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Part 2 —
Proteus: Identity and Guilt
The question facing Stephen in “Proteus” is identity and its continuity across time. Explicitly, he asks “What is that word known to all men?” (3.335). Stephen immediately tells the reader that his question is motivated by feelings of depression and loneliness: “I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me” (3.335–6). What Stephen wants are the “strandentwining cables” that connect all people together, the humanistic values that allow for empathy and that he needs to write Ulysses. In other words, Stephen is searching for the soul, the ballast of the individual that remains “yet the same” (10.311) within the fluctuating, protean mind and body.
Judith Butler famously maintained that one’s previous identity does not determine one’s present behavior. Rather, we perform an identity that does not exist prior to the performance (Butler 1990, 171–180). Stephen agrees with Butler in “Scylla and Charybdis,” recognizing that his “Molecules all change” (9.205) yet he maintains “I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms” (9.208–9). Stephen wants to embrace the spontaneous possibilities of the present and future, but he continues to ruminate on the past. I argue that this conflict between the unstable present, the outside world that “you damn well have to see” (9.87), and the unchangeable past, the nightmare from which Stephen is trying to awake, is a major source of guilt and a challenge to Stephen’s quest to find his soul.
