So I'm going to go ahead and make a blog post about the odd connection between Red Dragon and "Shiloh," two stories that shouldn't have anything in common but actually have a surprising amount. Also, long post ahead, please bear with it.
To lay down a good foundation for those unfamiliar with the story, Red Dragon is the first novel in the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris. The protagonist, Will Graham, is called from early retirement by the FBI because he was the best at hunting down serial killers and there's a really nasty one on the loose. Long, long LONG story short, Graham helps bring the Red Dragon down, but is attacked at home and critically injured. As he's laying in the hospital, a lot goes by and just before the end of the book he starts thinking that his wife Molly is going to leave him over the ordeal. He thinks back to a time he went to Shiloh and contemplated the indifference of Nature to man's suffering and bloodshed. The book ends with the words "Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn't haunted--men are haunted. Shiloh doesn't care," (Harris 454).
In "Shiloh," which was written one year later according to Dr. Hanrahan, we seem a subtly similar situation. Leroy and Norma Jean go to Shiloh to try to save their broken marriage, having both suffered trauma and loss that festered away inside. There is also a similar lack of "being around" that damages both relationships--Will having left for months to stop the Red Dragon. There is the similar disconnect with what Shiloh was thought to be and what it actually was. Mable thought that Shiloh was just a terribly romantic place (a ludicrous thought--3500 men died there, thousands more injured), but Norma Jean and Leroy found it utterly devoid of meaning. It was nothing to them, just some moderately pretty place. Will initially thought of Shiloh as this terrible cruelty of the world, this malevolent entity that swallowed thousands of lives, but then realized that Shiloh, the world, was ultimately indifferent.
That's about all the connection I can come up with. Note that there are also many differences between the characters and thoughts about Shiloh. Leroy has trouble thinking of the battles that took place on Shiloh as anything but pieces on a board game (15), whereas Will Graham ponders the stunning amount of bloodshed with morose clarity. And, let's be frank, Leroy is kind of a childlike idiot and Will is highly intelligent.
I don't know if this means anything, if there's any real connection here if it's just an absurd coincidence. I'd really appreciate other thoughts on this.
I cannot comment much on this as I have never read Red Dragon and never saw the movie. However,I am somewhat familiar with the Hannibal Lector story. That being said, Shiloh is a pretty famous battlefield. I am sure there are many stories about Antietem, Gettysburg, and so on. I really hope that there is some kind of connection and I can find it out someday because it is really cool to think about.
ReplyDeleteCivil war battlefields as present-day vacations - that's interesting to contemplate. A certain romantic thought process goes along with the Civil War - movies like "Gone with the Wind" and miniseries like "North and South" immediately come to mind. But we know now that the Civil War was really anything but romantic.
ReplyDeleteYet for some reason these old battlegrounds have become...pretty places to walk around and visit with people you care about. Gettysburg is one of my favorite places to walk around with my family, and I went to Harpers Ferry over spring break with my boyfriend. So I participate in this way of thinking about old Civil War places, too. I looked up pictures of Shiloh, and apparently it's quite lovely also. I don't know what it is. Maybe we're too far removed from the Civil War - the ugliness of the battles are gone, so all we see are lovely trees and quaintly worn monuments. So even if we're aware of what happened at these places - how many soldiers went into the battle versus how many came out - we don't necessarily get it.