Renzo’s period
Right from the start of their love story we will recognize that Leila is still obsessed by Dart. The haunting parallels between the two lovers of hers follows inevitably. All we have here is the Italian counterpart of Dart - another Don Giovanni, but an authentic one: ‘the Mediterranean man, who does the role right’.(p. 318/XIX) Is he a Mr. Right Man for a woman artist or has she merely fallen for Don Juan again? What will eventually prove right as the only proper place for love and art is the setting of Venice. Renzo is fittingly conceived as a Venetian gondolier. But like Dart, Renzo is just another version of the impossible lover - the taboo man, the demon lover, ‘the incestuous incubus’. He is beautiful yet unhavable which also heightens the God imagery associated with him. Renzo belongs to another woman, to his German wife who is mothering him all the time.
Indeed Renzo’s face is likewise Dart’s God-like. His cheekbones are slanted like Pan’s. When Leila is looking down at his feet, she is anticipating ‘hooves’ which are to match her great mythological expectations, ‘or at least fins’, as if to make us believe Renzo is inherently connected with the water, the lagoon, the sea, all the images that are boosting the woman-artist’s creativity The very next moment however Jong is to disappoint the reader with an abrupt ironic turn: ‘But all I see are cream-colored loafers and no socks’.
Actually Renzo is always approached through a simile and his own identity is thus questioned. With his ‘tousled’ blackish curls looks like a young Bacchus. With his ‘too pointed’ ears, he looks slightly like a satyr. With his ebony hair and his sea-green eyes, he looks ‘like a giavanotto painted by Bronzino’. It seems that all the attendants of Bacchus are summoned - fauns, satyrs, pans to foster the lascivious and lewdish nature of Leila’s lovers. And lewdishness is an entirely positive notion in Leila’s and Jong’s frame of mind.(see Jong, Index Journal). No wonder that Renzo is looking ‘even more a satyr in the morning light’. This is really a powerful combination of Bacchus images gathered in all in one that evokes her womanliness and all her Jewishness. And they are like Pan and Ceres, the god of the woods and the goddess of grain, who lie together ‘smelling their own musk, their love odor.’ (345/XX) However Renzo is more than a rough macho-man or a practiced Casanova because there is about him ‘a courtliness, a gentilezza’, that made Leila think of the Italian Renaissance (303,4,5,7/XVIII).
The passionate lay of Renzo and Leila evokes plenty of popular- images. This is how we once again after Dart, the Land of Fuck is revisited. The recurrent emphasis on the name of this special topos pays homage to this image devised initially by Henry Miller. Miller’s rage to live and work conjures up Jong’s positive notion of the animal sex, this need for mastery, possession. Without this animal entering, sex doesn’t work, and only when sex works like this can you enter the Land of Fuck. This image also brings to the front plenty of water:
Renzo and I do not practice safe sex. In the Land of Fuck nothing is safe. We are lost in a watery Atlantis, in the middle of the lagoon, where we communicate with cock and cunt 308/XIX
The legendary implications of Atlantis are ones of an imaginary island that once used to be a powerful kingdom before it was overwhelmed by the sea.(see Brewers’). But now it is powered by the mighty love of Renzo and Leila. This idea of the island brought back to life from the ancient myth is intensified by the cliché of discovering America. She - as America, he as Columbus:
He is fucking me as if he wants to enter every part of me, discovering America. 315/XIX
The mythological lay needs a reference to the primal couple of the Old Testament, Adam and Eve. So that Renzo and Leila are just about to board Noah’s Ark and reproduce the whole human nation. But their biblical aspirations are bluffed giving way to a subtle irony that is on the verge of re-writing the fairy-tale of Cinderella: ‘And then the bells ring and it is noon and we must go, we two daytime Cinderellas, turned to pumpkins by the stroke of noon’. 345/XX.
Leila’s Venetian affair is remarkably rich in female images. Next to water, the moon is a traditional symbol associated with womanhood. The full moon setting is too perfect, too magical, too much a cliches, and like many cliches, it is also true. The appropriate romantic touch is delivered by a poetic metaphor: ‘The lagoon is strafed with setting moon-sunlight’. Obviously in Jong’s mode of thinking outside, inside, sun, moon, male, female are all united, denoting how vital it is for Leila to have them all without tearing them apart. Here is a cluster of unifying metaphors that glorifies Leila’s aspirations: ‘We [Leila and Renzo] are rocking in the boat of each other, in the lagoon of dreams, at once liquid and starry, watery yet made of shimmering light.’
Leila’s sexual identity is eager to feed on mythological personae. The amazons are also ‘products’ of the Greek mythology, meaning women-warriors, but now as Leila’s contemporaries we would rather project the brawny, strong woman who craves for her centaur to carry her off.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998