Protean Phenomenology and Genealogy

I shall begin with a question: what, exactly, is Stephen doing on Sandymount strand? The short answer would be that he is interpreting the world around him, contemplating the various phenomena disclosed to him by his senses. More accurately, however, at least at the start of the episode, he is interpreting or attempting to interpret how his faculties of interpretation operate. The episode begins with Stephen contemplating the quality of the phenomenon of visual perception, the 'Ineluctable modality of the visible' (U 3.01), as it were. But Stephen is not contemplating the qualia of visibility as such, rather his thoughts and perceptions and thoughts about his perceptions are mediated by or inflected through contemplations of Aristotle and others. The '[s]ignatures of all things I am here to read' (U 3.02) are countersigned by others, such as, in this case, Jacob Boehme, the German mystic and cobbler who wrote the treatise Signatura Rerum. The matrix of Stephen's mind is conditioned by others, by all the others that come before, that pre-date and pre-sign his being. At least on some level, what Stephen is doing on Sandymount strand is he is acting as a ventriloquist - a word to which I shall return at the conclusion of this essay.

But, again, what is Stephen doing on Sandymount strand? This question could be rephrased in Latin: unde et quo, whither and whence? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this question is not entirely straightforward since Stephen's presence on the strand, after having taught at Dalkey, is not without some logistical complications. Sandymount is too far away from Dalkey for Stephen to have walked in the time available. Furthermore, in 'Hades', Bloom sees Stephen at or near Watery Lane (U 6.39). This raises the problem of the temporal conjunction between 'Proteus' and 'Hades', something which Joyce revised between the two schemata. On the Linati schema the two episodes were designed as consecutive, with 'Proteus' set between ten and eleven and 'Hades' between eleven and twelve; while on the later Gilbert schema they are concurrent, both taking place between eleven and tweleve. Following from the Linati schema, Danis Rose proposed that Stephen must have taken the 10 am train from Bray at Dalkey station in Ardeevin Road and then alighted at the Lansdowne Road station at 10.32, whence he would have walked to Leahy's Terrace.¹

There are several problems with this proposed itinerary. As Rose notes, the ten am train from Bray did not stop at Lansdowne Road and it is likely that Joyce would have been familiar with the timetable since he lived in Shelbourne Road from March-August 1904 (JJII, pp.155-71; Letters II, pp.41-50). More problematically, Rose's chronology only grants about twenty minutes for the action of 'Proteus'. Furthermore, his sequence obviates the conjunction between 'Proteus' and 'Hades', as is stated on the Gilbert schema. Clive Hart thus proposed an alternate possible trajectory for Stephen here: he would take the train from Dalkey at eleven minutes past ten with the intention of going into the city. However, once at Westland Row he decides to backtrack and visit his Aunt Sara. This would mean that the intersection of the paths of Stephen and Bloom happens just before not after the action of 'Proteus'. And so, in such a way, the ineluctability of Dublin train timetables informs the reading of 'Proteus'.

Hart notes that this trajectory occasions a number of correspondences between 'Proteus' and 'Hades'. For example, Stephen would see the 'bloated carcass of a dog' (U 3.286) at about the same time as Bloom sees the dogs' home by the Grand Canal and thinks of 'Poor old Athos' (U 6.125), his father's dog. And, more tellingly for my purposes, when Stephen thinks of his father as 'the man with my voice and my eyes' (U 3.45-6), Bloom would be thinking of his dead son: 'If little Rudy had lived. [...] My son. Me in his eyes' (U 6.75-6).² 'Proteus' and 'Hades' would thus coincide around the ineluctable modality of a visibility of paternity: Bloom...