labingi

I consider myself a fan of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The early books captivated me in high school and while I find much of the later material not great, my love for the core characters and concepts is enduring. My recent reread of Interview with the Vampire did not change that view, but it was definitely a different experience from reading it as a teen and young adult in the '90s. Here are my main takeaways on the book, in no particular order:

* It's really racist.
* It does good historicizing.
* I still love its refusal to engage with standard gender discourses.
* Louis is an extremely angry unreliable narrator (at least re. Lestat).
* Damn, Armand is a good character.
* Louis and Claudia's and Louis and Armand's relationships are both moving, realistic, non-clichéd, non-didactic examples of dysfunction.

Spoilery commentary on these below

It's really racist.
For context, Louis comes from a slave-owning, plantation family in New Orleans in the 1790s. The novel itself was written and set in the US in the 1970s. The racism is pervasive and casual when black people are mentioned and deeply present in the silences in which they are not. Most of the time, the slaves and second-class free citizens of color simply do not matter; they are not discussed. When they are discussed, there's this sort of (not exact quotes) "The slaves were restless," and "They weren't as stupid as we thought they were" (okay, it's not that bald, but the idea is there). I don't think people of color have more than two or three lines of dialogue in the whole novel. They are mostly a dark sea in the background, something between hapless victims and amorphous threats.

It makes every kind of sense that Louis (and Lestat) would be utterly racist in the 18th and 19th centuries. They wouldn't be historically plausible if they weren't. It makes equal sense that Louis would still be racist (but less) in the 20th century and that Daniel (the interviewer), a white American probably born in the 1950s, would be too. This is exactly what we see, and it's spot on. It's so white American it's like a white American wrote it! Seriously, I say this with all sympathy for Rice. I'm a white American from the 20th century too, and when I read this in high school I really did not see it. I seriously thought, "Well, slavery is obviously bad, and in the 20th century, Louis and Daniel obviously both know that, but Louis is also discussing his experiences from 200 years before, and that was obviously racist, but times have changed, so it's fine." I expect that's more or less what Rice was going for, and it's a very mainstream white American place to be in the late 20th century. It's very realistic. But were I to suggest a way to engage with race in the text, I might suggest making Daniel black. That would have been really interesting. It's that external critique, the non-white view that is missing.

It Does Good Historicizing
This is one of my favorite things about TVC. Rice may not be Umberto Eco, but she clearly loves the histories she invokes, and she has a gift for slipping out of her own time and place to write the perspectives of people from other contexts. The casual racism and patriarchy, indeed, fit well here. Rice's love for New Orleans also comes through very clearly in her lavish descriptions of early colonial clinging to civilization. ("That one burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp.") Interview is not the pinnacle of Rice's historical explorations, but it is a solid entry.

I still love its refusal to engage with standard gender discourses.
So here's the thing. From my teenage years, I have adored the basic world of TVC, and from about the same age, I have never enjoyed Rice's Mayfair Witch books, though they are written in a similar style and with similar skill. The difference? Gender. The MW books boast a nice array of well-written female characters, but they are fundamentally oriented around traditional gender roles. Women fall in love with men, they get together, have babies, raise them, etc. I find it… like a prison.

TVC, in contrast, was a freedom that fifteen-year-old me catapulted into, and I still very much feel today. A fundamental condition of Rice's vampires is that they have no important biological distinction between male and female. They are, indeed, anatomically male and female, having begun as humans, but all the experiential sexual differences are gone except for the lingering aftereffects of culture. They don't have sex; they don't have babies. Males and females "reproduce" the same way, by exchange of blood. Their substitute activity for sex is drinking blood, the same exact act for males and females. Their physical power is dependent not on sex but on age and the strength of the blood they were made with. Their primary attraction to human blood along with a sort of pan-aesthetic appreciation for the world means they are roughly equally susceptible to the charms of men and women, and most vampires can easily "fall in love" with either. Aside from whatever affectations of gender they retain from their human lives or preserve to live in the human world, they have no gender. That is to say, they do have gender, but it's pretty mild, not a driving force.

I find that extremely liberating—and not because it's gay. It's really not "gay." It's not even "bi."* It's just not human sexuality. It's in a different place, and I really enjoy the freedom of exploring that place. It hits the same sweet spot for me as Wuthering Heights: it's not with the dominant culture; it's not with the counterculture. It just doesn't care. It's outside. It has escaped.

* Mind you, there are gay and bi characters, going back to their human lives. Lestat is clearly bi. David is clearly gay (weird thing for Merrick notwithstanding). But that's separate from their vampire nature.

Louis is an extremely angry unreliable narrator (at least re. Lestat).
It's no secret to anyone who has read any of the other books that Lestat's characterization in Interview is off. Now, a "Doylist" reading would say Rice's premise for him subsequently changed; that's fine. But in-universe—and the books do explicitly address this in-universe—Louis did a hatchet job on him. He paints him as so dark, so petty, so weak, so very many things he just is not, at least not as dominant traits.

And let's think about this in-universe. At the time Louis is spewing this venom to Daniel, he hasn't seen Lestat in decades. Lestat may be dead for all he knows. Moreover, we know from later books that their decades living together weren't that awful. Troubled, yes. But also filled with a great deal of affection and family closeness with Claudia. I mean, something kept them together all the time, and something brings them back together as dear friends from the end of The Vampire Lestat on.

And yet in the 1970s, Louis is hatcheting away with a vindictive rage that seems out of keeping with his general post-Claudia detached melancholia. I honestly don't know how to read it, except to infer that Louis was powerfully, powerfully wounded by those years, not least by the loss of Claudia itself (for which he partly blames Lestat). And all that trauma spews out in that tirade against Lestat. I know it's largely an accident of writing, but it feels very real as an expression of pain.

Damn, Armand is a good character.
Of all the major VC characters, Armand is my favorite, so I'm biased, but I think he may be the only one Rice never "misses," the only one she writes completely in character every damn place he shows up. Sometimes she writes him thinly. Sometimes she writes him into a bad story. But I don't think she ever writes him in a way that feels OOC. (Okay, this is true of Gabrielle as well, but overall, she's less developed.)

This is feat because his character is extremely complex. His layers run deep. And, for sure, Rice did not know what all those layers would become when she first conjured him up in Interview. Yet it all tracks. You can read Interview from the vantage point of The Vampire Armand, and he still makes perfect sense and you know so much more about why he says and does the things he does. I may write another essay on The Vampire Armand, so I'll stop there, but I am impressed, and I always enjoy spending time with him.

Louis and Claudia's and Louis and Armand's relationships are both great, realistic, non-clichéd, non-didactic examples of dysfunction.
I guess it's obvious their relationships aren't happy, but I'm seeing this really differently from the perspective of my fairly recent Buddhist practice. Both of these relationships (and Louis and Lestat too) suffer from being attached, in the sense of needy. Claudia, in a child's body, needs Louis to help her navigate the adult world (if nothing else—and there may be something else). Louis clings to Claudia out of loneliness and parental duty, loyalty and habit. Armand wants to Louis to infuse him with a sense of being alive he cannot find within himself. Louis finds a solace in Armand that engages his intellectual needs and provides "somebody to love" when things fray to the breaking point with Claudia. They do all love each other, but they love each other primarily from a self-oriented fear of losing something they need.

There is a hollowness to these loves that seems indicative of vampire nature. Vampires are outside human continuity. Vampires need to find a way of living with themselves while murdering humankind. Vampires are unmoored from time, always drifting into an era that is not theirs and they cannot fully understand; they are always homeless, in a sense. They do not age or suffer physical afflictions as humans do. They are not physically weak, and thus, in some sense, they don't grow up. They don't learn to face death with the passing of the years or understand themselves in face of physical incapacity. They don't learn to give themselves to each other the way we humans do because we'll die without each other's support and life is brief and soon enough we have to turn the world over to others anyway.

Vampires are stuck clinging to the signifiers of a largely aesthetic experience of "falling in love," which they can do at first sight, over and over. And it's real, but it's not real. It's love, but its selfish love. It sacrifices, but it sacrifices out of desperation. Our pop culture tends to either describe dysfunctional relationships in terms of an obvious abuser oppressing an obvious victim—or it looks the other way and pretends they're healthy (see Twilight). TVC does neither. These relationships are both loving and sick. The people in them are both mature and childish, giving and selfish, good and bad. And while they are convincingly vampiric, they feel very human.