Digital Alterity

I just posted an article from a new author here on Bactroid.net—my friend Jeremy. I found his article quite interesting and it raised a lot of questions in my mind.

Levinas, the mentor who started Derrida on the way down the postmodern/deconstructionist path, says that we attain existence in the daily face-to-face meeting with the an Other. Will our very interaction with computer personalities help them attain our current philosophical definition of what it means to exist? Or will we go back to a Cartesian ethos that requires the machines to be self-aware? Who would judge sentience in such a case?

Reminds me of Sharon Apple from Macross Plus, actually.

All of this makes me miss Jeremy and Leah very much. I didn’t know them for very long when they left for California, but I don’t hesistate to call them friends. At least every other day, I think about how nifty it was when they lived in the same apartment complex as Allyson and I, and it makes me want to just head off to California.

I feel like I’ve left so many friends behind in my life because of some misguided attempt to adapt to my life experiences of moving around when I was little. I don’t want to lose any more.

Okay. End of ChangeLog. I’ve gone from melancholy contemplation to the absolutely maudlin.

While going through the large quantity of sheer crap that I’ve accumulated all through college and high school, I came across this passage in my notes taken for my Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature class . If I recall correctly, I had been up very late the night before writing a paper for another course, leaving me in this bizarre semi-awake state in which I cared about very little. I found it entertaining and thought I’d publish it here. Just remember: you can’t have psychoanalysis without anal.

How much is that doggie in the window?
The one with the foam in his mouth—
Oh, my God! Get him off my leg!!

General confession is not acceptable. Vague apology is not admissible.

Strong emotions—strong reactions—strong possibility for pain.

Psychopunk. That’s a fun word. I just made it up.

I really should get some sleep. Strange ideas are brewing in my head. Writing in cursive is such a pain.

I would sure like to make Dean’s List again. Actually, I’d really like to just make it out of this semester in one piece.

A coven of Christians feeding on the blood of Christ. How vampiric of me. Another hour?!? AUUUGHHH!!!

I would love to relax for a while. My new desktop on the computer is really neat. I should update the links in the drop-down box. Sleep = good…Emotional breakdown = bad. I’ll make it through. You see, I’m a psychopunk.

Girls are so cool. I wish I could explain why. The physical proportions of women are just so pleasing to look at. I know that I could look at them all day. Of course, that would be somewhat bizarre and sociopathic. I would just like to find a girl who could tolerate and love me on a daily basis. This is somewhat difficult—being a psychopunk and all.

We seem to be talking about female sexual organs again in this class. Yippee. I’m taking notes. Sex seems to permeate psychoanalysis. We talk more about sex in this class than I did in health class. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. I’m quite tired; I don’t know.

Feminists seem to talk more in class than other girls. That’s a stereotype. I shouldn’t do that. Oh, well. “I don’t lack a penis. I have something different.” Well, duh! I happen to have a penis. I’m told that can be a bad thing in English departments these days.

How did I get off on that discussion? Yes, yes, yes, I’m a guy. I adore and revere women. They are much (about a million times) cooler than I could ever aspire to be.

New subject. Have I mentioned that I’m a psychopunk?

Mello Yello gives you a sudden sugar boost, and then you get tired again. It’s getting kind of warm since we turned the air off and opened the windows. I think that may be contributing to my fatigue.

I’d like to get married one day. I’d like to be in a loving relationship; but, as time rolls on, I feel more and more like that will never happen. I’m 18. By the time my dad was 18, he was already married with a kid on the way (or maybe already there). I feel so terribly lonely and empty lately. I don’t feel like I am a complete person. I’m only part of a person that sits around and feels nothingness. From reading Levinas, I know that there is always already something. I know from reading the Bible that the something is God or—perhaps better stated in the language of John—the Word. Knowing this, I still feel empty in a way that I describe as nothingness.

More and more, I find myself believing that men and women really do need each other. It’s both Structural and Levinasian. Men and women can’t exist without each other. They are defined by each other. However, I don’t believe that one should be privileged over the other. (Even though I personally believe that women are much cooler than us…I can’t escape from my own gender so my opinions will always be tainted by it.)

There is a bee in the window. That terrifies me. I wish it would go away. Bees scare me. I would really like to leave. Technically it’s time to go anyway. People are packing up. I will, too. That way I can get away from the bee.

You simply cannot consider yourself well-read until you’ve read Anne Rice and learned to love her tragically beautiful characters and sensual, lush discourse.

Technorati Tags: Anne Rice

This is actually a paper that I wrote for the Foundations of Education course that I took during my last year of undergraduate work when I was pondering the possibility of becoming a teacher. The subtitle of this work is “Questioning the Answers Underlying Teaching and Respecting the I/Other Paradigm of Existence” which immediately tells those who have studied the works of Emmanuel Levinas that essays like “Time and the Other” were a major influence on this paper. I don’t claim that these methods would actually work in practice, but I would be extremely interested in seeing them tried in a charter school of some sort.

Formal Explanation: What are Critical Theory and Existentialism?

In his introduction to the seminal collection of critical theory entitled Critical Theory Since Plato, Hazard Adams writes, “The story of critical theory is a part of that intellectual and cultural history by which we come to know a certain dimension of ourselves.” This single statement illustrates a connection between our current view of critical theory and twentieth century existentialism that our textbook seems to ignore. The simple truth is that critical theory isn’t all about Marx and conflict (as the textbook would have us believe). Rather, it is about asking the underlying questions that define the existence that we are all forced into. Critical theory is about asking the questions that have been ignored because of statements like “It is a known fact that…” or “One can see the obvious nature of…”

Adams in his introduction also makes it quite clear that Marxism is only one of several theories now vying for space in critical theory anthologies. Marxism and the ideals of conflict are certainly one valid paradigm of viewing the world in contemporary critical theory. However, it is a theory which emphasizes the idealism of critical theory as a philosophic discipline. The theories of Marx revolve around the concept that there is a hierarchical relationship between any two objects seeking to exist in the same space. In a Marxist view, a society must value one class over another - namely the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. From this hierarchy stems the need for conflict as the paradigm of existence. However, many postmodern thinkers have moved beyond this notion classes must be warring. In fact, many postmodern theorists have rejected the notion that the underlying structure of society must necessarily be a hierarchy of rigidly defined objects or classes.

One of the most impressive answers to Marx and the entire philosophy of conflict is Emmanuel Levinas, a postmodern Jewish philosopher and theologian. Levinas was the teacher of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstructionism as a critical school. Levinas’ theories revolve around the notion that it is the other person who we meet face-to-face that wills us into existence. In a Levinasian model, the conflicting classes are replaced with two separate objects - the “I” and the “Other”. In this model, the I has an infinite responsibility to the Other for calling the self into existence. Levinas’ philosophy is a special kind of existentialism which moves beyond the existentialism defined in our textbook. In Levinas’ mind we are no longer “being toward death” as the Heidegger-based view of textbook would have us believe. It is not a recognition of the futility of existence in the face of death which is the crisis of existence; rather, it is the realization that existence precedes us and that existence continues to exist even in the nothingness of darkness. Levinas would say that it is this infinite responsibility for the Other and the existence it provides that is the true horror of existence.

The Levinasian viewpoint gives us a path into critical theory that doesn’t depend on Marxist conflict. I myself have used the theories of Levinas in many of my critical theory courses to define a system of “liquid structures” - effectively combining the structuralism dominant just prior to the postmodern era with the theories of alterity defined in the work of Levinas. According to this system, objects typically fall into a binary relationship. For example, consider the concepts of north and south. Asking a student to define the concept of north without using the concept of south is a rather impossible task. The student might try to explain the concept of magnetic north, but even in that case, the concept would be relative to your surroundings - namely the planet that the observer is on. The simple truth is that we define south and north as opposites of each other. They are polar opposites. This was the main thrust of the structuralist view of critical theory. According to those theories, this structure was rigidly defined based on natural laws governing the nature of the universe. Applying Levinas to this model, we realize that even though the concepts are defined by each other (much like the I/Other opposition), the actual definitions themselves might be constantly changing. In the instance of man/woman, for instance, the definition of man need not be rigidly defined. At any given moment, the concept of woman is the opposite of man (and equally vice versa), but the definitions themselves are constantly shifting with a changing society much like water alters itself according to the container in which it inhabits. In this way, even though critical theory is according to this essay primary an existentialist exercise, it also contains some of the pragmatism of Dewey, constructing at each moment a system that constantly changes with the society studied.

Applications of Critical Theory and Existentialism to the Classroom

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and designer of the Apple I and II, decided after ten years of working with Apple that it was time to leave the business of building computers in favor a far more personal approach. Multi-millionaire Steve “Woz” Wozniak left the corporate world to become a teacher. Every day he teaches fifth- and eighth-graders how to use computers as a medium for their creativity. Woz was unable to continue plodding along in the corporate world because he felt a responsibility to teach children that must be the center of alterity teaching.

The fundamental assertion of my teaching philosophy is that a teacher is infinitely responsible to the children they teach because it is the kids that call that teacher into existence. Put more simply, without kids who needed to be taught there would be no need for teachers. This responsibility should be made manifest in a respect for all students. Because the teacher is indebted to the children and responsible for them, the teacher who follows my alterity teaching methods must always be willing to do what needs to be done to help the individual student. In fact, the whole method might be summed up in the notion that individuality of the student must be protected at the same time that the individual student learns to respect and is responsible for the individuality of the others.

Each student must be regarded as an individual since violating the individuality of a person is analogous to grasping him or her and rending them into pieces. Forced conformity is violence in the classroom of an alterity teacher and must be treated in like manner. In the words of Ralph W. Emerson, “Who so shall be a man must be a non-conformist.” Children must be encouraged to express themselves according to their own personal interests. A prime example of curriculum planning in an alterity classroom in which many of the children are interested in the Internet and the World-Wide Web would be to allow the children to set up their own individual web pages - taking the time to learn HTML-coding, the principles of web server hosted content, good writing skills, as well as the information to be contained on the page. Alterity teaching must be an interdisciplinary approach in which the interests of the individual students dictate the subjects drawn into the primary curriculum. For this reason, the teacher best suited to teach in the alterity classroom would be either someone who has studied a cross-curriculum blend of subjects within liberal arts and sciences or someone who has been employed in the private sector where a blend of personal skills are used to achieve corporate goals.

This respect for the individual also influences the way that assignments are completed. Forced grouping isn’t encouraged in the alterity classroom since that practice forces students to stifle their own individuality to reach a group consensus. Teacher-generated grouping encourages the act of grasping and pillaging the ideas of other students. Highly social students with a more forceful personality have a tendency to take charge of other more reserved students in order to realize their own personal vision. Groups aren’t discouraged however. Students should be free to form their own alliances in producing their projects, mirroring the way adults chose with whom they are to associate and work.

Students should be encouraged to share not only the final results of their projects but also the methods they used to arrive at those results. This spirit of openness and sharing of methodology serves a dual purpose. First, it prepares students for the trend that corporate society is moving toward in the twenty-first century. The “open source” movement, in which programmers share their computer code with other programmers, is just one example of this emerging trend in business and technology. Second, this sharing of information calls to focus the methods themselves, a central notion of critical theory. Teachers are encouraged to have students think about why a student chose to do something one way as opposed to another way. In fact, “why” would be the dominant question word within a critical theory focused classroom.

Students should be prepared to understand the why of a given situation to prepare them for their future roles in society. The goal of an English teacher in alterity teaching should be to teach students the simple ability to ask why an author wrote what they wrote whether that author wrote Antigone or an editorial in the local paper. The goal of a history teacher should be to evaluate why we consider the events we study to be historical or important. The goal of a physics teacher should be to help students understand why the universe follows certain patterns but also to help them question why we chose to explain those physical forces governing the universe in the way that we did. Students shouldn’t be trained to merely accept without questioning, but sadly that is precisely what is happening in classrooms all over. Students are encouraged to classify themselves according to what group they resemble most in much the same way that they classify plants or animals in biology. Students are encouraged to simply conform to the nationalistic ideals that they are force-fed in their history and government classes. Students are told by the very structure of our educational system that art and technology are separate entities. Students are forced to forsake their own creativity by a system that marginalizes that which deviates from the norm. In contrast, alterity teaching rewards originality and a unique approach. It rewards those who dare to ask why a system is in place and what the system’s existence says about those who put it into place.

Both grading and curriculum in the classroom of an alterity teacher also reflects the individuality of the student. An absolute scale should be regarded as violence. A system in which a child is judged based on the abilities and results of the other children leads to a competition among students. I simply cannot count the number of times in high school that the other students asked me what I made on an assignment. Because I routinely fell at the top of the grading scale, students were using me as a ruler that they could judge themselves by. This sort of competition must be minimized in the classroom of an alterity teacher since it only serves to preserve the conflict that is the center of Marxism and is in direct conflict with the interdependence of the I/Other relationship. Failure at a task shouldn’t always mean a failing grade either. The method is perhaps more important that the end result. The means are infinitely more important than the end.

Projects and assignments should also be as individual as is possible. Students with special needs should be given assignments which are tailored to their individual needs and abilities. Gifted students, for example, should be given tasks which challenge their abilities in fields that stimulate their interest since they have a tendency to stagnate when placed in an environment that promotes mediocrity. If a student will only give what a teacher expects of them, the teacher’s expectations should be high and tailored to the student’s interests and abilities. For example, the most important skills I learned in AP Calculus had nothing to do with calculus. My friend Christian and I would do our class work as fast as we could so that we could use the school’s computers in the computer lab where we had class. We occupied our time finding security flaws in the software and hacking into the school’s computer network. Our calculus teacher, seeing our interest and ability, started using us to locate and log security holes that other students might exploit for malicious intentions. Without a teacher who guided our possibly harmful behavior to a positive end, Christian or I might have ended up in serious trouble. Of course, the pendulum swings both ways. Gifted students shouldn’t be given more emphasis than other students. In fact, in an alterity classroom, the concepts “gifted” and “retarded” should fade. Curriculum and evaluation are as individual as the children themselves.

The goal of alterity teaching is to instruct students not simply in how to “be”. Rather it should teach them about how to actually exist. It should teach them both individuality and a responsibility to the individuality of everyone else. Perhaps most importantly it should teach them to question the answers and realize that “truth” is usually nothing more than opinion.

Bibliography

Adams, Hazard. “Introduction.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. This is perhaps the most ambitious critical theory anthology to date. Adams seeks to trace the development of critical theory as a discipline from Plato all the way up through the present day. In such an ambitious work, the introduction from the editor is highly important. It sets forth the ideals and principles that guided the selection of pieces for the anthology. Toward the end of the article, Adams also discusses the current state of critical theory, which helped provide evidence that our textbook’s assertion that critical theory as a philosophy must necessarily deal with Marxist thought and conflicting ideas.

Freiberger, Paul and Michael Swaine. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, 2nd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. This book detailing the development of the personal computer from large tube-based mainframe computers all the way up the present day PC that resides on most desktops provided me with the story of Steve Wozniak. The chapter near the end of the work “Woz’s Way” provided the story outlined in this paper. Taken in the context of Woz’s talented life, the story is even more powerful, and I would encourage you to review the work.

Levinas, Emmanuel. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996. From this book came the main thrust of my information. All of the information related to Emmanuel Levinas comes from this volume. Rather than being one large text formulated by Levinas, it is actually a collection of his essays and lectures. The sources primarily used in this text were “Time and the Other,” which yielded the main points of the I/Other paradigm and “There is: Existence Without Existents,” which provided refutation of the assertion in the book that we are existing in angst because of death that the book used as a basis of existentialism.

Here’s an paper that I wrote for one of my undergraduate Critical Theory courses. I’ve always been intrigued by the Feminist theory as well as other body theory—especially as a response or way around the dilemma of Deconstructionism. This paper is actually light on theory in my opinion, using it only as an explorative tool to plunder a narrative. Keep in mind that this written to complete an assignment in which I had to demonstrate my knowledge of a particular school of critical thought by examing a text through my chosen school’s critical methodology.

What is feminism? This is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down since feminist discourse borrows a lot of ideas from other theoretical schools.(1) In feminist thought, you’ll find the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, the Structuralist concept of the sign, and the fluidity and subjectiveness of Deconstruction just to single out a few. There is also a great deal of variation within the feminist school. Some feminists focus on rediscovering the work of women whose work has been lost in our androcentric culture while others prefer to take a new look at older established male authors from a female schema. Some feminists (like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous) wish to focus on the body while others tended to focus more on the literary text.(2) Contemporary Feminism has concerned itself with all manner of critical issues from women’s role in the postcolonial to femininity as a masquerade.(3)

How, then, can we pin down such a diverse critical method? I believe the solution lies in applying the method to a literary work. The best way to explore the feminist method is to apply some of its aspects to a central literary text. For this application of the feminist method, I can think of no better work than Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Interview with the Vampire is an excellent text for exploring the feminist critical method because of its recurring theme of vampirism as the feminine. In this essay, I will take up three of these feminist themes. First, I will explore Interview with the Vampire’s connection with Elaine Showalter’s three stages of women’s writing as an allegorical journey from one phase to the next. Next, I will focus on the body as I explore the multiplicity of vampiric desire and pleasure and some of the ramifications of that multiplicity. Finally, I will turn to vampirism as motherhood and the concept of matriarchy latent in Ricean vampirology.

Interview with the Vampire as a Feminine Journey

In her essay “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine Showalter categorizes the whole of women’s literature in three stages: Feminine, Feminist, and Female. In the Feminine phase (from about 1840 to about 1880), women tried to imitate their male counterparts. The era was characterized by the absorption of male ideas - even those concerning female natures. The next phase, the Feminist stage dominated women’s literature from about 1880-1920. In this stage, the accommodating nature of the feminine gave way to the more aggressive posture of the feminist. Masculine ideas and conventions were rejected in favor of Amazonian utopias. In the final stage, the Female, which has continued from 1920 to the present day, women no longer concerned themselves with imitation and rejection, the two forms of dependence that characterized the first two stages. Instead, women draw on their unique female experiences to create a unique women’s literature - a Female Aesthetic.(4) It is easy to see a parallel to Showalter’s feminine journey in Interview with the Vampire. Louis, too, progresses from the submissive acquiescence of the Feminine to the autonomy of the Female.

When Louis is first born into darkness, his senses awaken. Louis sees the world in a completely different way. At first, Louis’ new senses are confusing. Sounds, for example, all run together in a very fluid manner. This is reminiscent of Patricia Waugh’s essay “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics.” In Waugh’s essay, female subjectivity is defined by a fluid notion of self and one’s environment. In Waugh’s concept of female existence, well-defined boundaries of the self are abandoned in favor of an intersubjectivity in which barriers have little meaning. This intersubjectivity often seems chaotic to male modernists and postmodernists.(5) In much the same way, Louis finds the new fluidity of his senses, at first, to be “confusing, each sound running into the next sound…”(6)

These new senses seem to allow even male vampires stunning insight into the female mind. Louis, for example, forges a new relationship with his sister. He tells us, “It was only now as a vampire that I did come to now my sister”. This new relationship is based on communication and openness. Louis learns of his sister’s “secret thoughts and dreams, those little fantasies she dared tell no one.”(7) Rice’s vampires are also very good listeners - a trait that we see best in Louis’ conversation with Armand:

I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened and listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on everything said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse - the things which make dialogue impossible.(8)

This skill with passive communication further allies vampires with femininity. Ricean vampires - at least those other than Lestat in Interview with the Vampire - don’t constantly interrupt their listeners with their ideas. Instead they focus completely on what is being said. This may be because of the telepathy which vampires other than Louis and possibly also Claudia possess.(9) With this telepathy, vampires wouldn’t have to constantly interrupt for clarification. They would grasp the meaning beyond the mere words someone was speaking.

In this confusion and awe of being a fledgling vampire, Louis first attempts to emulate Lestat, his creator - a task at which he fails miserably. He and Lestat are simply two completely different beings. Louis continues to have a lingering respect for human life that Lestat doesn’t seem to possess. Louis instead falls to feeding on rats. In his failed attempt to emulate Lestat, Louis is in Showalter’s Feminine stage.

The birth of Claudia brings a decidedly feminist turn to the novel. We learn very little about Claudia throughout the novel. Nina Auerbach has gone so far as to suggest that Claudia may even be an allegorical figure.(10) Claudia is the catalyst which will bring Louis into the new era of feminism.(11) It is she who incites Louis to revolt against Lestat; and, in doing so, she is part of a larger Western tradition of the disruptive woman - a tradition that is almost demonic - which seems to be at the root of feminism. Claudia is out to break down the patriarchy in which she is imprisoned by striking out against Lestat(12) and also by becoming Louis’ lover - a point which Auerbach doesn’t take up. The apparent death of Lestat in New Orleans and Louis and Claudia’s voyage to the Old World mark the end of the feminine stage and the journey into the feminist stage.

Louis enters the final Female stage when he accepts his individual nature with Armand. In order to enter the Female stage, however, Louis must leave his Feminist stage behind since it is still another form of dependence. That means that Claudia must be left behind if Louis is ever to reach the final stage of his journey. It becomes apparent that Louis is bound to Claudia so completely as a paramour(13) that only death can separate them. It is, then, necessary for Claudia to die so that Louis can progress. To enter into this stage which is characterized by acceptance, Louis must also accept Armand’s offer to travel with and learn from him. When Louis finally accepts Armand’s offer after Claudia’s death with a request to visit the Louvre, the patient Armand “thought it a very simple request” and wonders “why [Louis] had waited so long.”(14)

It seems important to note that Louis doesn’t fully achieve fullfillment of the Female stage until his eventual separation from Armand. At this point, Louis is finally autonomous. Louis finally confirms this independence near the end of the novel when he denies Lestat’s request to learn from him. Louis no longer needs the oppressive masculinity of Lestat, the combative nature of Claudia, or even the quiet comradeship of Armand. Louis has achieved the fluid intersubjectivity with the environment around him that Waugh was writing about. He has become his own coven.

It is interesting that Louis progresses to each stage through either a death or a perceived death. Louis passes from humanity to the femininity of vampirism through his own death and rebirth into darkness. Louis next escapes the Feminine stage by Lestat’s apparent death at Claudia’s hand. Finally, Louis enters into the Female stage with the death of Claudia and progresses deeper with the loss of Armand.

The Multiplicity of Desire and Pleasure

Anne Rice’s vampires possess a sensuality that many other vampires in the vampire tradition (Stephen King’s vampires from Salem’s Lot come to mind) lack. This sensuality brings with it a focus on the body. This focus on the body and sensuality also seems to point to a certain feminism in Anne Rice’s vampirology.

Luce Irigaray has a great deal to say about the body in her discussion of jouissance, or sexual pleasure. Irigaray says that women’s jouissance is more diverse than men’s. Whereas men only have the outlet of phallic pleasure, women find jouissance “just about everywhere” on their bodies. This multiplicity of pleasure leads women to write in a more multiple language than men exhibit.(15)

Using Irigaray’s concepts as a basis, we find yet another masculine/feminine dichotomy in the Lestat/Louis relationship. Lestat seems to have one unitary pleasure in Interview with the Vampire - the kill. Feeding, in Ricean vampirology, is an almost sexual experience. Like sex, the kill is also an expression of love: “For vampires, physical love culminates and is satisfied in only one thing, the kill.”(16) When Louis feeds on Claudia, his heart rate increases “with no hope of cease.”(17) Lestat finds great pleasure in the kill. He tells Louis, “I like to do it…I enjoy it.”(18)

Louis, however, has multiple sources of pleasure which Lestat either doesn’t possess or doesn’t perceive. Louis’ vampire sight causes him to become “so enamored with [the moon] that I must have spent an hour there [looking at it].” With this new vampire sight, Louis had found that “all things had changed.”(19) Louis also indirectly alludes to the tactile pleasures of vampirism in his conversation with the boy about the superstitions of the vampire tradition. The boy inquires whether Louis is capable of transforming into steam and passing through a keyhole. Louis tells him that he can’t but “I wish I could…How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shape.”(20) Sound is yet another source of pleasure for Louis. Louis refers with a smile to first hearing Lestat’s laughter with vampire senses as “peals of laughter…peals of bells”.(21) This is not to say that Louis derives no pleasure from the kill. On the contrary, Louis “never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands.”(22) Louis, however, never loses his respect for human life. This difference between Louis and Lestat is best evidenced in the passage where Louis is describing the death of the overseer that he had to witness before he became a vampire:

Lestat was laughing, telling me callously that I would feel so different once I was a vampire that I would laugh, too. He was wrong about that. I never laugh at death, no matter how often and regularly I am the cause of it.(23)

This multiplicity of language that comes out of the multiplicity of pleasure often simply isn’t translatable into logocentric Western languages. Rice shows the impossibility of rendering the chaos of multiplicity in our inherently logocentric language in Louis’ inability to speak of vampirism using words. Louis first encounters this dilemma when he tries to explain his peculiar state of undeath to the boy. He finally resorts to telling the boy “I can’t really make this clear to you for the obvious reason that you are now as I was before my body died. You cannot understand.”(24) Vampires cannot fully commune with humans because they don’t have the vampire experience.(25) Any attempt at communion between vampires and mortals is doomed to fail because vampirism is simply too intense for human comprehension.(26) Since humans cannot experience what it means to be a vampire, the burden falls to our logocentric language, which is doomed to failure. Vampires, like their female counterparts, must be defined as “other” in Western society.

Vampiric Motherhood

In psychoanalytic theory, one achieves maturity when he regards the mother as simply an object by which he obtains existence.(27) With this theory in mind, let’s take a look at Louis first few moments as a vampire. The first thing Louis sees after he is born into darkness is Lestat, his creator. It is through that first look that Louis explores his new “vampire eyes.” Louis learns about his new existence by looking at Lestat:

I saw as a vampire…Lestat was standing again at the foot of the stairs, and I saw him as I could not have seen him before…now I saw him filled with his own life and own blood: he was radiant, not luminous. And then I saw that not only had Lestat changed, but all things had changed.(28)

Lestat in the above passage is in a mother role. He is the first person Louis sees after being reborn as a vampire. He is also the way in which Louis will define himself throughout his early years. Lestat is what Louis will try to be in his early attempts to “be a vampire.” However, Lestat will also be the one who Louis must separate himself from to reach maturity. Lestat’s role as mother rather than father brings us to an important point about Ricean vampirism.

In Anne Rice’s vampirology, vampirism is a matriarchy. In later novels in the Vampire Chronicles, we discover that the progenitor of all vampires is a woman, the “queen” vampire Akasha. Her consort, Enkil - while powerful in his own right - is not the parent of all vampires. Whereas Akasha is linked to all of her progeny, Enkil has no connection to other vampires (other than the typical telepathic connection of Ricean vampires) and is therefore expendable. Akasha, however, is indispensable since whatever harm is done to her extends to all vampires.(29)

Another point of support for the vampiric matriarchy is the method by which vampires procreate. Vampiric life, like human life, is created through the exchange of fluids. First, the “mother” vampire takes in fluids, mirroring the female role in sexual intercourse. Next, the mother vampire nurses the newborn vampire with vampire blood. In this way, the Dark Gift is a return to the oral stage, where pleasure is centered on the mouth through nursing with the mother. In Louis’ words:

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment…(30)

Finally, Louis exhibits his final maturity in his independence from “Mother” Lestat. When Louis returns to New Orleans and trails the fledgling vampire back to Lestat, Lestat begs him to return to him to teach him about the new times and help Lestat become the dashing vampire he once was. Though Louis obviously still cared a great deal for Lestat, he rejected his offer. Louis had to avoid linking his existence with his “mother” because if he did he would lose his maturity and his identity. In this manner, Louis’ refusal of Lestat is the greatest test of Louis’ newfound independence. Louis remains an autonomous being.

Conclusions

What then have we learned in our exploration of Ricean vampirism through the lens of feminist theory? From the section on Louis’ allegorical feminine journey, we see that feminism is still a formalist system. Showalter’s attempt to break the whole of women’s literature into three stages is formalism writ large. From the section of the multiplicity of desire and pleasure, we learn about feminism’s emphasis on how the body relates to the text. Finally, in the section on vampiric motherhood we find psychoanalysis hiding in the background of feminism and we also see feminism’s attempt to break out of the dominant patriarchy to create a unique female system. Most importantly, I think, we have seen that feminism is not a critical method that can be reduced to a single idea. Feminism, like the female subjectivity, is a system of multiplicity and fluidity. Feminism is made up of many parts without clear boundaries separating them.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Beidler, Peter. “What is Feminism?” The Wife of Bath. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 255-262.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.

Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.

Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Addams. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. 1224-1233.

Waugh, Patricia. “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics.” Modern Literary Theory. 3rd ed. New York: Arnold, 1992.

Footnotes

1. Peter Beidler, “What is Feminist Criticism?”, The Wife of Bath (Boston, Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 255-256.
2. Ibid, p. 257-258.
3. Ibid, p. 255.
4. Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” Critical Theory Since Plato (Orlando, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 1231.
5. Patricia Waugh, “Stalemates?: Feminists, Postmodernists and Unfinished Issues in Modern Aesthetics,” Modern Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (New York, Arnold, 1992), p. 337.
6. Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (New York, Ballantine, 1976), p. 21.
7. Ibid, p. 38.
8. Ibid, p. 281-282.
9. The concept of vampiric telepathy is actually an elusive topic in Interview with the Vampire. It is only hinted at and never fully developed. Claudia, for example, asks Louis on page 249, “Do you know what it was that [Armand] told me over and over without speaking a word?” Yet when Louis asks Armand if he is capable of reading thoughts, Armand replies, “Not the way you mean.” It isn’t really until The Vampire Lestat that we are certain of the existence of vampiric telepathy.
10. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 154.
11. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1982), p. 1.
12. Ibid, p. 154.
13. Rice p. 281.
14. Ibid, p. 317.
15. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1993), p. 101-102.
16. Rice p. 254.
17. Ibid, p. 74.
18. Ibid, p. 84.
19. Ibid, p. 21.
20. Ibid, p. 23.
21. Ibid, p. 21.
22. Ibid, p. 82.
23. Ibid, p. 16.
24. Ibid, p. 25.
25. Auerbach, Vampires, p. 215.
26. Ibid, p. 153. This failure is demonstrated, for Auerbach, in the failed Lestat/David communion in Tale of the Body Thief. Auerbach misses the other perhaps more lucid failed vampire/human communion in the same novel of Lestat and Gretchen. While in human form, Lestat and Gretchen find a powerful connection - a connection which is broken with Lestat’s return to vampirism. In fact, we see that as a consequence of having seen Lestat’s true nature Gretchen is driven into madness.
27. Waugh p. 336.
28. Rice p. 21.
29. We actually first encounter Akasha and Enkil (”Those Who Must Be Kept”) in The Vampire Lestat. However, it isn’t until Marius finds Enkil sucked dry in The Queen of the Damned that we discover that Enkil is actually only ornamental. His only real value is in his role as Akasha’s consort - a role that Akasha believes Lestat can handle more effectively.
30. Rice p. 20.