Paura di volare, Erica Jong (1973)

Paura di volare è un romanzo scritto da Erica Jong nel 1973, che divenne famoso per la controversa rappresentazione della sessualità femminile.
Il romanzo è scritto in prima persona: la narrazione è condotta dalla protagonista, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, una poetessa di 29 anni che ha pubblicato due libri di poesie erotiche. Durante un viaggio a Vienna con il marito, Isadora decide di assecondare le sue fantasie sessuali con un altro uomo. Il tono del racconto è informale ed è la storia del tentativo da parte di Isadora di trovare il proprio posto nel mondo accademico, come studiosa femminista e, più in generale, nell'ambiente della letteratura.
Jong ha smentito che si tratti di un romanzo autobiografico ma ha ammesso che contiene elementi autobiografici. Ad ogni modo, un articolo del New Yorker riporta che la sorella dell'autrice, Suzanna Daou (née Mann), ha riconosciuto se stessa durante una conferenza nel 2008 come ispirazione del personaggio di Isadora Wing, e ha definito il libro come il racconto della sua vita mentre si trovava in Libano.

Trama

È la storia di una scrittrice trentenne, sposata infelicemente con uno psicoanalista freudiano cinese, che durante un congresso di psicoanalisti a Vienna incontra un "guastatore", Adrian, psicoanalista lainghiano inglese, hippie e libertino, con cui fuggirà per l'Europa alla ricerca di se stessa.
La protagonista racconterà ad Adrian tutta la propria vita sentimentale, analizzandosi e facendosi analizzare nel tentativo di superare tutte le sue paure, compresa quella di volare.

Critica

Il romanzo, che al momento dell'uscita ebbe successo soprattutto tra le donne che si sentivano imprigionate in un matrimonio infelice, ha venduto oltre 20 milioni di copie in tutto il mondo.

Paura di volare

Incipit

Citazioni

"La storia del mondo attraverso i gabinetti" [...] "un poema epico???" [...]
Inglesi:
Il gabinetto inglese come ultima spiaggia del colonialismo.
Tedeschi:
I gabinetti tedeschi osservano le differenze di classe. In terza classe : carta ruvida e scura. In prima classe: carta bianca. Chiamata Spezial Krepp (non c'è bisogno di tradurre). Ma i gabinetti tedeschi sono unici al mondo, grazie al piccolo palcoscenico (tutto il mondo è un palcoscenico) sul quale cade la merda. [...] Gente che riesce a costruire gabinetti del genere è capace di tutto.
Italiani:
Spesso si è in grado di leggere qualche articolo del Corriere della sera prima di pulirsi il sedere con le notizie. Ma in generale in Italia l'acqua scorre veloce e la merda sparisce prima che faccia in tempo a balzare in piedi e girarsi a guardarla. Per questo gli italiani sono grandi artisti. I tedeschi hanno già la merda da guardare. In mancanza di questo passatempo, gli italiani hanno pensato di scolpire e dipingere.
Francesi:
[...] Nei gabinetti francesi la luce si accende solo quando si chiude a chiave la porta.
Per qualche ragione non riesco a spiegarmi la letteratura e la filosofia francesi in termini dell'approccio francese alla merde.
Giapponesi:
Accovacciarsi è un fatto fondamentale nella vita orientale. La tazza è nel pavimento. Tutt'intorno decorazioni floreali. Tutto questo ha a che fare con lo Zen (Cf. Suzuki.) (p. 37-38)
Il guaio degli uomini sono gli uomini. Il guaio delle donne sono gli uomini.
"Una fantasia è solo una fantasia, e tutti hanno fantasie. In realtà soltanto gli psicoanalisti agiscono le loro fantasie; la gente normale non lo fa." (p. 52)
[...] il sesso è tutto nella testa. Battiti del polso e secrezioni non hanno niente a che fare col sesso. È per questo che tutti i best-seller sul sesso non valgono un cazzo. Insegnano alla gente a scopare con i genitali, non con la testa. (p. 53)
Dagli albori della storia fino a oggi i libri sono stati scritti con lo sperma, non col sangue mestruale. (p. 38)
La soluzione finale proposta dal sogno nazista: un mondo senza ebrei e senza maschi. (p. 87)
Il matrimonio ha dei lati buoni ma ne ha anche parecchi di cattivi. I lati buoni del matrimonio erano per lo più buoni al negativo. (p. 113)
Il mondo è una giungla piena di animali da preda: cerca di mangiare più in fretta degli altri.
Bigamia vuol dire un marito di troppo, monogamia anche.

Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong, which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality, figured in the development of second-wave feminism.
The novel is written in the first person: narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a 29-year-old poet who has published two books of poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, Isadora decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. Its tone may be considered conversational or informal. The story's American narrator is struggling to find her place in the world of academia, feminist scholarship, and in the literary world as a whole. The narrator is a female author of erotic poetry, which she publishes without fully realizing how much attention she will attract from both critics and writers of alarming fan letters.
The book resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilled marriages, and it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Jong has denied that the novel is autobiographical but admits that it has autobiographical elements. However, an article in The New Yorker recounts that Jong's sister, Suzanna Daou (née Mann), identified herself at a 2008 conference as the reluctant model for Isadora Wing, calling the book "an exposé of my life when I was living in Lebanon". Daou angrily denounced the book, linking its characters to people in her own life and taking her sister to task for taking cruel liberties with them, especially Daou's husband. In the book, Isadora Wing's sister Randy is married to Pierre, who makes a pass at both Wing and her two other sisters. Jong dismissed her sister's claim, saying instead that "every intelligent family has an insane member".

The zipless fuck

It was in this novel that Erica Jong coined the term "zipless fuck", which soon entered the popular lexicon. A "zipless fuck" is defined as a sexual encounter for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment or any ulterior motive, between two previously unacquainted persons.

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973)

Jong goes on to explain that it is "zipless" because "when you came together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."

The story

The novel begins on an airplane flight to Vienna, where the narrator is headed to attend a psychoanalytic conference of mostly Freudian analysts. (The opening sentence memorably reads, "There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them.") It seems the narrator might feel anxious on airplanes, in a time of both civil unrest and fear of foreign terrorism. The narrator is both literate and well educated enough to have been reading newspaper accounts of attempted and completed airline hijackings. Freudians perhaps inevitably have their own ideas about the symbolism of an airplane in the formation of the unconscious and the sexual psyche, and this contrast provides narrative suspense. What did the six psychiatrists make of the narrator's fears? Did she tell them? What will they say in Vienna if she mentions her nervous emotions? These questions are not really explicitly stated, but they may well occur to a reader's mind. The narrator, meanwhile, occupies her mind with many questions, plans, mental rough drafts and reminiscences as her journey unfolds.
But still the "zipless fuck", a major motif in the story, haunts the novel's narrator as she travels. Eventually she reaches both solid land and even her proper destination, Vienna. There she has a sexual adventure involving both her faithful male companion Bennett and a fling, Adrian. Then it is time to depart, and after she has said goodbye to her casual lover (giving him her real New York address and telephone number, confident in her hunch that this particular man will likely just lose it anyway), the reader finds her seated in a cafe, with suitcase, feeling "like a fraud" and wondering, "Why wasn't I grateful for being hunted?" At the parting, she had felt as though there were "nothing but a slim volume of verse between me and the void". In the cafe, she muses:

But now I wanted to be alone, and if anybody interpreted my behavior differently, I'd react like a wild beast. Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my "availability"—as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily. Or wore my hair too wantonly. Or something. I deserved to be attacked, in short. It was the same old jargon of the war between the sexes, the same old fifties lingo in disguise: There is no such thing as rape; you ladies ask for it. You ladies.

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973)

The last leg of the narrator's return trip must be by train, as she wishes to get from Paris to Great Britain, where she will meet up with Bennett again. As she is trying to swing her suitcase into the overhead train compartment, a young attendant wearing a blue uniform walks up and takes her suitcase from her. She thanks him, and reaches for her purse, but this supposedly universal gesture indicating "tip" seems foreign to him; he walks away. "You will be alone?" he [asks] ambiguously. He begins to pull down all the shades and to convert the compartment into a sleeper. At least, he runs his hands along the seats and the narrator assumes a linguistic gap and supplies reasons for his gestures within her own mind: she considers it most probable that he is just doing his train attendant job. She remarks that "this", possibly meaning all this attention, may not be fair to all the other passengers, for although she has travelled to Vienna, she is still an American, with an American code of politeness and consideration. And next:

"You are seule?" he asked again, flattening his palm on my belly and pushing me down toward the seat. Suddenly his hand was between my legs and he was trying to hold me down forcibly. "What are you doing?" I screamed, springing up and pushing him away. I knew very well what he was doing, but it had taken a few seconds to register.

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973)

The narrator does not end up being sexually assaulted; instead, she has grabbed her suitcase and fled the compartment. The train attendant merely stands and allows her to leave, smiling crookedly while shrugging. She finds another compartment, and after calming down, at last concludes her meditations upon the puzzle or conundrum that is her own personal invention, the "zipless fuck":

It wasn't until I was settled, facing a nice little family group--mother, daddy, baby--that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I'd been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me!

— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973)

The novel remains a feminist classic and the phrase "zipless fuck" has seen a resurgence in popularity as third-wave feminism authors and theorists continue to use it while reinterpreting their approach to sexuality and to femininity. John Updike's New Yorker review is still a helpful starting point for curious onlookers. He commented, "A sexual frankness that belongs to, and hilariously extends the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy's Complaint."

Film and radio adaptations

Many attempts to adapt this property for Hollywood have been made, starting with Julia Phillips, who fantasized that it would be her debut as a director. The deal fell through and Erica Jong litigated, unsuccessfully. In her second novel, Jong created the character Britt Goldstein—easily identifiable as Julia Phillips—a predatory and self-absorbed Hollywood producer devoid of both talent and scruples.
In May 2013 it was announced that a screenplay version by Piers Ashworth had been green-lighted by Blue-Sky Media, with Laurie Collyer directing.

Fear of Flying (1973)

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...

Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.
- (About Men)

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style.

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

Le complexe d'Icare

« Elle écrit comme un homme - mais non, si elle écrit comme quelqu'un, c'est comme une femme cent pour cent femme... Sur bien des points, elle est plus directe, plus franche que bien des auteurs masculins. Car voici une femme libérée, qui dit son besoin de l'homme, qui avoue étre obsédée par le sexe et l'amour, sujet sur lequel on n'entend pas assez le son de cloche féminin. »
Henry MILLER.

Sans complexe, sans intellectualisme, dans un roman d'une irrésistible drôlerie, Erica Jong raconte les désirs, les fantasmes, les contradictions aussi de la vie sexuelle féminine. Paru en 1973, Le Complexe d'Icare a été traduit dans le monde entier et vendu à plus de dix millions d'exemplaires.

Ils étaient cent dix-sept psychanalystes sur ce vol Pan Am à destination de Vienne. Cent dix-sept, dont au moins six m’avaient soignée, sans parler d’un septième que j’avais épousé. Cela dit, Dieu sait si c’était à l’imbécillité de ces jivaros rétrécisseurs de psyché ou à ma nature et à sa splendide imperméabilité à la psychanalyse que je devais d’avoir encore plus peur maintenant, si possible, de l’avion qu’au début de mes aventures psychanalytiques, quelques treize années plus tôt.
Au moment du décollage, mon mari avait posé une main de thérapeute sur la mienne en disant :
_ Ma parole, c’est un vrai glaçon !...

Et pourtant les hommes tiennent pour acquis que tout refus de la part d'une femme fait seulement partie du jeu. Du moins bon nombre d'hommes, sinon tous. Quand ils disent "non", c'est non. Quand c'est une femme, cela signifie oui, ou peut être (au minimum). C'est même devenu une bonne plaisanterie. Et petit à petit, les femmes se sont faites à cette idée et ont fini par y croire aussi.

A la rigueur on la pardonne à un homme – surtout s’il est un « charmant célibataire » qui « sort avec des starlettes » durant les brefs entractes entre deux mariages. Mais une femme seule est toujours présumée telle non parce qu’elle l’a voulu, mais parce qu’on l’a abandonnée. Et on la traite en conséquence – en paria. Il n’y a pas de dignité possible dans l’existence d’une femme seule.

Pisser au bord des routes, c'est, en théorie, du plus charmant Rousseau ; en pratique, cela laisse l'entrejambe un peu gluant. Et l'un des désavantages de la condition féminine est que l'on pisse dans ses souliers ou sur eux.

Pourquoi une femme n'aurait-elle pas le droit de dire sa vérité sans être traitée de putain ?