Proteus may seem ponderously serious much of the
time, but Stephen's meditations on his life and aspirations
are shot through with jocoserious
mockery. Having thought of the umbilical "cords of all"
linking back to archaic times in a "strandentwining cable of
all flesh," and having inferred that "That is why mystic
monks" contemplate their navels as an avenue to divinity, he
then becomes the "lovely mummer" that Buck Mulligan has
declared him to be: "Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to
Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one."
Entwined umbilical cords become telephone cables enabling
Stephen to connect to the paradisal suburb of Edenville (there
was, in fact, an actual Dublin area called
Edenville, off Merrion Avenue Upper). Dial the first Hebrew
letter and the first Greek one (doubly invoking the biblical
saying that God is the alpha and the omega), add "nought" and
"nought" (doubly invoking primeval nothingness) to get "one"
(the splendor of divine creation), and presto! you are on the
phone with Adam and Eve, by a miracle of ancient technology.
Stephen is clearly enjoying himself here, and—as in a mummer's play—his comedy
involves resuscitation of the dead.
Telephones were fairly commonplace in Dublin by 1904, and
they figure in several parts of Ulysses. The second
such appearance, in Hades, seems to bear some occult
correspondence to Stephen's
whimsical thought in Proteus: Leopold Bloom thinks
that perhaps undertakers should provide "a telephone
in the coffin" to rescue living people who get
buried by mistake, and shortly later he imagines being able to
hear the voices of people who have died: "Have a
gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After
dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.
Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark
awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth."
In both men's fantasies, the dead can be brought back
to talk to the living.
In Oxen of the Sun, Stephen continues to play with
the fancy of having a direct connection to humanity's original
perfection, but there the metaphor of telephony gives way to anastomosis.
