Word: dedalus
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...many things they do are fascinating-except, that is, for making art. That may be why so many movies and novels about creative types tend to focus on their personal lives. Even James Joyce ended A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, pursued his art. Dedalus moving from house to house because his father is broke: interesting. Dedalus rewriting a tricky patch of dialogue: not so much...
...subsistence to his family and his writing. His first published book of fiction, Dubliners (1914), contained 15 stories short on conventional plots but long on evocative atmosphere and language. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) provided a remarkably objective and linguistically complex account of Stephen Dedalus, i.e. James Joyce, from his birth to his decision to leave Dublin in pursuit...
...first reading of Ulysses can thus be a baffling experience, although no book more generously rewards patience and fortitude. Stephen Dedalus reappears, still stuck in Dublin, dreaming of escape. Then we meet Leopold Bloom, or rather we meet his thoughts as he prepares breakfast for his wife Molly. (We experience her thoughts as she drifts off to sleep at the end of the book...
...that Aristotle was wrong when he assigned a greater worth to imaginative literature than to recitations of real events: "Poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars." Authors have largely sided with Aristotle. When James Joyce decided to write about his harsh Irish childhood, he reinvented himself as Stephen Dedalus and created the imagined worlds of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses...
...conceive a version of the past that will justify the present and, if possible, shape the future. In older, fixed civilizations, this sort of cultural enterprise would be all but inconceivable. History is what happened and what everyone is stuck with -- "a nightmare," as James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus described it, "from which I am trying to awake." But bad dreams have never been popular, particularly in the U.S., where it has been assumed they can be erased by a different way of seeing the things that caused them...