Proteus
“Ineluctable modality of the visible.”
Stephen walks the beach, lost in dense philosophical thought about perception, memory, and shape-shifting. A famously interior chapter.
- Beat 01Closing the eyes
Stephen tests the limits of sight, walking with his eyes shut to feel the world by sound. The chapter is almost entirely inside his head.
- Beat 02Aunt Sara's house
He imagines, then declines, a visit to his uncle Richie Goulding's house — a quiet picture of family failure.
- Beat 03Paris memories
He remembers his student months in Paris: cheap cafés, telegrams, his mother's death pulling him home, the cheap-looking artist he was trying to be.
- Beat 04Cocklepickers and a dog
A pair of cockle-pickers and their dog cross the strand. The dog sniffs at a drowned corpse Stephen has been told about. He writes a few lines of verse on a scrap of Deasy's letter.
- Beat 05The leaving
He pisses against a rock, picks a scab, glances over his shoulder — and on that small private gesture the chapter ends.
Late morning, alone on Sandymount Strand with an hour to kill. Nothing external happens here. Stephen walks along the tideline and the chapter is simply the inside of his head, recorded almost in real time. He plays with the philosophical idea that we only know the world through our senses, tests it by closing his eyes and listening to his own footsteps, and slides off into memory: his student days in Paris pretending to be a bohemian, his uncle's grim flat, his mother's death, a drowned man whose corpse is expected to wash up nearby, the rhythm of the sea, the way language slips between meanings. He picks his nose, has a wee behind a rock, scribbles four lines of poetry on a scrap torn from Deasy's letter. The chapter is a stress-test for the reader — this is what Joyce's stream-of-consciousness really feels like at full strength — but it's also about a young man trying to think his way out of grief and failure with only his own clever brain for company, and discovering, slightly, that it isn't enough. He's lonely. The book is about to introduce him to someone who, without ever quite saying so, will offer him a way out.
- Scene
- The Strand
- Hour
- 11:00 AM
- Organ
- —
- Art
- Philology
- Color
- Green
- Symbol
- Tide
- Technic
- Monologue (male)
- Correspondence
- Proteus