The twin obsessions of our age - addiction and narcissism
However Leila’s adventurous road to knowing herself turns to some more of the obsessions of our age. As a woman artist Leila Sand is overwhelmed and haunted by the inevitable contemporary addictions to the phone, the car, the motorcycle. All of the addictions are extremely interiorized and given a particular significance throughout the narrative. Although Leila is trying to learn to live in another state: moderation, the golden mean, she experiences herself as an addict - to the phone, to Dart, to her car. Although the golden mean feels boring to her, she knows it is the secret of life. She knows that in a society that worships addiction one can hardly find a nonaddicted life. There is an army of addicts around her. Lionel is an addict too - addicted to taking over companies. Dart is also not so different from Lionel’s passion to take over companies or Andre’s to take over artists.
Consume, Consume, Consume. The bottomless pit of wanting. These are our values, and that is the world we have made. Never have we needed nonattachment more. 244/XV
By the hasty triple repetition the reader can recognize the intensity with which Erica Jong confronts the culture of consumerism. Her woman artist is definitely one that both belongs and fiercely fights against it. She is also an expert in the bottomless pit of wanting someone. She knows the narcissism of being desired, the thrill of making someone fall in love with her.
The telephone as the household god
What seems the most assuring of her narcissism is her steady relationship of addiction to her telephone. It is even provocative to follow the animation of the phone within the love affair of Leila and Dart. Whenever Dart is not available, the phone is. Thus Leila’s phone acquires the mythological status of the ‘household god’. Here are the two God-like figures, Dart and the phone, properly featured with God-like imagery, that are so dear and affectionate to Leila’s heart. ‘Panic grips’ Leila’s heart at the thought of going into the city and leaving the telephone unattended. (p.138/IX). Even the novel opens with Leila ‘in the grip of an obsession’ with the telephone.
I sit here by the phone (which may in fact be out of order) and wait for his call. p.9/I
And thereafter runs the gripping story of Dart and Leila. Even the persistent use of grip in the book invokes our readers’ perception of the strong woman, who takes and keeps a firm, powerful hold of her...addictions.
Leila cherishes an intimate relation with her phone, too. There is a telephone in her silo - a ‘secret’ one, the one only Dart and Emmie have the number of. This is her sacred silo studio which is made even more unattainable to the ordinary world by the secret phone. Despite our expectations that Leila will transcend her phone addictions, the end of the novel surprisingly brings us back to the outset of the story. Even though Leila has been trying to run away from the phone, she is alarmed and would have gone ‘crazy’ if the phone never rang (324/XIX). Leila’s intimacy with the phone develops to some weird mystical point. She is able to make Dart call by wishing. Erica Jong’s satire is at its full swing when Leila is no longer able to ‘create dynamite by the sheer force of longing’, when the phone gradually turns from a good-natured god into mischievous, destructive one.
Anyway, the first woman who perfects that technique is going to win the Nobel Prize for Women...Waiting by the phone - that old female pastime - has got to be of all distaff griefs the worst. It is the powerlessness, the sense of being out of control, that annihilates. Breathe on the phone. Make it ring. Pull on the old umbilicus and make it pulse. 234/XIV
This is what Leila is struggling to avoid throughout the novel - winning this Nobel Prize. Yet she is aware that all women are just too keen to stick to that phone addiction. The subtle alliteration in distaff griefs brings an air of ancient female character to that addiction, conjuring the conventional imagery of weaving and spinning, usually associated with women and housework [Smith 1994]. Those associations are further increased by the short imperative sentences which seem to cast some black magic on the phone. Even the special pick up of a strong anatomical word like umbilicus to denote the utmost attachment and the heavy dependency in a close relationship is suggestive of the twin obsession of our age.
Erica Jong’s humorous way of treating those current social issues seems the only way out of despair and didacticism. The readers are welcome to take pleasure from a mock-heroic episode with Lionel and his portable phone as anti-heroes. Precisely at the moment Lionel is about to enjoy the feast in Leila’s garden there comes the loud beep beep beep from the handmade Florentine briefcase of his. Precisely at the peak moment, at the sacred silo studio of Leila, when he reaches down and stars to unzip his fly, his briefcase beeps again. Yet to keep the readers laugh on, Jong ‘makes’ Lionel keep one hand on his fly and the other on the telephone, and thus his ‘proxy fight’ continues. Lionel is plugged into his addiction again and Leila is left to reflect on the immense destructive implement of the telephone.
More destructive than a machine gun or bullwhip. Suddenly the feast is turned to gall. This is a world they’ve made, a world in which sex is always interrupted by proxy fights, and they love it. 243,7/XV
Apart from the annihilating powerlessness for a strong woman artist such an addiction could bring painful alienation, too. The telephone numbers collected by Leila through the years are all stored in her Filofax and Rolodex notebooks and cards. Yet they are made obsolete by the time she takes a grip on her life. They are turned into a testament to mutability. And thus the feeling of mutability predominates in Leila’s relation with the phone. There is nothing but problems lurking behind each of the Filofax names, problems and untold depths of ‘fear of intimacy, fear of commitment, fear of falling, fear of flying, fear of fucking!’ (256/XVI) And the scissors of the collage-making Kali/Leila go over the Filofax as if to assure us of her creative/destructive power. We are drawn by the strength of Leila’s snipping and pasting Filofax pieces as if under a black magic spell again. And the sense of alienation as another obsession of our age is bursting out from the extensive list of old female fears. We can possibly argue that all E. Jong’s creative women are trying their best in overcoming those haunting fears, in transcending the ‘eternal’ womanhood.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998