Having followed the
"strandentwining cable of all flesh" back to Eden, Stephen
spends one paragraph in Proteus thinking about the
First Woman. An assortment of literary texts informs his
meditation on "naked Eve." Here and again later in the
chapter, he thinks also of Adam before the Fall. He returns to
his thoughts about Eve in Oxen of the Sun, and in Wandering
Rocks he again recalls a passage from Thomas Traherne's
Centuries of Meditations that inspires his thinking
about Edenic perfection.
He might have found in many different texts the notion that "She
had no navel." It is not in Genesis, but
many theologians have argued that, since neither Adam nor Eve
was born in the usual way, they would not have possessed belly
buttons. When Michelangelo put a belly button on his Adam in
the Sistine Chapel, some theologians accused him of heresy.
Thomas Browne devoted an entire chapter of the Pseudodoxia
Epidemica to the "vulgar error" of painters who depict
the First Couple with navels. Most painters through the ages,
however, have rejected the smooth-belly hypothesis. The canvas
shown here is a relative rarity. Stephen prefers to think of
such a "Belly without blemish," and in Oxen
he thinks again of Eve's body undistorted by the familiar
processes of gestation and birth: "A pregnancy without
joy, he said, a birth without pangs, a body without
blemish, a belly without bigness."
Thornton hears in "whiteheaped corn" an echo
of the Song of Solomon: "Thy navel is like a round
goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of
wheat set about with lilies" (7:2). Stephen, however, changes
"wheat" to "corn" (a word which meant simply "grain" before
the modern era): "no, whiteheaped corn, orient and
immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting."
This word allows him to pivot to a passage from Thomas
Traherne's 17th century prose Meditations. Section 3
of the third Century rapturously recalls a vision of Edenic
perfection that the author had when he was a child: "The Corn
was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never should be reaped,
nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to
everlasting." In this lovely passage, Stephen gets as close as
he will to the mystical gazing on perfection that is
apparently driving his meditation ("That is why mystic
monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. . . .
Gaze). But, as William York Tindall pointed out in
A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (1959), Stephen could
not actually have made such an allusion in 1904, because the Centuries
were not published in a modern edition until 1908 (148).
"Heva" approximates early Hebrew versions of
Eve's name: Cheva/Chawwah, derived from chawah
("to breathe") or chayah ("to live"). Eve is
described as "Spouse and helpmate" of Adam in
Genesis. "Adam Kadmon" is a phrase
from the Kabbalah meaning "original man." Thornton notes that
"He includes all of the ten Sephiroth or intelligences which
emanated from the En Soph." Gifford speculates that Joyce may
have taken the phrase from its theosophical elaboration in
texts like Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1886),
but there is nothing in Stephen's sentence to indicate any
particular theoretical intention.
Later in Proteus, Stephen recalls Edenic perfection
one last time when he thinks of "Unfallen Adam rode
and not rutted." As Gifford puts it, "According to
tradition, before the Fall sexual intercourse was without
lust."
