‘Proteus’ and Prose: Paternity or Workmanship?

Abstract

Unlike Menelaus in the Odyssey, Stephen Dedalus, in the ‘Proteus’ episode of Ulysses, does not ask why he has been held up for so long on his island. He knows the banal financial answer to that. Rather, he is seeking the answer to another question from a Proteus of his own who takes on the form of the ‘Old Men’ of his island, most of them dead — Columbanus, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Oscar Wilde — one figure after another, ‘nacheinander’, his literary fathers, and of some elders still very much alive, ‘nebeneinander’ (p. 37)¹ — AE, W. B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, even Bram Stoker. Each of these men has made a name for himself, and Stephen is wrestling with them to obtain an answer to his question: what must I do to be memorable like you, my fellow Dubliners? Or, as the catechism question might have been put at Clongowes: what must I do to gain eternal life? — on earth, of course, not in heaven.