Early in Proteus Stephen thinks of his feet "in his
boots" at "the ends of his legs," and near the end of the
episode he looks down at "a buck's castoffs" and thinks of
"hismy sandal shoon." His lower body is covered in Mulligan's
hand-me-down pants and shoes. Mulligan asks him in Telemachus,
"How are the secondhand breeks?" (Scots dialect for trousers),
and in Nestor Stephen recalls that he also owes
Mulligan "one pair brogues."
His body is not entirely his own. It is a protean assemblage
of parts connected to other people, and this fact bespeaks
trust in human connection as much as alienation.
The fact that Stephen can see nothing of his lower moiety but
someone else's belongings, together with his chronic alienation from his own body,
may explain the strangely distancing way in which Proteus
repeatedly focuses on "his legs," "his feet," "his boots,"
"his treading soles"—as if "he" and "his" are not quite on
speaking terms. This intimate non-dialogue between brain and
feet becomes entertainingly visible when Stephen realizes that
he has decided not to visit
his uncle Richie and aunt Sara: "He halted. I
have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there?
Seems not." In this ready acquiescence to what his
legs have done, one can perhaps hear some nascent trust in the
unconscious body, some reassuring indication of Stephen's
ability to journey out of his own mind into the mysterious
world of the flesh.
[2015] Despite his hyper-intellectual distance from his body,
the novel often shows Stephen sanely aware of his physical
connectedness to other people—as when his blood rises in
response to Mulligan's cavalier remark about his mother, or
when he wishes for a woman to "Touch
me." In Proteus, having recalled his
experiences with Kevin Egan
in Paris, he lies back against the rocks to take a nap, tips
his hat down over his eyes, and realizes that he has
unconsciously adopted one of Egan's physical habits: "That
is Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap,
sabbath sleep." Whatever Egan has or has not meant
to him as an exile, or a believer, or a sexual being, or a bohemian drinker, Stephen has
incorporated part of him into his own physical nature. His
recollection of Egan's friendly
greeting and his realization that he has taken some of
Egan into himself join with other details at the end of Proteus—his
yearning for a woman's touch, his expectation that "Evening
will find itself" in his day's wanderings—to suggest
that Stephen's mood is arcing toward trust.
