Hannibal as a fairy tale (and I mean the dark, old-school kind) part 1: liminality and borderlands
So there was an earlier post that casually referred to Hannibal as a fairy tale, and I had to seize on it because as you may have noticed I keep coming back to Hannibal as the Fairy King/Queen. (The Queen has always interested me way more than the King, and in light of aLL THE TAM LIN parallels I can’t help but go there; plus, Hannibal Lecter definitely has some tradish feminine attributes.)
Okay, this is going to be so long that I think I have to break it up into a series. Woo! This part will deal with the general theme of liminality as a characteristic of fairies and fairy tales, and as a point of vulnerability for the human protagonists in those stories.
Fairy tales–by which I mean, the particular subset of European folklore we tend to refer to by that name, since other than that socialized geographic separation there’s no difference between fairy tales and other folklore–in their earlier incarnations were dark, scary, gross, gory things, as I’m sure plenty of the people reading this know. But what’s less known than a lot of the horror factors (body horror, falling into a twisted reality that can’t be made sense of, being trapped, stolen, condemned, held (often by means of food or sex), making a bargain that turns on you–and all of those things are HUGELY important in Hannibal and I’ll get to them later) is the deep, deep importance of borders and liminality in these stories.
Quick definition of liminality:
In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.
Over and over again, fairies show up at borders–temporal, physical, and existential. Dawn and twilight; thresholds and doorways; birth, death, transitions from girlhood to womanhood and from unmarriage to marriage (I use feminine terms because in my experience those tropes turn up more often than male coming-of-age stories); the woods, the parts of the map on the edges of known, safe territory. The walls between fairy worlds and the “normal” world are, at least in Irish lore, weakest at the four great holidays (Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain), which mark the changing of the seasons and the passing of time.
(I owe a hell of a lot to At The Bottom of the Garden, an incredibly fantastic book that revolutionized my understanding of fairy tales, on this point. If you’re interested in the subject at all, I BEG you to read it.)
I bring all this up because Hannibal makes extensive use of liminality. Many of the focal characters have divided, near-contradictory natures: Jack is a ruthless, reckless and manipulative…do-gooder who loves his wife, takes responsibility for his mistakes, and ultimately wants to avoid harming Will beyond repair. Abigail is a vulnerable, homeless, damaged girl-child…who has been knowingly consuming human flesh and participating in murders for years, who killed again solo, and who is preserving Hannibal’s secrets. Hannibal is an elegant, courteous, helpful, nurturing host and friend who loves to feed people…and a serial killer, mental and emotional abuser, and all-around sociopath. (I’m saving Will for later in this post.) They’ve all got unstable personalities with one foot on each side of a border. In fact, I think many of the secondary characters are so comforting and more straightforwardly enjoyable because while they’re still complex and three-dimensional, they’re not quantum in the same way, constantly oscillating between two natures that seem they should never go together. (I’m thinking of Alana, Bev, and, yes, Freddie here.)
[SO HERE’S A THING: After writing further metas, I want to revise a little bit here. Hannibal himself is not liminal at all; he’s decidedly otherworldly. Fairies need not be liminal, it’s just that they appear in liminal spaces and times; those are the points of access between our world and the otherworld. Jack is also pretty consistent, though his position (as addressed in part 7) is more complex. I just thought I’d pop this note in here because otherwise the inconsistency you’ll see in later installments might get confusing.]
Moving on to the second point: murder. (MURDER!!!) Remember how I mentioned the physical, temporal, and existential forms of borders?
Garret Jacob Hobbs’ murders were about Abigail growing up and leaving home.
Mushroom man placed his victims in a permanent state of limbo on the threshold between life and death. (Yes, they died eventually, but as he saw it they lived on in the fungi. I am not going to make a vegetative state joke here, but only because fungi are not vegetables. I’m disappointed too.)
The Angelmaker’s killings were a response to his anxiety about his impending death, and his style of killing was its instrument.
Tobias (this one’s harder and so it’s a bit of a stretch) stopped his quiet, low-profile murders to announce himself with his serenade as a choice to move on in life, end one phase and begin another, fundamentally change the self he shows to and the role he plays in the world.
The totem builder was about not only his own passage into old age (change of life stage) but also birth, death, marriage, the family cycle–he didn’t know it, but we did, and as so many brilliant people have pointed out, the fourth wall is people exists to be played with on this show.
Georgia Mädchen was in another limbo between life and death; she also very literally came in from the edge of the map, from the wild. If existential transformations are about a change of identity, and if their liminal moments are like a ball’s moment of suspension at the top of its arc before the next stage takes hold, then you could say she’s trapped there: not only does she not know who she is, she can’t even define herself by her relationships. (On, say, a girl’s wedding night–and I say this in an old-timey and essentialist context–suddenly her existing familial relationships are being renegotiated, while her future ones have yet to take shape. She’s at a moment of disconnection, untouched by the gravitational pull of relationships.) No one around Georgia is recognizable. She’s nowhere (“we’re in Wolf Trap, Virginia”) and nothing; limbo, again.
The significance of these borders in fairy stories is that it’s in those spaces that a person becomes vulnerable to fairy intervention and seduction. Don’t linger at the wrong times, don’t pause too long in a doorway, and certainly don’t go to the edge of the map, because it’s in those places that you’re in the greatest danger of incursion from the Other. Ward your windows and doors; the chimney, too, if you’re smart. Certainly don’t open the door to strangers and invite them in. This is especially important for Will.
Will exists in a kind of permanent borderland, suspended between his own identity and the myriad others with whom he empathizes; while we spend most of our time on the serial killers, we have to assume he’s experiencing the effects of that empathy to one degree or another in any interaction he participates in. Furthermore, the degree to which we participate in his reenactments means we perceive him as literally two people at once every time we go there.
When we consider that Will is, in fairy terms, permanently vulnerable, both Jack and Hannibal can be read as a kind of fairy incursion. Jack is like a brownie or hob/hobgoblin, bargaining fairies that will help a person with domestic or farm work in exchange for what seems a modest price–but that price often comes with a hidden cost. (I recall one story in which a hob did all of a man’s farm work, but did it so well that his neighbors became suspicious and burned him as a witch. The man had begged the hob to stop or at least slack off; it refused. A deal’s a deal.) Jack offered Will a chance to do good, to do the kind of work he wants and needs to do, but with help: Jack will take care of the logistics and, supposedly, act as a handler to “cover him,” in exchange for Will’s cooperation. All he has to do, supposedly, is walk onto a scene, do his empathy thing, and walk out. But the price, as we’re seeing, turns out to be far higher than Will expected.
Hannibal, on the other hand, is absolutely the ruler of a fairy court. He gains power over people by feeding them his otherworldly food; he owns and dominates his space in a pretty explicitly regal fashion; he’s already been described (unwittingly) as “exotic”; he works by different rules than we do; his favor is a gift and a blow at the same time. He’s seducing Will out of the human world and into a kind of a dream world under the hill where time passes differently. (Usually these places are underground as much as they can be said to be anywhere, though I know of one adaptation where it was a college Classics department). He’s consuming him as a kind of fuel, an entertainment, but it’s a connection nonetheless born of a kind of admiration.
I have strong feelings about why Hannibal is a fairy Queen and not a King, but they’re going to have to wait for later in the series. I plan to do one on the otherworldly qualities of the show’s environment, one on Abigail as a changeling, one on Will’s story as a pretty direct parallel to the Tam Lin ballad, one on Hannibal’s feminine aspects in this context, and one on broader feminine themes of life changes. At least, off the top of my head that’s what I want to do; probably I’ll think of more, sigh.
I’ll update this post with links as I write!
UPDATE:
Part 2: Will Graham as Tam Lin
Part 3: Hannibal as the Fairy Queen
Part 4: Kingdoms under the hill: Hannibal’s otherworldly enviroments
Part 5: Abigail Hobbs, changeling child
Addendum to Part 5, re: Potage
Part 6a: The women of Hannibal, food, and entrapment (Bella, Freddie, and Alana)
Part 6b: The women of Hannibal, food, and entrapment (Abigail and Bedelia)
Part 7a: Jack Crawford: Fairy King?
Part 7b: Jack Crawford: Fairy doctor and bereaved parent, or: how Miriam’s death shaped the first season
Part 8a: Will Graham, fairy rings, and the Fairy Queen’s dominion
Part 8b: Tam Lin again: The Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane as Carterhaugh
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
titsay
germansingergirl
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
prguitarman
stormborns
