Abstract

The story of Ariadne has, as is the way with myths, its slightly asymmetrical echoes along both the narrative lines which converge in her marriage to Dionysus. Daedalus it was who told Ariadne how to save Theseus with the thread. Imprisoned by Minos in his own labyrinth, he escapes by flight, survives the fall of Icarus, and reaches Sicily safely. Daedalus is then discovered by Minos when he solves the puzzle posed publicly by Minos, with the offer of a reward to the solver: How to run a thread through all the chambers and intricate windings of a complex seashell? Daedalus pierces the center of the shell, ties a thread to an ant, puts the ant in the pierced hole, and wins the prize when the ant emerges at the mouth of the shell. Thread and labyrinth, thread intricately crinkled to and fro as the retracing of the labyrinth which defeats the labyrinth but makes another intricate web at the same time—pattern is here superimposed on pattern, like the two homologous stories themselves. J. Hillis Miller is Gray Professor of Rhetoric and chairman of the department of English at Yale. He is the author of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, The Disappearance of God, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Fiction and Repetition, and a study of narrative terminology, called Ariadne's Thread, of which his essay in this issue of Critical Inquiry is a part. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Critic as Host" and "Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch"