![]() Such was the vision that overcame Stephen Daedalus: a human form flying sunward, moving over the waves of the sea, like the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters before the dawn of creation. Both were struck by lightning, touched by the fire of transformation, but in the case of Stephen Daedalus the blinding encounter turned into a visionary experience of the mythic dimension. In the context of Portrait, the vision of Icarus that overcame Stephen Daedalus as he walked by the sea was Joyce’s version of the Road to Damascus. The catastrophe for Daedelus could not be more pleasing to the vengeful soul of Polycaste which took the form of a partridge “chattering for delight,” in this way having exacted the ancient law of an eye for an eye. This is the same conscience that comes to prick Daedalus at the price of his son. As Joyce put it at the very end of Portrait, my path as an artist is “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” The proper work of the artist is to create the collective conscience of the human race. The tragic flight of Icarus depicts the path of historic self-awakening through the work of Art. Icarus becomes a sacrificial victim after all. 291 17th-century relief with a Cretan labyrinth bottom right (Musée Antoine Vivenel) A partridge sat perched on a holm oak and watched him, chattering for delight – the soul of his sister Polycaste, at last avenged. Daedalus circled around, until the corpse rose to the surface, and then carried it to the near-by island now called Icaria, where he buried it. The heat of the sun had melted the wax, and Icarus had fallen into the sea and drowned. Presently, when Daedalus looked over his shoulder, he could no longer see Icarus but scattered feathers floated on the waves below. ‘Follow me closely,’ he cried, ‘do not set your own course!’ They had left Naxos, Delos, and Paros behind them on the left hand, and were leaving Lebynthos and Calymne behind on the right, when Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions and began soaring towards the sun, rejoiced by the lift of his great sweeping wings. ‘My son, be warned! Neither soar too high, lest the sun melt the wax nor swoop too low, lest the feathers be wetted by the sea.’ Then he slipped his arms into his own pair of wings and they flew off. Why must the the price for the ecstasy of flight be the death of your son-or daughter, as in the case of Joyce himself whose daughter “drowned” in the archetypal waters her father was swimming in?įor once Daedalus made a pair of wings for himself and another for his son Icarus, they were poised for flight just before take off, Daedalus addressed his son Icarus “with tears in his eyes”: The mythologem of Daedalus and Icarus speaks of a being “caught” in the flight of historic becoming and change, exacted by the logic of self-sacrifice and resurrection, in order to carry out a venture which is finally rewarded with loss and pain. Let us recall that todestrieb is, after all, the Freudian category of material transcendence. Precisely where the symptom becomes a repetition of a traumatic wound, we have already stepped into the subterranean pulse of deathdrive ( todestrieb), the realm of the Thing, a universal energy or drive which propells the incessant activity of the artist in flight. The archetypal nature of human creativity can be gleaned in the transgression of incest, which is again connected with the secret that binds sexuality with death, its self-relating “incestuous” or uroboric logic. ![]() Apparently, the ancient law found the satisfaction of an I for an I and a son for a son. ![]() In the end the dead Polycaste exacted her revenge on Daedalus by taking his own son. Daedalus had “punished” his sister Polycaste for having incestuous relations with her own son. If Daedalus represents the artist himself, Icarus, his son, stands for the work of art and its fall into the lifeless heap of mythic history.Īlthough Daedalus enjoys a momentary “release” from Crete, he ends up paying for his crime, the murder of his nephew Talos, with the life of his own son, Icarus. Joos de Momper the Younger (1564–1635).Īs we saw last time, the secret identity-in-difference between Hephaestus, Daedalus, Talos, and Icarus begins to expose the greater network of mythic inflexions that belong to the archetype of the artist in Greek mythology.
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