Venice - the land of art
However Leila’s personal choice of the mythical land of art is somewhat different from the ever cherished artistic venue of Paris. Her Paris is Venice, her France is Italy. Why not Paris? Because for her generation Paris is no longer the ‘midwife’ to the arts [Jong 1994/a, Jong 1992]. Henry Miller had to dream of Paris, as well as Jong’s grandfather. The voice H. Miller discovers in Paris is full of the exuberance of escape: ...Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Everyone has lived here some time or another. Nobody dies here...[Miller 1992]
Leila’s frequent visits to Venice are evidently motivated by the craving to touch both the sky and the sea. If we are to pick up just a single day of Leila's in Venice, it is never an ordinary hazy late-summer Sunday. It is rather a scene that ‘Monet might have painted: a scrim of humidity softening the campanili, the sky, the water’. The attraction of painters and writers who flocked to Venice lay in the way in which air and water illuminate each other, and where air and water ‘metamorphose moment by moment in a kaleidoscope of light’. Venice is perceived by the creative mind of the woman artist as the only city in which ‘every view is three-quarters sky’. Thus Venice turns into the ultimate apotheosis of Leila’s search of professional selfhood. This is her land of art and light, the land where she will be drawn irresistibly. By no accident in E. Jong’s narrative Venice will stand symbolically for both life and death, for a beginning and an end. From the structural point of view Venice closes up the woman artist’s story by virtually closing the final chapter of Any Woman’s Blues. We could probably relate this deliberate choice of an ending to the rather bizarre relation Venice/death in the open question of Leila:
Isn’t Venice where artists go to die? To die in Venice would be, at least, artistically correct. p.290/XVIII
Leila goes to Venice both to die and be reborn again as a phoenix from her ashes. At this point in the book, Leila is explicitly identified with the phoenix bird in the Afterword. In Venice and in the middle of her life Leila dies and is reborn, because at forty-five, ’you either perish or recreate yourself like a phoenix’,p.351. Leila, the woman artist, seems to have been chosen for the latter course. And suddenly she sees Venice as if for the first time. Is it her search for serenity; is it sobriety, the triumph of the sane mind; is it her ‘maenads and crystal’ that echo with her new ID of a phoenix, with this fabulous mythological creature? [BBM 1993] Like it Leila combines the yin-yang powers, the solar and lunar energy, the male and female qualities. Unsurprisingly Leila is fascinated by the Venice light that drew Ruskin, Turner, Monet - and before that all the great male Venetian painters, from Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese to Guardi and Canaletto. Perhaps thanks to these artists Venice has gained its popular reputation of the most romanticized, aesthetically packaged and photographed couple of square miles in the world. But Erica Jong cuts across this pleasure. As does Sophie Calle, a visual artist in her Venice project Follow me, 1988 in which Venice’s openings, closures, disclosures and narratives and its construction by the tourist industry as a cultural object of desire are all resolutely ignored by Calle’s narratives. [....] E. Jong is as determinate in her singular approach to Venice. This can probably give another clue to the new contemporary myth of women artists E. Jong deals with.
Leila Sand will however behave like an American artist when she pursues her career in Venice. Europe for the American artist tends to mean the proximity of culture, where one doesn’t have to justify being an artist or writer with bestsellerdom or a prestigious gallery. Therefore the contrast of America/Italy is generally intensified on the level of right and wrong priorities in Any Woman’s Blues. Italy has its priorities ‘set right’. The pursuit of art, love and sex comes first, while in America only the pursuit of money is in the air. On the other hand exile is necessary to many artists who come from puritanical cultures. J. Joyce and H. Miller are the other examples. They both had to leave their countries to see them clearly. They both had to escape the X-ray vision of their families in order to discover and utilize their gifts. But for the American artist it also means the escape from the ‘bourgeois values’, from those people who assume that making a living is the same as making a life [Jong 1992, p.84]. Leila Sand had also to escape the ghost of her own obsessed self in order to reach her professional ID. Erica Jong seems quite aware of the needy conflict between America/Italy which implies the mythological dualism in her thinking - setting her notion always in contrasting pairs.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998