#haggerty

With the taste of [David's] blood comes life itself: the life that Lestat has loved and wanted to possess. Lestat takes in an entire culture, of course: its colonial past as well as its rebellious present. His fantasy is one of possessions: he wants to be David as much as he wants to have him...[the] lurid exchange of endearments, as the blood spurts and the sucking continues, hints at the deepest fear behind the vampire's kiss: not that the victims are taken against their will, but rather that the vampire's kiss releases the hidden desires that the will would repress.

Rice racializes Magnus's quest in order to emphasize Lestat's white--increasingly enameled--identity. This whiteness reminds us of other races, though, and the various ways in which our culture has managed to sacrifice its youth. Inner city drug and gang wars fulfill this role in the nineties in ways that earlier decades relegated to KKK and random lynchings. This uncanny familiarity emerges in war footage, from the feature films as well as the evening news that haunts our daily lives; but there are other piles of bodies that our culture hides: the bodies of the dispossessed and undernourished, the bodies of the victims of racial violence, the bodies wasted by ethnic "cleansing," and of course the bodies of AIDS victims in various communities throughout the world, but in the gay community in particular. The communion that Magnus initiates is a communion with the dead, and the culture's repression of its own carnage is represented in this putrefying vault...This pile of blond corpses is important to the structure of The Vampire Chronicles, this massacre of the innocents determines the limits of the brash and magesterial reign of Lestat: no power without a pile of rotting corpses to generate it.

Now that the nineties have begun to realize their fully victimizing potential, as fights over gays in the military, the militarization of the country's borders, the politics of bigotry, and the institutionalization of misogyny and homophobia all suggest, cultural anxiety is at a fever pitch. But from the specific historical circumstances out of which these novels emerge, I would like to consider just three: the AIDS crisis, the crisis over "family values," and the collapse of the war on drugs with its attendant militarization of civilian life and war on male potency. Rice's Vampire Chronicles address the anxiety surrounding all three of these issues in a way that both poses the gay man as the solution to this problem and indicts him as its cause...[Lestat] lives by the exchange of bodily fluids; he defies the family at the same time that he repeatedly reconstitutes it; and he moves with ease through a drugged out culture as its inspiration and very rationale.

What is the Real that these vampires hold onto with their uncanny tenacity?..They defy the death drive and turn radical negativity into the original commodity: life itself--well, death-in-life, but the simulation is exactly the point. Rice's vampires bring this surplus of the real back into the symbolic as its desired objects. In doing so, they expose the very terms of the symbolic structure that would exclude them. Another way of saying this is that the vampire exposes the roots of bourgeois ideology in his ability to represent its desires and fears...In The Vampire Chronicles, Rice is aware of the vampire as the surplus of the real in western culture...appearing silently and taking his pleasure ruthlessly; and suffering for his sexual transgression by being shut out from the light and condemned to an eternity of darkness.

In articulating Lacan's account of the symptom in terms that help explain the workings of ideology, Žižek has occasion to explain that cultural signification itself involves a foreclosure of its key determinate...culture...is structured around the void left by a "key signifer" that explains the structure at the same time that it must be "foreclosed." The void that exists at the center is therefore symptomatic of the structure of culture itself...If "what was foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in the Real of the symptom," then Žižek's argument explains not just why, in his words, woman returns as the symptom of man, but also why the predatory homosexual, foreclosed from the symbolic, would return as the symptom of a culture that is so caught up in its own sexuality that it cannot even see its sexual obsessions for what they are...The homosexual represents the threat of the sexual relation that cannot be symbolized, the impossible fact of desire...The vampire represents the return of the repressed in a culturally significant way: both inside culture and outside, both a charmingly honest man and a wickedly deceptive one, both the phallic aggressor and the always already penetrated one, the vampire represents everything that the culture desires and everything that it fears.

In The Tale of the Body Thief...Lestat must re-possess his own body, and the scene in which he pushes the wicked body thief from himself is the climax of the book. In order to achieve his end, he must see himself as the object of desire, and in doing so he places the terms of his existence in vivid relief...The erotic thrill of paradoxically penetrating himself in this early morning light is expressed in the violent desperation of the act...it shows him to have no greater desire than the desire for the very self that prevents his ever really breaking out of vampiric isolation.