelling Lecter's rage or warping his desires, actually serves only to inform his expression of the general and diffuse hatred he feels toward his inferiors, of which the deserters were not the archetype but only the first examples. It is not that he is driven to cannibalism, but rather that, because of this memory, cannibalism stands out as an obvious way for him to show his disdain. Of course, unlike the crude and desperate way the army deserters gnawed his sister's bones, Lecter shows his superiority by preparing his meals with consummate care and exquisite taste – care and taste his prey would never be able to appreciate.
Hannibal Lecter kills people to remove sources of frustration from his life once and for all – but he eats them to express his contempt for them, to add the ultimate insult to the ultimate injury.
* Rest assured, Hannibal does not think of himself as a predatory animal feasting on prey like we would feast on chattle. Although he is quite comfortable comparing the general mass of humanity to a flock of dull sheep, the essence of his feast is that he is expressing a special contempt for his victim. We do not express anything when we eat chattle; we simply eat. Lecter relishes the indignity he is visiting upon his victims. This is the paradox of his superiority: However advanced he is or considers himself to be, he cannot think of himself as being of another species; for his act to be a real humiliation, it must be cannibalism. If he were eating something he thought of as an animal, it would not be an especial humiliation.
** "The Hannibal Library" (http://www.pentaone.com/hannibal/) has an excellent article detailing the sort of profile the FBI might make of Lecter. It's an incredibly absorbing read, but I do think it fails on this one point.