Mount Rushmore: Four Brief Essays on Fictions

Washington

Freud fucked us up, this Father business. The Mother business as well. He, Sigmund, is the inventor of the modern novel, is the novelist of the 20th century, the founder of the form. He is the Father, that again, of the notion of Character and even more importantly the notion of the character of Character, this business of depth, this business of three dimensions, this business of complex. The forefather of the epiphany of The Epiphany and the transformation of transformation of Character that follows. He, Freud, elicits in me a kind of envy, yes, Envy, that I have not, in all my years, invented or, in all my years to come, will never invent, any Character as real as Ego, as real as Id. There! There are fictions for you. So contagious as to jump the page, reformulate the brain chemistry so completely as to deny the efficacy and accuracy of Brain Chemistry to explain the brain. His invention of the Subconscious, the Unconscious naturalizes inside us (Inside Us!) the idea of the Subconscious, the Unconscious (See!) as if these fictions are not fictions. I like the bib of slag spilling down the General’s chest, a graphic demonstration that the head of the Head of State was always in state there inside the mountain. See the limestone wigged helmet of the figurehead on the brow of the cliff ship! The lithic waste is the cascading, foaming bow wake. George is a kind of Venus in drag and Penis in person, the titanic member being the progenitor of his Country, sure, but also Love, I guess, or at least that compelling drive of Sex, emerging from the sea of solid rock.

Jefferson

He was the writer. Well, Lincoln, too, wrote, signed on to write Jefferson’s sequel. And Jefferson is the one whose backstory has legs. The heritage of his transmitted DNA decoded as avidly as the Declaration is parsed for intention. My favorite plot twist? The branch of Hemmings’s children by Tom who passed into Ohio, refusing to cotton up to the analysis of their genes, preferring White-ness over Jefferson-ness. How odd our desire that this one have a life that is narrative not simply anecdote. And irony too. Backstory and, there on the escarpment, he’s got George’s back. The inventor of political parties, the originator of difference. The Great Deconstructor has the least “face.” No distinguishing marks save that distinction of no distinguishing marks. Okay, red hair, but this is a monochromatic mountain. Jefferson pulls duty, in two dimensions, flat visage on the screwy two-dollar bill. J is our K of presidents. Anonymous and somewhat known with the suggestion there are things one wants to know. And inside Jefferson is Madison, the symbiote inside the big brain, the watch in the pocket. Madison writes Jefferson; Jefferson writes America. America is the Great American Novel.

Roosevelt

Reading left to right: Roosevelt. The Modernist whose medium is stuff, stuff like mountains, like canals, like painting battleships white and sending them on a performance piece around the world. Probably his idea to create the thing itself, this wacky stunt in South Dakota. Or at least it was in the air he breathed, expelled. His is the spitting image of the contemporaneous Zeitgeist, the modesty of the placement of his visage tips-off the self-consciousness of the facade. The least equal of these equal giants but nonetheless the Great Sculptor of the ideal of giants. The last of firsts but the first of lasts. There is real artistry in the rendering of the pince-nez. The glasses are there but not. A transparent reproduction of Transparency. Transparency the dominant ideology of the age, our age. The trick of Realism, its tricklessness. See, these busts bloomed on the mountain top, a spontaneous generation like maggots appearing on rotting meat. WYSIWYG is what you see and what you get from this point on. No bull. The eye is drawn to those eyes, magnified by the invisible glass. What are you looking at? The writing of novels, I think, is so beside the...