"Reading with the Ariadne's Thread" (Essay)

Jason Cole Magnon

"Reading with the Ariadne’s Thread: Joyce’s 'Proper Art'"

Literature is more than language, or linguistics, or structures and patterns. Literature is art, and art is something I do not believe can be defined or fully comprehended. Art has a mysticism, I believe, which eludes any assertion of absolute definition. Our ideas about art, and literary art in particular, are shaped in part by theory, but primarily through the process of our own experience as a reader engaging with a text. A mythic view of Literature, and how it should be read, is given to us by Greek Mythology, in the story of King Minos. King Minos of Crete was given a bull by Poseidon as a gift to be sacrificed. When Minos chooses to keep the gift for himself, Poseidon punishes the King by causing his Queen Pasiphaë to lust for the animal. Pasiphaë mates with the beast and gives birth to a minotaur. Minos employs Daedalus, a highly-skilled craftsman and artist, to construct a labyrinth in which to imprison his bastard, beastly son. 

        The artist/craftsman Daedalus constructs the labyrinth so effectively that he himself could not escape it. Only the heroic Theseus, aided by the thread of Princess Ariadne, successfully enters and exits the maze, where at the center he slays the beast. Daedalus, and his son Icarus, meanwhile, are imprisoned in a tower by Minos in order to prevent word of his secret from spreading throughout the land. Finally, the craftsman/artist Daedalus sets his mind to unknown arts and flees Crete by devising wings for him and his son Icarus. Daedalus, author of the labyrinth, survives the escape but, as many of us already know, his son does not. In this Greek myth, I find more metaphors for the act of reading (and writing) than I will be able to explicate in this essay. Ironically, I can only use my own readings––of this story and a few others that are central to my argument––to present my very own unfiltered, and unapologetic, manifesto for the act of reading literature. You may find the perspectives presented here to be elitist, perhaps a self-serving exercise in the pristine context of the young white male’s imagination. That is fine, for it is here, in this final essay, that I reveal an antithetical mask. 

I have hidden my antipathy for Postmodernism because I, along with Annette Kolodny, have been “forced to negotiate a minefield” (Kolodny 2052). That simply will not do, not when I believe alternatives have not only been conceived, but successfully achieved (especially in the writings of James Joyce, whose aesthetic theory I will return to shortly). In “Dancing Through The Minefield,” Kolodny explains that “the very energy and diversity of our enterprise have rendered us vulnerable to attack on the grounds that we lack both definition and coherence; while our particular attentiveness to the ways in which literature encodes and disseminates cultural value systems calls down upon us imprecations echoing those heaped upon Marxist critics of an earlier generation” (2052-53). “If we our scholars,” she continues, “dedicated to rediscovering a lost body of writings by some, then our finds are questioned under aesthetic grounds. And if we are critics, determined to practice revisionist readings, it is claimed that our focus is too narrow, and our results are only distortions or, worse still, polemical misreadings” (2053). I respect Kolodny's perspectives she presents in her essay, and I also respect the purpose she shares with the many great feminist writers I have studied, all of whom are finally being given the space they have been denied in the literary canon for so long. I disagree with their claims, however, for we are not discussing the same thing. I am not primarily concerned with social institutions, or political institutions, or colonialisms, or pluralisms, or anything else in particular that is not art. 

       Literature that qualifies as art is, for me and at least one other reader, an “encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience,” where I find and feel in my soul “the uncreated conscience of my race” (Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man). I use the word race in a manner that seems most unpopular in our period. I refer to humankind, not one kind of human. I refer to global suffering, not any one specific symptom. I want to uproot the plant at the root, not debate about its foliage, and for that purpose I must present what I believe to be the most effective methodology for reading and which seems most conducive to facilitating a meaningful engagement with a text from a satisfied reader. In the process, I intend to sidestep Kolodny’s minefield altogether, with wings of my own to carry me away from the “kind of chaos for the future of literary inquiry” (Kolodny 5) which only appears as an obstacle due to Postmodernism’s insistence that plurality negates hierarchy, a statement as fallacious as one that claims the variety of animals in the animal kingdom as exempt from the hierarchy of a food chain.

      Returning to the myth of Minos, I want to illustrate the parallels between the mythic characters––the craftsman/artist Daedalus, the hero Theseus, the Princess Ariadne who provides the thread––and, from another context, the “bricoleur” that is described in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and is further explicated in the Deconstructionist writings of Jacques Derrida. The methodologies of the bricoleur and the characters of the story offer an exceptional model for readership. Together, they provide the theories that we need to better understand, and appreciate, the act (and the art) of reading. Before I go further, I must explain that a bricoleur is a special type of reader, one who uses “the instrument at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary” (Derrida 6). In another deconstructionist essay, “Structuralism and literary criticism (1964),” Gerard Genette helps to elucidate this metaphor:

“The instrumental universe of the bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss, is a ‘closed’ universe. Its repertoire, however extended, ‘remains limited.’ This limitation distinguishes the brico/eur from the engineer, who (in principle) can at any time obtain the tool specially adapted to a particular technical need. The engineer questions the universe, while the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavors, that is, only a subset of the culture” (Genette 1).

      Daedalus is not, as one might think, an example of the bricoleur so much as he is the engineer. The bricoleur is Theseus, aided by the thread of Ariadne. He uses “in a new structure the remains of previous constructions or destructions, thus making the manufacture of materials and tools unnecessary” (Gennette 1), whereas Daedalus––even while imprisoned in a tower––receives new materials for new designs. The death of Icarus may represent the sacrifice of authorship. So Theseus uses the materials at hand to achieve what was supposed to be impossible. He is aided by a thread, which could symbolize the thread that connects the mind of the hero to the wisdom and resources he must consciously leave behind upon entering the labyrinth. All readers are threaded with such a cord, a lineage or a compilation of experiences that affect perception. 

     Theseus slays the minotaur at the center, and enacts through myth the task of the reader. It is the reader’s job to use whatever resources are available and suitable to the reading of a text and, with the heroic quality of selflessness, finds the beast and kills it. What is the beast? What does the minotaur represent? I cannot be sure, but it seems appropriate that the minotaur symbolizes the correct textual interpretation within a selective context. To put it more simply, the minotaur (shrouded and walled in secrecy) is that which the reader gains from his/her reading.

Now, I will conclude with a brief presentation of James Joyce’s aesthetic theory that permeates his works. My preference for Joyce was purely personal, and then I discovered Reed Way Dasenbrook’s essay, “Philosophy After Joyce: Derrida and Davidson.” Dasenbrook, citing Derrida himself, makes a connection between literary study and criticism and the works of James Joyce in particular, both explicit and relevant:

“The impossibility of translation, the necessity of complicating any simple divisions of speech, the way this has already been    complicated by the development of new media of communication, the impossibility of an author controlling signification, even of the simplest words like ‘yes’: these are they themes found in Derrida’s essays on Joyce.  That these are his key themes about reading itself suggests that perhaps Derrida is right to see an engagement with Joyce as central to his work, given an engagement which dates back ‘twenty-five or thirty years’ [‘Two Words for James Joyce,’ p. 148] from 1982” 

(Dasenbrook 4).

Surely, therefore, there is something uniquely significant about Joyce’s work in its relationship to literary theory and criticism. In my reading of Ulysses, I unlearned nearly everything I had thought I previously learned about reading, and I was forced into a new and immersive style of textual engagement. Perhaps, Derrida’s world was shaken as much as mine (or as that of Joseph Campbell’s, or Harold Bloom’s, and so on).

Joyce’s theory of aesthetic is a useful collection of critical perspectives which enable an empowered and integrative (and entertaining) reading of an artistic text. Joyce defines art as either proper or improper. Improper art may be didactic, in that it has a political or sociological agenda, or it may be kinetic, in that it arouses emotions of desire or loathing. It is kinetic because it drives the individual towards either aversion or possession of the object that the art portrays. This is art that Joyce calls pornography, and it is not what the reader should be seeking in his or her reading. Proper art, by contrast, evolves some of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle and claims that art, the good and the beautiful, is essential for producing a unique effect on human awareness. The effect is… stasis: a state in which the reader achieves the ultimate end of reading through an impressive feat, a balancing act of conscious awareness that Joyce articulates in words much clearer and much more lucid than mine. When I read A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, and binged––as if it were some series on netflix––on lectures by Joseph Campbell, I was introduced to what has ever since held its ground as being the most pure theory of aesthetic. Mr. Joyce calls it: aesthetic arrest. In this state, boundaries and identity politics are irrelevant in the transcendent realization that the art renders. In my experience, aesthetic arrest can be described as a state of sublimity, what could be called a transpersonal experience in which the usually inevitable dualities, that imbue our lives with so much suffering and confusion, are transcended in the illumined perspective that art provides. Conflicts are seen as the already resolved parts of the complexity as well as the wholeness of existence.

        I believe in art for its potential profundity, and I have to wonder… in these days, with digital cable and instant streaming and so forth, what would be the advantage of reading if it were not in order to have a unique experience that can offer unique cognitive as well as personal/transpersonal benefits that television, largely in part to its liberal accommodation (and of course: entertaining appeal) to the senses By using the tools at hand to crack Joyce’s code, the concepts that underly a literary master code are more fully understood to be arbitrary. The center of a text belongs wherever the author stakes it, and James Joyce teaches us to be on guard as we read… to be prepared for imprisonment, and to gather the means for flight, if necessary.

Obviously, my argument is debatable. My perspective is just another mine on the field.
My hope, however, is to explode, and to ignite in every one around me the realization that reading is not only for the critic, but the soul that realizes itself as a piece of a whole that is already, despite its surface appearances and conflicts, harmoniously one. I read, you read, everyone should read in order to be arrested by beauty, nothing more (and never less).

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph, and Roy A. Cox. Joseph Campbell on James Joyce: Wings of Art. 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1970): n. pag.

         Print.

Genette, Gérard. "Structuralism and Literary Criticism." Figures of Literary Discourse. Trans. Alan

        Sheridan. New York: Columbia UP, 

        1982. N. pag. Print.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: n.p., 1962. Print.

Kolodny, Annette. "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and

        Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed.

        Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 

         2048-066. Print.