![]() The story itself is well known: Daedalus (which translates as ‘cunning artificer’), the greatest artist and architect of the ancient world, murderer of his nephew, fell out of favour with the king of Crete, Minos, who had given him refuge when he fled Athens. This story, the story of Icarus and his father Daedalus, is one of the enduring tales in western culture, and it conveys something significant about the relationship between self and other that is at the core of social being: something we can understand as intimacy. The seemingly permanent resonance of the issues addressed in mythology-sexual and social politics, family relationships, poverty and wealth-means that though the origins of the stories may be untraceable, contemporary readers of ancient narratives can still find points of reference, and can engage closely, even intimately, with the themes and characters of those myths however distant the characters or events may be, however wide the temporal space between then and now, or the ontological space between reality and story. ![]() It crafts a space characterised by ‘us’ and thus is invested in intimate relationships. Mythology, by contrast, is not neutral and not about the autonomous self, but about a collective voice. Michel Foucault argues that literary writings are invested with distance, with neutrality-‘language getting as far away from itself as possible’ (1998: 149) and, in the process, crafting a ‘neutral space’ in which the narratorial ‘I’ can speak. The story of Icarus seems a reasonable point from which to examine such ideas, because there is an intimate quality to myth. Taking a different view of the story, we choose to read it as an allegory of intimacy, and its pleasures and perils. Both Breughel and Auden seem to suggest that the Icarus story is marked by an absence of intimacy: each artist depicts a boy falling, alone and fundamentally unobserved, to a lonely death. Our paper engages with the same myth, and the same concern to think about the contemporary, and particularly to attempt to develop understandings of what Auden called the ‘human position’, which incorporates suffering, but includes more human connections, ethical relationships, and intimacy. These two works, separated by 400 years, are connected by a similar concern: to use a story out of mythology to illuminate something about contemporary life. Those are the opening lines of one of Auden’s better-known poems, ‘Museé des beaux arts’ (1976: 179 first published 1938), an ekphrastic account of Breughel’s ‘Landscape with fall of Icarus’ (1558). While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along ![]() Keywords: Intimacy – Icarus – myth – story Following these concepts, we will test the extent to which creative expression can invoke the intimacy between world and word, or self and other. ![]() Foucault writes of 'the buried kinships between things' that poetry can rediscover Lacan and Levinas in their different ways write of the ethical problems involved in attempting to reconcile self and other, attempting to suture the space between while retaining the fantasy of a discrete, though intimately known, self. We propose to tease out the tensions between several ephemeral points: between individuals, between ideologies, and between patterns of signification. Like so many such relationships, it ends badly, in a story that never reaches its end: Daedalus is always strapping the flawed wings onto his son, and kissing him for the last time Icarus is always joyfully flying, and then falling.Ī contemporary version of this story-with-no-(good)-end is, we suggest, to be found in various narratives that have emerged since the start of the so-called war on terror. The relationship between this artist father and his impressionable son is predicated on an intimacy that, like other intimacies, exploits the fragile relationship between self and other. One very early example of intimacy and its discontents is the story of Daedalus and Icarus, remarkable not least for the way Icarus has become a trope, appearing in various guises in literary and visual art over the centuries since his early appearances in works by Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Diodorus. Intimacy is both a problem and a pleasure that has been a feature of narrative right across history. ![]()
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