eremacausis

As a man, I can­not com­pare the rev­e­la­tion of a char­ac­ter to the giv­ing of birth.

As a father, how­ever, I can speak of the joy and pain of watch­ing these char­ac­ters grow up, a piece of myself woven into each one. The seed of the world around me, the peo­ple close and far that I have cop­u­lated with all engen­dered in these men and women, boys and girls — they are our chil­dren. What after all, after death, is the dif­fer­ence between these, my lit­er­ary, and these, my lit­eral, off­spring? Will not both con­tinue on in our mem­o­ries, writ­ten and oth­er­wise, and in our own char­ac­ters? Much is spo­ken of phys­i­cal genet­ics, and what of nar­ra­tive genet­ics? What of those Ivan Fyo­dor­ovichs, those Mer­saults, those José Arca­dios that have, in their own way, fused their per­son­al­i­ties, their very attrib­utes, with our own? Of char­ac­ter then, I can speak of hope and pride and love.

I can also speak as a voyeur, a curi­ous onlooker into the per­sonal, pri­vate strug­gles of peo­ple, real indi­vid­u­als exposed through story for all to read, mock, and lust after. Poor vic­tims towards whom the reader is free of all law and moral to prey upon, vicious judg­ment and rabid rav­ish, with absolutely no ret­ri­bu­tion except, per­haps, its effects on the soul. And yet, in an ironic twist, a voyeur actor, a Peep­ing Tom pup­peteer, with the dan­ger­ous power to direct the scenes into which I, the author, am look­ing in.