Fear of Flying

Author: Erica Jong

What Happens: Erica Jong, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband, writes about the marital discontent of Isadora Wing, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband. At a European psychoanalysis conference, Wing meets the subtly named Adrian Goodlove, and with him she takes a hippie-style vacation from her marriage, camping and fornicating all across Europe. In the process Jong--or Wing, the lines blur a bit--introduces the invaluable concept of the Zipless Fuck, the fantasy of the lover so compelling and perfect that all real-world obstacles simply melt away.

Censorship History: Fear of Flying has been banned far and wide, in Italy, South Africa, and right here at home.

The lasting controversy had to do with public funding of the arts. Jong received a $5,000 from the NEA to write Fear of Flying, and, as required, stated on page 1 that she had received this funding. On the very next page she introduced the world to the Zipless Fuck. This outraged people such as Jesse Helms, that champion of the oppression known as taste, who participated in public debates over Fear of Flying without actually having read the book. The debates grew to encompass the furor surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe's photography and works such as Serrano's Piss Christ, and eventually resulted in the decision that the United States would no longer fund individual artists.

One reader notes that Amazon still censors certain words, requiring discussion of this book to include phrases such as "the zipless fudge." But "zipless fuck" is right there in the Key Phrases, so no matter how grateful I am for the image of zipless fudge, I'm not sure what she's talking about.

Value as Erotica: Fear or Flying has a reputation for being wildly erotic. And sure, it talks about sex (or perhaps around sex) plenty. But if you're looking for an actual sex scene, there's not much in the way of explicit description--there's much more discussion of what doesn't happen. Isadora's husband can go for hours, but draws the line at oral sex; she runs off with her lover, who turns out to be mostly impotent; the three of them have one night together--but if that just made you think FINALLY! then you're still in for disappointment. It's very much the R-rated, cut-to-the-morning-after version of the scene.

Maybe Jong's language is what's supposed to be erotic. Maybe 30 years ago it was really hot to encounter a woman talking this way. There's a certain locker-room swagger to the way Isadora throws around words like cunt and fuck, but for contemporary readers whatever shock value the words might have had is long gone.

And, finally, apart from the basic idea of leaving your husband to go tooling around Europe with your new lover, there's nothing really erotic about the story, unless you have a fetish for neurotic, overprivileged, self-involved women who are hung up on Freudian analysis. Whininess is not hot. Not in women, not in men, not ever.

Value as Feminism: This is one of the sacred texts of the 1970s women's movement. It was a big deal, I guess, for Jong to use language that only male authors had used previously. I've seen recent press describe her as "the original bad girl" (somewhere, in whatever afterlife you believe in, Eve is getting tetchy). To be sure, there's merit and honesty in her recognition of the contradictions inherent in modern womanhood.

And yet, you know, for me, this book encapsulates everything wrong with second-wave feminism. It's whiny, it's solipsistic, it takes Freud seriously, and it makes the tacit assumption that empowerment begins and ends with the self-actualization of a woman who already has quite a lot of power. The heroine never stops to wonder if perhaps her privilege and her obsession with self are themselves to blame for her lack of fulfillment.

Now, don't get me wrong: we needed second-wave feminism, and perhaps need it still, but it has some serious shortcomings. Among them are narcissism and whininess--which I think are directly due to a Steinem-style assumption that women are the perpetual victims of society and of the men in their lives. More pernicious, and ultimately more damaging, is the notion that fulfillment comes from gratifying every personal whim, regardless of its impact on others. How can that count as feminine fulfillment? It doesn't even register as human fulfillment. It's fundamentally childish: the exaltation of appetite, the inability to see beyond the bounds of self.

So we might as well get into this:

Value as Literature: I'm not a huge fan of how all this self-gratification translates into literature. Feminist literary theorists suggested that women could--some said should--write according to their own separate aesthetic, ignoring such supposedly oppressive, phallocentric conceits as clarity and grammar. (These concepts didn't really come to prominence until the 1980s, but they'd been brewing at least since the beginning of the century; some say the Nora chapter of Ulysses is an example of écriture feminine, although I have trouble reconciling the ideas of Joyce and laxness.) Suffice to say that, one way and another, ideas of individual liberation have resulted in quite a lot of lazy writing.

Henry Miller--no stranger to censorship himself--championed Fear of Flying, and said in a letter that the book had a "natural, free flow. Just the contrary of Hemingway's studied prose which so many Americans consider 'good writing.'" Now, certainly Hemingway can get far too mannered. But is it wrong to expect a certain amount of discipline from an artist? Isn't that discipline--which boils down, after all, to exercising aesthetic choice--exactly what separates good art from bad?

There is little such discipline here. In fact, if your bookstore had a Lazy Writing section, you'd probably spot Fear of Flying on the shelf (right there next to On the Road and Angels and Demons). It's at least 50 pages too long. It's that dreaded beast, an autobiographical first-person novel. It's contradictory. It ends on the sort of cliffhanger that indicates the author couldn't solve the main conflict and opted to weasel out instead. It's in love with its own cleverness, brimming with parenthetical asides and the sort of feeble puns ("whoreoscopes," "my hysterical history") that give wordplay a bad name.

Is it antifeminist of me to get on Jong/Wing's case for whininess? That's an interesting question. You could point at literature's long history of neurotic male characters trying to make up their minds--from Hamlet to the protagonist in Notes from Underground--and argue that female characters are due for their turn on the couch. Fair point.

But the problem here is that Fear of Flying begins and ends with the couch. There's nothing more at stake. Hamlet's decision will reshape the kingdom, and he knows it; the process of deciding involves consideration not just of what he will do but of what it means to be human, what it means to die, what it means to face a decision like this. Isadora's decision is going to affect what she thinks about when she masturbates for the next few years, and it will affect her petulant analyst husband, and that's pretty much it. It's not a reflection on what it means to be human; it's just a reflection on what it means to be her--to be affluent and educated and still unsatisfied--and after a while it acquires the tedium of listening to a shrink's taped conversations with a hypochondriac.

Now, isn't there a case to be made for exploring an individual situation in such a way that it becomes universal? Of course. That's all literature ever is, or needs to be. The question is whether Fear of Flying actually makes the leap to universality. The concept of the Z.F. comes the closest. Are we willing to grant the book universality based on that concept alone? For me, it's not enough. I suspect that, when the book came out, the feelings it described were much like those of many women in the affluent chattering class that, coincidentally, happens to establish critical reaction to books. They saw themselves, and assumed the experience was universal. But it's not--not by a long shot.

So the real problem is that this is whininess and indecision without a larger purpose. Women are due for their Hamlet, no question, but should we settle for Isadora Wing? In terms of scale, scope, obsession, and would-be shock value, this is much closer to Portnoy's Complaint. Jong's real subject is Erica Jong, just as Philip Roth's is Philip Roth. That comparison would probably piss off Erica Jong and Philip Roth equally. But so be it.

What Else: There is nothing as simultaneously flattering and dismaying as the light of hope that leaps into a man's eyes when he finds out where you're from. I doubt the reputation American women enjoy in Italy is entirely due to the heroic philandering of Isadora Wing (or Erica Jong, acting as Isadora Wing). Based on my recent months in Tuscany, I'm guessing that the reputation has been well fortified by the hordes of sorority girls who file into the Florence airport wearing velour sweatpants with PINK emblazoned across the butts, chattering about Italy's lack of a drinking age.

Perhaps whole armies of American women, inspired by Fear of Flying, have been descending on Italy, demanding sexual awakenings? If American tourists demand sex the same way they demand other things ("HI! I'M LOOKING! FOR THE GIGOLOS! EXCUSE ME! HI! THE GIGOLOS?"), then oh, a brilliant comedy is waiting to be written.