Lauro de Bosis and Antonio Tabucchi: Icarus, the Aedo, and Daedalus, the Aviator (An Essay toward a Philology of the Possible)

Abstract

This article compares two modern recreations of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus: the tragedy Icaro (1928) by the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis and the story “Dream of Daedalus, Architect and Aviator” from Antonio Tabucchi’s Sogni di sogni (1992). From a myth-critical perspective, it examines how both authors reshape the classical myth according to their respective historical and aesthetic contexts. In Bosis’s tragedy, written during Mussolini’s dictatorship, Icarus is portrayed as a romantic aedo who embodies the aspiration to freedom in opposition to tyranny, while Daedalus represents a modern faith in science and technology consistent with the futurist imagination. By contrast, Tabucchi’s story—deeply influenced by Borges and Marcel Schwob—offers a more skeptical and postmodern vision of knowledge: Daedalus, described as an “architect and aviator,” becomes lost within his own labyrinth, and his ingenuity appears through logical puzzles and paradoxical solutions, while the Minotaur acquires a melancholic dimension. The analysis shows how both texts select and reinterpret elements of the ancient myth in order to generate new meanings. Finally, the article proposes a “Philology of the Possible,” concerned not only with the study of existing recreations of the myth but also with the exploration of potential relationships and imagined continuations between them.