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Chapter five is devoted to the physical letter in which ALP defends (or accuses?) HCE (and on another level, Joyce's Ulysses and FW). It seems rather padded to me, but I don't know it well: [fw]
In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times. Thus we hear of, The Augusta Angustissimost for Old Seabeastius' Salvation, Rockabill Booby in the Wave Trough, ...The Crazier Letters, ...He Can Explain, ...My Skin Appeals to Three Senses and My Curly Lips Demand Columbkisses; ...Mum It is All Over, ...Norsker Torsker Find the Poddle, ...The Suspended Sentence, ...It Was Me Egged Him on to the Stork Exchange and Lent my Dutiful Face to His Customs, ...Lumptytumtumpty had a Big Fall, ...The Flash that Flies from Vuggy's Eyes has Set Me Hair On Fire, His is the House that Malt Made, Divine Views from Back to the Front, ...Buttbutterbust, ...As Tree is Quick and Stone is White So is My Washing Done by Night, First and Last Only True Account all about the Honorary Mirsu Earwicker, L.S.D., and the Snake (Nuggets!) by a Woman of the World who only can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about Privates Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all the Unmentionability falsely Accusing about the Raincoats.
The handwriting is analysed: [fw]
The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput... Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough...In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody, similarly as... our social something bowls along bumpily, experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long lane of... generations, more generations and still more generations.
Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyhow?
Erect, beseated... by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind... by a rightdown regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?
...To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others...
The letter was found in a middenheap by little Kevin/Shaun, with the help of ALP-the-hen: [fw]
About that original hen. Midwinter... was in the offing... when... an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden... What child... but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up... a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice...
Ardagh chalice homepage
The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans... and what she was scratching... looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well... with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes... don't forget unto life's & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses... pee ess from... affectionate largelooking tache of tch.
First Draft Version (FDV): large looking stain of tea.
The stain, and that a teastain... marked it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o'er-the-hazy.Why then how?
Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive... unfilthed from the boucher by the sagacity of a... hen.
Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip.
You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means...
The hen embodies instinctual wisdom: [fw]
Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir... she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din and danger!) ...she is ladylike in everything she does...Yes, before all this has time to end the golden age must return with its vengeance... No, assuredly, they are not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer... when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature...
The letter forgives HCE (while sounding a bit drunk, like Nadine Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow):
We note the paper with her jotty young watermark: Notre Dame du Bon Marche... [*] ...All schwants (schwrites) ischt tell the cock's trootabout him... He had to see life foully the plak and the smut, (schwrites). There were three men in him (schwrites). Dancings (schwrites) was his only ttoo feebles. With apple harlottes. And a little mollvogels. Spissially (schwrites) when they peaches... Yours very truthful...
[*] thunderword [list]
Back to the handwriting, and the stain: [fw]
These ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course, but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism...The teatimestained terminal... is a cosy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumbprint, mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus... will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before and after the battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters always. Tip.
...So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own? A true friend is known much more easily, and better into the bargain, by his personal touch, habits of full or undress, movements, response to appeals for charity than by his footwear, say...
Anyhow, somehow and somewhere, before the bookflood or after her ebb, somebody mentioned by name in his telephone directory, Coccolanius or Gallotaurus, wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop. O, undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye. Why?Because... if it goes to that... every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the... variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns.
No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it; and, sure, we ought really to rest thankful that... we have even a written on with dried ink scrap of paper at all to show for ourselves... after all that we lost and plundered of it... and all it has gone through...
...and by all means... cling to it as with drowning hands, hoping against hope all the while that... things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour and be hanged to them as ten to one they will too, please the pigs, as they ought to categorically, as, stricly between ourselves, there is a limit to all things so this will never do.
Itemising the handwriting's characteristics: [fw]
...look at this prepronominal funferal... very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times... till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia:all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments:
that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse:
those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls...
and, in short, the learning betrayed at almost every line's end:
...the curious warning sign before our protoparent's ipsissima verba... which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the Aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of Aran man the hat through the whispering his ho...
the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings:
that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture... which, in its invincible insolence... seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer's hand;
...the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint;
the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first:
...the four shortened ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of the quickscribbler:
the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accusative hole in which it ends itself;
...the cruciform postscript... plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells...
The Tunc page [bigger] [More Kells GIFs] [Kells history]
and the fatal droopadwindle slope of the blamed scrawl, a sure sign of imperfectible moral blindness;...and, eighteenthly or twentyfourthly, but at least, thank Maurice, lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer than seven hundred and thirtytwo strokes tailed by a leaping lasso --
who thus at all this marvelling but will press on hotly to see the vaulting feminine libido of those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps sternly controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness of a meandering male fist?
FDV: continually controlled and led by the uniform undeviating course of a cold male fist.
(Illiterate ALP's hand was guided by Shem's.)
Holes in the paper are also seen as a clue: [fw]
...The unmistaken identity of the persons in the Tiberiast duplex came to light in the most devious of ways. The original document was in what is known as Hanno O'Nonhanno's unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was but pierced... by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument.These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, and following up their one true clue, the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men's asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina, -- Yard inquiries pointed out --> that they ad bin "provoked" ay ^ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é's Brèak -- fast -- table; ; acùtely profèssionally piqued, to = introdùce a notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ' ' fàç'e'] by pùnct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?!
(I only had to omit the upsidedown carets over the s's in 'professionally' above-- but some of the other HTML special characters may not be supported by your font.)
FDV of trimmed passage: Deeply religious by nature it was correctly suspected that such anger could not openly have been directed against the ancestral spirit of her who openly respected by him as our boys' best friend...
And finally, somehow, the handwriting is identified as Shem's: [fw]
...Wanted for millinary servance... Formelly confounded with amother. Maybe growing a moustache, did you say, with an adorable look of amuzement? ...To all's much relief one's half hypothesis of that jabberjaw ape... was hotly dropped and his room taken up by that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher (kak, pfooi, bosh and fiety, much earny, Gus, poteen? Sez you!) Shem the Penman.
Summary by Bill Cadbury
Chapter six
is a late (1927) addition to the first Book, recapping the twelve main characters (and/or elements) in a quiz show Q&A format. Strangely, many of the themes here have barely been hinted up to this point: [fw]
So?Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?
The echo is where in the back of the wodes; callhim forth!
(Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger, for the concern of Messrs Jhon Jhamieson and Song, rated one hundrick and thin per storehundred on this nightly quisquiquock of the twelve apostrophes, set by Jockit Mic Ereweak...)
Q1 is ridiculously long:
1. What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale than the bluegum buaboababbaun or the giganteous Wellingtonia Sequoia; went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies; ...killed his own hungery self in anger as a young man; ...is too funny for a fish and has too much outside for an insect; like a heptagon crystal emprisoms trues and fauss for us; ...is escapemaster-in-chief from all sorts of houdingplaces; ...threatens thunder upon malefactors and sends whispers up fraufrau's froufrous; ...pink sunset shower, red clay cloud, sorrow of Sahara, oxhide or Iren; ...is a horologe unstoppable and the Benn of all bells; ...exmountain of flesh was reared up by stress and sank under strain; ...blimp, blump; ...variously catalogued, regularly regrouped; ...real detonation but false report; ...his first's a young rose and his second's French-Egyptian and his whole means a slump at Christie's; forth of his pierced part came the woman of his dreams, ...taught himself skating and learned how to fall; distinctly dirty but rather a dear; ...put a matchhead on an aspenstalk and set the living a fire; ...till he was buried howhappy was he and he made the welkins ring with Up Micawber!; ...his striped pantaloons, his rather strange walk; ...a Colossus among cabbages, ...hallucination, cauchman, ectoplasm; passed for baabaa blacksheep till he grew white woo woo woolly; ...moves in vicous cicles yet remews the same; ...while satisfied that soft youthful bright matchless girls should bosom into fine silkclad joyous blooming young women is not so pleased that heavy swearsome strongsmelling irregularshaped men should blottout active handsome wellformed frankeyed boys; ...can be built with glue and clippings, ...like fat, like fatlike tallow, of greasefulness, yea of dripping greasefulness; did not say to the old, old, did not say to the scorbutic, scorbutic; he has founded a house, Uru, a house he has founded to which he has assigned its fate; ...our awful dad, Timour of Tortur; puzzling, startling, shocking, nay, perturbing; ...honorary captain of the extemporised fire brigade, reported to be friendly with the police; ...half heard the single maiden speech La Belle spun to her Grand Mount and wholed a lifetime by his ain fireside, wondering was it hebrew set to himmeltones or the quicksilversong of qwaternions; ...reads the charms of H.C. Endersen all the weaks of his evenin and the crimes of Ivaun the Taurrible every strongday morn; ...with one touch of nature set a veiled world agrin and went within a sheet of tissuepaper of the option of three gaols; ...stutters fore he falls and goes mad entirely when he's waked; is Timb to the pearly morn and Tomb to the mourning night; and an he had the best bunbaked bricks in bould Babylon for his pitching plays he'd be lost for the want of his wan wubblin wall?Answer: Finn MacCool!
2. Does your mutter know your mike?Answer: When I turn meoptics,
from suchurban prospects,
'tis my filial's bosom, doth behold with pride,
that pontificator,
and circumvallator,
with his dam night garrulous, slipt by his side.Ann alive, the lisp of her,
'twould grig mountains whisper her,
and the bergs of Iceland melt in waves of fire,
and her spoon-me-spondees,
and her dirckle-me-ondenees,
make the Rageous Ossean, kneel and quaff a lyre!If Dann's dane, Ann's dirty,
if he's plane she's purty,
if he's fane, she's flirty, with her auburnt streams,
and her coy cajoleries,
and her dabblin drolleries,
for to rouse his rudderup, or to drench his dreams.If hot Hammurabi, or cowld Clesiastes,
could espy her pranklings, they'd burst bounds agin,
and renounce their ruings,
and denounce their doings,
for river and iver, and a night. Amin!
3. Which title is the true-to-type motto-in-lieu for that Tick for Teac thatchment painted witt wheth one darkness, where asnake is under clover and birds aprowl are in the rookeries... which is not Whichcroft Whorort... not Haraldsby, grocer, not Vatandcan, vintner... gnot Antwarp gnat Musca not Corry's not Weir's not the Arch not The Smug not The Dotch House not The Uval nothing Grand nothing Splendid... nayther Erat Est Erit noor Non michi sed luciphro?
FDV: Which is the truest title for that Tiec for Teac which is not whichcraft not Ousterholm not Haraldsby
Answer: Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!
Dublin city motto: "Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas" (Happy the city where citizens obey) on [city seal]
4. What Irish capitol city... of two syllables and six letters, with a deltic origin and a nuinous end... can boost of havinga) the most extensive public park in the world,
b) the most expensive brewing industry in the world,
c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the world,
d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paupulation in the world:and harmonise your abecedeed responses?
Answer: a) Delfas. And when ye'll hear the gould hommers of my heart... bingbanging again the ribs of yer resistance... ye'll be sheverin wi' all yer dinful sobs when we'll go riding acope-acurly... down the greaseways of rollicking into the waters of wetted life.
b) Dorhqk. And sure where can you have such good old chimes anywhere... as on the Mash and how'tis I would be engaging you with my plovery soft accents and descanting upover the scene beunder me of your loose vines in their hairafall with them two loving loofs braceleting the slims of your ankles and your mouth's flower rose and sinking ofter the soapstone of silvry speech.
c) Nublid. Isha, why wouldn't we be happy, avourneen, ...after all the errears and erroriboose of combarative embottled history, and your goodself churning over the newleaved butter ...the choicest and the cheapest from Atlanta to Oconee, while I'll be drowsing in the gaarden.
d) Dalway. I hooked my thoroughgoing trotty the first down Spanish Place,
Mayo I make, Tuam I take, Sligo's sleek but Galway's grace.
Holy eel and Sainted Salmon, chucking chub and ducking dace,
Rodiron's not your aequal! says she, leppin half the lane.abcd) A bell a bell on Shalldoll Steepbell,
ond be'll go massplon pristmoss speople,
Shand praise gon ness our fayst moan neople,
our prame Shandeepen, pay name muy feepence,
moy nay non Aequallllllll!
5. Whad slags of a loughladd would retten smuttyflesks, emptout old mans, ...sprink dirted water around village, ...outshriek hyelp hyelp nor his hair efter buggelawrs, ...grindstone his kniveses, ...will, on advices, be bacon or stable hand, ...may get earnst, ...profusional drinklords to please obstain, ...nay, that must he isn't?Answer: Pore ole Joe!
Song: Old Black Joe [RealAudio]
6. What means the saloon slogan Summon In The Housesweep Dinah?Answer: Tok. Galory bit of the sales of Cloth nowand I have to beeswax the bringing in all the claub of the porks to us how I thawght I knew his stain on the flower if me ask and can could speak and he called by me midden name Tik. ...And who eight the last of the goosebellies that was mowlding from measlest years and who leff that there and who put that here and who let the kilkenny stale the chump. Tek. And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith. Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.
7. Who are those component partners of our societate, the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, the crook, the squeezer, the lounger, the curman, the tourabout, the mussroomsniffer, the bleakablue tramp, the funpowtherplother, the christymansboxer...who are latecomers all the year's round by anticipation,
are the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination,
and, contributting their conflingent controversies of differentiation,
unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination,
who crunch the crusts of comfort due to depredation,
drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication,
condone every evil by practical justification
and condam any good to its own gratification,
who are ruled, roped, duped and driven by those numen daimons,
the feekeepers at their laws, nightly consternation,
fortnightly fornication,
monthly miserecordation
and omniannual recreation...?Answer: The Morphios!
8. And how war yore maggies?Answer: They war loving,
they love laughing,
they laugh weeping,
they weep smelling,
they smell smiling,
they smile hating,
they hate thinking,
they think feeling,
they feel tempting,
they tempt daring,
they dare waiting,
they wait taking,
they take thanking,
they thank seeking,
as born for lorn in lore of love
to live and wive by wile and rile
by rule of ruse 'reathed rose and hose hol'd home,
yeth cometh elope year, coach and four,
Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more.
9. Now... if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands... were at this auctual futule preteriting unstant... accorded... with an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven...could such a none... byhold at ones what is main and why tis twain, ...the sap rising, the foles falling, ...the wrestless in the womb, ...then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?Answer: A collideorscape!
10. What bitter's love but yurning, what' sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?Answer: I know, pepette, of course, dear, but listen, precious! Thanks, pette, those are lovely, pitounette, delicious! But mind the wind, sweet! What exquisite hands you have, you angiol, if you didn't gnaw your nails, isn't it a wonder you're not achamed of me, you pig, you perfect little pigaleen! I'll nudge you in a minute! ...He is seeking an opening and means to be first with me as his belle alliance... Stoop alittle closer, fealse! Delightsome simply! ...What are you nudging for? No, I just thought you were.
Listen, loviest! Of course it was too kind of you, miser, to remember my sighs in shockings, my often expressed wish when you were wandering about my trousseaurs and before I forget it don't forget... I'll always in always remind of snappy new girters, me being always the one for charms with my very best in proud and gloving even if he was to be vermillion miles my youth to live on, the rubberend Mr Polkingtone, the quonian fleshmonger who Mother Browne solicited me for unlawful converse with....I'm fine, thanks ever! Ha! O mind you poo tickly... Funny spot to have a fingey! I'm terribly sorry, I swear to you I am! May you never see me in my birthday pelts seenso tutu and that her blanches mainges may rot leprous off her whatever winking maggis I'll bet by your cut you go fleurting after with all the glass on her and the jumps in her stomewhere! Haha! I suspected she was! Sink her! May they fire her for a barren ewe!
...Of course I know, pettest, you're so learningful and considerate in yourself, so friend of vegetables, you long cold cat you! Please by acquiester to meek my acquointance! Codling, snakelet, iciclist! My diaper has more life to it! Who drowned you in drears, man, or are you pillale with ink?...hug me, damn it all, and I'll kiss you back to life, my peachest. I mean to make you suffer, meddlar, and I don't care this fig for contempt of courting. That I chid you, sweet sir? You know I'm tender by my eye... Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning. I just don't care what my thwarters think... I'd risk a policeman passing by, Magrath or even that beggar of a boots at the Post. The flame? O, pardone! That was what? Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? ...O, you mean the strangle for love and the sowiveall of the prettiest?
...It's Dracula's nightout. For creepsake don't make a flush! Draw the shades, curfe you, and I'll beat any sonnamonk to love... If I am laughing with you? No, lovingest, I'm not so dying to take my rise out of you, adored. Not in the very least...
Magrath: [history of name]
But hold hard till I've got my latchkey vote and I'll teach him when to wear what woman callours... And because, you pluckless lankaloot, I hate the very thought of the thought of you and because, dearling, of course, adorest, I was always meant for an engindear from the French college, to be musband... for he's so loopy on me and I'm so leapy like since the day he carried me from the boat, my saviored of eroes, to the beach and I left on his shoulder one fair hair to guide hand and mind to its softness. Ever so sorry! I beg your pardon, I was listening to every treasuried word I said fell from my dear mot's tongue otherwise how could I see what you were thinking of our granny? Only I wondered if I threw out my shaving water.Anyway, here's my arm, pulletneck. Gracefully yours. Move your mouth towards minth, more, preciousest, more on more! To please me, treasure. Don't be a, I'm not going to! Sh! nothing! A cricri somewhere! Buybuy! I'm fly! Hear, pippy, under the limes... Shy is him, dovey? Musforget there's an audience. I have been lost, angel. Cuddle, ye divil ye! It's our toot-a-toot. Hearhere! Sensation! Let them, their whole four courtships! Let them, Bigbawl and his boosers' eleven makes twelve territorials...
No, I swear to you by Fibsburrow churchdome and Sainte Andree's Undershift, by all I hold secret from my world and in my underworld of nighties and naughties and all the other wonderwearlds! Close your, notmust look! Now open, pet, your lips, pepette, like I used my sweet parted lipsabuss......and I coloured beneath my fan, pipetta mia, when you learned me the linguo to melt... Do you like that, silenzioso? Are you enjoying, this same little me, my life, my love? Why do you like my whisping? Is it not divinely deluscious? ...Tell me till my thrillme comes! I will not break the seal. I am enjoying it still, I swear I am! Why do you prefer its in these dark nets, if why may ask, my sweetykins?
Sh sh! Longears is flying. No, sweetissest, why would that ennoy me? But don't! You want to be slap well slapped for that. Your delighted lips, love, be careful! ...The bold shame of me! I wouldn't, chickens, not for all the juliettes in the twinkly way! I could snap them when I see them winking at me in bed. I didn't did so, my intended, or was going to or thinking of. Shshsh! Don't start like that, you wretch! I thought ye knew all and more, ye aucthor, to explique to ones the significat of their exsystems with your nieu nivulon lead...
FDV of trimmed passage: It's only another queer fish in the damned old river.
Excuse me for swearing, love, I swear to the sorrasims on their trons of Uian I didn't mean to by this alpin armlet! Did you really never in all our cantalang lives speak clothse to a girl's before? No! Not even to the charmermaid? How marfellows! Of course I believe you, my own dear doting liest, when you tell me. As I'd live to, O, I'd love to! Liss, liss! I muss whiss! Never that ever or I can remember dearstreaming faces, you may go through me! Never in all my whole white life of my matchless and pair. Or ever for bitter be the frucht of this hour! With my whiteness I thee woo and bind my silk breasths I thee bound! Always, Amory, amor andmore! Till always, thou lovest! Shshshsh! So long as the lucksmith. Laughs!
11. If you met on the binge a poor acheseyeld from Ailing,
when the tune of his tremble shook shimmy on shin,
while his countrary raged in the weak of his wailing,
like a rugilant pugilant Lyon O'Lynn;if he maundered in misliness, plaining his plight...
or wringing his handcuffs for peace, the blind blighter,
...if the fain shinner pegged you to shave his immartial,
wee skillmustered shoul with his ooh, hoodoodoo!
broking wind that to wiles, woemaid sin he was partial,
we don't think, Jones, we'd care to this evening, would you?
Shaun offers a million technical reasons why he wouldn't: [fw]
Answer: No, blank ye! So you think I have impulsivism? ...But before proceeding to conclusively confute this begging question it would be far fitter for you, if you dare! to hasitate to consult with... my disposale of the same dime-cash problem... From it you will here notice... that the sophology of Bitchson while driven as under by a purely dime-dime urge is not without his cashcash characktericksticks... To put it all the more plumbsily. The speechform is a mere sorrogate. Whilst the quality and tality (I shall explex what you ought to mean by this with its proper when and where and why and how in the subsequent sentence) are alternativomentally harrogate and arrogate, as the gates may be.Talis is a word often abused by many passims (I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantumising state of affairs)... At a recent postvortex piece infustigation... an extension lecturer... borrowed the question: Why's which Suchman's talis qualis? to whom, as a fatter of macht, Dr Gedankje of Stoutgirth, who was wiping his whistle, toarsely retoarted: While thou beast' one zoom of a whorl!
HCE's self-defense is invoked as an authority ...so the beggar is the Cad, and Shaun is (like) HCE here? [fw]
...Professor Loewy-Brueller... in his talked off confession which recently met with such a leonine uproar on its escape after its confinement Why am I not born like a Gentileman... whole-heartedly takes off his gabbercoat and wig, honest draughty fellow, in his public interest, to make us see how though, as he says: 'by Allswill' the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television... I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity...
The poor will always be with us: [fw]
I need not anthrapologise for any obintentional... downtrodding on my foes... because the number of squeer faiths in weekly circulation will not be appreciably augmented by the notherslogging of my cupolar clods...
Shaun attempts a parable for his students, Aesop's Fox and Grapes [qv]: [fw]
As my explanations here are probably above your understandings, lattlebrattons... I shall revert to a more expletive method which I frequently use when I have to sermo with muddlecrass pupils. Imagine for my purpose that you are a squad of urchins, snifflynosed, goslingnecked, clothyheaded, tangled in your lacings, tingled in your pants, etsitaraw etcicero. And you, Bruno Nowlan, take your tongue out of your inkpot! As none of you knows javanese I will give all my easyfree translation of the old fabulist's parable. Allaboy Minor, take your head out of your satchel! Audi, Joe Peters! Exaudi facts!The Mookse and The Gripes.
Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!
The parable is HCE and the Cad, of course. (The references to space and time are Joyce's parody of a mild recent attack on Ulysses by his friend Wyndham Lewis [qv], who called Joyce middleclass.):
Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. The onesomeness wast alltolonely... and a Mookse he would a walking go... so one grandsumer evening, after a great morning and his good supper of gammon and spittish... he put on his impermeable... and stepped out of his immobile... and set off... to see how badness was badness in the weirdest of all pensible ways.
(There's an echo of the Buddha, here, discovering the truth of suffering after a sheltered childhood.)
As he set off with his father's sword... between his legs and his tarkeels... he clanked, to my clinking... every inch of an immortal. He... came... upon the most unconsciously boggylooking stream he ever locked his eyes with... It looked little and it smelt of brown and it thought in narrows and it talked showshallow. And as it rinn it dribbled like any lively purliteasy: My, my, my! Me and me! Little down dream don't I love thee!
The sexual sin this time includes the feminine urination fetish, instead of just the masculine cad/cigar one. Shem here is the spying soldier of ch2 who's unreliable because a bit drunk: [fw]
And, I declare, what was there on the yonder bank of the stream that would be a river, parched on a limb... but the Gripes? And no doubt he was fit to be dried for why had he not been having the juice of his times? ...In all his specious heavings... the Mookse had never seen his Dubville brooder-on-low so nigh to a pickle.
Shaun sits on a stone (his lifeless symbol, to Shem's green treebranch):
Adrian (that was the Mookse now's assumptinome) stuccstill phiz-a-phiz to the Gripes in an accessit of aurignacian... Hic sor a stone... and on hoc stone Seter satt...-- Good appetite us, sir Mookse! How do you do it? cheeped the Gripes in a wherry whiggy maudelenian woice... I am... blessed to see you, my dear mouster. Will you not perhopes tell me everything if you are pleased, sanity? All about aulne and lithial and allsall allinall about awn and liseias? Ney?
Shem asks for... gossip? [fw]
Think of it! ...A Gripes!-- Rats! bullowed the Mookse.... Blast yourself... No, hang you for an animal rurale! I am superbly in my supremest poncif! Abase you, baldyqueens! Gather behind me, satraps! Rots!
The Fox declares the Grapes to be sour? (sounding like the Willingdone's cursing). Or is Shem hoping Shaun is ill?
-- I am till infinity obliged with you, bowed the Gripes, his whine having gone to his palpruy head. I am still always having a wish on all my extremities. By the watch, what is the time, pace?Figure it! The pining peever! To a Mookse!
So Shaun as HCE is answering Q11 by telling a story of Shem as the Cad. HCE's reply resembles the sudden peacemaking after the fender-battle:
-- Ask my index... answered the Mookse... That is quite about what I came on my missions with my intentions laudibiliter to settle with you, barbarousse. Let thor be orlog. Let Pauline be Irene... Now measure your length. Now estimate my capacity. Well, sour? Is this space of our couple of hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? Will you give you up?...Sancta Patientia! You should have heard the voice that answered him...
The debate now resembles James's uncle in 1903 asking him to kneel by his dying mother's bed, viewed by Joyce as a non-negotiable point of honor:
-- I was just thinkling upon that, swees Mooksey, but, for all the rime on my raisins, if I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered from nethermost of his wanhope... My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own... But I will never be abler to tell Your Honoriousness... though my corked father was bott a pseudowaiter, whose o'cloak you ware.
FDV: But I can never tell you how a'cloak you are.
Incredible! Well, hear the inevitable.
Shaun would help if Shem were more manly (if the grapes were not sour): [fw]
-- ...My building space in lyonine city is always to let to leonlike Men, the Mookse... pompifically... concludded... And I regret to proclaim that it is out of my temporal to help you from being killed by inchies... I can seen from my holeydome what it is to be wholly sane... Parysis... belongs to him who parises himself...
FDV (plus trimmed passage): Paris belongs to he who praises himself. I can prove it against you.
Shaun/HCE defends himself hundreds of different ways:
Elevating, to give peint to his blick, his jewelled pederect to the allmysty cielung... He proved it well whoonearth dry and drysick times...-- Wee, cumfused the Gripes limply, shall not even be the last of the first, wee hope, when oust are visitated by the Veiled Horror...
And they viterberated each other, canis et coluber with the wildest ever wielded since Tarriestinus lashed Pissasphaltium.
-- Unuchorn!
-- Ungulant!
-- Uvuloid!
-- Uskybeak!And bullfolly answered volleyball.
This brotherly debate is eavesdropped by their adoring sister (the streamlet now a cloudlet): [fw]
Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers, was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars and listening all she childishly could... She was alone. All her nubied companions were asleeping with the squirrels. Their mivver, Mrs Moonan, was off in the Fuerst quarter scrubbing the backsteps of Number 28...
FDV of trimmed passage: And as for fur fuvver he was round up in Norwood's Sokaparlor eating oceans of ice.
Nuvoletta listened as she reflected herself... and she tried all she tried to make the Mookse look up at her (but he was fore too... farseeing) and to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be... but it was all mild's vapour moist.Not even her feignt reflection, Nuvoluccia, could they toke their gnoses off... She tried all the winsome wonsome ways her four winds had taught her. She tossed her sfumastelliacinous hair like la princesse de la Petite Bretagne and she rounded her mignons arms like Mrs Cornwallis-West and she smiled over herself like the beauty of the image of the pose of the daughter of the queen of the Emperour of Irelande and she sighed after herself as were she born to bride with Tristis Tristior Tristissimus.
But, sweet madonine, she might fair as well have carried her daisy's worth to Florida. For the Mookse, a dogmad Accanite, were not amoosed and the Gripes, a dubliboused Catalick, wis pinefully obliviscent.
-- I see, she sighed. There are menner.
FDV: You see, my dears, they were menner.
As dusk falls, Shaun and Shem turn into laundry drying by the riverbank, collected by two prankqueans: [fw]
...shades began to glidder along the banks... duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds... The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see... Oh, how it was duusk! ...It was so duusk that the tears of night began to fall, first by ones and twos, then by threes and fours, at last by fives and sixes of sevens, for the tired ones were wecking, as we weep now with them. O! O! O! Par la pluie!Then there came down to the thither bank a woman of no appearance (I believe she was a Black with chills at her feet) and she gathered up his hoariness the Mookse motamourfully where he was spread and carried him away to her invisible dwelling...
FDV of trimmed passage: ...for he was the holy sacred spit of a bishop's apron.
And there came down to the hither bank a woman to all important (though they say that she was comely, spite the cold in her heed) and... she plucked down the Gripes... from his limb and cariad away its beotitubes with her to her unseen shieling... And it was never so thoughtful of either of them. And there were left now an only elmtree and but a stone... O! Yes! And Nuvoletta, a lass.
Issy, brokenhearted, jumps in the river: [fw]
Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuee! Nuee! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream... there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears... for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!No applause, please!
Summary by Bill Cadbury
The parable over, Shaun addresses his audience again, with more rationalisations for shunning Shem:
...As I have now successfully explained to you my own naturalborn rations... insure me that I am a mouth's more deserving case by genius. I feel in symbathos for my ever devoted friend... I could love that man like my own ambo for being so baileycliaver... He ought to go away for a change of ideas and he'd have a world of things to look back on. Do, sweet Daniel! If I weren't a jones in myself I'd elect myself to be his dolphin in the wildsbillow because he is such a barefooted rubber...
FDV of trimmed passage: such a barefooted robber with my supersocks pulled over his face which I published in my best backgarden.
You will say it is most unenglish and I shall hope to hear that you will not be wrong about it. But I further, feeling a bit husky in my truths.
My heeders will recoil... how.. I proved... to your sotisfiction how his abject... is nothing so much more than a mere cashdime... for to this graded intellecktuals dime is cash and the cash system... means that I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps in your pocket at the same time... unless Burrus and Caseous have not or not have seemaultaneously sysentangled themselves...
(Sounds like quantum indeterminacy to me!)
Shaun offers yet another parable on the brother-dialectic as butter and cheese: [fw]
Burrus, let us like to imagine, is a genuine prime, the real choice, full of natural greace, the mildest of milkstoffs... and, of course, obsoletely unadulterous whereat Caseous is obversely the revise of him and in fact not an ideal choose by any meals... and... to understand this as well as you can, feeling how backward you are in your down-to-the-ground benches, I have completed the following arrangement for the coarse use of stools...Caseous may bethink himself a thought of a caviller but Burrus has the reachly roundered head that goes best with thofthinking... He has the lac of wisdom under every dent in his lofter while the other follow's onni vesy milky indeedmymy... Let me sell you the fulltroth of Burrus when he wore a younker... A cleanly line, by the gods! ...And what a cheery ripe outlook...
Burrus was a cheerful youth, but Caseous is a stinker: [fw]
This in fact, just to show you, is Caseous, the brutherscutch or puir tyron: a hole or two, the highstinks aforefelt and anygo prigging wurms. Cheesugh! you complain. And Hi Hi High must say you are not Hoa Hoa Hoally in the wrong!
This dialectic may or may not imply that Shaun should forgive Shem:
Thus we cannot escape our likes and mislikes, exiles or ambusheers, beggar and neighbour and... let us be tolerant of antipathies... And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional sinequam to... the Nolanus theory...Now, while I am not out now to be taken up as unintentionally recommending the Silkebjorg tyrondynamon machine... until I can find space to look into it myself a little more closely first I shall go on with my decisions after having shown to you in good time how both products of our social stomach... are mutuearly polarised...
(Probably, Shaun will first morph into HCE, and then into Shem-- at which point he'll finally find space to look into it.)
Positing, as above, too males pooles... and looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males we feel we must waistfully woent a female to focus and on this stage there pleasantly appears the cowrymaid M. whom we shall often meet below who introduces herself upon us at some precise hour which we shall again agree to call absolute zero... And so... we come down home gently... to meet Margareen.
Shem and Shaun both write lovesongs (cf the end of ch4, where they also compete for the girls, after the trial):
We now romp through a period of pure lyricism of shamebred music... evidenced by such words... as I cream for thee, Sweet Margareen, and the more hopeful O Margareena! O Margareena! Still in the bowl is left a lump of gold! ...The pawnbreaking pathos of the first of these shoddy pieces reveals it as a Caseous effort. Burrus's bit is often used for a toast... Of course the unskilled singer continues to pervert our wiser ears...
(Shem sings of his lust, Shaun of her chastity.)
The B-C-M triangle resembles the canoodler with the two peaches: [fw]
...it will be very convenient for me for the emolument to pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle... Margareena she's very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! she velly fond of chee... she at once complicates the position while Burrus and Caseous are contending for her misstery by implicating herself with an elusive Antonius, a wop who would appear to hug a personal interest in refined chees of all chades at the same time as he wags an antomine art of being rude like the boor.
Joyce's notes sometimes cite Tristram/Tristan as the third brother, synthesising Shem and Shaun. Shaun seems to dislike him as much as he dislikes Shem: [fw]
This Antonius-Burrus-Caseous grouptriad may be said to equate the qualis equivalent with the older socalled talis on talis one.... And this is why... an athemisthued lowtownian... may be awfully green to one side of him and fruitfully blue on the other which will not screen him however from appealing to my gropesarching eyes... as a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorus blesphorous idiot who kennot tail a bomb from a painapple when he steals one...
(Is this a Mack Sennett allusion?)
No! ...My unchanging Word is sacred. The word is my Wife, to exponse and expound, to vend and to velnerate... Till Breath us depart! Wamen. Beware would you change with my years. Be as young as your grandmother!
FDV of trimmed passage: Wrong man in his wrong place right words in right order.
...She that will not feel my fulmoon let her peel to thee as the hoyden and the impudent!
Shaun damns Issy as well, for her disloyalty, and then refuses Shem's request one last time:
That mon that hoth no moses in his sole nor is not awed by conquists of word's law... if he came to my preach, a proud pursebroken ranger... to beg for a bite... would meself and Mac Jeffet... foot him out? -- ay! -- were he my own breastbrother, my doubled withd love... were we bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt, had we tapped from the same master and robbed the same till, were we tucked in the one bed and bit by the one flea... though it broke my heart to pray it, still I'd fear I'd hate to say!
Q12 is Latin for 'let him be accursed?', A12 approximately 'we are Shem': [fw]
12. Sacer esto?Answer: Semus sumus!
Chapter seven
is Shem's: [fw]
Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming... but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at.Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull... the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve...
Shem's missing arm is rarely explicit in the text, but it looms large in the early notes:
Dec22 "never rob knife or 1 armed man" (thieves' superstition)
Dec22 "Pierrepoint invented strap for 1 armed men"
May23 "Trist has a silver arm/ Trist born with a silver arm up his sleeve"
May23 "useful arm"
Jul23 "Right arm of illuminator palladium"
Aug23 "Nuala of Silver hand"
Nov23 "1 arm was minus a hand"
?1924: "[Shem] pain in lost limb (innocence)" [more]
...fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip... the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver... a manroot of all evil, a salmonkelt's thinskin... a bladder tristended, so much so that young Master Shemmy on his very first debouch at the very dawn of protohistory seeing himself such and such, when playing... in their garden nursery... dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?: telling them take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past... to the winner.
Physical inferiority forces Shem to exploit his wits. [fw]
One said when the heavens are quakers... the next one said when the angel of death kicks the bucket of life... and still another when lovely wooman stoops to conk him... still one said when you are old I'm grey fall full wi sleep... another when yea, he hath no mananas... All were wrong, so Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being -- all give it up? -- ; when he is a -- yours till the rending of the rocks, -- Sham.
(So is this self-deprecating wit... or just shamelessness?)
Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen's teatime salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pineapple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook out of Ananias' cans...None of your inchthick blueblooded Balaclava fried-at-belief-stakes or juicejelly legs of the Grex's molten mutton or greasilygristly grunters' goupons or slice upon slab of luscious goosebosom with lump after load of plumpudding stuffing all aswim in a swamp of bogoakgravy for that greekenhearted yude!
Rosbif of Old Zealand! he could not attouch it... He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea...
FDV of trimmed passage: Once when in a state of helplessly hopeless inebriation he tried to lift the peel of a citron to his nostrils + hiccupped he could live all his days on the smell of it...
Like Joyce [qv], Shem favors a wine [Fendant de Sion] that resembles urine: [fw]
O! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to!No likedbylike firewater... or gulletburn gin or honest brewbarrett beer either. O dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice and... it came straight from the noble white fat... the winevat, of the most serene magyansty az archdiochesse... Fanny Urinia.
Aint that swell, hey? ...Talk about lowness! Any dog's quantity of it visibly oozed out thickly from this dirty little blacking beetle...
FDV of trimmed passage: ...for the very first instant the Kenny girl with her kodak saw the as yet unremunerated national apostate who was cowardly gun + camera shy taking what he thought was a short cut into Patatapapaveri's, fruiterer's + musical florist, she knew he was a bad fast man by his walk on the spot.
[...Exexex! COMMUNICATED.]
Predictions of his suicide are not fulfilled, instead he wires his brother for more money: [fw]
Around that time, moravar, one generally... hoped or at any rate suspected... that he would early turn out badly, develop hereditary pulmonary T.B., and do for himself one dandy time... but, though he fell heavily and locally into debit, not even then could such an antinomian be true to type. He would not put fire to his cerebrum; he would not throw himself in Liffey; he would not explaud himself with pneumantics; he refused to saffrocake himself with a sod. With the foreign devil's leave the... fraud diddled even death. Anzi, cabled... to his jonathan for a brother: Here tokay, gone tomory, we're spluched, do something, Fireless. And had answer: Inconvenient, David...
McH: anzi = on the contrary (Italian)
Visitors try but fail to broach the subject of his ignoble path:
All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour's word, and if ever, during a Munda conversazione... delicate tippits were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers... such as: Pray, what is the meaning, sousy, of that continental expression, if you ever came acrux it, we think it is a word transpiciously like canaille?: or: Did you anywhere, kennel, on your gullible's travels... happen to stumble upon a certain gay young nobleman whimpering to the name of Low Swine who always addresses women out of the one corner of his mouth, lives on loans and is furtivefree yours of age?...without one sigh of haste like the supreme prig he was, and not a bit sorry, he would pull a vacant landlubber's face, root with earwaker's pensile in the outer of his lauscher and then... begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to that... conclamazzione... the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and one moment tarabooming great blunderguns (poh!) about his farfamed fine Poppamore, Mr Humhum, whom history, climate and entertainment made the first of his sept and always up to debt... and another moment visanvrerssas, cruaching three jeers (pah!) for his rotten little ghost of a Peppybeg, Mr Himmyshimmy... as glib as eaveswater to those present (who meanwhile, with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their fichers), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the other people in the story, leaving out, of course, foreconsciously, the simple worf and plague and poison they had cornered him about until there was not a snoozer among them but was utterly undeceived in the heel of the reel by the recital of the rigmarole.
A coward, he avoids fights by agreeing with everyone (just hoping they'll buy him drinks): [fw]
He went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and, as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers, the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last speaker and clasp shakers (the handtouch which is speech without words) and agree to every word as soon as half uttered, command me!, your servant, good, I revere you... and then at once focuss his whole unbalanced attention upon the next octagonist who managed to catch a listener's eye, asking and imploring him out of his piteous onewinker... whether there was anything in the world he could do to please him and to overflow his tumbletantaliser for him yet once more.
FDV: out of his piteous eyes to fill up his tumbler for him.
One hailcannon night (for his departure was attended by a heavy downpour) as very recently as some thousand rains ago he was therefore treated with what closely resembled parsonal violence, being soggert all unsuspectingly through the deserted village of Tumblin-on-the-Leafy... by rival teams of slowspiers counter quicklimers who finally... thought... they had better be streaking for home... with thanks for the pleasant evening, one and all disgustedly, instead of ruggering him back, and awake, reconciled... to a friendship, fast and furious, which merely arose out of the noxious pervert's perfect lowness. Again there was a hope that people, looking on him with the contemp of the contempibles, after first gaving him a roll in the dirt, might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused, but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight...
April 1923 note: "SD [Stephen Dedalus] seeks the contempt of the contemptible" (A-Telemachus 4)
1920 Circe note: "SD... respect for contemptibles" (Lynch and the whores)
He didn't play normal children's games: [fw]
Darkies never done tug that coon out to play non-excretory, anti-sexuous, misoxenetic, gaasy pure, flesh and blood games... same as piccaninnies play all day, those old... games for fun and element we used to play with Dina and old Joe kicking her behind and before... games like Thom Thom the Thonderman, Put the Wind up the Peeler, Hat in the Ring, ...Twos and Threes, ...Fox Come out of your Den, Broken Bottles, Writing a Letter to Punch, ...Postman's Knock, ...Battle of Waterloo, Colours, ...Telling your Dreams, What's the Time, Nap, ...Last Man Standing, ...Handmarried but once in my Life and I'll never commit such a Sin agin, ...Hops of Fun at Miliken's Make, ...Here's the Fat to graze the Priest's Boots, When his Steam was like a Raimbrandt round Mac Garvey.
He flees home and locks the door: [fw]
Now it is notoriously known how on that surprisingly bludgeony Unity Sunday when the grand germogall allstar bout was harrily the rage... a rank funk getting the better of him, the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled... for his bare lives... pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow... kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar for the life, where, as there was not a moment to be lost... he collapsed carefully under a bedtick... with... a whotwater wottle at his feet to stoke his energy of waiting, moaning feebly... that his pawdry's purgatory was more than a nigger bloke could bear, hemiparalysed by the tong warfare and all the shemozzle... his cheeks and trousers changing colour every time a gat croaked.
(Shem is frequently seen as the blackskinned Cain [cf].)
Shem thinks he's a better writer than Shakespeare: [fw]
How is that for low, laities and gentlenuns? Why, dog of the Crostiguns, whole continents rang with this Kairokorran lowness!...But would anyone, short of a madhouse, believe it? Neither of those clean little cherubum, Nero or Nobookisonester himself, ever nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity as did this mental and moral defective.. who was known to grognt... upon one occasion... that he was... aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard... as what he fancied... he was himself and that... he would wipe alley english spooker... off the face of the erse.
He peeks out to see if the battle is over, and gets a shock: [fw]
After the thorough fright he got that bloody, Swithun's day, though every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod was smeared with generous erstborn gore and every... cobbleway slippery with the bloods of heroes... our low waster never had the common baalamb's pluck to stir out and about the compound... for the only once... he did take a tompip peepestrella throug a... telescope... out of his westernmost keyhole... with an eachway hope in his shivering soul... of finding out for himself... whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back... why... he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself... at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver... handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly, had been told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile to look facts in their face before being hosed and creased... by six or a dozen of the gayboys.
Shem claimed to be writing a book: [fw]
What... was this disinterestingly low human type... really at... for he seems in a badbad case? The answer... would sound: ...he had flickered up and flinnered down into a drug and drunkery addict, growing megalomane of a loose past...
FDV of trimmed passage: his manner was to write strings of honourable, learned, highplaced intials after his name
It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, edition de tenebres...
![[Original 1922 Ulysses cover]](../img/ulysses.jpg)
turning over three sheets at a wind, telling himself delightedly... that every splurge on the vellum he blundered over was an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before... but what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers... the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat... the fog of his mindfag, the buzz in his braintree, the tic of his conscience... the rats in his garret, the bats in his belfry... he was hardset to mumorise more than a word a week... Can you beat it? ...Was there ever heard of such lowdown blackguardism? Positively it woolies one to think over it.
He stank: [fw]
Yet the bumpersprinkler used to boast aloud alone to himself... how he had been toed out of all the schicker families of the klondykers... ordered off the gorgeous premises in most cases on account of his smell which all cookmaids eminently objected to as ressembling the bombinubble puzzo that welled out of the pozzo.
He could have been tutoring them in handwriting, but instead he was practicing to imitate their styles: [fw]
Instead of chuthoring those model households plain wholesome pothooks... what do you think Vulgariano did but study with stolen fruit how cutely to copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter an epical forged cheque on the public for his own private profit until, as just related, the Dustbin's United Scullerymaid's and Househelp's Sorority... turned him down and assisted nature by unitedly shoeing the source of annoyance out of the place altogether... holding one another's gonk (for no-one... dared whiff the polecat at close range) and making some pointopointing remarks as they done so... aboon the lyow why a stunk, mister.
Writing by the light of his nose, he portrayed himself as a ladies man:
[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received... ABORTISEMENT.]One cannot even begin to post figure out... how slow in reality the excommunicated Drumcondriac... really was. Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana... how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen?
Be that as it may, but for that light phantastic of his gnose's glow as it slid lucifericiously within an inch of its page... Nibs never would have quilled a seriph to sheepskin. By that rosy lampoon's effluvious burning... he scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met... while all over up and down the four margins of this rancid Shem stuff the evilsmeller... used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself... as... a heartbreakingly handsome young paolo with love lyrics for the goyls in his eyols... anna loavely long pair of inky Italian moostarshes glistering with boric vaseline and frangipani. Puh! How unwhisperably so!
The house O'Shea or O'Shame... known as the Haunted Inkbottle... with... a blind of black sailcloth over its wan phwinshogue, in which the soulcontracted son of the secret cell groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers... was the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth... The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof... were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells... alphybettyformed verbage... ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes... fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers... blackeye lenses... twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirls', young ladies', milkmaids', washerwomen's, shopkeepers' wives, merry widows', ex nuns'... mothers'-in-laws', fostermothers', godmothers' garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises... fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury... yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages... one stands... a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego... writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.
FDV: writing the history of himself in furniture.
(Shem is clearly a bachelor, but Joyce never again lived as a bachelor after 1904.)
He kept hens in the WC, for their eggs: [fw]
Of course our low hero was a self valeter by choice of need so up he got up whatever is meant by a stourbridge clay kitchenette and lithargogalenu fowlhouse for the sake of akes... which the moromelodious jigsmith... brooled and cocked and potched in an athanor, whites and yolks and yilks and whotes... with cinnamon and locusts and wild beeswax and liquorice and Carrageen moss... in what was meant for a closet...
His costive Satan's antimonian manganese limolitmious nature never needed such an alcove so, when Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators, on the nudgment of their legal advisers... boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose, he winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit's waste. You ask, in Sam Hill, how? Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed porporates that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek.
There follows a passage in Latin, translated here in RJ Schork's version (parenthetical phrases in italics are English in the original):
"First of all the Master Maker, the Exalted Seedsower, who positioned himself close to the life-giving and all-powerful earth with buttocks as bare as the day they merged from the womb, lifted up his raincoat and unfastened his underpants, weeping and groaning but without any shame or anyone's by-my-leave, and loosened his bowels into his hand (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!); next, after he had been relieved of this dark blast and was trumpeting a call to action, he deposited his own shit (that is what he terms his droppings) into a receptacle which once was the respectable urn of grief; then, into that same urn, with an invocation to the twin brothers Medardus and Godardus, he joyfully and mellifluously pissed, while chanting in a loud voice the Psalm which begins "My Tongue is the Pen of a Scribe who Writes Speedily" (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated); finally, from the foul crap that had been mixed with the sweet essence of godlike Orion, and baked and exposed to the cold, he created for himself indelible ink (faked O'Ryan's, the indelible ink)."
(This echoes the early St Kevin vignette.)
Writing on his skin with this ink makes his soul grow darker as well: [fw]
Then... with this double dye... this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all... cyclewheeling history...
FDV (notes): writes universal history on his own body (parchment)
August 1922, JAJ to Harriet Weaver: "I think I will write a history of the world."
but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud...
FDV: that self which he hid from the world grew darker + darker in its outlook
HCE as the older butler often has a name like Sigurdsen, and a role like policeman. Here he catches Shem sneaking home drunk (or with a quantity of wine?): [fw]
So perhaps... the blond cop who thought it was ink was out of his depth but bright in the main.Petty constable Sistersen of the Kruis-Kroon-Kraal it was, the parochial watch... who had been detailed from pollute stoties to save him... from the ... effects of... mobmauling... that wrongcountered the tenderfoot... on his way from a protoprostitute... just as he was butting in... under a hideful... through his boardelhouse fongster, greeting for grazious oras as usual: Where ladies have they that a dog meansort herring?
McH: Hvorledes har De det i dag, min sorte herre? = How are you today, my dark sir? (Danish)
This greeting echoes the cad's greeting to HCE [qv], but here it's in (Ibsen's) Danish, where the cad spoke Irish Gaelic... and it's a dark gentleman here instead of a fair one. So the fair Dane (Shaun) and the dark Gael (Shem) have made equivalent greetings.
Shem locks himself in (again), leaving the cop wondering (like the cad).
Sergo, search me, the incapable reparteed with a selfevitant subtlety so obviously spurious and, raising his hair... in he skittled. Swikey! The allwhite poors guardiant... was literally astundished over the painful sake... staggered thereto... at the caledosian capacity... of the caftan's wineskin and even more so, during... it was said him... fun the concerned outgift of the dead med dirt, how that... he was namely coon at bringer at home two gallonts... full poultry till his murder...
FDV (badly needed here!): The peace officer was astounded at the capaciousness of the wineskin + even more so when informed by the human outcome of drink + dirt that he was merely bringing home 2 gallons of porter to his mother.
What mother? Whose porter? ...But our undilligence has been plutherotested so enough of such porterblack lowneess, too base for printink! ...We cannot, in mercy or justice... stay here for the residence of our existings, discussing Tamstar Ham of Tenman's thirst.
JUSTIUS (to himother): Brawn is my name and broad is my nature... I'm the boy to bruise and braise... Stand forth, Nayman of Noland (for no longer will I follow you obliquelike through the inspired form of the third person singular... but address myself to you... direct), stand forth, come boldly, jolly me, move me... to laughter... till I give you your talkingto! Shem Macadamson, you know me and I know you and all your shemeries. Where have you been in the uterim, enjoying yourself all the morning since your last wetbed confession? I advise you to conceal yourself, my little friend, as I have said a moment ago and put your hands in my hands and have a nightslong homely little confiteor about things. Let me see. It is looking pretty black against you, we suggest, Sheem avick. You will need all the elements in the river to clean you over it all and a fortifine popespriestpower bull of attender to booth...
(ALP's letter washes clean all sins.)
Joyce's notes explain that seven charges are being itemised here-- all distinctly autobiographical. The first is 'Hell' (though it sounds like doubt): [fw]
You were bred, fed, fostered and fattened from holy childhood up in this two easter island on the piejaw of hilarious heaven and roaring the other place... and now... you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods... nay... anarch, egoarch, hiresiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul. Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger, Shehohem, that you will neither serve not let serve, pray nor let pray? And here, pay the piety, must I too nerve myself... for the horrible necessity of scandalisang (my dear sisters, are you ready?) by sloughing off my hope and tremors while we all swin together in the pool of Sodom? I shall shiver for my purity while they will weepbig for your sins...
(So in hearing Shem's confession, Shaun will share his sins?)
The second is 'Property' (though it sounds like refusal to marry):
Now... while yet an adolescent... you got a handsome present of a selfraising syringe and twin feeders (you know, Monsieur Abgott, in your art of arts... as well as I do (and don't try to hide it) the penals lots I am now poking at) and the wheeze sort of was you should... repopulate the land of your birth and count up your progeny by the hungered head and the angered thousand but you thwarted the wious pish of your cogodparents, soph, among countless occasions of failing... adding to the malice of your transgression, yes, and changing its nature... even extruding your strabismal apologia, when legibly depressed, upon defenceless paper and thereby adding to the already unhappiness of this our popeyed world, scribblative! -- all that too with cantreds of countless catchaleens... congested around and about you for acres and roods and poles or perches... accomplished women, indeed fully educanded... struggling to possess themselves of your boosh... mutely aying... for what would not have cost you... the price of one ping pang, just a lilt... of the oldest song in the wooed woodworld... accompanied by a plain gold band!
The third is 'Prophecy' (but sounds like pessimism): [fw]
...Sniffer of carrion, premature gravedigger, seeker of the nest of evil in the bosom of a good word... you with your dislocated reason, have cutely foretold... death with every disaster, the dynamitisation of colleagues, the reducing of records to ashes, the levelling of all customs by blazes, the return of a lot of sweetempered gunpowdered didst unto dudst but it never stphruck your mudhead's obtundity... that the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you cry over, the more bullbeef you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier fumes your new Irish stew.
The fourth is 'Shirking' (but includes exile): [fw]
O, by the way, yes, another thing occurs to me. You let me tell you, with the utmost politeness, were very ordinarily designed... to fall in with Plan... and do a certain office (what, I will not tell you) in a certain holy office (nor will I say where) during certain agonising office hours (a clerical party all to yourself) from such a year to such an hour on such and such a date at so and so much a week pro anno... and do your little thruppenny bit and thus earn from the nation true thanks, right here in our place of burden, your bourne of travail and ville of tares... but, slackly shirking both your bullet and your billet, you beat it backwards... to sing us a song of alibi... an Irish emigrant the wrong way out, sitting on your crooked sixpenny stile... you ... Europasianised Afferyank!
The fifth is 'Sin' but seems to involve corrupting his brother (Kevin-Shaun): [fw]
...There grew up beside you... on his keeping and in yours... that other, Immaculatus... that pure one... our handsome young spiritual physician that was to be... a chum of the angelets, a youth those reporters so pettitily wanted as gamefellow that they asked his mother for ittle earps brupper to let him tome to Tindertarten, pease, and bing his scooter 'long and 'tend they were all real brothers... that mothersmothered model, that goodlooker with not a flaw whose spiritual toilettes were the talk of half the town... but him you laid low with one hand one fine May morning in the Meddle of your Might, your bosom foe... (not one did you slay, no, but a continent!) to find out how his innards worked!
The sixth is 'Doles" (begging for charity): [fw]
...Malingerer in luxury, collector general, what has Your Lowness done in the mealtime with all the hamilkcars of cooked vegetables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales, the Parish funds, me schamer, man, that you kittycoaxed so flexibly out of charitable butteries by yowling heavy with a hollow voice drop of your horrible awful poverty of mind... To... give you your pound of platinum and a thousand thongs a year (O, you were excruciated, in honour bound to the cross of your own cruelfiction!) to let you have your Sarday spree and holinight sleep (fame would come to you twixt a sleep and a wake)...
(1922-- Molly's sleep at the end of Ulysses, and the start of Finnegans Wake.)
FDV (dropped): Where are the little apples we lock up in the little drawer?
Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact (gainsay me, cakeeater!) that... you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance and made a hottentot of dulpeners crawsick with your crumbs? Am I not right? Yes? Yes? Yes? ...And remember that golden silence gives consent, Mr Anklegazer! ...Sh! Shem, you are. Sh! You are mad!He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm.
In Joyce's notes, the seventh is 'Mother' and is not set off in any way from the first six, but here in the published version Justice is balanced by Mercy, somehow Shem addressing himself regarding his failures to honor his mother: [fw]
MERCIUS (of hisself): Domine vopiscus! My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault! Pariah, cannibal Cain, I who oathily forswore the womb that bore you and the paps I sometimes sucked, you who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been or you meant to becoming, bewailing like a man that innocence which I could not defend like a woman, lo, you there, Cathmon-Carbery......and thank Movies from the innermost depths of my still attrite heart... it is to you, firstborn and firstfruit of woe, to me, branded sheep, pick of the wasterpaperbaskel... you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil... to me unseen blusher in an obscene coalhole, the cubilibum of your secret sigh, dweller in the downandoutermost where voice only of the dead may come, because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!, that our turfbrown mummy is acoming...
So ALP forgives Shem: [fw]
...running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world... with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking... tramtokens in her hair, all waived to a point and then all inuendation, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght's green hills and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
-- Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!
Notes by FX Connor
Summary by Bill Cadbury
Chapter eight
is the last of book one. Joyce spent 1200 hours on it by his count, especially working in puns on some 350 river names.
JAJ: "a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone. The river is named Anna Liffey. Some of the words at the beginning are hybrid Danish-English. Dublin is a city founded by Vikings... Her Pandora's box contains the ills flesh is heir to. The stream is quite brown, rich in salmon, very devious, shallow. The splitting up towards the end (seven dams) is the city abuilding. Izzy will later be Isolde (cf. Chapelizod)."
JAJ: "It is an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water."
Ellmann: The idea for the episode came to him on a trip to Chartres, where he saw women washing clothes on both banks of the Eure... he liked to think how some day, way off in Tibet or Somaliland, some boy or girl in reading that little book would be pleased to come upon the name of his or her home river.
Joyce oversaw a French translation in 1930-31 [compare] and an Italian one in 1938 [compare]
It opens with the two washerwomen from chapter six sharing gossip by the river as dusk falls. (Even as Issy speaks to her mirror, and Mercius is somehow Shem speaking to himself, so these two are somehow both ALP as well.) [fw]
O Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes. And don't butt me -- hike! -- when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He's an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me... I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! ...What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did... As you spring so shall you neap. O, the roughty old rappe! ...And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking wiesel rat... How elster is he a called at all? ...Huges Caput Earlyfouler...
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia?
Like James and Nora, HCE and ALP are rumored never to have formally wed: [fw]
Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve's or were him and her but captain spliced? ...O, passmore that and oxus another! ...I heard he dug good tin with his doll, delvan first and duvlin after, when he raped her home, Sabrine asthore, in a parakeet's cage, by dredgerous lands and devious delts... Who sold you that jackalantern's tale? ...Not a grasshoop to ring her, not an antsgrain of ore... Don't you know he was kaldt a bairn of the brine, Wasserbourne the waterbaby?
FDV of trimmed passage: HCE has blue in his ee.
ALP is said to have solicited other women for him: [fw]
...Shyr she's nearly as badher as him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling... sals from all around... to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? She was? ...Yssel that the limmat? ...Letting on she didn't care... Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate... Didn't you spot her in her windaug... pretending to ribble a reedy derg on a fiddle she bogans without a band on? Sure she can't fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! Sure, she can't...!
FDV: at the window pretending to play a fiddle she has without a bottom?
She worked her fingers to the bone to cheer him out of his depression, but he just abused her:
Well, I never now heard the like of that! Tell me moher. Tell me moatst. Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus... sittang sambre on his sett... hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv... and his fringe combed over his eygs... You'd think all was dodo belonging to him...And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child, Wendawanda, a fingerthick, in a Lapsummer skirt and damazon cheeks, for to ishim bonzour to her dear dubber Dan...
McH: wish him bonjour
And an odd time she'd cook him up blooms of fisk... for to plaise that man hog stay his stomicker till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt and as rash as she'd russ with her peakload of vivers up on her sieve... he'd kast them frome him, with a stour of scorn, as much as to say you sow and you sozh, and if he didn't peg the platteau on her tawe, believe you me, she was safe enough.
FDV: the old chap'd cast them from him if he didn't peg the tea at her
She tries whistling to him, and singing: [fw]
And then she'd esk to vistule a hymn, The Heart Bowed Down or The Rakes of Mallow... And not a mag out of Hum no more than out of the mangle weight... And brahming to him down the feedchute... Hello, ducky, please don't die! Do you know what she started cheeping after, with a choicey voicey...? ...I loved you better nor you knew... Go away! Poor deef old deary! Yare only teasing! Anna Liv? As chalk is my judge!
And the soliciting again: [fw]
And didn't she up in sorgues and go and trot doon and stand in her douro, puffing her old dudheen, and every shirvant siligirl or wensum farmerette walking the pilend roads... usedn't she make her a simp or sign to slip inside by the sullyport? You don't say, the sillypost? Bedouix but I do! Calling them in, one by one... and legging a jig or so on the sihl to show them how to shake their benders and the dainty how to bring to mind the gladdest garments out of sight and all the way of a maid with a man and making a sort of a cackling noise like two and a penny or half a crown and holding up a silliver shiner. Lordy, lordy, did she so? Well, of all the ones ever I heard! Throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him! To inny captured wench you wish of no matter what sex... to hug and hab haven in Humpy's apron!
FDV: A half a crown to any girl to sit + make fun in Humpy's lap!
ALP's poem is also her letter:
And what was the wyerye rima she made! ...I'm dying down off my iodine feet until I lerryn Anna Livia's cushingloo, that was writ by one and rede by two and trouved by a poule in the parco! I can see that, I see you are. How does it tummel? Listen now. Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am!...By earth and the cloudy but I badly went a brandnew bankside, bedamp and I do, and a plumper at that!
For the putty affair I have is wore out, so it is, sitting, yaping and waiting for my old Dane hodder dodderer, my life in death companion, my frugal key of our larder, my much-altered camel's hump, my jointspoiler, my maymoon's honey, my fool to the last Decemberer, to wake himself out of his winter's doze and bore me down like he used to.
Is there irwell a lord of the manor or a knight of the shire at strike, I wonder, that'd dip me a dace or two in cash for washing and darning his worshipful socks for him now we're run out of horsebrose and milk?
Only for my short Brittas bed made's as snug as it smells it's out I'd lep and off with me to the slobs della Tolka or the plage au Clontarf to feale the gay aire of my salt troublin bay and the race of the saywint up me ambushure.
(Like answer #4 in ch6, this song also echoes the end of the Mamalujo vignette.)
Her children: [fw]
Onon! Onon! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul... Well, now comes the hazelhatchery part... How many aleveens had she in tool? I can't rightly rede you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven... She can't remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop's infallible slipper... A hundred and how? They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle... She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad. She had a flewmen of her owen... Tell me, tell me, how cam she camlin through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? ...Waiwhou was the first thurever burst?
Her early sexual history: [fw]
Someone he was, whuebra they were, in a tactic attack or in single combat. Tinker, tilar, souldrer, salor, Pieman Peace or Polistaman. That's the thing I'm elwys on edge to esk... She can't put her hand on him for the moment... Such a loon waybashwards to row! She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her and how it was gave her away.She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees...
Cf Circe draft [qv]: "A girl with hair on the wind rushes across the street, her shawl flapping from her arms. She shrieks, laughing, rushing, and is engulfed in a doorway. A burly navvy pursues with long strides. He stumbles on the steps but recovers and plunges into the doorway after her."
She thought she's sankh neathe the ground with nymphant shame when he gave her the tigris eye! O happy fault! Me wish it was he! You're wrong there, corribly wrong! Tisn't only tonight you're anacheronistic! It was ages behind that when nullahs were nowhere, in county Wickenlow, garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she'd lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge... to wend her ways byandby... for all her golden lifey in the barleyfields... of Humphrey's fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper, wellingtonorseher...
JAJ: "Dublin is a city founded by Vikings. The Irish name is Baile atha Cliath. Ballyclee = Town of the Ford of Hurdles."
Then whereabouts in Ow and Ovoca? Was it yst with wyst or Lucan Yokan or where the hand of man has never set foot? Dell me where, the fairy ferse time! I will if you listen. You know the dinkel dale of Luggelaw? Well, there once dwelt a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name... and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked... in the silence, of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown... He cuddle not help himself, thurso that hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the man so, rubbing her up and smoothing her down, he baised his lippes in smiling mood, kiss akiss after kisokushk (as he warned her niver to, niver to, nevar) on Anna-na-Poghue's of the freckled forehead... But she ruz two feet hire in her aisne aestumation. And steppes on stilts ever since. That was kissuahealing with bantur for balm! O, wasn't he the bold priest? And wasn't she the naughty Livvy?
(This refers both to the St Kevin vignette and the Tristan and Isolde vignette.)
I picture Nora confessing some of this to James: [fw]
Two lads in scoutsch breeches went through her before that... before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler not to mention a bulgic porterhouse barge. And ere that again, leada, laida, all unraidy, too faint to buoy the fairiest rider... she was licked by a hound, Chirripa-Chirruta, while poing her pee, pure and simple, on the spur of the hill in old Kippure, in birdsong and shearingtime, but first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly, she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil's glen while Sally her nurse was sound asleep in a sloot and, feefee fiefie, fell over a spillway before she found her stride and lay and wriggled in all the stagnant black pools of rainy under a fallow coo and she laughed innocefree with her limbs aloft and a whole drove of maiden hawthorns blushing and looking askance upon her.
FDV: + fell + wriggled under a cow.
Returning to the washing, they discuss other ALP-like identities (and their undies), Lily Kinsella and the wife of the villain Magrath:
...O go in, go on, go an! I mean about what you know. I know right well what you mean. Rother! ...Arran, where's your nose? And where's the starch? That's not the vesdre benediction smell. I can tell from here by their eau de Colo and the scent of her oder they're Mrs Magrath's. And you ought to have aird them. They've moist come off her. Creases in silk they are, not crampton lawn. Baptiste me, father, for she has sinned! ...The only parr with frills in old the plain. So they are, I declare! Welland well! If tomorrow keeps fine who'll come tripping to sightsee? How'll? Ask me next what I haven't got! ...And here is her nubilee letters too. Ellis on quay in scarlet thread. Linked for the world on a flushcaloured field. Annan exe after to show they're not Laura Keown's. O, may the diabolo twisk your seifety pin! You child of Mammon, Kinsella's Lilith! Now who has been tearing the leg of her drawars on her? Which leg is it? The one with the bells on it. Rinse them out and aston along with you! Where did I stop? Never stop! Continuarration! You're not there yet. I amstel waiting. Garonne, garonne!
ALP decides she must defend HCE's sullied reputation: [fw]
Well, after it was put in the... Sitterdag-Zindeh-Munaday Wakeschrift... even the snee that snowdon his hoaring hair had a skunner against him... Everywhere erriff you went and every bung you arver dropped into, in cit or suburb or in addled areas, the Rose and Bottle or Phoenix Tavern or Power's Inn or Jude's Hotel... you found his ikom etsched tipside down or the cornerboys cammocking his guy...
FDV: you found his picture upside down or the cornerboys burning his guy
McH: mocking Guy Fawkes
She swore on croststyx nyne wyndabouts she's be level with all the snags of them yet... So she said to herself she'd frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard. What plan? Tell me quick and dongu so crould! What the meurther did she mague?
Her plan involves Shaun's mailbag, and a lot of costuming: [fw]
Well, she bergened a zakbag, a shammy mailsack, with the lend of a loan of the light of his lampion, off one of her swapsons, Shaun the Post, and then she went and consulted her chapboucqs, old Mot Moore, Casey's Euclid and the Fashion Display and made herself tidal to join in the mascarete... I can't tell you how! It's too screaming to rizo, rabbit it all! ...O but you must, you must really!
FDV of trimmed passage: I'd give my chance of going to heaven to hear it all, every word.
...O, leave me my faculties, woman, a while! If you don't like my story get out of the punt. Well, have it your own way, so. Here, sit down and do as you're bid... Tongue your time now. Breathe thet deep... Lynd us your blessed ashes here till I scrub the canon's underpants. Flow now. Ower more. And pooleypooley.First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet... Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud... from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel... with ... butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould... allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles... of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shellmarble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey... and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes...
She doesn't tell HCE what she's plotting: [fw]
...and she sendred her boudeloire maids to His Affluence... with respecks from his missus... and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin.
FDV: And then she sent her boudoir maid to Humphrey with a request that she might leave him for a moment
A call to pay and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrosa, back in a sprizzling... She said she wouldn't be half her length away. Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slang over her shulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came.Describe her! ...What had she on, the liddel oud oddity? ...Here she is... Call her calamity electrifies man... I'll tell you a test. But you must sit still. Will you hold your peace and listen well to what I am going to say now? It might have been ten or twenty to one of the night... when the flip of her hoogly igloo flappered and out toetippit a bushman woman, the dearest little moma ever you saw, nodding around her, all smiles... a judyqueen, not up to your elb...
FDV: The door of the ugly igloo opened outward + out stepped a fairy woman the height of your knee.
Save us and tagus! No more? ...Ay, you're right. I'm epte to forgetting... The linth of my hough, I say! She wore a ploughboy's nailstudded clogs, a pair of ploughfields in themselves: a sugarloaf hat with... a band of gorse for an arnoment and a hundred streamers dancing off it and a guildered pin to pierce it: owlglassy bicycles boggled her eyes: and a fishnetzeveil for the sun not to spoil the wrinklings of her hydeaspects: potatorings boucled the loose laubes of her laudsnarers: her nude cuba stockings were salmospotspeckled: ...stout stays, the rivals, lined her length:...her civvy codroy coat with alpheubett buttons was boundaried round with a twobar tunnel belt: a fourpenny bit in each pocketside weighed her safe from the blowaway windrush; she had a clothespeg tight astride on her joki's nose and she kep on grinding a sommething quaint in her fiumy mouth and the rrreke of the fluve of the tail of the gawan of her snuffdrab siouler's skirt trailed ffiffty odd Irish miles behind her lungarhodes.
FDV: the tail of her snuffbrown skirt trailed 50 miles behind her on the road.
When the shocked citizens see her they conclude she's 'doped': [fw]
Hellsbells, I'm sorry I missed her! Sweet gumptyum and nobody fainted! But in whelk of her mouths? Was her naze alight? Everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer... Kickhams a frumpier ever you saw! Making mush mullet's eyes at her boys dobelon. And they crowned her their chariton queen, all the maids. Of the may? You don't say! Well for her she couldn't see herself. I recknitz wharfore the darling murrayed her mirror.
McH: muddied
She did? Mersey me! There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen, boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and the undification of her filimentation, lolling and leasing on North Lazers' Waal all eelfare week... and as soon as they saw her meander by that marritime way in her grasswinter's weeds and twigged who was under her archdeaconess bonnet... sedges an to aneber: ...Between our two southsates and the granite they're warming, or her face has been lifted or Alp has doped!
FDV: Between you + me + the wall we are on as round as a hoop Alp has doped.
October 1923 note: "Between you + me ?Nop has doped"
The mailbag is full of presents for her children (who had grown estranged?): [fw]
But what was the game in her mixed baggyrhatty? ...And where in thunder did she plunder? ...I want to get it frisk from the soorce. I aubette my bearb it's worth while poaching on! Shake it up, do, do! That's a good old son of a ditch! I promise I'll make it worth your while. And I don't mean maybe... Spey me pruth and I'll tale you true.Well, arundgirond in a waveney lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses... not knowing which medway or weser to strike it... making chattahoochee all to her ain chichiu...
(Chattering to her children, feeding her chicks.)
...nistling to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Reims... then bathing Dirty Hans' spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door...!And they all about her, juvenile leads and ingenuinas... Hasn't she tambre! Chipping her and raising a bit of a chir... every dive she'd neb in her culdee sacco of wabbash... and reach out her maundy meerschaundize, poor souvenir as per ricorder and all for sore aringarung, stinkers and heelers, laggards and primelads, her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them. For evil and ever. And kiks the buch.
The inventory of gifts mentions many of the book's characters: [fw]
A tinker's bann and a barrow to boil his billy for Gipsy Lee; a cartridge of cockaleekie soup for Chummy the Guardsman; for sulky Pender's acid nephew deltoid drops, curiously strong; a cough and a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor Piccolina Petite MacFarlane; a jigsaw puzzle of needles and pins and blankets and shins between them for Isabel, Jezebel and Llewelyn Mmarriage; a brazen nose and pigiron mittens for Johnny Walker Beg; a papar flag of the saints and stripes for Kevineen O'Dea; ...a prodigal heart and fatted calves for Buck Jones, the pride of Clonliffe; ...a jauntingcar for Larry Doolin, the Ballyclee jackeen; a seasick trip on a government ship for Teague O'Flanagan; ...a drowned doll, to face downwards for modest Sister Anne Mortimer; ...to Sue Dot a big eye; ...a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick and a drop every minute for Stumblestone Davy; ...a pretty box of Pettyfib's Powder for Eileen Aruna to whiten her teeth and outflash Helen Arhone; ...for Seumas, thought little, a crown he feels big; ...for Camilla, Dromilla, Ludmilla, Mamilla, a bucket, a packet, a book and a pillow; ...a hairpin slatepencil for Elsie Oram to scratch her toby, doing her best with her volgar fractions; an old age pension for Betty Bellezza; a bag of the blues for Funny Fitz; ...Jill, the spoon of a girl, for Jack, the broth of a boy; ...a stiff steaded rake and good varians muck for Kate the Cleaner; a hole in the ballad for Hosty; ...a letter to last a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit; ...a change of naves and joys of ills for Armoricus Tristram Amoor Saint Lawrence; a guillotine shirt for Reuben Redbreast and hempen suspendeats for Brennan on the Moor;...a sunless map of the month, including the sword and stamps, for Shemus O'Shaun the Post; a jackal with hide for Browne but Nolan; ...whatever you like to swilly to swash, Yuinness or Yennessy, Laagen or Niger, for Festus King and Roaring Peter and Frisky Shorty and Treacle Tom and O.B. Behan and Sully the Thug and Master Magrath and Peter Cloran... and whoever you chance to meet knocking around; and a pig's bladder balloon for Selina Susquehanna Stakelum.
Twentyfive (?) of the 28 rainbow girls get the same gifts: [fw]
But what did she give to Pruda Ward and Katty Kanel and Peggy Quilty and Briery Brosna and Teasy Kieran and Ena Lappin and Muriel Maassy and Zusan Camac and Melissa Bradogue and Flora Ferns and Fauna Fox-Goodman and Grettna Greaney and Penelope Inglesante and Lezba Licking like Leytha Liane and Roxana Rohan with Simpatica Sohan and Una Bina Laterza and Trina La Mesme and Philomena O'Farrell and Irmak Elly and Josephine Foyle and Snakeshead Lily and Fountainoy Laura and Marie Xavier Agnes Daisy Frances de Sales Macleay? She gave them ilcka madre's daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress.
FDV: She gave them all moonflowers + bloodstone + a pint + a half of prunejuice.
So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime...
FDV: To Izzy O'Gorman life beyond her years. To Shem her son life before his time.
JAJ: "Her Pandora's box contains the ills flesh is heir to."
That's what you may call a tale of a tub! ...All that and more under one crinoline envelope if you dare to break the porkbarrel seal. No wonder they'd run from her pison plague.
The river has widened, the washerwomen on opposite sides:
Throw us your hudson soap for the honour of Clane! The wee taste the water left. I'll raft it back, first thing in the marne... You've all the swirls your side of the current. Well, am I to blame for that if I have? Who said you're to blame for that if you have? You're a bit on the sharp side. I'm on the wide... My hands are blawcauld between isker and suda like that piece of pattern chayney there, lying below.
(broken china = Humpty Dumpty)
Or where is it? Lying beside the sedge I saw it. Hoangho, my sorrow, I've lost it! Aimihi! With that turbary water who could see? So near and yet so far! But O, gihon! I lovat a gabber. I could listen to maure and moravar again. Regn onder river. Flies do your float. Thick is the life for mere.
These last paragraphs were recorded by Joyce, and must be tracked down to hear all the drama he puts into them. An almost full version is currently available in RealAudio or MP3 format. (Two shorter segments, in AIFF and/or RealAudio are also available on the Web-- see below.) Joyce collaborated on some explanatory notes at the time, quoted below.
If you're joining us late, here's a recap: we're at the end of chapter eight, one-third of the way thru the book. We've heard dozens of versions of the tale of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) and his fall from grace. In the current chapter we've been hearing about his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), as remembered by two old washerwomen gossiping across the river Liffey, upstream from Dublin. She hatched a plan to redeem his sullied reputation, which involved giving gifts to her 111 children. Because ALP's symbol is the river, this chapter has hundreds of puns on river-names woven into the text.
As night falls, the washerwomen change into a tree and a stone (symbols of the twin sons of HCE and ALP, the artist Shem and the conformist Shaun): [fw original text] (The indented portions below transcribe what Joyce is reading.)
Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it.
McHugh's Annotations (McH): kennet = 'ken it' = 'know it' (Anglo-Irish)
First-Draft Version (FDV): every story has an end
McH: that's the long and the short of it
Rivernames: Kennet, Taling
Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root.
Explanatory note (JAJ): "At this point the woman who is to be turned into a tree sees herself pictured upside down in the water, in the form that she later takes."
Rivername: Root
And my cold cher's gone ashley.
JAJ: "This statement comes from the woman who is later to become a stone."
JAJ: "chair (seat)" also French for 'flesh' (so 'ashley' = ashen colored)
Rivernames: Cher, Ashley
Fieluhr? Filou!
McH: 'Filou' ('scoundrel'), shouted across the Rhine by a Frenchman, was heard by a German as 'wie viel Uhr?' ('What's the time?') (here reversed by Joyce)
Rivername: Fie
What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it?
Rivers: Saone, Senne, Erewon, Clogh, Hurd
FDV: It's ages now since I last saw Waterhouse's clock.
McH: Dublin had a clock known as 'Waterhouse's clock' (mentioned in Two Gallants as the place where a 'tart' is spotted)
Clocks and watches (and a misunderstood request for the time) were associated with HCE's moment of disgrace [qv], and in the Nausikaa chapter of Ulysses [qv] Bloom's watch is punned with his penis: "Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said his waterworks were out of order."
The missing clock probably also parallels the missing Jesus of ch1 [qv].
The fates of ALP's children:
O, my back, my back, my bach! I'd want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There's the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang!
Rivers: Ache, Ping, Pongo, Belle, Pang
McH: Aix-les-Bains [info] French spa
McH: Sexaloitez = Sechselauten (Zurich's spring festival [info])
McH: 'et concepit de Spiritu Sancto' = and she conceived of the Holy Ghost
Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman.
Rivers: Godavari, Vert, Shower, Thaya, Amana
McH: vert = avert
They lay out the wet clothes to dry:
Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I'll spread mine on mine. Flep! It's what I'm doing. Spread! It's churning chill. Der went is rising.
Rivers: Churn, Derwent
The bedsheets were stained by newlyweds:
I'll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I'd have sprinkled and folded them only. And I'll tie my butcher's apron here. It's suety yet. The strollers will pass it by.
Rivers: Lay, Bride
JAJ: "The meatman's garment is put among the linen and is so badly washed that no one will take it." strollers = thieves
We met the butcher/meatman in ch3 [qv] as yet another version of the various assaulters (cad with pipe, masked man with revolver, hotel guest with beerbottle), but here it's clearly also Jesus's stained shroud.
Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby's shawl.
JAJ: "In the war, notes in secret writing were sent on face clothes."
Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas!
Rivers: Joseph, Joss, Mutt
JAJ: "As the story goes on the river gets wider and the two women become parted. Their words are no longer clear to one another."
JAJ: ""Deo Gratias: Said to a person who gives a sneeze." (Shaun will sneeze near the end of ch14 [qv].)
McH: Dea Tacita = nurse of Romulus and Remus; taceas = 'be quiet' (Latin)
The AIFF-format reading (with notes) starts here:
Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger.
Rivers: Wharnow, Alle, Lost
FDV: more again gone to the stranger.
McH: alla stranger = a l'etranger = abroad (French)
I've heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland's Vineland beyond Brendan's herring pool takes number nine in yangsee's hats.
FDV: And all the Dunnes takes eights in hats.
McH: yangsee's = Agnes (French hatmaker)
Rivers: Shannon, Yangtze, Hat Creek
JAJ: "dunce = Duns Scotus school of thought"; "Markland's wineland is a Northman's name for America, and Brendan's Sea for the Atlantic"; "the American Irishman has a very high opinion of himself"
So: those of ALP's (Ireland's) children who went to America got swelled heads.
References are being made to the presents ALP gave her children a few pages back-- a brooch for Nancy Shannon, beads for Biddy, trousers for Wally Meagher: [fw]
And one of Biddy's beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler's candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor's Walk.
Rivers: Lost, Ister (Danube), Main, Manzanares
JAJ: "person being given a high place in the church after death"
McH: marigold window (aka rose window) in church [eg] [etym]
JAJ: "man's-in-a-hurry here used for a place for making water"
But all that's left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front.
FDV: "But all that's left now to the last of the Meaghers I'm told it's a kneebuckle + two buttons in the front."
River: Loup
McH: in de loop der jaren = in the course of years (Dutch)
McH: the trousers ALP gave to Wally Meagher earlier have been washed until only the buckle and hooks remain
Do you tell me that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas!
Rivers: Orara, Orbe, Las Animas
McH: orar por Orbe y por las Animas = to pray for the Earth and for the Souls (Spanish)
Ussa, Ulla, we're umbas all! Mezha, didn't you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It's that irrawaddyng I've stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound.
McH: earwadding I've stuck in my ears
McH: aars = arse (Dutch)
Rivers: Ussa, Ulla, Umba, Mezha, Ufa, Dee, Irrawaddy, Stoke, Aar, Husheth, Lethe
One thinks she sees HCE, but the other accuses her of drinking:
Oronoko! What's your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist?
FDV: Is that the Dunboyne statue behind you there riding his high horse?
Rivers: Orinoco, Finn, Joachim Creek, Horse Creek
McH: Adam Findlater, Dublin politician
McH: brothers Horsa and Hengest led Saxon invasion of England
McH: fornenst = over against (dialect)
This is the anticipated/hallucinated return of Christ.
Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You're thinking of Astley's Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers.
Rivers: Father of Waters (Mississippi), Yonne, Isset
Various allusions to horses and stagecraft suggesting the hallucination derives from a youthful seduction.
Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It's well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me!
[The AIFF sample ends here]
McH: Ireland sober is Ireland free.
McH: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Rivers: Maria Creek, Greese
Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway's Carrigacurra canteen?
McH: opera: La fille de Madame Angot (a washerwoman)
McH: lifting elbow = drinking
Rivers: Madame, Isonzo, Amman, Conway
JAJ: "Carrigacurra. Town on Liffey where Conway had a beer house"
Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait's creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees.
McH: Your rear gate's Graeco-Roman (creaky, rheumatic) but your buttocks/buttresses (...are Greek?)
Amn't I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan's pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow.
Rivers: Mary, Alice, Son, Limpopo
McH: St Margaret Mary Alacoque drank wash water [bio]
McH: lavandiere = washerwoman (French)
Maybe it's the ass belonging to the four Masters, Matthew Mark Luke and John (Mamalujo):
Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere!
JAJ: "My blood is ice... See there!"
Rivers: Scamander, Isar, Isis (Thames), Icis, Seint, Zezere
McH: Golden Falls on river Liffey
Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns.
FDV: What is [it?] at all but a blackberry growth or a grey mare ass them four old fellows own.
JAJ: Dwyer Gray (owner of Dublin's Freeman's Journal newsaper) "gave the town its water. The ass here is representative of the Apocrypha" [more on Mmlj as Gospels (500k)]
River: Hamble
Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them.
Rivers: Me Nam, Lyons, Gregory, Meyne, Drava
JAJ: "That go-in-the-mist: another name for a 'long-ears' or ass"
Perhaps it's the light on a ship returning (Tristram rearriving as in the opening paragraphs [qv]): [fw]
Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye.
Rivers: Pharphar, Nyar, Kistna, Garry, Indus, Lune, Eye
JAJ: "She's dead, little Eve, she's dead. The boys and girls at play send one another back and forward in the air a hundred times, and then let them come slowly to rest, saying those words with the name of the person in question."
JAJ: "Strange things are seen in the eyes of persons on the point of death."
Ulysses- Sirens [qv] "Lullaby. Die dog. Little dog, die."
We'll meet again, we'll part once more. The spot I'll seek if the hour you'll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk's upset.
JAJ: "The stone is a sign of space, and the tree, which has growth, of time."
JAJ: blue milk = Milky Way
River: Milk
Forgivemequick, I'm going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna's end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.
[The long RealAudio and MP3 samples end here, but don't skip the continuation below, from the WiP site.]
Rivers: Bubye, Evenlode, Save, Jurna, Sow, Moy, Valley, Towy
McH: Towy I too, rathmine = So will I too by mine
HCE had seven wives:
Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we're all their gangsters. Hadn't he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor's bill for Joe John.
McH: old skeowsha = old friend (Anglo-Irish)
Rivers: Quare, Fingel
JAJ: "The splitting up towards the end (seven dams) is the city abuilding."
McH: cf 'As I was going to St Ives...'
McH: Sudd = mass of floating vegetation in Nile
Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair.
Rivers: Biferno, Pink, Lim, Indian
JAJ: "The colours of the colour-band seen by moonlight, so that their dresses are in light shades"
McH: markets = Margarets = maggies (seven rainbow girls); cheek by jowl; turkis = turquoise (Danish); indienne = indigo; milkidmass = Michaelmas = 29 September
Cf Berkeley vignette "the enamelled Indian gem of the ruler's maledictive ring"
(The RealAudio sample from [WiP] begins here.)
Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be.
Rivers: Tys Elv, Elfenland, Tees, Teme, Seim
JAJ: "Vico's order but natural, free"
Northmen's thing made southfolk's place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person?
JAJ: "The high place on which the Norwegian Thing had its meeting has now become Suffolk Place"
JAJ: "What number of places will make things into persons? Play on the statement that a 'substantive' is the name of a person, a place or a thing"
Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis!
Rivers: Trinity, Eure, Our
McH: Hircus civis Eblanensis = goat citizen of Dublin (Latin)
He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans.
FDV: He had paps too, big + soft.
(St Patrick's Confessio [qv] mentions a pagan initiation ceremony which he resisted, involving sucking a man's breast.)
Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men.
FDV: And what all men have.
Rivers: Ho, Save
Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone?
FDV: Is that Mrs Malone? -> What wrong Malone?
Can't hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!
Rivers: Moose, Oos, Elm, Halls Creek, Stone
Summary by Bill Cadbury
[Next as published-- II.1 thru II.4]
[Next as written-- III.1 and III.2]
Portrait:
etext: 1 2 3 4 5a 5b; main :
ch1 notes :
friends :
Pinamonti :
Stephen Hero :
symmetry :
prices
Ulysses:
chapters:
summary :
anchors :
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12a
12b
13
14a
14b
15a
15b
15c
15d
16a
16b
17a
17b
18a
18b
notes:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
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