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labingiPrince Lestat: Or Return of the Divine Right
Anne Rice's Prince Lestat is one of the most disturbing books I have read in a long time. I remain a fan of The Vampire Chronicles; it has an inviolate place in my heart. And after waiting ten-plus years to see if Rice would ever write in this series again, it is sort of pleasant to catch up with old vampire friends, who are, by and large, in character if only due to minimal development. I mildly recommend the book to VC fans for the nostalgia, the fun of seeing the old characters wielding iPhones[1], and the sense that these persistent vampires still persist. However, the social values this novel promulgates should terrify anyone who still holds out hope for the post-Enlightenment commitment of equality and democracy.
To be fair, the book has some nice bits: Rice illustrates well how totally the proliferation of digital technology has changed communication, privacy, and knowledge. She makes a good point that this change would be as radical for vampire kind as for humankind, and I accept her contention that the internet is making vampires one global community in a way inconceivable for thousands of years.
But these (and a small handful of other) redeeming traits do not rescue the book from its central problem: blindness to anything outside of one very restricted point of view. Lestat is the putative author of the book, but it's not his point of view I'm talking about; in fact, the story gives several characters' thought processes. The problem is that all these thought processes are 95% the same and equally unaware that their elitist mindset directly undercuts more than two hundred years of post-Enlightenment work toward the establishment of social equality and universal human rights.
Bodily Integrity and Reproductive Rights
For example, vampire Gregory reflects that vampire doctor, Fareed, "would be forever a servant of vampires, yes, but respecting all living things and never engage in that which would harm anyone unless somehow that being had fallen beneath the bar of his concern by being an unspeakable of some sort" (160). On the very next page, we are informed that Fareed has cloned Lestat without Lestat's knowledge or consent.
Let us leave aside the disturbing proviso about falling beneath the bar of concern (we'll return it). Are we really meant to believe that cloning someone (effectively forcing them into parenthood) without their informed (or any) consent is "respectful"? Or maybe Lestat is below the bar? No. Fareed is in love with him, like everyone. Or maybe Gregory, whose perspective this, has an old-fashioned view of medical ethics?
Yes, of course, he does. And I'll give Rice's universe a pass on a wide range of disturbing thought based on the argument that her vampires present antique mindsets. One of the enduring strengths of Rice's vampire universe is its historical depth. Her vampires may come from any time back to about 6000 years ago, and one of the central premises of the series is that a vampire never really stops being the person he or she was when first vamped: personality, life stage, and certain kinds of cultural situatedness survive the centuries. By this argument, Gregory is an ancient Egyptian who spent his first several centuries viewing himself as a literal god. It makes every kind of sense that his morality is not 21st century. It makes sense that he hasn't thought a lot about the ethics of cloning or modern, post-World War II medical ethics at all. So, yes, it's entirely likely that the clone's existence would not creep him out the way it creeps me out.
And yet Gregory is presented as one of the wisest of vampires with many fair words about his long years on Earth, his happy and stable vampire family, his knowledge of the world, his capacity for love, etc. So if we're meant to question is 6000-year-old morality founded by a society of gods and slaves, the text gives us no such invitation.
As for the clone, Lestat himself, when he finds out about him, is momentarily hurt but not really angry and soon embraces him as his son. Fareed, at any rate, is a modern doctor, only sixtyish mortal years old, and he has no excuse for not having some understanding of modern medical ethics, but this is not discussed. No, as far as I can see, we're meant to swallow that forced parenthood and forced cloning are perfectly ethical, at least when you're vampires.
We're also told that being a clone raised in secrecy, devoid of peer contact, without his father knowing he exists has done no damage to Lestat's son, Viktor[2], who loves the vampires who created him unreservedly and apparently has never shown anger. My response to this latter assertion is threefold:
1) He is not the clone of Lestat (personality is partly genetic), or…
2) He is damn good at hiding it, or...
3) There is something chemically wrong with his brain.
The story engages with none of this. He's just a nice boy, i.e. psychologically impossible.
Killing
It gets ickier. Completely gone from this novel is the core problem of Interview with the Vampire and, indeed, all vampire-with-a-conscience literature: the moral conundrum of having to kill people. The "moral" perspective seems to have universally become Marius's old dictum of "kill the evildoer." Apparently the "evildoer" is beneath that "bar of concern" where Fareed draws the line. Lestat describes a nasty victim's soul as "[breaking] open like a rotten carcass" (311), a bit of vague glossing that gives no sense of a person's underlying psyche and seems to indicate that it's okay to eat him without a second thought, despite seeing telepathic images going all the way back to his innocent childhood "filled with curiosity and dreams" (311).
I want to unpack the notion of "evildoer." This is an old style of thought: you are your actions--and more than that, you are your most obvious actions (since everyone does many different things). Now, for Marius in the 1490s, this may have been an enlightened vampire perspective: that you don't have to be indiscriminately murdering monster or "Child of Satan" or god ordained to take human life but can use your need for blood to some worldly good by ridding the streets of dangerous filth.
But this position is surely not tenable in any simple way in a post-psychological-revolution 20th and 21st century. We know now that people are the sum of their psyches: "evildoers" are just you and me fallen in directions that lead to increasingly unhealthy acts. By saying this, I don't mean to justify cruel acts but simply to observe that the people who commit them are still people, are still complicated, and almost universally still have a lot of good in them, certainly a lot of pain.
Again, we're up against point of view. Most of the vampires in this story were born well before modern psychology. For them, we might expect the old-school "evildoer" to remain an idea with traction. And, indeed, since the leaders of vampire culture tend to be older, we might expect a certain antiquated type of morality to infuse vampire culture overall. But this explanation is not wholly satisfactory.
For one thing, there are powerful vampires from modern society too. David was born while Freud was in his heyday, and though David is young for a vampire, he carries the authority of a self-assured man who was a leader in his mortal life and lasted seventy-four mortal years on Earth. Fareed is younger than David but a very forceful personality who has convinced many an ancient vampire that modern scientific exploration of the vampire condition is a good idea and, moreover, that Fareed's theories about it should be accepted more or less without question.
And while I've tied the idea of valuing the whole of the human psyche to modern psychology, this isn't just a modern revelation. Many vampires grappled with the morality of killing in earlier times (signally Louis). And Jesus was talking about not throwing the first stone at sinners around the time Marius lived.
Furthermore, a vampire, who telepathically sees his (or her) victims' thoughts, has to know about his victim's psychological complexity. And yet, we're shown, he can kill people over and over and not think twice, not even consider the weight of snuffing out a whole life, not even regret that this victim was in so much pain and lost so much potential?
Of course, vampires kill a lot—practically speaking, they have to to be healthy—so they have to get used to it. Fair enough. But there's "used to it" and then there's "never showing any sign of thinking about it even when sitting down to pen a major book on vampire kind and codify global laws for vampire conduct for the first time in history," and the latter is blind to point of ickiness.
Capitalism
And it gets still ickier. Let's return to Gregory, that bastion of ancient wisdom and stable vampire family hearth. Now Gregory, like many of the book's characters, is filthy rich, and we're told that "his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now" (142). In other words, Gregory is one of the one percent of the one percent: a mogul at the top of one of the most profitable examples of one of the profitable industries in the world. It is also an industry whose profit is partly based on restricting low-cost access to drugs, indirectly condemning many poor to die; bankrupting the slightly less poor (at least in America) by making suffering and dying people choose between agony and death or supporting their families; pathologizing a large percentage of normal human variation (from shyness to twitchy legs) in order to peddle meds to people whose only illness is being human; fixing results of scientific studies to push the success of their products (see Ben Goldacre's TED Talk on bad science); and that's just a slice of it. And, yes, the industry does good too: it does research and produce drugs that help people. This doesn't change the fact that much of its wealth is built of manufacturing and perpetuating human suffering. So let's be clear, Gregory, who wears "a gold watch on his wrist that was worth as much as diamonds" (359) bought that watch—in a very mundane way—with the blood of average Joe American losing his house so that he could pay for his cancer treatment. Or if we're meant to think that Gregory runs a kinder, gentler, still magically "one of the most profitable" fantasy pharmaceutical empires, there is not one syllable in the book to that effect. Yet this man is presented as a paragon of wisdom, love, and good values.[3]
This divorce from the reality of the 21st century world permeates the text. For all the pages devoted to the wonders of iPhones and internet radio, there is not one mention (in 2013) of climate change; not one mention of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the home town of the Vampire Chronicles; not one mention of global mass extinction of species or billions going hungry, of global recession, a whole generation in the developed world struggling to find jobs, an American educational system in collapse, the rising tensions between the Muslim world and the West (though one of the characters is Palestinian), fracking, factory farming, racism. Instead we get passing mentions of how nice it is to live in a modern world where everyone is so healthy and big and well fed.
What world do they live in?
They live in the world of the one percent of the one percent, where the only reality is the "first-world problems" of the filthy rich and "riffraff"—this word must be used at least six times in at least three different characters' points of view—the riffraff are expendable, a vision of reality in which ancient vampire Teskhamen describes ancient Rome as "magnificent temples" and "pure and lofty columns" (232) and no one mentions that this pure loftiness was built on slavery, war, plunder, and torture, not even Daniel, who grew up in the age of "How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?"
The Return of the Ancien Regime?
The story culminates with Lestat becoming the official vampire "prince," (which on the whole, I hold to be a good plot move. He's the only one simultaneously stable enough and bizarre enough to take on the job without soon going insane.) As prince, one of his first moves is to make his headquarters his family's old chateau in Auvergne, where his father was a marquis, eventually forced to flee by the Revolution. Thus, the text symbolically identifies his monarchy with pre-revolutionary France, one of the most despotic regimes in modern history. My guess is this was unintentional, but the tone deafness is indicative of the central problem: the little people (i.e. us) just aren't even worth thinking about. Indeed, in discussing the need to codify rules for hunting mortals, Lestat notes that even mortals have rules for hunting game, "And are we not better than they are?" (401). Yes, the people who kill us and drink our blood are now officially better than we are.
The book closes with Louis reflecting on his life and how he has come to be less self-punishing and more empathetic towards everything, from his victims to himself. He looks forward with a sort of bittersweet hope to a life in which pain is just one piece of a larger narrative of a worthwhile life. There's wisdom in these reflections, and I wish the book illustrated them. Alas, it doesn't.
The mindset the book chiefly presents is not one of hopeful embracing of a more positive and proactive view of the world; it is one of ignoring moral responsibility to—and arguably even the existence of—the vast majority of the world in the name of self-satisfied self-congratulation. The quest for fine Armani shirts continues to suck the life blood out of the 99%, and the really galling thing is that the blood drinkers don't even register that they're doing it. I hope this is not an accurate psychological portrayal of the real-life one percent of the one percent—but a voice in my head whispers that it probably is. Damn vampires.
Notes
[1] iPhone appears to be the official smart phone brand of vampires. At least no one uses anything else. Or maybe Lestat just thinks that all smart phones are iPhones. There's a cute micro-drabble possibility there:
"You know, Uncle Lestan [that's what she calls him]," said Rose, "That's actually an Android."
"Android? Like Data?"
[2] Yeah, "Viktor." No, nobody ever makes the obvious observation, not even after a vampire tries to enlist Viktor as an aid in transferring brains. This is a world devoid of irony.
[3] It is worth noting the venerable old Maharet, consistently presented as one of the wisest and kindest of vampires, drives some Amazonian natives off a piece of the minuscule remains of their native land to build a vampire compound. It's worth noting, but the novel has nothing to say about it.
Anne Rice's Prince Lestat is one of the most disturbing books I have read in a long time. I remain a fan of The Vampire Chronicles; it has an inviolate place in my heart. And after waiting ten-plus years to see if Rice would ever write in this series again, it is sort of pleasant to catch up with old vampire friends, who are, by and large, in character if only due to minimal development. I mildly recommend the book to VC fans for the nostalgia, the fun of seeing the old characters wielding iPhones[1], and the sense that these persistent vampires still persist. However, the social values this novel promulgates should terrify anyone who still holds out hope for the post-Enlightenment commitment of equality and democracy.
To be fair, the book has some nice bits: Rice illustrates well how totally the proliferation of digital technology has changed communication, privacy, and knowledge. She makes a good point that this change would be as radical for vampire kind as for humankind, and I accept her contention that the internet is making vampires one global community in a way inconceivable for thousands of years.
But these (and a small handful of other) redeeming traits do not rescue the book from its central problem: blindness to anything outside of one very restricted point of view. Lestat is the putative author of the book, but it's not his point of view I'm talking about; in fact, the story gives several characters' thought processes. The problem is that all these thought processes are 95% the same and equally unaware that their elitist mindset directly undercuts more than two hundred years of post-Enlightenment work toward the establishment of social equality and universal human rights.
Bodily Integrity and Reproductive Rights
For example, vampire Gregory reflects that vampire doctor, Fareed, "would be forever a servant of vampires, yes, but respecting all living things and never engage in that which would harm anyone unless somehow that being had fallen beneath the bar of his concern by being an unspeakable of some sort" (160). On the very next page, we are informed that Fareed has cloned Lestat without Lestat's knowledge or consent.
Let us leave aside the disturbing proviso about falling beneath the bar of concern (we'll return it). Are we really meant to believe that cloning someone (effectively forcing them into parenthood) without their informed (or any) consent is "respectful"? Or maybe Lestat is below the bar? No. Fareed is in love with him, like everyone. Or maybe Gregory, whose perspective this, has an old-fashioned view of medical ethics?
Yes, of course, he does. And I'll give Rice's universe a pass on a wide range of disturbing thought based on the argument that her vampires present antique mindsets. One of the enduring strengths of Rice's vampire universe is its historical depth. Her vampires may come from any time back to about 6000 years ago, and one of the central premises of the series is that a vampire never really stops being the person he or she was when first vamped: personality, life stage, and certain kinds of cultural situatedness survive the centuries. By this argument, Gregory is an ancient Egyptian who spent his first several centuries viewing himself as a literal god. It makes every kind of sense that his morality is not 21st century. It makes sense that he hasn't thought a lot about the ethics of cloning or modern, post-World War II medical ethics at all. So, yes, it's entirely likely that the clone's existence would not creep him out the way it creeps me out.
And yet Gregory is presented as one of the wisest of vampires with many fair words about his long years on Earth, his happy and stable vampire family, his knowledge of the world, his capacity for love, etc. So if we're meant to question is 6000-year-old morality founded by a society of gods and slaves, the text gives us no such invitation.
As for the clone, Lestat himself, when he finds out about him, is momentarily hurt but not really angry and soon embraces him as his son. Fareed, at any rate, is a modern doctor, only sixtyish mortal years old, and he has no excuse for not having some understanding of modern medical ethics, but this is not discussed. No, as far as I can see, we're meant to swallow that forced parenthood and forced cloning are perfectly ethical, at least when you're vampires.
We're also told that being a clone raised in secrecy, devoid of peer contact, without his father knowing he exists has done no damage to Lestat's son, Viktor[2], who loves the vampires who created him unreservedly and apparently has never shown anger. My response to this latter assertion is threefold:
1) He is not the clone of Lestat (personality is partly genetic), or…
2) He is damn good at hiding it, or...
3) There is something chemically wrong with his brain.
The story engages with none of this. He's just a nice boy, i.e. psychologically impossible.
Killing
It gets ickier. Completely gone from this novel is the core problem of Interview with the Vampire and, indeed, all vampire-with-a-conscience literature: the moral conundrum of having to kill people. The "moral" perspective seems to have universally become Marius's old dictum of "kill the evildoer." Apparently the "evildoer" is beneath that "bar of concern" where Fareed draws the line. Lestat describes a nasty victim's soul as "[breaking] open like a rotten carcass" (311), a bit of vague glossing that gives no sense of a person's underlying psyche and seems to indicate that it's okay to eat him without a second thought, despite seeing telepathic images going all the way back to his innocent childhood "filled with curiosity and dreams" (311).
I want to unpack the notion of "evildoer." This is an old style of thought: you are your actions--and more than that, you are your most obvious actions (since everyone does many different things). Now, for Marius in the 1490s, this may have been an enlightened vampire perspective: that you don't have to be indiscriminately murdering monster or "Child of Satan" or god ordained to take human life but can use your need for blood to some worldly good by ridding the streets of dangerous filth.
But this position is surely not tenable in any simple way in a post-psychological-revolution 20th and 21st century. We know now that people are the sum of their psyches: "evildoers" are just you and me fallen in directions that lead to increasingly unhealthy acts. By saying this, I don't mean to justify cruel acts but simply to observe that the people who commit them are still people, are still complicated, and almost universally still have a lot of good in them, certainly a lot of pain.
Again, we're up against point of view. Most of the vampires in this story were born well before modern psychology. For them, we might expect the old-school "evildoer" to remain an idea with traction. And, indeed, since the leaders of vampire culture tend to be older, we might expect a certain antiquated type of morality to infuse vampire culture overall. But this explanation is not wholly satisfactory.
For one thing, there are powerful vampires from modern society too. David was born while Freud was in his heyday, and though David is young for a vampire, he carries the authority of a self-assured man who was a leader in his mortal life and lasted seventy-four mortal years on Earth. Fareed is younger than David but a very forceful personality who has convinced many an ancient vampire that modern scientific exploration of the vampire condition is a good idea and, moreover, that Fareed's theories about it should be accepted more or less without question.
And while I've tied the idea of valuing the whole of the human psyche to modern psychology, this isn't just a modern revelation. Many vampires grappled with the morality of killing in earlier times (signally Louis). And Jesus was talking about not throwing the first stone at sinners around the time Marius lived.
Furthermore, a vampire, who telepathically sees his (or her) victims' thoughts, has to know about his victim's psychological complexity. And yet, we're shown, he can kill people over and over and not think twice, not even consider the weight of snuffing out a whole life, not even regret that this victim was in so much pain and lost so much potential?
Of course, vampires kill a lot—practically speaking, they have to to be healthy—so they have to get used to it. Fair enough. But there's "used to it" and then there's "never showing any sign of thinking about it even when sitting down to pen a major book on vampire kind and codify global laws for vampire conduct for the first time in history," and the latter is blind to point of ickiness.
Capitalism
And it gets still ickier. Let's return to Gregory, that bastion of ancient wisdom and stable vampire family hearth. Now Gregory, like many of the book's characters, is filthy rich, and we're told that "his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now" (142). In other words, Gregory is one of the one percent of the one percent: a mogul at the top of one of the most profitable examples of one of the profitable industries in the world. It is also an industry whose profit is partly based on restricting low-cost access to drugs, indirectly condemning many poor to die; bankrupting the slightly less poor (at least in America) by making suffering and dying people choose between agony and death or supporting their families; pathologizing a large percentage of normal human variation (from shyness to twitchy legs) in order to peddle meds to people whose only illness is being human; fixing results of scientific studies to push the success of their products (see Ben Goldacre's TED Talk on bad science); and that's just a slice of it. And, yes, the industry does good too: it does research and produce drugs that help people. This doesn't change the fact that much of its wealth is built of manufacturing and perpetuating human suffering. So let's be clear, Gregory, who wears "a gold watch on his wrist that was worth as much as diamonds" (359) bought that watch—in a very mundane way—with the blood of average Joe American losing his house so that he could pay for his cancer treatment. Or if we're meant to think that Gregory runs a kinder, gentler, still magically "one of the most profitable" fantasy pharmaceutical empires, there is not one syllable in the book to that effect. Yet this man is presented as a paragon of wisdom, love, and good values.[3]
This divorce from the reality of the 21st century world permeates the text. For all the pages devoted to the wonders of iPhones and internet radio, there is not one mention (in 2013) of climate change; not one mention of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the home town of the Vampire Chronicles; not one mention of global mass extinction of species or billions going hungry, of global recession, a whole generation in the developed world struggling to find jobs, an American educational system in collapse, the rising tensions between the Muslim world and the West (though one of the characters is Palestinian), fracking, factory farming, racism. Instead we get passing mentions of how nice it is to live in a modern world where everyone is so healthy and big and well fed.
What world do they live in?
They live in the world of the one percent of the one percent, where the only reality is the "first-world problems" of the filthy rich and "riffraff"—this word must be used at least six times in at least three different characters' points of view—the riffraff are expendable, a vision of reality in which ancient vampire Teskhamen describes ancient Rome as "magnificent temples" and "pure and lofty columns" (232) and no one mentions that this pure loftiness was built on slavery, war, plunder, and torture, not even Daniel, who grew up in the age of "How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?"
The Return of the Ancien Regime?
The story culminates with Lestat becoming the official vampire "prince," (which on the whole, I hold to be a good plot move. He's the only one simultaneously stable enough and bizarre enough to take on the job without soon going insane.) As prince, one of his first moves is to make his headquarters his family's old chateau in Auvergne, where his father was a marquis, eventually forced to flee by the Revolution. Thus, the text symbolically identifies his monarchy with pre-revolutionary France, one of the most despotic regimes in modern history. My guess is this was unintentional, but the tone deafness is indicative of the central problem: the little people (i.e. us) just aren't even worth thinking about. Indeed, in discussing the need to codify rules for hunting mortals, Lestat notes that even mortals have rules for hunting game, "And are we not better than they are?" (401). Yes, the people who kill us and drink our blood are now officially better than we are.
The book closes with Louis reflecting on his life and how he has come to be less self-punishing and more empathetic towards everything, from his victims to himself. He looks forward with a sort of bittersweet hope to a life in which pain is just one piece of a larger narrative of a worthwhile life. There's wisdom in these reflections, and I wish the book illustrated them. Alas, it doesn't.
The mindset the book chiefly presents is not one of hopeful embracing of a more positive and proactive view of the world; it is one of ignoring moral responsibility to—and arguably even the existence of—the vast majority of the world in the name of self-satisfied self-congratulation. The quest for fine Armani shirts continues to suck the life blood out of the 99%, and the really galling thing is that the blood drinkers don't even register that they're doing it. I hope this is not an accurate psychological portrayal of the real-life one percent of the one percent—but a voice in my head whispers that it probably is. Damn vampires.
Notes
[1] iPhone appears to be the official smart phone brand of vampires. At least no one uses anything else. Or maybe Lestat just thinks that all smart phones are iPhones. There's a cute micro-drabble possibility there:
"You know, Uncle Lestan [that's what she calls him]," said Rose, "That's actually an Android."
"Android? Like Data?"
[2] Yeah, "Viktor." No, nobody ever makes the obvious observation, not even after a vampire tries to enlist Viktor as an aid in transferring brains. This is a world devoid of irony.
[3] It is worth noting the venerable old Maharet, consistently presented as one of the wisest and kindest of vampires, drives some Amazonian natives off a piece of the minuscule remains of their native land to build a vampire compound. It's worth noting, but the novel has nothing to say about it.
