Dante was born in Florence Italy at the height of the medieval period, in May 1265 under the sign of Gemini, the twins. He was of noble but economically modest birth. His mother died when he was very young and his father left him to be raised by teachers. He studied mathematics, rhetoric, philosophy (the forerunner to psychology) and poetry under Bruno Latini from who he learned "how a man makes himself eternal." He was affiliated with the Guelph party as opposed to the Ghibellines and became prominent in Firenzian Guelph politics. In order to hold any public office a citizen was required to join a guild, Dante became a member of the Physicians and Apothecary Guild. This also enabled him to sell his poetry in the various Apothecary shops in Florence as was the custom of the time. He also probably belonged to The Arch Fraternity of the Misericordia, (Lecters hospital) a bunch of good-doers who cared for people injured from the Crusades, pilgrims etc. They invented the stretcher, and the forerunner to the ambulance and they also provided education and dowries to orphaned girls.(Clarice) He was reputed to have an astonishing memory, a talent for word play, (including anagrams, rhymes, numerology, puzzles and riddles), and he was considered an intellectual genius by his contemporaries. He was also a political firebrand and made many enemies. As a prior of Florence he objected to papal authority over Florence. He believed the church should have power over religious beliefs and doctrine but should stay out of issues of local politics. He published a political tract called Il Monarchie, advocating a separation of church and state. Pope Boniface disagreed. While on a diplomatic mission to Venice the Pope's army swept into Florence and took over. He was charged with heresy, graft, embezzlement and any other atrocity they could think up. If he returned to Florence he would be burned at the stake. Negotiations took place but he refused to allow them to fine him or question him on the trumped up charges. As a result of sticking to his principles he never saw Florence again. He became dependent on various wealthy patrons who offered him asylum and supported him for the remaining twenty years of his life. It was during this time, as he wandered about Europe, that he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. He died in Ravenna in 1321 shortly after finishing the Comedy. His sons discovered that 14 cantos were missing. One night his son dreamt that Dante came to him and told him they were hidden behind the wall of an old patrons house. Upon waking his son went to the location and indeed they were in exactly the place described in the dream. Some years later after all the Papal unrest died down along with Boniface, the dignitaries of Florence asked to have his remains removed to Florence. Ravenna refused and to protect their treasure they had his bones disinterred and hidden. It wasn't until 1865 that workman discovered the hidden grave of Dante, complete with a cryptic engraving about how he had visited the afterlife while he was alive so wouldn't have to when he was dead. His friends and supporters applied a great deal of mystical importance to him, as he was believed to be somewhat precognitive as well as one of the first westerners to believe in reincarnation. The Dante family is believed to be related to the Visconti family and Thomas Harris is somewhat implying that Hannibal Lecter is the reincarnation of Dante. Francis Dolarhyde compares Lecter to a Rennaissance Prince, and many scholars date the beginning of the Rennaissance period in literature to the publication of The Comedy.****

Now his works. In Il Monarchie he used poetic imagery to describe how the church and state should be separated. There were two suns constantly struggling for supremacy over Florence, neither serving the city as well as they should, the struggle harming Florence irrevocably. In Red Dragon Dolarhyde had two mothers, whose struggles with each other harmed him irrevocably, one religious and traditional, the other married to a politician. Several characters are named, Linda King, Queen Mother Bailey, Prince Easter Mize.****

De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Elequence of the Vernacular) was a treatise on how Italy should be united by a common language, Tuscan being the one preferred by Dante because of it's inherent beauty. It also argued the case that literature and religious works should be written in this common language rather than Latin, Greek or Hebrew so that the masses, the common people could have literature available to them. To set an example Dante wrote in what is now considered the root of modern Italian. Harris, who holds a Masters degree in literature, chose to tell his story in the form of a popular best seller, books for the masses rather than the literati.****

Il Convivio, (sometimes called Living It Up, sometimes called The Banquet) is an unfinished work about philosophy and the nature of man. Originally meant to be told with Dante playing the servant, with a 14 course meal being served, each course representing a different philisophical research. It was believed during this period that organs represented certain spirits, the brain, animal, the liver, natural, the heart, vital.****

La Vita Nuovo (the new life) a discussion about the nature of love in both poetry and prose, the prose coming in the form of letters to and from ladies and friends in which the poetry is discussed. It is here that Dante casts himself in the role of Dante the lover, an actual character in his work. Harris does this in his remarkable forward to the 2000 paperback edition of Red Dragon where he discusses going into the first interview with Will Graham and observing Lecter. If you haven't read this, do so immediately, he sets himself up as Virgil from The Comedy. Here we meet his great love Beatrice for the first time. The first sonnet is the one used in Hannibal and is the basis for several of the visuals in Hannibal.****

Before I get to the Comedy, I have to talk about Beatrice Portani. He first met her/saw her when he was nine. He fell totally in love with her on sight. He met her again nine years later at the age of eighteen. Because of this the number nine became very mystically important to him. It was the number of the trinity squared, and he used nine and variations of nine when ever he could in his poetry. Beatrice was betrothed to and married to another man, as was Dante himself betrothed and married. This did not get in the way of him carrying a very public poetic torch for her. The last time they met there had been a nasty unfounded rumor going about Florence about him. When she saw him on the street she displayed her dissatisfaction with him and snubbed him. Shortly after she died at the age of twenty five, (Clarice's age at the beginning of Silence). Her death and her incorrect opinion of him at the time sent him into despair. The sonnets in La Vita Nuova were his way of coping. In the poem Love (an actual character) carries the dead form of Beatrice to him and she eats Dante's burning heart out of his hand and they are separated forever. The left hand often represents the heart in medieval poetry. The poem begins, " To every captive heart." This is also the title Hans Zimmer gives to the piece of music that accompanies the end of the film. Then it goes on, "The first three hours of night were almost spent, the time that every star shines down on us" The fire works in Hannibal went off when Lecter escaped at nine o'clock, three hours after evening would have begun. "When love appeared to me so suddenly that I still shudder at the memory" Well this could be Clarice realizing at that moment, because of the sacrifice he made that he really did love her, or you could look at this as a reference to the first time they met in the asylum, when he realized he loved her, it was certainly a moment that made the audience shudder. "Joyous Love seemed to me, the while he held my heart within his hands, and in his arms my lady lay asleep wrapped in veil" When we first see Clarice in the film she is asleep and we see her through the fog/veil of the dry ice. He does later carry her in his arms. "He woke her then, and trembling and obedient" He does wake her on the cell phone, and nervously she does follow his instructions. "She ate that burning heart out of his hand." Well he does leave her his heart in his hand. "Weeping I saw him I saw him them depart from me" Well, she's not bawling her eyes out but she does watch him leave. I believe when they decided to end the film differently from the book they simply switched from The Comedy which has a happy ending to Vita Nuova ("it's good to try new things") which has an unhappy ending. This is the sonnet that "Doctor Fell" used to impress the studiolo in the chapter in Hannibal when Pazzi first encounters him.

Anyway back to Beatrice. After he got booted out of Florence and labeled a heretic, he decided to dedicate his life to writing an epic poem honoring Beatrice and spelling out all his beliefs about politics, religion and the nature of God, his friends and contemporaries, mythical figures, biblical figures, religious and political leaders, astronomy, mathematics, in sum, the total of his knowledge and beliefs about life. He chose to use the Aristotelian form of comedy, a story that starts in despair and ends in joy. A wish fulfillment where he, as Dante the pilgrim, would be united with the dead Beatrice (the carrier of light: Clarice literally means bright light) in Paradise. He chose to use all the figures to metaphorically demonstrate lessons, because he was trying to draw on the subconscious collective memory of his readers, the everymen. Which brings us to the opening page of The Red Dragon****.

Harris starts with an epigram from Alphonse Bertillion, the great criminologist, who gave us fingerprinting, phrenology, and the concept that people store important information deep in their subconscious, that if properly drawn out, say with hypnotism, drugs and therapy, could solve crimes. "One only sees what one observes, and one observes things which are already in the mind." Harris began his career as a crime reporter in Mexico and Washington D.C., truly two of the most gruesome beats in North America. He decided to write about what he knew and had seen in his work, and the people he had met in those fields, police, forensic scientists and criminals****.

Then he gives us another epigram this one from William Blake's posthumous editions of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Divine Image. He makes a big deal out of pointing out that these were published posthumously. These poems are a riff on Dante's Inferno. Blake grooved mainly on Milton (but also on Dante) who grooved on Dante, and who gave us Paradise Lost, a poem where the central character, the tragic hero, is Satan, an angel with a grudge against God.****

Before I get to Red Dragon, a few words about The Divine Comedy. It's written in three parts, each called a canticle, each canticle consisting of 33 (Clarice's age again) cantos (or Sonnets) with The Inferno (the first canticle) having an extra introductory canto, the one where Dante the pilgrim discusses how in the middle of his life he found himself lost in the woods having strayed off the path.

In the beginning of the film of Silence, Clarice is going through an obstacle course in the woods where she passes a tree with signs that say, AGONY, PAIN, HURT, LOVE IT. Then she is diverted away from her path by the message from Jack Crawford. (J.C.) Lecter in Red Dragon is caught looking at actuarial table where he has his age 41, marked off. Well 41 would be the middle of a man's life span with his previous lifestyle. Plus his response to Chilton's question about "what have we got here?" "Time." is a reference to a comment made in the Purgatorio where Dante meets a guy who doesn't seem to be all that much in a hurry to atone for his sins, and when Dante asks him why he's not working on getting to heaven the guy replies, "What's the hurry? I've got plenty of time. I've got eternity."

Now, most people have read the Inferno or at least have a pretty good idea of what it's all about. In my research I read that it's estimated that 95-99% of the people who have read the Inferno never go on to read the Purgatorio or the Paradiso. That was certainly true of me before I read the Lecter trilogy. Let's face it, people love gore and loved to be scared to death, what could possibly be interesting about the other two canticles with all their redemption themes? Boring. Tedious. Actually as I've found out recently, they're just as interesting and pretty funny in places.

The Comedy although written between 1302 and 1321 is set on Easter weekend of the year 1300. This allowed Dante, the pilgrim (his character's name in the Comedy) to make correct predictions about current affairs that would impress readers. Dante enters the afterlife on Good Friday and emerges on Easter Sunday. The Goldberg Variations also carries the theme of Easter Weekend and ascension, as well as being a soporific. The title of the Inferno is ironic as Dante finds out when he reaches the final level and sees that rather than a burning furnace of damnation it is instead a frozen block of ice. Lecter's cell in Red Dragon, when he's at his lowest, is stark white, an ice cube. Recall that in the end of the film, Hannibal, Zallian had Clarice trapped in an ice box.

Now when Dante goes down to hell he is the only living creature there. Virgil his guide, (sent by Beatrice to help him out) is a shade, like all the others. Virgil is there not because he sinned but because he died before Christ and is a pagan. He is see through. In Harris' forward to the 2000 pb edition to Red Dragon he talks about being invisible when he goes with Will Graham to that first meeting with Lecter. He also talks about the sound of the door slamming behind him, the bolt sliding home and the overwhelming dread of being in this horrid asylum. This is very much like the opening canto of The Inferno and the warning about "abandoning all hope ye who enter here". The thing about the Inferno is that we quote it every day of our lives. When we talk about pulling our punches, skinny bitches, work is hell, blow it out your ass, just desserts, these are all phrases from The Comedy. We think about it "at least thirty seconds every day."

Now one of the most important things to know about The Inferno, as it relates to the Lecter trilogy, is contrapasso. Contrapasso is the concept of your own personal hell, the hell you made for yourself that is completely fitting. In the first circles of hell Dante meets Francesco and Paulo, who were killed by her husband, (his brother) when they were caught in an embrace. Their contrapasso is to be affixed to each other as they are swept around and around by storms. They can never let go of each other for eternity. Further down in the ninth level Count Ruggerio who betrayed his fellow conspirator Ugolino (who betrayed his own in-laws the Visconti family) is frozen in the ice and Ugolino is gnawing on his head. This is because he imprisoned Ugolino in a room with his sons and left them to starve. After his children died Ugolino gave in to the "hunger that overcame despair" and cannibalized his own relatives.(Mason's starving dogs) There are countless examples of groups of people paying appropriately for their sins. The Epicureans (the Baltimore Philharmonic), the sodomites (Mason), the heretics, the fraudulent (Krendler), they all get what they deserve. Like Multiple Miggs. "It has a pleasant symmetry, though, his swallowing that offensive tongue, don't you agree?" Lecter asks Clarice. Contrapasso.

Now while Dante is in the Inferno he gets to meet a lot of sinners and comes to know how they came to be in hell. What they don't know is how to get out of hell, which can be done. The rules to how to get out of hell aren't revealed until Dante gets to the Paradise and he can ask questions of Beatrice and St. Bernard (Barney). They explain to him the concept of conditioned will as opposed to absolute will. Dante is confused as to why there are some people in heaven who surely should be in hell, they did morally questionable acts. It's explained to him that if you do the right things because you were trained, or taught to (conditioned will) then you don't get automatic entry into heaven. You didn't think for yourself, you just went along with the rules. And if you did bad things for the right reasons because you truly believed that they were necessary acts, (absolute will) than you can get into heaven after you make the journey through hell and purgatory and after you been humbled. Breaking an oath or vow you made to God, for instance can be forgiven if the results of breaking the vow contributes to the greater good. So say you're a doctor who has taken an oath to do no harm, but some of your patients are out and out sinners who hurt innocents, you can break your oath and get out of hell after you have suffered enough, do your waiting in purgatory and help others along the way. Lecter's contrapasso is to 1) be considered a monster, 2) be locked up in an asylum as insane, and 3) not be allowed to speak directly, a contrapasso twist on his confidentiality oath. He can only talk around a subject, hint, use negatives, puzzles, riddles, anagrams etc. In the first meeting in Red Dragon with Will, (everybody's name means something), Lecter mentions that Chilton says that he beat the rap by faking Ganser Syndrome. GS is one of three factitious illnesses, Munchausen and Munchausen By Proxy, being the other two. GS, is found almost entirely in arrest or prison situations, (it's very rare, only 100 documented case) and is characterized by the inability to answer even the simplest question with a truthful or direct answer. How much is two and two? Six. What color is the sky? Peach. Or the patient answers only with questions. It is sometimes referred to as the "syndrome of approximate answers". This is Lecter's way of communicating to Will that he has a curse on him. GS is the psychological explanation of the Cassandra curse, who knew the future but was doomed to speak backwards. Lecter eventually masters the technique of hinting and asking questions and leading the other person to the answers. And just as Dante is different from the other people in hell in that he is alive, Lecter is different from everyone else because he is the only one who knows that they are all dead and in hell. He just can't communicate it.

Now while it might be easy to assume that they are in dead and in hell, just from the fact that this is a rewrite of the Divine Comedy, Harris provides us with other evidence. Red Dragon provides us with the least amount of it, I believe that Red Dragon was kind of a trial run. When Crawford first recruits Will for the Tooth Fairy case he makes a huge point of constantly telling him that the people in these photos are dead, all dead, because it's easier for Will to work if he knows they're all dead. That's Harris talking to us. They also mention that the Tooth Fairy isn't good with locks, bolts etc. Well in his many writings on the Comedy, C.S. Lewis writes that the gates to hell are bolted, but bolted from the inside.(Frances also works for Gateway Film Processing) Dolarhyde requires bolt cutters to enter the premises. About Frances' name: in The Inferno the ninth circle is referred to the dolorous realm, Dolarhyde= hidden sorrow. His first name refers to Francis of Assisi and it is here that Harris is using the technique of reversal, Francis of Assisi was kind to animals, Francis Dolarhyde kills them. Reversals and the use of mirrors as a reversal technique feature prominently in all three books. In Red Dragon Dolarhyde inserts broken mirrors into the mother victims. In Silence Jame Gumb cavorts in front of a three way mirror and in Hannibal there is Mason's mirror that provides the weapon for his self destruction as well as the mirrors that Clarice avoids looking into until Lecter convinces her to. Mirrors are also portals to other dimensions, as in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

The most telling evidence that they are all dead appears in Hannibal when after talking to Lecter about their previous sessions and then witnessing the catastrophe in the pig barn, Margot (Isis) collects her prize from Mason (Osiris) by using the cattle prod. Angered, Mason tells Margot, "You're dead, Margot" She replies, "Oh, Mason, we all are. Didn't you know?" Osiris and Isis are of course the Egyptian Gods who rule over the underworld. They are also brother and sister and Isis extracts Osiris' seed from him after he is destroyed and impregnates herself with it.

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