Upward Mobility and the Common Good

Princeton University Press

Introduction

ADVANCEMENT, OF COURSE"

Early in Thomas Harris's novel Silence of the Lambs (1988), Dr. Hannibal Lecter, psychiatrist, serial killer, and cannibal, makes a proposal to Clarice Starling, FBI trainee, through the bars of his cell.

"I'll give you what you love most, Clarice Starling."

"What's that, Dr. Lecter?"

"Advancement, of course."

As usual, Lecter is right. Silence of the Lambs could be described in various ways-as a Gothic horror story, a detective thriller, or an oblique argument for vegetarianism. But if what matters is what Starling wants most (which is also what she gets), then the novel should be classified as a story of advancement, a modern-day Cinderella fable.

The fairy godmother of this Cinderella story is of course Lecter himself. Approached for advice in solving a fresh series of murders, he describes Starling to her face as "white trash," then goes on to reward her for glimpses into her inner life by supplying riddlelike clues. Deciphering the clues, she will track down the killer, rescue the prospective victim, and finish her training in a blaze of professional glory. However diabolical his character may be, Lecter's narrative function is thus indisputably benevolent: he bestows on the virtuous but disadvantaged protagonist the magical help that makes possible her advancement.

In the pages that follow, I will be working from the premise that a broad range of narratives, fictional and nonfictional, can be described more or less as Lecter describes Starling's. Whatever else these stories appear to be about, they are also about advancement. This book assembles an archive (perhaps less consistent than a genre, though I will use that term as well) composed of stories that can be shown to display a common problematic of upward mobility. Having chosen to discuss very few texts out of an almost infinite field of possibilities, I offer my choices up in the hope that, analyzed in my somewhat obsessive terms, they will also resonate interestingly in the much wider circle of texts around them. This pushy procedure will seem worth carrying out only if it can be established at the outset that these stories are doing cultural work of an unpredictable and significant sort-doing something other, that is, than peddling simple wish-fulfillment fantasies or the shopworn ideology of individual self-reliance we have come to associate with them. This is what I want to suggest by proposing Silence of the Lambs as a characteristic upward mobility story of our time and Hannibal Lecter as its unlikely fairy godmother.

What could be more characteristic of our time than a Cinderella story without a Prince Charming? Starling seems to seek only what she finds: the satisfaction of solving the case, getting the respect that goes with a job well done. What she loves most is professional success, sweetened only by the admiration of her colleagues and superiors. Even as late as 1991, when Jonathan Demme's enormously successful film version appeared, viewers expressed surprise and elation that the Jodie Foster character seemed so uninterested in finding a suitable mate. As Elizabeth Young observed, "It is not that she is waiting for the right man to come along; rather, she seems utterly indifferent to any suggestion of romance as the film proposes it, in heterosexual terms." Was it possible that a Hollywood blockbuster was really offering up a beautiful female star and yet eliminating from her ambitions any romantic interest, leaving only the striving to succeed? No, it wasn't. But the moment did seem to mark a turning point in the erotic economy of spectatorship. The audience was not asked to forsake entirely its usual vicarious pleasures. Instead, it was invited to take those pleasures in a displaced and diluted form: as a series of hints, threats, and promises surrounding two older men, Lecter and Crawford, Starling's boss at the FBI. Each is established in a position of superiority over her, with effects both vexatious and flirtatious. With each, Starling has intense and somewhat ambiguous if only intermittent and finally inconclusive relations. These not-quite-relations seem to replace the dynamics of romantic coupling that, from novels like Richardson's Pamela to films like Mike Nichols's Working Girl, had merged the protagonist's advancement in her erotic bonding with a social superior and the promise of a new, socially elevated family to come. Rather than being wooed and wedded by her prince, one might say-taking the italicized term in a slightly more neutral sense than is customary-that Starling is patronized by her mentors. The activity of patronizing does not result in reproduction. Still, however disagreeable it may sound, it does not rule out some degree of seduction.

The historical shift from marriageable masters to unmarriageable mentors, a shift that could only happen once paid employment for women outside the home had become the rule rather than the exception, marks a shift toward greater gender equality. A prince, once wedded, would remain a superior. A patron or mentor, however intent he may be on preserving his putative superiority, is structurally obliged to allow the possibility of final freedom and equality. If for no other reason, this is true because, having helped raise the protagonist up, he will then disengage from the protagonist's life and very likely disappear from the plot. This means that, though the mentor may engage less of the protagonist's desire, and thus less of the accompanying desire of the reader, what desire there is is rerouted in a more democratic direction.

Appearances to the contrary, then, the mentor is a figure of (relative) democratization. This paradox accounts for why, though he is no prince, Hannibal Lecter is charming. His charm does not stand solely for the sexiness of power, a psychological fact that can never be safely neglected. Nor does it merely register a residual charisma that cannot be banished from the dominant bureaucratic rationality, though the Weberian vocabulary seems pertinent. His charm emerges at the exact point of power's susceptibility, its mysterious but narratively necessary willingness to break its own rules so as to open up, however slightly, to aspiration from below. Without it, there could be no story. Since Starling needs the scientific expertise that Lecter possesses, the extracurricular murders that accompany his rule breaking show another, more sinister face of the world of experts she is so eager to enter. But Lecter does not block the entrance or in any way discourage her efforts. No matter how murderous he is, on the level of narrative function he remains first and foremost the fairy godmother, the one who enables and approves Starling's accomplishment, even if that accomplishment trains and accredits her to come in search of criminals like himself. This is the source of his charm. And his charm pulls the story away from what might otherwise seem its proper destination.

I am not suggesting that Starling's rise is all pull and no push, dependent on Lecter's intervention alone and owing nothing to her own demonstrations of merit. That merit is much in evidence. But the true logic of her rise only appears when her merit suddenly coincides with Lecter's susceptibility to it. One has to ask, therefore, what Starling offers that Lecter wants or needs.

An initial hypothesis might be that power is acquired, in Silence of the Lambs, by mastery over sex-in other words, that Starling acts out something like the Protestant work ethic, indefinitely sacrificing present sexual gratification in a quest for the higher if delayed good of social advancement. This hypothesis is supported by the manner in which Starling acquires her benefactor's support: Lecter decides to offer his assistance, having initially refused, only after she is sexually assaulted or insulted by his sperm-throwing fellow inmate Miggs. As we shall see, this is a crucial type of scene for the genre as a whole. That is, it responds to the same causal logic as the benefactor. If the benefactor's support is the cause of the protagonist's rise, then one needs to know how and why the support itself was obtained. What was the cause of the cause?

Evidence for this hypothesis is also to be found in the narrative's deep structure. Starling's upward mobility is accompanied by the symbolic elimination of those two contrasting characters whose ambitions are expressed sexually, that is, the film's two genuine villains, Buffalo Bill and Dr. Chilton. Chilton, the head of the asylum where Lecter is incarcerated, tries to take advantage of his position by grossly and gracelessly coming on to Starling. Professionally speaking, he is also Crawford's ambitious and unscrupulous antagonist. This sexualized ambition, or ambitious sexuality, seems largely responsible for the fact that, as the credits scroll, audiences find themselves unexpectedly cheering the prospect that Hannibal the Cannibal is about to "have" the bureaucrat for dinner-a serious measure of the film's achievement, and a hint, though finally a misleading one, about its politics.

But what about the sublimated or not-so-sublimated sexuality in the relationship between protagonist and mentor? Critics have disagreed about the presence or absence of an erotic subtext between Starling and Lecter. For Elizabeth Young, "Lecter sexualizes all discussions with Clarice in the guise of exposing her emotional interior.... Clarice, while clearly attracted to Lecter's eroticized advances, just as clearly resists them" (Young, 9,12). Adrienne Donald, on the other hand, sees Lecter as an ideal mentor for Starling because of "his sexual indifference to her as a woman" (358). This erotic uncertainty again seems characteristic of upward mobility in our time. It reflects a narrative in which the goal of advancement has broken free from customary heterosexual bondings that refer explicitly or implicitly to marriage and the reproduction of the patriarchal family and for better or worse has come to reside increasingly in looser, half-formed relationships, neither biologically reproductive nor necessarily heterosexual, that seem to fit social units other than the family. Like the reproduction of the family, the reproduction of institutions, disciplines, teams, professions, and even corporations involves the eliciting and channeling of erotic energy, if not in the direct and literal way demanded by procreation. This is one reason why the fairy godmother can also be perceived as a "fairy" in the somewhat (but not entirely) modern sense of the word. Indifferent to the usual destinations of heterosexual desire, Starling aims the narrative of upward mobility at something less familial than collegial. Borrowing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, we might think of this collegial alternative as "a vision of 'family' elastic enough to do justice to the depth and sometimes durability of nonmarital and/or nonprocreative bonds, same-sex bonds, nondyadic bonds, adult sibling bonds, nonbiological bonds, bonds not defined by genitality" (71). "Fairy godmother" is one of the items on the list of roles that Sedgwick associates with "queer tutelage": "patron, friend, literal uncle, godfather, adoptive father, sugar daddy" (59). As a patron, Lecter is also something of a queer tutor. His indeterminate sexuality, which hints at an erotics of male-female mentorship while also drawing Starling into an atmosphere of campy homosexual performance, urges her toward a nonmarital, nonprocreative endpoint which seems to have more in common with a workplace or some other nondomestic grouping.

The central moment in the film, I would argue, is the one that reveals this rechanneling of desire away from reproduction and into the workplace. This is the "silence of the lambs" story alluded to in the title, a story that emerges in Starling's final therapy-like session with Lecter. As Judith Halberstam writes, "The secret of her past that threatened all along to be some nasty story of incest or rape is precisely not sexual. Clarice Starling is the girl who wanted to save the lambs from the slaughter, who could only carry one at a time and who finally could not support the weight" (44). Making much the same point, Elizabeth Young credits Starling with a "refusal to give Dr. Lecter what he wants: the narration of a childhood experience explicitly involving sexuality (that is, the primal scene)" (12). The film's titular secret is thus not a sexual but a professional secret: a secret about why Starling wants to practice her profession. In other words, it is something that need not have been a secret at all. Instead of the shameful memory of sexual abuse or Oedipal hatred that one might have expected from the narrative's lurid atmospherics, we are given a story that Starling might tell voluntarily and even with pride. For it merely explains why she wants to do the work of rescuing the helpless for which she is in training. Indeed, it is a sort of myth of professional legitimation. By going through the University of Virginia and the FBI Academy, this myth tells us, Starling is not just climbing the social ladder. She is trying to alleviate the suffering of women like herself. Her efforts fuse the two motives together.

There is no reason to credit this revelation, as Young does, to Starling's "refusal to give Dr. Lecter what he wants." It makes more sense to give at least some of the credit to Lecter himself. Faced with this evidence of what Starling really loves, he neglects to be ironic. He does not suggest that her advancement in the FBI will be an unhappy ending, a consummation unworthy of her efforts. He is speechless. The film's close-up of his expression when he elicits this avowal suggests that Lecter is deeply and strangely satisfied by discovering a nonerotic key to Starling's character. It is the suggestion, in both film and novel, that he embraces this asexual, ethically generous interpretation of Starling's deepest motives, and indeed derives from it something equivalent to erotic pleasure, that most clearly marks him, in spite of his bad habits with everyone else, as a good mentor to Starling.

In short, the common ground on which Starling's merit and Lecter's susceptibility to that merit coincide, thus enabling and affirming her rise, is her sense of vocation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a professional therapist (though no longer licensed to practice) approves the commitment of another would-be professional, her commitment to tend to those who are in need. What Lecter reassures Starling of by his interpretation of her story is that the "cool professionalism" she seeks is not, as Adrienne Donald thinks, "a vain flight from her white trash origins" (352), but rather a reconnection of sorts with those origins, an identification that is also a rescue, a rescue that is also an identification. "The corpse laid out on the table," Judith Halberstam writes, "... is a double for Starling, the image of what she might have become had she not left home, as Lecter points out, and aspired to greater things" (42). According to Lecter, the corpse would also be proof that her aspiration to greater things is not an abandonment of those left behind or below, a proof that she advances, forward or upward, precisely so as to do something for them, and precisely because they are versions of herself, because she is what she must take care of. This professional creation myth demonstrates to anyone who might doubt it-and we have every reason to believe that readers and spectators will indeed be skeptical on this point-that her individual advancement will be in the interest of society as a whole.

References to the interest of society as a whole, like references to the common good, are most often made these days in a more or less cynical mode, as if we assumed that such claims could only be ideological, hence self-aggrandizing and self-incriminating. I'm not convinced that a post-Gramscian or post-Althusserian understanding of ideology should permit this assumption. If there is no privileged (that is, theological) position completely outside ideology, attempting to reconcile versions of self-interest with versions of the general welfare becomes something all social players are obliged to do. Making and defending claims like this is simply what we mean by political discourse. In this case, politics would have to be understood as involving the tricky, unending task of discriminating less desirable from more desirable claims-in large part a matter of timing and context.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Upward Mobility and the Common Goodby Bruce Robbins Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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