"Noon slumbers": Stephen's thoughts turn
from Paris in the morning to Paris at mid-day, and the scene
changes from various imagined Parisian love-makers to a
particular remembered meeting with Kevin and Patrice Egan. But
noon is also approaching in the present moment, on the
Sandymount strand, and the narrative will link Stephen with
several different literary representations of gods and
demigods napping in the mid-day. One of these, implicitly at
least, is Homer's Proteus.
In Book 4 of the Odyssey Eidothea tells Menelaus that
her father, "immortal Proteus of Egypt," leaves the sea each
day "When the sun hangs at high noon in heaven."
He comes ashore in some "caverns hollowed by the sea," joined
by a crowd of seals whom he counts each day before "he lies
down like a shepherd with his flock." Following her advice,
Menelaus and three of his men lie down on the sand, covered
with newly flayed sealskins, waiting for the god to show up so
they can wrest his secrets from him.
Later in Proteus, Stephen lies down on the rocks
bordering the sand and thinks of Kevin Egan "nodding for his
nap, sabbath sleep. Et
vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona." Egan taking a snooze
on Sunday recalls the Judeo-Christian God resting after his
labors. Stephen then thinks of "Pan's hour, the faunal
noon." The Greek fertility god Pan too was said to
rest at noon, and the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé composed a
famous work about a faun who
awoke from an erotic dream in the "après-midi,"
after-noon.