The Jong remains inflamed
Is Erica Jong a free speech martyr in the making or just another paranoid android?
Eamonn McCann, 24 Jul 2008
US novelist and feminist pioneer Erica Jong fears that Muqtada al-Sadr may order her execution by firing squad.
Jong revealed her terror following a conference at Columbia University celebrating the 35th anniversary of Fear Of Flying, the novel which made her name back in 1973. The style and first-person narration suggests that Fear Of Flying is autobiographical – which Jong denies. The book’s lasting significance may lie in the way it liberated language. Long before the Vagina Monologues, it made casual use of “cunt” and inserted the phrase “zipless fuck” into the vernacular.
Fear Of Flying depicts the heroine/writer, Isadora Wing, visiting her sister, Randy, who lives in Beirut with her children and husband, a Lebanese Arab – who crawls into Isadora’s bed and asks for a blow-job.
The chapter containing this sequence is named ‘Arabs and Other Animals’. It sparked an outburst at the conference from Jong’s sister, Suzanna Daou. Prior to the book’s publication, Daou was visited by Jong at the Beirut home she shared with her children and husband, a Lebanese Arab.
“I have been angry about this for 35 years,” Daou told the conference. “The book was based on my family. But my husband was a wonderful man. It’s implied that he climbed into her bed and asked for fellatio. He would never ever have behaved in that way. It was a terrible betrayal.”
What seized my interest was not the betrayal but the reaction to the chapter-heading back in the 1970s, and Jong’s reaction to her sister’s complaint now.
1973 was the heyday and high point of political correctness – the year the Roe-v-Wade judgment made abortion legal in the US, Black Panther Bobby Seale came within a few hundred votes of becoming mayor of Oakland, and the US Gay Liberation Movement held its first national conference. Never was awareness of the right to separate identity so acute.
Would the heading ‘Blacks and Other Animals’ or ‘Gays and Other Animals’ or ‘Jews and Other Animals’ have passed without comment in a Number One best-seller that year? But Jong’s reference to Arabs went entirely unremarked.
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