#sonser

In...Rice's text, the vampire's "self" can only survive through the "dark trick," the consumption of blood that is predicated upon his or her talents for seduction. It is seduction that operates as the guarantor of subjectivity in Interview, and those elements of seduction give the text its "unrelentingly erotic nature" encompassing all options, homosexual, heterosexual, and pedophile.

The desire that drives Rice's vampires is propelled by Lacanian misidentification, leaving the subject permanently fragmented and in perpetual slavery to desire. Louis' myth of a united self is initially dependent on the gaze of the Other, reflected in the eyes of Lestat or Armand. However, that illusory self is soon fed by cultural commodities and...Louis becomes as cold and distant as "strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms...as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form;" he becomes a disembodied voice on tape...Rice's vampires exemplify Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum, neither copy nor original, simultaneously less and more real, hyperbolic facsimiles

A feature of this neo-capitalism, among the play of images and signs of the counterfeit, is the transformation of Lestat's "law of aesthetics." In the present stage of simulacra, reproduction itself becomes a dominant principle ordered by the laws of the market...Rice's vampires are the first in gothic history to be fabulously wealthy not through labour, production, or even inheritance but simply through an understanding of how wealth operates as a system of signs that replicates itself continually and without referents; the logic of capital accumulation as dependent only on sign-value.

Lestat's story...is punctuated by a hyperreality, simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs erase the boundaries between representation and reality. "We are illusions of what is mortal, and the stage is an illusion of what is real," explains Gabrielle about the lives of vampires...In this Baudrillardian universe, signs and modes of representation come to constitute reality; signs interact with other signs, referring to and gaining their significance in relation to other commodity signs...Louis' and Lestat's stories exist both in real and unreal terms; the reader experiences the materiality of the novel, the activity of reading or interpretation.

Lestat's gothic world exemplifies an environment shaped by the proliferation of cultural images and signs, forces which cancel meaning in the white noise of undifferentiated information, thereby collapsing the distinction between reality and unreality. Lestat's attempts at Dionysian frenzy, his rock concerts, his melodramatic antics on stage at Renaud's House of Thesbians, change exactly nothing because they are inextricably linked with a commodified system of sign values governed by rules, codes, and a social logic...Rice's vampire world indirectly legitimates the "real" American not unlike Baudrillard's explication of Disney's legitimating relationship to America...Rice's vampire world is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real.

Outside the symbolic, jouissance transgresses the Law-of-the-Father, moving beyond the pleasure principle into the orbit of the forbidden. Beyond the Law, Rice's vampires exist in a realm that is characterized by the anarchic, incestuous, sadistic, oral, and pre-gendered. Without the phallus, the indicator of difference, Rice's vampires cannot take up a gendered position that is socially and culturally (symbolically) constructed...the text offers the androgynous, polymorphous sexuality that transcends notions of hetero- and homosexuality as well as the incest taboo. It exemplifies a decadence that flies in the face of the traditional vampire myth as a cautionary tale against incest. Rice's vampires cannot be destroyed by a fatal and phallic stake-through-the-heart in a world where seduction is oral.

The gaze or the look is both implicit and explicit in this process of seduction/consumption, the correlative of subjectivation and the death drive, as well as integral to the Lacanian concept of "seeing oneself seen." As Rosemary Jackson explains, the gothic has long been preoccupied with "problems of vision:" "In Fantastic art, objects are not readily appropriated through the look: things slide away from the powerful eye/I which seeks to possess them, thus becoming distorted, disintegrated, partial and lapsing into invisibility." Rice's text implicates the vampire, his victim or object of desire, and the reader in a closed circuit of scopic identification which underscores a relationship of spectacular seduction.

Interview reflects a fascination with seduction and simulation, with displacements and dissolutions of boundaries between the real and its simulacra, between the authentic and the counterfeit and between the subject and the object of consumption. Seduction and consumption, literal (blood) and figurative (commodity), are integral to vampires' survival as subjects.