| Episodes |
Giving in to the Dark Side: An Overview
Please God the Monticello Association so good at preventing even the appearance of posthumous miscegenation in the Jefferson family cemetery never reads Steve Erickson's Arc d'X (1993). Therein lies apoplexy for the Jefferson idolizer. For if there were such things as T-shirts in 1780s Paris, Erickson's Jefferson's would probably pay homage to William Blake with "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." For Erickson's Jefferson is initially a slave to his slaves -- riven by contradiction, shackled by repression, stifled by paralysis. "Habitually tormented" by holding slaves, he is yet powerless to give them up. Haunted by the "excruciating visions" of the fiery execution of a black female slave who has murdered her sexual pig of a master, the "dreadful smell" of her immolated flesh and the dreaded coating by her wafting ashes demonize his nightmares. Erickson's Jefferson even imagines hanging himself in his own house in front of the unperturbed gaze of his own unaffected and unresponsive slaves. This publicly acclaimed "people's champion" recognizes that, as a person, he is a "poor champion" of the "great idea" playing out in revolutionary France and turns "pale" at the "violence of the adoration" of which he is not worthy.
What's the cure for this Founding Father's funk? Giving in to the dark side. Raping Sally. Again and again. And over time. The hallucinatory smell of the burning flesh becomes "the smell of his own freedom. . . . he inhaled its sensuality. . . he was filled with desire for the burning slave woman." And so he "follows the smoke to her quarters," Sally's room, where he strips her naked, binds her hands, buries her face in a pillow -- and takes her. Immediately, the "possession of her" released him, emancipated him from personal servitude to the public ideal: "It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear for once the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn't he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other." The moral Jefferson "couldn't quite forgive" the way he took Sally, but "he accepted it," and here is one of the conundrums of the book, "as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good." The rational Jefferson -- heretofore slave of the head rather than embracer of the heart -- "never felt as alive" as this first night he took her. Over time Jefferson would take Sally orally and anally, and "he never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I'd done something that could never be forgiven. . . . I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in" -- and here comes that conundrum again -- "but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me." "Surrendering to passion" -- that is, committing Unpardonable Sins on the road of excess -- "I came to believe my convictions not less, but more."
Since at least James Parton (episode 5), Jefferson has been thought of, in Bradford Vivian's words, as the "synecdoche of America" and the American ideal that all men have the unalienable right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Erickson's Jefferson recognizes his role. "I've invented something," he says, something wild, elusive, "halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast," and "I've set it loose gyrating across the world." But, in a rather astonishing self-reflection that abruptly brings us face-to-face with Erickson's worldview, Erickson's Jefferson knows as well that his invention is "a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me" (emphasis added). Erickson's Jefferson suspects that even the vow of celibacy made to his dying wife was "but a way to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it." The flaw in America is that the pursuit of happiness must come at the expense of others. "Democracy," in Vivian's formulation of Erickson's grim message, "is not an antidote to tyranny, only another form of despotism."
This synopsis of Arc d'X does not do justice to Erickson's complex, multi-layered, post-modern novel, not even to the first forty-six pages on which it is based, a novel that, frankly, has not had great impact on the trajectory of the Jefferson-Hemings controversy and, some might say, therefore unworthy of an episode in our miniseries. The reason no doubt is that Erickson's novels -- this one no exception -- with their surreal landscapes, dystopian societies, time warps, protean characters, and Kafkaesque plots, are not much read by the kind of people shaping the controversy. His Faulknerian non-linear plots are difficult to follow, and his politics are, well, as ugly and apocalyptic as Henry Miller's -- to mention two writers Erickson self-reports in his literary genealogy. To wit: his "American Weimar" article begins with the claim that "America wearies of democracy. . . . A deep freeze has settled in the American soul . . . until rage is the only national passion left." To wit: his article on George Bush begins "I am a traitor." To wit: he has written that "over all my novels hovers the ghost of America." The "end," in fact, haunts Erickson's worldview: "cynicism and spiritual bankruptcy" grip the land, rage at the death of the American Dream "is the only thing that seems to pump blood through the national heart anymore," and "lately the country's been dying more than growing."
Thus, while it might be tempting to pass over Erickson in our miniseries, it would be unwise to do so. Erickson is no slouch, no lightweight. His literary output has been remarkable if not widely remarked, and he's written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, been a film critic for Los Angeles magazine, and edited a journal. In the Bush article his knowledge of American history ranges impressively and effortlessly from Cotton Mather, Tom Paine, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Doors to Bill O'Reilly and "last Sunday's" Meet the Press. Let Vivian's very useful typology be our guide in positioning Erickson within the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. Vivian classifies the motivation of the "the most provocative texts shaping the public memory of Jefferson" into 1) a desire for judgment (for example, in Annette Gordon-Reed [1997], whom we will take up in episode 12), 2) the desire for romance (good examples are Fawn Brodie and Barbara Chase-Riboud), and 3) the desire, exemplified in Erickson, to represent the "incestuous relationship between slavery and democracy."
"Slavery has been a running theme in my books," claims Erickson: we are a society in which the "original residents were systematically wiped out and the new tenants built a society in large part on the labor of people who were shipped over in chains." America, in a charge reminiscent of those hurled at Jefferson by 19th century British traveler-critics we saw in episode 2, is a country that "fed on slavery in order to declare itself the cradle of liberty." And thus Jefferson's Sally, says Vivian, "is the dark secret in which the goodness of America is rooted," that is, that "the pursuit of happiness . . . is conducted through the sacrifice of another's self-determination . . . some form of slavery is not anomalous with liberty but a necessary complement to the articulation of its 'self-evident' nature." Erickson, then, according to Vivian, is "unmatched" among commentators in his "sober willingness" to dwell on those elements of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship many have always found "disquieting," even "horrible." Erickson exposes "the libidinous other, the demon we imagine must have dwelled within [Jefferson]." Erickson exposes "the private demon within the civic saint." But, as you can see if you wrestle with Arc d'X's difficulty past page forty-six, Erickson also renders Sally triumphant in another universe. Time-warping Sally meets Jefferson again in Paris, this time refusing to return to Monticello, which precipitates a revised history in which, among other things, Jefferson sells himself to his slaves, and Monticello is transformed into a training ground for a black guerrilla army.
On an alley wall at the dark corner of Desolate and Unrequited streets in Arc d'X's volcano-shrouded and priest-ruled city of Aeonopolis, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS is graffiti, and a chunk of the wall on which it is inscribed is used to crush the skull of a man who calls himself "America." "Happiness is a dark thing to pursue," concludes the novel's Thomas with T-shirt concision, but for author Erickson "The issue is to what extent Jefferson's darkness made his light possible. I worked from the premise that for somebody in trouble, the pendulum had to swing. Otherwise, he was simply a hypocrite. I assume [Jefferson] was a man of genuine contradictions."
