From this fictionalised history blooms the dark historiography, as a Pynchonesque style of connectedness is drawn out from the murders to the major events and attitudes of the Twentieth Century. Specific sequences stand out for the potent narrative mastery of this vision. There's Chapter Four's tour of London, mapping a history of archetypal conflicts (patriarchy versus matriarchy, the Dionysian virus the Appollonian) on the monuments, cathedrals and obelisks of the city. Chapter Five's striking conception (literally) of Adolf Hitler, followed by a parallel narration of London life, high and low. Chapter Ten's hallucinatory dissection of both Marie Kelly and 20th Century anomie, followed by a similarly hypnotic hallucination marking the Ripper's death in Chapter Fourteen. These make plain that From Hell is a masterpiece because it's an audacious polemic, not despite it.
The text appendix accompanying each chapter established Moore's sources and intentions, often in as fascinating a manner as he does in the actual story. The second appendix, the comics-format Dance Of The Gull-Catchers, closed off the saga with a history of Ripperologists and Moore's own implication in a process which he claims "has never been about the murders, not the killer nor his victims. It's about us. About our minds and how they dance." Moore sums up his most accomplished, most ambitious work, in this confession. What he doesn't talk about - what's best left for readers to discover - is the passion and empathy he brings to his own dance, the elements that make From Hell his most accomplished work to date.
ALAN MOORE:
(from Correspondence From Hell with Dave Sim, 1997)
With From Hell, the seed idea was simply that of murder, any murder. It had occurred to me that murder is a human event at the absolute extreme of the human experience. It struck me that an in-depth exploration of the dynamics of a murder might therefore yield a more extreme and unprecedented kind of information. All that needed to be decided upon was which murder. Perhaps predictably, I never even considered the Whitechapel murders initially, simply because I figured they were worn out, drained of any real vitality or meaning by the century of investigation and publicity attached to them... It was only towards the end of 1988, with so much Ripper material surrounding me in the media on account of it being the centenary of the murders, that I began to understand that, firstly, there were still ways to approach the Whitechapel murders that might expose previously unexplored seams of meaning, and secondly that the Ripper story had all the elements that I was looking for. Set during fascinating and explosive times in a city rich with legend, history, and association, the case touched peripherally upon so many interesting people and institutions that it provided the precise kind of narrative landscape that I required. You see, to some extent the peripheries of murder, the myth, rumour, and folklore attached to a given case had always seemed more potentially fruitful and rewarding than a redundant study of the hard forensic facts at a murder's hub. This traditional approach to murder might tell us Whodunit (which is admittedly the most immediate of practical considerations), but it does not tell us what happened on any more than the most obvious and mechanical level. To find out anything truly significant, we must take the plunge into myth and meaning, and to me a case with the rich mythopoeic backwaters of the Whitechapel murders suddenly seemed like the perfect spot to go fishing...
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