THE ISSUE OF IDENTITY IN MARIO ACEVEDO'S THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS

Headnote

Abstract: The Nymphos of Rocky Flats by Mario Acevedo is an immediately contemporary vampire novel from 2006. Its main character is Felix Gomez, an American soldier serving in Iraq, where he gets transformed into a vampire, after which he goes through a significant identity crisis. Therefore, this paper focuses on the significance of identity regarding the issues of the contrast between human and vampire life, isolation and othering in Acevedo's novel.

Keywords: 21st century literature, Gothic novel, identity crisis, isolation, othering, vampire fiction

1. Introduction

The Popularity of vampire literature has been indisputable for several decades. In the beginning of the 21st century, an expansion of this popularity, which is still in progress today, could have been observed. Vampire literature finds its way towards potential fans regardless of their age, gender, education, etc. This popularity affected the academic world as well, the process of which mainly took place in the 1990s. If we take the history of vampire fiction into consideration, we can observe an almost 200-year-old way of literary representation. Considering the length of this period of time, it does not seem astonishing that today we can break vampire literature down into phases.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the vampire was depicted as a one-sided antagonist, an ultimate evil, or to put it simply, a pure negative character. Bram Stoker's Dracula is perhaps one of the most significant representatives of these vampires. Nina Auerbach calls its main vampire character loveless (1995:69), Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler (2005: 221) in agreement with Sally J. Kline (1992:197) label him as unambiguously evil. Dracula's example demonstrates that the otherness of the vampire seems to be inevitable in the above mentioned period of time.

This phenomenon changed with the publication of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire in 1976. As a result of the literary oeuvre of Rice, the character metamorphosis of the vampire set out. According to Stacey Abbott, this turning point is a move from pre-modem vampires towards modem vampires (2003:136). Anne Rice's vampires are not considered solely from the perspectives of humans as the reader gets to know their thoughts, opinions, feelings, ways of life, and so on. Milly Williamson uses the term the new vampire for the vampire who is not a cruel bloodsucker seeking humans to victimize but a sensitive creature who finds such things as family or friendship important (2003:101). Evaluating the significance of the vampire metamorphosis, Fred Botting optimistically notes: "The Vampire is no longer absolutely other" (1996:178). Contrary to Botting, Catherine Belsey presents a rather pessimistic consideration in a well formed thought regarding the Ricean change: "Anne Rice's postmodern move is to make the vampire speak, to tell its own story from this uncanny place, without simply reversing the original opposition." (1994:699).

Today, more than thirty-five years after the publication of the first novel of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, the Ricean vampire delineation is quite common. However, as it can be seen in the contrast between Botting's and Belsey's above mentioned elucidations, for instance, scholars approach the importance of this seemingly positive phenomenon differently. This paper is to study the vampiric identity through the example of Mario Acevedo's The Nymphos of Rocky Flats in which the vampire identity and issues around it, particularly the conflict between the human and the vampire existence, isolation and othering, are emphatically represented from the perspective of the main character, Felix Gomez. As a result, we can get a piece of representation and its classificatory significance in immediately contemporary literary vampire depictions. In other words, we will see whether this part of 21st century vampire literature represents the vampire in accordance with Botting's or Belsey's view.

2. The Turning Point

At the beginning of the novel, Felix Gomez is an American soldier who serves in the U. S. army at the time of the USA's war against Iraq. In an unfortunate event, Felix's team accidentally kills a family of Iraqi civilians and Felix is personally responsible for the death of a twelve-year-old girl. At the moment of the sudden realization of what he did, the following thought comes into Felix's mind: "Not a man's cry but the shriek of a girl, a horrible noise told me my life would never be the same again." (2006:8).This moment is in parallel with the emergence of Felix's remorse, a feeling he cannot get rid of almost to the end of the novel. His sense of guilt results in his disbelief in the war and the simultaneous occurrence of the burden of the murder he conducted. Felix, who considers himself a murderer rather than a war hero, feels that, as a consequence of his crime, his life has changed significantly. In accordance with this burdensome feeling, he undergoes the first step of his punishment when he encounters an Iraqi vampire, who offers him death or torture in exchange for his crime, both of which Felix rejects. Eventually, the vampire turns Felix into one of his kind, an existence he calls "[a] punishment even worse than death." (2006:15).

3. Isolation

With the transformation, Felix's punishment begins to take place. At the very beginning of his vampire life, Felix leams that being a vampire means to have an extremely marginalized position in society, as the most important governing principle of the vampire existence is, as he notes: "Above, all, don't let the humans know we exist." (2006:37). Hence, being a vampire in Acevedo's novel is inherently a form of othering and isolation.

3.1. False Identity

The vampiric existence of Acevedo's main character is a complicated one. As a young vampire among more hundred-year-old other vampires, he suffers from his still extant human properties. Thus, it does not seem astonishing that he is exceptional among the vampires who are generally fully aware of their identity.

Felix considers vampire life from human perspectives. This is what I call the false identity in which Felix's vampire life and his human properties conflict. It mainly manifests itself in Felix's over-evaluating vampire life and consequently his own vampire capabilities.

After Felix returns from the war, he gets hired as a private investigator to solve the case of an outbreak of nymphomania. Simultaneously, he realizes that an assassin follows him. However, he is not too afraid of the encounter, as he thinks: "My vampire sixth sense nagged at me and whispered danger. [...] I dismissed my doubts. I was dealing with humans. What could go wrong?" (2006:38) Later, it turns out that he comes out badly from the encounter, owing to the fact that he underestimated his attacker and got stunned. After he regains his consciousness, he faces the inadequacy of his previous notion:

What hurt worse than the lump or the nauseating headache was the humiliation of getting KO'd by the human goon who had ransacked my place. Being a vampire, I was heir to the legacy of the most feared ghouls in history, Dracula and Nosferatu. I was supposed to be the terrorizer, not the terrorized. (105).

A very similar aspect of Felix's false identity is connected to his relationship with women. When he questions the three women involved in the nymphomania case, he takes it for granted that with the use of vampire hypnosis he can get all the information he needs from them, but eventually, he fails in each of the three cases.

Later in the novel, he gets to know that there are not only vampires living in society but also other supernatural creatures. He falls in love with a dryad, a fairy-like woman, Wendy. Again, he gets surprised by the contrast between his very first intuition and reality:

Was I the first vampire ever to feel embarrassment? We were fearsome killers, rapacious as wolves, and yet at this moment, I, Felix, the vampire, felt as awkward as a schoolboy at a dance. (171).

When he meets Wendy for the second time, the same feeling pervades him:

Wendy looked away. This made my aura brighten in annoyance. We supernatural used our ability to read aura to outwit humans. Now this power betrayed me. I took a calming breath and let my aura smooth out. [...] Being the vampire, I was supposed to manipulate the woman. (227).

Thus, Felix's false identity is a result of his misconceptions regarding vampire power. He simply thinks that vampires are superior to humans as well as to women, regardless of whether they are humans or supematurals. He supposes that his vampiric features overlap with what he thinks about them. He is certain that he can easily defend himself against the assassin and he turns out to be the less prepared for their encounter. He is sure that he can effortlessly manipulate women, but exactly the reverse happens.

So as regards his vampire identity, Felix is a stranger to the other vampires who are familiar with their abilities and limitations and do not suffer from an identity conflict, like him.

3.2. Drinking Human Blood

The most important distinctive feature of Felix as compared to other vampires is his aversion to the consumption of human blood. This property of his character not only makes him even more different from other vampires, but also clearly isolates him from them. His reason for not drinking human blood is that it reminds him of the Iraqi girl he had killed in the war.

Regarding this kind of rejection of a pivotal part of vampire nature, Acevedo's main character is not an invention of the author of the novel. Anne Rice's Louis in the Interview with the Vampire struggles with the same feature. As Louis says to Lestât:

If I can live from the blood of animals, why should I not live from the blood of animals rather than go through the world bringing misery and death to human creatures. (176).

The vampiric behavior deriving from Anne Rice's Louis turned out to be a crucial aspect of vampire representations. Sally Miller calls it vampiric anorexia (2003:55). According to her, the anorexic vampire is human and not human at the same time. Considering the fact that in both of the cases of Louis and Felix, the refusal of consuming human blood is a result of the human nature embedded in their vampire characters, Miller's thought-provoking idea seems to be indisputable. Marina Levina's idea has the same basis as Miller's. However, Levina's argument is more radical than Miller's, as she states that forbidding bloodsucking means the end of vampire identity (2003:122).

Although Felix follows the line of Louis, his case is more emphatic in this respect, as he does not have to bring misery and death to human creatures in order to consume human blood. Vampires in Acevedo's novel do not have to take humans as their victims to acquire the amount of blood they need. Louis is against the unethical conduct of murder. Felix, on the contrary, is under the curse of the crime he committed as a human. Judging from the above quoted words of the Iraqi vampire who transformed Felix, it seems that Felix's continuing his life as a vampire is itself enough to equal his crime. After his transformation, Felix is no longer a human, so he cannot have a place in the human society. Additionally, neither can he really find his place among vampires, because he is actually a human vampire, if we follow Miller's explanation. None of the other vampires can be considered similar to him. They do their best to separate from humans as much as they can. The reader cannot find any of them talking about their past human life, and anything related to humanity is of no interest to them. They regard themselves as having a different culture that does not have anything in common with that of the human.

Felix's character is unarguably different from that of the other vampires. He interacts with humans and does not live his life in accordance with the vampiric separatist dogma. Although this is enough for the other vampires to think that Felix's behavior is disturbing, his refusal to drink human blood makes them condemn and despise him.

Not long after Felix introduces himself to Bob, who is the leader of the vampire union, the main character tells him that he does not drink human blood, and Bob scolds him: "Your behavior is irrational and unhealthy. Preying on humans and drinking their blood is our nature." (2006:48, my emphasis). Understanding that Bob is not interested in his reasons, Felix feels that he is a stranger to the vampire community as well. This phenomenon appears even sharper when Felix discusses the same issue with Andre, another one of the vampires. Andre's reaction resonates with that of Bob: "Human blood replenishes our vampire powers. It makes us strong. It makes us monsters." (2006: 215, original emphasis). In his response, Felix expresses his opposition and reveals the burden this means for him: ""I don't want to be a monster." [...] At this moment I hated being a vampire. I wanted to [...] be a normal human." (2006:215, my emphasis). The vampires do not even think that what Felix committed in the war is a crime. They consider their vampire existence a heavenly pleasure that is irreconcilable with Felix's viewpoint according to which: "God has damned us with this existence." (2006:216).

4. Conclusion

Nina Auerbach (1995:34) uses the term the Puritan vampire.Felix is really a puritan figure. He cannot be compared to the cruel vampires of Polidori's Lord Ruthven or Bram Stoker's Dracula who has nothing humane in them. Felix feels remorse for his accidental and unintended crime and punishes himself as a vampire.

Getting excluded from the human society, he cannot find his place even as a vampire due to the fact that he does not accept the normative and prescriptive mies of the vampire community. As a result, he gets isolated among the already socially marginalized vampires. Owing to his double isolation, Felix can live neither as a human, nor as a vampire. This results in his living in an identity crisis.

The terms half vampire and mortal vampire are also introduced by Auerbach (1995:168). The former seems to be evident regarding Felix's position in the vampire union. The latter can also describe his character, as his half-vampire nature derives from his human features which include remorse, his attitude towards human blood consumption, his relationships with humans as well as his nonseparatist way of vampire life.

Another one of the pivotal arguments of Nina Auerbach is that the modem vampire is a creature who has no future (1995:174-175). For this reason modem vampires constantly turn back to the past. Although it is not tme for the vampires of the novel in general, it cannot be considered false for Felix. We do not really see his future in the novel. Simultaneously, he cannot get rid of the past in the form of his remorse for his crime which constantly haunts him. He longs for the remission of the Iraqi girl and there is nothing more he clearly wants to achieve in the future.

Considering the vampires, especially Louis, depicted in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Catherine Belsey claims: "Anne Rice's vampire is surely [...] solitary." (1994:701). It would be difficult to find a word which would more effectively describe Felix's character than solitariness. It seems to be obvious from his already mentioned double isolation. However, it is much more complicated, as Felix is not a modem Byronic hero. He wants to belong to a community. Although he is a stranger among the vampires to some extent, this does not change the fact that he is a vampire and that he thinks of himself as a vampire. He regularly mentions the phrases "we vampires" or "I, the vampire", etc.

After the revelation of the circumstances of an old vampire's death, Ziggy, the vampires get to know that there are vampire hunters killing the members of the vampire union. Felix has to experience the death of his minor and major friends, Andre and Bob. Afterwards, he also gets chased by the vampire hunters, because he is 'the other' from their perspective.

Belsey also argued that "Vampires [...] have no proper place." (1994:697). This is also especially tme for Acevedo's main character. Near the end of the novel, after his fight with the vampire hunters, he is on the verge of death when he has a vision in which he gets forgiven by the Iraqi girl. At the end of the plot, it seems that Wendy and he can reach the fulfillment of their love, and the novel will have a happy ending, when Wendy, saying that "I've lived long enough to know that nothing's ever permanent" (2006:354), announces that she is commanded to go abroad.

In spite of the fact that Fred Botting (1996) is right when claiming that the vampire is no longer the absolute other, Mario Acevedo's The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, through its main character, Felix Gomez, does not reverse the original opposition in the sense of Catherine Belsey's argument in connection with Anne Rice's vampire representation. It is tme that the vampire undergoes a significant liberation, if we consider the figure's delineation, but as regards his character, the following argument of Patrick McCormick (2010:41) persists even in the 21st century, for which Acevedo's novel serves as a pivotal example: "[T]he constant lesson of vampire stories is that a shorter, human life filled with love and friendships is vastly superior to the long loneliness of the vampire.".

References

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