The Proteus chapter has been the most experimental chapter we have read so far. By experimental I mean that it was incredibly elusive and hard to follow. As the title of the chapter calls itself Proteus, the shape-shifting ruler of the sea (second to Poseidon), I could have anticipated a radical departure from continuity and a radical interpretation of the changing of form.
Rather than the change of body, “Proteus” as a shape shifter, is better personified by Steven’s change of mind. As he first steps on the beach his mind dwells on what he sees, and looks at everything with equal scrutiny. “Signatures of things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snot green, bluesilver, rust; colored signs.” But then he decides to close his eyes and everything goes haywire. Stevens mind begins to go one hundred miles an hour, changing from this to that. Sometimes not even reaching a full sentence. Just a word, and then something else. He dives into his past, then back to the present, then into the further past, and then the future. All the while, the passages are written with the same amount of importance. At times, for example when he thinks about going to his aunt and uncles house, I couldn’t figure out if he was just thinking about it or actually going there. In conjunction with Homer, it is the reader who is Menelaus and Steven’s thought process personifies Proteus. It is a beautiful comparison; Proteus and the mind.
One part that I found very confusing is when Steven find the dogsbody. I am still not sure whether it is Steven who transforms into a dogsbody, or whether he just sees it. Remember, the dog goes over the smell the dogsbody.
“Ah, good old dogsbody. Here lies dogsbody’s body.
-Tatters! Get out of that, you mongrel.
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me…”
I cant tell whether it is Steven or the dogsbody that the master calls his dog away from. Does the dogsbody refer to the way Steven sees himself? Or the way he assumes other people to see him?

I love Steven’s train of thought. Joyce has an incredible ability to express the candid unaffected sincerity of internal thought. Unlike Shakespeare (the king of the soliloquy), Joyce’s character Steven thinks to himself, for himself. In Hamlet, Hamlet obviously thinks to himself --for example the famous “To be or not to be, whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer…” -- but Hamlets internal dialogue reads too much like a speech, as though Hamlet speaks to an audience and not himself. Shakespeare’s soliloquies are too well written, while Joyce allows Steven’s thought process to unwind distortedly and ungrammatically.
Steven’s thoughts balance perfectly between intellectual reasoning and unexplained instinctual self-consciousness. For example when Steven teaches his class and makes a comment, which he thinks Mr. Haines would have wanted for the collection of sayings.
“‘Kingstown pier, Steven said. Yes a disappointed bridge.’… For Haines chap book. No one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise.”
Joyce writes Steven’s thoughts as contradictory. Steven is human. He wants to prove himself to Haines, but at the same time he becomes aware of the subservience that accompanies this want. The quote is clever but not too clever. Phrases like “No one to here.” – are not a sentence but a thought and it rings out with the aura of feeling and instinct, not contrived practicality.

On another note, on the plot of the story, I found one important passage of the chapter to be about the ‘possibility of possibilities.’ Steven, while teaching, questions history.
“Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave weaver of the wind.”
The importance of this passage lies beneath the subtext of Homer’s Ulysses. Here, Steven not only questions history, but he questions, as Telemachus and Hamlet did, whether the ‘books are accurate’. He wonders whether Odysseus is coming home. Yes, Odysseus is thought to be dead, but there is a possibility that he is not. Yes, King Hamlet is dead, but what if he was killed. This passage shows Steven having a ‘new hope’, and further emphasizing his persona in connection with Telemachus and Hamlet.

Telemachus cont.
I forgot to mention. I find it keen how Joyce placed these two characters around Steven; Mulligan and Haines. Steven, I cannot help but assume is Joyce’s alter ego. Steven and Joyce concern themselves with Ireland, and the voice of Ireland, like Yeats. Why else would Steven play such a master of rhetoric, and have such an incredible sense of the Irish identity (needless to say the remark about the cracked looking glass). But back to Mulligan and Haines, I would like to imagine Mulligan and Haines as personifying to polarized citizens of Ireland. Mulligan being the cliché Irish “good ol’ boy”, social, funny, and whitty. Remarks like “O damn you and your Paris fads” and “…Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty” reassure the quintessential Irishness. On the other hand, Haines represents the other end, the invader, the religious, and the materialistic. He is a British man and wants to make a book of Stevens’s sayings, but also he wants to take away from Steven what he has. When Steven asks him about money, it is all too convenient that the conversation ends. Steven becomes aware later on, as Haines brings back up the collection of Stevens’s work, that Haines has an expensive and flashy cigarette case and lighter. “A smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone… from his waist coat a nickel tinder box.” In this chapter, these two characters give us a vision of what both Steven and Ireland are up against.

Telemachus:
We are introduced to Steven Dedalus, Buck (Malachi) Mulligan and Mr. Haines in the first chapter of the book, living together in a tower. As the title of the chapter has been given to “Telemachus” I couldn’t help but assigning such a persona to Steven. Joyce continually makes a connection between Steven and prince Hamlet. Most notably when Steven recalls seeing her ghost. She says to him in Latin “pray for me” (though this is my basic interpretation). In Hamlet the father says, “remember me”, a very similar expression. In addition, Steven remains in a subtle state of morning. He refuses to wear grey, though it doesn’t explicitly say that he only wears black. And he confronts Mulligan for being disrespectful to his dead mother. Also, It seems that Steven has just come back from Paris, where he must have been studying, as Hamlet was (studying abroad but not in Paris) when his father was killed.
Hamlet and Telemachus have very much in common. Besides the fact that they are both missing their fathers, they are both apart of a royal family being threatened by foreign (or not so foreign) infiltration. I wonder then, if Buck Mulligan and Mr. Haines could be interpreted as the suitors of Penelope? What we do know is that both Mulligan and Haines leach off of Steven. They are staying in the tower, where Steven pays rent and don’t hesitate to ask for favors, whether it be the key to the place or just some money for drink. Steven has problems with both Mulligan and Haines, but he doesn’t kick them out of the tower. In Mulligan’s case, Steven thinks he is rude and a bully. In Haines case, Steven is just annoyed by his obscure sleeping habits. In both cases the reasons are benign but present.

-Totemic, animism and the primitive- nature and man are as one.
The primitive artist was the original modernist, upholding his tool or his medium (i.e. animals and pants) as his spiritual guide. Yeats adopts this spirituality, and uses similar symbolism, such as the moon, the sun, the tree, or the bird, but also his own tools such as in his book “The Tower” where he writes about his table in “My Table”, describing his working area and his own ‘tools’. I make the connection between the primitive animism and Yeats’ rhetoric or symbolism neither to emphasize Yeats as modernist poet nor to illustrate primitive art as being modernist, the significance of the connection between Yeats and the primitive craftsman is the unification of man to nature. Like the primitive, Yeats doesn’t see the human race to be superior to nature. Man is a part of nature and his existence moves equally and as one with his surroundings. Yeats enunciates how man and nature are affected by the same cause and effect relationships. For example in the poem ‘Death’, Yeats understands that in the end, in death, flesh is flesh.
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone--
Man has created death.
This poem is called “Death”, but really it best describes human vanity. The line ‘Man has created death’ searches for the significance of ‘death’. Why does the individual struggle to comprehend the meaning of his own mortality while the death of an animal weighs nothing on his mind? Death, the word and the associations with the after life, hell, and the grim reaper, are human inventions, a product of our self-obsession and attempt to make our lives seems more meaningful than they really are.

Yeats’ work is bound to nature. In this working relationship, Yeats’ understands the mechanics of the world through nature, in a cause and effect relationship. As I stated before in an earlier entry, (Observational Science) according to Descartes, the world is like a clock and as one gear turns so does the next. As he describes in the poem “Happy Townland” the world’s great annoyance and distress is due to the anomaly of the rotation of night and day. In other words, the ‘world’s bane’ is the universal ‘machine’.
The little fox he murmered,
Oh what of the world’s bane?
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
The fox, is a totemic symbol, akin to the coyote, who represents cleverness, and slyness. The clever fox asks, ‘what about the trouble of the world’ and in response the sun says ‘I do what is natural for me to do… I rise when the night is over.’ in this part of the poem, Yeats describes a world that works under the principals of determinism. And determinism is the basis of all scientific inquiry.
- Cause and effect- modernism (causality) “When he thinks, he dreams, but when he acts, he thinks.”
(The Concept of Causality in the Physical and Social Sciences
Alexander Goldenweiser
American Sociological Review > Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1938), pp. 624-636)

-Creationism vs. determinism, a deterministic individual would be more inclined to appreciate the craft of something, and want to see it and show it. Where a creationist would be much more fascinated with the product of something, such as realism and perfection.

Ellmann really nails something here in the essay on Yeats’ “esotericness”. That is -- Yeats’ is the center of his own world. In other words Yeats creates an entire universe (much like Freud’s interpretation of dreams) where he and his wife reign as king and queen. In this world there is a faith, a totemic faith, and Yeats is the prophet. The Tower, where he and his wife lived, further emphasizes how Yeats was the king of his own castle. His world is almost impenetrable, and the only real window into it is his poetry. It is funny, like all religions Yeats couldn’t avoid imposing it on everyone around him, classifying his peers by the different cycles of the moon. The reason for the poet’s creation of this insulated universe is because of his inescapable contemplation of mortality. In Yeats’ desperation to freeze time and avoid death and aging, he designs a ridiculous spiritual connection between himself and the “order of the world”. Not to say that his fantasy is unfounded or uninsightful, it’s just comedic.
It would be too much to bear, Yeats’ self-imposed faith or doctrine, if the poet didn’t lighten this load by confessing self-consciousness.
What shall I do with this absurdity,
O heart, O troubled heart, - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dogs tail?
In this stanza of The Tower, Yeats openly jests on his own monomania. And if it were not for this, this humanization, where he comes down to earth and walks among us laymen, Yeats esotericism would be unbearable. I like that at times he makes fun of himself and humbles himself.
On another note, I want to vent more on the idea of Yeats and his connection to a process of science. It is obvious that Yeats doesn’t follow an ordinary scientific process, albeit he, like all scientists, has an “object” and an “aim”. In other words he exercises his spirituality in a scientific way. For example, he attempts to understand his “object”--that is his own mortality, or himself-- by the means of an “aim”—that is his poetry and his freestyle writing. And by the observation of nature and all the things of life, he reflects what he sees upon his doctrine and attempts to solve ‘nature’. Yeats sees the world as an equation, and the variables are reified by symbols such as the moon and the tide and rocks and trees. His writing is, in conjunction with the equation of life, a type of experimentation.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Its clear here how Yeats is a self-proclaimed prophet. If it is Yeats who is speaking and I a will assume it is whether Yeats knows it or not. And if my calculations are correct, he is talking about how when he dies, his lifes work, such as that of a goldsmith, with bring people a beauty but also a meaning. And when he says ‘to sing… of what is past, passing, or to come’ he proclaims that he will solve the equation of time and answer mortality.