LWiA 4.3: The Dance of the Gull Catchers

The end of the chapter, though not, obviously, the last section I have to write.

Some two years later Kitchen Sink Press released an eleventh issue of from Hell entitled “The Dance of the Gull Catchers.” This was not a complete surprise—Moore first alluded to the possibility back in the annotations to Tundra’s first collection of the series back in 1991, when he raises the possibility that Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, the book from which Moore’s entire theory of the case is derived, might simply be a hoax before noting that “this will form much of the basis for a proposed appendix to appear after the completion of From Hell, titled ‘Dance of the Gull Catchers,’ in which we will try to document the interplay of the various ‘Ripperologists’ who have tried to solve the mystery since its inception.” In The From Hell Companion Campbell reprints several initial stabs at this chapter from Moore’s notebook at the time, the earliest of which is dated at the end of 1996 and starts with the extremely meta conceit of Moore at his typewriter composing a letter to Campbell in which he explains that “I’ve avoided starting this appendix quite long enough. It’s almost exactly eight years since we began From Hell. Time to get with the program. Partly, I suppose my reluctance stemmed from fear that this might get too personal for comfort. Eight years is a lot of water under the bridge.”

In fact it would take ten, with Moore not finishing the script until the year it was published. His difficulty seems to have been not so much with organizing the substantial amount of information that he had to cover as with figuring out the frame with which he would present it all. Ironically, his eventual solution was simply to lean into his long-mooted title, portraying the eponymous dance as a bunch of guys with nets trying to capture a bird hovering just off panel. “The quarry,” Moore explains of his gull catchers, “is elusive, unidentified and unidentifiable, a suspect archeopteryx. A fraud. Perhaps there’s no such bird.”

Moore uses this frame for what is in effect an essay in comic form. This was not completely uncharted territory—he’d done something like it with “The Mirror of Love,” although that has as much poetry to it as it does essay, and more straightforwardly with Brought to Light. As with that project, the primary challenge facing him is clearly the sheer amount of information he has to assemble—a century of mad theories and popular culture beginning with Walter Sickert’s obsession with the case and extending up through Joseph Gorman. Each is laid out with a kind of sardonic skepticism. One supposed suspect, Thomas Neil Cream, a serial poisoner who declared himself to be Jack the Ripper as the trap door opened for his hanging, is described as an “irritating bastard,” while another theory hinging on an elaborate theory about a Russian barber/cross-dresser/spy who happened to be an exact double of a surgeon/hairdresser in Whitechapel, gets depicted in several panels of increasingly goofy farce. Perhaps most memorably, Aleister Crowley’s various interventions are dismissed with a wry “but then, that’s Crowley.”

Sixteen pages into their twenty-four page exegesis Moore and Campbell themselves step into the dance, Campbell amusingly wielding a mop instead of a butterfly net while Moore shusshes him to “be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting wippers.” Here Moore finally explains his real view on the matter, which is to reject the very idea of “solving” a murder by reducing it to a matter of murderer, motive, and means, noting that by this standard “the solution to the Second War is as follows: Hitler, the German economy, tanks.” The reality is that murder “a human event located in both space and time, [with] an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution,” citing the notion of quantum uncertainty, to declare that “Jack’s not Gull, or Druitt. Jack’s a super-position.” Later, in an uncanny echo of his fateful observation about gods and demons, he remarks that “the complex phantom we project. That alone, we know is real,” while “the actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed, might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it there?”

But of course, he doesn’t. And he’s aware of this, delving into the strange sense of obsession that seizes his fellow dancers. He notes one theorist, John Morrison, who succumbs to a particularly intensive version of the common drive to in some fashion save Marie Kelly (a drive Moore plainly shares), going so far as to get a headstone crafted for her, and describes an interview where he “speculates on traveling in time to alter Mary’s awful fate. ‘But there’d be no coming back. You’d be trapped… trapped in the past,’” this last line given its own panel of the dancing gull-catchers, one of them having sunk beneath the muddied playing field, a desperate hand trying to escape from the mire. Shortly thereafter he notes that “It isn’t getting drawn into Masonic Death Conspiracy that troubles me, you understand. It’s getting drawn into the vortex of a fiction.”

Subsequently he turns to the analogy of Koch’s Snowflake—a simple fractal that has an infinite perimeter but a finite area. “Likewise,” he explains, “each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle: autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. What have we to look forward to? Abberline’s school nickname, or the make of Mary Kelly’s shoes? Koch’s Snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver.” It’s a deft and stinging attack, but it’s also a very strange thing to say on page 575 of your 576-page magnum opus about Jack the Ripper.

It’s notable that Koch’s Snowflake was originally presented in terms of the coastline paradox, typically framed in terms of the question “how long is the coast of Britain,” this being the title of Benoit Mandelrot’s article on the matter. If one measures with sufficient precision, tracking the contours not simply of every little bay and peninsula but of every single grain of sand on a microscopic level, the length similarly approaches infinity. Is the conclusion thus that Albion is a similarly limiting subject? When every grain of sand on that infinite coastline contains an entire world? Indeed, there’s a real sense in which the whole point of From Hell is that the autumn of 1888 in Whitechapel is infinite—that William Morris and Aleister Crowley and Charles Howard Hinton are all contained within that supposedly limiting circle alongside the whole of the twentieth century. But therein lies the real danger that Moore’s Koch Snowflake analogy cautions against. It is, as Moore notes, trivial to get lost within infinity—to become mired in the minute details. One mustn’t get so wrapped up in the endlessly unfolding length of the British coast that the trip from Bournesmouth to Portsmouth becomes infinitely long. Blake’s maxim is not an invitation to write a twenty-six issue Who’s Who about every single grain of sand.

This, then, is Moore’s real accomplishment with From Hell. Its subject matter may be infinite. So too might its implications. But From Hell itself is finite; it contains five hundred and seventy-five pages, with no more than nine tiny boxes on each one. Moore has taken the infinite scope of Whitechapel and fit it down into the nine panel grid. This was not something he started the project knowing how to do. Indeed, he very nearly failed at it, just as he had in capturing the similarly infinite majesty he glimpsed in Big Numbers. The effort can fairly be described as having driven him mad. But in the end, by the grace of Glycon and Eddie Campbell, he finished his second great work. He’d not only gazed upon the infinite, but had figured out how to capture it accurately, without any loss of fidelity or detail, within the finite. Onwards to his next subject.