Proteus

"Proteus" is in one way an extended riff on the creative process; it's self aware and forces the reader to think about Joyce and his relation to writing Ulysses. Dedalus' struggle to capture the essence of experience as it happens, or in the "ineluctable" passage of time, is the struggle of authorship. Authorship of one's experience, and by extension, of records of that experience.

The process fascinates Dedalus; he is unable to stop his thoughts, first from controlling or authoring the way he experiences his walk along the beach, and then from spiraling out to simulatenous possible experiences, like visiting his Uncle Richie. Joyce convinces us that he has in fact gone to his uncle's house. This forces the reader to intepret whether experiences are channeled from reality and narrated by the self, or whether all experience is in fact engineered.

The question becomes important again when Dedalus sees the cockle pickers. His fantasies about them are as real as anything else; in fact, they are all we reader's have to judge them. That is, there is no break between an objective and subjective, because the total experience is subjective. The reader has to become a participant and make his own assessments.

As much as he is fascinated by creation, Dedalus is equally intimidated by it, and especially by his powerlessness over it. By the end of the chapter, the few lines of poetry he is trying to write seemed to me like an escape from his thoughts and were experienced as a relief from the maelstrom of consciousness. Writing things down, fixing (as in a fixed reality) deadens Dedalu's experience, and there is no question that the lines he writes are less interesting than what he thinks. But given the tumult, which is more frighening because it is a quotididan tumult (notice that everything he thinks about is in his line of vision, and relates directly to what he is happening...there is no thinking about the future, beyond the next hour or so) a fixed, unshifting point must be experienced as a relief.