Word: bellerophon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Barth's Perseus is twenty years past the glorious days of the slaying of Medusa--he is impotent, his wife sleeps around. Pegasus can no longer fly and Bellerophon has become a professor of literature. Barth's heroes have unheroic self-doubts, think dirty thoughts, study poli sci and get high on hippomenes. Zeus, in the form of a high school drop-out, rapes unsuspecting women and Bellerophon is dismissed by all as another quack would-be hero. Heroic love is forever lost in the sexual profusion and confusion of these post-Freudian ancient Greeks...
...narrator to comment impatiently on the unsatisfactory progress of the narrative. Heroes from other Barth novels make cameo appearances, and halfway through Bellerophoniad, Barth presents an autobiographical account of his novelistic career. For the confused reader, he obligingly provides Robert Graves's summary of the details of the Bellerophon myth...
...Bellerophoniad," the domesticated archetype is Bellerophon, tamer of the winged horse, killer of the fire-breathing Chimera, conqueror of the Amazons and generally a favorite of the gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly...
Presently, Lipchitz is working on a 40-ft. sculpture to stand above the entrance to Columbia University's law school. To symbolize law and order, he chose the classical theme of Bellerophon grappling with the winged Pegasus to exemplify man taming the wild forces of nature. In their lumpy energy, the forms spew from the pedestal, masses stretching ever wider and spreading out into giant wings. As in the Duluth statue, Lipchitz is pursuing an ancient myth in his uniquely modern manner...
...enfeebled, one elderly U.S. admirer has died, another is on the verge of suicide. Her task is made easy by the trifling competition of U.S. women, who, though pretty, "were devoid of fragrance like immortelles, coarsened into mannishness by some deep disappointment, and hostile to the male." Jacquemar, no Bellerophon, is unable to slay this particular Chimera. He falls hopelessly in love with Gabrielle and is endlessly deceived. Watching as she frolics with a farm boy, Jacquemar thinks: "The bitch is democratic." Age, status or wealth mean nothing to her "so long as she can do harm...