"Eat Yourself, Clarice!"
The Banal Legacy of Hannibal Lecter
2nd Edition ISBN-13: 978-1542660099
2nd Edition Publication Date: February 2017
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Hannibal Lecter, the anti-heroic cannibal and sophisticated psychiatrist from Thomas Harris’s novels and the corresponding Hollywood movies, has been a type of ‘recurring reflector’. He has come and gone, tantalising subjects with the secrets of themselves. Again and again this has happened, until at last the subject cannot resist the urge to ejaculate his/her fantasies out into the external world.
This study is intended for students and enthusiasts of film, literature and low culture who wish to gain a greater understanding of the relationship between the individual Subject and the Big Other state by using the figure of Lecter as a lens through which people view and externalise themselves.
Considering everything from Wagner’s Parsifal to the TV Show Big Brother via Columbo, this study will uncover the reasons why the western citizen has become disconcertingly blasé about privacy and basic freedoms. At its heart is the pervasive, haunting figure of Doctor Lecter.
The study will focus on:
- How subjects construct fantasies that are connected to their position within society
- That Lecter the psychiatrist is a paradox; he is simultaneously less extreme and more extreme than the conventional psychoanalyst
- Lecter’s continuing influence upon popular culture
- The ways in which this has resulted in a tragicomic inversion of the horrors of Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
- A sense of a sense of enjoyment, and the enjoyment of that enjoyment
- Further postulations upon the dangers of externalising our fantasies via two full appendices, considering David Lynch's Eraserhead, and monsters in general.
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The 2nd Edition of EYC, published in 2017, features a new cover, an updated Author's Foreword for 2017 and updated content within.
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A Short History Of This Book
The bulk of this study was written in 2004 as part of my Masters in Literature at the University of Essex. It was left untouched until 2012 when I decided to revisit it, add two new appendixed chapters, update some of the information in the main body of text, and ask one of my old university teachers, Dr Jeff Geiger, to write a preface, which he was kind enough to do.
Being a book written in 2004 (before Youtube!), much of the internet-based informationis now humourously outdated, but rather than edit it to fit a more modern perception of web-based technologies and communications, which have exploded in a big way since the initial writing of the book, I left much of it as it was originally written. I do in fact think that the book was rather prescient in its own way - the subject who aches for ratification at the hands of his peers as described in the book is now all around us, amplified by the megaphone ofmodern social media.