James Joyces Ulysses :: James Joyce Ulysses Poem Essays

James Joyces UlyssesTheres five fathoms out at that place.... A sail trend about the blank bay waiting for a swollen atomic reactor to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. present I am (18). If Old incur Ocean (42) is Proteus (Gifford 46), graven image of primal matter (32) t ally with a viridian tinge of primal dope up as well as the tide that washes in the ruined jetsam and jetsam of mans voyages, it makes some kind of sense that there is no corresponding symbolic organ to this episode. We are in the protean realm of the non-organic, or rather unorganized and de-organized matter. The aforementioned bobbing corpse is of course more than a homicide case in Joyces symbology. The corpse lost to seas rot and bladderwrack is the luggage compartment of Proteus manifest in a disturbing (dead) human form, bloated and dissolving. It is there to intimately remind us of our eventual return to unformed matter, to info at its extreme. This disintegration will lead to a chaotic reintegration with the Ocean, illimitable be of energy, crusher of bodies washed to shore, carried to the sandflats of Dublin via Cock Lake. Proteus harbingers the seachange (42) of all organisms, all matter the corpse also manifests the Seadeath, mildest of all deaths (42), soft as the guide of mist (Book XI of The Odyssey). Full fathom five thy father lies (41) Father Ocean or Proteus as the drowned, absent father, hidden body of coral and pearls (The Tempest), always in the sea change... rich and strange (ibid.). This blue dance of matter and energy is witnessed in the undead movement of the corpse impulsive before it a drift of rubble (41), an indeterminate mass of preterit matter. He will rise again sunk though he be beneath the watery floor (41). He is a pocket book of corpsegas, porous, a spongy titbit. In his undead, coral-like growth, matter transforms according to un foreseeable, heretical logic, which Dedalus is compelled to lead as he does signat ures of all things... seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot (31). This logic moreover a poet could follow, or perhaps it is simply poetic creation idol becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain (41-2). This fabulation of the reach of being is certainly profane, or at least outside the accepted, predictable logic of any catechism. Ocean is God as an immanent squeeze and flux the abstract, ethereal God of Christendom is more ascetic, barren, removed.