The antithesis of this birth imagery is seen in the bloated carcass of the dog sniffed by Tatters and in Stephen's vision of the leprous corpse from the sea. The last, like Milton's Edward King, was sunk beneath the watery floor, but, unlike King, he undergoes no kind of transformation.
Neither does fatherhood escape unscathed in "Proteus," as Stephen wonders who his real father is: Simon Dedalus, whose act of love was blind, drunken copulation — or God Himself — Whose "coupler's will" Mary and Simon were simply carrying out, and about Whom there is the command of a lex eternal — that is, an eternal law. Stephen, looking towards Dublin's electric power station, the Pigeonhouse, thinks of the blasphemous lines from Leo Taxil's La Vie de Jesus (Paris, 1884) , in which Joseph asks the pregnant Mary who has put her in this "fichue position," or tough situation; there, Mary answered that it was the pigeon (dove, Holy Ghost, etc.). Thus, Stephen, by implication, shares (symbolically) the nebulous parentage of Christ and of many epic heroes. He is a Telemachus who wonders at this point not where his father is, but who his true father is.
Stephen's psychological dislocation, then, his ability to see only the "signatures of all things," to hear only their sounds, and not to know their essential selves or noumena, leads him to think of his many difficulties, past and present. He remembers the lies that he told about his ancestors at school at Clongowes. He recalls that, while others predicted a fine future for him as a religious man (Stephen was ostensibly a saintly lad), he was really thinking about naked women. He also remembers his ostentatious displays of erudition and his wish to send copies of his early, short prose poems, his epiphanies, to all the major libraries of the world.
The present offers little solace for Stephen. His return from Paris was occasioned by his father's telegram announcing that his mother was dying, and he thinks again of the reason that Buck Mulligan's aunt has forbidden Buck to remain as Stephen's friend: Stephen's refusal to pray at his mother's bedside. He recalls Mulligan's present possession of the key to the Tower. Stephen was afraid of the gypsies' dog, Tatters, and he contrasts himself (again) with Mulligan, who saved a man from drowning. Stephen is supremely sensitive (once again) of his teeth, which he sees as mere shells, an effective image which recalls both Deasy's shell collection in "Nestor" and the beach setting in this chapter. Stephen wonders whether he should use his school pay to see a dentist; then he thinks of the comment made by the anti-Semitic journalist Edouard Adolphe Drumont about Queen Victoria: "Old hag with the yellow teeth."
