In Telemachus a "boatman" standing on the rocks says
to his companion, "There's five fathoms out there... It'll be
swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine
days today." Stephen thinks, "The man that was drowned." A
fathom is six feet, so the boatman is indicating thirty feet
of water in the outer reaches of Dublin Bay where it gives way
to open ocean. (Thornton observes, "I have seen several maps
of the Dublin Bay area which include a 'Five Fathom Line'.")
Somewhere out there a man's body is being pushed about by the
currents and swelling up with gas, and folk wisdom holds that
it will surface after nine days. Within these realistic
details lurks an allusion to Shakespeare's The Tempest
that raises metaphysical questions about life after
death.
The depth of the sounding and the fact that a dead body is
washing about in those thirty feet of seawater invite readers
to hear the strains of the song that Ariel sings to Ferdinand,
who is stumbling about the island mourning a father who has
died in a shipwreck:
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.
The song implies a reconstitution on the other side of death,
possibly Christian but more likely not: Ariel sings not of God
saving Alonso’s soul but of the sea making something beautiful
of his drowned body. However one may read Shakespeare’s
powerfully visual and aural image of humanity becoming
transformed into “something rich and strange,” the effect is
certainly to evoke a mysterious reality on the other side of
death.
Ariel sings the song to assuage Ferdinand’s grief, to assure
him that he lives in a beneficent universe, and to free him to
love the young woman whom he is about to meet. These
characteristics of Ferdinand’s situation seem peculiarly
relevant to Stephen, who is haunted and accused by his mother's death,
convinced that he lives in a
malignant universe, and eager to discover love.
In Proteus Stephen recalls the boatman’s words from
Telemachus and makes the implicit allusion explicit:
“Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father
lies.” As his thoughts continue to play over the
boatman’s words (“At one, he said. Found drowned. High
water at Dublin bar”), he imagines the “Bag of
corpsegas” becoming transformed, not into a celestial spirit,
but into all the multifarious forms of physical existence:
“God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes
featherbed mountain.” This shifting of corporeal shapes
through decomposition and reintegration resembles
Shakespeare's "sea-change" by which Alonso's eyes become
pearls and his bones coral: "A seachange this, brown
eyes saltblue."
