Chapter 6

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Pages: 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168

In which Shem asks Shaun questions about the main characters and symbols of FW. The first question concerns HCE, the second is about ALP, the third the motto of Dublin, the fourth is Dublin (as told by the respective historians of the four main cities of Ireland), the fifth Old Joe, the sixth Kate, the seventh concerns the 12 Murphys, the eighth the 28 Rainbow girls or Magdalene girls, the nineth is the core vision of FW, the kaleidoscope of history, the tenth Issy, the eleventh is Mick or Shaun and the twelth is about Nick or Shem.

P. 126

So?

Who do you know [of the characters of FW] tonight, ladies and gentlemen?

There is an echo way back in the woods: call him forth!

(Shaun, son of Earwicker, a postman, all for a bottle of Jameson whiskey, rated one hundred and ten percent in his responses to this nightly quiz about the 12 apostles, as set by Shem, son of Earwicker. In his answers, he misunderstood the aim in number three, and in number four referred to the Four Historians [instead of just Dublin])

1. [Question one is a list of desciptive phrases concerning HCE – most are included here, mainly for navigational purposes]. What second-to-none mythical erector and bridgemaker:

• was the first [man] to rise taller in his history [beens-tale] than the blue gum or the baobab or the gigantic ‘Wellington’ Sequoia;
• dirtied the Liffey when he swam in the nude up at the source [sex with ALP/Issy];
• is known to have a cloud [Issy] around his head at Howth Head;
• sports a [fob] watch over the Dutch opulence [his clothing, Cad incident];
• thought he was Newton when he felled his apple [ALP];
• gave everyone the freedom of choice at his midnight fall between yesterday and tomorrow;
• the rainbow girl[s] played on his big white hearthrug [Jarl v.H.];
• is recognised as a god in his house as he is in heaven;
• pumped the catholic water [ALP/Issy] and shocked protestant boys [3 soldiers][i.e. the Sin];
• killed himself in anger as a young man [perhaps referring to the replacement of the Irish god with the Middle Eastern?];
• fed his family during the flood [Noah];
• was in Cornwall with an Irish tutor [King Mark];

P. 127

• a notable one moment, then roadkill the next;
• bred many sons to vie for his one leap-year daughter;
• is fishy as in ‘Finnegan’, and like an insect as in ‘Earwicker’;
• like a crystal prism, embodies true and false for us;
• was a hunchback and had ill-fitting garments [Norwegian captain];
• once he was buried [Betrefender/interred] and once he was arsoned [shot in backside by Buckley] and once he died in a flood [van Hoother], and ALP hung him out to dry [tales during washing];
• has a tale about telling a Cad what o’clock it is [i.e. 12 noon];
• gets excited if there is a girl’s leg before him;
• found coal at the end of his rainbow [grave?], and Miss Roses behind the scenes [heliotrope?];
• made a fort or city out of his house and had a motto on his buckler [Dublin];
• is like Houdini when escaping from his hiding places;
• if as fox he outsmarts the dogs, he acts ‘whitely’ to schoolkids [gives tobacco to them in Cad stories];
• he shat himself at the appearance of 3 soldiers while beseeched by 2 servant girls [Sin];
• in all aspects of his life, from his body to his position of power, he is the result of the spin of a coin;
• a tower of a man, a lighthouse amongst those in darkness, he casts his sunbeams on the deep;
• he thunders threats upon males but whispers to the girls;
• when the hunchbacked king [R. III] falls off his horse those at Bosworth cheered, but they oohed and aahed when his death was acted by Luke Plunkett;
• [there is a letter] written by ‘so-and-so’ and ‘such a party’ all about him and a lady in this city;
• his normal life consisted of business, reading newspapers, smoking a cigar, eating etc, and he took minerals, would wash, go out and hear the local news with coffee, peruse the comics at a newsagents [HCE as mass-man];
• in those days he was their hero;
• his minerals or washing items: ‘Pink Sunset Shower’, ‘Red Clay Cloud’ [Adam], ‘Sorrow of the Sahara [Sarah], ‘Oxide of Iron’ [shield of Erin];
• he was arraigned and detained, then tried in court where he pleaded, and the charges were proved;
• cashes his cheque at the Bank of England then endures his doom at Chapelizod [Phoenix Park];
• he had the brain of the Franks, the hands of a Christian [Hans Christian Anderson], and tongue of the north [northern language i.e. he was Scandinavian];
• like Don Giovanni he invited the Commander to dinner to call the bluff;
• is hit on the hat and has a headache all the afternoon;
• plays the dirty rat when he’s in earnest, but misses his ‘Mousey’ when he’s lusty;
• walked as far as Howth Head where interred he lies, or sits, in ‘State’ as the ‘Rump’ [parliament];
• with traces of English architecture and framed in an orange window, we see the kaleidoscopic lights [picture of his city], with two remarkable swimming pools [Issy’s - urination] and three recesses [soldiers];
• his arches are supported and his navel goes back to the year dot [Ulysses];
• is…

P. 128

… like an unstoppable clock and the Big Ben of all belles;

• he was, he is and he will be, even though he’s mildewed and his gravestones are mouldy;
• he is a queer cuss in a forest, but plain when a member of a Megalopolis [Dublin];
• as mighty as a mountain, but as fleet as a faun;
• while a plank in the platform of our culture, he’s not shown on the escutcheon;
• he is enumerated by the landscape, as old as an earl, but he counts the seconds [until his return];
• a ship-shaped or bug-looking letter [an ‘E’ turned on its back or front – HCE interred or risen];
• he brought law into our lives, and by his will made our manners change – and built his villa over our homes;
• he sent many underground [death] and put water on the fiery devils [deuce?];
• his sons went whooping for joy when they saw his blackened arse [shooting of Russian General] and his daughter showed herself after he falls for her [sin in Park];
• preserves the shame [puder] of all people and is sport for all Dublin [Pale];
• gave his bad foot to Shem, Anna Livia her pinch, his fine hair to Issy [cherry] and the motto ‘what are you laughing at’ to all his sons;
• made Wellington behave like an English duke rather than an Irish gentleman;
• bonked two prostitutes and then fought with three soldiers minus clothing [‘draughts’ - sin in the park];
• interred into the landscape, he fumes like a volcano at his fate;
• men should be in fear of him, women mourn him, by gad!;
• snow now falls on Howth, his head, like ashes of repentance for those who shed his blood;
• peace and rest, a trinity god;
• went into town for the police but went by the wayside [?];
• hail to those who find him, but stop if you’re still looking;
• those who once had so much, now have nothing [Fall];
• Hock [Shaun - wine] is leading, Cocoa [Shem] is next, but the Emery [third combined character] tries to win;
• to his own music he dances the dance of life, but like a dancing bear;
• [the sin] took place before an international convention of midwives [ALP] but he was killed before the congress for the study of international calamities;
• his crime was an entrée before he was killed [for the sin] between the sweets [women] and the savouries [the soldiers];
• flouting all prophecies, he went to find fun and fighting in the fairground [the sin];
• he cleared out the legacy of all other males, and set himself up as the one god for all women;
• the flawed prince [Shaun], the grasping one [Shem], the kindler of paschal fire [holy ghost in HCE trinity];
• forbids our trespasses even as we forgave his;
• let him rise like a Phoenix, his cinders his sire!;
• he piles his mountain [Howth] on little hills, as though they were the pillars of Hercules;
• has an Oedipus Complex…

P. 129

… and a bent for drinking to the dregs;

• sausages are for chumps [Issy] and cow’s meat for kitchen-help [soldiers][??];
• when he wants our favour, [he signs a letter] ‘very truly yours’;
• two psychic espousals [come-ons from girls in Park] and three deserters [soldiers];
• it may be all matter-of-fact now but he was the father/fucker of the maid then;
• the Capitol Hill [of the catamite] reared up by tresses, sank again under the strain [of the soldiers];
• he was tanked up [as alcohol] and thought up [G. denken?], as the tailor tells the [ship’s] agent [tout];
• umbrella [condom] for a man, but a mere thimble for a maid [contraceptive device – Bk III.4];
• [with condom/he was a] blimp [that went] ‘blump’;
• he is like a ‘letter’ from the dead, a sing-a-song of Sybil;
• a sentence of his letter reads ‘Sir, cease!’;
• while his Dublin stands, women will fall for him;
• [HCE] while he developed in Ireland, he was spawned abroad [foreign gods/emigrants];
• as it has been since the beginning, it ended in a battle to be boss;
• Roderick O’Connor, you’ve gone the way of the Danes [i.e. displaced];
• he is [like a deity] catalogued under a number of different names, and regularly regroups [after a fall];
• a bushboy’s holiday [soldier’s on leave?], a Quaker’s meeting [HCE’s sin and silence], a wench’s sandbath [burial of HCE];
• [HCE] is the same heather-covered, lost-cheque egg as when he heard ‘sorry I barely blew ye’ [Finnegan]
• his fall was real, but the subsequent reports were false;
• mad when in a spa, but sane at his pub;
• half a million population by the census, but [Dublin is] not planned out like Haussmann’s Paris;
• [interred as Howth Head] he is the closest we have to the Andies, and a good place to lay down your lover [hump/Ulysses]
• he handed over his leadership to the new patricians, but he and the plebs still believe in the brutal old ways;
• eats with an open door, but shuts it when he ruts [Bk III.4];
• some dub him Rothschild and others Rockefeller;
• shows his trouser flies to two fair maidens, but tries to cover his traces to the three soldiers;
• seven rainbow girls [or Greek towns] claim to have been the home to this homing pigeon;
• he is independent of temporal powers, but acknowledges the rule of the Pope in Rome;
• we saw his youthful form - Domhnall [song];
• he smells like a cheese from home, and looks like an Ear [Earwicker ‘listens’];
• lodged in many places and lived through many reigns;
• has Saturday for his weekend, and Sunday for his resurrection;
• after a good bout at football [stoolball: watching football?, Buckley?] he enjoys the twin sisters;
• what the raven missed and the dove found [brought leaves to Noah’s ark];
• believes that everyman is his own gold-keeper, and in ‘Africa for the blacks’ [arch-conservative];
• the arc of his batting hit was forty degrees [forty bonnets = ALP – Bk III.4] and his stumps were knocked at 80 [runs/years];
• he is boasted as the oldest creator in Erin and looks down on the Swiss mountains which he calls the ‘new rocks’;
• though his heart, soul and spirit turns to the far off times of the Pharaohs, his love, faith and…

P. 130

… hope is with the future;

• chorus girls smile at him to his face, while grim-faced boors curse him behind his back;
• between the lasses and lads a glimpse of Heaven;
• his mountain peak has an ear [lug], and Loki has his pile [of wealth?];
• he drinks like Thor and Wotan for his asthma and eats an imperishable boar to stave off Ragnarock [destruction of the Norse gods];
• cloaked beggars recline around his pedestal [statue in Don Giovanni?] while whores wink at him from the sidewalks;
• [buried] at Christmas at Advent Lodge, New Zealand, after a lengthy illness, the reverend Mr Easterling, with no followers [of the hearse] by request, a private funeral;
• gone to where glory awaits him [a song], but not here yet [not resurrected];
• defiled minxes under articles [of their clothing] but finished as a ‘Borgia’ [reputation?];
• from the draught beer, through to the butter in the dark, to the Battle of the Boyne [?];
• is A1 at his highest, but is crude at his root;
• filled himself with blueberries when [food was] luck and a toss-up for him as a youngster, before he fell drunk from wine [hock] and discovered the use of reason [or grapes];
• eats aliments, gives dole [money], breaks rustics, tames turmoil;
• has seed enough for sowing, but inseminates skivvies on the sly;
• learned to speak with sign language before he could use his ears to understand the Irish;
• hacked his way through this and that, but hanged himself [with help] from the rafters;
• [hanged from?] Rialto Bridge, Annesley Bridge, Binn Bridge and Balls Bridge, to say nothing of Tolka and Newcomen Bridge;
• the gleam of the sun, through to the dirt on the bricks of the old house of his children’s home, has dust turned all brown [wild man of Borneo rhyme];
• his tartan of was rainbow hues [rainbow coat];
• long gone, but not forgotten;
• withstood the assault of [the potato] famine but grew bigger and bigger;
• he has 24 cousins cities called Dublin in the USA, and there’s a Lublin in Poland;
• the first syllable of his name is a young rose [Bud] his second is the Nile in French [Nil] and the two make up a slump in Christies [Null Bid, i.e. anagram of Dublin];
• from his rib came the woman of his dream [Eve], and because blood is thicker than water he lost trade overseas [??];
• a shopkeeper with a glinty look or Bishop of Glendalough, the hod-carrier or Earl of Howth;
• you and I are constituted of him, and the surrounding brown buildings;
• Erin’s free port, perhaps, but the emperor’s city always;
• he was one of your high-born boys, but fancy him smoking cigarettes at his time of…

P. 131

…life;

• [he went] from the mountain of a goatherd to the Magh Meall plain of paradise;
• had two cardinal virtues [two girls] and three capitol sins [soldiers];
• has a look in his pocketbook, and has a packet boat in his care [Norwegian captain seeking a suit?];
• [has the following false titles?] B.V.H., B.L.G., P.P.M., T.D.S., V.B.D., T.C.H., L.O.N.;
• is Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Supper;
• acting as though the streets were paved with gold, he touched his topiary haircut [or in the cold streets he was a toper in the open air];
• taught himself to skate, but soon after learned how to fall;
• he is ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’;
• he Haveth Childers Everywhere [HCE], and they want to murder him;
• a Viking offender, Sergeant Paddy or Ottoman ruler [middle east];
• overwhelmed by the many, he is remembered as a Priam rather than the Paris of his sons [?];
• first among the fenians, he was of the last kings;
• his crown could not be filled by anyone else, till one William Fail from Westminster felled him [Gladstone vs Parnell];
• was struck out of his seat when he rowed to Damascus, and then to our appalling predicament came plagues from Budapest [Christianity?];
• with a match head he set the living bush on fire [?];
• he was sparing with the rod and so spoiled the lightning [Stephen/Nothung];
• married with cakes [letter] and repented with pleasure;
• he was happy until he was buried, and he made the skies ring with ‘Up Micawber’! [‘me Kyber’?];
• Osiris at the top of the staircase, but he is also the carrion on the mat of straw;
• as Mohammed, a spiderweb [ALP] hid the mouth of the cave where he had hidden, but the nestlings [children] that live in the leafy screen sing of him all over the forest;
• we clap [?] at his bloody war record, but we are pledged to his green mantle [leafy canopy as tree/Irish cause?];
• our friend the Viking king, but also our sworn foe;
• he lies under the four stones [historians] who lost their sorrow with the joy at looking at shells [archaeology?];
• the hills looked down on the confused battle until readiness and fearlessness strewed him over the last of his fields;
• we grieved for you, father [adulterer], in the year of mourning, but we’ll fiddle to the stars when the morning light shows its first sunbeam;
• his striped pantaloons, his rather strange walk [?];
• [HCE] a lofty column inherited [Wellington monument];
• [HCE] the holy garment [HCE wears a rainbow coat/tartan];
• nods while napping, but calls ‘cheerio’ when they get religious;
• is split in the middle [two girls] and has integrity eliminated by three upon one and which is determined by inspection to be improper [?];
• has the most comical headpiece of Confucian shape [bump] and that chin of his is moving like a Chinese kangaroo [?];
• he’s hopeful to hold [gasometer contains gas] the two girls [lithium is used for stabilising mental disorders, + lurid = 2] and then was thrice [soldiers] ten…

P. 132

… years before he wallowed round Regents’ Circus;

• on the cobblestones at the opening of his cavern is a loyal dog [Howth Castle?], but only an admiring American could appreciate the appropriateness of his Atlas-like elongation [he is interred into the land];
• sticky rights and lefts [two girls] at Baddersdown in his hunt for the bare truth, but he came to his end with the murderers/reds that came at him in Camden Street [sin];
• a Hannibal [or animal?] in exhaustive conflict, an author to return [transition to Shem];
• a burning body in the chill air of the mountain snow before the waves [Howth?];
• as our father we go to him as sleepy children, but return as strugglers for life;
• he removed his clothes to save the two girls from drowning in the Liffey, but the three soldiers made off with his stolen clothes;
• [his city is] taxed and rated, licensed and ranted [at];
• his three-faced stone head was found on Whitehorse Hill and his footprints are to be seen in the constellation of Capricorn [?];
• lead the blind and tell the deaf [two girls?] and then call dumb, lame and halty [soldiers/Trinity?]; miracle of a big arse and a monster of a ‘bird’;
• led the applause at the Creation [play] and hissed a charming snake off the stage [or created Earth and law and defeated Lucifer…];
• as the hounded, he became the hunter then as the hunter he became the fox;
• harrier – hound, ‘marrier’ – hunter, terrier – terror, death [?];
• Olaf the Ostman Viking, Turko the Terrible [Norse gods replaced by middle eastern god?];
• you feel he is Vespasian [urinal], yet you think of him as Aurelius [golden];
• Whig, commercial Tory, socialist, communist [he’s all of them…];
• made a summer assault on our shores and by god he got his hands full; [Patrick?]
• first he shot [a cannon?] down Raglan Road and then he tore up Marlborough Place;
• Cromleach and Crommal Hills were his far-flung footrests as our lurcher [hunting dog/sprinter?] lout was let free to the lover he loved;
• Marshalled his citizens and cut off the men [?];
• Weighted before eating, he hardly weighs a thing, but weighed after meals, weighs as much as Dublin;
• Ireland prayed for his conversion, England missed the grand old voice [of Gladstone];
• a Colossus among cabbages [Earwicker in Bk1.2], the all-fruits of fruit;
• larger than life, and braver than death;
• the Sultan of Turkey [Middle East], fermenter of grain;
• a Luxemburger [lax], he leaps like lean salmon;
• the sparkle of his fancy, the depth of his calm sagacity…boundless benevolence [tongue-in-cheek inscription?];
• our family forbear [Mahon], our tribal tax collector [turnpike Bk1.2];
• how was he convicted, and why was he murdered?;
• he partitioned the Danes in Ireland, but united Irishmen;
• he took a sip of his own mother[-in-law], but she tasted bitter, and as for the salmon he had indigestion from it all his life;
• [CEH], come, hurry up, Huckleberry and Tom Sawyer yourself [comes back to life], will you;

P. 133

• silent as a bee preserved in honey, cold as breath on Howth;
• Costello, Kinsella, Mahony, Moran, though you roam Amorica, your home ruler is Dan [O’Connell];
• [in an illustration…] the figure on the right shows HCE hanged by the neck, the figure on the left shows his ‘body’ being distributed as patties to the crew [Eucharist];
• one son asks whether HCE was poisoned, one son wonders how much did he leave [in his estate];
• an ex-gardener [Bk1.2] (the mountain of a man) owned such plantations on which Rosy O’Greedy (the mite of a woman) could use her little hose;
• the sails are taut with wind, and the sailors are scrubbing the decks, but the oiled-silk lobsterpot [or ‘dear pet’ ALP] makes his aquarium [or raincoat];
• he took his enjoyment in Quay prostitutes, and employed detectives;
• a sponsor to a squad of javelin throwers, he was ally to a host of soldiers [‘rawl chocolates’ Bk1.1, Persse O’Reilly];
• he is insured against many disasters…;
• he can rant and rave gravely but also chat as gaily as any joker from Oporto [?];
• is unhesitant in his unionism [either unionism?], and yet a bigoted nationalist;
• Sylvia [in the Park] is shy of him, but the sailors [i.e. the soldiers] think he’s a joke;
• he has the sins of peace in his war chest;
• his fiefdom is his home, a nine hundred and thirty nine year lease;
• his pub is always open for sake of the city, except at night-time when he makes love to Janus [ALP/Issy];
• he is such a cosmopolitan – he loves the small pickles of the Jewess and sulks if any Catholic decries the Huguenots and their poplins;
• he is all the players of the great battles, Bonapart, the Duke of Wellington, Field Marshall Blucher, and the gardener;
• to one person he’s fat and a judge, to another he’s full of beans [lively/hot air] and a judge;
• he’s an hallucination or a dream [HCE];
• he was like a father ‘Blacksheep’ until he grew so white and woolly;
• he was dramatised in The Last of the Fianna and put to music by Schubert;
• he is remembered by the sons of Patrick and the Wexford boys hail him as Babu [It. ‘Dad’ – used in Joyce household];
• he indemnified himself with borrowed tribute and was sent to Borstal [Dublin was given by the pope to Bristol];
• he was born in three places, and was buried in three places;
• now that his likeness is branded onto the earth [interred], he gives rest to the rainbow girls [?];
• liberty, fraternity and equality – sort of;
• his first son makes a virtue of necessity [Shaun], while his other upsets his mother with all his invention [Shem];
• put silk on his sides and he’s the second city in the Empire, but undo his stockings and his clothes and he’s the true master;
• he calls upon his parliament in place of appealing to any of us;
• he’s the king [in many languages];
• in the mouth of danger…

P. 134

… he bared his backside at Balaclava [Russian General];

• [Dublin] is either El Dorado or just at the ends of the earth;
• an enclosure of four fires, or a pubcrawl of five pubs [X with donkey?];
• spent many pounds to hunt down his family ancestors, then quickly tried to hush up the facts [about the two girls and Buckley];
• he created all the people, then dragooned them as his soldiers;
• pipped as the inventor of beer, as grim as Peter the Great;
• he is the darling of the arts and the demimonde, and trouble at a club;
• he enjoyed the two nurses [prostitutes] but three-to-one [soldiers] tipped the scale against him;
• he had the title role opposite a brace of actresses on the Silver Screen, but in the next sequence was cast as Richard III by Tom, Dick and Harry [i.e. 3 soldiers];
• he can get on [the cross at Easter] as early as 22^nd of March, but occasionally he doesn’t come off before 25^th April;
• his Indian name is Have-Papooses-Everywhere and his special number is seven - for the stars in the Plough [and Rainbow colours];
• [as Huckleberry Finn] he took weapons in Pike County and went fishing for eels;
• moves in Viconian Cycles and renews himself;
• [now interred into the landscape] only the drain rats bless his rubbish while the birds curse the floodlights [installed into Phoenix Park];
• the port, the aqueduct, the terracotta pipes – the remains of Persse O’Reilly;
• he pours into the soft-clad Venus [Botecelli painting of Birth of Venus standing on shell] the hard cash he earned in Watling St [name of Roman road];
• that his birth was accidental just shows that his death was a grave mistake;
• [as Finn] he brought us ivy [green?] from the ancient hunting grounds and thundered at Rome [St Patrick] with his Gaelic gall;
• happy that young girls turn into women, but not so happy that young boys turn into heavy, swearing, strong-smelling, irregular-shaped men;
• he is Harald Fairhair and Olaf the White;
• [like a Pharoah or Tristan] he would marry his aunt and produce nephews;
• listen and keep quiet – put up a screen and you will see him [a movie e.g. BkIII.4];
• Now an archbishop, now a tradesman [his Everyman resurrections follow the wheel of fortune]
• [HCE’s Dublin was once] an ancient ford of a brook, where a small boat landed;
• [HCE’s] rainfall is the urination of two young girls, when three [soldiers] marked him out on the grass [interred into the landscape];
• [laid out from Howth across Dublin] he has both the melting point of snow and the boiling point of alcohol;
• he had a tussle with the whores and then does himself justice [falls at the hands of the soldiers];
• his existence is hinted at in the study of the four final things [4 Historians] and he was sniffed out by the Theban writers of the Book of the Dead;
• the king…

P. 135

…was in Cornwall being Mark the Merry, the queen was amongst the trees deeply in love and feeling fine and ‘furry’, the maids were in the hedge, pulling up their hose, when out jumps the blackguards and used pump guns on him;

• to all his forebears he reared a stone, and for his descendents he planted a tree [his two sons are the stone and tree];
• forty acres, sixty miles?? union jack? brought his fleet into the Liffey (King William IV of Bk 1.2?];
• he missed Mrs Porter [ALP] to sit with Miss Pimp-Loco [Issy], but they taught him to stand for a suit [Norwegian Captain??];
• HCE as the Dutch lord [William of Orange] preferable over all others;
• [his history is kept by] Edmund, king and martyr, Dunstan in the east, Peter the Poor in Stone, Bartholomew the Great at the Exchange [4 churches/Historians];
• he hastens to the girls ‘Truth’ and ‘Wedding-Hand’, like Prince Orange of Nassau, while he has the trinity [soldiers] left behind him like the murderer Billy and the Bowl [did to his victims];
• [his Dublin once had names like] the brow of hazelwood, the dark pool, and [names were changed from the old Irish ones] like Blowicks became Bullocks, and a well of artesia became a bird of Arabia [the Irish name of a well was transformed into ‘Phoenix Park’][middle east];
• his handwriting was on the city wall, in his flowery Germanic language;
• his birthspot lies in the beyond the Hellespont [Middle East] and his burial plot is in Dublin Cemetery;
• [he founded] the oldest kiosk [Turkish Parliament] on the peninsular [Middle East], and the youngest hostel in Ireland;
• he made all the streets and filled them with night lights [street lights/brothel lights];
• his big wide arse was blown across fifteen acres and the White Horse symbol [for William III] is painted on dozens of doors;
• sorrowfully, many of his progeny went to America;
• but his sons and daughters, Huns and Tartars, are here in plenty today;
• he repulsed the cannon-fire from the East [Middle East] and cut deep with his sword;
• his persona is a problem and his location is an enigma;
• when he is upright, he chases rainbows in the field [2 prostitutes], and uses cannons in the field of war, but when he is dead he is the land over which the river circulates through Dublin;
• apart from the whole as a support for a while [i.e. interred];
• [the subject of the letter:] “Dear Howth Castle Esquire, were delighted with our outing and are looking forward to an early summer, Rhoda Dendrum” [on Howth];
• [Howth Head] is above fruit-tree level and outside the region for legumes;
• when he is old he’ll resemble his spouse ALP;
• models can be built resembling him, and his name can be written on a wall, then scrubbed off again;
• the night train whistle sings his name, a song written by birds on a stave of electricity wires;
• though now crawling with lice and maggots, he is the subject of evangelising priests;
• [the basis of all religion] he is a quiet as…

P. 136

…mosque, but can be as noisy as a synagogue;

• was in paradise when his days were balmy, but became mud [or maudlin or Dublin] after his head was cracked [Humpty Dumpty/Joyce’s skull cracked as a child];
• after searching the seas he lauds about at ease, with one girl on his lap and another on his knee [2 prostitutes?];
• his beer [porter] is powerful, and his sons are the toast of Broadway;
• all over the world he is exalted then overthrown, re-created then blown apart [in a cycle];
• expelled from society he is then missed and his return is awaited [hopefully] to stop us feeling disgusted with ourselves;
• bored with the east, he leapt the infernos sea, swam a river and crossed the Moyle sea into Ireland [Middle East];
• in Ireland, there he was fat, greasy and graceful [?];
• there was no age or scurvy and he founded a city;
• he bore the crest of a raven and a dove on a mountain [Moses];
• [in his descendents] he became a multitude of people, which confused his valet and wife;
• he became a brewer and made ale [to soothe?] the nettles of his rashness;
• he built the roofs of churches and houses, and made sure people had food;
• he was waiter, circus entertainer and chief gardener;
• he bought drinks for drunks and was the subject of writers who would topple him;
• he still makes our hair stand on end, but at the same time gets our goat;
• he man with a notebook on a ferry, and the hardman on a gun-run;
• our dad, [the brutal conquerer] Tamerlane the Tartar;
• puzzling some, startling others, but always perturbing;
• [as turnpiker – I.2] he went puffing after the king in his borough but went onto more modern customs, doffing his opera hat to everyone;
• composed of bits of genetic pieces from various ancestors, he’s a cutlass left to us from antiquity
• he was a young head on old shoulders, with his neck of a middlish age;
• [CHE] a herring in the daytime, but a sleepy giant tarpon in the night [i.e. interred into the landscape]
• he was like Orion, chameleon-like, but changed the end of history by leavening his bread, or leaving a loaf [having children], with ‘Forty Bonnets’ [ALP];
• she drove him deaf [deaf when interred] till he put up the blind [let the sun in – resurrected in Book IV]
• the doves [girls] are all over him [statue] during the day, but at night the dark ravens [3] set traps for him behind Kingstown Harbour;
• a triumph of the repertory, comfortable in the privy and prosperous in his pub;
• his head is made of wood [tree] and his feet are clay [Dublin] [i.e. interred];
• he flattened trees when he fell in Phoenix Park, but to fill the vacuum, stone [monuments] were set up [tree/stone];
• he looks like a mountain boulder, and sounds like a rude word [Howth – Thoth/Egyptian writer god?]
• remembered with whiskey, lemon peel …

P. 137

…and sugar, and a dash of boiling water;

• three Irishmen took shots [up guards and at ‘em] at him [when he was] Wellington in his saddle;
• was married to Grania, but she made off with Dairmaid, ‘swank and swarthy’;
• once a diamond cut garnet, but now Diarmaid cuts Grania;
• now you might find him at the pub;
• [slurred] there’s his bowl and where’s his liquor and here is his big white arse, hic;
• Swedish and English, he is the likeliest villain;
• Henry Cockerel – egg company [Humpty Dumpty?];
• we take tea and scratch our fleas [in Dublin] around the foot of the sad-urn [i.e. HCE interred] mountain [Howth?];
• as Finn, built the Lund Cathedral, but in other times destroyed the church’s lands;
• whoever knew his real name could take the glory for his deeds [or his property];
• [as common as] meat and potatoes, or fish and chips;
• the Duke of Wellington;
• [the body at] Huge Belly’s Funeral
• crazy hillbilly??
• heard out in a secret room [& we hear him from his ‘pictures’] and then excoriated [& executed];
• he is celebrated when his meeting benches are filled, but he’s despised after being shot in the back;
• spawned in heaven, born in chaos but a man on earth [typical mythological ingredients of heroes and gods]
• his [unknown] father must have conjoined with his mother while on the job [Roman soldier and Mary?] and his mother must have ‘worked’ her fair body;
• his footprints can be seen in an archaeological dig: a commander unhorsed by searing sand [& Magazine wall, whores, soldiers…]
• [these days he might be] captain of the fire brigade and reportedly friendly with the police;
• the [genetic] door is still open [for his return];
• wearing old fashioned clothes, he may come back;
• don’t forget when he was last here you laughed at his white trousers and hairy legs;
• through Kersse the Tailor, he was married to ALP with her auburn tresses [Bk II.3];
• when his ‘kettle’ became just a skull in the earth [i.e. after his Fall] the soldiers set the Liffey on fire;
• his letter was concocted by the master of essays [Shem] and his hallmark was recognised by silver-plate [second–rate] standards [i.e. the Letter and its signature];
• Icarus flying with his false wings and tail or a fan for getting the ‘wind up’ [frightened] [also the 2 prostitutes and three soldiers];
• a giant who lights his pipe with a burning bush and whose shoes are towed by a horse;
• foments revolution amongst slaves, lancing a baron’s boils;
• a travelling salesman who is caught in a bedroom;
• is a judge, a priest, a farmer and a baker [?];
• as a prospector he had a rucksack, but as spectre [after the Fall], he holds the whole stake;
• he won the freedom of New York for the young;
• in the first age he is active, in the second, passive, but in the third he is self-righteous;
• with laughs and misinformation, he overcomes salty tears [?Lot’s of Fun at Finnigan’s Wake]
• heard the story Issy told to her Grand Old Man and spent his whole life…

P. 138

…by the fireside, wondering whether it was the mountain brew or the onions that was making him cry [?];

• [after the Fall] his troubles are over, but new incarnations of him are still to come;
• the earwig trapper, and the earwig that spoils our peas [peas in a pod riddle];
• as the Wellington Monument, he stands in Phoenix Park, nor far from the sea, and Dublin, the town of his three attackers/sons, importunes him;
• grown out of civilised humanity, he makes war in Europe;
• he made songs and words [the Letter], and pounds and pence, but he also wants to reproduce himself with young maids [the Sin], rural and plural [Plurabelle];
• has large rings [to give to girls?] and is unusually perfumed [from contact with girls?];
• he lusts as he listened to the clear whispers of a chemise;
• a prince of the Fingals [Irish warriors] in an Irish story full of holies [Patrick etc];
• he has an Englishman to ferry him, a Frenchman to carry him, a Belgian for his bearer and a German with a switch [fan?] [Four historians];
• was waylaid by a cad with a pistol and shot by Buckley;
• kicks lintels when he’s in his cups [sleeps in doorways?] and gives Jacob’s arrowroots and dimes to poor waifs;
• reads Hans Christen Anderson in the evenings [before he slips away], but about Ivan the Terrible in the morning [when he resurrects];
• smooth talks you to your face, and slaps himself when he’s bathing [his story as told by the washerwomen?];
• owns the biggest beer barrel [biggest arse] ever seen in the Mullingar pub;
• was born with a silver tongue and went around Erin lifting his hand to Sin [or to describe the Picture];
• raised two fingers [to the Sin] and smelt them all day [or, could raise only two fingers, but could smell the coming daylight of his resurrection];
• he could found a Holy See in Dublin easier than you or I could find a common coin in Amsterdam;
• to live with him is a nightmare [of history] but to know him is a liberal education;
• has ‘dipped’ into two prostitutes, Hoily Olives and Scent Otooles [or was embalmed and buried at St Laurence OToole’s church];
• his enthusiasm for cricket [sex] annoys preachers;
• turns the deaf ear of Darius [Middle East] to the infuriated son of god;
• made man [with a penis] and minted money for them [to buy sex?];
• likes a six o’clock pudding when he’s at home sweet home [?]
• has come through the era of history to selling porter in a pub;
• William I Henry VIII, Charles II, Richard III;
• if [his mother?] sounded like a mandrake shrieking in the convulsions of his birth, women will wail [in childbirth] after the rotter is resurrected;
• looses weight in moonlight [after death] but is like a girder at the dawn [of resurrection];
• with one touch…

P. 139

…of nature sets the veiled sex grinning and went close to going for the three soldiers [three castles on Dublin coat of arms];

• who saw with one glance a salmon speared, hunters pursuing a deer, a ship in full sail and a white-robed priest raising the host;
• regarded flattery [dimly] like King Canute, and like Cincinnatus turned his back on power;
• is father and grandfather and a hoary Father Buck Naked [Adam] in towns old and new
• drinks a quart and finds a bride [?] when his ship’s in town on the haven;
• he’s whiskery on his head, and stout at his base;
• he stutters as he falls and goes entirely mad when he’s resurrected;
• is a Tree in the early morn, but a stone tomb in the night;
• and has had the best baked bricks in old Babylon with which he constructed the walls of Dublin?

Answer: Finn MacCool! [i.e. HCE]

2. The second question is: Who’s your mother Mick?

The answer is [in lines of six or seven syllables in the text]:

When I turn my eyes

From suburban prospects,

My son’s bosom

Sees with pride

That bridge and

Fortress builder,

With his woman, so garrulous by night,

Sleeping by his side.

Anna Livia, the slip of her,

So the mountains whisper of her

And the icebergs of Iceland

Melt in waves of fire,

And her spooning poetry

And her ‘tickle me on your knee’,

Make the raging Ocean [Ossian]

Kneel and play a lyre.

If Humphrey was a Dane, Ann’s dirty [‘mixed blood’?]

If he’s plain, she’s pretty

If he longs for her, she’s flirty,

With her auburn streams of hair

Her coy cajoleries

And Dublin drolleries,

To rouse him to put his rudder up

And quench his dreams.

If either hot Hammurabi [a king of Babylon]

Or cold Ecclesiastes

Could see her playful pranks

They’d burst their self-imposed bounds

Renounce their rueful interment

And denounce whatever they had been doing

In favour of her river, forever

And a night, Amen!

3. The third question is: what is the motto for those ticking and teak thatched houses, painted over with darkness [as HCE sleeps], where a snake lies under cover, and birds of prey are in the brothels, and maids go to convents, and a [U. black] panther was seen – it is not ‘a crofters suburb’, nor ‘the foreign home of the three soldiers’, nor a ‘Haralby’s the grocers’, or ‘Vatican the vintners’, nor the ‘Houseboat’ or the ‘Beehive’, nor ‘Nighttown’ or ‘Phoenix Park’, nor ‘One Square Room’ [FW symbol] or ‘Dublin Downs’, nor the ‘Mayor and …

P. 140

…his Minx’, nor named after any of its pubs, nor ‘Nothing Grand, Nothing Splendid’, nor ‘It was, It is, It will be’, nor ‘“It wasn’t me”, said Lucifer’.

The Answer is the motto of Dublin: ‘Your fatness reflects the well-being of the globe’ [or The Citizen’s Obedience makes for the Happiness of the City’]

4. Question four is: What Irish capitol city (dear o dear!) with a Celtic beginning, but ruinous end (dust to dust) boasts, a) the largest public park in the world, b) the largest brewing industry, c) the widest street in the world, and, d) the most horse-loving, god and drink worshipping population of paupers in the world: answer using a, b, c, d.

Answer: [it is something of trick question because while it appears to refer to just Dublin, the answer refers to the four cities associated with the Four Historians who come into their own in Book 3.]

a) Belfast. The hammers of my heart will be banging against your ribs, my flaxen lass, and you’ll be shivering with sinful sobs when we ride a like a new ship down the causeway into a wedded life.

b) Cork. And where can you have such good times as on the whiskey as I engage you with my soft accents, you beneath me with vines in your hair, and your hands braceleting your slim ankles and your mouth rising [to kiss] following my slivery speech.

c) Dublin. We’ll be happy on the mill’s money, and he’ll be soon leaving you, when I have my own Georgian’s mansion lawn to recruit upon, with a panful of soybeans and whiskey in one hand, and a Guinness in the other, while you churn the butter as I drowse in the garden.

d) Galway. I hooked my…

P 141

…totty down in Spanish Place, two of ’em I take, ‘Holy Hell and Sainted Heaven, a rod[of]iron is not your equal!’ she said, leaping like a fish about the lane.

abcd) The bells ring on Shandon steeple,

And we’ll go to mass on Christmas, people,

Shall praise goodness [Guinness], our first Anna nipple [?],

Our pain shall deepen, pay me my fee pence,

Money, not equality! [an alcoholic’s/church’s plaint??]

5. The fifth question goes, What sort of low lad would serve dirty glasses [of ale], empty out the draught stout overflow, milk a vicious goat, scare away children, clean out waste paper baskets, pee around the village, sell newspapers, tobacco and sweets, listen for the church bell, kick would-be frauds out, shriek ‘help’ after burglars, hold the three children, polish the shoes, put out the fires at night, serve his ‘time’ till death, grind his knives, is lewd but godly, sometimes takes the tram, swobs doorways and windows, will do gardening or work in the stable, must understand the Irish language, is preferably a big Jutlander or Norwegian, does all duties without any rights, no commission, mustn’t be a drinker, is a father-in-law, a sound-minded person but an ale inspector, nay, he mustn’t be?

Answer: Poor Old Joe [the old servant of the pub]

6. Question six asks: When heard in the pub, what does the phrase ‘Summon in the House Sweep’ mean?

Answer: (Tock [similar to the repeated ‘Tip’ in the Museyroom episode, where old Kate shows us around]) A glorious bit of sailcloth and beeswax to wipe away the mud of the pigs. I thought it was his stain on the flower [cf Letter], if you ask me, and when he could speak, he called me by my maiden name (Tick). ‘I am your honey, honeysuckle phwhtphwht I am the bee’, and ‘who broke the candles’ and ‘who seen the black current jam for tomorrow’s big picnic’. I hope it’ll pour with rain, praise the climate of old Ireland. I heard…

P. 142

…birds calling while I was spreading the dripping on your sandwiches, thripence a duck’s leg. (Tock.) And ‘who ate the last of the gooseberries’ that were mouldy anyway, and ‘who left that there’ and ‘who put that here’ and ‘who let the Kilkenny [cat] steal the chop’. (Tick.) And ‘who was, you was it?, left the pot in the yard’ and ‘what in the name of St Luke are you rubbing the floor of the lobby with? Shite! You could eat a plateful of that [expensive beeswax?].’ [Tock] [i.e. the answer is Kate Strong, an old servant of the pub]

7.Question 7 asks: Who are those people in our society, like the doorboy, cleaner, soldier etc, the peekaboo tramp, the gunpowder plotter… the porters of the passions… all contributing to the controversial stories arising from their differentiation, who unify their voices in a vote for the Vatican, who must eat old crusts due to the depredation of others, and drink to intoxication, who condone evil by every possible justification, and leave good to be its own reward, who are ruled, roped, duped and driven by those numerous demons the lawyers and fee gatherers. They suffer nightly consternation, enjoy fortnightly fornication, monthly charity and recreation once a year. They are Doyles in the act of deliberation, but Sullivans when they are armed with swords; nine Mors and three MacCarty’s [= 12 apostles].

Answer: the Murphies [i.e. Irish males]

8. Question eight asks: And how are your Maggies? [the 28 rainbow girls/Magdalene laundry girls]

They fight in love and love laughing and smile hating and hate thinking…they live for love and will be wives and rule through rile and ruse in a rose-wreathed…

P. 143

… home, and when marriage comes, with a coach and four, the sweet girl will just have picked one man more.

9. Question nine asks, how do we understand the process of our renewal, our linear basking in the refreshed panorama of the flowering of our culture, for what if an average human, fatigued by his daily labour, hapless behind the shared dreams of accuracy, and a certain as any Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, were at this instant given an instantaneous vision of all the historical ingredients, the different peoples and languages, which persist through history and shape the present – all those ‘yes’ and ‘no’ decisions, the dissolving of one thing into another, that shape the Whole of it – could such a person, even as his wife is asking him to come to bed and sleep away til dawn, behold in that vision what is ‘main’ – even though it has diffracted so that all things and people have melted one into the other before passing away, with people sharing the features of one ancestor or another, and that beautiful distant ancestor that we all share has split like the spectrum of rainbow colours amongst us all – if that person could see where we all came from, what would he be seeing?

Answer: a Kaleidoscope [of all the historical inputs perceived in the present at once – a key concept that lies behind the content and form of Finnegans Wake itself!]

10. Question ten asks: What embitters love more than yearning, what’s our love but a brief burning, until she who draws on the cigarette does to the smoke return? [love is like a nicotine addiction!]

Answer: [Shaun doing an impression of Issy speaking to her mirror image] But listen precious – delicious [chocolates or cakes – cf the letter] - and my what beautiful hands you have, if you didn’t bite your fingernails. I bet you use her [ALP’s] best Parisian cream from her vanity table…

P. 144

…I use it three times a day. By my shawl, when I think of that Clancarthy, the footballer saying ‘Predregast, is that you Innkeeper?’ and he and the fourteen other members of the team baiting my Lord Ornery [HCE] just because they won an ‘egg and spoon’ race at Baldoyle. He [a foreign Lord Ornery?] admires my Irish accent, he said. He is looking for an opening, and wants me to be his beautiful consort. ‘And you must not play the hot one! Always calm!’ such are the Spanish. ‘Come a little closer, please!’ [to put a sweet in her mouth] Simply delightful. Like Julio and Romiette. I haven’t felt like Turkish Delight for ages! This one I will call ‘Squishious, the chocolate with a soul’. They are a mucky lot, and I wouldn’t pay three hairpins for them [cheap chocolates? Footballers?]. Pull! [Pulls out a hairpin]. Come to Erin! [Iran – Middle East]

Don’t forget it has been my expressed wish to go to Show Week which will be coming around again wearing red heels [a big fashion event]. But look what the fool bought me, the cabbage head, [chocolates] Anyway I’ll always have plenty of snappy new garters, me being the one to charm the men, and can live on my loving, even if the revered Mr Polkingtone [Father Michael – or Joyce in an alternate career?] is a million miles away from my youthfulness, the fishmonger Mother Browne [ALP] solicited me for conversations with, with her pot of tea, and him creaking around on his shanks like a crusty old bird. ‘I’m fine, thanks ever! [to the offer of more tea] Ha! O mind your pour quickly. Shall I put it in my mouth? [chocolate or tea cake] Mummm. ‘Funny spot to have a thingy. I’m terribly sorry, I swear to you I am!’ [tea stain of the Letter]

May he never see me in my …

P 145

… birthday clothes, and the white hands rot with leprosy off whatever winking Maggie he goes flirting after, with all her glass jewellery and the jump marks on her stomach. Haha! I suspected Mrs Browne was [having it on with Polkingtone?/a Maggie?]! Sink her [drown her]! May they burn her like a barren ewe!

So Mrs Browne [ALP] says ‘Tea for you?’ ‘Well’, I said, ‘Thanks so much’, and hoped she wouldn’t take it badly if I thought her odd. ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance’: my diaper has more life in it [than Mr Polkingtone] – someone drowned him in ‘drears’, or he was sick from all the ink he uses. Did some little sorrow get past the gates of your pride, I wonder? Am I treading on your clover, sweetness? I’ll kiss you back to life – I mean to make you suffer – and I like to be courted. Did I cheat you, sweet sir? You know I’m tender-hearted, surely you can see through me? Make me laugh, make me cry! Tell me everything you know, speak volumes with your eyes, cast a spell over me, and send me swooning. Call me ‘Loveliness’ and transport me now and for all time! I’d risk a policeman passing by [to kiss him].

Pardon? Did you speak? [Mr Polkingtone] Poetry from Shakespeare? Or choral music? Or something from the Garden of the Soul prayer book? Flesh and immorality, or life in the colonies? O, you mean the struggle for love and the survival of the prettiest? Yes, we often talk about that at home. And once a week I improve on myself – I’m keen on that magazine The New Free Women with the novel inside [by Harriet Shaw Weaver]. I liked the story: ‘Man in a Surplice’ [Polkington/or ‘surplus’]. Let’s get out Bramstoker’s Dracula and read it for a fright! Draw the shades, I’ll beat any son-of-a-monk in the game of love [i.e. block out the vision of anyone out there pining with love]. I’d make his hair bandana burn into two if I ran about with a torch [and pretended to be Dracula?] (and he adores…

P 146

…me, then dies [as in D, ’The Dead’] – but whatever for?) Or burn your hat, if you had one. Am I laughing at you? Not in the least. The reason I said that was because I’m just any old girl, you lovely fellow, and because old somebody [Polkingtone] is not about, my dear Tristan amongst the tulips, like some old pope-defying Lutheran assailing us. He thinks that’s what the vestry is for:

How vain is that hope in cleric’s heart,

Who still pursues the adulterous art,

For sure that rusty gown of his,

Will make fair Sue forget his face!

I hope they threw away his mould, or else we’ll have Belshazzars and Sardanapalus all over the place [Middle Eastern kids], but wait until I’m old enough to vote, and I’ll teach him when to wear his Roman colours. Because I hate the very thought of you [Polkingtone], and was meant to have an engineer from the French college as a husband, and you are married to reading and writing - although that won’t last long now that he is loopy about me, after the day he carried me from the boat to the beach and I left a fair hair on his shoulder to remind him of my softness.

‘Ever so sorry! I beg your pardon [to Polkington], I was listening to myself think, otherwise I would have realised you were really interested in my granny [??]’.

It was a bit like throwing out the shaving water [rather than the baby with the bath water].

‘Here’s my arm, it’s yours. [Polkingtone to her] Move your mouth towards mine, precious. To please me, treasure’.

‘Don’t be a…’

‘I’m not going to! Sh!’

Nothing! A cry somewhere! Bye bye! [she imagines herself being assaulted or losing her virginity?] Here father under the lime trees. You know the big tree near the gravestones. The snakes [soldiers] got him, the nasty man. So cheer up for the love of Mike.

P. 147

… Listen – there’s the train, and the sounds of all the four courts, and the big guy and the eleven boozers [Last Supper/Middle East] causing a nuisance, and my eight and twenty classmates [Rainbow girls]! There’s A B C D… and me! The reformatory boys are in church, so we’re come to feast like grasshoppers and got absolution and penance. When I get married all my girls will sing and bright pigeons all over the world will fly with mistletoe around their necks and a crumb from my cake – we keep all the wrapping paper [the Letter]. Oh my Darling! Close your eyes – now open your lips Pepette [mirror image - for cake/or chocolate], like I used to with Dan Holohan. Whoever would have ears like ours – do you like [the sound of the cake/chocolate wrapper] my silent one [looking into mirror]? Do you like the…

P. 148

…whispering of the paper? Is it not divinely delicious? Isn’t it bad for you? I’ll not open this one, I’m enjoying the sound – why do I prefer it in is dark wrapper, you may ask? It’s like my dress, all gold and silvery, the newest tones that make me look like a princess. Oh yes, there’s a cost for such wrappings, you don’t have to tell me! But I would be sold dear – not like a cheap unwrapped conversation lozenge. I didn’t, or was going to, or thinking of it… but don’t start, you wretch! But have you never spoken about clothes to a girl before? Of course I believe you, my doting liar, when you tell me. I’d love to open [the chocolate wrapper], I live to! Listen, I must know! If you take away my clothes, then bitter will be the forbidden fruit of this hour! It is with my whiteness [of my bridal gown?] I thee woo and with my silk breaths I bind you! Always! As long as lady luck lasts!

Question 11.

If you met on a binge a poor aching exile from Ireland

With his trembling shaking even the trousers on his legs [?],

While his contrary [brother] raged in the wake [aftermath] of his wailing

Like a pugilant roaring lion or Brian O’Lynn;

If he moaned in his miserliness,

Complaining of his…

P. 149

…his plight, playing fox and a louse

Picking then dropping his teeth, or wringing his hands for peace,

A blind blighter playing deaf and dumb, for something to eat;

If he wept when he leapt then he fell with a whimper,

And ‘cold blooded’ for him was as easy as a ‘Blue Monday’, and he ‘made no bones’ without meat,

Took a kiss, cake or a kick each with a sigh, suck or simper,

Was a ‘devil to learn’ and a ‘devil to teach’;

If the Sinn Feiner begged you to save his immortal

Small schoolmaster soul with his, ‘Oh how do you do!’

Breaking wind, and saying that to wine women and song, he was partial,

We don’t think, Jones, we’d care to this evening - would you?

Answer:

[Shaun replies – realising that it is about what he would do for his own brother] No, f**k you! So you think I’m a Bolshevik? And they told you I had a wig? And my lifestyle is not natural? But before refuting the content of this question, it would be better for you to pause and consider the time-money problem from the ‘spatialist’ viewpoint [i.e. why Shaun’s stance on life is correct…]. And you will also notice that the sophistry of Bergson’s time arguments [i.e. Shem’s perspective] are not without ‘money’ characteristics, necessitated by the fairy godmother of misfortune, and that these theories are in reality a chance debasement of the theories of Einstein. The writing is sorrowfully bad and the quality alternatively provincial and erroneous, as the case may be.

‘Such’ is a word often abused by many people. (I’m working out a theory about time because it is really most traumatising [i.e. the Cad].) A person may say: ‘Have you…

P. 150

… seen much of ‘such and such’ these times?’ Meaning, ‘Will you buy me a drink?’ Or as a man might ask a lady: ‘Is So and so, the sword swallower at the Criterion Theatre, the same as Such von such, the writer on the Daily Mail?’ [Shaun is perhaps suggesting that Shem is asking these questions about people to get something, or that they are irrelevant]. Or here is another example: a lecturer at the Hague called Dr Het Ubeleeft asked the question, ‘Why is it that Such and such is like So and so?’ [?]. To which Dr Gedenkje retorted, ‘Thou are a sum of the whole [Aristotle: the sum of the parts greater than the whole] and a son of a whore’. (‘Such and such’ indicates a thing of the same sort.) [Shaun is suggesting that, as we are all similar, questions concerning the difference between people are irrelevant – and so Shem’s question above doesn’t apply to him].

Professer Levi-Bruel, in his talk which caused such uproar about ‘Why am I not born a Gentleman and why am I now speaking about the contents of my intestines’, takes off his gabardine coat and wig to allow us to see that the inception, the descent and end of Man through time is borne out of obscenity, when one takes a longer or far-off view [i.e. we are a jumbling together of the sexes down through time – the kaleidoscope], and [listening to this] I can easily believe in my own theory that the immensity of space…

P. 151

…is mirrored in my own microcosm, when I consider that the space occupied by my books [volumes] outweighs their subject matter like a globe compared to a vacuum. [??] I need not apologise for an intentional downtrodding of my foes (contrary to the new Italians and old Parisians who say I’m wrong because of their revolt from Romanticism). Professor Levi-Bruel finds, from an experiment holding an egg and watching a watch boil in a witch’s cauldron - though it’s like a rebellion behind the Pope’s back, because the number of square [correct] views will not be diminished by their backstabbing of these clods – is that like all time-champions looking for the escapement device explaining time, it is, like the search for the Holy Grail, all just a waste of time. [i.e. theories such as evolution that distinguish changes in life – and therefore individuals – over time, are not important.] Hear him squawk, that thief, about how well he uses language! What a fine shot! ‘When Mulligan won the gold’, ‘When we were stripping in number three’, and ‘I would like the neat drop of malt that would melt in my mouth’ – but I fail to see when. [Shaun depreciating Shem or Joyce’s writing, a parody of Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of U and WiP, and therefore Shem’s question.] Merde alors! as old Marshal Cambronne put it. On Professor Levi-Bruel’s showings, the plea [i.e. to explain or represent time] is stuff and rubbish, since his ‘when is a man not another man’ quandary [i.e. ‘Why is it that Such and such is like So and so?’] has the same sort of [vapid?] answer as ‘all’s fair in love and war’ and …

P. 152

…‘where my arts soar you will also get thunder’ and ‘because I cling, it is true once I climbed a tree’ and ‘where Innocent looks best, there’s holly and ivy’.

[I think Shaun is suggesting that Nick/Shem, as author of FW which presents a blurred ‘kaleidoscope’ of culture and humanity over time, cannot then ask questions concerning the specific characteristics of character at any fixed point in time – even though a champion of the ‘space’ argument, such as Mick/Shaun, might ordinarily insist we do exactly that!].

As my explanations are probably above your understanding, little brother, I shall revert to a method I use when I lecture middle-class pupils. Imagine that you are squad of urchins, cloth-headed and tangled in your laces, etc. ‘You Bruno Nolan, take your tongue out of your inkpot! As none of you knows Javanese I will give you my translation of a fable. Allaboy Minor take your head out of your satchel!’ Christ hear us…

The Parable of the Mookse and the Gripes [based on Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Grapes’]

Gentlemen and ladies!

Once within a Space there lived a Mookse. When his solitariness was all too lonely he would go walking, so one evening he put on his impermeable raincoat, picked up his sword, put on his crown, stepped out of his home ‘The White Country’ [Arse?] (so called because of all the plasterers, with gorgeous gardens, cascades and aqueducts) and set off to see how badness was badness [i.e. ‘Why is it that Such and such is like So and so?’] in the weirdest of conceivable ways.

And he set off with his sword, like a Pope Breakspear, clanking about as though every inch an immortal.

He had not walked far from home when…

P. 153

… he came upon (according to the prophecy of ALP) the most boggy stream he had ever seen [i.e. the Liffey]. It was small and brown and he thought it narrow and shallow. And as it ran it trickled, purring ‘My my my! Me and me!’ [Mookse thought] ‘Little brown stream don’t I love thee!’ [The river is metaphor of the passage of time in FW!]

And, what was there on the other bank of the stream, perched on a tree, upside down but the Gripes? [tree/stone on opposite sides of the river] And no doubt he was fit to be tied, for had he not been able to drink the juice [wine?] of his times [unlike the rich pope the Mookse]?

His peeps [eyes] were tear-filled, his nose had changed colour, he was forgetting any sense of design and had been put onto his backside in the street by the Bailiff. The Mookse had never seen anyone in such a pickle.

[Pope] Adrian (the name of the Mookse) stood face-to-face with the Gripes in an attitude of indignation. But all Mookses end their moods, just all roads, east, west or south, lead to Rome. He sat on a stone, with his fox fur encircling his oiled body, whereupon he rested, like a Patrick of the west, with his amethyst sprinkled staff dubbed ‘God did it’, with his cheek upon his ringed fist. The longer he sat there, the longer he thought, the more he thought, ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’ [i.e. in inspiration], he looked like an endless series of Popes sitting [for a painting?].

- ‘Good afternoon, Sir Mookse! How do you do?’ said the Gripes in a maudlin voice, and jackasses…

P .154

…all laughed because they knew what a sly fox he was. ‘I am blessed to see you, master. Will you not tell me everything? All about the tree and stone and Anna Livia, and all-in-all about Shawn and Issy?’

Consider the situation! The pitiful tempter was a Gripes! [i.e. a Grape instead of a fox]

- ‘Rats!’ bellowed the Mookse, and everyone quailed at his noise. ‘Blast you and your inferior anatomy! No, you’re but a rural animal. I am a supreme pontiff! Abase yourself! Get thee behind me satan!’ [For not talking about the Christian religion]

- ‘I am till infinity obliged to you’, bowed the Gripes. ‘I have still to wash all my extremities [ablations]. By the watch, what is the time, please?’ [i.e the question the Cad asks HCE which prefigures his downfall.]

Go figure! Imagine saying that to Mookse!’

- ‘Read the index of prohibited books, mind my Achilles heel, swell my coffers and worship the Nazerene [Christ]’, answered the Mookse. ‘What’s the hour? That’s what I wanted to settle with you, grape. Let’s have a war. Now, measure your length. Now, estimate my capacity. Well sir? Will you give up? What do you say?’

Holy Patience! You should have heard the little voice that answered him.

- ‘I was considering that, sweet Mookse, but, for all the rhyme and reason, I cannot submit’, the Gripe whimpered. ‘My temple is my own [i.e. Dublin’s religion was very old and independent]. Even if my Felicity [i.e. Dublin motto] sees me fitted in stocks. My speciality is the “belowing” of things “above”. But I will be able to tell Your Honour…

P. 155

…because my father was a sort-of waiter, when your time is up [or, whose cloaca you are]’.

Incredible! Well, hear the inevitable.

- ‘Your temple? The space in my Holy City is only let to leonine men’, the Mookse concluded pompously. ‘And I regret to say that it is out of my power to prevent you from dying a death by degrees. My side is as safe as houses or mother’s milk, thank the law, and I can see from my Holy Dome what it means to be sane. I hereby give Ireland to the Union Jack! Praise be to he who praises himself. And there I must leave you to die your slow death. I can prove that [his temple predated the Dublin one?], and I bet you a baker’s dozen [Christ and 12 disciples] – even though it will be a bitter fruit preserved in syrup - that this knowledge and proof is contained in books.’

Standing up and pointing his jewelled stick at the sky, through sheer luck he blew out a cluster of stars and a firefly in Teresa street and a stop sign in front of Sophie Barratt’s, then he gathered together the odd dozen of his books, Greek, Latin and Russian up into his arms, and set about conducting his wider proof leading to the extinction of the Gripes (Shem having once been the name of the Gripes). Referring to many books, he proved it altogether…

P. 156

…if not in that order then in a different one, 333 times, referring to mathematics and history and legend, the blessings of experience, and the Book of the Dead.

While the Mookse was preoccupied and promulgating his ipso facto and said contradictions, the rascally Gripes has all but succeeded in monopolising his [in]subordinates. But as he had taught his naked seminarians to consider the origins of his immaculate conception, and the followers of his Holy Ghost to understand the procession of the Holy Ghost as a synthesis, so eventually they were all loggerheads and at variance with the synod of his symbolism, and papal infallibility was given the hoof by the schism.

- ‘After a thousand years, O Gripes, you will be blind to the world’, essayed Mookse the pious. [blind like Joyce]

- ‘After a thousand years’, answered the Gripes, ‘by the god of Mohammed, you will still be, O Mookse, deaf.’

- ‘We [the Mookse] shall be chosen as the first amongst the last [standing] by Electra of Vale Hollow’ [Issy], observed the Mookse nobly, ‘for by the unicorn of Elijah, we are in the saddle [or own the constabulary] and that is what the common person falls for [i.e. authority], bless ‘em.

With his pills, aftershave and a cigarette – [the Mookse was] as British military as Bond Street and as straight – noted a broken-shoed traveller from New Zealand… [travelled the future ruins of civilisation and seeing the church as strong as ever].

- ‘We’, confessed the Gripes, ‘shall not even be the last amongst the first, we hope, when we are visited by the Veiled Horror [ALP?] of death and Valhalla. And’, he added, ‘we are relying on the weight of mother’s breath [Letter?]. Puff!’

Blind ambusher, foe to social and business success! It might have been a happy night out but…. [the Gripe showed up].

P. 157

And they insulted each other:

- ‘Eunuch!’

- ‘Horned one!’

- ‘Grape!’

- ‘Whiskey sot!’

Volley after volley.

The little cloud girl Nuvoletta [Issy – as the judge?] in her nightdress was looking down on them from the stairs and listening like a child. How she was frightened when the Mookse [now a customer in the pub] raised his walking-stick into the sky, and how she was overawed when the knobbly-kneed Gripes made such a putz of himself! All of the 28 Rainbow girls were sleeping like squirrels. Her mother, Mrs Moonan [ALP] was scrubbing the backsteps and her father, that Scandinavian, was in the bar eating an ocean of Viking’s relish. Nuvoletta and her reflection listened and tried to make the heavenly Mookse look up at her (but he was far too absorbed) and tried to make the Gripes hear how sweet she could be (though he was too deep in his schismatic thoughts to heed her) and was all lost as though a vapour. They couldn’t take their noses or their minds out of their arguments. She tried every way she could, tossing her hair like a princess, and showed off her arms, and smiled and sighed as if she were born…

P. 158

…to be the bride of Tristan. But the sweet maid had no chance, for the Mookse, a dogma-driven acolyte was not amused, and the Gripes, a Dublin Catholic, was plainly oblivious.

‘I see’, she sighed. ‘They are men.’

The wind whistled though the reeds and shadows began to gather along the banks of the Liffey as the gloomy dusk approached. The Mookse had good eyes, but he could not hear everything. The Gripes had good ears but he could not see well. As the dusk overwhelmed them, the Mookse thought he could think profoundly until the morning and the Gripes thought of the logical traps he would escape, if he had enough luck.

And now it was dusk! Adieu! Then it began to rain!

Then there came down to the opposite side a black woman and she gathered up the Mookse, where he was spread out and carried him away. Then there came down to this side another comely woman and angrily plucked down the panicky Gripes [from his tree] and carried him away in beautitude to her…

P. 159

… hut. And so the poor Gripes got it wrong, for that is always how a Gripes is and always will be. And there was only the elm tree and the stone each of them had been sitting on left, and Nuvoleta, the little cloud, a girl.

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her life and coalesced her myriad of minds [i.e. her reflections] into one. She climbed over the banisters of the stairs, gave a cry of, ‘Rain! Rain!’ Her dress fluttered as she jumped and she was gone. And into the river she went (like a thousand tears, when she became stout and liked dancing, and her name became Mrs Liffey) And then fell a perfect tear: a leap tear. But the river swept her away, tripping along, lapping as though she just a brook. Why o why! I can’t stop myself flowing!

‘No applause, please!’ [said Shaun] ‘The shaking coin bowl will be circulated in due course’.

‘Allaboy Major, I’ll take your views of the story another time [or place]. Nolan Browne, you may leave the classroom. ‘

[Why does the parable suggest the ‘space’ argument is superior – simply because a Gripes is ‘always wrong’? The Nuvoletta ending suggests that both sides of the river are irrelevant compared to the motion of the river itself – a metaphor of the argument for ‘time’. This argument for time – i.e. the flow - again suggests that Shem’s question does not apply to Shaun – even though he argues against ‘time’ as the character differentiation is unimportant.]

As I have explained, my reasons why my genius is much more deserving. I feel sympathy for my friend [Shem] Knackers Dopeyvitch. He’s so bally clever but awful careless and I am a slave to method. I think he should live on the island of Tristan da Cunha and make inhabitant 106 and be inaccessible from now on. (That reminds that the mahoganies on this island…

P. 160

…should be classified under the genus Inexhaustable, when we reflect how much red cedar is there…) ‘I am the Voice of the People’, and ‘I wish I had another glass of that harbour whisky’. [Shem will often say] But why should he rot by the roadside or fawn over an alms bowl? He aught to go away for a change of ideas. If I weren’t a Jonah myself I be his dolphin [to carry him there] because he’s such a barefaced robber [of ideas], with my socks pulled over his face [as a disguise]. But I falter and am a bit husky in the throat.

Well please come closer and we will murmur in low voices. Everyone is mixed: I am overheard by Belfast, and Welsh is full of Cork [expressions?]. The coal ship is full of Dubliners… How are you doing my dark Sir? And they are all feeble minded and bodied.

My listeners will recall with pleasure how I trespassed where…

P. 161

…even Michaelangelos would fear to tread, when I proved how his subject is ‘cash-time’ [or ‘space’ related because he asks questions about individuals] and for this degraded intellectual time is money and the cash system means that I cannot now have and not have a piece of cheese in your pocket at the same time – unless Burrus and Caseous [Butter and Cheese, Brutus and Cassius] have and have not simultaneously disentangled themselves.

Burrus is a genuine prime choice, full of natural grace, the mildest of milkstuffs and completely unadulterated, whereas Caseous is not an ideal choice by any means, although the former is addicted to the meltingly casual side of the later. It was the same old ‘Home and History’ story, five and sixpence, that we used to read, until Daddy died and Mother brought us our supper. [The story –FW -was all about…] Our old family united round a bowl [or ‘bowel’ – bodily functions] at prayer: Father Salmon [HCE] himself and Petersen [Shaun - Stone] and Time [Shem - Tree] and a dozen of the Murphy’s and twenty plus of the Rainbow Girls and Lettucia [Issy - Lucia] and you and me [Shem and Shaun] were twins. But there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip, and knowing how backward you are I have completed the following lesson on the ‘coarse use of tools’ [for Shem on the island?], and if I don’t do you in [to his school pupil Schott] I must be a murdered Caesar.

P. 162

The older Caesar becomes unendurable in old age (the composer makes the mistake of making a joke at the outset), having been nine-lived (the composer is another of those bubbles whose Sandhurst training makes the campaign he describes as flat as a pancake) and the twins are billed to make an appearance as the new knife-to-neck, neck and neck, rulers in a newly deserted battlefield of the Pub. (A cursory reading of the Persse-O’Reilly history shows how Finn McCool picked up the proper name [of Earwicker] out of collection of prefixes [U. god as a collector of prepuses, i.e. Christian names?] though, of the permeating uncertainty of this his offspring are certain.) But although I deny wanting to waste time, I could paint that story better if you gave me some [white?] wash [the Picture]. Casseous may think of himself as a Cavalier [knight] but Burrus is closer to a Roundhead, which goes better with a soft-thinking, defender of the faith. He [Burrus] has a lake of wisdom teeth in his head, while the other fellow’s sweet tooth is but a milk tooth [?]. It was aptly stated that his [Burrus/Shaun’s] seeing was so good [bad?] that if a whole barrow of putrescence was poured over him he could with his ‘ostrich eye’ make out the mote in Ireland’s eye. Let me tell you the truth about Burrus when he was younger. He was like a king off-duty and his jaw went forever. With a cherry ripe outlook, gold help me! If I were to say…

P. 163

… everything about him, you would say I giving you the principles of a list of fame. Eating butter [i.e. Burrus] was in the biblical prophesy of Jesus! And that is why we learned the [anti-semitic] song in childhood: Hans eats bread and butter but Jacob eats pork fat bread [or stinking shit]!

To compare with Caseous, his brother ‘scotch’ or poor cheese, with a hole or two [in his clothes] and a high stink that you notice before he arrives. ‘Cheeugh!’ you complain, and you are not wholly or holey in the wrong!

[Shaun now returns to his criticism of Shem’s question] Thus we cannot escape our likes and dislikes, the exiles and robbers, or beggars or neighbours – this is why the time-show believers advocate temporal welfare relief – let us be tolerant of antipathies. [Hence the saying] ‘You cannot make pure cheese from butter’? I am not giving my endorsement to the ‘Learned Ignorants’ of the Cusa philosophy, in which old Nicholas [of Cusa] suggests the smarter the top [brain], the bigger the bottom (what he ought to have said was that the more immobile in space is the bottom, the better it can be used in time by the ‘top’). And I shall be misunderstood if I were to give an unconditional endorsement to the ‘Heroic Enthusiasts’ theory of Bruno of Nola, or that part where Theophilus swears that while eggs are cheap all over the world [i.e. when HCE has fallen or lots of HCE types ??], butter [Mike] will be dearer than cheese [Shem].

Now I would not want to be understood as recommending the Silkebjorg cheese-making machine for more economical production of butter and cheese until I can look into it a little more closely, and I shall make a decision after showing how both products…

P. 164

… are mutually exclusive, and any suggestion otherwise is a delusion stemming from his [Shem’s] fixation [about all things being blended over time]. As suggested above, the two twins, as males we feel we must focus on a female, and at this stage there appears a cow maid who introduces herself to Burrus and Caseous at zero hour [midnight]. And so we meet ‘Margareen’.

We now hear the lyrics of shameful music, having the words ‘I cream for thee, Sweet Margareen’, and ‘O Margareena! I left a lump of gold in the bowl!’ [butter, but ref. the ‘family around the bowl’ above]. (Correspondents always ask what is the correct garnish to serve with sheep’s intestine: tansy sauce). The pathos of the first reveals it as a Caseous effort, while Burrus’s song is often used for a toast. The study of hair can tell us how this yellow colour first appeared on the bowl, that is the human head, where amongst all the other colours it was like a wig. Of course the unskilled singer would pervert our wiser ears by subordinating the space-element of the song and singing in time, a practice which should be killed. I advise all singers to forget musical time…

P. 165

… and sing a roulade with a swift glottal stop, then on the third beat, to close her eyes and open her mouth and see what I give her. What will I give her? Butter!

I do have something to say about the acoustic and architectural management of the music hall, but for the moment I will pursue the Burrus and Caseous story. All my admirers have seen my painting of Marge, which I titled ‘The Very Picture of a Needless Woman’, which decorates our national gallery. This genre of portrait painting should evoke the ‘bush soul’ of the female, and I leave it to the viewer complete the picture by mentally adding a wallaby or kangaroo tail. The hatboxes [I have painted] that compose ‘Rhomba, Lady Trabezond’ (or Marge in her excelsis mode) form a staircase that you can imagine Burrus and Caseous ascending, each level like the archaeological clay layers of the morphological development of our body politic, and each one a box of surprises. The boxes are worth about four pence each, but am inventing a new process, foolproof and pry-perfect, after which their cost can be reduced to a fragment of …

P. 166

…of their true worth by even the youngest of Marges when she sits on them [for her portrait, and breaks them?] and smiles.

Now there can be no question that I have not got the ‘size’ of young Marge, whose type may be met in any public garden wearing a very ‘dressy’ affair, wearing fur and matching cap, ostentatiously ‘hemming’ [coughing] over a garment, when she is not sitting on ‘all’ the free benches, reading about ‘it’ but on the look out for ‘him’, and so thrilled about the best-dressed dolly pram, or at the movies swallowing down sobs, or blowing biscuit crumbs at the latest Chaplin comedy, or beside the gutter with someone’s toddler, teaching the infant majesty how to make water.

(I am closely watching Master Pules [the toddler] as I have reasons to suspect that her ‘little man’ is really a secondary school teacher who is being used by Marge to conceal her own more masculine personality by flaunting frivolous finery over mens’ underwear, but she will always lack the muscularity of the real thing. But my solutions concerning the proper behaviour of mothers and the education of their toddlers must stand aside until I finish tackling this hussy for occupying my attentions.)

Margareena is very fond of Burrus, but alack! She is also fond of cheese. A ‘cleopatrician’ in her own right, she complicates matters, while Burrus and Caseous contend for her mastery [mistress, mystery…], by implicating her-…

P. 167

…self with an elusive Antonius [Mark Antony], an Italian who would appear to take a personal interest in refined cheese, but at the same time makes an art of being as rude as the boor [Hun?]. This Anotnious-Burrus-Caseous triad equate in the same way as X is to Y as Y is to Z, like your godchild’s ABC. [Here again the principle that all people merge…] And this is why any simple fool, an atheist [amethyst-hued] lowdown, legless fratricide, may be green on one side and frightfully blue on the other, but this does not disguise him from me as I know him to be a blasted, bleating, bloated, blasphemous idiot who cannot tell a bomb from a pineapple when he steals one, and will not sing his psalms with the congregation.

No! The thundering legion has stormed Mount Olympus. Twelve times have I predicted it. [the murder of Caesar] My race is run, so let Democracy take the highmost! My unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife, to sell and to venerate, and may the calls of curlews crown our marriage. Till death do us depart! Amen. I am the right man in the wrong shop, I have the words of the rite spoken in rote order! She that will not feel my full moon let her kneel to thee as immoral and impudent! That man who has no knowledge of Moses nor is awed by conquests…

P. 168

…of god’s law, who never was happy with himself and leaves his toil to wash his head – if he came into my reach to beg for a bite in our ship [pub] ‘Noisdanger’, would MacJaffet and I kick him out? – ay – were he my own brother, Dublined with love, were we bred by the same fire and made from the same salt, had we worked for the same master and both robbed from his till, were we tucked in the one bed and bitten by the same flea, though it breaks my heart to pray it, I don’t think I could say it! [i.e. words that would save Shem’s soul, as per the question]

Question 12. And the cursed one is?

Shem!