Daedalus yearns to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” A lofty goal, yes? And notice the ego: the “conscience” of the “race” is not yet created. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. The famous final line of Portrait, an entry from Dedalus’ journal, reads: In this chapter, Atwood references Stephen Dedalus repeatedly, the “star” of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (as well as Ulysses, although Atwood focuses on Portrait because it is about the “artist” more explicitly). Atwood is interested in that anxiety, about the powers of the artist, and how the artist uses his power … and what that all might signify. Writers often struggle with this, in little or large ways, even in the present day when we no longer burn witches at the stake. There is sometimes something uncanny there, which may be described as “evil”, as a sort of communing with the supernatural, a Faustian deal with the devil, in order to bring the art out. In this lecture, Atwood discusses the relationship between a writer and his art. NEXT BOOK: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, a collection of a series of lectures, given by Margaret Atwood, about writers/writing. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |