Episode 3: Proteus

The “Proteus” episode depicts the erudite musings of Stephen Dedalus as he walks along Sandymount Strand just before 11:00 am.  Dense and difficult to follow, “Proteus” is where most first time readers of Ulysses throw in the towel.  Don’t.  Despite the fact that even the most serious Joycean could spend an entire career reading deeply in this episode, you needn’t get bogged down if you don’t want to.  In this guide, I’ll give you what you need to continue your momentum toward meeting Mr. Bloom in the next episode.  Of course, if you enjoy Aristotelian philosophy and like following the ricochets of Stephen’s mind, pull out the Gifford and have at it!  If not, I’ll aspire to concision in presenting the episode’s main ideas and highlights.

In The Odyssey, Menelaus describes to Telemachus his ambush of the shape-shifting sea god Proteus.  Difficult to pin down, Proteus changes into a lion, a snake, a leopard, a boar, water, and a tree.  Menelaus holds on, and the elusive old god finally returns to his normal form and tells truths about the journey home.  From Proteus (via Menelaus), Telemachus learns that his father is alive but trapped on Calypso’s island.  Just as Proteus repeatedly shifts his shape, this episode’s technique of “monologue (male)” demonstrates the changeability of our minds.  As J. Mitchell Morse explains, this episode depicts how “the metamorphosis of literary styles […] both reflects and produces the endless metamorphosis of our ways of thinking” (Morse 48).  In “Proteus,” Stephen constantly changes his focus and his attitude, shifting between intellectual playfulness and bitter despair, modulating between contemplation, imagination, and memory.  As he varies his mentality, his inner monologue adopts different styles, syntactical rhythms, and prosody. 

After leaving Mr. Deasy’s school, Stephen took the train north from Dalkey and has made his way to the shore of Dublin Bay, needing some quiet time after a relatively tense morning. 

(There is some scholarly debate over Stephen’s movements between the end of “Nestor” and the beginning of “Proteus.” Ian Gunn and Clive Hart posit that he takes the train to Westland Row station in town and then walks 1.5 miles (30 minutes) southeast to Sandymount, which puts the start of “Proteus” around 11:10 am. Danis Rose suggests that Stephen got off at Lansdowne station and that the events of this episode begin around 10:40 am.  I agree with Rose, as indicated in my chronology for Stephen’s Day. While you may or may not find these sorts of topographical rabbit holes interesting, you can at least appreciate that they exist.)

As Stephen contemplates the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (3.1), it is worth noting that his eyesight is severely impaired, limiting what he can literally see.  Stephen is also unable to see his own future – both in the near-term (where will he sleep tonight having left the tower?  will he continue to work for Mr. Deasy?) as well as in the long-term (how long can he remain alone and disesteemed in Dublin?).  Stephen’s walk in “Proteus” is an inverted echo of his euphoric walk on the strand in A Portrait, when he “burned to set out for the ends of the earth” and proclaimed that he “would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul” (AP 157).  That adventure seems to have ended in a blind alley. 

Stephen opens his monologue with philosophical musings on Aristotle’s notion that ideas originate from sensory experience of the external world, deriving “thought through [his] eyes” (3.1-2).  He examines the relationship between sight, object, and color, then closes his eyes to walk blindly as he ponders sound, time, and space.  On the opening page alone, Stephen’s mind adopts the shape of “Aristotle, Boehme, Hamlet, Blake, perhaps Lessing, perhaps Gutzkow, and an upside-down Berkeley” (Morse 37).  When he reopens his eyes, he betrays a shade of solipsism as he confirms that the world was “there all the time without” him (3.27) and observes midwives coming down the stairs from Leahy’s terrace to the strand.  Stephen contemplates his own birth and imagines that one of the women has in her bag a dead fetus with its umbilical cord, prompting him to reconsider the omphalos idea from “Telemachus.”  He whimsically imagines the cords linking everyone back to Adam and Eve, as if to a telephone operator.  Stephen then contemplates his own parentage and creation, leading him to consider the Christian theological notion of father-son consubstantiality as well as the heretic Arius previously linked in Stephen’s thoughts with Buck Mulligan. 

The style of the episode is heavily weighted toward Stephen’s interior monologue by a ratio of nearly 8 to 1 (Bulson 85), but moments of 3rd person narration interrupt his thoughts and ground Stephen in the setting on the strand.  For example, the narration that “airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs” (3.55) briefly removes the focus from Stephen’s thoughts and onto the external world even as the narrator borrows Stephen’s idiom in quoting Hamlet.  Stephen reminds himself to deliver Mr. Deasy’s foot and mouth disease “letter for the press” (3.58) and to meet Buck at The Ship at 12:30.  With biting self-deprecation, he advises himself not to drink away his “money like a good young imbecile” (3.59).  Stephen then slows his walk to consider whether he might visit his Aunt Sara and Uncle Richie Goulding at their nearby home (and perhaps to ask if he can sleep there tonight).  Stephen imagines his father Simon’s mockery of Uncle Richie’s stammer (“And and and tell us Stephen, how is Uncle Si?” (3.64-65)). Yes, this is a parody of a parody.  We remain in Stephen’s imagination as he mentally sees himself arriving at the Goulding home (some first-time readers might mistake this vignette for something that actually happens; it doesn’t.  Stephen physically remains on the strand for the entirety of this episode).  The imagined visit with his relatives begins with a delay in their opening the door (for fear that he is a bill collector).  Uncle Richie offers Stephen a whiskey and insists that he sit down (despite the absence of an extra chair) and have a meal (despite the absence of any food in the house).  Stephen then imagines his Uncle whistling a tune from an opera about a fallen family. 

The revery ends, and Stephen’s attention returns to the present, which he prefers to the imagined future, thinking “this air is sweeter” (3.104).  He laments the many “houses of decay” (3.105) in his life and chastises himself for the aggrandizing lies he told his Clongowes schoolmates about his family, thinking “come out of them, Stephen.  Beauty is not there” (3.106-07).  We are left to discern whether by “them” he means lies, his family, or the Clongowes elite.  He also finds no beauty in the Dublin library where he read the prophetic writings of Joachim Abbas.  The word “rabble” in this dense paragraph recalls Joyce’s 1901 essay “The Day of the Rabblement,” wherein he rails against the Irish Literary Theatre for its parochialism; the essay opens with the notion that “the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.”  After thinking of Jonathan Swift’s misanthropic madness, Stephen rejects his own crowd of intellectual sparring partners, “Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell” (3.112).  He blasphemes and thinks about Occam and the eucharist.  Stephen then applies the same bitterness to himself as he mocks his season of piety, his sins of simony, his misogyny, his youthful literary pretentions, and his delusions of grandeur.  While he may be feeling the sting of his failure to achieve his lofty goals, we have to feel that Stephen is relentlessly hard on himself in this passage of thought.  The young man is lost and in despair.

Stephen’s attention returns to his present experience as he walks from the sand to the tideline’s “crackling mast, razorshells” (3.147-48), navigating between “a pocket of seaweed” (3.151) and a beer bottle half-buried in the sand.  Stephen then stops, realizing he has, in his state of thoughtful distraction, already “passed the way to aunt Sara’s” (3.158).  He shifts his focus to memories of Paris, where he met two Irish expatriates, Patrice and Kevin Egan.  Stephen mocks his failed medical studies and his social projection of cosmopolitanism by wearing a Latin quarter hat and casually name-dropping Left Bank street names.  He reveals a measure of paranoia in carrying a punched ticket as an alibi if he was arrested on suspicion of murder.  Stephen recalls a scene from his time in Paris indicative of the depths of poverty and hunger he suffered there: at the door of a closed post office, he pleading with an officer to reopen and cash a money order his mother had sent him so that he could buy a meal.  When the post officer refuses, Stephen imagines “shoot[ing] him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun” (3.187-88) and then apologizing and helping put the post officer back together.  He again castigates himself for his failure to achieve his goals and shamefully remembers pretending not to speak English in order to avoid tipping the porter upon his arrival back in Dublin.  Stephen then mentally paints a morning scene of “Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets” (3.209).  If you’ve been there and experienced one of those bright Paris mornings, you know that his description nails it.  

Stephen thinks again of the Egans, Irish revolutionaries in exile, and recalls snippets of his conversations with them.  Spurred by the thought of exile, he turns to face south where the tower stands across the bay.  He imagines the interior scene of the tower and that Haines (the “panthersahib” gentleman) and Buck (his “pointer” dog) would not answer his call from outside the tower.  Knowing that Buck now “has the key,” Stephen confirms that he “will not sleep there when this night comes” (3.276).  They can “take all, keep all”; Stephen claims to be undaunted by loneliness and isolation so long as his “soul walks with [him]” (3.279).  He climbs and sits upon a rock and notices a dead dog carcass nearby.  Then, a live dog named Tatters runs along the strand, spurring a moment of cynophobic panic.  Stephen decides to sit still and respect the dog’s right to liberty.  He thinks of Viking invaders on these shores, then compares Buck Mulligan’s courage to his own cowardice, thinking “he saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping” (3.317-18).  He probes himself as to whether he would “do what he did” (3.320) and try to save someone from drowning, and the best he can muster is “I would want to.  I would try” (3.323).  Despite this unfavorable comparison, Stephen affirms that “I want his life to be his, mine to be mine” (3.327-28).  But then he is again haunted by the idea of drowning and the related memory of his mother’s death.  The text departs from Stephen’s inner monologue as it spends a few paragraphs narrating Tatters’s adventure on the beach, including encountering the dead dog’s carcass and digging in the sand, which echoes the fox burying his grandmother in Stephen’s riddle.

Stephen suddenly remembers pieces of a shadowy dream from the previous night, and his inner monologue attempts to reassemble it:

After he woke me last night same dream or was it?  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.  That was the rule, said.  In.  Come.  Red carpet spread.  You will see who. (3.365-69)

Beyond capturing the elusiveness of our subconscious experiences, the content of Stephen’s dream foretells events and associations that will be revealed later in Ulysses.  Stephen will visit a “street of harlots” in the brothel district around midnight tonight.  Mr. Bloom will be briefly identified with Haroun al Raschid, a wise Persian king who walked in disguise among everyday people.  In the early morning hours, Bloom will lead Stephen to his home and spread out the “red carpet” of hospitality.  In my reading of the passage’s last sentence, the arranger directly addresses the reader to promise that “you will see” how this prophetic dream unfolds in the text.  Stephen’s thought, “I am almosting it,” uses an anthimeria to represent what Joyce described as the protean quality of the entire episode: adjectives shape-shift into verbs. Like Proteus revealing that Telemachus’s search for his father is not in vain, Stephen’s prophetic dream suggests the possibility of experiencing the grace of fatherly care.

The gypsy cocklepickers who brought Tatters to the strand are described in detail, and Stephen takes a multilayered interest in the woman.  They pass him by with “a side eye at [Stephen’s] Hamlet hat” (3.390).  Stephen then begins to compose lines of poetry in his head and searches his pockets for some scrap paper.  Realizing he has twice forgotten to take slips from the library, Stephen tears a blank corner off of Deasy’s letter on foot and mouth disease and begins to compose a few lines of verse (about a vampire kissing a woman?  the angel of death visiting his mother?  a romantic encounter?  not entirely clear here).  Then the text offers a rather poignant paragraph: “Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me” (3.434-36).  This passage might be Stephen expressing his vulnerability, loneliness, and deep desire for companionship and love (the “word known to all men”), or these lines may be part of the poem he is drafting.  Stephen has completed his writing for the day as the narrator reports that “he lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket” (3.437-38).  The text quickly returns to Stephen’s self-aware inner monologue, thinking “that is Kevin Egan’s movement I made” (3.439) when he tilted down his hat.  

The sun of the “faunal noon” (3.442-43) shines on Stephen before he recalls a snippet of “Fergus’s Song” from earlier this morning and looks at his boots (Buck Mulligan’s hand-me-downs (or foot-me-downs, as the case may be)).  In an efficient synecdoche, Stephen reflects that they once held a “foot I dislove” (3.448-49).  He muses briefly on the homoeroticism of his relationships with both Mulligan and Cranly.  His mind pings from The Tempest to Proteus to Lucifer to Ophelia before observing that he is ready for a drink.  Stephen contributes his own waters to the rising tide and imagines the scene of the drowned man being pulled from the sea.  He notes that next Tuesday will be the summer solstice, and he thinks of Queen Victoria in derogatory terms.  He observes that his “teeth are very bad” (3.494) and momentarily considers using the salary he collected this morning toward a visit to a dentist.  As he tongues his rotting teeth, we might note the episode’s motif of decay, involving his family, the dog carcass, the imagined corpse of the drowned man, and his ambitions.

Needing to pick his nose, Stephen searches for his handkerchief and realizes he must have left it back at the tower.  Stanley Sultan notes that “in medieval science, the nose was considered the passage to, and an expurgative of, the brain.  In a sense Stephen has been ‘picking at’ his mind during the chapter – his nose-picking is a counterpart to his brooding meditation” (Sultan 60).  He leaves the booger on a rock, then has a moment of self-consciousness and peeks over his shoulder to see if anyone saw.  Richard Ellmann suggests that this backward glance exposes the absurdity of Stephen’s toying with subjectivism earlier in the episode and “implies that art is not self-isolation, that it depends upon recognition of other existences” (Ellmann 26).  Nobody is behind him, anyhow, although Stephen does see a tall ship with “crosstrees” (3.504), imagery portending crucifixion.  The ship is the Rosevean and – like almost everything else we’ve encountered in Ulysses’s opening triad of episodes – it will appear later in the novel. 

Like Stephen, this ship is due in Dublin.