Ulyssus, Chapter Three: Proteus

Stephan stands by the sea yearning for its mystical embrace. His mother has abandoned him, his father is unreachable, his art has withered and died - is there anything left to keep him from casting himself into the waters? The one thing left to him, his intellect, seems just capable of leading him beyond the lifeless cul-de-sac in which he finds himself. Stephan contemplates the source of all things in the ineffable, linked by genetics or metempsychosis.

"Creation from nothing. [...] A misbirth with a trailing navelchord, hushed in ruddy wool. The chords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."

The omphalos is the navel of the world. The navel, of course, is the mark left my the once physical connection with the mother. The omphalos is linked to prophecy through the oracle at Delphi. Prophecy appears in this chapter as foreshadowing (see below). Prophecy may be linked as well to poetic and artistic inspiration, which, for Stephan, seems to have run dry. Ah, but there is an omphalos at Jerusalem as well. Jerusalem exists in both heaven and on earth, partaking equally of the mythical and the actual.

Let us not forget that the omphalos at Delphi (which, let us say, relates to the navel or center of Stephan's tortured psyche, as the one at Jerusalem relates to the center of Leopold's) is equated with the black stone given to Chronos by Rhea. The stone was wrapped in cloth and was intended to fool Chronos, the tyrannical father who eats his children, who supposed it was his newborn son Zeus.

Kinch, Stephan,  is the knife that cuts the umbilicus (likened here to a telephone chord), severing the connection between the individual and the universal. The knife is the rational mind which Stephan uses to isolate himself, hacking madly at any possibility of a connection between himself and any other person. Intimacy gives rise to vulnerability, whereas the life of the mind is a safe one. Yet Stephan yearns ever back toward his source, which in his mind links his dead mother with the sea. He craves the intimate connection that he denies himself. He desperately wishes to move beyond his present state and into something greater.

"Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze."

The stars are described as "darkness shining in the brightness", one allusion of several to the mysteries of night shining behind the common light of day.

"Me sits there with augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars."

Stephan sees himself as wholly unremarkable in the common world. His sandals are borrowed, he doesn't belong in this world and he is not of it. At night, however, in the light of Mystery, in the numinous irrationality of naked truth, there he feels perfectly at home. How to reconcile this with the island of the intellect on which he has stranded himself?

His "auger's rod of ash", which he feels does not belong to him, reappears quite dramatically in the Circe chapter. This again links Stephan to the oracle at Delphi.

Elsewhere in the text, Stephan, as Telemachus mourning Odysseus whom he thinks dead, muses on the death of a man found drowned off Maiden's rock, five fathoms out to sea.

"Full fathom five thy father lies."

Stephan pines for the dissolution of his rational mind into something larger, he wishes to drown himself in the sea of universal consciousness. Yet still he clings to the rocks of scholasticism, rationality, and literary theory. He cannot quite let these things go.

"Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man."

Leopold Bloom, as Odysseus, could be Stephan's redemption, the true father resurrected, returned from the sea, brought back from the ineffable, come to life from ancient myth to form a bridge between the night and the day. Joyce will give us no such satisfaction, of course. The waters of mythical fantasy will break upon the shores of day to day existence. But, and here is the key, this does not invalidate the myth in any way.

Leopold, of course, is quite a different animal than Stephan. He is a man of many failures, yet he accepts all of these and still manages to maintain his connection to the mythical. One could say that Bloom is the rose, and Dedalus the cross. The rose is whole and complete, while the two bars of the cross , though joined at the center, are ever at odds with each other.

Stephan has not yet met Leopold, Telemachus still does not suspect that his father lives and will return, yet he knows that something does await him.

"Come. I thirst."

In the final paragraph of the chapter, a ship is spotted out at sea.

"Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship."