A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping
rot in the West of Europe.
(Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, 1919)
The essence of the worst, the true
asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden
or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces
of the crowd.
(Thomas Harris, Hannibal, 1999)
This essay makes a claim about the registration
and significance of “popular” culture. In this case, it is the Hannibal
Lecter novels that are elevated beyond being “just entertainment”
to a position where they engage both with some central late-twentieth-century
debates and with some characteristic obsessions of an earlier fin-de-siècle
culture. This is not to deny that the Hannibal Lecter texts are
shrewdly designed products of the modern culture industry — they
clearly are. But this essay takes the now familiar position that
such a status is not inconsistent with ambitions larger than the
just commercial. Indeed, the suggestion here is that this sequence
of novels constitutes a fascinating expression of nothing less than
the condition of Western society and culture at the end of the twentieth
century. This engagement with wider society and culture goes way
beyond the occasional allusion to a specific event or contemporary
concern, although there are plenty of those in these texts. In fact,
these novels manage very much more sustained and complex positions
established in relation to a whole range of issues that have emerged
as being key to the period — issues
around social cohesion and consent, for example, gender, sexuality,
and, perhaps especially, class. These more fundamental engagements
often appear not as momentary references but more complex textual
dispositions. They are expressed in sustained and mediated techniques,
frequently involving the signifying implications of narrative, which
takes on dimensions of allegory and participates in metonymical
and metaphorical meanings, especially, and not for the first time
in the history of thriller writing, around ideas of modernity and
postmodernity. 1 It is with this latter engagement
that this essay is principally concerned.
The Hannibal Lecter novels, like all cultural
products, are viewed here as being constitutive of culture and society,
as well as having an explicitly reflexive relationship with the
societies from which they stem. They can be properly analyzed in
terms of what Geertz terms the “thick description” of culture (10)
where the organization, construction, and meaning of cultural products
becomes treated in terms of how they are lodged within, and lodge
within themselves, the cultural and social structures
of the society of which they are an expression. “Popular” novels
generally may have a particular significance here. As well as reflecting
the historical and cultural character of society, they often operate
as strong expressions of society’s own sense
of its life and values. Best-selling narratives often create fantasies,
but they are sometimes expressive of more than mere escapism. 2Here the popular novel becomes the site of a characteristically
open, direct and unapologetic expression of the ideals, dreams,
anxieties, and frustrations of its readers. This means that, conventionally,
popular fiction works to produce a utopianist view of life 3
and the Hannibal novels, the first two at any rate, are no exception.
Although they are more hard-edged and engaged than many other forms
of contemporary popular fiction, their pleasures lie in part in
their expression of qualities and conditions that are lacking in
real life. In this way, these novels become powerful vehicles of
popular collective expression, articulating the tensions, and reconciliation,
of everyday relations between individuals and society. It is partly
for this reason that the central figure of these novels, Hannibal
Lecter, can lay serious claim to being our Frankenstein, our Dracula,
for like these earlier terror icons, he belongs to a fictional world
that resonates with the contemporary condition.
Functional Mandibles? — Secure Sites and Discourses
of Order
As J. Kenneth Van Dover and
many others have established, the interrelation between the fictional
detection of crime and the codification of scientific method goes
right to the heart of the detective novel and its constructions
of the world. 4 Linkages between order, science
and detection are entirely characteristic of the form, and the Hannibal
novels are no exception. Indeed, these pay exceptional attention
to the redeeming powers of science and technology — their central
figure, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is, ironically, himself a master of
this modernity, a monster who attacks from within.
For all their apparent relish of dark corners and bloody chaos, then, the first
two of these novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, like many thrillers, have at their center a conservative order of rationality,
discipline, and control, something of which can be seen in the sites
that they most privilege. Harris’s thrillers may be infamous for
their exploitation of the bizarre pleasures of the dungeon and the
unthinkable freedoms of the basement, but equally important to their
narrative dynamic is the celebration of the expert, the technocrat,
and the scientist. It is for this reason that the novels often elevate
a very different kind of location — the more workaday office and
laboratory. The true antithesis to the gruesome mess below Jame
Gumb’s kitchen is only partly the all-American family den where
the innocent victims romp. The further and, in many ways, more compelling
counterpart is Beverley Katz’s “calm and busy” hair and fiber lab;
Jimmy Price’s latent fingerprints department or Lloyd Bowman’s documents
section. It is here, in the bright light of advanced technocracy
and science, that the awful “transformations” visualized by the
mad logic of the psychopath are countered, and in more senses than
one. These locations do more than simply provide the fortuitous
space for chasing the madmen. They represent the authority of modern
science pitted against the “transforming” instincts of the crazed
alchemists, “Buffalo Bill” and the “Tooth Fairy.” In this sense,
Harris follows traditions which go back to the beginnings of the
detective novel in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries.
Like Conan Doyle before him and many proponents of the form since,
Harris configures narratives that insist on the progressivism of
modern science and program the victory of scientific rationalism
over bloody chaos.
The discourse equivalent to this arrangement of space is the stark contrast
made between, on the one hand, a stylized mad talk characterized
by grim parodics and mythopoetics and, on the other, the super efficiency
of a range of jargons and officialese imported from the related
worlds of criminology, psychology, and jurisprudence. Against the
Red Dragon’s furious and slippery declaration that he is “not a
man. I began as one but by the Grace of God and my Will, I have
become Other” (Harris, Red 171) is positioned the very much
more controlled script of the scientist, the administrator, and,
above all, the State investigator. Clarice Starling, the heroine
of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal,
is symptomatic here, a professional who speaks with the voice of
a professional: “since Raspail is deceased and not suspected of
anything, if we have permission of his executor to search the car,
then it is a valid search and the fruit admissible in other matters
at law” (Red 39). The conviction of order, operating
according to known systems, underpins Starling’s professional status,
but more than this it is central to her sense of the world and,
indeed, to the security of the broader fictional world that these
novels, and their film versions, construct.
Stylized technospeak trademarks not just Clarice Starling, then, but these novels
generally and is clearly more than “just talk.” It is, firstly,
an essential code for establishing authenticity. These texts can
claim reality to the extent that their experts sound as if they
know what they are talking about. The discourses deployed are specifically,
even self-consciously, authoritative, sometimes to the point where
fiction might reasonably be expected to be in danger of defeating
its reader/audience, which is precisely the point about a sentence
like, “no distinct respiratory organs on the dorsophalic regions,
spiracles on the mesothorax and some abdominals, let’s start with
that” (Harris, Silence 98). But more than operating as mere authentication,
securing the surface of the texts as it were, these discourses signify
at rather deeper narratological levels. They imply a modern world
that is essentially ordered, secure, and authoritative. They register
as the real weapons with which the grim perversions of psychopathology
will be captured, studied, and, even, understood. Operating across
“behavioral science,” police and military tradecraft, psychology,
entomology, criminal pathology, and, of course, information technologies,
such discourses construct the “positivistic, technocentric, and
rationalistic” dimensions of a “universal modernism.”
They aim for “absolute truth,” “linear progress,” “the standardization
of knowledge,” and they constitute “the rational ideal of an ideal
social order.” 5 The obvious stars of Harris’s
trilogy, Dr. Alan Bloom, Will Graham, Clarice Starling, Jack Crawford
and so on, have the collective authority of an expert panel, a dream
team, albeit aided by a little inspiration and imagination, typically
supplied by the thoroughly transgressive and sociopathic expert,
Hannibal. For the most part, these figures are technocrats implicated
in State systems. Modernity in these texts is thus epitomized by
the elite world of the FBI and its even more elite Behavioral Science
Section. This is the world of VI-CAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension
Program), and, up to the last in the trilogy at least, it signifies
a modern order under threat but indispensable to humanity and just
too good to lose.
To What, Then, Could I Have Aspired in My Craft?
— Postmodern Mayhem
At one narrative level the dramas of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are victim saving. At a rather different level, they test the efficiency and
ethics of the modern order against the wild and freakish monsters
of psychopathology. There is a further danger to stability, however,
and in some ways this is the more insidious threat. It comes from
those who would disturb the integrity of the technocracy from within.
Until Hannibal, these wild egoists and corrupters
of the system are kept under control, and the strongest physical
restraint in the case of Hannibal himself. Hannibal, however, produces not only a framework
in which the good doctor is on the loose, but an astonishing contamination
that transforms the essentially secure modernity constructed in
the earlier novels. This is prefigured by a highly suggestive removal
of some of the stalwarts of science and professionalism at the outset.
With John Brigham, a master craftsman of law enforcement, being
shot by an AIDS-carrying drug baroness in the first few pages, and
Jack Crawford, the one-time administrative genius behind FBI Behavioral
Science now transformed into a spent force, the stage becomes set
for an extensive assault on the high virtue of professionalism and
the efficiency of the moral technocracy. The authority of police
craft and its commitment to “right” is displaced by a new order
of corrupt officialdom. Scientific detection, the traditional mechanism
of the moral world of the thriller, is banished to the cellars of
Quantico where it occupies very limited physical space, has low
status and can easily be manipulated by the new debased order. State
security is not only thrown into the hands of the corrupt official,
it is also put at the disposal of a figure new to Harris’s fiction
(and owing something to American Psycho): the super-rich sociopath.
Innovation, a defining character of modernity, remains key in Hannibal. Here, however, science and technology serve not the State and the common good,
but the highly idiosyncratic and individualist purposes of Mason
Verger. This is the pedophilic sadist who seeks revenge for the
havoc inflicted on his body by Dr. Lecter. Despite confinement to
a supra high-tech dependency unit, this son of an immoral, and highly
successful, capitalist is at the very center of the Hannibal world. In this way, the cool detachment
of the professional becomes usurped by a madman who has the communications
power to determine events on a global scale. His influence extends
from the New World to the Old World, from the American center to
the seeming outskirts of civilization on a remote Sicilian farm.
In this novel, then, it is not the progressive powers of modernity
that are in authority but, rather, the wildly twisted Verger, drinker
of children’s tears. His enormous wealth allows him the effortless
control of both law and order across continents and the criminal
world. By this final novel, then, the distinction between good and
bad guys, already under threat from the dark figure of the deadly
psychologist, really is in danger of breaking down, as money and
a crazed desire for revenge maintains rule over all.
Such an utter transformation does more than tip Hannibal into lapsarian disorder. Rather than
evolving from the old modernity in some way, the site that is constructed
here seems to have separated out and embarked on an entirely new
course. The science so elevated in the earlier texts is hardly recognizable
in its new incarnation as the genetics that races to produce and
train the fiercest breed of pig, one that will consume a living
human and thus become the agent of Verger’s bloody revenge on Lecter.
Administrative efficiency and rationalism become perversely tricked
into serving the awful vision forecasted by Mason Verger’s father,
the pioneer in industrial livestock production who “in the 1940s
… first took away the pigs’ fresh drinking water and had them drink
ditch water, made of fermented animal waste, to hasten weight” (177).
The separation of worlds, so characteristic of the earlier novels
now becomes utterly compromised. The sociopath positioned at the
very extremity of society and culture in the first two novels has
moved to the hub where he becomes metonymical of the new modernity,
by virtue of the association with new capitalism, mega-industrial
power, and postmodern communications.
This reversal of things is highly suggestive
of the modern/postmodern debates that flourished in the late-twentieth
century, which makes it important to emphasize at this point that
neither Hannibal the book nor film is
postmodern in any formal, technical sense. Although
both are more playful than the earlier texts and could perhaps be
understood as adopting dispositions for McHale’s “ontological” over
the “epistemological,” 6 Hannibal
shows no postmodern preference for the pastiche that Jameson sees
as so defining of new times culture (16-19). It clearly does not
favor Hassan’s “exhaustion and silence” over “mastery and logos”
(123-24). In narrative terms, Hannibal adopts a very obvious master code. A highly traditional thriller
in many ways, Hannibal is a technically conservative
fiction that adopts the position of finding itself in a different
world. The angst of a certain kind of modernist is fundamental to
the text, and it is this angst that takes its revenge against the
now culture from which it feels so alienated. In this sense, Hannibal
takes position after modernity, but it is not a postmodern novel
in terms of textuality.
Such characteristics are hardly unique, but “popular” culture typically finds
a way back to some kind of restoration of modernity ordered on conventional
lines. Somehow morality is restored to science and bureaucracy,
or, at least, personal morality wins out in some partial sense.
This is where Hannibal breaks contract with its implied readership for, highly unusually, Hannibal can find no way of returning science, technology, or political
economy back to the world in moral forms. Hannibal thus reproduces contemporaneity as
an endgame, spiralling into corruption and vulgar decadence without
hope of meaningful salvation. Modernity is not recoverable here.
The best that Harris’s narrative can do is to exact a tangible (and
terrible) revenge on the new times perversion as it is represented
by the likes of Paul Krendler, the corrupt FBI man who is Starlings’s
nemesis, and Mason Verger, the representative of modern capitalism
gone horribly wrong. Indeed, this is the central dynamic of the
Hannibal plot. The problem is where to find an agent for revenge on
the necessary scale in a narrative that insists there is no moral
or ethical cultural reserve to draw on. Harris’s answer to this
predicament involves a considerable degree of risk taking. In the
novel, it engages the removal of Starling from the heroine role
and banks on the gamble that the readership will consent to the
resurrection of a much older form of authority, one that has prestigious
literary origins and no interest whatsoever in the salvation of
modernity. The potential outcome of such a configuration may be
gratifying in some ways, but it cannot redeem an irredeemable contemporaneity.
It also implicates the Hannibal text in an obvious condescension towards modern life and
a thorough mystification of the much-connected ideas of aristocracy
and distinction. These are just two senses in which Hannibal really belongs to another time, and
it is from this disposition that a “problem” with Hannibal the blockbuster emerged.
Return to Gothic — Aristocratic Revival
The Krendler and Verger figures in Hannibal are emblematic of a much wider sense
of cultural decline. They are the exaggerated representatives of
what Nietzsche has referred to as the “uglification” of modernity,
of a general decadence and both moral and aesthetic disintegration
that is imaged throughout Harris’s book as the contemporary condition.
This is one of the great and, again, risky, divergences from the
earlier novels. Hannibal produces a culture so debased that
it is hardly worth the effort of saving — a devaluation that has
highly significant results, producing the ambiguity, for instance,
with which we must now read Hannibal’s carefree slaughter of the
world’s vulgarians: for preference, we are told, Hannibal will always
choose the vulgar as victim. This emptying of value from the contemporary
world becomes confirmed not just in the broad narratology of a text
where order, professionalism and authority are vanquished, but in
a whole range of narrative detail — the representation of fast food,
for example, “slippery meat and processed cheese food,” and of mass
travel where the members of a package tour group rebreath “the farts
and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation
on the ditch-liquor principle established by cattle and pig merchants
in the 1950s” (290). Or, again, there is the reference with which
this essay begins, where the narrator sees nothing less than “Elemental
Ugliness in the faces of the crowd.” Such perspectives collude to
designate a modernity that is a perversion of “real” life.
They suggest a highly superior angle on things and this becomes
the characteristic position not just of Hannibal the character,
but of the text itself.
It is against this vulgarized contemporaneity that the new Dr. Lecter now takes
on a firmer shape. Much less of a bizarre puzzle than in the earlier
fictions, he is significantly filled out in Hannibal and the central dimension is his
status as a culturally displaced figure. A landed aristocrat by
birth, whose family and their estates have been overrun by the Nazis,
he becomes Europeanized and humanized, both as the traumatized brother/son,
whose parents have been killed and sister eaten by soldiers, but
also as the lost (last?) aristocrat:
We knooowww Hannibal Lecter was born in Lithuania.
His father was a count, title dating from the tenth century, his
mother high-born Italian, a Visconti. During the German retreat
from Russia some passing Nazi panzers shelled their estate near
Vilnius from the high road and killed both parents and most of
the servants. The children disappeared after that. (314)
This latter guise of Hannibal as dispossessed
landowner is particularly important and invoked again and again,
particularly in the novel version of the story. Through it, Hannibal
becomes reconstituted in emblematic terms. Still straddling the
scientific modernity he is master of and the darker atavistic universe
that is his compelling reality, he also resonates with newly emphasized
dimensions. Now he epitomizes the taste, tradition, and distinction
that have been all but dispatched by the leveling dynamic of mass
society and mass culture. In this context, the key elements in Dr.
Lecter’s make-up, his extraordinary intelligence and great refinement
(see, for instance his taste for exotic food — “wonderfully aromatic
truffled pâté de fois gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from
their severed stems” (193) — for classic cars, the best perfumes
and so on), these become culturally placed in unequivocal ways and
deployed against Harris’s version of the awfulness of modern life.
The idea of the displaced landed aristocrat outcast
from, or, at least, adrift in, a flat, monotone modernity is a very
familiar and highly literary configuration. More particularly, it
had a decisive role in the literary culture of Western Europe at
the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
By the 1920s and 30s, the figure had a somewhat diminished cultural
viability, which decreased further through the 1940s and 1950s,
although there were periodic returns to aristocracy, in the British
Gainsborough films produced for wartime audiences, for instance,
or the BBC costume dramas, like Upstairs, Downstairs and
Brideshead Revisited of a later period. Dr. Lecter joins
ranks with these fictional aristocrats of the past. He can be aligned
with the insecure and volatile fin de siècle cultural environment that produced such figures as Dracula (1897), the
Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Sir Henry Curtis in King Solomon’s
Mines (1885), Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier
(1915), Lord Warburton in The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), the Baskerville family in The
Hound of the Baskervilles, the landowners of Yeats’s
vanishing Anglo-Ireland and a host of other fictional figures created
at the turn of the last century. This declining elite was constructed,
with quite extraordinary frequency, precisely from the sense of
vanishing order that characterizes Hannibal. The same
return to aristocracy, as a measure of authentic social, and often
national, value, appeared across a wide range of literary and film
styles and genres. As characteristic of high
modernism as popular historical romance, it is not too much to say
that the defense of aristocracy was a characteristic attitude struck
by the culture of that period. Writers and intellectuals, convinced
that a decadent contemporaneity was becoming “leveled” and uniform,
turned to the idea of aristocratic distinction as a Derridean hauntology
hovering over debased modernity. 7
There clearly is a sense in which some key dimensions of Harris’s late twentieth century romance thriller derives from, and seeks connection with,
this source. His aristocrat, like the aristocrats of the earlier
period, is powerful, intelligent, refined, deracinated and, above
all, usurped. For all the obvious ambiguities
about the status of this dispossessed nobleman seeking revenge,
Hannibal the Cannibal is one of a piece with the “turbulent, discontented
men of quality” 8 who populate the earlier culture.
In this most recent Hannibal Lecter story, Harris turns away from
contemporaneity to identify with more “literary” narratological
and aesthetic traditions. Thus Hannibal is highly romanticized and gothicized
by comparison to the earlier novels. It is for this reason that
Dr. Lecter, disguised as “Dr Fell,” is separated out from his former
life as a renegade from the scientific establishment. In his first
appearance in Hannibal, he figures not as a twisted psychiatrist but as a medieval scholar in
Florence, leading a fruitful and relatively innocent life amongst
the artifacts of the Old World, the world from which he so manifestly
originates. Significantly, he inhabits a Gothic space, complete
“with battlements like jack-o’-lantern teeth, bell tower soaring
into the sky.” Like some version of the phantom of the opera, he
is imaged playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on his clavier amongst the dark velvets of an elegant, spacious, renaissance
room, and the reader is led into perception of this vision by a
narrative intimacy again highly suggestive of late-nineteenth-century
Gothic styles. Thus we have the whispered imperative, reminiscent
of Poe, and Vincent Price, narrating, inviting us, “rest your head
against the cold iron … and listen. You can hear a clavier …. If
you believe you are beyond harm, will you go inside?” (154).
There are many further divergences from the earlier
novels in Hannibal that confirm these shifting agendas
and allegiances, but the broad sense of things should be clear without
further illustration. What seems to have happened here is that Harris
has swapped one kind of fantasy for another. The earlier commitment
to a state modernity, characterized by order and efficiency and
constructed from a basic confidence in progress, has become entirely
compromised. With science and technology misappropriated, not simply
by the sociopathic exception (Hannibal) but by the corrupt
generality, narrative commitment to the modern becomes displaced
by a kind of appalled disgust. This new sensibility takes its authority
from a retrospective that draws on, and redesigns, somewhat old-fashioned
literary responses to the idea of the modern. At the very center
of Hannibal then, is that familiar idea of the Old World
operating as a visitation on the New for the crimes it has committed
against authentic “civilization” and “the glories of the great races”
(Stoker 26).
It is not entirely surprising, given this revivalist instinct, cultural retrospection
and the accompanying detachment from urban, modern life, that Harris’s
audiences may have felt somewhat puzzled and even aggrieved by Hannibal. It was widely felt that Hannibal was not as accomplished a thriller
as The Silence of the Lambs (1989), or even as the prototype
Lecter novel Red Dragon (1982). A sense of unease became
apparent in the pre-production negotiations over Hannibal the film, with Jodie Foster pulling
out of the project. Her reasons for doing so were not entirely clear,
but may have had something to do with Harris’s bizarre transformation
of the Starling role from ambitious FBI operator to Hannibal’s lover
and partner in madness. Although other reasons were suggested for
Foster’s withdrawal — the press reported that she was peeved at
being excluded from preliminary discussions on the film, for example
— it is easy to imagine that she read this metamorphosis of Starling
the action-hero into Hannibal’s “partner” as a change too far.
Perhaps the further reason for this sense of letdown is that by comparison to
the early novels, Hannibal is indeed “unrealistic” and “not believable,”
in the sense that it operates according to principles quite different
from the earlier fictions, most of which involve a very precise
turning away from the modernity so streamlined and efficient in
Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Most importantly, Hannibal rejects contemporaneity for the comfortable familiarity of stylized romance,
and it is this that produces the most serious offence. Among other
things, Harris’s new taste for the romantic has been responsible
for transforming the tough heroine of The Silence of the Lambs into a curiously fantastic figure,
still dangerous but now made monster, feminized in swathes of finery,
and above all, subjected to the astonishing indiscretion of becoming
Hannibal’s woman. But the indicators of Harris’s new direction do
go far beyond that final twist. They are, indeed, embedded in the
Hannibal text as the signifiers that denote
a strong appreciation for the “good life” and, as corollary, a disdainful
distance from communities of the modern.
In this sense, this terror icon has lost some cultural
purchase, perhaps because the exploitation has reached a natural
saturation, but also because the last version proves awkward to
readers and, despite the attempt by filmmakers to moderate things,
film audiences also. The argument here is that the underlying problem
with Hannibal is not that it is simply one reprise
too many or that it fails the quality test, but, rather, that it
constitutes a kind of betrayal of the earlier novels. The offence
is not just a matter of the volte face that, in the book version at least,
turns a strong young woman from the American West into an aristocratic
vamp monster of the Old World, although that conservative gender
move is understood as being symptomatic here. The more general shift
is that, with Hannibal, Harris sets about a systematic canceling of his confidence
in a highly technocratic modernity. The authority of this version
of the modern, established so completely in the earlier texts, and
so decisively connected to Starling’s original status, now becomes
undermined. Indeed Dr. Lecter’s last outing is to a modernity that
has no remaining capacity for security or salvation. In this sense
the shocks of the set pieces of the third Hannibal incarnation —
the poeticized gutting of Rinaldo Pazzi, for instance, and the exquisite
scene in which Hannibal and Starling dine on Paul Krendler’s brain
— become outdone by a disturbance more subtle and, in many ways,
more interesting: the breaking of an epistemological contract between
a hugely popular writer and his public. At the center of this divergence
is a shifting articulation of the nature of modernity, and it is
in this sense that these texts, and their reception, can become
linked to one of the defining debates of intellectual
times since the mid 1970s.
Notes
1. See, for example
Thompson.
click here to return to your place
in the article
2. For a deconstructive discussion of
the term “entertainment,” see Dyer, 11-15.
click here to return to your place
in the article
3. For a discussion of utopianism
in other cultural forms see Dyer, 11-34.
click here to return to your place
in the article
4. See, for example, Van Dover,
1994.
click here to return to your place
in the article
5.
This is modernity according to the editors of the architectural
journal PRECIS 6 (1987): 7-24, quoted in an early account of postmodernity
— Harvey, 9.
click here to return to your place
in the article
6. McHale makes this
essential distinction in Postmodern Fiction. By “epistemological,” he means a
novel that attempts to grasp a complex but essentially singular
reality. “Ontological” refers to a postmodern vision that sees reality
as pluralistic.
click here to return to your place
in the article
7.
For a discussion of this phenomenon see Platt.
click here to return to your place
in the article
8.
Appropriately, given his defence of traditional values, the phrase
is Edmund Burke’s, 135.
click here to return to your place
in the article
Works Cited
Burke Edmund. Reflections on the
Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. London and New York: Routledge,
1992.
Geertz, Clifford. Interpreting Cultures.
London: Hutchinson, 1975.
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. London: The Bodley Head,
1982.
Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the
Lambs.
London: Random House, 1990.
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal. London: Random House,
1999.
Hassan, I. “The Culture of Postmodernism.”
Theory, Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 119-131.
Harvey, David. The Condition of
Postmodernity. Oxford and Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
McHale, Brian. Postmodern Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Platt, Len. Aristocracies of Fiction:
the Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Literature.
Connecticut: Greenwood, 2000.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ware: Wordsworth, 1993.
Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime and
Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.
Van Dover, Kenneth. You Know My
Method: The Science of the Detective Novel. Bowling Green, OH: The Bowling Green
State U Popular P, 1994. |