How the Story of Icarus Can Set You Free

James Joyce, esthetics, and flight by unknown arts

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus. Possibly Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes. — Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188

So begins A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce’s first novel, conceived when the writer was just 22, but not published until he was 34. It would take a similarly overeducated egghead as the novel’s main character, Stephen Dedalus, to translate the book’s epigraph. And a classical education is rarer now than it was in the early 20th century.

And he set his mind to unknown arts. That will do. Because A Portrait, as the name suggests, is a semiautobiographical account of Joyce becoming the artist that he was. One who, without exaggeration, changed the world through his gifts.

But the quote first appears in reference to Daedalus. The mythical genius who built the labyrinth that contained the Minotaur. The man who, with his son Icarus, tried to escape imprisonment on the island of Crete by flying on artificial wings.

Daedalus himself survived the journey across the sea. But his reckless son Icarus flew too high, until the heat of the sun melted the wax in his wings and sent him plummeting to his death.