Proteus

Whereas in the episodes Telemachus and Nestor we only saw intermittent flashes of Stephen's internal monologue—the famous "stream of consciousness"—in Proteus almost the entire episode is seen through the filter of Stephen's mind, the text a chaotic jumble of thoughts, memories and sensory perception. Though short, it is one of the more difficult episodes in the book, dense and abstruse, with many intra- and extra-textual references.

Stephen is wandering aimlessly on a beach, his thoughts circling around the idea of change and transformation in the physical world around him—birth, death, tides and metamorphosis. He thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas, and imagines his shadow being cast backwards through the endless reaches of space. He also thinks back on his own recent history, specifically his time spent in Paris; the ending of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man saw him leaving Ireland to study abroad, and now we learn that he returned early because of his mother's imminent death. He thinks back with bitter distaste on his own pretentiousness at that time, and thinks also of his acquaintance in Paris with an Irish revolutionary named Kevin Egan.

What does the episode mean to the book as a whole, aside from the repetition and expansion of motifs? At the simplest level, it is an addition of more brush strokes to the picture of Stephen as one who is unhappy, aimless, and artistically alienated. Though a genius, he is also a young man who needs direction.

There is also the underlying theme of Stephen's—and therefore Joyce's—own artistic development. Here on the beach Stephen is able to embrace his long-sought freedom, but after stripping away the conventions of society he is left on a shifting, rootless landscape with only the riot of his own swarming thoughts to guide him. Perhaps this is not an entirely bad thing, however, for out of the freedom/chaos comes creation; towards the end of the episode Stephen has a flash of inspiration and is able to jot down a piece of writing.

One question that struck me this time through was why Joyce chose to include the reminisces about the older expatriate, Kevin Egan. It is difficult to read into this passage to figure out how Stephen views this would-be father figure who haunts cafés and plays with fuses, but there is in the characterization a sense of oldness and tragic obsolescence. There is also an echo of the political theme of the betrayal of Ireland in the depiction of this aged freedom fighter left idle and alone.

This episode is not patterned after anything that happens in the main action of the Odyssey, but rather its themes are inspired by one element of a story within the story. When visiting Menelaus as Nestor suggested, Menelaus tells the young man the story of his return from Troy. In part of that story, the king finds himself stranded on an deserted island, where he is visited by the goddess Eidothea. Willing to help, she tells him how to subdue her father Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who on release will give him instructions on how to return home. She tells Menelaus that he must take hold of the god while he is sleeping and not let go, even if he changes from form to form when he tries to escape. On capture Proteus does exactly this, transforming from a lion to a serpent to a panther to a boar to a torrent of water to a tree.

In creating, has Stephen also conquered? Has he conquered the chaos of the physical world, the "ineluctable modality of the visible"?

One could also draw a parallel between the meeting between Telemachus and Menelaus and the meeting between Stephen and Kevin Egan. Again, this may be an ironic parallel, since Stephen seems no less lost and unhappy after meeting the revolutionary than he was before.

The final thing I'll say is that I discovered something neat this time around, which is Joyce's transformation of an ordinary dog into a protean, shape-shifting monster:

The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal.

It's funny that in the end this fantastical creature is sniffing "like a dog."

Incidentally, if you noticed that "one great goal" echoes the passage about history that I quoted in the previous post, multiply that by tens of thousands of words and you'll get an idea of how densely interwoven the text of Ulysses is.