Reading Ulysses by Russell Block — Proteus Pt. 1

“Casually as though I stroll through a museum, I recognize in Proteus those forms that were integral to classical statuary rendered new. Joyce’s modernist aesthetic appears strange, supple and expressive, but strange, but I recognize in it the precepts of antiquity. Those wings of the museum I walked earlier in the day form a basis from which this Joyce was shaped. There sits the artist transforming the world by looking out upon it from the Sandymount Stray. There is the old, familiar anxiety, with origin in Menalaus’ uncertainty in Egypt about what offense he did the gods, and who of the immortals fetters him far from his native shores. Stephen Daedalus explores these same or similar anxieties. All of this is evident, if but I look for the precepts that sustain the enterprise, not to assume that the strange and new is confused, but rather to recognize its underlying cohesion…”