Chapter 1: Gentleman Reptile
March 2, 2010Henry Baum No Comments »There was a nice review of the novel yesterday on Amazon, which singled out the porn section as giving him pause, before realizing that I was after making a larger point. It actually only takes up two chapters of the novel, but it gives me pause as well. The reason is pretty significant: I have a daughter. The novel begins with a writer discovering his daughter doing porn on the internet. When I initially wrote the chapter, my daughter was a baby, which is much more abstract then the person she is now, with language and closer to being a young woman.
So I now have to think about my daughter one day reading this story about her father fearing her doing porn. There’s no doubt this could creep her out, and perhaps I was being careless not foreseeing that scenario where she’d be old enough to read what I’d written.
But the point of the chapter is to illustrate how the lead character’s world is disintegrating in a way that mirrors the world at large. Sort of like the rats at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s Native Son – the novel opens up with rats crawling around a slum apartment and kids screaming. I read an interview somewhere that he wrote the chapter last and he wanted a kind of archetypal situation to set up the rest of the story. So that’s where I was going with “Gentleman Reptile” – something to typify the lead character’s worst fears.
This chapter was actually released as a self-contained story a couple of years ago by Cloverfield Press:
The woman who accepted the story is a mom and knows my daughter, so that’s some armor. Too much explanation? Just getting down some of the guilt I’ve felt about the opening. I know that as a writer self-censorship isn’t a good idea, and the opening serves a very direct purpose. Not only about the writer’s revulsion about the world, but the fact that he’s working on a story that – within the confines of the novel – turns out to be true in real life. That sets up the other prophetic writing he does later in the novel.
It’s that sense of prophecy that adds another layer of guilt to the whole thing. Am I literally predicting this will come true? No. But one of the ideas in the novel is that “ideas are real” – consciousness can create reality and the dream world is as tactile as the waking world (something I believe is possible). The evolution of the mind is when these different worlds come together and we can travel freely between them. If so, though, what’s it mean for this story? It’s true for the novel daughter, but not true for the real daughter. They’re not the same person.
Long intro to the song I’ve written for the chapter, which was hard to write, considering. The chapter begins with the writer talking to a fellow professor about being attracted to his female students. “I’m adulterous just by looking at them.” So,
I don’t know wrong from right
I cannot let go of a vice
When I sit down to write
I’m unfaithful to my wife
The basic message of the song is that it’s supposed to be sung both from the lead character’s point of view, but also the porn king who takes advantage of the writer’s daughter – as if to say, there’s also a violation in the writing itself, which is something I’ve considered and explained above. The main theme of the song is this one:
I am a lie
Do you need a ride?
All in all, touchy subjects. But I’m happy with how the song turned out. And, for that matter, the chapter.
I Am a Lie by theamericanbookofthedead
mp3 link: I Am a Lie
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