Arc D'X
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

''Arc d'X'' (1993), by
Steve Erickson Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as '' Days Between Stations'', '' Tours of the Black Clock'' and '' Zeroville'', he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the ...
, is an
avant-pop Avant-pop is popular music that is experimental, new, and distinct from previous styles while retaining an immediate accessibility for the listener. The term implies a combination of avant-garde sensibilities with existing elements from popular ...
novel. Upon publication in 1993 it received wide attention particularly from other novelists such as
Thomas Pynchon Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, Literary genre, genres and Theme (narrative), th ...
,
Tom Robbins Thomas Eugene Robbins (July 22, 1932 – February 9, 2025) was an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy dramas"). Robbins had lived in La Conner, Washington, since 1970, where he wrote nine of his ...
and
William Gibson William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his ear ...
, and has been translated into
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
,
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
and other languages.


Plot summary

The story begins as a historical novel, telling the story of the relationship between
Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson (, 1743July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the United States Declaration of Indepe ...
and his
African-American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...
mistress
Sally Hemings Sarah "Sally" Hemings ( 1773 – 1835) was a Black people, black woman Slavery in the United States, enslaved to the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, inherited among many others from his father-in-law, John Wayles. Hemi ...
, a young woman with a "skin that was too white to be quite black and too black to be quite white." Erickson focuses on the period Jefferson spent in France at the beginning of the French Revolution (in one of the climactic scenes of the first part there is a nightmarish description of the
storming of the Bastille The Storming of the Bastille ( ), which occurred in Paris, France, on 14 July 1789, was an act of political violence by revolutionary insurgents who attempted to storm and seize control of the medieval armoury, fortress, and political prison k ...
). After "Thomas" and Sally become lovers the couple return to the United States, with Hemings remaining a slave even as her children are set free; this agreement between the lovers seems to have a powerful symbolic value for the rest of the novel, as "it was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take pleasure in something he possessed." An abrupt change in the narrative finds Hemings leaving Jefferson after he is elected President of the United States. In a departure from factual history, Hemings travels West, reaching a territory where Native Americans have never seen black or white people. There, in a room where a murder has taken place, Sally wakes in an alternate present when the United States have disappeared; the action is set in Aeonopolis, a strange city under harsh theocratic rule and built near a volcano on the West Coast of
North-America North America is a continent in the Northern and Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, and to the sou ...
(though there is no overt indication about the exact position of the city). Sally meets an Afro-American police detective named Wade who sets her free because he doesn't believe she is guilty of the murder, though the priests want her prosecuted. After a dramatic confrontation Wade deserts the police force and hides in the Arboretum, a vast subterranean construct beyond the jurisdiction of the Church and police where the illegal activity centers on a nightclub called Fleurs d'X and Wade becomes fascinated by a dancer named Mona. The novel recounts Mona's relation with Wade, and Sally's relation with one of the archivists of Church Central, Etcher. The atmosphere is dream-like, both in the part of the novel focusing on Wade and in the longer part where the protagonist is Etcher. Etcher's tormented love story with Sally ends with her death, which takes place in an Icy region north of Aeonopolis where she and Etcher have escaped the police and church. After Sally's death the narration abruptly moves back to Paris and the present, where a French mathematician named Seuroq is stricken by unbearable grief for the death of his wife Helen; Seuroq begins to research a different concept of time, perhaps hoping to invert its flux. What he discovers instead is the existence of an extra day, called Jour d'X or X-Day, between December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. Following this short episode the narrative focuses on a character named "Erickson" travelling towards Berlin in 1998. The city he reaches is not the real Berlin of the 1990s but an alternate version of the city which has been abandoned by many of its inhabitants notwithstanding the fall of the Wall, and which barely survives an unspecified disaster (while Erickson's home city,
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...
, has been obliterated by an unspecified Cataclysm, possibly an earthquake). Erickson is killed by a young nazi skinhead, Georgie Valis, the son of an East German professor who has attempted to escape to West Berlin; Georgie uses Erickson's passport to reach the United States and hitchhikes toward its ravaged West Coast. There he will meet in the ruins of Los Angeles Thomas and Sally, and this meeting will move him to the alternate universe of Aeonopolis, where he will reach the Fleurs d'X night club.


Influence

Fleurs d'X is a collection of short musical pieces for solo classical guitar inspired by the novel and written by the Italian composer Fabio Selvafiorita.


References

*Murphy, Jim. "Pursuits and Revolutions: History's Figures in Steve Erickson's ''Arc d'X''", ''MFS Modern Fiction Studies'' - Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2000, pp. 451–479


External links

*
Arc d'X
' at
Goodreads Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and readi ...
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Arc D'x Novels by Steve Erickson 1993 American novels Poseidon Press books Sally Hemings Cultural depictions of Thomas Jefferson