The rite of passage for Leila Sand - the AA Meetings
In the initiation of the new myth for the creative woman, as with all myths, our heroine needs to pass through a rite of passage. The rite of passage for Leila is the AA - Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings. They are held at various church basements and it is here Emmie introduces her. Leila is initiated into this new world half-way through the book which is also very telling about the central place of this experience for Leila. Further on the AA is viewed most appropriately as ‘only one of many roads to self-knowledge’ rather rather than a sensational up-to-date activity. The AA follows suit when Leila learns that the answer to her problems lies within her and she stops blaming other people. For the woman artist however the Twelve Steps of the AA meetings inevitably resemble the Rules of Love - a codification of the Provencial poets of love, written centuries ago. They are both treated like parallel universes, like ‘floating spars to a drowning person’ - p.127/VII. It seems comforting for a person who hit the bottom to know that others have passed that way before. Yet the drive towards the bottom invokes the image of the drowning person which make the reader appreciate the huge upheaval involved.
Qualifying at an AA meeting: without your knowing what transpired, your whole life is altered - it is like childbirth, like falling in love, like the Land of Fuck. It is hard to remember what you did there, said there, cried there... p.101,8,2/VI
The AA period is worthy enough as an initiation which Leila needs badly as a means to rationalize her search for her innermost identity. She needs sobriety to set herself free of her addictions although she feels the sobriety, which AA brings to her, has taken everything from her that she cares about - sex, her work, Dart. Yet ‘feelings are not facts’ and this is just another self-revelation pushed up by Emmie, who has been through AA herself, and who knows that ‘It will be maenads and crystal from now on’- p.131/VII.
Evidently the AA is attributed as the important watershed for Leila and for her new identity. Unsurprisingly the group love therapy of the AA is perceived by Erica Jong as a search of people for a new way to be ‘communal animals’. Leila, though an avid individualist, mingles with those people. She becomes just one of them. They all needed new tribal identities, because the old ones do not hold for them. For Leila, the old myth of the artist is not enough and she too is trying ‘to reinvent the human species’ in church basements like the rest. This reinvention marks a new stage in Leila’s life, as well as a new profile for an emerging myth of the artist. Far from being sympathetic, Jong makes fun of the contemporary ritual of getting sober. This is a ritual with coffee instead of sacramental wine, with Oreos instead of holy wafers.
The blood and the body: instant coffee and chocolate cream cookies. A caffeine-and-sugar rush to lift us toward God.
As if always looking at the bright side of life in her rush to her own self Leila is aware that there is a border to be crossed in which fate and the gods are involved. That she didn’t get killed is a tribute not to prudence but to providence or sheer dumb luck that she mysteriously preserved her during her drinking, drugging and driving days. She is pretty convinced that the gods must have spared her for some ‘awesome task’ and whatever it is, she ‘would fashion it with her own two capable hands’ p. 53/III. The woman artist then goes to Yale School of Arts and there is certainly a play with the Romantic notion of Artist as Demiurg, destined to create with her hands.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998