1992 Postexistentialism in The Neo Gothic Mode of Anne Rice

Postexistentialism in the Neo-Gothic Mode: Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire"
Author(s): BARBARA FREY WAXMAN

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 79-
97
Published by: University of Manitoba
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Postexistentialism in the
Neo-Gothic Mode: Anne Rice's
Interview with the Vampire
BARBARA FREY WAXMAN
Serious philosophical questioning, ethical inquiry, struggles of individuals

to shape their identity and create a meaningful existence are not uncommon
in twentieth-century American literature. Recently, however, a writer of
"popular" fiction, Anne Rice, has carried these philosophical themes into a
seemingly unusual genre: Gothic vampire fiction. In such novels as Inter
view with the Vampire (1976), Rice is not only chilling readers' spines but
drawing their minds into the angst of twentieth-century philosophical in
quiry. According to Rice—who has been an enthusiastic reader of such
existentialist philosophers as Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre since her
college days (Ramsland 65, 69)—the intensely emotional moods, strange
atmospheres and supernatural elements of Gothic fiction are "the most
powerful means...for writing about real life" (qtd. in Ferraro 74).
In this essay, I wish to explore the "real life" issues of our postmodern
world that Rice addresses in Interview with the Vampire, the first of her
three Vampire Chronicles. Specifically, my purpose is threefold: to note the
way that existentialist themes have characterized Gothic fiction from its
beginnings; to demonstrate the way that Rice's "postmodernist" reinterpretation
of these themes gives Interview with the Vampire a distinctly "neo-Gothic
character and "postexistentialist" perspective; to suggest the variety of
ways in which Rice has explored these concerns in her fiction after Inter
view with the Vampire and the reasons for these later modulations in genre
and philosophy.
Mosaic 25/3
0027-1276-92/010079-19$01,50©Mosaic
80 Barbara Frey Waxman
From its beginnings as a subgenre emerging with the development of

Romanticism in the later eighteenth century, Gothic fiction has always been
more than mere "thrills and chills" sensationalism and escapist entertain
ment. In its probing of forbidden realms and occult experiences, it has been
hospitable to philosophical ideas and quests: to speculations about ontol
ogy; to analysis of the nature of reality and surrealistic states; to investiga
tion of the constituents of moral behavior; and to determination of the
meanings of human existence. As G. R. Thompson has noted, Gothic litera
ture, which represents the darker side of the Romantic movement, expresses
"an existential terror generated by a schism between a triumphantly secu
larized philosophy of evolving good and an abiding obsession with the
Medieval conception of guilt-laden, sin-ridden man....[It] is the drama of
the mind engaged in the quest for metaphysical moral absolutes in a world
that offers shadowy semblances of an occult order but withholds final
revelation and illumination" (5-6, 10).
Challenged by the ambiguity of the universe and the complexity of
human nature, these "dark Romantics" attempted to interpret humankind's
moral capacities and to discover reasons for our existence. To Mark M.
Hennelly, Jr., therefore, the existential philosophizing of Maturin's Melmoth
the Wanderer and other Gothic novels links them to the later tradition of
such novelists as Dostoevsky and Kafka (665, 669). Similarly, Robert D.
Hume has described the heroes of writers like Beckford and Byron as
suffering from "existential agony" because they cannot have what they long
for: "solutions...absolutes, ontological certitude." Hume, echoing Jean
Paul Sartre, notes that these Gothic heroes suffer a pattern of "pain, No
Exit, and damnation" (126-27).
Maturin's Melmoth is an early example of the Gothic supernatural hero
who prefigures the existential seeker. His insatiable thirst for forbidden
knowledge—God's knowledge about the origins and meaning of human
existence—locks him into a hellish existence that transcends time and space;
he "lives" and witnesses horrible events centuries apart and flies over the
earth, like Satan and vampires, acting as eternal witness "to the truth of
gospel amid fires that shall burn for ever and ever" (299). Melmoth's destiny
alienates him from the human beings who must become his victims, denying
him human joys and the solace of human religions, both of which he cyni
cally interrogates. His existence becomes the fruitless search for a person
who would change places with him; he continually seeks vulnerable indi
viduals who wish to escape from a desperate situation into which their own
passions and weaknesses have placed them. Seeing these flaws of human
nature, Melmoth can believe in no one, even though Immalee, the child of
nature who becomes his wife, begins to revive his religious faith. One of his
near-victims, Moncada, sums up the frustrating nature of the quest for
meaning and belief: "we ask with the desponding and restless scepticism of
Vampires and Ethics 81
Pilate, 'What is truth?' but the oracle that was so eloquent one moment, is
dumb the next, or if it answers, it is with that ambiguity that makes us dread
we have to consult again—again—and for ever—in vain" (64).
Despite Melmoth's blasting of humankind for its "malignity and hostil
ity" (236), Maturin's narrator hopes to establish a moral framework for the
world: "Such, perhaps, will be the development of the moral world. We
shall be told why we suffered, and for what; but a bright and blessed lustre
shall follow the storm, and all shall yet be light" (248). Although this
passage sounds optimistic, light and certitude do not prevail in Maturin's
novel. As Elizabeth R. Napier has observed, in works like Melmoth the
Wanderer we experience the existentialist quester's "exhaustion at being
tantalized by meaning and finally being denied it" (52, 149).
The prefiguring of existentialism in Melmoth is apparent not only in the
novel's quest motif, but also in its emphasis on issues of entrapment, escape
and individual moral agency. Such issues, within a Christian framework,
are raised in Moncada's tale of his imprisonment in the monastery and his
escape with the aid of his brother and a man who had committed parricide.
Moncada describes the pressure of moral responsibility and our occasional
desire to relinquish it: "I was like a clock whose hands are pushed forward,
and I struck the hours I was impelled to strike. When a powerful agency is
thus exercised on us,—when another undertakes to think, feel, and act for
us, we are delighted to transfer to him, not only our physical, but our moral
responsibility. We say, with selfish cowardice, and self-flattering passive
ness, 'Be it so—you have decided for me,'—without reflecting that at the
bar of God there is no bail" (141).
The will to freedom and Immalee's choice to wed Melmoth are also
analyzed existentially by the narrator of Immalee's tale: "When a mind
strong by nature, but weakened by fettering circumstances, is driven to
make one strong spring to free itself, it has no leisure to calculate the weight
of its hindrances, or the width of its leap,—it sits with its chains heaped
about it, thinking only of the bound that is to be its liberation—" (295).
Maturin ponders the individual's capacity for moral choices while being
hampered by vices that can turn her/him into Satan's agent: he concludes
bleakly that we are our own worst enemies (334).
Victor Frankenstein, protagonist of Mary Shelley's classic Gothic novel,
is another Romantic quester, the personification of the scientific researcher
hero who seeks knowledge about human existence, answers to ontological
questions and understanding of our moral nature. Although he thinks that by
creating human life he has found one answer, the result is that he is left with
more problems, with "pain, No Exit, and damnation." Even family ties as
a source of meaningful existence, the spiritual satisfactions of nature, ro
mantic love and domestic happiness are interrogated by Shelley: none offer
Victor permanent solace or refuge in his morally ambiguous, post-creature
world. The frozen wastelands of the North are a fit emblem of the existen
tial void surrounding Victor at the end of his life.
Concern with moral choice and speculation about the nature and origins
of evil are also evident in Bram Stoker's vampiric Gothic novel Dracula.
Through the character of Professor Van Heising, who has analyzed the
facets of evil, Stoker suggests that evil is not an isolatable force, but is
inextricably linked to good. The two moral absolutes, as bipolar opposites,
define each other, according to Van Heising: "For it is not the least of its
terrors that this evil thing [Dracula] is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren
of holy memories it cannot rest" (247). Van Heising postulates that evil
originates in good, that it develops as a radical rebellion against goodness.
Stoker implies that Dracula could not have seduced the virtuous Lucy were
it not for the lustful impulses growing in the soil of her virtuous soul.
Conversely, Dracula himself might have had some "training" in good that
led to his rebellious alienation or satanic leap into the realm of evil.
Dracula moves beyond Maturin's and Shelley's existential concerns by
blending "modern" scientific thinking with theology in the moral project of
Van Heising. By focusing on the seductive nature of evil and the human
psyche's vulnerability to it, Dracula offers a quasi-Freudian investigation
of the way that the amoral human unconscious and its pleasure-seeking
impulses conflict with societal taboos and moral codes. With its interweav
ing of good and evil, and in its illustration of the amoral nature of human
sexuality in a world no longer supported by a framework of faith, Stoker's
novel heralds the perspective of a twentieth-century existentialist.
Like Stoker, Shelley, Maturin and other Romantic writers, Anne Rice
embraces the Gothic, and in particular the vampire, as a vehicle for philo
sophic speculation. While vampires have historically been considered an
image "of anthropomorphized evil" (Thompson 6), Rice's vampires become
what Susan Ferraro calls "loquacious philosophers who spend much of
eternity debating the nature of good and evil" (67). They are also vehicles
to explore the tabula rasa condition of twentieth-century human existence,
as well as the quest for truths, moral rules and a purposeful existence.
Interview with the Vampire is structured in four parts, beginning and
ending as an interview between a young journalist and the vampire Louis,
set in New Orleans in the present (1970s). In the middle sections, Louis
mostly narrates his past, with questions and reactions occasionally inter
jected by the journalist. The interview is being recorded on a cassette
player, as Louis describes how he became a vampire in 1791 at the age of
25 and how he developed relationships with other vampires, particularly
Lestat, his maker, and Claudia, the child-vampire whom he and Lestat have
created. The plot offers traditional Gothic love triangles and power struggles,
as in Louis's alliance with Claudia to "kill" Lestat and rid themselves of his
domination, and in Claudia's withdrawal from Louis to be with Madeleine,
the vampire that Louis had created for her. After the "death" of Lestat, the
scene shifts to Paris, home of an old "coven" of vampires, the Théâtre des
Vampires.
In the Théâtre lives an ancient vampire, Armand, to whom Louis is
attracted mentally and physically: as is typical of Gothic fiction, incest and
homoeroticism are prominent in the book. Armand acts as his teacher,
warning Louis against killing the other vampires. Despite his wisdom,
Armand's world-weariness pushes Louis toward desperate action, a war
with the Theatre des Vampires in which Louis is imprisoned (the conven
tional entrapment imagery). He is rescued by Armand. Claudia is burnt to
ashes in these wars, Louis torches the Théâtre, and Lestat returns from the
"undead," seeking reunion. Finally, Louis and Armand, now outcasts from
vampiric society, return to New Orleans. At the end of the novel, despite
having learned of Louis's ordeals as a vampire, the young interviewer asks
to be turned into a vampire and to join the search for Lestat.
In many respects Interview—despite or by way of its popular Gothic plot
of power struggles—contains Rice's most complete existentialist and
postexistentialist philosophizing. Ferraro captures its philosophical spirit
when she calls it "a brooding meditation on good and evil, immortality and
death" (28). According to Ferraro, the novel's comparison of mortal death
to versions of immortality implies that sometimes mortal death is preferable
(74). This may be because of Rice's view of the prevalence of human evil
in her godless world. Her parallelling of evil vampirism with immoral
human behavior is suggested when one of the Parisian vampires declares
that "men [are] capable of far greater evil than vampires," but that vampires
"strive to rival men in kills of all kinds" (245). In the aftermath of the Nazi
Holocaust, which has greatly expanded philosophy's and literature's con
ceptualizing of human evil, this statement is acceptable to many thoughtful
readers. With evil a given, then, Rice offers existentialist paths to meaning
ful action. She also posits some postexistentialist conditions and ideas
about moral choice.
In his study of Melmoth the Wanderer, Hennelly has observed that
existentialism comes in many varieties, but in all of them there is a "revolt
against any authority—Church, State, Society—that places a synthetic,
abstract system between the individual and real life experience" (669). In
other words, he sees the existentialist, isolated from all institutions, as
confronting a universe devoid of moral absolutes, where the individual
must construct his/her own system of authority. The existentialist's "onto
logical insecurity" is an angst about the universe's "relativism, meaning
lessness, and even nihilism" (671).
There is, however, a component of existentialism that pulls the indi
vidual back from the edge of suicidal despair: the freedom of choice and the
ethic of responsibility. These empower one to choose actions, to shape a
meaningful moral life, to judge oneself, and to take responsibility for the
consequences of one's actions. The difference between existentialism and
postexistentialism, as I use the terms, is that the postexistentialist cynically
notes the relativity not only of morality, but also of freedom and choice.
Postexistentialism recognizes that there are internal and external constraints
on the individual's ability to build a good life. The vampire Louis is like
that still-hopeful existentialist who must confront the compelling
postexistentialist outlook which fears that freedom itself may be a chimera.
Rice's novel places Louis in a life which Kierkegaard would identify as
pure existence. Helmut Kuhn describes this rarified existence as "that
passionately intensified form of human life which makes the mind suscep
tible to experiencing a crisis, and through crisis, existence" (409). Rice
explores the complexities of human nature by analyzing Louis's life-crisis
and by highlighting his differences from humans. As Elizabeth MacAndrew
has noted, Rice's novel "uses the supernatural, as the Gothic tradition has
always done, to present new views of human nature ambiguously, so we are
forced to ask questions about it" (250).
Rice's novel is unique, however, because in it the vampire's conduct is
self-condemned. Even after rejecting God's law, Louis accepts responsibil
ity for the consequences of his evil acts, includ' ig his killings. He sees his
evil conduct as resembling Sartre's acts of "bad faith," behaviors whereby
the existentialist "lapses" and temporarily rejects both responsibility for
acts and freedom of choice. In other words, when he kills, Louis tempo
rarily believes that his vampiric nature forces him to kill; after the kill, he
struggles against any notion of having a fixed nature that dictates his
conduct and thus reaffirms his moral responsibility. In addition, Louis is
repelled by his objectification of each victim as Other and by his efforts to
make his victims' surrender of their freedom the means by which he fulfills
his own goals.
Persistent in spite of his compulsion to kill, then, is Louis's urge to
embrace ethical behavior, which according to philosopher Hazel E. Barnes
involves "recognition of the need to justify one's life" (9), as well as
acceptance of "responsibility for others and for one's own past and future"
(25). Louis's ethical stance provokes the derision of Lestat and Claudia,
who revel in their killings. His alienation from them by these moral promptings
suggests the existentialist's condition; "an isolated individual," he "is not
compelled to acknowledge his involvement with others unless he cares to
do so" (Barnes 51). Suffering from this loneliness, Louis parries his ethics
and does seek reunion with them, despite their egocentrism and amorality.
Through Louis, Rice's novel displays a twentieth-century ethical relativ
ism more complex than Stoker's. Presenting the vampire as a metaphor for
the ambiguities of human nature and of our moral energies, Rice extends
Stoker's notion that evil is rooted in good; as she presents it, evil encom
passes a profound knowledge of and longing for good. Interview thus
explores what Judith Wilt describes as the "tempting proposition that the
killer obtains special knowledge and special sensitivity to life, and the
vampire, whose life is death, has supreme comprehension and sensitivity"
(90). Rice gives this proposition an existentialist framework by positing
that the morally sensitive Louis lacks supreme comprehension of the mean
ing of his life, even as he struggles to obtain gnosis or to create an expla
nation for his existence. Rice's postexistentialist addendum is to emphasize
the naivete of the existentialist assumption that one can obtain supreme
comprehension and shape his/her own fate.
There are three ways, in particular, that Rice encourages readers to

rethink good and evil and to analyze the human condition, first as existen
tialists and then as postexistentialists.
The first way involves the depiction of Louis's feelings about religion
and ethics. At the beginning of the novel, Louis describes his own indirect
contact with religious fervor and ethical commitment through his brother
Paul's visionary religion and fanatical devotion to God's work. He de
scribes his initial tolerance of Paul's holiness, even building him an oratory
for his prayers. Yet out of his own vicious egotism, "which could not accept
the presence of an extraordinary human being in its midst" (13), he disbe
lieves in Paul's prophetic visions. After his brother's death, Louis expresses
a new awe at Paul's sanctity and appreciates the contrast between good and
evil: "Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult" (12). In
retrospect, the awesome challenge of doing good impresses Louis. He
finally appreciates his brother's moral fiber and commitment to God. At the
same time, Louis also recognizes his own moral laziness, his shallow "lip
service to God and the Virgin" (13).
Still half-believing in Christian humility, Louis chastises his own ego
tism and attributes to it all his evil impulses; egotism is central to the evil
characters of Lestat, Gabrielle and Armand as well. Perhaps the paradigm
for vampiric egotism is Milton's Satan; he is propelled by an egotism,
"Pride and worse Ambition" that makes him think he can challenge God's
authority in heaven. Because of his egotism, he tumbles to hell. There he
declares, "Evil be thou my Good," thus redefining through its polar oppo
site the evil egotism which he must endlessly feed.
Louis's egotism, however, is undermined when he meets Lestat. While
traditional Christianity might applaud this change, existentialism—because
it values the energetic ego—would not see it as positive. When they meet,
Lestat's aura crushes Louis's ego, reduces him to nothing, so that "[he]
completely forgot [himself]" ; yet at the same moment he "knew totally the
meaning of possibility" (13). An existentialist would see this reaction as
problematic. To the existentialist, Louis's insight into the meaning of pos
sibility would be a cause for celebration, since the individual must choose
a future from among infinite possible futures and must be able to diverge
from past choices (Barnes 84). An existentialist, however, might begin to
worry about whether Louis could fulfill the rich possibilities for his future
without an alert ego to make and implement decisions. With traces of
Christian belief remaining in him, then, Louis feels guilty about his ego
tism. In turn, as his existential outlook develops, he views with alarm
Lestat's ego-crushing impact on him, the existentialist equivalent of a
cardinal sin: Lestat objectifies Louis (the Other) and makes of Louis's
freedom "the instrument of [his] own project" (Barnes 87-88). Lestat's
egocentric project is to turn Louis into a vampire, even if he does not freely
choose to become one, in order to secure Louis's plantation for his ailing
father.
Looking back on his transformation from man into vampire, Louis can
not say how or whether he decided on this fateful step in his life. The
ambiguity of his language reflects his crushed ego, his repressed self
consciousness, his confusion about the determining factors behind this
choice, all of which traits are uncharacteristic of the existentialist:
"And so you decided to become a vampire?" [the interviewer] asked....

"Decided. It doesn't seem the right word. Yet I cannot say it was
inevitable from the moment that he [Lestat] entered the room....Let me
say that when he'd finished speaking, no other decision was possible for
me." (13)
Katherine R
pursued by
not consciou
Thus, while
ties for exi
nism for a
freedom.
Through Lestat's influence, Louis finds it increasingly difficult to distin

guish between good and evil. Perhaps this conflation of good and evil
makes it easier for Louis to slip into the role of the vampire, to see good in
its evil. In persuading Louis to become a vampire, Lestat consciously
chooses language that blurs Judeo-Christian distinctions between good and
evil and thus moves the disoriented Louis closer to existentialism's relativ
ism. Lestat's pseudo-religious linguistic games are evident in his claim that
vampires' acts of killing enable them to "see a human life in its entirety"
and to have "a hand in the divine plan" (83). Sounding like a parody of Van
Heising, Lestat equates the Master with the anti-Master, sophistically pos
iting resemblances between vampires and God: "Evil is a point of view...God
kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and poorest, and
so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as
ourselves..." (89).
By seeing evil as a concept defined according to one's perspective, by
implicitly criticizing God's decision-making as random and indiscriminate,
and hence by subverting the concept of a God who sanctions moral beliefs
and conduct, Lestat is articulating existentialism's central tenet, as philoso
pher Robert G. Olson puts it: "each man will tend to become a law unto
himself [and]...choose for himself' (515). Louis gradually moves toward

creation of his own moral laws. Yet by weakening Louis's ability to choose,
Lestat also makes him question human responsibility for ethical behavior,
without which the universe is empty and chaotic. Caught between existen
tialist and postexistentialist views of life, Louis suffers moral paralysis.
Ironically, the very fact of his philosophical quest places Louis among
the morally and spiritually earnest citizens of our century. Unlike the anti
religious Undead in Dracula, Louis does not shrink from the crucifix after
he becomes a vampire and in fact "rather likes looking on crucifixes" (22).
Early in his vampiric life, he even visits a church, wistfully seeking a priest
for confession. He also seeks some theological answers to his questions
about God's mercy toward killers and His reason for the sacrilege of
allowing Louis to exist (148). That he winds up at the end of this scene
killing the priest in frustration and rage—a Nietzschean act confirming that
God is dead—does not lessen the intensity of his quest for a meaningful life
and for confirmation of the presence of good and evil principles in the
universe. By killing the priest, however, Louis relinquishes the Victorian
vestiges of his belief in a God and embraces the modern existential tenet of
individual moral responsibility. Like Nietzsche, Louis "thinks a human life
triumphant just insofar as it escapes from inherited descriptions of the
contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions" (Rorty 29); until
the end of the novel, Louis believes he can "create himself' and make his
life meaningful despite the constraints of his circumstances.
Louis's spiritual impulses are in contrast to those of Armand. Armand
denies the existence of gods and devils, calling Satan and God "these old
fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural" (240). Like
existentialist philosophers, Armand cites the self as the true repository of
authority: "the only power that exists is inside ourselves" (240). This power
includes the freedom to do good and evil and the responsibility to distin
guish one from the other. Knowing of this condition, Armand is able to
offer Louis no incentive for ethical conduct, only cynicism. Armand's
deepening cynicism is what assures his survival and makes him the world's
oldest vampire; Hennelly has suggested the same reason for Melmoth's
survival: "In the topsy-turvy world of existentialism...it is not the discov
erers of some good in the universe who survive, as much as it is the
guardians against such self-restricting delusion who fully choose not to be
blinded by the mere appearance of cosmic benevolence or divine provi
dence" (678).
At first Louis denies this "loss of absolutes," which according to Ramsland
had been a painful loss for Rice herself (187). When the ethical optimism
of Louis fades after Armand's lesson, however, readers expect that his quest
for meaning and hope of good will end and that he will completely abandon
himself to evil. Yet he has enough moral scruples and moral urgency left to
hesitate to fulfill Claudia's request that he turn her friend Madeleine into a
vampire. He resists performing this act of Sartreian "bad faith," that of
reifying Madeleine by trapping her in the vampiric role, which abolishes

her freedom. Claudia's angry response to Louis's refusal is also that of an
existentialist, as she points out that Louis is attempting to curb their right
to choose another path: "How dare you make this decision for both of us!"
Her anger also prompts her to malign Louis's vampiric "virility" and his
claim to freedom: "Your evil is that you cannot be evil" (263). Her allusion
here is to Louis's conflicting existences in the human and vampiric worlds,
to his persistent yearning for good, and to the impairment of his freedom:
his postexistentialist condition.
Although Louis is beginning to recognize that this conflicted condition
will doom him, even when he ultimately transforms Madeleine and gives up
the last traces of his humanness, he is still yearning to justify his existence;
he is still clinging tenuously to the notion that he has the freedom to do so,
and still actively probing into the heart of evil through Armand. He sees in
Armand "the only promise of good in evil of which I could conceive" (278)
even though Armand has taught him all the subtle gradations of evil and the
phenomenon of evil without guilt. Almost to the end, when his life has
virtually been destroyed, Louis resists with rueful self-derision Armand's
lesson on the absence of goodness, calling his resistance "that refusal to
compromise a fractured and stupid morality" (309). Eventually, however,
even a vampire becomes exhausted by the futility of the struggle and must
acknowledge irreducible restrictions on his freedom. With that acknowl
edgment, Louis becomes a postexistentialist.
Louis achieves the detached wisdom and moral indifference of the pure
vampire when he ends the quest and separates himself from those he has
cared for: Claudia (who has died) and Armand (who is dying). This is his
parting message to Armand: "I wanted love and goodness in this which is
living death....It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot
have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil....You can
only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom
goodness in its human form" (339-40). He had created a moral code in his
life, but attempts to follow it were futile; he cannot justify his life, as
Barnes would observe, because he cannot say that "he has freely chosen the
values by which he has guided and judged his life" (46). Surrendering moral
responsibility for his actions, this erstwhile existentialist accepts the con
straints of his nature.
Because he knows that he is constrained by his compulsion to kill, Louis
is now closer to postexistentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ethic of contin
gency, which acknowledges that one's ethics are related to the givens of
one's situation. In contrast to some earlier existentialists, Merleau-Ponty
says that "no one by himself is subject nor is he free, that freedoms interfere
with and require one another, that history is the history of their dispute,
which is inscribed and visible in institutions, in civilizations, and in the
wake of important historical actions" (205). While Sartre claims that only
men and things exist, Merleau-Ponty suggests that there is also "the interworld,
which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made"; all actions in this

interworld are symbolic and are constrained by other actions (200). Ameri
can philosopher Richard Rorty also recognizes the constraints of one's
historical situation, sees freedom "as the recognition of contingency
[and]...insist[s] on the sheer contingency of individual existence" (26).
Louis finally sees the operation of contingency on his life, realizes that he
is being acted upon by a world that condemns killing and by his internal
world of vampiric cravings, while at the same time he acts upon the world
both to satisfy these cravings and to perform ethical deeds. With these
conflicts hampering his freedom, he is more likely to act unethically, to fail
as an existentialist. Louis finally understands the problematic nature of
freedom and thereby names his postexistential condition.
Readers who interpret philosophically and metaphorically Louis's final
statement about love, goodness and vampirism (339-40) are left with nag
ging questions about the statement's applications to the human condition.
Is human morality stupid, or a mere phantom? Can we define good or evil?
Is our striving for morality as outmoded for us in our postexistential con
dition as it is for Louis, since we may, like him, be circumscribed by our
natures? Louis's quest may not provide unequivocal answers to important
metaphysical questions, but Rice does show readers how simplistic are their
usual conceptions of human nature and good and evil. She also demon
strates a postmodern mode of thinking by addressing questions about ethi
cal conduct in a more fluid and situational manner.
The second aspect of Interview with the Vampire that encourages an
existential interpretation of Louis's strivings and a postexistential perspec
tive on the human condition involves Rice's blurring of the distinctive
character traits of the human and the vampire in Louis, so that he experi
ences guilt about killing, divided allegiances, and alienation from both
humans and vampires. Unlike Stoker's vampires, who can move down the
Great Chain of Being, turning into wolf, bat or elemental dust, Louis
remains a vampire tied to humans and nostalgic about sunrises. He burns
"with the questions of [his] divided nature," like so many conflicted human
beings (80); as Ferraro puts it, he is "full of self-loathing and doubt...in
short [he is] Everyman Eternal" (67). Louis retains a human aversion to
killing and asserts his freedom to make an esthetic and moral decision when
he determines to satisfy his cravings by killing only animals. In such
decision-making, Louis enacts the human being who strives to repress his
baser instincts in order to perform higher intellectual and ethical tasks. He
behaves in accordance with the existential belief articulated by Alasdair
Maclntyre that peoples' freely made choices "bring whatever nature they
have into being" (149). Louis believes that he can determine the kind of
vampire he will become. We see him struggle to avoid the basic impulses
of vampiric nature, the characteristic detachment and the parasitical killing
instinct, in order to live a more human life.
Yet Louis's conception of humanity may be naive; postmodern philoso
phers like Rorty point out the parasitical nature of human life and its
incapacity to be independently willed: "one may say that there can be no
fully Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction, no
lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past and depen
dent on the charity of unborn generations" (42). Confused in his definition
of human nature, yet yearning to be human, Louis experiences an identity
crisis which puts him in what Karl Jaspers calls a "boundary situation," an
intense, unchangeable situation—such as endurance of suffering or guilt—
that we "cannot see through as a whole" and that we can avoid "only by
closing our eyes to [it]"; boundary situations are "like a wall we run into,
a wall on which we founder. We cannot modify them; all that we can do is
to make them lucid" (178-80). In his boundary situation, Louis accepts
responsibility for being a flawed vampire because he thinks and feels too
much; he is too human (254).
His human longings draw Louis to human culture and specifically to the
arts because they promise him "a deeper understanding of the human heart"
(321). Like Sartre, who in his earlier years was drawn to a literature yoked
to ethics (Barnes 39-40), Louis turns to the young journalist to help him
shape his life's story and extrapolate its moral significance. According to
Paul Jude Beauvais, Sartre sees the writer as "a unique volitional agent"
who dwells in a particular historical context and who desires to observe and
record his or her life and times; Sartre's writer is also shaped by member
ship in a social class (19, 20). Thus the writer embodies both existential
possibility and the prison of circumstances, a combination that reflects
Louis's existential/postexistential conflict and explains his attraction to the
journalist. As he speaks to the young writer, the otherness of Louis is
dispelled. MacAndrew has observed that this narrative arrangement encour
ages readers to give "imaginative assent" to the vampire's tale "of passions
that we can recognize" (249-50), to identify with Louis as if he were a
human being.
Louis also turns to other human arts, especially drama, when he visits the
Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. It is fitting that Rice brings Louis on a
pilgrimage to Paris, a major center both of art and of existentialist thought,
to seek justification of his existence. Although Louis kills, one of the few
acts that even Sartre would see as irredeemably evil, he still maintains this
human cultural framework, which encourages him to hope in his future
goodness. Surely goodness can grow in this rich soil, even though it has
been sown with the vampire's evil. Rice, until near the end of the novel,
leads readers to believe, with Louis, in such a possibility.
This possibility seems especially viable when readers consider the third
aspect of Rice's novel: the concepts of community and love, vampiric and
human, that Louis affirms and seeks. As MacAndrew points out, Rice
"explores the forms of human love and the nature of its relationships"
through Louis and the others (249). Ramsland also notes that through Louis
she depicts "the impetus in the human heart to seek others" (172). In
contrast to Stoker's Dracula, whom Wilt calls an isolato (87), Louis actively
seeks to end his painful isolation, the given condition of the existentialist.
He forges relationships, although ultimately unsatisfactory ones, first with
the woman Babette, then with Claudia, and finally with Armand. He also
experiences community both when he and Lestat live with Claudia, a curi
ously incestuous triangle, and when Madeleine forms a new triangle with
Claudia and Louis. Finally, he visits the vampire "commune" in Paris,
which enacts the negative traits of the extended nuclear family: unified by
kinship and conformity, it is also ravaged by jealousy, mistrust and power
struggles.
As Hennelly notes in his study of Melmoth, alienation and the failure of
love are common existential themes in Gothic literature: "Love does not
usually provide the needed release from the universal Angst-, rather it frus
tratingly highlights the failure of real communication" (674). His words
would also apply to the love life of Louis, on which he had hoped to build
a life of goodness. The frustration and disillusionment about love which
Hennelly describes become Louis's postexistential condition.
Louis's loneliness is most alleviated by Armand, for whom he feels a
deepening love: "it was as if the great feminine longing of my mind were
being awakened again to be satisfied" (237). Later he says, "I felt a longing
for him so strong that it took all my strength to contain it" (256). While Rice
uses sexual language to describe this love, sexual passion may also be a
metaphor for Louis's impassioned philosophical and intellectual searching:
he feels the deep love and admiration of an apprentice-philosopher for a
wise master and his stores of knowledge. For this love, however, Claudia
and Madeleine must eventually be sacrificed. This love between vam
pires—a reflection of love between human beings—can destroy those who
experience it. So-called humanizing love becomes the impetus for inhuman
ity, for acts of existential bad faith, for murder. All that the wise Armand
can, ultimately, teach Louis is the complexity of evil, just as Rice leads us
to realize that no good can emerge from the vampire.
Despite his initial hopes and longings, then, Louis finally confronts the
nothingness of the universe. When his relationship with Armand fails,
Louis understands that he is alone. His intention of creating a valuable
pattern for his life, which had included loving relationships, has not been
fulfilled; so, as Barnes would conclude, his existence has not been "worth
while" (107). He recognizes that he will never "grow warm again and filled
with love" (339). There comes a Kierkegaardian moment of "generalized
dread...of nothing in particular...[of] this nothing, this void we confront"
(Maclntyre 149). Then he takes up the vampire's stoic detachment, reject
ing the option of reaching out to others in love. He acknowledges his
postexistential condition, letting his vampirism now dictate his actions.
Louis's last hope is in reaching out, not in love but in despair, to the
journalist who might be able to make meaning out of his life's story for
other human beings. By speaking to the journalist, Louis hopes to warn
humans not to seek the eternal life of the vampire and to dispel the illusion
that they are free to shape their own destinies and to eschew evil. This
reaching out to the young writer also fails, it may be argued, since the
journalist's response to the story is to ask to be turned into a vampire too.
He would not have made this request if he had really understood Louis's
portrayal of the vampire's enslavement to his own nature.
Love and community have actually been Louis's downfall, not his salva
tion. Formerly Louis had mirrored the Victorian age in which he was born,
an age, Walter Houghton has observed, that replaced God with love as the
source of salvation. Louis had looked to love with great hope. Now, how
ever, having seen into the essence of love, he experiences a crushing fall
from "grace and faith [that] is the fall of a century" (288). This fall propels
him, philosophically speaking, into the postmodern world, where Rice
destabilizes Louis's and readers' usual categories of good and evil by
aligning love with eternal damnation.
Just before her death, Claudia is clear-eyed about the love between
vampires—love among the ruins of a moral structure. She teaches Louis
about vampiric love's quintessential evil, and he gives it a philosophical
dimension: "that is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love
each other...and who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of
compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could
do anything but destroy us?" (319). As one vampire peers into the soul of
another, he sees absolute evil and, if ethically motivated like Louis, he must
judge that soul as harshly as he judges himself. Barnes says of the existentialist's
vision, "my own judgments cannot move outward without an accompanying
inward movement. Consequently, I am always before the Bench. The eye of
Judgment is ever there" (78). Louis has, nevertheless, loved two vampires,
thereby denying his ability to judge himself or others and surrendering his
power to choose what is good over what is evil. Such postexistentialist
moral tolerance, needed for vampires' love, is defined by Claudia and Louis
as the vampires' permanently damning evil: it seems inhuman, a tolerance
of which humans would be incapable.
Or would they? Readers of Rice's novel have been drawn into this
postmodern world of the vampire so powerfully and have had their simplis
tic moral sensibilities so thoroughly "drained" that in their disorientation
they might be receptive to new objects of love and compassion, open to
more complex categorizings of good and evil and to new ways of explaining
the universe. Through the interview format, Rice has swayed us to suspend
our aversion toward the vampire, and in so doing leads us to question
assumptions about human nature and to re-envision the repositories of good
and evil in the world. Moreover, because Rice morally energizes the vam
pire Louis, we are inclined to reject the traditional compartmentalizing of
good and evil. Louis emerges as an appealing, remorseful, though obses
sive, killer: his obsessive need to kill makes him a victim of his nature, but
he struggles against this restriction of his freedom.
Under Rice's tutelage, therefore, persuaded by Louis's eloquence and the

poignancy of his struggle, we begin to recognize the legitimacy of the
vampire's quest for good in evil and evil in good. Yet by witnessing the
futility of Louis's struggle, we are also forced to surrender our naivete
about individual freedom. Ultimately we come to tolerate a postexistentialist
world view that emphasizes the relativity of morality, freedom and choice
in a universe wherein the only meaning is that which we ourselves must
construct, but which also vitiates our power to do so.
Rice's later vampiric fiction reveals the consistency of her interest in the
major philosophical questions of modern and postmodern times. In The
Vampire Lestat, especially, the protagonist from the beginning is a vampire
with a conscience, repelled by "the stories of the ugly nihilistic men of the
twentieth-century" (509) and seeking guidelines for moral choices, even in
selecting for his kills only remorseless evildoers. As Lestat's mentor the
ancient vampire Marius says, even seventeen hundred years ago vampires
were "questing...rejecting the answers given us"; but Lestat is unique
among mortals and immortals in his commitment to the quest for knowl
edge: "To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind....But you have
been truly asking" (380). Lestat, decrying the placelessness of the vampire's
evil nature and actions in the world, moves beyond the despairing conclu
sion of Rice's earlier novel. He finds a function for his evil condition,
which is to create "the art that repudiates evil," the music of rock stars that
"dramatize[s] the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself'
(10). Louis had had hopes for the efficacy of art, but his hopes had been
dashed by the failure of his relationship with Armand.
Through art and beauty Lestat in Rice's second novel takes up where
Louis leaves off. The work begins with his despairing observation that on
their deathbed people "probably don't find out the answer as to why [they]
were ever alive... .We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing"
(55). Then, however, he turns to the beauty that humankind creates, culti
vating an amoral wilderness that he calls the Savage Garden, " an uncharted
land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent
paradise without signposts of evil or good" (131). He suggests that mean
ings and guiding laws, derived from the esthetic, do exist (143). The Master
painter-vampire Marius becomes his role model, because Marius "found a
way to imitate mortal life....He created good things...he believed more in
the vistas of heaven that he painted than in himself' (310). Both Lestat and
Marius believe in the beauty and goodness of the world, and Lestat admires
Marius's efforts to stem the chaos that threatens to destroy the world: as he
sees it, this is a way for a vampire to achieve some good—to become a little
more lovable (335).
Lestat's amoral esthetic framework has a drawback, however: it encour
ages the Théâtre of the Vampires in Paris to "make a mockery of all things
sacred" (265) and it sanctions Lestat's plan to wage war against mortals as
the novel ends. Lestat uses his "Satanic powers to simulate the actions of
a good man!" In other words, Lestat has the moral conscience of an exis
tentialist, but he redefines the conscience as something that prompts the
individual to do whatever he or she wants. Since art has limited redemptive
force, Lestat also considers the salvational powers of love. Like some of
Rice's other vampires, he believes in and longs for love, even while declar
ing that "it's a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love!" (231).
A vampire seeks companionship and love because he cannot stand being
alone as a killer (425), because he cannot accommodate death easily or
name a place for evil in the world (446). Yet even with his impulse for love
and goodness fighting his evil instincts, he emerges at the end of the novel
without a system of ethics and, like Louis, with a postexistentialist sense
that his freedom to choose is circumscribed by his thirst for blood and the
vagaries of history. In her second novel Rice is more optimistic about the
value of art and love than in the first novel, but she still does not fully trust
that they will offer a meaningful life.
Lestat, nevertheless, continues his existential quest and asserts his free
dom to break the rules of vampires; as Ferraro has observed, "in Lestat's
search for the meaning of existence, he gleefully breaks them all" (28).
There is a comedic quality to his outlook that is missing from Louis's view.
Even though Lestat knows that vampires, like mortals, are "prisoners of
circumstance" (Ferraro 67), he is not as burdened by such knowledge as
Louis had been. With a satirist's humor, he describes his mission to create
new evil in rock music, with its "images of evil, not evil...[its] image of
death, not death": "So let us take on a new meaning...I crave the divine
visibility. I crave war [with mortals]...the new evil...the twentieth-century
evil" (531). In seeing evil as shaped by the historical moment that makes
rock music its fit vehicle, Lestat mirrors Sartre's post-World War II blend
of Marxism and existentialism which, as Beauvais has observed, leaves "a
margin of freedom...for individuals to act in ways that contradict their
social conditioning"; Beauvais suggests that for Sartre, "self and society are
mutually determining: history makes man, but man makes history" (13, 14).
More than Louis, Lestat in Rice's second novel persists in his existentialist
quest, despite his postexistentialist recognition of constraints.
Whatever tentative conclusions Lestat reaches at the end of his tale about
the conditions of individual freedom, purposes of evil, and influences of
history on existence, the vampiric quest for meaning and philosophical
questioning continues in the ensuing Vampire Chronicles. In Rice's 1988
novel, The Queen of the Damned, which revisits the power struggles of the
vampires and depicts Queen Akasha's efforts to defeat Lestat, Ramsland
observes the existentialist concern with "'paradox, free will, personal choice'"
(qtd. in Ferraro 67). Moreover, Rice's metaphysical speculations are even
present in her nonvampiric erotic novels, such as Exit to Eden (1985) and
Belinda (1986), written under the pen name of Anne Rampling, and The
Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), written under the name A.N. Roquelaure.
In these works Rice uses a less supernatural but still fantastical medium and
continues to explore issues of freedom and moral choice. Indeed, in these
works, she suggests that intimate sexual relations and vampirism have many
things in common.
In Exit to Eden, for example, instead of describing vampires who create
and possess mortals through the Dark Trick, Rice depicts mortals who
possess one another by fuelling sexual fantasies and desires and who obtain
sexual fulfillment through pain and pleasure. A sadomasochistic fantasy
island of the Club-Med variety is the site of the elaborate slave/master sex
games that transform patrons and employees of the Club into uncivilized,
almost supernatural, creatures. Like the vampires who feel their victims'
hearts beating as they suck their blood, the participants in the Club's
sadomasochistic rituals experience an intimacy in which "you reached out
and touched the beating heart of the person" (13).
This context prompts the "head sex-manager" Lisa to question her own
morality and the objectives of the other island "professionals," as well as to
explore philosophical alienation and the degree of freedom available to the
individual. Lisa confesses to having felt like a freak, a sexual outlaw, as a
younger woman because of her sexual feelings and fantasies. Every bit as
lost and marginalized as Rice's vampires, Lisa suggests that perhaps "we are
all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness
of normality that is just a myth" (6). Questioning her mentor Martin about
her creation of an "Outsider Heaven" on the island, she echoes the questions
about identity and earthly purpose raised by vampires and existentialists: "Is
what we do right, Martin? Or is it evil? Are we the good thing that we tell
ourselves we are, are we the healthy thing we say we are to others? Or are
we some evil, twisted thing that never should come to be?" (278). The
tentative conclusion she reaches before the book's romantic, love-affirming
ending is that by channeling aggressive, violent feelings into harmless sexual
fantasizing and game-playing, the Club people may save the world from war.
Lisa's quest leading to this conclusion begins with an episode that sug
gests the existentialist's sensation of exile, fear of the borders of freedom,
and interrogation of the meaning of work and life. Returning from a vaca
tion, Lisa's plane has to circle for a long time before landing; that is, she
has psychic and literal difficulty re-entering the island—"no entry" instead
of "no exit"—and feels as if she is experiencing "an existentialist play.
There is my world down there but I cannot get into it. Maybe it is all
something I've imagined" (12). As the narrative progresses, however, the
nightmare recedes. The search for love by Lisa and her lover Elliott recalls
the yearning for companionship of Louis, Lestat and Armand; their explo
ration of freedom is similar to the rebellious paths that were taken by Louis
(as autobiographer) and Lestat (as rock star). Whereas the vampires failed
in their quest, however, Lisa and Elliott ultimately succeed.
The clue to their success is suggested by Martin, who encourages Lisa to

claim both freedom AND love: "very few of us anymore get through life
without a dramatic bid for freedom....But most of us never really reach our
goal. We get stuck halfway between the morass of myth and morality we
left behind and the Utopia on which we've set our sights....You've scored
your victories [freedom in sexual behavior without being denounced for
sinfulness]...but if you think you cannot love Elliott, you've paid an aw
fully high price at the same time'" (289). This couple eventually enjoy their
freedom together, in contrast to the vampires, who make the victim/lover's
surrender of freedom the necessary condition for fulfilling their own goals.
Lisa and Elliott carve out a Utopian world of love for themselves under their
own rules of moral behavior.
In certain ways, therefore, Exit to Eden is a philosophically naive throw
back to pre-nihilist impulses of the earlier nineteenth century, whereas
Rice's vampiric fiction is a provocative harbinger of more complex postmodern
philosophizing. Although Rice may have tried to write a conceptually
sophisticated novel in Exit to Eden and failed, it is likely, instead, that she
has simply taken a brief respite from her bleak vision of our condition on
this planet. Her overall artistic mission and greatest intellectual energies
seem directed toward the metaphysical questions and grim answers of her
Vampire Chronicles. In Interview with the Vampire, especially, Rice pre
sents with fervor a profound exploration of freedom, moral constraints and
contingency in order to prepare us for the philosophical issues that face us
on the darkling plain of the twenty-first century.
WORKS CITED
Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, 1967.

Beauvais, Paul Jude. "Sartre's Plea and the Purposes of Writing." Pre/Text 10.1-
12-31.
Ferraro, Susan. "Novels You Can Sink Your Teeth Into." New York Times Magazine (14 Oct.
1990): 27-28.
Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. "Melmoth the Wanderer and Gothic Existentialism." Studies in
English Literature 21.4 (1981): 665-79.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957.
Hume, Robert D. "Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Variet
ies of Negative Romanticism." Thompson 109-27.
Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy. Vol. 2. 1932. Trans. E.B. Ashton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970.
Kuhn, Helmut. "Existentialism." A History of Philosophical Systems. Ed. Vergilius Ferm.
New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950. 405-17.
MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1979.
Maclntyre, Alasdair. "Existentialism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol 3. New York: Macmillan,

1967. 147-54.
Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer. 1820. Intro, by William F. Axton. Lincoln: U
Nebraska P, 1961.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic. Trans. Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern UP, 1973.
Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

Olson, Robert G. "Nihilism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5. New York: Macmillan,
1972. 514-17.
Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Dutton,
1991.
Rice, Anne [Anne Rampling], Exit to Eden. New York: Dell, 1986.
Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine, 1976.
"A Talk with Anne Rice." Interview by Charles Winecoff. Book of the Month
Club News (Dec. 1990): 11.
The Vampire Lestat. New York: Ballantine, 1986.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1816. New York: Signet, 1965.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. New York: New American Library, 1965.
Thompson, G.R. "Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition." The Gothic Imagi
nation: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974.
Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

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Postexistentialism in the Neo-Gothic Mode: Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire"

Author(s): BARBARA FREY WAXMAN

BARBARA FREY WAXMAN

Serious philosophical questioning, ethical inquiry, struggles of individuals

From its beginnings as a subgenre emerging with the development of

There are three ways, in particular, that Rice encourages readers to

"And so you decided to become a vampire?" [the interviewer] asked....

Through Lestat's influence, Louis finds it increasingly difficult to distin

himself [and]...choose for himself' (515). Louis gradually moves toward

reifying Madeleine by trapping her in the vampiric role, which abolishes

which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made"; all actions in this

Under Rice's tutelage, therefore, persuaded by Louis's eloquence and the

The clue to their success is suggested by Martin, who encourages Lisa to

Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, 1967.

Maclntyre, Alasdair. "Existentialism." Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol 3. New York: Macmillan,

Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

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