Anne Rice

Barbara Szymczak-Maciejczyk’s chapter The Witches, ghosts, and specters: The New Orleans House at the First Street delves into the haunted house described in The Witching Hour by Anne Rice. The house is haunted by Lasher, a half-demon, halfghost, and the souls of the dead members of the Mayfair family. The author contends that it is the family’s history that has considerable influence on the perception of the
house (both its exterior and interior). Every witch has left an indelible mark of her own personality and power, affecting the entire Mayfair family in each generation.
Personal family belongings accumulated in the house draw flashbacks of the past, family legends and extended historical narratives of the Mayfair family by strangers, enabling a post-memory discourse. Most of the novel characters dream of renovating the residence. The house on First Street is renovated—symbolizing an exorcism. Many references to Christianity and demonology occur in The Witching Hour exemplified
by the appearance of figures of saints, visits to church, setting of altars in the rooms of the witches, devotional articles and the theme of confessions breaking the power of the Mayfair house. The novel delves deeper into the occult by providing descriptions of the Candomblé religion and voodoo rituals. Attention was also drawn to Lasher,
whose origin and nature are not thoroughly explained. However, he has a tremendous impact on many aspects of the family’s life. Lasher’s powers allow the reader to infer that haunting is not related to a specific location (as evidenced by even the lack of obstacles to the emergence of Lasher in different places of the world), but rather, with certain persons. Interesting is Lasher’s connection with an emerald necklace, inherited
by successive generations of witches. For the Mayfair family, it is a sigil signifying that of the women were chosen as a beneficiary of the “great heritage”. In spite of the many failed attempts to expel spirits, Lasher makes the New Orleans House on First Street the focal point of their visitations.

Seria "Perspektywy Ponowoczesności" (t. VII): "Groza i postgroza"

Świat stworzony przez Anne Rice jest jednym z najdokładniej opisanych i najbardziej interesujących  wampirzych uniwersów. Wykreowana przez autorkę przestrzeń nie emanuje grozą wprost, lecz w subtelny, nieraz zawoalowany sposób przedstawia imaginarium nowoorleańskiej pisarki, wzbudzając jednocześnie lęk i fascynację. Nagromadzenie elementów piękna spotyka się tutaj z opisami krwawych uczt wampirów, makabry ich dekapitacji, pełnego poczucia rozpaczy i samotności. Prezentacja trojga głównych bohaterów o skomplikowanej psychice wzbudza empatię – czytelnik zaczyna współczuć nieumarłym, rozumie ich, przenosi sympatię ze śmiertelników (po których stronie znajduje się zwykle odbiorca) na istoty, których powinien się obawiać.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

It seems rather difficult to imagine creatures of classic horror films, such as the monster of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman or Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde as icons that an audience could admire and understand empathetically. Furthermore, the sins these monsters represent are recognised immediately as reprehensible, punishable and worst of all, unattractive. This is perhaps the reason as to why their appearance and themes in film have remained practically unchanged throughout their different iterations. Vampire films on the other hand are a different case altogether, as they are so varied in their themes that they have managed to become a film genre of their own.

Vampires have fascinated generations of cinemagoers; with depictions of hideous vampires such as the rat-like Count Orlock in Nosferatu (1922), to the silent and sensualised Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula (1958). These creatures have taken a hold of audiences all over the world.

These vampire films would later go on to inspire a generation of filmmakers to pose the question of what it could mean for a human to become a vampire. As a result of this question the humanisation of the vampire was made possible. This change has altered entirely the vampire film genre and it provided the films -notably during the 1980s and 1990s- with a different narrative. In these films the vampire's role as the villain is not so clear anymore and the monster becomes the protagonist to the detriment of its victims. However, the vampire remains the representation of evil whilst allowing the audience to experience the power of the vampire.

The fantasies vampires represent are those of sex, control of others and of nature and ultimately of guilt-free power. Jeffrey Weinstock observes in his work The Vampire Film, Undead Cinema: "What cinematic vampires have arguably done for much of their existence is to provide representations of tabooed sexuality in order to establish and reinforce proper sexual roles." (Weinstock, 2012: 8). It is precisely this idea that filmmakers and writers alike, employed to convey the attraction of becoming one of the undead, the possibility of enjoying an eternal life free of moral and physical boundaries.

The film industry adapted Dracula for first time in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). This adaptation inherited Victorian models of horror literature, thus, it carried in its narrative the repression against the vampire's unnatural sexual behaviour. The Count's appearance did nothing but emphasise the horror of that which is both forbidden and unknown.

It is precisely the forbidden nature of the vampire, which helped filmmakers to make them so appealing in the films of the 1980s. The vampire then becomes the figure of the renegade, helping those members of the audience who consider themselves different, or 'not normal' to identify themselves with this new generation of bloodsuckers. Milly Williamson explains this idea in her book The Lure of the Vampire: "Thus the vampire is no longer an expression of terror, it is the expression of the outcast and this helps to explain its enormous popularity" (Williamson, 2005, 183).

There was yet another dramatic change to the vampire's narrative with the poorly critically received Twilight (2008). This iteration is perhaps one of its most puzzling transformations. This creature of unfathomable and uncontrollable power appears in these films to be submissive to the desires of what would have been its prey. 

It is the idea of the romanticised vampire that fuels this work. The primary aim of this project is to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the vampire with regards to human fantasies of power. This will allow me to understand the reason as to why this supernatural creature has changed so much throughout its different iterations in film.

In order to do this I will use a textual analysis on a series of films as well as academic texts to better analyse the libertine nature of the vampire and the repressive narrative in its different films.

The myth of the vampire can be found throughout history. When the literary vampire came forth its popularity kept growing steadily. This essay will be discussing the author Anne Rice and her Vampire Chronicles and how her writing helped change and forge a new tradition in vampire fiction. The specifics of Rice’s vampires characters will be discussed, the changes she produced, and the explicit traits of the vampires in Rice’s fiction such as their connection to the Byronic hero and to the sexuality of the vampire. To bring out the these traits this essay will analyze the first three books in The Vampire Chronicles to show how Rice manages to grab the reader through not only her story-telling talent, but Rice’s intellectual, melancholic, erotic and alluring characters that are somewhat perverse but in an oddly charming and seductive way.

To perpetuate itself in time, tradition makes recourse to figures that convey it. This study takes as its object the vampire figure that, in transmitting important aspects of the cultural tradition, takes the form of its own tradition, manifesting itself in a series of narrative and cultural works. As this study maintains, the vampire figure possesses its own literary and cinematographic tradition, even as it provides an understanding of transmission, tradition, and education.

In order to persist through time, traditions need to retain a static core, while also being malleable enough to allow for the transformation of the secondary features. The vampire is a malleable cultural figure, making it the perfect emblem of the concept of tradition. Moreover, five recurring traditional constellations are present, in various degrees, in vampire-centric narratives. The victim choice, the vampiric bite and the transformative blood exchange – with its undeniable relation to “perverse” sexuality, the training process, the desire to belong to a family or a community, and the search for one’s origins all illustrate the link between the vampire and the concept of tradition.

This thesis explores the impact of the vampire figure as an emblem of tradition through the most classic – the most traditional – narrative, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and through the first three installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned – as well as through their film adaptations.

This paper explores Anne Rice's first published vampire novel "Interview with the Vampire" and explains how she uses homosexuality, pedophilia, and incest between her vampire characters. With her unique style of writing Rice cleverly covers up these taboo acts by disguising them as a vampire's nature so as not to distract the reader from the story. It examines the three main characters: Louis, Lestat, and Claudia and their different relationships between all three of them.

Per gli studi di genere in campo cinematografico il masochismo e le sue dinamiche hanno costituito una delle linee di ricerca più significative nel costruire un’ipotesi alternativa al modello teorizzato da Laura Mulvey nel suo saggio fondativo “Piacere visivo e cinema narrativo”. Se Mulvey vede nel sadismo la dinamica psichica fondamentale nel definire il rapporto di subordinazione del femminile al maschile – dinamica che nel cinema ha gli esempi più alti nell’opera di Hitchcock – il masochismo vede proprio un rovesciamento di tale rapporto. In effetti, il masochismo – nella versione proposta da Gilles Deleuze in Il freddo e il crudele – è caratterizzato da una reversibilità delle posizioni di genere, prevede lo scambio continuo dei ruoli di potere: in ultima analisi esso mette in scena questioni riguardanti la bisessualità.

Ma il masochismo è anche un’estetica particolare, in quanto presuppone strutture narrative circolari e ripetitive e attiva un regime visivo sensuale. Partendo da questi presupposti, il saggio affronta le diverse teorie psicoanalitiche sul masochismo (Freud, Deleuze, Silverman, ecc.) per passare poi a studiare le molteplici forme del masochismo cinematografico ed in particolare la sua declinazione nelle dinamiche del piacere visivo prodotte dal genere horror.

When considering the current developments in popular culture, the steadily rising popularity of vampire narratives is stunning: from 'Interview with the Vampire' to 'Twilight', a wide range of different conceptions of the vampire circulates. The introspective, dark, brooding and attractive vampire whose nature becomes highly eroticised is present everywhere, but what about the undeniable dark side of a ruthless killer that every vampire necessarily possesses? In other works, such as 'The World on Blood' written by Jonathan Nasaw in 1996, the vampire is not even considered supernatural anymore and instead is simply a human whose genetic predisposition makes him or her addicted to drinking blood. At the same time, there is a steadily growing fascination with the concept of evil and villainous characters in both popular and academic culture, with several current academic conferences dedicated precisely to this matter. This paper analyses the way vampire identity is dependent on evil and how vampire nature in general is portrayed in 'Interview with the Vampire', and compares this to the portrayal of these elements in its movie adaptation. Especially the character of Claudia is cited as a prime example for vampire nature as being animalistic and evil, where the gothic trope of the innocent victimised virgin is the reason for her capability of pure evil.

In this thesis, I provide an analysis of Angela Carter’s and Anne Rice’s works based on their depiction of vampires. My corpus is composed of Carter’s short stories “The Loves of Lady Purple” and “The Lady of the House of Love” and of Rice’s novels The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. My analysis of this corpus is based on four approaches: a comparison between Carter’s and Rice’s works,  supported by their common use of vampire characters; an investigation of how this use consists of a particular way of exploring gothic elements, related to the contemporary context; an identification of the mechanisms through which this use of vampire characters conveys discourses on the issues of sexuality and gender  in the 1970s and 1980s; and an investigation of the possibility for the vampire characters to express such discourses, in terms of their symbolisms. I demonstrate here that Rice and Carter explore the potential of abjection of the vampire and the subversive potential of a gothic representation of life experiences to question and subvert in their works patriarchal ideologies about the issues of sexuality and gender. This strategy of questioning and subversion is informed by the debates about these two issues in late-twentieth century, a period marked by the development of theories about sexuality and gender, by political movements towards sexual and gender freedom, and by the eminence of the AIDS epidemic that influenced the direction followed by these theories and movements.  My analysis of Carter’s and Rice’s works demonstrates that, although they are different in their focuses and concerns, both authors represent, through their vampires, discourses against the imposition of gender roles and of sexualities by patriarchal societies, reflecting the contemporary view of gender and sexuality as constructed, complex, and fluid categories. In this sense, their works can be said to characterize a contemporary gothic fiction written by women.

This paper discusses the concept of the New Woman Heroine as characterized by one of Anne Rice's heroines from her short story, the Master of Rampling Gate. The paper further talks about the implications of the New Human Heroine particularly their portrayal in Vampire Literature.

"A Vampire Cannot Live in the Outskirts.
An Image of a City in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice (Based on Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat)"

The chapter by Barbara Szymczak-Maciejczyk delivers an analysis of the creation of eighteenth-century Paris and nineteenth-century New Orleans as cities that become lairs for covens of vampires. The American writer describes, in a very picturesque manner, the atmosphere and the operations of erstwhile cities while embedding monsters
of an undead nature. The text addresses several issues. There is the labyrinth of the Gothic space; Rice writes of gothic features that include secret passages, abandoned cemeteries, secret rooms, dead-end towers and catacombs which are homes to the Parisian vampires. The author of the paper uses the term “labyrinth” which was coined by Agnieszka Izdebska. The article explores the solitude of an individual in a metropolis. It expounds on the culmination of that solitude with the transformation of a mortal man into the immortal vampire (e.g. kidnapping Lestat, Louis being in dangerous places, leaving Claudia by her dead mother). It also tackles the issue of mirror imagery between the mental state of the characters and the condition of the city and
their location at any given moment. The author also points out that the vampires’ desire is not merely driven by hunger and bloodlust but also by a desire for the accumulation of wealth including freely participating in the exchange of money for goods and services. The paper highlights the differences in the understanding of economic issues from the perspectives of a citizen of the Old Continent and the New World.
Furthermore, it aims to identify Rice’s methods of creating space with a confined and dangerous element. These literary aesthetics include crossing of barriers to a home’s threshold and a temple and multiple labyrinthine structures. Other vivid imagery includes urban landscapes, e.g., side-streets, stone walls, crumbling stairways—all used as the living, breathing sarcophagus and feeding grounds for undead creatures that
hunger and thirst for human blood. The combination of these elements reveals creative and novel methods in Gothic writing and it provides a more modern adaptation for the character of the vampire.

To perpetuate itself in time, tradition makes recourse to figures that convey it. This proposal takes as its object the vampire figure that, in transmitting important aspects of the cultural tradition, takes the form of its own tradition, manifesting itself in a series of narrative and cultural works. As this article maintains, the vampire figure possesses its own literary and cinematographic tradition, even as it provides an understanding of transmission, tradition, and education.

In order to persist through time, traditions need to retain a static core, while also being malleable enough to allow for the transformation of the secondary features. The vampire is a malleable cultural figure, making it the perfect emblem of the concept of tradition. Moreover, five recurring traditional constellations are present, in various degrees, in vampire-centric narratives. The victim choice, the vampiric bite and the transformative blood exchange – with its undeniable relation to “perverse” sexuality (in psychoanalytic terms), the training process, the desire to belong to a family or a community, and the search for one’s origins all illustrate the link between the vampire and the concept of tradition.

This paper will explore the impact of the vampire figure as an emblem of tradition through the first three installments of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles – Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned.

For "The Once and Future Antiquity" conference, Tacoma March 27-29, 2015

Vampires are usually associated with the medieval Eastern European world, thanks of course to both the literary productions of the 18th century and to Bram Stocker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Yet authors of the early 19th century did also draw a lot of inspiration from the Classical world of Greece and Rome as is shown by poems, short stories and novels by authors such as  Goethe, Allan Edgar Poe or John Keats, to name but a few.

Those texts were mostly set in the Ancient World and following rather closely models from the second century CE, most notably Phlegon of Thralles and Philostratos. Yet this line of the tradition would mostly die out in the second half of the 19th century and the Ancient World would almost disappear from the vampire lore until the last quarter of the 20th century when author Anne Rice would introduce her characters of vampires living since the earliest periods of mankind.

Her vampires, born in Ancient Egypt and living through the centuries since, did give birth to new vampires from various periods, including some made during the early Roman Empire. Marius and Pandora are two such characters who do play an important role in the Vampire Chronicles and were both the subject of dedicated novels largely set in the period.

Those elements are part of a larger interest of the author for the Classical period, as shown by her novels “The Mummy” and “Servant of the Bones”, which do refer to Babylon at the time of the Exile and Ancient Egypt both at the time of Rameses II and in the era of Cleopatra VII.

Our goal shall thus be to study how the Ancient World is depicted in Anne Rice’s novels and the role this period does play in her writings.

En ouvrant la porte sur l’analyse de l’engouement littéraire et cinématographique pour le vampire, cette communication propose d’explorer le renversement identitaire à travers la figure littéraire du vampire et son rapport à la figure du miroir. En effet, le vampire traditionnel ¬– plus particulièrement dans le roman Dracula de Bram Stoker – ne peut pas voir sa propre réflexion dans un miroir. Cette non-vision physique trouble la question identitaire du vampire lui-même – question déjà très ambigüe puisque le vampire n’est ni mort, ni vivant. Il est donc toujours pris dans un entre-deux, autant physique, mental, qu’identitaire. Ce questionnement est souvent mis de l’avant dans des textes plus contemporains, tel que dans les Vampire Chronicles d’Anne Rice.

Cette problématique identitaire pousse souvent le vampire à vouloir reproduire une copie de lui-même à travers l’acte transformatif vampirique qui est composé du choix de la victime menant à la morsure et finalement, à l’échange sanguin entre le maître-vampire et sa future progéniture. Ce désir de reproduction, de copie identitaire de la part du vampire mène à des actes de narcissisme, de contrôle et de fétichisme. En expliquant ces trois concepts psychanalytiques, nous pourrons soulever la problématique identitaire et corporelle qui se trouve au cœur de la figure du vampire. En effet, le vampire littéraire reverse le concept de l’identité à travers la vision – plutôt la non-vision – que le vampire a de lui-même et par le fait même, de ses victimes. Le miroir joue donc un rôle primordial dans cette conception identitaire et corporelle. Cette communication propose donc  une étude majoritairement psychanalytique du reversement identitaire à travers les figures du vampire et du miroir à l’aide du roman Dracula de Bram Stoker et de quelques uns des tomes des Vampire Chronicles d’Anne Rice.

According to Western ideology as expressed in contemporary mythology, the difference between generations, like that between the sexes, tends to be portrayed as a difference between species, for it is articulated with theories of evolution. The article illustrates this perspective by drawing on the work of three contemporary American authors, Robin Cook (Mutation), Greg Bear (Darwin’s Radio, Darwin’s Children), Anne Rice (The Lives of the Mayfair Witches). Each offers a paradigmatic variant of the motif of the birth of a gifted child belonging to another, superior species.

No interesa en este trabajo tanto el origen de la mitología y literatura vampíricas como el análisis de algunos caracteres recurrentes entre estos personajes en los siglos XIX y XX. Amparados por tal objetivo saltamos en el tiempo y llegamos a 1816.

When considering the current developments in popular culture, the steadily rising popularity of vampire narratives is stunning: from Interview with the Vampire to Twilight, a wide range of different conceptions of the vampire circulates. The introspective, dark, brooding and attractive vampire whose nature becomes highly eroticised is present everywhere, but what about the undeniable dark side of a ruthless killer that every vampire necessarily possesses? In other works, such as The World on Blood written by Jonathan Nasaw in 1996, the vampire is not even considered supernatural anymore and instead is simply a human whose genetic predisposition makes him or her addicted to drinking blood. At the same time, there is a steadily growing fascination with the concept of evil and villainous characters in both popular and academic culture, with several current academic conferences dedicated precisely to this matter. This paper analyses the way vampire identity is dependent on evil and how ...

The article titled Fatum and madness? An essay about Anne Rice's vampires tries to prove that insanity and vampirism are inseparably connected. The author analises the situation of a few immortals: Lestat, Louis, Gabriela and Nicolas. She also mentions some else characters.  She considers what a vampire's features are. The loneliness and madness are very important because every vampire has it. It showed up, that only mad people can became an immortal but only a few of them could overcome the insanity.

A pioneer of the mummy legend, Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) conjures the horror of the mummy through Tera, whose body is brought from Egypt to London as part of archaeological excavation. Picturing the strict struggle between the evil and the good as well as the constant imperial and racial conflict between the west and the east, Stoker’s story sets an example to Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989), which revivifies the mummy of Ramses II. Despite drawing certain similarities with Stoker’s horror work, Rice’s romance novel focuses mainly on Ramses’ humane adventures in the-twentieth-century London and Egypt. More significantly, the mummy legend is utilised in these narratives to reflect the fin de siècle pursuits of the British Empire and the androcentric and racist mind-set prevailing throughout the twentieth century through the objectification and stigmatisation of the mummies as part of the east.

Blood has many contexts. It creates an affinity to others. It can be worshipped in a reliquary. It can instil horror when copious amounts are outside of the body. Blood represents life and the idea of it being taken without consent strikes a particular fear, worse than the loss of any other bodily fluid. The Christian Bible states in Leviticus 17:11 "the life of a creature is in the blood." In worldwide mythologies, there is only one creature known for its consistent conquest of blood. Vampires prey on the vulnerable, the weak and the criminal; having to coerce, entrance or outright kill in order to slake their thirst. Some vampires hunt indiscriminately; others prefer a targeted approach. Some always kill their victims; others devise a way to leave their prey alive.
Across several vampiric themes in movies and television, there are underlying different motivations when it comes to be pursuit of blood. In the traditional horror genre, blood is taken by any means necessary with no regard for whether the human victim survives the encounter. The hunt for blood is akin to a predator stalking prey. The main objective is to instil fear.
In the more romantic genre, blood is given freely by a human to a vampire or exchanged blood between two vampires as an act of love, trust and commitment. A relationship, romantic or plutonic, must be formed and this requires some social skills on the part of the vampire to persuade humans to give what is in their nature not to share.
This paper will analyse a number of differing faiths’ attitude towards blood, the methodology and effects of vampires drinking blood, its benefits or detriments and how the very act of taking or being given blood provides different contexts. This paper will also explore the consequences of vampires not drinking blood; what happens to the demons who refuse to partake in their natural instinct.
The drinking of blood can increase power and strength, it can quell an immense thirst and it can be deadly, to vampire and human. As Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer professes ‘It's what keeps you going, makes you warm, makes you hard, makes you other than dead’.

http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/blood/

Aujourd’hui je confesse publiquement mes crimes comme si je les commettais encore. Aujourd’hui je raconte à qui veut l’entendre mon histoire peu ordinaire et pourtant régulière, cette histoire que j’ai vécue pendant des millénaires, jusqu’à ce qu’un bouffe-merde plus téméraire que d’habitude réussit à me piéger dans la mort. Me piéger dans la mort, c’est bien là le comble d’un mort vivant, puisque j’étais un mort vivant. Mais passons à cette histoire peu commune qui changea complètement la face de l’humanité, et certainement l’interface de ma vie.

Avec des suppléments:

Fifi Sans Tifs quand il était le Vampire de Roubaix sur Trichon en version scannée JPEG et illustrée par David Gommez.

AU ROYAUME DES PLAISIRS MILLÉNAIRES : LE THÉSAURUS SAURIEN DE LA RÉALITÉ HUMAINE SAUROPODE, manuel du tortureur mondialisé de haute technologie. Tout sur la civilisation barbare libératrice de la schizophrénie universelle des refoulés existentiels

Myth, according to the Académie Française, is a fabulous story that may hold a more or less implicit moral.

One may also define myth as a story trying to explain some fundamental aspects of the world and of the society in which it is created. Mythologies are the grouping of such stories in a more or less coherent ensemble, and form the basis on which a community defines part of its identity.

According to such definition of myth, many contemporary fantastic novels do, in their own way, attempt to reach such goals by legitimizing the existence of the supernatural in our world with “rationalized” mythologies that explain the origin of monsters and tell us of the story of some of them. Communities

grow around those stories, defining and defending a “cannon” of the new mythology and creating a world parallel to our reality.

The Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice (born 1941) are a good example of this phenomenon. Since the world famous “Interview with the Vampire”, published in 1976, she has written, amongst other, a dozen vampire novels, creating a complete rational explanation for the existence of her supernatural characters which she imbedded within the classical Christian mythology and the recorded history.

The very wide appeal of her novels (and the movies made out of them) largely contributed to the resurgence of the vampire character in popular consciousness during the 90’s and the 2000’s. But few, if any, of the other creators of vampire novels or movies went as far as Anne Rice to integrate their creatures in our world, most relying much more on simple suspension of disbelief by their public: the Blade comics and movies, or the Underworld movies are good example of the phenomenon, as are the many “bit-lit”
novels published in recent years.

Two books in particular will be the focus of the talk, namely “The Queen of Damned” (1988) and “Memnoch the Devil” (1995). The mythology, deeply rooted in the Christian mythology, created in those books became the inspiration for later role play games (Vampire: The Masquerade, the basis for the Underworld movies) and other cultural artefacts which we’ll also mention.

Through this example we intend to show that rather than being in a crisis, more myths than ever are blooming under the pens of writers, but maybe without trying to become universal anymore.

Although feminism abounds in different and often contradictory theories of gender, almost all of them spring from the same supposition. As Helene Cixous puts it: every theory of culture, every theory of society, the whole conglomeration of symbolic systems is ordered around hierarchical oppositions that come back to the man/woman opposition, an opposition that can only be sustained by means of a difference posed by cultural discourse as “natural,” the difference between activity and passivity. the opposition is founded in the couple.

Following on from a talk given by Paul Adams on vampire serial killers, this talk is about the emergence of the sympathetic vampire. The killers presented in Adams’ talk are people whose actions render them barely human. In contrast vampires in fiction are becoming, if not more human, than more sympathetic which offers a different way of engaging with monsters, difference and what makes someone 'other'.

The vampire/human split in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles is structured like a racial split. Becoming a vampire constitutes an essence, a shared material difference that is not something humans can come close to understanding. In the process of erasing actual racial differences through the "Dark Gift," Rice relies on embodiments of ethnicity and racial specificity in her management of gay male desire (a major factor in her popularity). The complexity of the relationships that shift and multiply between desire, race, sexuality and otherness is captured most strikingly in the fourth novel of the series, Tale of the Body Thief. After establishing the gender and sexuality work accomplished by Lestat’s body-switching, the paper examines David Talbot's switch into a young male body himself. Talbot’s own becoming-other, and becoming-vampire thereafter, are instances of both general and specific racialized embodiment. Lestat's experience of the human flesh is different from Talbot's, and in fact does more to constitute identity as gender and sexuality than as race. Talbot's assimilation into Lestat's identity formation (erasing ethnicity by way of becoming an other) still produces a specificity, one that exoticizes a youthful otherness overcoded by Portugal, Africa, India and Brazil. However, the othered body can only be animated by an aging white British gentleman’s mind and manners.

The terrifying return of a ghost that has much to tell about the past is a recurrent trope in Gothic fiction. But what if the ghost does not return from an abyss of nothingness, but from the very depth of the self? What if we carry our ghosts with us, sealed in the subterraneous realm of the unconscious from where they break free to voice horrific secrets? This paper aims to provide an analysis of Amel, the demonic spirit considered the source of vampirism in Rice’s chronicles, as a ghost that escapes the crypt and returns to haunt and bewilder vampires connected to him by blood ties. My discussion of Amel’s influence on vampires borrows from Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic theories according to which the phantom represents the incorporation and sealing into a crypt of a lost loved object or the burden of ancestors’ secrets. Therefore, Amel, the Sacred or rather the Secret Core of vampirism, can be read as the ghost that voices the limits of vampirism in that his etheric body stretches too far over the entire tribe. Amel was merely contained in Akash because her mind was attuned to the voices of the world; but incorporated into the mindless Mekare, the loved object of his ghostly self, he gains in awareness and perceives Mekare’s body as a crypt, as a prison. If vampires tune out voices to avoid madness, Amel speaks of his despair at not hearing, at not sensing anything, at being enslaved and overstretched to sustain all the undead.