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Good at Being Evil: the Demons of The Vampire Chronicles 179novel (mise en abyme) finishes with Lestat’s signature bearing the date 1984;this is where the fictional novel The Vampire Lestat ends. However, TheVampire Lestat continues after the publication of its fictional incarnation.The short part at the end of the novel (“Dionysus in San Francisco, 1985”)as well as the prologue (“Downtown Saturday Night in the Twentieth Century,1984”) properly belong to the chain of events that are recorded in TheQueen of the Damned. There is, thus, a part of The Vampire Lestat that doesnot coincide with its embedded self-reflection. 33This incapability to fully comprehend the material that makes up one’sidentity is, in a way, appropriate for a novel that aspires to explain the originand nature of its demonic characters. The very structure of Lestat is markedby otherness, an uncontrollable flow of semi- or subconscious materials. Inthe first part of the Vampire Chronicles Rice’s vampires were figurativelycalled fiends or demons; as the thirst for meaning pushes Lestat deeper towardsthe origin of vampires, they become literally demonised. Vampires aresaid to be created by a demon, Amel, who blended his own substance withthat of humans. 34 The narrative layers become more and more complicated;Lestat embeds into the novel his own autobiographical narrative, which includesthe story of Marius, an ancient Roman vampire – and this in turncontains the myth of Enkil and Akasha, as told to Marius by the Elder (aneven more ancient vampire). Until this explanation, there has been no indicationthat any sort of spirit would inhabit the world of the VampireChronicles. The openly atheistic world is suddenly transformed with the introductionof “a common demon, the kind one hears of in all lands at alltimes.” 35 The demon acts as a turning point: if demons are accepted into the“secondary universe” of the Vampire Chronicles, then there would be no endof spiritual, religious and theological speculation. 36 Furthermore, it wouldjust move the origin of evil away from the vampire and open the question ofthe origin of demon. The closed universe of Interview with the Vampirewould break open, and its uncompromising lack of meaning would give wayto competing systems of thought. A tragedy would give way to an existentialtravelogue.This is exactly what happens. After the story of the demon has beentold, ghosts and spirits became an essential part of the Vampire Chronicles.In Interview with the Vampire there are several scenes in which Lestat ridiculesdeath: he makes a danse macabre with a corpse of a dead woman, andthen makes a vampire of a small child, her daughter. After one of Lestat’s33 Rice: “There’s a more deliberate use of the vernacular and a deliberate use of humor,things I would never have risked in Interview. But when Lestat was finished, I was blacklydepressed. I thought it was a real failure of a book, and in some ways I still think it’s afailure. It just ends. Never was I so clearly aware that a book had a bad form.” (Riley1996, 39.)34 According to Anne Rice, ‘Amel’ was an ancient Middle Eastern word for evil. SeeRamsland 1995, 14.35 VL, 437.36See above, pages 129-30.
180Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsoutrageous antics, Louis asks him “why have you propped her [his victim]here in some grotesque manner, as if tempting the gods to strike you foryour blasphemy?” 37 These kinds of comments are clues to the reader, makingit painfully poignant what it means to have no such “gods,” to have nomeaning that would transcend the world of mere chance and matter. Afterthe story of the demon is told, the world starts to react to Lestat in differentsupernatural ways: in The Queen of the Damned he shares the vision of a dyingperson’s soul being greeted by loved ones and vanishing into the afterlife;38 a human character, Jesse, who is a sort of “psychic detective,” also revealsthat something of his victims may have been left behind after theirdeaths. 39 The ghost of the dead vampire child, Claudia, is haunting the centralparts of The Tale of the Body Thief. The last of Lestat’s adventures is depictedin Memnoch the Devil, which tells about Lestat’s confrontation withthe Devil and God, and about his fantastic travel through Christian mythology(including the history of Creation, and visits to Heaven, and to Hell).The introduction of the demon has finally transformed the substance of theVampire Chronicles into spiritualist adventure novels, leaving the limits ofInterview with the Vampire far behind. The demon thus also functions as theelement that breaks up the initial “purity” of the Vampire Chronicles universe,and changes its textual composition into a field of conflicting (andeventually blasphemous) intertextuality. “Intertext,” however, should in thiscase be applied more generally as a concept for transposition of whole systemsof meaning, not so much as the influence or interplay of specific individualtexts. 40MYTHICAL ORIGIN IN DISHARMONYThe disclosure of the vampires’ demonic origins is a very important turningpoint for Rice’s series. It supposedly ends the quest for knowledge after severallayers of embedded narratives, and opens up a possibility for completeself-understanding: a recognition of the vampires’ true identity (Anagnorisis).However, to the vampires (and to the reader) an original disharmony isrevealed, and a conflict between two incompatible substances (demon andhuman), instead of a single, clear-cut identity. I will now take a closer lookat how this conflicted identity is articulated in the text; particularly, how itis characterised by its vampire narrators.The educated Roman vampire, Marius, impulsively rejects the demonicversion of his vampire nature. He is an intensely individual vampire, verymuch like Lestat, who always begins his narratives in the characteristic man-37 IV, 90.38QD, 57-58.39 QD, 187.40See above, p. 101 (and Kristeva 1974/1984, 60).
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TAMPERE STUDIES INLITERATURE AND TE
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Tampere Studies in Literature and T
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ments, and also such further lines
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IllustrationsCover: “Possessed Re
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The BeginningsAnd Jesus asked him,
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The Beginnings 3mons form an import
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The Beginnings 5negative, demonic a
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The Beginnings 7chapter four), but
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The Beginnings 9scious conflict, fo
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The Beginnings 11that is produced o
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The Beginnings 13The History of the
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The Beginnings 15emphasised that su
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The Beginnings 17turalism,” but i
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The Beginnings 19the materials I ha
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1. The Ancestry of the DemonicÑH.
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 37The f
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 43Chris
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 51tween
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2. The Demonic in the SelfBut ancie
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The Demonic in the Self 61A number
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The Demonic in the Self 65the nethe
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The Demonic in the Self 67sciousnes
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The Demonic in the Self 69influence
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The Demonic in the Self 71LEADER:Yo
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The Demonic in the Self 73Particula
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The Demonic in the Self 75NIETZSCHE
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The Demonic in the Self 77ing into
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The Demonic in the Self 79Nietzsche
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3. Unravelling the Demonic TextThe
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PART II
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114Demonic Texts and Textual Demons
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5. Mothering a Demon:Rosemary’s B
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The EpilogueIf there are answers to
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BibliographyA note on this bibliogr
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Index2001: A Space Odyssey; 207abje
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