After witnessing the development of the young, unsophisticated Stephen Dedalus into a skeptical and scrupulous artist who concludes James Joyce's earlier novel, Portrait of the artist as a young man, his reappearance in Ulysses suggests that his intellectual journey is not yet complete. His penultimate journal entry describes his mission statement regarding art: “I will encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and forge in the forge of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race. » (Joyce 213) “the forge of Stephen's soul” sums up his realized artistic consciousness, the foundation of all his work; “the uncreated consciousness of his race” implies that he gives an individual voice to the community into which he was born. Essentially, through his art, Stephen will use his individuality to forge a conscience for the population around him. The episode Proteus documents Stephen's return to Sandymount Beach and recognition of his poetic vocation, as explained in the opening lines: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “Inescapable modality of the visible: at least that, if not more, thought through my eyes. The signatures of everything I'm here to read, the darkspawn and the wrecks, the approaching tide, this rusty boot. Snot green, blue silver, rust: colored signs. » (Joyce 37) Stephen's exploration of the material world in relation to his own cognitive systems is a first step toward his self-awareness as an artist. Throughout Proteus, he will examine the beach scene as a field of signs, readily available for interpretation and association. Stephen considers the existence of the external world with reference to the theories of figures such as Aristotle and Jakob Böhme; however, as an artist, he intentionally perceives the beach through the “reading” of signatures. An application of Ferdinand De Saussure's general linguistics course can better highlight the mechanical thinking that occurs in Stephen's mind and, in a broader sense, the employment of Joyce's "internal monologue" as a narrative method. Although Stephen's mental wanderings seem disoriented and erratic, his cogitation of the sign responds to his poetic intention of Portrait; impulsively, Stephen creates a conscience for his race. Due to the semi-autobiographical nature of Joyce's previous novel, Stephen's artistic intention is also perceived as Joyce's intention: the analysis of linguistic systems and the exploration of the limits of these systems become a creative expression. The Proteus episode is presented almost entirely through Stephen's mental activity. , a narrative technique described as “internal monologue”. The method simultaneously relays the content of Stephen's thoughts and the ingenuity of Joyce's craft. The dialogue that springs from Stephen's mind is both characterized and sustained by the "inevitable modality of the visible" (Joyce 37), an Aristotelian concept that considers how individuals view the material world through sensible qualities. Inevitability alludes to various aspects of the chapter, such as the inevitable flow of thoughts that reside in Stephen's head, visible only through the monologue. However, Stephen's discernment of inevitability rests on his assumption that the beach is eternal, both static and dynamic, based on the inevitability of his vision and hearing; he is aware of the relationship between space and time, reality and imagination. Despite this link, to fully understand the inevitability of his "thought through his eyes", he must read the signatures of allthings. “Thinking through my eyes” therefore relates to two concerns: first, that a person's perceptions are themselves unreliable in relation to the independent reality from which they originate; and, second, that the thoughts one constructs through an interpretation of the visual world are potentially false. Saussure postulates “without moving our lips or tongue, we can speak to ourselves or mentally recite a selection of verses. Because we consider the words of our language as sound images…” (Saussure 853) Regarding semiology, Joyce's story is a material interpretation of the mental verses that Stephen recites, as well as the anxiety that he feels faced with the possibility of a world. Accordingly, in Saussure's study of semiotics, the external world exists – but its reality remains indistinct until language articulates it. Thus begins Stephen's attempt to solidify his visual experience through language. When Stephen notices, “the signatures of all things I am here to read” (Joyce 37), he recognizes himself as a perceiver, first in a visual sense. This awareness describes the thought process he will adopt, that of the world being “real” through the congruence of his eyes and mind. The activity of reading indicates two things: first, that the world exists before him as a text to be read, and second, this mode of perception is also artistic. The following list of things littering the beach, such as the approaching tide and a rusty boot, is saturated with meaning for Stephen, by association (water, for example, has negative connotations for Stephen, as it represents drowning, amniotic fluid, etc.). The corresponding colors: "Snot green, silver blue, rust" (Joyce 37) refer both to his imaginative perception and to Aristotle's "limit of the diaphanous", color as a determinant of the physical manifestation of a body. Contemplating a physical world with and without color forces Stephen to remember Aristotle's “diaphanousness,” an attempt to visually fortify the signs he perceives. This shows Stephen's maturation as an artist because he realizes that he must organize his thoughts into categories that are both imaginative and philosophical. The Proteus episode is Stephen's response to his poetic election, but also a realization that his intellect lacks the structural basis of language in relation to visual perception. Stephen is constantly suspicious of his visual experience and decides to close his eyes, focusing instead on hearing. experience of its environment. Listening to the sound his shoes make on the shells on the beach, the integration of an eternal world is tested through Stephen's ears. According to semiology, language is form while speech is substance; Stephen makes this distinction and attempts to materialize the world through sound. His monologue continues: “I am, step by step. A very short space of time through very short space times. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and it is the inescapable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No, Jesus! If I fell from a cliff that rises above its base, I would inevitably fall through the Nebeneinander! and conceptualizes them as characteristics of time and space. The successive, time-based perception inherent in auditory experience and self-experience is no different in nature from the side-by-side experience of the visual and sensory fields. Saussure provides a comparable semiotic explanation for audible signifiers: “Their elements are presented successively; they form a chain. This trait appears easily when they are represented in writing and the spatial line of the graphic marks replaces thesuccession over time. » (Saussure 855) The two modalities are also the sensory channels of the two modes of the linguistic sign: writing and speech. . As Stephen's experiment demonstrates, the modalities cannot operate independently: space cannot be distinguished without time nor time without space. Likewise, reading and writing are not possible without a temporal capacity for visual apprehension of the textual surface, and hearing depends on a certain spatial proximity.Joyce, as the narrative style suggests, is interested further to unravel the relationship between the visual, spatial and written conditions of the sign. Once Stephen and Joyce's linguistic exercise is carried out, artistic expression becomes more apparent; Stephen manipulates the language of his thoughts in a rhythmic manner, while Joyce inserts unconventional literary devices. From the point of view of a semiotician, arbitrariness reigns almost entirely over the process of signification, arbitrariness to the extent that signs have no natural connection with the signified. For Saussure, onomatopoeia and interjections are considered objections to the rule of arbitrariness, that is to say, they are relatively motivated. Saussure explains: “Onomatopoeia could be used to prove that the choice of signifier is not always arbitrary. But onomatopoeic formations are never organic elements of a linguistic system. , crick, crick” (Joyce 37) and when he recreates the sound of the bell that rang at mass: “Dringdring . aspects of the sign and are potentially inserted because of the protean metaphor; as the figure of Proteus is transformable and flexible, Joyce's choice of motivated signs is perhaps deliberate within the literary tradition, particularly in works that aspire to canonical recognition, the use of. The onomatopoeias are unusual. Although Joyce is known for breaking narrative boundaries, his emphasis on onomatopoeic moments serves a dual purpose: first as a means of merging visual and spatial cognitions in written form, and second as a poetic insight into the Stephen's rapidly developing mind. Since the narrative is given through an internal monologue, the onomatopoeic moments occur in Stephen's thoughts, and although it is difficult to determine whether they are a coincidence, this is certainly Joyce's authorial intention . Stephen's poetic participation occurs most distinctly in his meditation on the "inevitable." The modality of the audible is further tested by listening to the sea. His thoughts, in reaction to a physical entity, notably to the surge of the rising tide, adopt a poetic rhythm. The following two verses are recited mentally: “Will you not come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare? » (Joyce 37) What Stephen then thinks: “The rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic iambic tetrameter in motion. No, agalop: demarcate the mare. » (Joyce 37) He considers rhythm and poetic structure as elements within the audible modality. Stephen sees language in terms of reality, but he also seems to see the reality of language; the language itself gallops while describing the galloping mare. The monologue documents a poem he mentally crafts about a woman and intimacy, in conjunction with his efforts to find paper. Through Stephen's interior monologue, Joyce explores the fundamental affectations of writing and its convoluted interaction with the parallel modality of the audible. After writing his poem, Stephen meditates on the most fundamental of these properties: “Who is looking at me here? Who, somewhere, will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone with your flutiest voice. » (Joyce 48) Anxiety.