Fathoming Fathoms
Post Seventeen
In Ulysses there are at least two references to five fathoms; so one suspects it to be significant and as I’ve never been comfortable with what that significance is, it’s time to get to grips or at least try. A decent starting point is to ascertain just what is a fathom. It transpires that it is an old fashioned measurement of about 6 foot depth of water and generally has been superseded by the metric system. So when in Telemachus the boatman informs the businessman that it’s five fathoms deep out there to the north of the bay, he means a depth of around 30 feet so, more than sufficient for a drowning.
This conversation is overheard by Stephen as he sat with Haines near the forty foot (one assumes over six fathoms) and he recalls it in Proteus where it plays into his fear of drowning.
“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.
A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue.”
Being from Proteus one could create a blog from every line but lets try and pick over the most significant bones and the first bone, the one on which I shall concentrate in this short blog is the extract from Ariel’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.”
This quite early in the book is already our second reference to The Tempest with Mulligan earlier accusing Stephen of having the rage of Caliban. Here, Ariel suggests that Ferdinand’s father has drowned which is an immediate link to the conversation at the forty-foot and to Stephen’s Icarus-like fear of drowning as he has expressed earlier in the episode and as Mulligan earlier mocked him for washing only once a month. Which actually turns out to be a gross under-exaggeration.
But it’s what happens after death that resonates for us. He changes, he metamorphoses. His bones become coral, his eyes become pearls. Nothing fades it just changes, he undergoes a sea-change; a phrase I also associate with Sirens and greaseabloom though I note it is not actually mentioned there. What happens after death is a question real and raw for Stephen, still reeling from the death of his mother. Moreover, drowning is the phrase he uses in Wandering Rocks to metaphorically describe the fate of his surviving family.
The phrase
“God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain”
is alone worthy of far deeper analysis than this little blog permits and we’ll do it some injustice shortly but first let’s consider other fathom or drowning occurrences.
In Nestor one boy must recite a piece of Milton’s poem Lycidas. It concerned his friend Edward King who had drowned or so Milton heard because the body wasn’t recovered. In Proteus, as well as the God becomes man line above, the sea (triggered by the Swinburn poem quoted in Telemachus) is the mighty mother drawing us back to the womb and when in Paris it was Stephen’s mother’s money that kept head above water, it was also her terminal illness that sucked him back beneath the waves. And Stephen is not good down there, not like Mulligan who saved a drowning man.
Further on; in Hades drowning is considered a pleasant way to go, in Scylla the whirlpool Charybdis will metaphorically suck us to our deaths, In Wandering Rocks Stephen considers his family to be drowning in poverty and in Oxen we have a torrent of rain.
Back to Proteus and god becoming man etc. This smacks of John 1:1:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
and moving to the word becoming flesh in John 1:14 and dwelling among us and then dying, and rising again. The phrase morphing from the resurrection miracle of the believer to the evolution of the non-believer with fish being eaten by geese and all living things eventually becoming part of the landscape. In this case the Featherbeds, hills in the Dublin milieu. And please note, not just any geese but Nora Barnacle geese and further wheels spin in episode eighteen with Bloom on the featherbed mattress with Molly, his Nora. Death it seems is no barrier to life going on, in some way shape or form. And don’t think we didn’t spot that quiver of minnows ejaculating sperm-like from the drowned man’s trouserfly.
Not so different to Ferdinand’s father becoming the coral reef nor to Bloom’s thoughts in Hades and Lestrygonians.
Its all reinforcement of a theme if not the central theme, that the soul can’t be contained by death. The body just morphs into something else and the soul moves on. John Milton believes he will yet see his friend in heaven because he’s a believer. Rational Bloom, we think a non-believer, will feel and arguably see again the soul of Rudi. Stephen a confirmed non-believer, nevertheless wonders just where his mother has gone.
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