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UPDATE: I apparently have social media anxiety about dreamwidth (mostly the way the interface requires sustained writing and thinking and direct contact at all times) so I've made a WordPress blog where I'll be posting things about the Mystery Dissertation Project in a format that feels less stressful to me, as well as more accessible to my colleagues in academia. (Visit it here: https://mysterydissertationproject.home.blog.) I'll crosspost them here, too, though, and maybe someday I will do a better job of responding to the four or five people who are active on my reading page and who are all full of brilliant insights. <3
In the above image, Will Graham (NBC's Hannibal, 2013-2015) and Victorian spirit mediums (Annie Eva Fay, Florence Cook) stare with the same brooding eyes into some strange in-between realm that others cannot see. Their pale faces are made paler by their dark eyes and dark, mildly disheveled hair. Their lips are set in slight ambiguous curves; they look like they know something we don’t. And they are pretty. They are pretty in their vulnerability, their delicacy. They know how to wait; they know how to open themselves up to others. They are haunted by their remarkable capacities and the responsibilities and pains that come with them. They speak secret truths and suffer for it.
It is difficult to know how to write about two texts that are not from the same field of study. How does one compare a set of nineteenth-century accounts of Spiritualist séances with a twenty-first-century work of online erotic fanfiction about the television show Hannibal? In many ways, actually, it is not hard to talk about them in the same piece of writing. These texts center so many of the same questions about bodily agency, erotics, consent, constraint, pleasure and pain, insides and outsides. They can both be read productively through queer and feminist scholarship. They both require consideration of the tension between a potentially subversive queer approach to erotics and the conservative anchoring of that approach in whiteness.
But there are two major difficulties, one a matter of formal clarity and the other of institutional structures. How does one shuttle back and forth gracefully between two different subjects that each require in-depth analysis? And how does one justify why one is discussing contemporary fanfiction when one is meant to be a Victorianist, or why one is spending so much time relating a nineteeth-century text to a twenty-first century text if one is not writing a historicist genealogy of how we get from then to now? What jobs am I planning to apply to, anyway?
Yet I feel that these texts need to be read together. I feel it, more than I am capable of articulating in clear, scholarly language why. The ways in which I know how to express this need are less scholarly than they are…something else. So far, my best attempts are the picture above, and the beginning of a fic in progress below.
To be posted on Archive of Our Own under Lu Fairchild’s username (warning for explicit violence and non-sexual consent issues):
Most mediums speak with the dead. Will Graham speaks with their killers.
That is what he is, Hannibal thinks, watching Will’s eyes move rapidly back and forth under his closed eyelids, beneath thin pale skin with blue-branching veins that Hannibal wants to trace with his fingernail. Will Graham is a medium. He opens his body like a conduit and lets the words and thoughts and deeds of others pour out. He channels bloodspatter and broken glass and arcing knives. Hannibal imagines the insides of his brain, capillaries and secret chambers, tinged dark red in the light of somebody else’s violence. Will calls up the spirits of the vicious and the depraved, ushering them back into the scenes of trauma they have made. Will conjures murder.
He has, Hannibal thinks, the same translucence as the sheeted ghostly figures in nineteenth-century spirit photographs, as if his contact with the intangible traces of those not present has left him half-opaque himself. Will is enormously strong, to contain these killers within him, and yet he is patently vulnerable, smudged-bruised shadows under his eyes, curls like a girl’s, twitches and trembles in his forehead and fingers. Hannibal wants to place his thumb into the hollow at Will’s white throat and press until red rises up to meet it.
---
Hannibal watches Will channel him—watches Will close his eyes and make pronouncements about the copycat killer, about the Chesapeake Ripper. About Hannibal.
Hannibal’s thoughts course through Will’s brain. His words fill up the hollows of Will’s cheeks and spill out of Will’s mouth. Will’s nightmares are garish with razor-sharp antlers and weapons piercing flesh. Will’s mind is blurring at the edges as Hannibal invades him slowly, secretly, under cover of night. He is losing himself in Hannibal.
Eyes unfocused, trembling, Will seizes in Hannibal’s dining room. Hannibal lies to him. Hannibal smoothes back his hair and clasps his glistening forehead, clinically, gently. Hannibal sends him out into the snow with a gun.
Hannibal inserts a rubber tube down Will’s throat. A tunnel, a passage, a surgical opening of the entrance to hell. Abigail’s ear shoved down the chute. She is a willing sacrifice, a sacrifice for Will. He consumes this synecdochical offering, this portion of their surrogate child, now truly flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Hannibal forces her down Will’s throat and now they are both in Will’s blood.
---
Will fights back.
---
In fighting back, Will becomes a killer. Will manipulates, deceives, worms and wriggles his way deep under Hannibal’s skin, a parasite Hannibal does not know how to extract. In fighting back, Will kills and sculpts a man who believes he is a monster into the monster of all their dreams. In fighting back, Will becomes, every day, more like Hannibal.
---
In the moonlight, blood looks black. Will, in the moonlight, streaked in blood, is beautiful.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispers, and the miracle has been accomplished. Hannibal’s thoughts, in Will’s brain, coming out of Will’s mouth. Beautiful.
Both of them drip blood, their own and the Great Red Dragon’s. They grip at each other. Flesh of my flesh.
Hannibal knows what Will is about to do just before he does it. Long enough to stop it, if he wanted to. Long enough to wrench himself away, split them down the middle. It wouldn’t be precise, now, not surgical, not clean. But he could do it. Sever them in two with a bloody ragged wound, and watch his other half fall into the sea.
But he doesn’t.
---
And they fall into the deep. And hell spits them back up.
In the above image, Will Graham (NBC's Hannibal, 2013-2015) and Victorian spirit mediums (Annie Eva Fay, Florence Cook) stare with the same brooding eyes into some strange in-between realm that others cannot see. Their pale faces are made paler by their dark eyes and dark, mildly disheveled hair. Their lips are set in slight ambiguous curves; they look like they know something we don’t. And they are pretty. They are pretty in their vulnerability, their delicacy. They know how to wait; they know how to open themselves up to others. They are haunted by their remarkable capacities and the responsibilities and pains that come with them. They speak secret truths and suffer for it.
It is difficult to know how to write about two texts that are not from the same field of study. How does one compare a set of nineteenth-century accounts of Spiritualist séances with a twenty-first-century work of online erotic fanfiction about the television show Hannibal? In many ways, actually, it is not hard to talk about them in the same piece of writing. These texts center so many of the same questions about bodily agency, erotics, consent, constraint, pleasure and pain, insides and outsides. They can both be read productively through queer and feminist scholarship. They both require consideration of the tension between a potentially subversive queer approach to erotics and the conservative anchoring of that approach in whiteness.
But there are two major difficulties, one a matter of formal clarity and the other of institutional structures. How does one shuttle back and forth gracefully between two different subjects that each require in-depth analysis? And how does one justify why one is discussing contemporary fanfiction when one is meant to be a Victorianist, or why one is spending so much time relating a nineteeth-century text to a twenty-first century text if one is not writing a historicist genealogy of how we get from then to now? What jobs am I planning to apply to, anyway?
Yet I feel that these texts need to be read together. I feel it, more than I am capable of articulating in clear, scholarly language why. The ways in which I know how to express this need are less scholarly than they are…something else. So far, my best attempts are the picture above, and the beginning of a fic in progress below.
To be posted on Archive of Our Own under Lu Fairchild’s username (warning for explicit violence and non-sexual consent issues):
Most mediums speak with the dead. Will Graham speaks with their killers.
That is what he is, Hannibal thinks, watching Will’s eyes move rapidly back and forth under his closed eyelids, beneath thin pale skin with blue-branching veins that Hannibal wants to trace with his fingernail. Will Graham is a medium. He opens his body like a conduit and lets the words and thoughts and deeds of others pour out. He channels bloodspatter and broken glass and arcing knives. Hannibal imagines the insides of his brain, capillaries and secret chambers, tinged dark red in the light of somebody else’s violence. Will calls up the spirits of the vicious and the depraved, ushering them back into the scenes of trauma they have made. Will conjures murder.
He has, Hannibal thinks, the same translucence as the sheeted ghostly figures in nineteenth-century spirit photographs, as if his contact with the intangible traces of those not present has left him half-opaque himself. Will is enormously strong, to contain these killers within him, and yet he is patently vulnerable, smudged-bruised shadows under his eyes, curls like a girl’s, twitches and trembles in his forehead and fingers. Hannibal wants to place his thumb into the hollow at Will’s white throat and press until red rises up to meet it.
---
Hannibal watches Will channel him—watches Will close his eyes and make pronouncements about the copycat killer, about the Chesapeake Ripper. About Hannibal.
Hannibal’s thoughts course through Will’s brain. His words fill up the hollows of Will’s cheeks and spill out of Will’s mouth. Will’s nightmares are garish with razor-sharp antlers and weapons piercing flesh. Will’s mind is blurring at the edges as Hannibal invades him slowly, secretly, under cover of night. He is losing himself in Hannibal.
Eyes unfocused, trembling, Will seizes in Hannibal’s dining room. Hannibal lies to him. Hannibal smoothes back his hair and clasps his glistening forehead, clinically, gently. Hannibal sends him out into the snow with a gun.
Hannibal inserts a rubber tube down Will’s throat. A tunnel, a passage, a surgical opening of the entrance to hell. Abigail’s ear shoved down the chute. She is a willing sacrifice, a sacrifice for Will. He consumes this synecdochical offering, this portion of their surrogate child, now truly flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Hannibal forces her down Will’s throat and now they are both in Will’s blood.
---
Will fights back.
---
In fighting back, Will becomes a killer. Will manipulates, deceives, worms and wriggles his way deep under Hannibal’s skin, a parasite Hannibal does not know how to extract. In fighting back, Will kills and sculpts a man who believes he is a monster into the monster of all their dreams. In fighting back, Will becomes, every day, more like Hannibal.
---
In the moonlight, blood looks black. Will, in the moonlight, streaked in blood, is beautiful.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispers, and the miracle has been accomplished. Hannibal’s thoughts, in Will’s brain, coming out of Will’s mouth. Beautiful.
Both of them drip blood, their own and the Great Red Dragon’s. They grip at each other. Flesh of my flesh.
Hannibal knows what Will is about to do just before he does it. Long enough to stop it, if he wanted to. Long enough to wrench himself away, split them down the middle. It wouldn’t be precise, now, not surgical, not clean. But he could do it. Sever them in two with a bloody ragged wound, and watch his other half fall into the sea.
But he doesn’t.
---
And they fall into the deep. And hell spits them back up.
