| Episodes |
1) Whereas Jefferson's public principles form the scaffold of his canonical memory, Erickson conjures a vision of Jefferson's private and unconscious drives, which can only be represented fictionally. In sum, he produces an unadulterated encounter with Jefferson's other: the private demon within the civic saint.
Bradford Vivian 295
2) He is committed to understanding human emotions, and sometimes goes over the top because he's willing to take risks that other literary writers aren't. If he slips on occasion, it's because he's one of the few American writers willing to leave himself open to the truly visionary.
Brian Evenson
3) The novel [Arc d'X] is vintage Erickson: a surreal hodgepodge of political allegory, futuristic imaginings and dreamlike homages to earlier novels and movies.
Michiko Kakutani
4) Aeonopolis, the author tells us, is almost impossible to leave: thus a waking nightmare of reason paralyzed, of civility blood-cursed, perhaps only degrees worse than the dark urban dream we ourselves can't get free of. Which may be meaning enough.
John Skow
5) As Sally Hemings is re-read and re-interpreted, her silence -- present as she was at the dawning of American Independence -- is given voice and her alienation transformed into insurrection by popular fictions like Erickson's post-modernist Arc d'X. The kind of fictions and histories which allow Sally Hemings a place or space within them seek to legitimize an illegitimate legacy that has stood outside America's narration of itself.
Sharon Monteith
6) Sally feels compassion for her suffering master, but she also becomes aware that setting foot on French soil has by law manumitted her. Subtly the relationship between Sally and Thomas changes, becoming more amiable and intimate. Then in a frenzy of combined sexual transgression, racial domination, and self-immolation that is unexpected even to its perpetrator, Thomas rapes Sally, and it becomes clear to both that a fierce will to dominate that had prior to this juncture been sublimated in the mind of Thomas -- the public's democratic hero -- has now found its outlet. A pattern of abuse is established. But soon his visits to her bed alternate subjugation with tenderness, until, becoming increasingly indiscreet and desperate, their sexual relationship is unmistakable to the entire household. The situation becomes more complex when Sally, now ostracized by all but Thomas for being "a great man's whore," comes hesitantly to depend on Thomas's attentions.
Jim Murphy 454
7) Here a theme appears that is developed more fully in "Arc d'X." American novelists are not usually concerned with American history, but here the idea of Jeffersonian democracy opposes what passes for modern American political thought. In both the new novel and its predecessor, there is a haunting presence transferred to the modern age from the beginning of the Republic. This is Sally Hemings, who was not merely a slave of Jefferson's but his mistress. She stands for something.
Anthony Burgess 9
8) The unavoidable impression made on the reader by a first encounter with Erickson's work is one of spatial and temporal disorientation: we become travelers in an unknown country without reliable road maps or chronometers, where every signpost points us in several directions at once. But I wan to suggest that there is a clear pathway indicated into this dense and enigmatic corpus: the apocalyptic rhetoric of Jeffersonian American origins. No doubt the collocation of "Jeffersonian" and "apocalyptic" will seem strange to those who discern in the former merely the visionary sage of the revolutionary American state. Erickson, however, is fully attuned to the paradoxical movement of Jeffersonian thought, which understood every origin to be defined by a necessary and reciprocal relationship with death and annihilation.
Lee Spinks 216
9) Mr. Erickson wishes to present a vision of some of the basic contradictions in this strangest of Mr. Jefferson's inventions -- the United States -- and in the "pursuit of happiness" that is one of its foundations: What if one person's happiness runs directly against another's very humanity? The best example of this paradox was slavery, but Mr. Erickson's exploration of it is a bit too disorienting.
Michael Rust
10) Which introduces the first major character of "Arc d'X," Thomas Jefferson on the eve of the French Revolution. Recently widowed, stationed in Paris with his daughters, he takes Sally Hemings, his former slave, as his mistress -- thereby ensuring a snare of sex and power and race that holds the major concerns of the novel. Torn between his conscience and his lust, Jefferson accepts his exploitation of Sally as "the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me."
Gail Caldwell
11) Steve Erickson's work has been decisively informed by the experience of having grown up in one of Los Angeles's innumerable suburban communities, where Erickson witnessed a mind-boggling series of physical transformations; equally significant was the impact on his sensibility of the wider cultural, political, and social upheavals that occurred during the late sixties and early seventies, while he was working on a film degree at UCLA. Collectively and individually, his novels have captured more convincingly than any writer since Nathanael West Los Angeles's peculiar ability to disorient and deceive with its glitzy, seductive facades and illusions. Erickson's Los Angeles differs from novel to novel in terms of its particulars, but it is always a surreal, utterly fluid landscape where volcanoes belch fire and brimstone, rivers and enormous condo developments appear and disappear form one day to the next, and characters become lost within their own houses and memories as the y wander through bizarre, subterranean labyrinths in doomed efforts to find love and make sense of their existence.
Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 395-96
12) Rather than suggesting that Thomas's molestation of Sally amounts to a failure of character, Arc d'X portrays his fevered lust as the means by which he replenishes his democratic convictions.
Bradford Vivian 295
13) Erickson's Thomas Jefferson, portrayed as father of the idea of America, is also rendered as a man who cannot help but abuse the most cherished of his progeny: ideals of American justice and freedom.
Jim Murphy 456
14) The invention of America sprang from men of furious sexual torment: Jefferson with his forbidden slave mistress; Washington who loved a woman who was not his own wife but the wife of another man; Patrick Henry who kept his insane wife locked in his basement at the very moment he pleaded for death if not liberty; Thomas Paine whose first wife died in childbirth so that he believed he'd killed her, and thus was impotent with his second wife who chose to advertise this failure throughout the community, and in the shame of which Paine wrote his fierce pamphlets. The invention of America by these men was meant to spring them loose from the bonds of afterlife; it redefined us as instruments of God or heaven but rather as the incarnations of our memories of our own selves. . . . America is the apotheosis of this, where memory itself is a country, because America is where only memory divides the present from the future, and where the unconscious dreams of the people who live her understand that the Declaration of Independence was signed after Hiroshima, not before, and neither has yet happened.
Lee Spinks 220
15) In Arc d'X, Steve Erickson's fourth novel, the author appears alongside Thomas Jefferson as a character, announces that 1993 is "the final failure of his career as a novelist," and then tops this by having Steve Erickson murdered in Berlin in 1999 by a character who kills himself when he finds Erickson's Jefferson alive in America. Like the sentence you've just finished, Arc d'X is constructed of looping arcs, spatial dislocations, temporal contradictions and vertiginous doubling. Reimagining the American revolution, Erickson has a character rewriting "Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History." His name is Etcher. Like M.C. Escher's famous "Drawing Hands," Erickson's and Etcher's projects cross each other, one meaning of "x." But the Escher lithograph that best reflects what Erickson calls the "psychitecture" of his novel is "Relativity," a structure of impossible walls, odd openings and strange perspectives.
Tom LeClair
16) Thomas represents a synecdoche of America. He calls it "a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me" (46). By associating his rape of Sally with the pursuit of happiness, Thomas allegorizes the rape committed by America in the name of liberty. Erickson's exploration of this other Jefferson's unconscious unveils the sinister politics clocked by his nation's most pristine ideals.
Bradford Vivian 296
17) Erickson turns the formula around, allowing Thomas to assume responsibility for the ugliest aspects of national consciousness, as seen in his thoughts on the origins of America's spirit: "I've invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It's a contraption 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. I've set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It's a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor: it will test most those who presume too glibly to believed in it. But I know it's a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me"(46)." While Faulkner's Sutpen may be viewed ultimately as the product of an immoral society, Erickson's Jefferson imagines that he has personally calibrated the political conditions by which a society will emerge that reflects his own shortcomings.
Jim Murphy 456
18) Erickson's energetic rehabilitation of the Jeffersonian origins of American republican discourse naturally runs the risk of establishing a "golden age" which exerts moral authority simply by the contrast it presents to the clamor of an uncertain present. That Erickson avoids such a sentimental conclusion is due not only to his emphasis upon the rapacity of the Jeffersonian project, but also to his refusal to conceive of Jefferson as a narrowly "historical" figure.
Lee Spinks 219
19) "The whole rape scene [in the Esquire piece] is absolute fantasy," says Willard Stern Randall, whose biography, "Thomas Jefferson: A Life," will be published Aug. 9. Indeed, Mr. Erickson's piece, and excerpt from his new novel "Arc d'X" (Poseidon Press), eschews historical fact and reads like a Southern romance potboiler. Or, as Mr. Randall says, "It's soft porn."
Jeffrey Staggs
20) The impious imagery of Arc d'X suggests that the pursuit of happiness for one political body is conducted through the sacrifice of another's self-determination, that some form of slavery is not anomalous to liberty but a necessary complement to the articulation of its "self-evident" nature. Democracy is not an antidote to tyranny, only another form of despotism.
Bradford Vivian 296
21) Arc d'X's structure is not linear but rather takes the form of a series of jumps that allow both backward and forward "loops" (or "arcs") of motion. The end of the millennium serves as a point where these arcs converge. The result of their junction is a pooling of all the emotionally significant moments of the millennium at its end, creating an aberration in time.
Jim Murphy 457
22) The bifurcation of "America" functions as a metaphor for two ideas that Erickson develops in Arc d'X: that the promise of America is created out of the apocalyptic tension between our desire for revelation and our fear of a dystopian future; and that the idealism that enables us to project revelatory new worlds is indissociable from the threat of violence and dispossession.
Lee Spinks 219
23) I have to find fault with Mr. Erickson's brash treatment of his historical episode, The Jefferson who wished to found the new America on deistic rational principles was, of course, frustrated by two kinds of religious fundamentalisms, one south of the Potomac, the other well north. Jefferson is here presented as one who copulates with a slave, knows it to be wrong, but regards evil as a necessary corollary of the national good to which he aspires. Jefferson the intellectual is not in evidence at all.
Anthony Burgess 9
24) Arc d'X also alludes to the alleged contract between Jefferson and Hemings. In Erickson's retelling, the contract is made not for love, but because Sally is the dark secret in which the goodness of America is rooted.
Bradford Vivian 296
25) In fact, Erickson's characters and settings are so strongly rendered that they tend to undermine his more lofty concerns. You want to spend more time with them; you wish the author was more physical than metaphysical. This is especially the case with young Sally, who disappears far too soon. But maybe that's an inevitable by-product to such a grand design. As Erickson would no doubt admit, the individual has never had a prayer when confronted with the juggernaut of history.
Stephen Amidon
26) What is the most accurate portrayal of "the intellectual Jefferson?" Author of the Declaration? Envoy to France? President of the United States? Founder of the University of Virginia? Deist? Architect? Lawyer? Inventor? It is clearly a worthless exercise to claim precedence for any one of these roles. The fictionalized Jefferson in Arc d'X includes as subtext each of these aspects of the historical persona, but it also includes qualities which historians have been reluctant to accept, which may or may not be based on the experience of the third president of the United States.
Jim Murphy 460
27) The fact remains that in the decade since Days Between Stations was published, very little critical work on Erickson has appeared. Against this background, any response to Erickson's writing must necessarily be introductory, which is itself an irony given his conviction, played out through his unswerving attention to America's declension from its Jeffersonian origins, that modern American history is always already posthumous, inaugurated and brought to perfection as it was by an eighteenth-century apocalyptic vision that was neither recognized nor understood.
Lee Spinks 215
28) Erickson's novel is motivated by a desire to bring Jefferson's unconscious into the stark light of the late twentieth century. Arc d'X pursues to its logical extreme the contemporary desire to expose Jefferson's libidinous other, the demon that we imagine must have dwelled within him.
Bradford Vivian 297
29) They're also the reason that kids read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and Harry Potter: this notion that there's a more alluring, more magical, and more menacing world beyond our own. One of the great pleasures of reading Erickson is his ability to capture the dreamy danger and vividness of Narnia while still offering the complexities of grown-up reading. . . . This, finally, is both Erickson's strength and his downfall: he's interested in the way popular genres can be appropriated for literary use. The appropriation of popular genres is something that's as old as literary history, but it's most often done in a way that removes the generic elements.
Brian Evenson
30) Memory . . . memory of a lost parent, a lost mate, a lost country, a lost opportunity, even a lost lifetime preceding one's present incarnation. Memory fractured. Memory decayed. Memory expunged. Memory regained. Sally Hemings' memories of an America that may never have existed in Arc d'X, Daniel Pearse's memories of his slain mother in Stone Junction, the young boy's struggle to recover his memories in Fiskadoro, Nu Wa's phantasmagoric journey to the aptly named Island of Mist and Forgetfulness as well as Miranda's fear of being infected by the memories of other species in Salt Fish Girl. Strangely, compellingly, all of these authors -- separate from one another -- decided that the tools of speculative fiction were the best and only tools by which to build these fictive monuments to memory. Memory . . . and all the painful obsessions, all the incurable neuroses, all the sad beauty, all the tortured artwork born from same.
Robert Guffey
31) Arc d'X is an underappreciated novel, perhaps because of its many flagrant transgressions against more traditional forms of the genre. It contains violently clashing discourses and conflicting ideas that nonetheless cohere around the idea of American freedom, the book's fundamental subject. As such, it displays a virtuoso synthesis of materials, working a vast amount of information into a simultaneous whole through the arcing dynamics of the book's form.
Jim Murphy 477
32) Historically contingent, Sally Hemings is nothing if she is not read as a key figure in exposing the history of racial and sexual relations in the United States. . . . Symbolically, she is slavery personified in all its contradictions and irresolution.
Sharon Monteith
33) Erickson's narrative dissociates the man from the ideals he authored, suggesting that they need not share the same alloy, because the man will always fail the ideals, but the ideals will never fail the man. Ultimately, Arc d'X debases the public memory of Jefferson and perverts his puritan ethos in order to renew the ideals to which he lent his voice.
Bradford Vivian 298
34) It's not that Erickson isn't good enough -- he's able to match the best of the young and old postmodernists to either side of him. Instead, it's that his mode isn't acceptable: what he does with pop culture and literary genres, what he does with the arrangement of his narratives, what he does with feeling, what he does with the notion of apocalypse, all cut against the current. If Erickson hasn't had the success he deserves, it is precisely because his voice is decidedly original enough to be out of step.
Brian Evenson
35) This division between a Jeffersonian "America" and the "United States" is of considerable importance to Erickson and recurs in different guises throughout his work.
Lee Spinks 219
36) Georgie commits his second murder in the book when he brings a rock down upon Thomas's skull while the statesman sleeps -- a murder for which Sally has been charged in Aeonopolis more than two hundred pages previously in the text, which she believes she has committed at the Hotel Langeac more than two hundred years prior. When it finally arrives, rather than an apocalypse or a rebirth, the millennium is figured as a loop, feeding back all of the arcs of the novel to their origins, keeping Thomas, Sally, and all of their fictional progeny forever suspended in the cognitive territories of Erickson's America.
Jim Murphy 476
37) Arc d'X could almost be read as a fictional analogue of these works of political fabulation. It is a novel about memory, the relation of the future to the past, the apocalyptic origin of the history of the American republic, and the dialectical relation between freedom and dispossession.
Lee Spinks 225
38) Though it's hard not to admire the ambition of this novel, its groping efforts to paint a fantastical portrait of a world on the verge of the millennium, Mr. Erickson fails to deliver the goods. His attempts to use the tale of Thomas and Sally as a kind of mythic parable feel forced and contrived, just as his juxtapositions of love and independence, the heart and the conscience, black and white, ultimately feel reductive. In the end, what's meant to pass as significance simply comes across as pretentiousness.
Michiko Kakutani
39) The frank portrayal of American race relations found in Arc d'X places Erickson in a tradition of authors such as Faulkner, Reed, and William Styron -- individuals whose observations on race are often couched in what are ostensibly historical novels, but which also may be read as documents deeply infused with the race consciousness of the times in which they are written. A clash of forms and discourses is present in Erickson's novel that is analogous to Reed's pastiche style in Mumbo Jumbo. Along with Reed and other writers of recombinant fiction, Erickson integrates historical conceptions of race with his own opinions and with certain expectations of his readers.
Jim Murphy 470
40) Some indication of the strangeness and complexity of Erickson's narrative strategies may be gleaned from a provisional summary of the plotlines of Arc d'X. The novel begins with the story of Thomas Jefferson in Paris during the French Revolution, his (true or apocryphal) relation with his slave Sally Hemings, Jefferson's rape of Sally, her flight to a surreal volcanic landscape where she encounters a man (later identified as Etcher, an inhabitant of the twenty-first-century city of Aeonopolis) and a woman identical to herself (who turns out to be Polly, Sally's daughter, in another dimension), Sally's return to Paris, her subsequent departure to America with Jefferson, who is elected president and then mysteriously disappears, only to be rediscovered by Sally years later high atop an Indian mesa,, where she falls asleep beside him. At which point the second narrative begins: Sally wakes in a hotel room two hundred years in the future with blood on her bedsheets, a knife and a dead body at her side, and the word "America" on her lips. This plotline is propelled by the relationship between Sally and Wade, the policeman nominally investigating her for the "murder" of the unknown man beside her, in the outlaw zones of Aeonopolis. It modulates into the third narrative, the story of Etcher, archival clerk at Church Central (the repressive control center that keeps the theocracy of Aeonopolis functioning) History, which he removes, copies, and hides. This story also details Etcher's relationship with Sally, his flight with Sally and Polly to The Ice, a bleak district at the World's End, her confession of her love for Jefferson, and her death at the hands of a strange spirit which invades her body and demands to be released. After this point, things do not, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, delay in turning curious. The novel swings back to Paris on the brink of the millennium and the "discovery" by Seuroq, a French mathematician, of a mysterious "Day X," a missing twenty hours which represented all the moments abstracted from historical time by the forces of memory and which could find no way back intro the structures of historical recollection. And the most disorienting shift of all occurs as the locale changes once again, this time to the apocalyptic scene of Berlin in 1998, where Erickson puts in a personal appearance only to be murdered by Georgie, a fascist German skinhead. From this point the novel picks up speed, shuffling episodes with disconcerting rapidity, as we follow Georgie on his crazed journey across America, west toward California, as the clock runs down into Day X. It reaches its climax at the moment when Georgie enters the door of an Indian mesa and murders the old man (Jefferson) lying there. This moment, which conflates the death of an avatar of apocalyptic time with the death of a particular historical epoch, is both an end and a beginning: it brings all the main themes of the novel into focus while simultaneously redoubling each narrative level. Thus Polly's search for Etcher in Aeonopolis (and her inexplicable encounter with a stranger identical to herself at Etcher's door) concludes the novel, but this narrative also describes the moment in 1789 in which Sally encounters her mirror image at the volcano's edge and flees back to Paris, Jefferson, and America. Both narratives occur at the same point in alternative histories, as Arc d'X takes on the configuration that Erickson detected in the work of Philip K. Dick, where "the past and present are a road always winding, like a figure 8, back to the same intersection of the present, over which memory hovers like a window in space" (American Nomad 147).
Lee Spinks 226-27
41) In his novel Arc d'X, Steve Erickson dives under the historical documentation of Jefferson's struggle with his theoretical beliefs and private practices and obtains a gauge by which he measures a largely undocumented America as it spins its chaotic course toward the millennium. Erickson's America is a psychological country stocked with extremes of beauty and terror, both of which arise from Jefferson's incipient declaration, subsequently grown wild beyond the control of reason. "Happiness is a dark thing to pursue," Erickson's Jefferson observes in retrospect, "and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well" (261). Erickson uses the figures of Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the permutations of their master/slave/lover relationship to write an "unexpurgated unconscious history" of America in jarring terms. The novel contains probing explorations of character and darkly picaresque action in alternative visions of the American landscape, past and future.
Jim Murphy 452-53
42) Magic realism veers into toxic gray as Thomas Jefferson's guilt haunts an alternate America. This brilliant, desperate, sheet-soaking nightmare of a novel begins in what seems to be the clear air of rational narration, as Thomas Jefferson, living in Paris at the outset of the French Revolution, beds his mulatto slave girl Sally Hemings. Whether the historical Jefferson actually did so is unprovable; he denied it, perhaps because of social necessity, and modern assertions on either side of the question are clouded by the racial politics of tradition vs. revisionism. For author Erickson, the power of his theme's dark vision sweeps away argument. Jefferson was the giver of America's creed of life and liberty, but he was tormented and ineffective at facing the nation's blood curse of slavery.
John Skow, "Liberty's Dark Dream"
43) The novels of Steve Erickson occupy a curious position upon the landscape of contemporary American letters. For a figure whose seven published books suggest that he might seem destined to become that most fabled of beasts, a "great" American writer, his work has yet to elicit a definitive critical response. Indeed, it has yet to elicit almost any response whatsoever; the loquacity of Erickson's style discovers a corresponding intensity only in the silence that his work attracts.
Lee Spinks 214
44) The same fabric also binds Thomas to the promise he made at his dying wife's bedside never to remarry, the promise that had allowed other forbidden fantasies to enter his consciousness after hear death (11). The secret that becomes public is not merely the sexual intent of Thomas toward Sally -- it is the ruthless will to dominate that has existed underneath his public veneer. And it is also ruthless underside of what had appeared to be the wholesome rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Jim Murphy 472
45) The narration never breaks free of its restraints as Erickson continually directs his readers' attentions. Even though we wander through centuries and locations, finishing with Sally's fortunes, turning full circle, the author always signals his intentions, underscores his points, and leaves little room for maneuver.
Carl Mcdougall
46) The Jeffersonian inheritance is both constitutive and subversive of American conceptions of selfhood.
Lee Spinks 221
47) Like Faulkner's streams and eddies in Absalom, Absalom!, Erickson's loops trace the perpetual motion of mastery, racism, guilt and self-destruction, exporting them to Europe, returning them to America, but by novel's end characters have dissolved into points on the arcs of Erickson's plot. Perhaps this is his point: characters who internalize the Jeffersonian "pursuit of happiness" open up a sucking black hole within. Still, sacrificing character to "psychitecture" courts the failure Erickson predicts.
Tom LeClair
48) During the past decade, Steve Erickson has published six remarkable, visionary books of great stylistic virtuosity and thematic ambition. . . . These books all combine features of the magical realists' exaggeration of the familiar with Faulkner's mesmerizing rhetoric and ability to explode time and space. The end result is a haunting and grotesque evocation of the shattered nature of twentieth-century life and its ongoing love affair with fascism and violence.
Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 395
49) It becomes increasingly clear that the city of Aeonopolis, where Sally has awakened, exists somewhere on a coast between awful dream and bleak reality, in some American future which is the result of a struggle for love and freedom initiated centuries earlier.
Jim Murphy 463
50) The difficulties of Sally's historical position are exacerbated by the choice she is compelled to make to make between the values of love and freedom. Erickson's voluntarist revision of republican history makes her dilemma a central theme of the novel: Sally agrees to remain with Jefferson, and love him as her master, if he assents to the eventual emancipation of her children and consolidates her dream of an Enlightenment American republic. One of the novel's more controversial contentions is that Sally hesitates before the embrace of love or freedom because she misunderstands the relationship between these terms: for her they stand opposed in a pure antithesis, whereas Jefferson understands history to be produced at the intersection of the two.
Lee Spinks 235-36
51) Writers since Crevecoeur and Tocqueville have tried to get a fix on America; it's probably the predominant obsession of our national literature. In Steve Erickson's apocalyptic vision, the very scroll of history has all but set itself on fire. What once was America is now a place spun so far out of control that its inner-city zones have names like Sorrow and Humiliation. The sky, when you can see it, seems to leak fire. A despotic, secularized clergy has taken over, and the authorities are constantly on the lookout for subversive behavior (including certain aesthetic judgments).
Gail Caldwell
52) The Jeffersonian republic was everywhere the product of an imagination haunted by paradox: advocate of states' rights and the integrity of the Union; slaveholder and apostle of freedom; seer of the revolutionary apocalypse and pragmatic statesman of genius.
Lee Spinks 224
53) Though Arc d'X starts out as an historical novel, it soon becomes clear that it is, in fact, about history itself, how time can arc and cross back on itself. In Paris, Jefferson must choose between the pursuit of human rights and the pursuit of happiness. By opting for the latter course and keeping his slave girl, he condemns his nation to a self-indulgent, sensually doomed fate that lands it in the millennial muck of Aeonopolis. The only chance for its salvation comes from Etcher, who is able to rewrite history when, unlike Jefferson, he grants Sally her freedom.
Stephen Amidon
54) An introduction to Erickson's work should first take account of the "difficulty" that it presents to its readers. The question of how to read Erickson arises, I believe, because his writing seeks to give both structural and thematic expression to the complex relationship between temporality, history, and narrative. The involuted timescales and intricate plotlines of his novel consistently imbricate ends with beginnings and inscribe an eschatological trajectory within the discourse of American history.
Lee Spinks 215
55) The modern age that Mr. Erickson presents is not easily recognizable. It is a creation and a rather grim one. There is a lot of sex in it as well as the mandatory violence. We do not seem to be quite in the realist world.
Anthony Burgess
56) Like the paragraph you've just read, Arc d'X has science as the base of its art. Erickson alludes to "the Great relativist himself" and creates a French scientist who uses quantum theory to predict "Day X," a few hours before the second millennium when future and past can leak through into the present. They do in Arc d'X, taking the recursive form of chaos theory's strange attractor, figure-eight arcs around the unknown -- another meaning of "x." "I'll be at the mercy of either God . . . or Chaos," says Erickson in the book. The author who killed this Erickson and wrote the novel implies that the disorderly order of contemporary chaos theorists is a merciful relief from the historical dualisms -- God and Satan, master and slave, ruler and citizen, God-like author and certitude-seeking audience -- that imprison the characters within Arc d'X.
Tom LeClair
57) What has not yet been recognized by reviewers or critics is the degree to which Erickson has used his setting, characters, and plot materials as a means of metaphorizing, exorcising, and otherwise projecting outward aspects of his own psyche, a region of blasted hopes, confusion, idealism, self-lacerating guilt, and perpetual isolation. His fiction thus becomes a kind of magical looking glass reflecting back to himself hand his readers a dark, troubling, but extraordinarily vivid self-portrait of an artist struggling to strike through the mask of illusion and self-deception and uncover the real. Always this struggle is linked to efforts to find love and some source of personal security in a world whose spatial and temporal coordinates have become warped by psychological forces as well as those of technologically driven change.
Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 396-97
58) Whereas much contemporary discourse about Jefferson and Hemings employs romantic themes in order to neutralize the most chilling prospects of their relationship. Steve Erickson's 1993 novel Arc d'X displays a sober willingness, unmatched in the annals of public memory, to linger over such prospects.
Bradford Vivian "Jefferson's Other" 295
59) The eschatological origin of Enlightenment American history fascinates Erickson and forms the basis for his powerful and idiosyncratic vision of the modern United States. His imagination is haunted by paradox and driven by the contradictions that constitute the ambivalent "meaning" of America. He believes, like Jean Baudrillard, in the "paradoxical" idea that America is an "achieved utopia" whose meaning and significance depends upon the projection into the future of an ever-renewed self-evidence; but he also believes, like Thoreau, that the American Revolution never really happened, since the utopian Jeffersonian moment was inimical to the processes of historical time. The reconfiguration of the image of Jefferson is fundamental to Erickson's writing not merely due to the ambivalence of Jefferson's legacy â€" evident for example in the unresolved dialectic in his life between the issues of freedom and slavery -- but also because Jefferson produced a vision of "America" simultaneously utopian and historical in its essence. This tension between history and what exceeds and perhaps constitutes the historical is common to all of Erickson's work.
Lee Spinks 218
60) Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings remains an obscure alien presence in American official history but she is becoming a powerful presence in fiction and film, in ways which dramatise the relationship between race and rights as an interracial drama of American nationhood.
Sharon Monteith
61) Thomas and Sally's relationship exhibits many of the "small causes" that lead to "great effects" in Arc d'X. From the individual case of a white master's violation of a black slave, Erickson extrapolates a certain national condition: "It was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take his pleasure in something he possessed, the same way it would ultimately by the nature of America to define itself in terms of what was owned" (38).
Jim Murphy 466
62) In Leap Year Jefferson becomes the avatar of the nuclear imagination: People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront it, but are liberated by it; everything they do is infused with the blood of an Armageddon with no god, a judgment day in which the guilty and the innocent are damned with equal cosmic merriment. They dance along the edge of the abyss to banish their dread of falling over, relishing the view that their position affords, daring the ground to shift beneath their feet. They can't be bothered with pretending the edge isn't there. They won't be paralyzed by it. They'll take a running start toward it only to stop inches away while the crowd gasps in horror. In the process they force the crowd to consider matters as they do, confronted with the truth that every moment is potentially irrevocable.
Lee Spinks 221
63) So far, so simple. After 50 pages we are involved in a deft historical novel, fueled by the frisson of seeing the man whose head adorns the $10 bill engaging in kinky sex. But then Erickson abruptly switches gear. We are unceremoniously propelled into our near future, to the city of Aeonopolis, a dystopia run by a hierarchy of priest and bureaucrats, where a volcanic smog permeates everything and the districts have names such as Desire and Ambivalence. There, a young mulatto named Sally Hemings is discovered in bed with a nameless corpse. An investigation begins, yet is sidetracked when a clerk named Etcher falls in love with the suspect. He hijacks the secret history of mankind, long kept hidden by the priests, and offers to return it only if Sally's freedom is guaranteed. Meanwhile, he surreptitiously begins to rewrite world history, undoing assassinations and changing the results of wars. The novel then makes another quantum leap, this time to Berlin, where an American writer named Erickson has come to witness Day X, 24 hours of accumulated time that will sprout between the second and third millennia. He is soon murdered by a neo-Nazi named George, who uses his passport to return to America in 1999. He winds up in Aeonopolis, which turns out to be a quake-ravaged Los Angeles. There, he meets Sally and becomes the violent engine that completes the circle of the book's action.
Stephen Amidon
64) Indeed, the narrative form of Arc d'X is simultaneously linear and cyclical: it registers the presence of those narrative processes that conditioned the Jeffersonian republic which the image of Jefferson ceaselessly interrupts, as it is relayed across the face of the novel from a number of alternative futures. The cyclic and futuristic intrusion of the spirit of a millennial Jefferson articulates Erickson's conviction that the meaning of Jefferson's words always lay elsewhere, in the traces of the future-to-come. This belief is conveyed by the title of the novel, which suggests that the meaning or ground of any historical event (the "X" factor) will only be determined at that moment when the future arcs back into the past. The shape of Erickson's narratives also re-creates the trajectory of Jefferson's imagination, which outlined the apocalyptic and futuristic origin of American history and argued that this future must continually be experienced by each generation, as death or annihilation, in the guise of a radical repetition. "Jefferson," it becomes clear, is the conceptual locus that holds the main themes of Erickson's writing in place, and it is with the image of Jefferson that Arc d'X begins.
Lee Spinks 230
65) The disorienting spatial and temporal feature of Erickson's fiction are created not in the service of attempting to describe some possible future, but as a formal means of capturing a sense of Los Angeles's dizzying ability to alienate its citizens from each other and from themselves, and to wreak havoc on time and space. Likewise, the nightmarish dystopias that recur in Erickson's novels are not SF trappings but literalizations of his sense that the ideals of the American Dream have withered in the harsh desert of the real. For Erickson, as for Nathanael West and Thomas Pynchon before him, Los Angeles is much more than a sprawling, smoggy megalopolis: it's the end of the Yellow Brick Road, the world's dream dump, the place where all the original promises of the American Dream find their most vivid incarnationâ€"and their most traumatic betrayal.
Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 396
66) Readers undiscouraged by the self-reference, allusiveness and density of this review will appreciate Arc d'X. The orderly disorder of its architecture is, however, inescapable and tends to overwhelm more conventional interests such as character and plot even when Erickson tries hard to preserve them. The book begins as a historical novel, placing Thomas Jefferson and his slave-lover Sally Hemings on rue d'X in Paris during the French Revolution. Thomas is enslaved by passion and guilt, Sally by race and disgust. Returned to America and seeking the elected president, Sally arcs into a Manichaean city of the future, where contemporary movie cops enforce The Church's dogmas in neighborhoods such as "Desire," now named "Redemption."
Tom LeClair
67) Although historians continue to debate whether the real Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings actually had an affair at all, Mr. Erickson creates a fierce, fictional portrait of their sexual involvement. As he tells it, Thomas rapes Sally one night, then proceeds to make her his mistress. Having publicly declared his opposition to the institution of slavery, Thomas is torn between his conscience and his determination to keep Sally in his possession. Sally, meanwhile, struggles between her desire for freedom and her love for Thomas. When Thomas leaves for America, she is faced with a decision: she can remain in Paris, where slavery does not exist and she is technically a free woman, or she can go home with him, and return to a life of bondage. Having set up the story of Thomas and Sally as an allegory about freedom and love, principle and passion, Mr. Erickson proceeds to take the reader on a strange and often mind-numbing trip through the twilight zone of science fiction. We are next immersed in a futuristic world in which Sally has been reincarnated as a beautiful young woman accused of murder. It's the sort of world that might have been painted by Chirico, full of Kafka-esque corridors and Borgesian labyrinths. Here the Church runs the state, and police officers pursue the guilty and innocent alike.
Michiko Kakutani, "Books of the Times"
68) The fraught transition between different worlds of historical experience is a central concern of Arc d'X, and Erickson explores this issue in perhaps the most controversial sections of the novel, those which deal with the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. The veridical status of accounts of a relationship between these figures remains a matter of scholarly dispute and adds a further degree of ambiguity to a text hypersensitive to the question of narrative legitimation. What is beyond dispute is that Erickson focuses upon and develops this "relationship" because it supplies him with vibrant metaphors with which to represent the imaginative negotiation between inauguration and nihilism that he detects in the Jeffersonian sense of history. In the inchoate struggle between Jefferson and Sally, Erickson fleshes out an eschatology in racial terms, since Jefferson recognizes in the slave a "darkness" that repeatedly brings his belief in his own Enlightenment origins to a point of crisis. Yet it is precisely this rupture within and deconstitution of Jefferson's Enlightenment narrative that enables him to produce a law, a constitution, and a radical vision of the future. In a gesture wholly consonant with a certain deconstructive logic, Erickson inscribes the end of "history" conceived of as an Enlightenment practice within Jefferson's legitimation of his own Enlightenment narrative. The collocation of the thematics of enlightenment and darkness, and of violence and the law, reappears constantly within descriptions of Jefferson's violation of Sally Hemings. The relationship begins with her rape, and the encounters between them persistently reproduce, at both a physical and metaphorical level, this violent opposition of forces. Such opposition is felt in Jefferson's rhetoric: he accepts his violation of Sally as "the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good" (26); it is "the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me" (46).
Lee Spinks 231-32
