"d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once against the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bowshot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian plain of Xanthus, he beat off a band of Carian pirates led by one Cheimarrhus, a fiery and boastful warrior, who sailed in a ship adorned with a lion figurehead and a serpent stern. When Iobates showed no gratitude even then but, on the contrary, sent the palace guards to ambush him on his return, Bellerophon dismounted and prayed that while he advanced on foot, Poseidon would flood the Xanthian Plain behind him. Poseidon heard his prayer, and sent great waves rolling slowly forward as Bellerophon approached Iobates's palace; and, because no man could persuade him to retire, the Xanthian women hoisted their skirts to the waist and came rushing towards him full butt, offering themselves to him one and all, if only he would relent. Bellerophon's modesty was such that he turned tail and ran; and the waves retreated with him.
"e. Convinced now that Proetus must have been mistaken about the attempt on Anteia's virtue, Iobates produced the letter, and demanded an exact account of the affair. On learning the truth, he implored Bellerophon's forgiveness, gave him his daughter Philonoë in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xanthian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, all Xanthians should reckon descent from the mother, not the father. .
"Those familiar with my fiction will recognize in this account several pet motifs of mine: the sibling rivalry, the hero's naïveté, the accomplishment of labors by their transcension (here literal), and the final termination of all tasks by the extermination (here figurative) of the taskmaster; the Protean counselor (Polyeidus means 'many forms'); the romantic triangle; et cetera. But it was the two central images — Pegasus and the Chimera — which appealed to me most profoundly. I envisioned a comic novella based on the myth; a companion-piece to Perseid, perhaps. To compose it I set aside a much larger and more complicated project, a novel called Letters — It seemed anyway to have become a vast morass of plans, notes, false starts, in which I grew more mired with every attempt to extricate myself. Hopefully I turned to the lesser project, labored at it unremittingly for a full year and a half — alas, it, too, metamorphosed into quicksand, not before much good spiritual money had been thrown after the bad. Followed my first real affliction by the celebrated ailment Writer's Block, a malady from which, in the hubris of my twenties and thirties, I had fancied myself immune; I examined it as one might a malignant growth, with sharp interest and dull fright. For a long time I could not understand it — though I did come to understand, to the heart, the lamentations of those mystics to whom Grace had been once vouchsafed and then withdrawn. To the world it is a small matter, rightly, whether any particular artist finds his powers sustained or drained from one year to the next; to the artist himself, however minor his talent, imaginative potency is as critical to the daily life of his spirit as sexual potency — to which, in the male at least, it is an analogue as irresistible as that of Grace, and as dangerous.
"Eventually I did come to understand what was ailing me, so I believe; in any case the ailment passed — for little better or worse from the world's point of view, but much to my own relief — and I found myself composing as busily as ever. What I composed is another story, of no concern to us here; I recount this little personal episode by way of introducing the subject of this afternoon's lecture: an altogether impersonal principle of literary aesthetics, the understanding of the nature of which illuminated for me my difficulty with Bellerophon's story and, so I must presume, set me free of both the mire and the myth.
"The general principle, I believe, has no name in our ordinary critical vocabulary; I think of it as the Principle of Metaphoric Means, by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value: not only the 'form' of the story, the narrative viewpoint, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular genre, the mode and medium, the very process of narration — even the fact of the artifact itself. Let me illustrate:?"
A: "I am."
Q: "Sir?"
A: "I am inclined, with you, to sniff in this a certain particular seer, the full history and scope of whose treachery, however, I am still in no position to appreciate at this point in this rendition of this Bellerophoniad. The writer's language is not Greek; the literary works referred to do not exist — wouldn't I, of all people, know that Perseid if there were one? As for that farrago of misstatements purporting to be the story of my life, the kindest thing to be said about its first three paragraphs is that they're fiction: the brothers are too many and miscast; my name is mishistoried (though 'Bellerus the Killer' is not its only meaning); my acquisition of Pegasus is mislocated as to both time and place; the Bellerophonic missive read simply 'Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world'; et cetera, d and e, perhaps, are slightly less inaccurate, if no less incomplete, and their events are out of order. I call your attention, earnestly, to the suspension-points following the fifth paragraph: that's where we are, have been, have languished since the first good night. There's the sink; there's the quag; there's the slough of my despond. Drive me out."
Q: "No, sir."
A: "That's a question?" The document disappointed me as much as my students' unwillingness to follow the Pattern. We're to the day before my fortieth birthday now, page before Page 1: this particular lecture-scroll I'd pinned great fresh hope upon; sealed with an impression of the Chimera, it was inscribed For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life; I'd first come across it twenty years previously, in circumstances about to be set forth at length; newlywed Philonoë had taken it to be a posthumous wedding gift from newly dead Polyeidus, who'd expired in circumstances about to be et cetera, and interpreted its legend to mean either Open at the Midpoint of My Life or Open Halfway Through Our Married Life. Either way, reckoning from the Polyeidic calendar, it meant age thirty-six — four years too late already! I'd put the thing aside many years ago; forgot it existed; then it turned up accountably in my scroll-case this morning in place of my text for this final lecture in the First-Flood series. Crushing, to find it such a mishmash! "Drive me out, sirs, as you love me; exile me from the city; make me wander far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul, et cetera, till I meet my apotheosis in some counterpart of the Axis Mundi or World Naveclass="underline" in a riven grove, say, where one oak stands in a rock cleft by the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of some hill or other." This is your best, Polyeidus?
"Here's how it was. As I came in on the glide-path over Halicarnassus into Lycia, Pegasus swept into a sudden curve and went whinnying around what I took to be the plume of a small volcano, in ever-diminishing circles like a moth around a candle, till I feared we must disappear up our own fundaments. When we finally touched down and the world quit wheeling, I found us inside the crater itself, not active after all except for smoke issuing from one small cave; there an old beardless chap in a snakeskin coat, that's right, was lighting papers one at a time and tossing them into the hole, where they combusted with enormous disproportion of smoke to flame. At sight of Pegasus the fellow panicked, and no wonder: willy-nilly we charged, and Peg nipped him up by the neck-nape. Better to grasp the bridle, I'd been holding Proetus's letter in my mouth; lost it when I hollered whoa; next instant the man was gone and it was that letter in the horse's mouth; instant after, when I snatched it from there, I found myself holding sidesaddle the same old man, himself holding the letter. 'I'm an unsuccessful novelist,' he muttered hastily: 'life's work, five-volume roman fleuve — goddamn ocean, more like it; agent won't touch it; I'm reading it aloud to the wild animals and burning it up a page at a time. Never attracted a winged horse before; mountain lions, mostly, at this elevation; few odd goats from lower down, et cetera. Dee dee dum dee dee.'