Synopsis by Gerry O'Flaherty

Joyce in a 1902 Postcard

It is now 11 o'clock and Stephen is on his way to deliver Mr Deasy's two letters and to meet Mulligan and Haines in the public house called The Ship at 12.30 pm. He has some time to spare and goes fora walk on the strand at Sandymount.

One of the problems that Stephen thinks of is that he perceives the world principally through his eyes (the visible) and his ears (the audible) and also through time and space. His eyes perceive the signatures of things, not their reality. He closes his eyes to find out how he will perceive reality through the audible only.

Two women come on to the beach and Stephen assumes that they are midwives and that one has a misbirth with a trailing navel cord in her bag. He then thinks that our navel cords link us through our ancestors all the way back to Eve.

Dalkey

His Aunt Sara lives nearby and Stephen wonders if he should call on her. He walks on and he decides to postpone the visit. Instead he turns towards the Pigeon House. A joke in French about a pigeon and the Holy Ghost reminds him of the Fenian, Kevin Egan, and his son, Patrice, in Paris and, by association, of the telegram he received there telling him that his mother was dying.

School Boys

Two gipsy cockle-pickers and their dog come into view and as they pass they note his Latin Quarter hat. The rhythm of the tide bring some lines of poetry into his mind and he writes them down on a piece of paper, which he tears off one of Mr Deasy's letters. He wonders if anyone is watching him and lies back to look at the sun.

He picks his nose and feels that there is someone behind him. When he looks around he sees a three-master sailing up the river to the docks.

In the Odyssey, Telemacus/Stephen visits Menelaus who had pinned down the ever-changing Proteus and, in that way, had managed to get news of Odysseus and his travels.

Episode 3 Proteus

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Kevin Egan is based on the Irish Fenian Joe Casey whom Joyce knew while in Paris in 1902-3. Casey was a typesetter for the New York Herald of Paris and had fled to France after escaping from Clerkenwell Prison in Manchester in 1867. He, and his son Patrice, generously loaned money to Joyce.