| Episodes |
Arc d'X: This experimental (post-modern) novel is, frankly, the piece of the controversy I have thought least about. Perhaps because it seems to have the least tangible effect on the course of the controversy and the popular public perception of it. Perhaps that's because, almost alone, Erickson discredits and demonizes Jefferson, showing him in a struggle between the pursuit of human rights for all and the pursuit of his personal happiness in Sally. Interestingly, an excerpt from the novel published in Esquire was entitled "The Violation of Sally Hemings," an incendiary phrase.
Contrary to Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, this novel may be quite difficult to understand, perhaps another reason it seems to have had little impact on the controversy. Here's a summary of the Arc d'X plot from a review:
"This historical presumption [that Jefferson had sex with Hemings] provides the starting point for Steve Erickson's wildly ambitious fifth novel, Arc d'X. In its opening scene, a five-year-old Jefferson witnesses the execution of a female slave who murdered her white masterlover. It is a sight which is to haunt young Tom for the rest of his life. The narrative then jumps forward a third of a century, with the newly widowed statesman travelling to revolutionary Paris, where he falls in love with Sally, his daughter's 14-year-old attendant. He rapes her, repents, then forces her to become his lover. Sally has no say in the matter, though she fantasises about killing her master and escaping to freedom. She cannot, however, and winds up returning to Virginia with him, where she gives birth to several of his children.
So far, so simple. After 50 pages we are involved in a deft historical novel, fuelled 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 priests 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.
It sounds confusing, and it must be admitted that Erickson is not the sort of novelist who insists on giving the reader an easy time. Time doesn't behave itself here the past has all the immediacy and pitched emotion of the present; while the future, with its medieval terrors and intrigues, resembles nothing so much as the past. And the present doesn't really exist at all. 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."
Read the first part of the novel, 50 pages or so. The provocative parts, of course, occur once sexual relations commence (24) and include rape, oral sex, anal sex.
