people and objects he sees mingle in his thoughts / Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff/That bee- with memories of his past relations with his family, tles o'er his base into the sea' (Hamlet 1.4.50?52). of his schooldays, of his residence in Paris (from Allusions to Hamlet occur often in Ulysses. where he was recalled by his mother's fatal illness), 1. Beside one another (German). of his feeling guilty about his mother's death (he 2. Stephen is still walking with his eyes shut, tap- had refused to kneel down and pray at her bedside, ping with his 'ash sword' (the ash-wood walking because he considered it a betrayal of his integrity stick he carries), as 'they' (i.e., blind people) do. as an unbeliever), and also with a variety of spec-3. I.e., his friend Buck Mulligan's. Stephen, lackulations about life and reality often derived from ing boots of his own, had borrowed a cast-off pair mystical works he had read 'in the stagnant bay of of Mulligan's.
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ULYSSES [PROTEUS] / 220 1
ends of my legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos.4 Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crik, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.5
Won't you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter6 of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare. Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta!7 I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, Frauenzimmer:8 and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy,9 coming down to our mighty mother. Number one swung lourdily1 her midwife's bag, the other's gamp2 poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe,3 deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords 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.4
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva,5 naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.6
4. The Demiurge, or demiurgos, supernatural being who, according to Gnostic philosophy, made the world in subordination to God. The mystical notion of the Demiurge, whose mallet fashioned all things and who writes his signature on them, haunts Stephen's mind. The world, sensed by the ear only, 'sounds solid,' as though made by the Demiurge's hammer. The ending -os gives the word the appearance of a Spanish plural, so Joyce whimsically writes 'Los demiurgos, '' which in Spanish would be 'the demiurges.' 5. 'Dominie': schoolmaster. Mr. Deasy was the headmaster of the school where Stephen taught (the previous episode has shown Stephen teaching). 'Kens them a' ': knows them all; Stephen is putting Deasy into a mock-Scottish folk song. 6. The first of the two lines of popular verse that have come into Stephen's head consists metrically of four iambic feet ('tetrameter') with the last foot unlike the first, not defective ('catalectic'). 7. Enough! (Italian). 8. Dames, wenches (German). Here, midwives. Stephen sees them coming from Leahy's Terrace, which runs by the beach. 9. Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote: 'I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea. / I will go down to her, 1 and none other' ('The Triumph of Time,' lines 1?3). 1. Heavily (coined by Stephen from the French lourd). Stephen, like Joyce, had studied modern languages at University College, Dublin, and his preoccupation with words and languages is part of his character as potential literary artist. 2. Umbrella; and perhaps reference to Mrs. Gamp, the nurse in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. 3. Stephen imagines the first midwife is called Mrs. MacCabe. 'Relict': widow. 4. Stephen is speculating on the mystical significance of the navel cord, seeing it as linking the generations, the combined navel cords stretching back to Adam and Eve. A mystic gazed in his omphalos (navel) to make contact with the first man. Stephen thinks of himself ('Kinch,' his nickname) calling up Adam in 'Edenville' through his navel, using the line of linked navel cords as a telephone line. Adam's telephone number, 'Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one,' begins with the first letters of the Hebrew and of the Greek alphabet to suggest the great primeval number. 5. Hebrew for Eve. Because she was not born in the regular way, but created from Adam's rib, she had no navel. 'Adam Kadmon': Adam the Beginner, so called in Hebrew cabalistic literature of the Middle Ages. 6. Stephen is led, through reflection on Eve's navel-less 'belly without blemish,' to a recollection of the description of the original Eden (Paradise) by Thomas Traherne (ca. 1637?1674), from whose prose Centuries of Meditation he quotes: 'The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which should never be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.' But immediately afterward Stephen reflects that such language is inappropriate to Eve's body, as hers was the 'womb of sin'?i.e., she first ate the fatal apple and brought forth sin.
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220 2 / JAMES JOYCE
Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.7 They clasped and sundered, did the couplers will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex etema8 stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius9 to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.1 Illstarred heresiarch.2 In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.
Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.3
I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile. Yes, I must.4
His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O weeping God, the things I married into. De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers. And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less. Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ.5
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.6
?It's Stephen, sir.
?Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
?We thought you were someone else.
