John N. Duvall

DeLillo's Dedalian artists

When Don DeLillo was asked in a 1979 interview – the first he ever gave – why he shunned publicity and rarely spoke about his work, he replied, “Silence, exile, cunning, and so on.” He was quoting James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), wherein protagonist Stephen Dedalus famously vows to use those three “arms” to defend his art from the intrusions of nationalism, religion, and domesticity. DeLillos novels about artists – Great Jones Street (1973), Mao II (1991), and The Body Artist (2001) – sustain a dialogue with these modernist, “Dedalian” aesthetic principles. Each novel depicts the lure of silence and exile, as each artist figure coils inward in order to spring outward, often with a new work that redefines his or her artistic practice. This pattern indeed forms a link in an intertextual chain that leads back to the Greek myth from which Stephen takes his name. Daedalus was, of course, the artificer who built a nearly inescapable labyrinth for King Minos of Crete, where he kept the half-bull, half-human Minotaur and fed him human sacrifices. Taking one victims place, the Athenian prince Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped afterward using a thread given to him by Minoss daughter, Ariadne. Later, Daedalus himself was imprisoned in the labyrinth but, by fashioning wings from feathers and wax, escaped with his son, Icarus. Failing to heed his fathers warnings, Icarus flew too close to the sun; his wax wings melted and he fell into the sea. Daedalus subsequently put aside his wings, but after enviously murdering his clever nephew Perdix, he was transformed by Athena into a bird.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?