What is Louis De Pointe Du Lac’s problem? – Interview With a Vampire
The Inside World Of Louis De Pointe Du Lac
What is Louis de Pointe du Lac’s problem?
Louis turned into a vampire after the death of his brother, Paul. But, why then? Anne Rice informs us that Louis feels guilty, and that he seeks his own death at the hands of someone else, that’s when Lestat somehow answers that call.
The truth is that Louis has every reason to feel responsible. He calls ”selfish” that part of himself that induced his brother’s death. It was this selfishness that prevented him from believing that his brother could really be having visions. Now the guilt feeds his pain, a terrible pain that leads him to become a vampire:
He couldn’t think of anything but his body rotting on the ground. I lived like a man who wanted to die but didn’t have the courage to do it myself… 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 egoism of Louis who, let’s remember, is defined in terms of refusing to believe in his brother’s visions and, ultimately, in the supernatural? What about vampires?
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 he becomes his brother.
While before he had been the egoist, the one who did not believe, Louis becomes, now as a vampire, the great visionary, the great believer; he becomes the tortured visionary that was his brother.
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 siblings alive by assuming this new role. And it is Lestat, in this first book by Anne Rice, who is entirely selfish. He is what Louis was to his brother, a painful reminder of all the attributes that killed his brother.
We hear early on, that Louis is overwhelmed as a vampire by the horror of an other human’s death. Killing horrifies him, and yet by killing his victims it is his own death that he reaffirms:
Killing is not an ordinary experience, feeling the loss of a life that slowly flows through the blood. It is, over and over again, the experience of losing my own life as I sucked the blood from Lestat’s wrist and felt his heart beat with my heart. It is, over and over again, a reminder of that experience.
That also means that the loss of one’s life occurs 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. By the way, Armand points out:
You’re weird, Louis, in the sense that you always die when you ”vampirize”.
(Translation: you are so caught up in that, that you are always repeating the same loss, but you never experience death.)
Or, as Lestat says:
You are dead to your vampire nature.
As 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.
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. So suicidally, ambivalently, he becomes a vampire (and assumes the identity of his brother).
Louis’ 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 lost love, he cannot kill, he can only murder and, consequently, suffer indefinitely.
How does Claudia emerge in this scenario?
What does she represent to Louis?
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 embody the various 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 brooding ghosts only come into focus from Louis’s perspective. Claudia, created by Louis and Lestat, is, by her own account, on the side of killing. There is no attachment in her to some lost love; in fact, among her hunting strategies is setting up 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 a cry. He is drawn to the girl who cannot leave her dead mother lying next to him. This, strangely, rekindles his instinct. He stops short of killing Claudia, but he leaves her to 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 deteriorating couple. It is significant that, during this time, Louis experiences a series of recurring dreams of 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 see first-hand the perspective of a vampire, to see the world through his eyes, although in this case Louis’s vampirism is very mixed with the human.
[By the way, there are vampire stories that offer us the vampire’s perspective, like The Outsider, by H.P. Lovecraft; and Over the River, P. Schuyler Miller, where is notable as an example of the sensory difficulties that vampires face]
Claudia externalizes the melancholic bond of disconnection between the siblings. That’s why she can push for Lestat’s destruction without having to take his place. Instead, she turns to Madeleine to contain her sense of helplessness. When Claudia dies, holding Madeleine in her arms, she dies alongside her “mother,” as she would have done long ago but for Louis’s melancholic intervention.
At this point, Louis is devastated. He sleeps in a coffin in a cemetery. He gives in to his pain and spreads it by burning the ”Theatre des Vampires” 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 their loss into something more. Both novels are nourished by mourning 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 way, by 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 if her daughter, Michelle did it. At the other extreme is the heartbreaking scene of Claudia herself clinging to the corpse of her mother, whose death she does not recognize.
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:
And cruelly, I asked him:
“Did you love this girl?”
I will never forget her face, the violence in it, the absolute hatred.“Yes,”
She almost whispered the words to me. ”How dare you!”
It was her guilt that consumed her, not love. It was guilt, that doll shop was just as Claudia had described it to me: shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. There was something as hard in her as the evil in me, something powerful.
When Louis goes ahead and turns Madeleine into a vampire, he confides in Claudia:
What has died in this room tonight is the last vestige of the human in me.
If the last mortal part of Louis dies when he creates Madeleine, it is because the terms of an implicit contract have been fulfilled in the story. What releases the last remnant of Louis’s humanity? Madeleine, who is the huge monster of mourning, a sick, twisted mourning, like the one that was inside Louis for so long due to the death of her brother.
Once she enters the undeath, Madeleine builds a doll-sized mortuary habitat for Claudia, Madeleine’s eternal little intern. All the props of the cult of death that are exchanged in Anne Rice’s novel between Claudia and her dead mother, or between Madeleine and Claudia, are suffocating; they choke us with a pain we hope never to experience.
What is Louis de Pointe du Lac’s problem? We asked ourselves at the beginning of this article. The usual in the Gothic novel: the melancholic retention of a relationship that is both murderous and idealized.
Louis is selfish, on one extreme, and vulnerable on the other. He cannot survive his immortality, he cannot affirm life through death.
And that is a serious problem in the world of the vampires.
