Learning to Fly-Cast: Icarus and Myth in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It (1976) tells of the author’s younger brother Paul, a fisherman and reporter, who at age thirty-two—”at the height of his power” (34)—dies violently, his body dumped in an alley in Chicago.¹ The story makes no direct reference to the classical figure Icarus. There is no fall from the sky, no wings, and no paternal inventor. Yet I wish to show that the myth of Icarus—along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses more generally—haunts and helps to explain Maclean’s fictional portrait of his beautiful, hard-drinking brother, who makes a living with words and is a magician with a fishing rod. Commentators have previously looked for connections between Maclean’s writing and the works of other American authors who depict a masculine immersion in a fallen nature. Most notably, Walter Hesford has compared Maclean’s idea of a transcendence through angling to Henry David Thoreau’s claims of personal liberation through fishing in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, while Harold Simonson and Wendell Berry have separately traced Maclean’s “theologically courageous” doctrine of salvation to the portrayal of natural redemption in the Nick Adams stories of Ernest Hemingway (Simonson 151).²

But the classical story about the miraculous flight and tragic death of Icarus provides a valuable, additional lens through which to view Maclean’s narrative. The myth encapsulates the dilemma faced by the character of Paul and points to the various layers of irony that the author folds into his story, in particular the ways that the tradition of the American West both represents the source of Paul’s strength and contributes to his untimely death. Maclean’s novella has been lauded for upholding the frontier mythos (see, for example, Stegner 156–59), but I argue that the narrative also allusively finds fault with pervasive western tropes.

According to the myth of Icarus as told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, the inventor Daedalus was commissioned by King Minos to build the labyrinth that would contain and conceal Minos’s illegitimate son, the Minotaur.³ The king continued to keep Daedalus prisoner on the island of Crete so that he would not reveal the labyrinth’s secret. Ultimately, though, the inventor attempted a bold escape by designing and creating two sets of huge wings—one pair for himself and one for his young son, Icarus.

The plot of Ovid’s brief story turns as Daedalus—hovering in the air on his own newly-made wings—tries to prepare his son for their flight:

instruit et natum “medio” que “ut limite curras,Icare,” ait “moneo, ne, si demissior ibis,unda gravet pennas, si celsior, ignis adurat:inter utrumque vola. nec te spectare Bootenaut Helicen iubeo strictumque Orionis ensem:me duce carpe viam!”

(Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.203–08)

“Take care,” he said,“To fly a middle course, lest if you sinkToo low the waves might weight your feathers; ifToo high, the heat may burn them. Fly half-wayBetween the two. I bid you not to steer by the stars,The Great Bear or the Wagoner or Orion,With his drawn sword. Set your courseWhere I shall lead.”

(Based on Melville 177)

As Daedalus fixes the wings on his young son’s shoulders he is overcome with emotion. The father clearly loves Icarus as he cries and kisses him for a last time.

Ovid then shifts perspective to three men on the ground who witness the father and son’s wondrous flight: a shepherd, a ploughman, and a fisherman, each working with a man-made tool—a crook, a plough, and a rod. They marvel at what looks like gods flying through the clouds. The contrast between the workers’ common tools and Daedalus’s aerial invention measures the space between the everyday and the miraculous, even as it teases Ovid’s readers that one day such an innovation might be realized. Icarus, however, famously fails to heed his father’s advice. As the boy begins to...