What is Louis de Pointe du Lac’s problem?

What is Louis de Pointe du Lac’s problem?

The first time he is vampirized is after the death of his brother, Paul. Why then? Anne Rice informs us that Louis feels guilty, and that he seeks his own death at the hands of another person, when Lestat somehow answers that call (see: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Lestat de Lioncourt)

The truth is that Louis has every reason to feel responsible. He calls that part of himself that induced the death of his brother selfish. It was this selfishness that prevented her from believing that his brother could really be having visions. Now guilt fuels his pain, a terrible pain that leads him to be vampirized:

He couldn’t think of anything but his body rotting on the ground. He lived like a man who wanted to die but didn’t have the courage to do it himself… And then I was attacked. It could have been anyone, my invitation was open to sailors, thieves, maniacs, anyone. But he was a vampire.

What about this selfishness of Louis, which, remember, is defined in terms of refusal to believe in brother’s visions and, ultimately, in the supernatural? What happens with vampirization?

The rest of Interview with the Vampire is the story of Louis de Pointe du Lac’s change. It’s not just that he becomes a vampire, but that he becomes his brother.

While before he had been the selfish one, the one who did not believe, Louis becomes, now as a vampire, the great visionary, the great believer; He becomes the tortured visionary that his brother was.

To complete the transformation, Louis de Pointe du Lac must go all the way, beyond becoming a vampire: he must keep the disconnection with his brothers alive by assuming another role. And it is Lestat, in this first Anne Rice book, who is entirely selfish. He is what Louis was to his brother, a painful reminder of all the attributes that killed his brother.

From the beginning we hear that Louis is overwhelmed as a vampire by the horror of the other’s death. Killing horrifies him and yet, by vampirizing his victims, it is his own death that he reaffirms:

Killing is no ordinary experience, feeling the loss of a life that flows slowly through the blood. It is, over and over again, the experience of the loss of my own life when I sucked the blood from Lestat’s wrist and felt his heart beat with my heart. It is, again and again, a celebration of that experience.

That also means that the loss of one’s own life takes place when one is taking the life of another, and this transformation is what animates Louis’s relationship with vampirism.

In this way, Louis de Pointe du Lac will be rejected by the other vampires for having adopted this unusual relationship with vampirism, in other words, with killing and immortality (see: Anti-age vampires: how to stay young over the centuries ). By the way, Armand points out:

You’re strange, Louis, in the sense that you always die when you vampirize.

Translation: you are so caught up in the other that you are always repeating the same loss, but you never experience death.

Or, as Lestat says:

You are dead to your vampire nature.

Because death, here, is the definition of life for the vampire; Killing is what must be reaffirmed. And that is what Louis cannot master: his relationship with death, with killing, but in terms of life (see: Coppola’s Dracula and Stoker’s sewers).

After witnessing his first murder (a demonstration sponsored by Lestat), Louis goes to the scene of his brother’s suicide (or “accident”), and asks Lestat to kill him. Then, suicidally, ambivalently, he becomes a vampire (and assumes the identity with his brother)

Louis’s melancholy is the soul of Anne Rice’s novel. He is a kind of modern man destined for suicide because he cannot survive his immortality, he cannot renounce his lost love, he cannot kill, he can only murder and, consequently, suffer indefinitely (see: Why we still need Vampires)

How does Claudia emerge in this scenario?

In any case, it is impossible to understand Louis without first understanding what Claudia represents in the novel.

All the characters in Interview with the Vampire, including Louis, seem to represent the different shades of melancholy. In this context, Claudia stars as the melancholic ghost of the missing child (the little one who still haunts us)

Now, these melancholic ghosts are only focused from Louis’ perspective. Claudia, created by Louis and Lestat, is, by her account, on the side of killing. There is no attachment in her to some lost love; In fact, among her hunting strategies is staging a scenario similar to the loss of her mother to cause compassion in her victims.

For years, Louis deprives himself of killing, that is, of living in vampire terms, but suddenly he hears crying. He is attracted to the girl who cannot abandon her dead mother who lies next to her. This, strangely, rekindles his instinct. He stops short of killing Claudia, but he lets her die. However, the girl is converted by Lestat, and that means that she is now part of the couple, of the family. Claudia is like a daughter adopted by a couple in clear deterioration. It is significant that, during this time, Louis experiences a series of recurring dreams about his dead brother.

In Interview with the Vampire, vampirism is reduced to the perspective of Louis, who maintains a convergence between vampirism and humanity. In fact, it is the first vampire novel that allows us to know first-hand the perspective of a vampire, to see the world through his eyes, although in this case Louis’s vampirism is very sifted with the human.

Claudia externalizes the melancholic bond of disconnection between the siblings. That’s why she can push for Lestat’s destruction without having to take her place. Instead, she turns to Madeleine to contain her sense of helplessness. When Claudia dies, embracing Madeleine, she dies alongside her “mother,” as she would have done long ago if not for Louis’s melancholy intervention.

At this point, Louis is devastated. He sleeps in an occupied coffin in a cemetery, in an ID drop scene. He gives in to his pain and spreads it by burning the Vampire Theater to the ground.

It is important to mention that Interview with the Vampire is a tribute by Anne Rice to her dead daughter, Michelle; who in fact died of leukemia, a blood disease. In a way, Anne Rice, like Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, managed to transform her loss into something more. Both novels are nourished by grief and helplessness. Interview with the Vampire and Frankenstein seem connected to the crypts of dead children that their two mothers could not mourn, not directly, not openly, but only through this remote possibility of placing their stories in a secondary, tangential way.

The reader is offered elegant detours from this secondary drama, but ultimately it is an open concealment, because Anne Rice herself enters the novel, is part of it, and openly tells us about her pain.

Anne Rice is, literally, Madeline. Or rather, it is in Madeleine’s inability to mourn her daughter and in her willingness to become a vampire, that is, to assume the maternal role of Claudia’s protector for all eternity, who in turn never died, as she did. his daughter, Michelle, did. At the other extreme is the heartbreaking scene of Claudia herself clinging to the corpse of her mother, whose death she does not recognize (see: The gender question between vampires and vampiresses)

And the scenario of disconnection between mother and daughter reappears in the cult of dolls, figures, miniature kingdoms. Claudia discovers Madeleine in a toy store filled with doll-sized replicas of the same dead daughter. When Louis interviews her for the position of Claudia’s partner, Madeleine reaches the limit of ambivalence:

When Louis goes ahead and turns Madeleine into a vampire, he confides in Claudia:

What has died tonight in this room is the last vestige of humanity in me.

If the last mortal part of Louis dies when he creates Madeleine, it is because the terms of a contract implicit in the story have been fulfilled. What releases the last remnant of Louis’ humanity? Madeleine, who is the enormous monster of grief, a sick, twisted grief, like the one that was inside Louis for so long due to the death of her brother.

Once she enters undeath, Madeleine builds a doll-sized mortuary habitat for Claudia, Madeleine’s eternal little one. All the props of the death cult that are exchanged in Anne Rice’s novel between Claudia and her dead mother, or between Madeleine and Claudia, are suffocating; They drown us with a pain we hope to never experience.

What is Louis de Pointe du Lac’s problem? we asked ourselves at the beginning of this article. The usual thing in the Gothic novel: the melancholic retention of a relationship that is both murderous and idealized.

Louis is selfishness, at one extreme, and vulnerability at the other. He cannot survive his immortality, he cannot affirm life through death.

And that is a serious problem in the world of vampires.

Vampires. I Gothic Workshop.

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