REPORT ON JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

EPISODE 3--PROTEUS (37-51)

When he first encountered the opening chapters of Ulysses, William Butler Yeats proclaimed it to be a "mad book," but upon closer examination finally acknowledged that "it is an entirely new thing--neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time" (qtd. in Ellmann 530-31). This assessment quite adequately sums up the "Proteus" chapter of the book. It revolves around the Irish outsider/poet Stephen Dedalus, who has fallen from grace since the end of A Portral of the Artist as a Young Man. Now a simple school teacher, he takes a walk on the beach at Sandymount strand at approximately 11 AM, and it is there that the chapter takes place (Gifford 144). Its overarching theme is the inherent nature of reality versus illusion.

As in Dubliners, wandering is once again taken up, in both physical and spiritual contexts. The first two paragraphs of "Proteus" employ a stream of consciousness technique that allows the reader to see the inner workings of young Stephen's mind. The beginning paragraph starts off with the "Ineluctable modality of the visible: At least that if no more, thought through my eyes," or in other words, by questioning if what we perceive through our senses is truly reality (37). As he walks by the sea in Buck Mulligan's boots, he encounters two women and pretends they are "midwives," this thinking leading him down a curious corridor of subconsciously connected thoughts (38). After questioning who his real father is, Simon Dedalus or God Himself, he ponders going to his aunt's house to visit. His obvious alienation from his family is apparent, as he makes up an entirely fictitious visit in his mind, and then recalls the lies he told about his family, or as he calls them, "the house of decay," at the Clongowes school he attended as a boy.

As a matter of fact, much of Stephen's ponderings, as his thoughts unravel, orbit around events of his youth that took place during or after Portrait. "You were awfully holy, weren't you?" he asks himself, ironically remembering how when most had thought him pious, in actuality he had been thinking about "naked women" (40). He chastises himself a great deal for his pretentiousness concerning his literary efforts, as well as for his unwillingness to pray at his mother's deathbed, remembering particularly Mulligan's comment that his "aunt thinks you killed your mother" (42).

Though laced with guilt and brooding, "Proteus" is not an exercise in complete hopelessness. Stephen does get out a scrap of paper from Mr. Deasy's school and begins to write again, asking "What is that word known to all men?" (49). The chapter ends with his turning and seeing a ship's sail catching the wind, obviously a tie-in with the book's Homeric themes.

A. Walton Litz asserts that "Joyce did more than any other writer to shape our modern views of The Odyssey. The relationship between Ulysses and The Odyssey is a dynamic one, each work modifying our view of the other" (90). In the "Proteus" episode, the parallels with Homer are fairly general. The first four chapters of The Odyssey center around Telemachus and his quest to find his father Odysseus who should have returned home after the Trojan War. The father quest is taken up by Stephen, who questions not where his father is, but rather who his father is.

In The Odyssey when Telemachus arrives at his court, Menelaus tells of how he set sail once on a journey but was detoured by adverse weather to the Pharos, a rocky island west of the Nile delta. There he was trapped by Poseidon, god of the sea, but was taken pity on by Proteus, who was second in command and who also had the power of prophecy. After performing the proper ritual, Menelaus did succeed and escape, for "Proteus answered his questions," telling him not only how to break the spell but also of the whereabouts of Odysseus who was imprisoned on Calypso's island (Gifford 44).

According to Don Gifford in his annotated notes to Ulysses, "Telemachus's visit to the palace of Menelaus is reflected in Stephen's recall of his mission to Paris and of Kevin Egan's 'palace'" (44). Egan was of course the latest in a long line of potential Irish saviors who had been betrayed by their own people. The Homeric parallels also nicely coincide with Irish mythology. As Stephen waits an hour or so for his scheduled meeting with Mulligan, he paces beside the surf and muses about "the whitemaned seahorses, champing, bright-windbridled, the steed of Mananaan" (38). Again, according to Gifford, "the waves are the white manes of the horses of Mananaan MacLir, the Irish god of the sea, who had Proteus's ability for self-transformation" (48). Archetypal shape-shifting deities seem the perfect metaphor for a chapter-long dissertation on the tenuous appearance of reality.

"Proteus" has been called the most crucial chapter in our understanding of Stephen Dedalus. The seashore setting alone speaks volumes about the intellectual dilemma confronting him as he stands on the shore assimilating the meanings in and beyond the immediate sensible world. Or as the critic S. L. Goldberg puts it, "the chapter explores the Protean transformations of matter in time . . . apprehensible only in the condition of flux . . . as object . . . and Stephen himself, as subject. In the one aspect Stephen is seeking the principles of change and the underlying substance of sensory experience; in the other, he is seeking his self among its temporal manifestations" (25).

It is also in this episode that Joyce embraces what his biographer Richard Ellmann calls "the most famous of the literary devices in Ulysses," namely the "internal monologue" (358). As Stephen's thoughts roll about and deconstruct themselves in quick succession in his mind, every single one is recorded for the reader. It is very much a stream-of-consciousness technique that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Joyce himself helped refine. "After he woke me up last night same dream of was?" Stephen questions himself, "Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. You who will see" (47). This dream dialect is just one example of the internal monologue employed frequently in the novel.

The imagery of "Proteus" is varied and rich. Joyce uses everything from Shakespearean allusions to Biblical symbolism, such as the frequent parallels between Stephen and Hamlet and the two "crucified" shirts the protagonist catches sight of on a clothesline (48). Many details also bring it into close union with Portrait. Sound and the other senses are extremely important, and Aristotle and Aquinas, both of whom helped Stephen form his theory of art, are mentioned. All the political and religious turmoil of that novel also reappears in this episode, despite the fact that it ends with hints of potential.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Goldberg, S.L. "Homer and the Nightmare of History." Modern Critical Views: James

Joyce. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 21-38.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Litz, A. Walton. James Joyce. Boston: Twayne, 1966.