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, covered in Mulligan's
hand-me-down pants and shoes, is not entirely his own. This
awareness of being a protean assemblage of parts no doubt
involves some sense of alienation, but it also implies trust
in human connections.
The fact that Stephen can see nothing but someone else's
belongings in his lower "moiety" (he uses this word to
describe Uncle Richie washing the upper half of his body),
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 aunt and
uncle: "He halted. I have passed the way to aunt
Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not." His ready
acquiescence to what his legs have chosen bespeaks some trust
in the body's independent wisdom. Lestrygonians
features a similar moment when Bloom concentrates on reading
the throwaway while proceeding south on autopilot: "His
slow feet walked him riverward, reading."
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.
