1 Thomas Jefferson and the Genre of Chronicles: A Study of Notes on the State of Virginia* Woosung Kang (Seoul National Univ.) Chronicles in America What would be the best way to configure the shape of America with its vast geographical territory and cultural specificity? A well-known recipe for the intellectual gourmet in the field of American studies has been to enumerate a list of usual suspects: a collection of classical canons about American civilization that witnessed and diagnosed its birth, growth, and possible decline. From foreign illuminati like Tocqueville, Dickens, and Trollope throughout the 19th century to the domestic literary figures of the 20th century like William C. Williams, Steinbeck, and Kerouac, ‘America’ itself has been a tasty or, more often, a flavory main dish for many intellectual relishes. 1 Travelers or not, they all liked to taste the then newly-served dumpling and record their own ‘virgin’ culinary experiences. Whereas their judgmental descriptions of its identity varied from “un-European,” “unprecedented,” to “tastelessly dystopian,” their unanimous savory instrument was a genre of non-fictional prose. Not poetic at all except for that “barbaric” Walt Whitman, America seems to be best relished when served prosaically. Whether we label it “Exceptionalism” or otherwise, the prosaic proclivity when defining American identity still remains a controversial issue. For many identity-oriented scholars of sort, a signature way of assessing American uniqueness usually starts from the familiar notion that the American newness has everything to do with certain forms of “absence” of, or rather felicitous immunization from, bad influence inherent in old civilizations: no feudalism, no class revolutions, no socialism, and so forth. 2 Americans themselves particularly excel in chronicling such negative coordinates by boasting their apparent favoritism of such diverse genres of prose *This work was supported by Research Fund for New Faculty of SNU in 2008. (100-20080048) I am referring here to such books as Democracy in America, American Notes, North America, In the American Grain, Travel with Charley, On the Road, respectively. 2 A classic example would be Louis Hartz’s, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) 1 2 writings: biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and historiographies. America is truly exceptional at least in its preference for what I call “a genre of chronicles.” 3 Then why prosaic chronicles of facts and events, rather than fictive or poetic aestheticism of American specificity? Historically, the resilient residues of die hard Puritan sentiment against anything factitious and ambiguous scored a tremendous impact upon the public distrust of artistic creations. Every truth, either divine or secular, has to be conveyed in simple, plain words with no possibilities of confusion and miscommunication (Cromphout 329). No wonder that Hawthorne insists on the readers’ sympathetic acceptance of his story as historical narrative, emphasizing, in his prefaces, the discursive authenticity of his fictional creations. And we all know the anecdote that Edward Taylor, a prominent Puritan poet of the 17th century, refused to let his poetic meditations be published even posthumously. Every individual truth must be circumscribed or legitimatized by the public examination, or else it should be enshrined strictly within private boundary. The discursive ethics of open publicity among Enlightenment intellectuals also contributes to the same propensity. Inventing fictions and stories remains an avocation more or less pertaining to the softer sex, whose power of imagination generally denotes a derogatory state of human faculty, registering as it does the lack of proper guidance by reason and understanding. Pamphlet debates over federalism and republicanism during the Revolutionary period were a case in point. All kinds of political documents—from religious sermons, to opinion essays, to propagandist papers—appeared on the public platform, but no imaginative product comparable to English salon culture or coffee-house literatures cropped up. 4 It was much too preoccupied with the rule 3 “Chronicle” is the term I deliberately choose for the argument. It can be easily replaced by terms like “nonfictional prose narrative,” “philosophical essay,” or “scientific report,” but they cannot fully implicate what American prose writing in general aims to express. Despite its linearity implicit in the term, “chronicle” may best connote complex maneuver of American prose writing at least in three aspects. It can include most of prose writings written without fictional intention; it can denote the author’s sense of history without reducing his or her prose into a form of historiography; it refers to the argumentative aspect of prose writing which is closer to scientific essay. But most of all, “chronicle” has the definite advantage of implying the individual prose’s public dimension. Thus in what follows, the term “chronicle” has nothing much to do with the method of writing in a chronological fashion. 4 See Bernard Bailyn’s classic analysis of pamphlet culture around Revolutionary period in The Ideological Origins of American Revolution. 3 of reason or what Cotton Mather called “public spirit” 5 to allow any room for an American Dunciad or a cis-Atlantic version of “A Modest Proposal.” A distinctive culture of pragmatism peculiar to Anglo-Saxon ethnicity also played a huge part in the sweeping partiality for factual chronicles. According to Bernard-Henri Levy, Americans are famous for their extreme obsession with archival desire, a national predisposition to record anything in factual detail. 6 Earlier, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who posed the question as to why “American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious,” finding the hint at the “practical common-sense” and “utilitarian direction” of Anglo-Saxon temperament. He writes, “They [Anglo-Saxons] are impatient of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought,” and continues to lament that “they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters, and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one on which words make no impression” (Emerson 809). Indeed, factdriven culture prefers prose chronicles over fictive “sallies of thought.” These three elements altogether fundamentally contribute to the shaping of American predisposition for factual chronicles and “archive fever.” Of the well-known achievements of the genre, we could safely number Jefferson’s writings one of the best products of the Enlightenment intellectuals, alongside those of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Federalist writers. Especially, Jefferson’s book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-2, 1787), takes a peculiar status for its outspoken Americanism and the adoption of chronicling method. This book differs widely from other writings of chronicle genre in that it deviates from popular negative definitions of America and its down-right advocacy of American geographical advantage and natural as well as cultural abundance. Scholars often classify Notes one of the few examples of positive cataloguing as concerns the distinctiveness of new Republic (Manning 357-47). This essay attempts to read Notes in terms of its generic specificity as a chronicle of America, focusing on its peculiar discursive formation and thematic structure. 5 Cotton Mather is notoriously well-known for his jeremiad about the decline of “Public Spirit” in his The Present State of New England (1690). “I wish it were not as Evident, that men are too generally Lovers of Their own selves” (23). 6 I have in mind his penchant criticism on American civilization in his American Vertigo: Travelling on the Footsteps of Tocqueville. 4 Jefferson and America Despite its long history of limited acceptance as a book of predominantly “political and scientific thought” (Ferguson 381), many scholars have already pointed out the illustratively literary structure of Notes from early on. For instance, Harold Hellenbrand in 1985 remarked that “Notes has emerged as a literary text that is rooted in the discursive forms as well as the philosophical assumptions of eighteenth-century literature that is concerned with the operations of nature and the origins of natural and civil law” (3). But it was originally conceived of as a sort of reference book (initially written in response to Marbois’ request), the main purpose of which lies in its desire to deliver ‘useful’ information on the geographic, cultural, and natural environments of Virginia and American continent. And yet in spite of the author’s modest denigration of the book as “nothing more than the measure of a shadow” in his letters and “Advertisement,” seemingly dry, “trifle” descriptions of facts very often come closer to what might be termed ‘an impassioned’ argumentation on various current issues concerning American specificity and, at the same time, an aesthetic, even romantic, relish of native exuberance. In fact, the narrative structure of chronicle in Notes bespeaks a strong undercurrent of “pastoral impulse” with its “unconventional composition and intention” (Ogburn 141), rather than following typical Enlightenment conventions of philosophical speculation or a familiar Puritan rhetoric. There abound stylistic aberrations and over-excessively fore-grounded passages with uneven narrative distribution, though it has undergone long, tedious years of composition, revision, and correction (Peden xix). According to Hellenbrand, Jefferson’s Notes is a sort of mixed genre without premeditated systematic narrative structure: “Contained within several Queries are passages of scientific theory and social belief. Yet Notes has no philosophical preamble, no introduction really to its method or subject” (19; emphasis added). Looking back 40 years after its first composition, Jefferson himself also insinuated his life-long anxiety over the book’s ultimate incompleteness and structural unevenness (Cillerai 60). Of the entire twentythree Queries, only four queries—“Production Minerals, Vegetables and Animals (VI),” “Aborigines (XI),” “Constitution (XIII),” and “Laws (XIV)”—are given substantial length of full argument, and there is no thematic or formal connection among these four (Richardson 453). Furthermore, at Query VI, statistical descriptions of “Mineral, Vegetables and Animal” abruptly digress to the correction of prejudices about American Indians, and Queries on “Manners” and “Religion” unexpectedly result in a severe attack on slavery and the necessity of political 5 pluralism. Alongside these digressive shifts between descriptions and argumentations again parallels the tendency to make factual descriptions about natural laws as a basis for analyzing human society. As we read along the Queries, Jefferson’s narrative more and more comes closer to a random composition of off-hand proposals and arguments. 7 Jefferson, as a chronicler, must be conscious of this structural deficiency, or at least deliberately intending such a mixture of complex narrative formation. 8 In this respect, Notes can be registered as a sui generis re-inscribed by the seemingly scientific format of Query, an apt form of discourse tailored for an American empiricist who hopes to rebut domestic and foreign prejudices about America and spread the news among the American public. 9 Arguing against Count de Buffon’s misconceptions, Jefferson attacks the uninformed prejudice that the nature of America is more or less a degenerated version of Europe, particularly denouncing the bad travel narratives from which Buffon might presumably take his theoretical ground (Medlin 85-87). Indeed, Jefferson deliberately employs the method of comparative cataloguing in order to correct such a biased notion unadvised by the strict empirical observation. What seems to be the neutral collection of concrete data turns into a patriotic foundation of emergent republic and is given the moral and scientific validity into the bargain. The rigorous cataloging of natural abundance and relative superiority of American paleontology with its democratic polity buttresses, for Jefferson, the “ideological placement of new Republic” on a firmer basis (Ferguson “Obligation” 386). The Problem of Slavery However, Jefferson’s overall architectonic of Notes with its discursive method of argumentation generally follows, at least in its philosophy of composition, the then popular 18thcentury Enlightenment discursive ideal: to aestheticize the objective contemplation and to translate private experiences into the public discourse (Ferguson Reading 230-31). He repeatedly valorizes, whenever necessary, the importance of reason and free spirit in matters of scientific 7 We may select the following as instances of structural unevenness: proposal for importation at “Population” (VIII), request for emancipation of slave and reform of school system at “Laws” (XIV), and the description of sublimity at “Cascades” (V). 8 As to his idea of narrative strategy, see his letter to T. Walker (Sep. 25, 1783), and to James Madison (Dec 10, 1783/ Feb 20, 1784). See Peden, xvi. 9 “This format—besides recalling the structure of legal treaties by Grotius, Montesquieu, and others—also reminded readers intermittently that the entire book was an American’s no-nonsense response to European curiosity” (Hellenbrand 20). 6 research as well as moral speculations (159-61). Especially in the controversial area of religion where the decline of Puritanism looks most apparent, his empirico-philosophical speculation displays a familiar pattern of what might be called an ‘Enlightenment rhetorical style’ that attempts to posit subjective sentiments in terms of public communality. 10 Against the general tendency of “religious slavery” in America, he exhorts; Constraints may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man. It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them. Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. (159) For Jefferson, religious coercion or an enforced law only aggravates the true spirit of individual belief. In this respect, he seems to be at one with a familiar Puritan rhetoric. But he actually distances himself from Puritanism by strongly emphasizing that the only way “to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them” (161). In this respect, his religious criticism is more akin to the spirit of Enlightenment and American Transcendentalism: individual conscience should not be judged by any other external form of authority than the rule of reason and common sense. He even goes on to assert that now is the time for humanity in general to accept the idea that “the difference of opinion is advantageous in religion” (160). Nevertheless, there is no doubt a specific Jeffersonian flavor quite unique among the structural discursivity of Enlightenment: his nonnegotiable commitment to public democratic ideal. Despite his Enlightenment proclivity towards publicity and commonwealth, he firmly believes that only individual difference, not a unitary conformity, among democratic people secures the solidarity of commonwealth. This may be called a radical liberalization or democratization of Enlightenment ideal as well as American Puritanism, a far cry from the elitist tradition of Enlightenment intellectualism and the strict religious code of New England Puritanism. As Marius Bewley put it, the spirit of Jeffersonian democratic style is what distinguishes him from the possessive individualism of Alexander Hamilton and the aristocratic archaism of John 10 As for Jefferson’s “habitual silence” upon personal feeling, see Tauber 645. 7 Adams, and what connects him to a more secular and public intellectual like Benjamin Franklin. 11 The strength and novelty of Jefferson’s democratic style is most prominent when he takes the issue with the problem of native Indians and slavery. He refutes public misconception about American Indians: false racism comes, he diagnoses, from the lack of sympathy and experience. After enumerating the relative disadvantages of aborigines compared with the white, he insists that direct comparison between Indians and the white people, without concrete observations of facts, easily lead to misconceptions and distortions. 12 Jefferson emphatically points out the valor and honor of a Native American chief Logan by resorting to his own personal experience with him and his speech, idealizing him as the representative of the combination of “reason and nature’s anesthetization at its best” (Cillerai 73). Jefferson seems to argue that uninformed judgment and unsympathetic scientificity would destroy the principle of reason. Indictment of slavery is more poignant and structural. His attack on slavery comes not only from the fact that slavery has been based on the master’s “intemperance of passion,” but also from the realization that “there must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us” (162). For Jefferson, slavery amounts to an undesirable institution not merely because it is the form of immorality and inhumanity of the white and a violation of natural laws, but also because it is an externalization of human ‘alienation’ from his or her proper integrity. It’s detrimental to civilization process itself. Unlike other sentimental or philanthropic discourses of anti-slavery among popular narratives, Jefferson’s chronicle indicates, above all, the exploitation of slave labor, the devaluation of labor itself, and the bad education of tyranny on the children. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? (163) 11 Bewley, 33-40. Benjamin Franklin’s publicity is quite different from Jefferson’s in that his model of public spirit depends upon a populist plebianism devoid of any tinge of Enlightenment idealism. See Gordon S. Wood 1-2. Unlike Franklin, “Jefferson has never been accused of lacking elegance or of being a lackey of capitalism” (Wood 5). 12 For example, “Indians are more or less indifferent than the white people because they have little sexual capacity, and this indifference to the other sex is the fundamental defect which weakens their nature, prevents its development, and---destroying the very germs of life---uproots society at the same time.”(59) 8 It is not difficult to read off the typical “Jeffersonian moral agrarianism” in the above passages. Actually, Jefferson strongly opposes to the idea of “manifest destiny” of capricious market system and industrialization: “for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe” (165). Slavery is not just a vile institution detrimental to American economy; it is also against public moral sentiment and commonwealth ideal. Isn’t there, however, any possibility to take this move as an expression of Jeffersonian anachronism or insularity in the face of the inevitable flow of modernity? Regardless of the fact that his insistence on agrarian industry reminds us of the well-known high-capitalist economic theory of “relative ascendancy,” and “the division of labor” between both sides of the Atlantic, what seems to be really anachronistic is, for Jefferson, people’s persistence and indulgence of slavery. It is the manifest violation of their founding principle of free society. Here his discourse comes closer to an eloquent rhetoric appealing to the public sentiment, rather than a scientific rebuttal. The way he takes the problem of slavery dramatically demonstrates how Jefferson’s discursive peculiarity deviates from the contemporary conventions. It is in Query XIV, “Laws,” a long section right after “Constitution,” that he introduces his “personal conjectures” concerning slavery and racial issues. So it appears, at first sight, that he is going to talk about slavery in terms of its unlawfulness, but what he really deplores turns out to be the lack of sympathy on the part of white people. He refutes common prejudice about the inhumanity of black slaves, ascribing deviant behaviors of the blacks “to their situation, not to any depravity of moral sense” (142). And he warns that “the opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence” (143; emphasis added). In all its facets, the issue of slavery resists, for Jefferson, “rational management” because “it defies legal terminology and solution within the intellectual framework of an 18th century lawyer” (Ferguson “Obligation” 401). Jefferson’s prose description of slavery displays this difficulty, resulting in a sort of mixed style widely different from contemporary denigrations of black race for its outright denial of biological, moral, and even scriptural rhetoric of racism. A Sublime Style Curiously enough, whenever Jefferson’s prose narrative divulges from scientific report and approaches the philosophical arguments and political discourses, it resorts not to the speculative 9 logic or rhetorical persuasion, adopting instead a sort of apocalyptic exhortation similar to a Puritan jeremiad. 13 Especially, when he deals with the matters of crucial concern like “Constitution” or “Slavery,” his narrative seems to veer away from the boundary of Enlightenment rhetoric and defies the solutions offered by his legal and ideological appropriation of deep uncertainties (126-7, 159). In fact, as Ferguson put it, the “prevailing mood of Notes as text is one of profound anxiety” (400). Ferguson convincingly suggested that “the prose of early republicans is not so much problem-oriented as it is a juxtaposition of problem to solution in cycles of gloom and gladness that never seem to end. Notes is a type for the manic-depressive tendencies within this process. And Jefferson’s creativity is clearest in his use of legal formulation to bridge these extremes through structure and thematic control” (Ferguson “Obligation” 405). Where does this discursive anxiety come from? Setting aside personal inconveniences he suffered during the period of composition, we can find throughout Notes Jefferson’s acute political sense that the new Republic is still in the process of making or in a state of constant crisis in which it was “less an achievement to be recorded than a possibility to be nourished” (Philbrick 162). To what extent then can he be sure of the success of American experiment? With slave labor, it may be possible to turn that “immensity of land” into the fertile and profitable farm, but how about our immensity of mind? He would have asked. And these must have been the very questions that trouble him all along and make his prose ironically distinctive among typical Enlightenment discourses. And yet, here we can also adumbrate a dilemma of Jeffersonian idea of democratic polity. In effect, the abolition of slavery, contrary to his rational expectations and political ideal of agrarianism, actually contributes to the incorporation of frontier within capitalist industrialism. This is the similar kind of dilemma that annoys Natty Bumppo in The Pioneer when he retreated further into the natural frontier making at the same time a way for the progress of commercialism and capitalism. But Natty’s ‘retreating back to the future’ comes from the disparity between Cooper’s manifest political commitment to aristocratic society and his sense of historical reality as an artist, while Jeffersonian dilemma derives from the double meaning of democratic Enlightenment ideal itself. His empirical perspective of reason has a definite 13 Ferguson “Obligation”, 401. On the Puritan jeremiad, see Perry Miller, “Errand into the Wilderness” in Errand into the Wilderness(1975) and Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (1978). 10 advantage against European Enlightenment ideal, but it also functions as the very weapon by which the advocates of North-Eastern industrialism attacks his thought as agrarian anachronism. The narrative strategy of enumerating a catalogue of positive facts and things becomes a means of destroying common prejudices about American inferiority, but it simultaneously reduces the natural facts into abstract signs and symbols as in statistical tables and cartography. The logical method of describing the process of understanding American nature turns out, ironically, to be an act of paving the road to the appropriation of nature into controllable items. The oscillation between concretization and abstraction, empiricism and idealism, however, has already been implied in Jefferson’s conceptualization of reason itself. As we saw in his treatment of religion, reason is, for Jefferson, both the ultimate source of human truth and the uncertain means for grasping nonhuman reality or aesthetic wonder prevalent in American nature. Thus, rational and scientific argumentation makes possible an understanding of the American abundance, while at the same time debilitating the sensitive configuration of the peculiarity of the invisible force working behind the visible nature. No wonder, then, that the act of contemplation or gazing is fore-grounded as the primary faculty of reason, but it becomes all the more apparent that the result of observation remains uncertain in Jefferson’s speculation on nature. Just as his narratives are deeply driven by the unconscious anxiety over the surety of contemplative reasoning, so Jefferson’s cataloging of natural facts frequently result in the doubt of scientific objectivity itself and the concomitant predilection for the faculty of aesthetic imagination. Therefore, the reader often feels extremely perplexed when he unexpectedly encounters the sudden outburst of sentiment in the middle of scientific demonstration as in “Productions Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal.” There is a wonder somewhere. Is it greatest on this branch of the dilemma; on that which supposes the existence of a power, of which we have no evidence in any other case; or on the first, which requires us to believe the creation of a body of water, and its subsequent annihilation? (. . .) And we must be content to acknowledge, that this great phenomenon is as yet unsolved. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. (33) The irony is that this passage belongs to the section where Jefferson classifies American natural peculiarity under the heading “Limestone.” What is the thematic or even discursive relevance of sublimity here with limestone? Indeed, we wonder. Surely, this passage reminds the reader of the 11 one immediately antecedent, where Jefferson chants the sublime beauty of Natural Bridge and Blue Ridge Mountains under the title of “Cascades”: “It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven” (25). The only possible discursive linkage between “Limestone” and “Cascades” would be found in the viewer’s sublime exclamation: “the rapture of the Spectator is really indescribable!” (25). And so it is. What Jefferson here tries to unravel but is unable to fully render effable is the fundamental inability of contemplative reasoning and discursive maneuvering to capture the natural distinctiveness and grandeur of American continent in its own terms. In this respect, the unexpected narrative insertion of the sublime experience concerning natural infinity of America provides us with the clue to a paradigmatic narrative “pattern for his style” in general (Ogburn 149). Jefferson singles out the inscrutably sublime inhuman power in American nature, and he wants to translate it into speculative as well as political terms. From slavery to democratic constitution, and to religion, Jefferson’s prose attempts to configure the cultural differences of America with the idioms of natural sublimity. Conclusion On the verge of sublime uncertainties in front of natural infinity, Jefferson feels totally anxious about the surety of his faculty of reason. Though aesthetically motivated, his narrative movement ultimately demonstrates a subtle, complex epistemological compromise that attempts to curb the state of uncertainties or mysteries into the universal process of human reasoning (Frankel 698). These uncertainties not merely originate from the oscillating perspective of Jeffersonian observer who is “struggling to find the proper perspective” (Franklin 30), but are also caused by the very incomprehensible, frightening dimension of ‘abundance’ in the American continent itself. He confesses himself on Natural Bridge: “Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent headache” (24-5 emphasis added). Then how is it possible for Jefferson to re-present and incorporate this feeling of abyss and dizziness into the narrative framework? Does he succeed in overcoming that headache and finally move into the realm of sublimity? 12 Unlike Emerson’s famous speculation on the “transparent eyeball” in Nature, which operates an optical appropriation of inhuman wilderness, the abyss, into the realm of human spirit, Jefferson’s “aesthetics of seeing” firmly remains within the moment of sublime rapture and a painful realization of epistemological uncertainty. Jefferson might have resorted to an Enlightenment solution by imposing an intellectual order on the fearful nature or legal imperatives on the narrative structure. But he did not. He renounces to transcend his epistemological dilemma with the imposition of idealism on nature, persisting instead within the territory of uncertain co-existence between wonder and fear, recording, as lucid as possible, his own wavering between speculative reason and aesthetic imagination. In fact, his style of chronicle truthfully records the meanderings of his thinking with complex and subtle mixture of scientific contemplation and aesthetic description. In this respect, Jefferson’s prose writing amounts to a representative model of new mode of American writing: a sublime style that has continued ever since in the distinctive style of prose writing throughout the period of so-called American Renaissance. Works Cited. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Bewley, Marius. The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1963. Cillerai, Chiara. “The Eloquence of Nature in Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature 41 (2006): 59-78. Cromphout, Gustaff Van. “Cotton Mather: The Puritan Historian as Renaissance Humanist.” American Literature 49. 3 (1977): 327-337. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 13 Ferguson, Robert A. “‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 52 (1980): 381-406. ______. Reading the Early Republic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Frankel, Matthew Cordova. “‘Nature’s Nation’ Revisited: Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 73 (2001): 695-726. Franklin, Wayne. Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Hellenbrand, Harold. “Road to Happiness: Rhetorical and Philosophical Design in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature 20 (1985): 3-23. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982. Levy, Bernard-Henri. American Vertigo: Travelling on the Footsteps of Tocqueville. New York: Random House, 2006. Manning, Susan. “Naming of Parts; or the Comforts of Classification: Thomas Jefferson’s Construction of America as Fact and Myth,” Journal of American Studies. 30 (1996): 345-47. Mather, Cotton. The Present State of New England. New York: Haskell House, 1969. Medlin, Dorothy. “Thomas Jefferson, André Morellet, and the French Version of Notes on the State of Virginia,” The William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd Series. 35 (1978): 85-99. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975. Ogburn, Floyd. “Structure and Meaning in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” Early American Literature 15 (1980): 141-150. Peden, Willliam. “Introduction,” Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982. xi-xxv. Philbrick, Thomas. “Thomas Jefferson,” American Literature 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years. Ed. Everett Emerson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977. 161-66. Richardson, William D. “Thomas Jefferson & Race: The Declaration & Notes on the State of Virginia,” Polity 16.3 (1984): 447-466. Tauber, Gisela. “Notes on the State of Virginia: Thomas Jefferson’s Unintentional Self-Portrait,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1993): 635-648. Wood, Gordon S. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Penguin, 2004. 14 <Abstract> Thomas Jefferson and the Genre of Chronicles: A Study of Notes on the State of Virginia Woosung Kang (Seoul National Univ.) This paper explores Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia as a narrative example of American genre of chronicle, focusing on the discursive complexity and thematic peculiarity. Jefferson’s prose writings are generally considered the manifestation of a typical Enlightenment style whose rational argumentation denotes a combination of scientific rigor with aesthetic contemplation. With the commitment to democratic ideal, Jefferson’s Notes intends to respond to European prejudice towards American nature. Rebutting the familiar paradigm of American depravity, Jefferson demonstrates the natural abundance of American continent and links it to the cultural and political specificity of America. Especially, Notes concentrates on the problem of slavery in America and tries to correct public misconceptions of slavery as an institution. His discourse about slavery oscillates between moral indictment and the criticism of civilization itself, resulting in the mixed style of distancing from the conventional discourse disguised with scientific argumentation. Aesthetic contemplation about American natural environment subsidizes such a narrative move, enhancing philosophical speculation into a sublime style. His style of chronicle ultimately records the meanderings of his thinking with complex and subtle mixture of scientific contemplation and aesthetic description. This essay concludes that Jefferson’s prose writing amounts to a representative ideal of American genre of chronicle in that it displays the subtle combination of scientific argumentation and sublime style of writing. Key words: chronicle, Enlightenment style, public spirit, the sublime, slavery, Notes on the State of Virginia.