So much joy even in misery, even in the misery-the real eternity, the real forever-the mortal mystery of that…
I was chatting with @itiireae about how joy and pain are entwined for Nicolas de Lenfent, and I thought… maybe let’s make a little post chatting about it?
Caveat that all this is only as I understand/interpret it! If you feel differently, I’m really curious to hear your thoughts.
A little bit of context of a few examples from Anne Rice’s words before we begin…
Just before Lestat turns Nicolas in The Vampire Lestat, he sees in Nicki’s mind… “…There had been the eternity of growing up and growing old before us, and so much joy even in misery, even in the misery-the real eternity, the real forever-the mortal mystery of that…”
Lestat says to Louis in Blood Communion, “Seemed all the little victories of life and life after death were so hard for him, happiness was so hard for him [Nicolas]… joy was an agony I think…”
After Nicki’s death, Lestat imagines Nicolas saying to him, "I am beyond all pain and sin…”
So, for Nicolas, how are joy and pain entwined?
I think, for Nicki, to feel joy at all is to sin. Everything that brings him happiness is bound up with guilt and unworthiness and he feels he doesn’t deserve it in the first place. To feel loved by Lestat is to sin, to play violin is to sin, to actively seek his own desires is sin. All of it feels like transgression. Even his body’s delight is, to him, proof of his own corruption.
Lestat also thinks upon what Nicolas might believe, which I presume links to Anne Rice’s thinking regarding Nicki’s psychology… “Beauty was a Savage Garden. So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting? Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden. But maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice.”
I think Nicolas’ experience of joy and pain is sewn into how he seeks justice and truth as well. He sees his own evil not as question, but fact. But there is still objective honesty and justice. The closest Nicki can get to goodness is that he clings to absolute truth and justice. However, rather than offering a path to goodness, this belief only provides a lens through which Nicki is forced to condemn himself even more thoroughly. He already knows he cannot be good, as he sins against God, against his family… but now truth and justice are absolute and so the sin of his desire, his joy is also an absolute certainty. Justice is the only “goodness” left to him. But he refuses to lie, even to himself, and when he judges himself on a scale of absolute justice, he is always guilty.
That’s why he can’t ever feel joy simply for what it is. It’s always shadowed by the conviction that it’s wrong for him to have it. And that belief threads through him, right to his core. Part of its origin is his religious upbringing, and his family’s expectations… and then also - his nature, and his own self-perception. Because when we take it further, Nicki is a thinker, and yet in the eyes of family and religion, to be good is not to think, but to obey. Nicki does not obey, therefore he sins. (Lestat on the other hand never believed that to obey was good, and he can’t really conceive of this deep-seated truth as Nicolas knows it. To Lestat, this perception is simply false. But to Nicolas, it is true.)
For Nicki, to feel joy or pleasure is to transgress. So his heart, or his body feeling joy is confirmation of his own damnation. And he feels he ought to be indicted for it, struck down by the cosmic hand of Absolute Justice.
Now, I don’t think Nicki cares at all about being good. But that’s because he feels inherently he is evil and he’s accepted that. I think Nicki doesn’t feel he could be good. Or, at least, the only way Nicolas feels he could be good would be a complete negation of the self. Nicki feels he would be good if he followed exactly what God and his family tell him he should be, if he denied his desires and did exactly what God, his family and society expected of him. And Nicki rejects that, he doesn’t even want to do it. To him, he isn’t just bad, he is actively evil, intentionally rejecting the only possibilities he had to be good.
And I feel like when Lestat idealises goodness, Nicki internally feels something like, “Yes - you are good Lestat. You only bring light to others. You bring light to me. But I bring only darkness. I am not good. I cannot be good. I do not even want to be good. So when you bring everything you care about and feel from back to it being about “goodness”, if you knew the truth of me, you would despise me.” Nicki feels what Lestat says deeply, because it is true of Lestat. He knows Lestat brings light and goodness to the world, just as surely as he is convinced of his own evil. But if anything, Lestat talking of it only illuminates Nicki’s own darkness and wrongness.
Nicki says, “If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I’m evil and I revel in it. I thumb my nose at goodness. And if you must know, I don't play the violin for the idiots who come to Renaud's to make them happy. I play it for me, for Nicolas.” Here, Nicki is saying very plainly that if he plays violin for himself, it means he is evil. That’s what he believes. That’s what he feels. He doesn’t call himself self-indulgent, or selfish - he calls himself evil. It’s an extreme, self-punishing perspective.
And of course, it makes love unbearable. Because if goodness is what Lestat values more than anything, and Nicki knows himself to be evil, then Lestat’s love also confirms his unworthiness. Nicki must feel like he cannot be loved. He is not good like Lestat is always saying he values. And then Nicki then quantifies that belief even further, insisting not only on deeming himself evil, but on absolute justice and truth… so now, he is, by his own judgment both evil and bad, and it is an immutable, true fact.
Either Lestat doesn’t really know him and he has somehow tricked Lestat into it, or Lestat’s love cannot be “true” because he knows he is not good. Therefore, Lestat’s love must be either false or mistaken. Lestat's love becomes painful, because Lestat values goodness above all - and Nicki knows that everything he is stands in opposition to that. To be loved, then, is to be misunderstood; and if Lestat does see him truly, then it means Lestat has joined him in sin. That’s the only way the love can make sense to him.
And here we get into thorny territory… because Nicolas has had enough experience of the world to see that all (or almost all) humans are hypocrites, who, if he judges them by his personal unbending scale are sinners too. So “if goodness does exist”… in Nicolas’ conception, goodness could exist, but it would require being almost saintly, a literal martyr, I think. Although the extremity of the concept is almost irrelevant to his experience of reality and real people anyway, I’d say…
And, ironically, Nicki then hurts Lestat deeply by stating these beliefs, and so becomes confirmation of the evil he has already condemned himself as… To slip into Lestat’s perspective, of course, Nicolas saying that they are partners in sin, or that what they do is sin, not goodness, feels as though Nicolas is intentionally diminishing something Lestat literally holds to be sacred.
So I think Nicki never feels joy simply for itself. It is always accompanied by a deep knowledge that his joy is sin that he is utterly unworthy of, and he feels accused (And he is accused! By himself!) at the same time he is feeling joy. And so any joy is pain and his body as much as his mind and heart is, I imagine, uncertain whether to feel it or reject it, and so it does both at the same time, like a strange torture.
Nicolas never believed joy belonged to him. And its transience only confirms what he already knew: joy was never his to keep, he was sinful to allow himself to even feel it for a moment… and so, even in that first instant of joy, pain has already begun. And when joy fades, he is left with the penance he always knew must be meted out to him.
For Nicolas, joy and pain are never opposites. They are the same sensation, distorted through guilt and fixed by unbending truth.
To feel joy is to sin; to sin is to suffer; and to suffer is, at last, the only way he can still feel alive.
Is the suffering worth it?
So much joy even in misery…
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