Dart
Dart is the foremost of Leila’s lovers. He ranks first in her love pantheon. On the one hand Dart is the perfect unhavable God-like and Don Juan figure to whom Leila aspires ; and on the other his importance is much too much her own creation, her own self. It is in this love affair that Leila's myth of 'skinlessness' closes. Probably one of the reasons for his power over her is that Dart stands for life and to Leila’s mind life and art are irresistible. Leila and Dart's relationship is perceived as an even exchange - Leila gave him the gifts, made him a star, but he also gave her gifts - chief among them bringing her back from the dead. This is how life and love are closely intertwined as love and art in Jong’s narrative as these lovers give each other life. That is what makes love so irresistible - no matter what killjoys say. Who can resist the one who makes you feel alive? Who can resist salt and sperm and sea and shakti? For love is nothing less than the gift of life. (Though sometimes you have to pay for it with your own death). p.82/IV
Leila who, even in her marriages always maintained her obsessive separateness - now feels ‘relaxed’ into the sweetness of coupling, the sweetness of partnership, the two who are united against a world of hostile strangers.(p.31/I) It seems that Leila’s sexual identity is very keen on handling ancient mythological images and couples. Here is an example of the mythological reunion of male and female. Erica Jong’s style conjures up various arche-symbols and patterns and makes this love scene sound both real and unreal. The setting moon and the rising sun can provide the classic ambiance for a love scene, but it is scarcely enough. We can feel the touch of the devil who aids the two sorcerers, who are practicing the magic art of love. The witch and warlock match each other even in the way they sound alike - the bad girl needs the bad boy. Further more the Greek and Egyptian superior mother-goddesses can evoke their supreme counterparts and sons as if to initiate the modern couple into the mythological domain of love and war. But the earth that obviously stands for Leila proves unbeatable no matter how much it hurts when Dart is gone.
Under the mocking moon we couple like witch and warlock, powered by the blue fullness of the moon. ...on one side of my bedroom the moon sets: on the other side the sun rises. I lie in the middle - Isis with Horus in her arms, Astarte with Adonis, Rhea with Zeus who is destined to dethrone her. But can we ever dethrone the earth? The earth is there whatever we do. p.113/VI
Dart is not exceptionally identified with Horus, Adonis and Zeus or the devil. Usually he is referred to as ‘a young god, whose armpits are lined with gold (p.31) or ‘lying in the sun like a young god; with the glimmering gold of his chest’. Leila is fascinated and bound to him in the archaic sense of the word - enchantment - with rapture, with magic, with ‘invisible ropes of allure’. Thus Dart implies both the good and bad sides of a God/Devil stereotyped dualisms trying to achieve the balanced status between the two. Leila is really torn apart in her need to both nurture and annihilate her creativity at once. For Dart seems not just a great lay, Leila’s knight on a white charger or live-in muse, i.e. everything that is positive and constructive for a woman artist. For Dart’s dark side seems to be rather destructive. He is likened to a great hungry primitive god and his insatiable desires to a gluttonous primitive ritual. Dart is ‘ravenous’ for virgins, wreaths of flowers, plucked hearts, slaughtered oxen, chalices of blood, burnt offerings. (p.20/I).
If the notion of a sacred offering figures somewhat earnestly, there is also a fair amount of ironic humour, bordering on ridicule. The reader is perhaps able to take the joke when Dart trades his place with Pan or the warrior god. Very often Leila is nursing the delusion of having found at last her Pan, her universal deity. However her Pan is a naughty down-to-earth deity who ‘does not buy one life insurance nor come home for dinner at the same time each night’. Obviously Jong is busy with reworking the Greek mythology although she prefers to keep alive Pan’s goatish lustful nature and to attribute it to Dart. In Jong’s reworking, Pan/Dart is no longer the symbol of fecundity himself but he can only discharge abundance and productivity in the women’s art.
Dart is also the warrior god eventhough he is engaged in a rather low-profile battle while ‘he is killing a copperhead by blasting its head off with a shotgun’(152/IX). Dart is able to enter the locked house of Leila without leaving a trace to take some of his things as the perfect second-story man. There are number of instances when Jong puts to doubt Dart’s presence as if he never really existed, as if he was entirely made up by Leila’s creative imagination. Thus Dart will often be viewed as someone who belongs to the underground world of human sexual desires - as if he emerged from under an earth barrow like one of the little people, the green man ‘the horned god of the witches and like all devils, he is our own creation’ (p.190/XI).
The longer Dart is gone the more intense becomes Leila’s need for God=Dart:
My God, my God. Dart, Dart, Dart. I convulse around the Michelangelo-Brancusi-Marini marble, shouting Dart’s name and God’s name as if they were one.
The marble that clings to the grand names of the old masters of sculpture appears to be a life-size marble cock, sent by a famous Japanese sculptor when Leila Sand’s film stills of Dart opened in Tokyo. With her mind set on the immutable blend of art and sexuality Erica Jong points with a hint of humour and sadness and a reference to the great masterpieces that the marble cock is as pure as Michaelangelo’s Pieta, that its cold white purity is half Brancusi bird and half Marini horse cock. Juxtaposed to this earnest praise is an ironic touch - this is the same Pieta in Vatican, which was not long ago ‘defaced by some thug’(p.191/XI)
In our search for Leila’s sexual identity we are coming to a point in which Dart is Leila and Leila is him. He is a part of Leila - the crazy, irresponsible part maybe, the part she couldn’t freely express. Leila is eager to identify herself with the badness and boy-ness of Dart as if to prove how pressing is the need to break the conventional female stereotype. She is aspiring to the bad boy ‘roaring inside’ her who wants to run, to bolt, to drink, to drug, to be Donna Giovanna, Donna Quixota, ‘the madcap picara with no fixed address and a million aliases’. No wonder Leila’s addiction to Dart is so mighty. We can even attribute some positive sides to it because Dart seems to lead Leila to her self-love. When Dart left Leila felt ‘like an orphan’ (131,2/VIII) because she missed something really ‘precious’, she missed part of her own self.
In fact the last date of Dart and Leila is quite significant for the sexual integrity of Leila. This is a date far enough from the sacred place of Leila’s studio in Litchfield County. Insted, Da Silvano Restaurant, New York is ironically notorious for the one of their last fights. Being invited out for lunch by her friend Emily in Da Silvano, just by accident Leila bumps into Dart’s bimbo. By the time of their last rendezvous what was once love and joy seems to be gone and can only be recalled as a ‘myth’:
We make plans for our mythical trip. I know it is mythical - does he?.. We speak of everything: the fictitious trip, my fictitious fiancee, his million (as usual) projects. Why I am not more angry at him? Because I have discharged my anger in the Pandora’s Box collage? ..But in my sane mind I don’t trust him. 286,7/XVIII
Danny Doland from Dallas
Leila’s invented ‘fictitious fiancee’ is actually nobody else but: Danny Doland from Dallas
With the single opening line of Danny’s chapter we could compile his profile: Danny Doland from Dallas drove a Porsche. p. 201/XII. Thereafter he is always addressed most ‘intimately’ as Danny Doland from Dallas which stylistically produces an overwhelmingly distressing and awkward feeling towards this man - Leila’s third husband. The fact that he collected everything from Important Art (Monets, Modilglianis, Warhols, early Sands) to Rare Books to Major Antiques to Fine Wines can make us believe that he was ‘willing to consider acquiring’ Leila, as well. Everyone around Leila but her was approving of this new venturous marriage, because at long last she has found a proper millionaire, befitting her station as a celebrity artist. Yet Leila failed to enjoy her socially convenient relationship although Danny Doland from Dallas loved Italy, Turner, Blake, i.e. all that Leila loved. He collected her film-stills but yet their affair was doomed to end very abruptly. Anyway who could tell Leila how to live and work. Not anyone who lacks the vigour and rage to live and love passionately but appropriately fits the profane notion of love in the 1980s instead:
After all was not love in the eighties merely a prelude to the purchase of real estate? and in the upper classes, art? p. 212/XII
Always standing on the fringe of the society evenmore in terms of her sexual identity, Leila would never put up with this zeal of consumerism. What she seeks desperately is her true self, her artist’s self, her Dart-ing self. Never before was she closer to it. Her relationship to Renzo offers her another kind of relationship
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998