The drug of travelling
Erica Jong is also consistently concerned with the overwhelming need of travelling around in our culture. In our age travel has become a ‘drug’. There are people who grow so used to coming and going that they find it impossible to stand still. If they are not boarding a plane and going somewhere, they feel somehow bereft - ‘like a gambler deprived of his chips, or an addict of his needle, or a sexoholic of her marble cock.’ The similes are all drawn from the ‘drug-store’ of images, which basically recall the drug-addiction at once arousing the negative essence of any addiction. One could perhaps realize how sensitive Erica Jong and her woman artist are to the fear of flying even in its literal meaning once again in Any Woman’s Blues. There is one airport scene when Leila is to collect her daughters Mike and Ed from a holiday away with their father. Airports have always affected Leila deeply, made her want to cry. Even though it is a jolly occasion for her to meet the twins, her fear-ridden heart and mind are fixated on the inevitable troubles, on the loses and restrictions of all those arrivals and departures. The ‘ill-fitted fragments’ of people’s lives going off to hang suspended above are likened to a puzzle, which Leila hasn’t got the key for.
What she holds the key for are the two vehicles, featured in the novel as extensively as a couple of human characters. These are the car and the motorcycle that Leila have bought for Dart. The deliberate exaggeration and the animation of the images could be traced even in the numberplate which pertinently reads DART. It seems that E. Jong pursues some metonimical identification of Dart with those darting machines. We can dare compare their god-like omnipresence to the household god, the telephone, except for their outdoors function. The very opening of the novel could run that parallel in our minds. Leila, in a grip of an obsession, listens for the sound of Dart’s motorcycle ‘spraying pebbles on the curving driveway path’ (p.9/I), as she is waiting for his call. In the course of the relationships Leila/Dart and Leila/her other addictions there comes a glorious midsummer Connecticut day when Leila takes possession of the car she bought for Dart.
With its oxblood exterior, its white leather seats, its new sound system, and its rebuilt engine, it drives like a wet dream. But Dart has made a mess of the interior, as he makes mess of everything. A rebuke to his woman’s money, because he didn’t earn it. His mess infuriates me, and the fury gives me a power to drive to New York. The gas is incidental. p.138/IX
The description of Dart's car is as vivid and colourful as that of Dart, the troublemaker. The simile of the wet dream is necessary to remind us of the archaic eroticism implied in boats, cars, trains, etc. The wet dream of Dart however fails to achieve its erotic mess-age, it actually remains just another mess of Dart’s. Ironically this mess and the fury, rather than the gas, can fuel and propel Leila’s road to non-attachment towards Dart and to lead her to herself. What could even speed her up on the way to herself is the trustworthy voice of Bessie Smith - there are two sets of complete Bessie Smith - records for home and cassettes for the car. It seems Leila’s road to New York is also incidental. Actually she heads for New York as the place where she can re-claim herself as an extraordinary woman artist.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998