How far can the Don Juan myth go?
Besides the remarkably longish list of Dart’s personality what seems most like his proper mythical counterpart is Don Juan. There is one recurrent line that comes back to Leila from a poem she read in college: ’Wax to receive and marble to retain’. Don Juan’s heart. Byron’s Don Juan. Dart’s heart.
’Wax to receive and marble to retain’ I don’t want to fall in love with Don Juan again. p.177/X
Don Juan’s image is an ever haunting one all throughout the book thereafter. With Dart gone, Leila even imagined a piece based on this insight, using the materials of marble - faux marble - and real wax. This is a work in progress that would be called Don Juan, that would deal with all the many possibilities of this theme - ‘The marble heart. The wax heart. The heartless heart’ - p.177/X.
As a further extension of the love/art pair Leila will involve still another of her darting lovers - Renzo in the Don Juan myth. However Leila tends to identify herself with both of them. Dart’s good intentions in his words ‘I’ll be your mirror’ appear to be very prophetic. So that Leila’s post-Dartian work Don Juan could be decoded in the old favorite way of reversing Don Juan with Donna Giovana in a new myth. Leila considers herself a Donna Giovana, while Dart is her ‘karmic revenge’ - the revenge of her own philandering. In rendering their split-up in this way Dart becomes the visible manifestation of Leila’s own addiction to love, to her falling in love with love, to her breaking (or at least collecting) hearts. In underlying the fact that Dart is ‘the god’s revenge’ for Leila E. Jong is probably aware how persistent is the patriarchal tradition which dictates for women artist never to take the control of their lives. Otherwise, for gaining control, women must pay a very dear price.
This is actually how the novel’s real time opens - with Dart as the visible display of Leila’s obsession with him, with Leila’s self-confidence at its lowest. The artist is alone in her studio-silo, trying to get together some paintings for a new show. But her concentration is ‘utterly blasted’ and she is ‘utterly wretched’. The exaggeration corresponds to the troublesome and painful process of self-discovery. Leila is in, but her muse has flown, Dart has gone. She is struggling to discover the muse within herself to be able to work, but in reality all she does is listen for ‘the sound of Dart’s motorcycle on the gravel pathway and for the sound of the telephone announcing his arrival...’- p.69/III.
Meanwhile in anticipation of Dart’s arrival we are invited on a art tour with Dart and Leila. They both shared a love for art by going for a year to all the art world key venues. They toured the world. They went from Documenta to the Basel Art Fair, from Whitney to Palazzo Garssi, from Dusseldorf to Munich, from Venice to Vienna. And then even without a beat Erica Jong goes from serious art observation to her lovers’ bed:
Who cared where we were, as long as we were in bed. p.16/I
It is quite interesting that the last visible apparition of Dart in the novel, almost closing the story in the chapter before the last, is envisaged through the phone image. This is a very significant image for Dart’s entry and presence both in the novel and in Leila’s heart and art. The telephone motif thus will be exclusively reviewed in regard with woman artist’s social identity. What is relevant for us now is the episode just before the Viva Venezia Ball, at the Venetian hotel when Leila is deep asleep. There is a telephone call from New York for Leila in the middle of the night as if ‘from the dead’. It is Dart, who is wide awake and walking down the Madison Avenue, seeing nothing but the Lone Ranger in a gallery window. These are the same magic film stills, in which he was dressed as the Lone Ranger, ‘and his gun was tucked into his pants rakishly and seemed to bulge like a cock’, that turned him and his gun into a myth: [Dart:] Remember the Lone Ranger, baby? How can I ever forget?... Because of you everyone knows about my big gun... Darling - the whole world knew before. 325,6/XIX
Leila's 'Dart Gone' style
With Dart gone we enter the period where the dominant style of the woman artist, of Leila Sand seems to be rather conceptual and always on the level of the project which never comes into being. We could briefly mention some brilliant ideas for Leila’s works that are left to linger in the world of ideas, just before taking the venture of exploring the three paramount series in Leila’s career: her Pandora’s box collages; Albino still-lives and the Nymph and Satyr series.
By becoming an expert on porn videos, Leila begins to think of doing a porn video piece as a tribute to her love affair with Danny Doland. With her mind focused on the irony and lightheartedness Erica Jong once again mixes art and sex. The moment Leila ‘wasn’t about to give up’ her sex and art, Danny ‘seemed he was’. 210/XII
At some point Leila is considering to do a conceptual piece on the AA scroll, but she gives up ‘for fear of tampering with the magic’ (p.159/IX). Perhaps for fear of flying she gives up the idea of a collage of all the objects and photos of Dart’s girlfriend found in her New York loft. She contemplates of entitling it 'Dart’s Bimbo' but the pain seems too great, so she lets ‘anger triumph over art’ and tossed them all out of the window. With the pain still inside her, Leila goes as far as thinking of a suicidal art not without a tinge of black black humour, calling it 'Dart Gone'. This work is further related to the water imagery which stands for Leila’s aspirations to creativity. Dart is gone and so is Leila’s fear of diving and flying back to her creative self. Here is Leila, who for her art’s sake, could open her veins in the bathtub. Here is Leila who could draw a water painting with her blood - ‘all that red blood marbleizing the clear water’. Here is Leila who could do film-still self-portrait as her ‘life ebbs away’ ...who could puncture her veins and smear the fresh blood all over a canvas... - p.90/V. Despite the degrading attention of E. Jong to the suicidal work of Leila who defines it as a small ‘talk about postmodernist images’ we are well-convinced that the woman artist draws her works from her immediate experience, from her harsh life.
What could drive Leila that far is probably the awareness of another mythologised concept that rules her life: the motif that art is life and life is art. After the overwhelmingly shocking and sullying experience at the Psychodrama Institute of Madame Ada Leila is figuring an S & M piece. Collages of black leather and whips, S & M film stills, sculptures of boots and shoes, shackles and chains, obsess her for a while. But she gives them up as ‘hocke’ and decides to do nothing and later converts to writing. (p. 279/XVIII 'Bye-bye Blues'). Although at the bottom of her despair, alone, as she has ever been, she tries again to work on various collages on the single haunting theme of Dart. Yet the very symbolic act of creating a collage seems to match perfectly Leila’s troubled state of mind. She no longer knows whether she is painting or living, whether she is ‘killing Dart or killing herself’. She is not simply making a collage on the theme of Dart, but a collage ‘out of the bits and pieces of her life’. Unsurprisingly the metaphor of collage may imply woman artist’s life. Once Leila is in the collage, she cannot get out. - 254/XVI.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998