“Let the flesh instruct the mind”:body, desire, and synesthesia in Anne Rices’ the vampire chronicles

Abstract

In Anne Rice’s novels subjects apparently paradoxical – such as materiality and spirituality, profane and sacred, and natural and supernatural – have a special range of discussion. Such matters relate to debates concerning the origin of the material universe as well as its spiritual meaning, and to reflections about the limits of corporeal sensual appreciation, magnified by perceiving of art and nature. Rice usually counterparts these subjects, as in The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Lasher (1993), Memnoch(1995), and Servant of the Bones (1996), novels in which such matters are approached by plot as well as expressed by working with the style. In this essay, we intend to discuss one of these questions, the one which relates to representation, understanding, and intensification of corporeal senses; intensification provided by the main character’s vampire nature, as it can be read in Rice’s first novel Interview with the Vampire (1976). In a dialogue with critics such as Katherine Ramsland, Jennifer Smith, and Terri R. Liberman, among others, we will demonstrate how – concerning her monsters’ drama – Rice indirectly proposes an intensification of corporeal sensations, not just relating to the perception of art and nature, as well as the very capacity of the body to reconcile and recreate its material environment.