What is the omphalos? Previous chapters of this book have shown how the omphalos in Joyce signifies both separation and connectedness, specifically connectedness to the dead (or undead) mother. In the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen envisages an incestuous merger with the mother via the rhizomatic networks of the umbilical cord. He also associates these networks with the cables of the telephone. This humble instrument, as David Trotter has observed, transformed social relations in the twentieth century, establishing “new forms of remote contact, of intimacy at a distance.” Like Stephen's navelcord, the telephone connects users across time and space yet also marks their separation from each other, enforcing solitude and interconnectivity at once. The “cords of all” that link the modern subject back to matrilineal prehistory also inosculate this subject in a networked world, creating uncontrollable dependencies and interfusions.

This book has traced some of the ways that this networked world has been reimagined in modernist fiction. In The Ambassadors, networks of representatives branch out from the absent mother, Mrs. Newsome; in Joyce's Dubliners, the absence of the father gives rise to networks of substitution and exchange. Woolf's To the Lighthouse, on the other hand, is dominated by the motif of the scar, rather than the networks of umbilical connectedness. Yet the navel in both its guises – scar and cable, hole and knot – serves to undermine the notion of the autonomous subject.