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Good at Being Evil: the Demons of The Vampire Chronicles 181ner: “I’m the Vampire Lestat. Remember me?” 41 Marius cannot feel comfortablewith a story that would violate his individuality and unity:I revolted against all of it because if I was anything, I was an individual, aparticular being, with a strong sense of my own rights and prerogatives. Icould not realize that I was host to an alien entity. I was still Marius, nomatter what had been done to me. 42This deep anxiety and rejection of heterogeneity is presented also as themotive for the demon, Amel, to go after humans in the first place. TheQueen of the Damned goes in greater detail into the origin of vampires. Insteadof a legend rounded by time into a fairy-tale about a “good King andQueen,” who were accidentally transformed into vampires because theywent to face the demon alone, this book presents an eyewitness report fromthose times, around 4000 B.C.E. 43 The evil spirit, Amel, is presented to bemotivated by an anxiety towards heterogeneity: he feels an enthralling mixtureof hatred and jealousy towards the curious nature of humans. He was“feeling that we are abominations, we humans, because we have both bodyand soul, which should not exist on this earth. […] He told us that to havespirit within mortal bodies was a curse.” 44 This rejection is reported by Maharet,a female vampire even more ancient than all the previous ones (andtherefore one who is able to report even more ancient, and supposedly moreauthentic, knowledge).As narrative desire propels Anne Rice’s vampires deeper and deepertowards the elusive origin of their evil disposition (Nina Auerbach notesthat Rice’s vampires are “compulsive storytellers” 45 ), this origin seems totwist into a circle. Humans were made vampires by a demon; but the demonwas incited into action by the monstrous character of humans – a unifiedspirit looks with horror and anger towards this “Chimera,” a creature ofmixed up nature. Monstrous liminality is dramatised by the demon in thecreation of vampire, but the original heterogeneity is to be found in humansthemselves. This is underlined by Maharet’s narrative; she describes how thetwisted psychology and personality of Queen Akasha made it impossible forher to live in peace and harmony – and because Akasha behaved the way shedid, finally she is really to blame for the acts of the evil spirit.This is, of course, a modern solution to the complex problem of evil.The Vampire Chronicles is an openly post-Nietzschean work; it underlines,41 QD, 1. Cf. similar announcements of emphatically underlined self-awareness: VL, 3;BT, 1; MD, 3.42 VL, 446.43 The virtually immortal characters in the universe of these novels act in many importantroles; from a narrative point of view, one of the most central ones is to operate asnarrative devices, and to open up new possibilities for story-telling. These ancient charactersfrequently engage in long narrative sessions which make up substantial parts ofRice’s novels.44 QD, 341.45Auerbach 1995, 154.
182Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsfor example, that good and evil are human creations; that “Satanic” is just aname humans have given to such behaviour that disrupts their conception oforderly existence. 46 Nature itself is described as amoral, more prone to beesteemed by aesthetic criteria than by ethical ones. The demonic elements inthe series are connected to an ideological structure, which emphasises theexistence of destructive and chaotic potentials as parts of nature. The centralmetaphor is that of a “Savage Garden.”If “our conversation” [between Lestat and his mortal friend, Nicolas]could only continue.Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an unchartedland where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferentparadise without signposts of evil or good.In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art– the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeurof Fragonard’s canvases – beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawlessas the earth had been eons before man had one single coherentthought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beautywas a Savage Garden. [...]Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better,really, than the Savage Garden. 47It is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world areeternally justified,” is the way that Nietzsche formulated this principle. 48Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is packed with demonic metaphors and images,and he is very useful in pointing out the paradoxes and tensions thattypically motivate the use of them. “Whatever exists is both just and unjust,and equally justified in both,” was his formulation of the tragic conflict. 49 Ihave above (in chapter two) read the ambiguity of the Nietzschean position,the simultaneous acceptance and recognition of contradictory opposites. Inmorality, this amounts to the necessary recognition that value-systems arebased on human “myths,” and (simultaneously) that such myths are essentialfor our existence.The central problem in the Vampire Chronicles is analogous to the onepresented by Nietzsche. Rice’s modern vampires like Lestat believe in theSavage Garden – a reality without any inherent “meaning” – but they simultaneouslyare driven by their “desire for knowledge” to find some significantmyth. The endless dialectic of new questions and answers creates a particularversion of Carroll’s “erotetic narration.” Even if morality is just a human in-46 VL, 334. – The view of morality as a construction is linked with Nietzsche’s name;the view itself, however, has been common enough. In H. Rider Haggard’s She(1886/1926, 153) Ayesha ponders: “My life has perchance been evil – I knew not, forwho can say what is evil and what good?” Earlier on, the narrator had confirmed that themorality was “an affair of latitude and religion, and what is right in one place, wrong andimproper in another” (ibid., 87).47VL, 131.48 Nietzsche 1872/1967, 52 [§ V].49Nietzsche 1872/1990, 65 [§ IX].
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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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1. The Ancestry of the DemonicÑH.
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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 55Individua
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The Demonic in the Self 57should be
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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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BibliographyA note on this bibliogr
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Index2001: A Space Odyssey; 207abje
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