"Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air."
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Daedalus Complex is the name that I had given to a project that draws upon René Girard's theories of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism and Kenneth Burke's observation that "the perfection of the work, including the perfecting of the victim" is a fundamental motive underlying all narratives. Its title was taken from the story of Daedalus as recounted by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, in which the perfect work is represented by the objects that Daedalus constructs -- including both the labyrinth that was commanded by King Minos and the wings that allowed him to escape from Knossos -- and the role of perfect victim is played in turn by the Minotaur and Icarus. It focused on the comparable craftsmanship exhibited by writers who create both perfect victims in the form of protagonists who serve as the scapegoats upon whom they displace a form of suffering that could otherwise have been their own, and perfect works in the form of literary masterpieces in which the sacrificing of their victims – foreshadowed by the fates of the Minotaur and Icarus – will assure their enduring glory. More recently, Mircea Eliade's work on the role played by human sacrifice in construction-site rituals and alchemical processes -- which bears a striking resemblance to the act of literary creation -- has led to some fresh thinking about this project. In particular, it has helped me to shift the emphasis away from the community's sacrificing of the scapegoat as a way of putting an end to internecine violence and toward the author's sacrificing of his protagonist in order to construct his work. I've been especially intrigued in this respect by Eliade's discussion of "The Legend of Master Manole," a Romanian folktale in which an architect learns that he must sacrifice his own wife in order to build the church that he has designed.
Throughout this project, I have had at hand such resonant touchstones for the perfecting of the victim as T. S. Eliot’s question, raised in a letter, "Is it true that sometimes one can only live by another's dying?” as well as his celebrated distinction, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” between “the man who suffers” and “the mind which creates," the Romanian writer Emil Cioran’s assertion that “cruelty is a sign of election, at least in literature,” and Vladimir Nabokov's quip that the characters in his novels are "my galley slaves." Stephen Daedalus’s assertion, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that “the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails'' was an especially useful touchstone with respect to the perfection of the work.
A book-in-progress that began with this project, to be entitled The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing, is inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's advice that we should read the work of great writer neither with our heads nor our hearts but with our spines because that is where we feel the "telltale tingle." In a nutshell, it focuses attention on the potentially spine-tingling effects produced by our discovery of the symbiotic connections within the trinity formed by the designing author, his designated victim in the person of a protagonist, and the formal design of the work itself, which achieves the goal whose pursuit had led the protagonist to an impasse.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, for example, Gatsby's determination to "fix everything just the way it was in the past," which leads eventually to his death, parallels Fitzgerald's authorial success in "fixing" every detail of his novel -- including the highly dubious sequence of events that eventuates in Gatsby's death and Nick Carraway's equally dubious eulogizing of Gatsby -- in order to produce a literary triumph. Fitzgerald mimics Gatsby's behavior but without relinquishing his authorial invulnerability. Similarly, the drift into senility and eventual death of Father Flynn, who was "too scrupulous always" in the exercise of his priestly duties, is uncannily mirrored by the writerly triumph that James Joyce achieves in his short-story "The Sisters" by employing a narrative technique that he himself described as "scrupulous meanness." Emil Cioran's self-diagnosed "hysteria" is both a paralyzing personal predicament in his A Short History of Decay (Précis de décomposition) and the source of the "incendie verbale" that lies at the heart of his literary glory. So also, the experience of loss in The Book of Disquiet is both a predicament for its protagonist-author Bernardo Soares, a self-described "ruins of buildings," and an ironically apt description of The Book itself, a pile of disparate fragments discovered in a sea trunk long after Pessoa's death that is generally acknowledged to be a towering masterpiece of literary modernism.
J. Alfred Prufrock's paralysis -- induced in him by words (whether real or imagined) that an adversarial "they" speak to him -- is mirrored throughout "Prufrock" itself by T. S. Eliot's creative surrender to words written by others-- especially Dante and Shakespeare -- from which he continually drew inspiration as he was writing the poem. Similarly, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame feature characters who are involved in activities -- "doing nothing" in one, "playing it" in the other -- at which their creator is far more adept than they and which he constantly turns to his advantage at their expense. In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the word "misfit" points not only to the protagonist -- whose cruelty gives him no pleasure -- but also to Flannery O'Connor's choice of narrative technique -- what Frederick Asals has called her "aesthetics of incongruity" -- from which she herself obviously derived immense pleasure. Finally, the inability of Wertheimer,"an unrelieved emulator," to survive his traumatizing encounter with Glenn Gould at the Salzburg Mozarteum is paralleled throughout the The Loser by Thomas Bernhard's creative emulation of Gould.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Daedalus Complex "Together with his father, the boy Icarus was standing unaware he was facing danger now with a beaming face kept on capturing the feathers which the moving air has moved, with his thumb now kept softening the yellow wax and with his play he kept interrupting the marvelous work of his father."
Ch. 1 Fixing James Gatz in The Great Gatsby
Ch. 2 Being Scrupulous in “The
Sisters”
Ch.3 Incarnating Ruins in The Book of Disquiet
Ch. 4 Doing Nothing in Waiting for Godot
Ch. 5 The Eliot Ways in “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” Ch. 6 Playing It in Endgame Ch. 7 Transfiguring Hysteria in A Short History of Decay Ch. 8 Perfecting Misfits in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Ch. 9 Emulating Glenn Gould in The Loser
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 Updating... Thomas Cousineau, Sep 12, 2012, 7:15 AM
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