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 It transpires that it is an old fashioned measurement of about 6 foot depth of water and generally has been superseded by the metric system.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.

For more Ulysses idle thinking: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

Shut Your Eyes and See

Post Nine

This, one of the book’s very famous quotes, appears in that atrociously tricky part of Proteus as Stephen, sense testing, walks along the beach at Sandymount Strand, crunching shells as he goes. His eyes shut, he listens as he crunches and crunches to hear. He wonders; does the world disappear when he cannot see it and will it again exist when he opens his eyes? It will; but this is not as silly as it sounds for can an object exist without a subject to perceive it? Stephen is exploring whether our sensory equipment is to be trusted for when we get down to brass tacks, our senses are our only link to a world beyond our skin (even possibly under our skin). 

This part of the book is replete with symbolism as we skirt philosophy, art and natural sciences but I am more interested here in the conduit of the visible or more to the point lack of it, for both Bloom and Stephen will contemplate blindness as they go through the day. As well as Stephen on his beach walk, Bloom will help a blind chap across the road who will then feature in the Sirens episode and no doubt in Circe; which is a safe bet as everyone appears in Circe. The Homeric blinding of Polyphemus plays out in the Cyclops episode with Bloom politically jousting and let’s say defeating the myopic nationalist in Barney Kiernan’s pub. In Lestrygonians after seeing the blind chap on his way Bloom tries to imagine life through the eyes of the blind. For example he feels his stomach and wonders in what colour the blind visualise flesh which is an interesting example and one wonders if it was prompted by the horribly racist Eugene Stratton poster advert that Bloom notices on the way to Glasnevin cemetery. 

I like how Bloom in a very practical way considers the same concepts Stephen grappled with in Proteus in his impossibly obscure style. 

So what do we read into our blind character? Is he Homer’s Tiresias there to predict Bloom’s future? Before we get excited for clues beyond 17th June, Tiresias’ predictions concerned events within our story not after. Essentially, that if Odysseus harms the sun god’s cattle, things will go very bad back home in Ithaca. Well its hardly Bloom’s fault that there’s a foot and mouth* cattle blight but certainly for him, thing’s aren’t great at home. Does our blind friend predict this? Even if he did, it was hardly news as Bloom knew it via the morning post but the tap tap tapping of his white stick in Sirens is in a kind of counterpoint to Boylan’s ‘jingly jaunty got the horny’ cab ride to Molly’s house and his cock carracarracarra cock knocking on the door once he arrived. 

But why? In a book where everything is volitional and a portal of discovery, why the blind character?  

Did we need him simply to facilitate Bloom’s translation of the ineluctable modality of the visible as suggested above? That feels underwhelming. The blind stripling links in Sirens to Robert Emmet, the whereabouts of whose mortal remains are something of a mystery, as we learn in Hades. So maybe the point of the Blind Stripling shall also remain mysterious and is a matter for the professors. Here’s to the many and full explanations that no doubt exist in whatever passes for reality out there. In here, it’s pretty much the blind leading the blind.

For more idle Ulysses thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

*Apparently Stateside, they say hoof and mouth. Either way, the cows don’t like it.

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

The Promised Land is no Place Like Home

Post Three

Zion. It’s become an emotionally charged word. It’s mentioned over 150 times in the bible (I love the internet) and six times in Ulysses. Strictly it is the hill on which the City of David (Jerusalem) was first built around 900 BCE but its broader meaning has (at some point in the last three millennia) come to refer to causes and for our purposes, its first reference is in Proteus in the context of Kevin Egan in Paris.

               ‘Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.’

The steady hands that once lit Fenian fuse wire now weak and wasted, shake to light his cigarette. Stranded in Paris like the beached whales we shortly encounter, he yearns to be reunited with the cause that no longer needs him. For to continue the psalm playing in Stephen’s head, how can he sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

That Stephen thinks ‘Sion’ is in addition to whatever else it might be, one of Stephen’s many subconscious premonitions of Bloom, a man he doesn’t know. For Egan’s Zion, his Promised Land, should not be ridding Ireland of the British; at least not just that. Like Bloom, he needs to worry more about issues much closer to home. His wife has thrown him out, his son mocks him and his life is a daily crusade of failing to find a willing audience on his regular pub crawl. He doesn’t even vary the pubs.

Next chapter, Bloom’s mood undulates as he contemplates a Jewish homeland in then Turkish Palestine. But he needs to realise (and he subliminally does) that his Promised Land is not in the Levant but rather around the corner in the jingly bed in 7 Eccles Street. I succumb to temptation to mention enormous melons. Bloom and Egan need to worry more about the problems at the end of their noses and less of far flung causes, of whatever worth.

So there you have it. Stephen thinking Sion, might be as much (though he doesn’t know it) about Bloom as Egan or futile causes generally. Moreover it’s not simply semantics, he reveals that Egan has fallen into the trap that may also endanger Bloom; misreading the grid reference location of one’s Promised Land.

Well, it could be anyway. The beauty of Ulysses is that there are very few wrong answers when one allows one’s mind to expand.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021-2023

A Rock and a Hard Place

Post One

I have been catching up on the excellent U22 The Centenary Ulysses Podcast (u22pod.com) recently as we build up to the 2nd February 2022 centenary. The latest was on ‘chapter’ Nine, Scylla & Charybdis. This difficult episode set in the National Library, is against the Homeric context of the fleet sailing through a very narrow passage that we now know as the Straits of Messina, where it must pass either by the cliff of Scylla on one side and the small rock of Charybdis on the other. This rock is marked by a single fig tree. Should they hug the cliff or veer close to the small rock? High up in the cliff lives Scylla the dragon. She has six long necks each topped with a head of nasty razor teeth. Sail too close and she will swoop to kill six of the crew. She cannot as Odysseus foolishly thinks, be beaten. Better avoid and go for the fig tree. Well that’s no plain sailing either. For underneath lurks a whirlpool and that will destroy the entire fleet. So no good choices.

An entertaining aspect of the U22 Podcast is to hear the views of students and others fairly new to Ulysses. This provides fresh energy and fascinating insight. But they considered both options to be terrible, leading to certain death. On this basis there is no choice as one naturally would opt for Scylla, the lesser of two evils and hope to lose only six. I don’t think this is quite right. The whirlpool Charybdis is not a constant. Rather it occurs three times a day and so there is a prospect of passing by it entirely unscathed. Now we have real choice. Definite loss of six against potential loss of all but possible loss of none. That brings in appraisal of risk and calculation of odds.

It’s a really tricky chapter and as if we don’t have enough to grapple with, we wonder why a genteel discussion of literature in the National Library is paralleled with Homeric Scylla and Charybdis which is red in tooth and claw. But understanding this real choice illuminates the various lifestyle and artistic choices facing Stephen and which lurk subliminally within the text and suddenly it makes a lot (or at least a bit) more sense. I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to consider the chapter but I believe it provides a reasonable framework and significantly leads to Bloom’s vital contribution (by his checking the backsides of statues!) which enables our understanding of the chapter as well as facilitates Stephen’s choice analysis.

For more idle thoughts: www.russellraphael.com

© RUSSELL RAPHAEL 2021 -2023