This chapter is one of those pub quizzes the final paragraph of the previous chapter has just declared unnecessary. It’s also a continuation of that chapter’s scholarly investigation, though now the terms are broadened to include not only the letter but also the parties involved or mentioned in it and the earlier chapters. As such, it’s also an examination on everything we’ve learnt so far. Joyce marked each of the twelve questions with one of his sigla, to indicate who or what it’s about.
As a quiz, it’s also a catechism, “cut and dry aks and wise form” (123.02), like that of the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses alluded to towards the end of the previous chapter. In much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Ireland and the UK, the secular catechism was an enormously popular form of childhood instruction. The most popular of these, The Child’s Guide to Knowledge, Being a Collection of Useful and Familiar Questions and Answers on Every Day Subjects, Adapted for Young Persons, and Arranged in the Most Simple and Easy Language. By a Lady, was first published in 1825, and went through 67 editions before it ceased publication in 1907. It’s almost certainly the “Child’s Guide (blue cloth)” we see on Bloom’s bookcase in “Ithaca,” to which it gives its form (U 17.1368). One of the pleasures of “Ithaca” is in discovering how the apparently cut-and-dried form of catechism is actually warm, funny, and steeped everywhere in Bloom’s idiosyncratic and far from dispassionate point of view. Throughout the earlier part of the book, Bloom had been anxiously obsessed with the way he’s sure others must see him, as if all Dublin must know about Molly and Boylan. Now, though, at the end of this long and fraught day, his rescue of Stephen has given him a new buoyancy and the unexpected feeling of his own worth—as if at last, in the unbiased, objective eyes of the universe, he must surely be a good person after all. The comedy of “Ithaca” is that for the not particularly well-educated and would-be scientific Bloom, the weight of showing this impartial universality gets laid on the shoulders of a children’s book, and its haphazard omnium gatherum.
The catechistic form may have a similar function in this present chapter of the Wake. After the deep and coruscating doubts of the earlier chapters, here’s an attempt to state the facts and personages of the matter in the form of a series of questions and their apodictic, authoritative answers. Or so it would seem. If so, it certainly won’t take long for that to unravel, and for the catechism to devolve into all sorts of other things.
126.01-09
Like “Ithaca,” this catechism is not just a decontextualised set of questions and their answers. (But then, for that matter, neither is a catechism, whose disciplined to-and-fro is always part of a pedagogical ritual of induction.) As this first paragraph suggests, the quiz is part of the long-standing battle between the two Earwicker brothers. It has been set by Shem the Penman (“Jockit Mic Ereweak,” 126.07), the scholarly one of the family, and the past winner has been rakish Shaun the Post (“Shaun Mac Irewick, briefdragger,” 126.04)—who, having previously scored 110 percent, may be a bit of a cheat. The anomosity between the two brothers will show throughout many of the questions, and even more in Shaun’s increasingly vituperative answers. The goad of the third-last answer, ostensibly in their sister Issy’s voice, will raise the stakes so much that Shaun’s contempt for his brother will spill put of the bounds of this chapter into the next.
To begin, then. Shem the quizmaster calls for attention: “Who do you no tonigh, lazy and gentleman?” (126.02). That singular, “gentleman” rather than “gentlemen,” may suggest that there’s really only one man among the participants that all this is really aimed at—the rival brother Shem wants to bring down with his questions. We shall see the animosities emerge soon.
Q: 126.10-139.13
A: 139.14
1. Perhaps aiming to be difficult in its sheer length and apparent complexity, the first question takes 13 pages to ask. For all of that, it still takes only a single line to answer: “Finn MacCool!”, the figure of Irish legend and thus another stand-in for HCE. (Variations on the trigram are everywhere in these pages too.) Like the names of ALP’s letter that began the previous chapter, this question too is a list—but one that’s more than four times as long.
The version of the question David Hayman gives in his First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake takes up not even a page. Loosely speaking, that version seems to move from the exploits of the younger HCE through to the wake of I.i. In the final version, most of this material ends up in the beginning and end of the list, and the terms added don’t seem to have any obvious chronology to them. As we have seen, for the most part, the previous chapter’s Mamafesta list used commas as (very ambiguous) separators of the terms, so it’s never entirely clear whether a particular comma separates two terms or is internal to a single term. Reading the list, your eye is always trying out possible groupings—rather like reading “Penelope,” where we get no guidance from punctuation and are forced to parse as we go. In the Mamafesta list, the presence of two semicolons among these commas leads Tindall to suggest that it falls into three parts, representing Issy, Kate and ALP. In the HCE list, though, where the separators are all semicolons, there’s no such demarcation into parts, and we can even count the number of items (390, though unlike many Wake numbers that doesn’t seem to be particularly significant). There are echoes here of all the major events and motifs of the Wake: the prehistoric giant, the wooing of ALP, the meeting with the Cad, the Museyroom of history, the indiscretion in the Park, Tristan and Isolde, the fall and the wake, trial and imprisonment, the phoenix reborn, the Prankquean, the hen, Richard III, thunder (though no 110-letter thunderwords), Buckley and the Russian general, the giveaway stammer, …
But the list form may be as significant as its content. It’s a huge list, as befits a giant. In its sheer size and excess, it surely goes beyond any conceivable verisimilitude as an actual question in a pub quiz. If the aim of quizmaster Shem is to overwhelm rival Shaun with detail upon detail, it soon becomes perfectly clear that every successive addition is actually rather superfluous. The sheer number of terms doesn’t actually complicate things: each new term just confirms the answer that’s going to be obvious to anyone listening, and does little more than delay the moment of giving that answer. As indeed must be clear to the one asking: there’s a freight of anxiety in this unchecked proliferation of elaborations that go nowhere.
But there is “another cant to the questy” (109.01). Vengeful Shem may be the quizmaster, but all of this is also—like everything else in the Wake—to be traced back to that unknowing, senseless, sleeping giant who underlies the entire book, and whom we first met on the very first page, his “humptyhillhead”—empty hill head—sending out a profoundly unconscious “unquiry” (3.20-21). As John Bishop points out in his Joyce’s Book of the Dark, the Wake is characterised throughout by statements that withdraw from any suggestion of a deeper consciousness, here in this deep, even dreamless sleep. The sleeper is empty. Humpty Dumpty, Finnegan, Earwicker, all are attempts to fill that endless void, to say in the manner that positivistic psychologisation insists on, that here at last, this, is the real thing, the real person. And what they fill that space with is an endless anxiety of things that can’t be said but which insist on bubbling up again. There are items in this list that invoke, yet again, those old anxieties about incest, with its familiar anagrammatic guise (127.02-13), the indiscretion in the Park (127.12-13, 131.31-33, 134.08-09), the unwitting confession to the Cad (126.15-16, 128.01), the outwitting by the Prakquean (128.17-18), to take only a quick survey.
A list is disconnected. The semi-colon separators mark that disconnection. They don’t say, Here’s more on that, or Here’s what came after that, or Here’s what followed from that; all they say is, Here’s something else. Like Freud’s unconscious, the list can and does harbour contradictions. What matters is not the logical consistency so much as that something is said, even if it should be babble. Or, to turn that around in a more radical fashion, for this mute sleeping figure that underlies the Wake, there is a sense in which any content whatsoever, no matter how urgent or how accurately it might reflect what we might guess to be the facts of a daytime waking personage, is babble. With the list, we are already in the territory of Beckett’s The Unnamable and How It Is. Or perhaps it’s already the radical twist on the Cartesian cogito that Lacan will offer: just as the cogito is best seen not as any conceivable content that fills thought, but is instead the empty and contentless form of thinking, the pure I think—so too that nameless sleeping figure is the pure form of which all the other personages are just avatars. We come closest to that not in the 390 attributes, biographemes, praises, phrases of abuse, sarcasms and jokes that are the content of the list, “variously catalogued, regularly regrouped” (129.12), but in the form of the list itself: “apersonal problem, locative enigma” (135.26-27).
Q: 139.15
A: 139.16-28
2. For all its over-complication, the first question has failed to stump Shaun. The second question, a one-liner this time, is not even really a question at all, but a sarcastic put-down, “Does your mutter know your mike?” (139.15: elsewhere the two brothers are Mick and Nick, archangel and devil). This is most obviously, “Does your mother know you’re out?”, but there’s a further barb to it. These are brothers who were introduced at the beginning of this chapter as “Shaun Mac Irewick” and “Jockit Mic Ereweak”: if we take that “mike” as a third Wake-variant on “Mac,” son of, it’s a slur on both Shaun and his mother: “Does your mother know whose son you are?”
Shaun replies with a song about their mother, something like a parody of “The Bells of Shandon.” The most common editions of the Wake don’t set this out as verse, though the scansion makes it clear that that’s what it is, as does the layout given in Hayman’s First-Draft Version. Rose and O’Hanlon set it out like this:
When I tum 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!
The song begins with what looks like a statement of filial pride, though almost immediately that’s revealed to be pride not, first of all, in his mother, but in his father, that “pontificator and circumvallator” who sleeps with her by his side. There’s the uneasy suggestion in this that Shaun’s gloating over that classic primal scene, where the child sees the parents in the sexual act—a preview of chapter III.4, and of the geometry lesson of chapter II.2, where Shaun will goad his brother to blows with a diagram that turns into a picture of their mother’s genitals (293). The song becomes more ribald, to suggest how arousing all this is to the father and, by extension, to the two naughty sons: if the parents, and particularly the father (“If hot Hammurabi or cold Clesiastes could espy”) could see them, there’ll be hell to pay. Or perhaps that just increases the delight they take in it, bursts the bounds of it. That final “Amin” is also “à min,” to love, where min is Dutch for love, and Dutch love is proverbially intense. The boys are “her pranklings,” children of the Prankquean rather than of the man they displace. Shem has taken up Shaun’s imputation about paternity, and wrapped them both in it, to show his brother the implications of his words: you want this too, don’t you?
Q: 139.29-140.05
A: 140.06-07
3. Back to the quiz proper, though by now every question stands to be thoroughly tainted with the brothers’ rivalry. The question itself is in the first four lines (“Which title is the … motto … for that Tick for Teac thatchment … where …?”, 139.29-32); the nine lines left are a series of hints about what’s not the right answer.
In Joyce’s earlier draft, question 3 is marked by the square siglum, which does duty for a number of things. Originally, it stood for the riddle of the title of the book, which Joyce concealed from his friends right up until its final publication. Most broadly, it’s a container: depending on the context, it may come to stand for anything from the city of Dublin itself to the object, Finnegans Wake, that we are holding in our hands. Here, it seems to stand for HCE’s pub in Chapelizod, the pub in which the present quiz is taking place: the list of wrong choices includes a number of Dublin pub names, tig and teach are Irish words for a house, and a house with a hatchment (coat of arms) displayed outside it is likely to be a public house. So, the question would seem to be, What is the motto of this pub?, where the giveaway this is disguised by a short list of local happenings or stories (the pub where…) and a longer list of wrong answers (the pub that’s not…), just to muddy the waters. Trying to confuse Shaun with a vast number of positive hints of the right answer didn’t work for the first question; this time, Shem seems to be listing the wrong answers he imagines Shaun might give and pre-emptively declaring them wrong.
The answer he gets plays it safe, and is a version of the motto of the city of Dublin in its entirety: The obedience of the citizens is the happiness of the city: “Thine obesity, O civilian, hits the felicitude of our orb!” (140.06-07). We can’t be too sure who gives this answer; the sarcasm (Dublin would be a better place if it wasn’t for fat people…) may suggest Shaun as the source, but the sarcasm may rather be against him: the Shaun we see in later chapters (III.1, III.2) is distinctly fat.
Q: 140.08-14
A: 140.15-141.07
4. The fourth question moves further afield: “What Irish capitol city … can boost of having a) 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 phillohippic theobibbus paùpulation in the world…?” (140.08-13). For those who missed the question’s local pride in Phoenix Park, the Guinness brewery and O’Connell Street (or the less flattering horseloving God-drunk paupers), there are even hints that the answer has two syllables, six letters, and begins with D and ends with N.
Is Shem trying to make the answer so obvious that someone other than Shaun—anyone but Shaun—is bound to jump in first? Indeed, the four old men who are regulars at the pub, and who have provided an occasional chorus for the events, jump eagerly in, and Shem the quizmaster asks them to “harmonise [their] abecedeed responses” (140.14).
Like 
, the old men (represented by 
in the drafts) stand in for a number of things. They are the four gospellers, generally abbreviated collectively as “Mamalujo”; in the primal scene chapter, III.4, they are the four posts of the marital bed, the onlookers who see and judge all; they are the four directions of the compass, and the four provinces of Ireland, Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaught; and their names are Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougall (476.25-28). Each answers with the capital city of his own province (Belfast, Cork, Dublin and Galway), even if he has to distort its name to fit the hints, or simply ignore some of them altogether (Delfas, Dorhqk, Nublid and Dalway: Leinsterman Luke Tarpey still manages to get it wrong despite having the right answer). Their responses are steeped in the nostalgia for their youth that characterises so much of what they say elsewhere in the book; the memories on which they’re focused are seductions; all of the response mention local landmarks or folk attributes of their cities; and all play with parodic stage-Irish versions of the regional accents.
The “harmonise[d] responses” they conclude with suggest some sort of barbershop quartet, especially if it’s laid out as verse:
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,
may nay non Aequallllllll!
There are echoes of the four previous responses here: south and north, “speople” and “neople,” from the Cork and Belfast passages; Guinness and the “feepence” or “mill’s money” from Dublin; “aequal” from Galway. The references to Shandon Bells echo the song that was the basis for Shaun’s answer to question 2, and thus once again imply Anna Livia, the harmoniser.
Q: 141.08-26
A: 141.27
5. This question is all about the old man, Sackerson, who is jack-of-all-trades around the pub. It’s largely a list again, phrased as a job description of all the duties the incumbent must perform: cleaning and general maintenance in the pub and the stable, and keeping order in business hours and security after hours: five days off a year; a wage but no commission (141.23); preferably Scandanavian in origin (a “loughladd” from Irish Lochlann, Scandanavian (141.08); the entire passage is full of puns on Danish words); and no “prufusional drunklords” need apply (141.24). The services required of him overlap into services to the family. He is expected to look out for the three children (“underhold three barnets,” 141.14; “putzpolish crotty bottes,” 141.14.15, where crotte is French for dung, suggesting dirty boots and bottoms). The final lines, which break into the Norwegian of Peer Gynt, suggest a close paternal relationship to young quizmaster Shem in particular (and we remember that the young Joyce taught himself Norwegian in order to write a letter of admiration to Ibsen):
he is fatherlow soundigged inmoodmined pershoon but aleconnerman, nay, that must he isn’t … (141.24-26)
Han er faderligt sindet imod min Person;—men ökenom,—nej, det er han ikke! (Peer Gynt)
He [God] is fatherly towards my little self, but economical—no, that He is not! (McHugh)
God the Father? But then the siglum 
suggests the snake in the garden, and he may be in the pay of the authorities, like Corny Kelleher in Ulysses: hence, perhaps, that multiply-emphatic denial that he might be an inspector of ales, an aleconner.
Q: 141.28-29
A: 141.30-142.07
6. Now we turn to Sackerson’s counterpart, Kate. The question asks what it means to “Summon In The Housesweep Dinah” (from the song, “There’s Someone in the House with Dinah”)—a course of action that seems to have become so frequent, and such public knowledge, that calling her in almost amounts to the house slogan.
Kate, of course, cleans up the messes left by others, and there have been plenty of them of late. Whoever gives the answer summons her in another sense, speaking in a parody of Kate’s own voice in a litany of complaints punctuated by variations on the “Tip!” that marks her presence. She has had to clean up “all the claub of the porks” (141.31), the mud of the the scandal of the park, knows her employer’s “stain on the flower” (141.32), and even seems at times to have been herself the object of his advances: “if me ask and can could speak and he called me by me midden name[. ] Tik. I am your honey honeysugger phwhtphwht tha Bay” (141.32-34).
Q: 142.08-28
A: 142.29
7. If are the four evangelists, then 
are the twelve apostles, the pub regulars who form the jury of rumour that is always ready to cast opinion on HCE. They are enumerated in four lists of twelve:
- occupation: “the doorboy, the cleaner, the sojer, …” (142.08-11);
- the district of Dublin they come from: “prés salés and Donnybrook prater and Roebuck’s campos …” (142.11-16);
- their collective behaviour in the story: “latecomers in all the year’s round by anticipation, … the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination, … contributing their conflingent controversies of differentiation, …” (142.16-25); and finally:
- their names, which, as with and the gospellers, are all Irish versions of the names of the apostles: “Matey, Teddy, Simon, …” (142.27-28)
is public opinion and the heat it generates, the power of rumour. Falling back on the wisdom of hindsight (“retroratiocination,” 142.17-18) but claiming the wisdom of prophecy (“vaticination,” 142.19), it has its roots in the world Dubliners outlined so clearly. In that need to “crunch the crusts of comfort due to depradation, drain the mead for misery to incur intoxication” (142.20-21), everything becomes inverted into a self-perpetuation of misery, “condon[ing] every evil by practical justification” and “condam[ing] any good to its own gratification” (142.21-22), all of it “ruled, roped, duped and driven by those numen daimons” of the name of God and authority (142.23).
[That third grouping shows ‘s signature: here and elsewhere, their collective utterance is always marked by latinate words ending in -ation, of which there are twelve here. It is no accident that the book of critical essays by friends which Joyce saw through the press in advance of the Wake itself, the book that put the Wake up for critical discussion and circulation within public opinion, should come from : Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, from 497.02-13. (It’s no accident either that this was the passage that finally, though still indirectly, stated the name of the book, and thus some 350 pages later answered quiz question 3: 496.36-497.03.)]
Who are these “component partners of our societate” (142.08)? “Answer: The Morphios!” (142.29) collapses Murphies (a Jungian Everyman in stage-Irish?), shapechangers and sleepers. Campbell and Robinson read them in an essentially moralistic sense, as “those still dreaming the dream that is life, those not yet awake, etc.” (Skeleton Key 109); but given the waking anxieties that fuel and incessantly disturb this night’s sleep, how is the apparently simple act of waking up any solution? There is one sleeper in the Wake, the inert and barely differentiated giant we first glimpse at the beginning of the book and then sporadically throughout it until the culminating séance on Howth in III.3 (531.27-554.09). Like all other personages of the Wake, the of this passage are avatars of that sleeper. These twelve, though, are a multiplicity of citizens from all over Dublin, with a quite specific set of functions in the book. They are the audience for 
‘s mortifications, the eyes that come to see and hear whatever he might do, no matter how private it may seem, and they pass public judgement on him. Whatever, if anything, happened in Phoenix Park, it’s the versions of it that circulate in the pub and around Dublin he has to deal with; any attempt to eliminate them or to deny the charges just adds fuel.
This is why remain so relatively faceless. It’s tempting to group those lists term-by-term, so that we’d have Matey the doorboy from the salt marshes, Teddy the cleaner from Donnybrook, Simon the soldier from Roebuck, and so on, but that falls down with the third list of twelve terms, which are all resolutely collective actions and attitudes: “latecomers in all the year’s round by anticipation, … the porters of the passions in virtue of retroratiocination, …” and so on. The logic here is like the one set out in Ulysses. In the first sustained patch of interior monologue in that book, Stephen catches sight of his bleary unshaven face in Mulligan’s shaving mirror, and registers it uncomfortably as, “As he and others see me” (U 1.136). Bloom, later in a day that has had him acutely aware of the judgements of others, and now confronted with the scenes of gluttony in the Burton restaurant, will also wonder, “Am I like that? See ourselves as other see us” (U 8.662). It’s a being-seen that’s not by any particular person: those individuals Matey the doorboy and Teddy the cleaner and Simon the soldier are irrelevant here, empty place-holders for a pure, empty being-seen. This being-seen is not the property of any particular person or group, as it’s still there in the complete absence of any actual person to see it. In the middle of an all-but empty beach, Stephen picks his nose and smears the snot on a rock, then looks up guiltily (U 3.500-502). It’s a property of the very possibility of sight, the pure form of sight (μορφή, morphé, form): to see, you must already be in a field of visibility, over which you have no control. HCE is visible in a world, and the consequences of that visibility can neither be calculated nor eliminated, because they extend beyond what any given individual, including HCE himself, may or may not see. This particular conjuncture may of course be highly paranoid on HCE’s part, but that sense of being responsible to some value, good or justice that’s not summed up by opinion is surely also part of the very possibility of the ethical.
We can go a bit further: , the Morphios, are not other sleepers, other subjects, but a name for the ineradicable aspect of being a subject that no longer answers to that subject alone. On the broadest level, we could call that unconscious: not some deeper, truer level, but simply that to which the subject has no access. Here, for HCE’s endlessly multiplying anxiety, it is the repeated and insatiable cruelty of the super-ego, which sees and judges everything relentlessly. That siglum is a peephole, an unyielding eye that is completely blank.
Q: 142.30
A: 142.31-143.02
8. The next question is, like the second, not so much a proper quiz question as a dig at Shaun and his fondness for his sister Issy’s schoolmates—to whom he will later deliver a gleefully lecherous sermon on sexual purity in chapter III.2 (431.21-445.26). “And how war yore maggies?” (142.30) suggests that he might just have seen them recently—perhaps after school and before the quiz.
There are 28 or 29 of these “maggies” (German Magd, maid, young woman), depending on whether we count Issy in with them (hence the common designation of them as the “leapyear girls,” though that precise term doesn’t actually occur anywhere in the Wake). The number reflects HCE’s fascination with his daughter’s incipient puberty and menstruation, just as the siglum itself may be a variant on the diagram of the mother’s vulva from the geometry lesson on page 293. Fourteens and sevens also abound whenever the maggies are around, the latter often as the colours of the rainbow (hence the “rainbow girls,” which again isn’t a term that appears in the Wake).
(In two questions’ time, Issy will tell us the girls’ names: “Ada, Bett, Celia, Delia, Ena, Fretta, Gilda, Hilda, Ita, Jess, Katty, Lou, … Mina, Nippa, Opsy, Poll, Queeniee, Ruth, Saucy, Trix, Una, Vela, Wanda, Xenia, Yva, Zulma, Phoebe, Thelma. And Mee!” (147.11-15).)
Shaun’s answer has three parts.
- The first is a verbal daisy chain. or a round dance of swapping partners, where the third element of one term becomes the second of the next: “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…” (142.31-35). There are 14 of these doubled terms, and they show clearly what Shaun imagines femininity to be: feeling and sentimentality, tempting men whom they thank for taking them.
- The second is a word ladder, in which each successive word changes a single letter of the previous word. The usual edition has only 13 of these words, but Rose and O’Hanlon bring it up to 14: “as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile and rile and rule by rune of ruse ‘reathed rose and hose hol’d home” (142.35-143.01: R and O’H’s addition marked). More than the first part, this one suggests a sentimental project of the entrapment of men.
- The third is a brief bit of verse, like that of a Valentine’s Day card, though it’s not laid out as such:
yeth cometh elope year,
coach and four
Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart
picks one man more (143.01-02)
The scattered HCE trigram (“hol’d home, yeth cometh elope year”) combines with Issy’s lisp to suggest the father’s fantasy—and even (it being a leap year) that the daughter might be the initiator.
Q: 143.03-27
A: 143.28
9. This is a siglum that occurs almost nowhere else in Joyce’s notes or drafts. Roland McHugh’s otherwise exhaustive The Sigla of Finnegans Wake doesn’t even mention it. We could think of it, perhaps, as combining (with a bit of liberty) two earlier sigla, + = 
, but that doesn’t seem to help very much either (the total clientele of the pub?). It may be better to simply take it as a one-off, and as significant precisely because of that. It certainly looks like a spoked wheel* of four parts, able to rotate on an axle, so that you always come back to the beginning. Sounds a bit like Finnegans Wake itself and those “vicous cycles” mentioned in the first question (134.16).
If we parse the one huge sentence that makes up the question, and discard most of the secondary clauses and tropes that make it balloon out in such a familiar Wake fashion, we’re left with a basic armature something like this:
Now, … if a human being duly fatigued by his dayety in the sooty, having plenxty off time on his gouty hands and vacants of space at his sleepish feet … were … accorded … with an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven … then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all? (143.03-27)
This “fargazer” who has plenty of time on his hands and vacants of space at his feet seems a close cousin of the Letter chapter’s “ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia” (120.13-14). Stripped back like this, the sentence even reads as an echo or continuation of an earlier sentence from that chapter:
Has any fellow, of the dime a dozen type, it might with some profit some dull evening quietly be hinted—has any usual sort of ornery josser, flatchested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination … ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? (109.01-08)
The Letter chapter was concerned with a surface so intricate that we seemed forced to stop only at description, and to narrow our gaze in to the detail as much as possible: everything is envelope. Similarly, in this chapter question 3 () was concerned with the title of the book, the slogan on the sign outside the inn, and with containers in *general, such as the rectilinear object of the book or missive we hold. Here, though, seems concerned much more with the far gaze of vistas of time and space.
But this is not a sudden burst of clarity, a visionary glimpse of a profound content that the forbidding surface of the letter had previously withheld from us. This fargazer is “as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk,” in “the states of suspended exanimation” (143.06-07, 08-09): a “none” rather than a one, at an “unstant” of time (143.13, 08), the inert giant we first glimpsed on the first page, with “vacants of space at his sleepish feet” (143.05-06). Everything that the fargazer sees—”all the ingredient and egregiunt whights and ways to which … the course of his tory will had been having recourse,” from the birth of “the wrestless in the womb” to the dissolution of all rivalries in ALP’s return to the sea, with the cracks of thunder that mark each of the changes in the cycle (143.10-12, 21, 13)—all of this, including the very status of the one seeing, dissolve in the core of the question which we reach only in the last two lines:
then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all? (143.26-27)
That core of the question seems to suggest that it is going to ask, “then what would that fargazer see?”, but it immediately qualifies that seeing as a seeming, and multiplies that seeming to affect even the “seemself” who would seem to be doing the seeing. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it effects that seemself, which is by this point not an exterior vantage point so much as part of the labyrinth.
In that barrage of seems, should we also hear seme? I am not suggesting that Joyce is prefiguring Roland Barthes’ take on Saussure, or that he has a thorough knowledge of linguistics (Mirriam-Webster dates the term back to 1866 in its sense of “a linguistic sign”) or with the sub-discipline of semantics (though he certainly knows the word, as he does semiological: 173.32, 465.12). Joyce is merely drawing on Greek and Latin: séma, sign, and serere, to sow. Sign as seed gives us Shem the Penman and his “Semus sumus!” (168.14). The very beginning of the question, “Now, to be on anew” reaches out to the end of the Anna Livia chapter, where it becomes “The seim anew” (143.03, 215.23—after having passed through “the semagen” at the end of this present chapter, 162.27-28). This welter of signs is a proliferation of meanings, none of which are ever completely under the control of the one who utters them. As we have seen, Humphrey’s carefree walks by the cemetery are always likely to become blurts of suppressed truths: “umphrohibited semitary thrufahrts, open to buggy” (85.09-10). There are seams between words, at the very heart of them. These “flores of speech” (143.04) are also the flaws at the very heart and possibility of speech. As the answer to the question insists, what we have is not a vision of harmony so much as “A collideorscape!”, where the “panaroma” produced in the rainbow (143.24-26) collisions of the Wake‘s sixty-plus languages escapes calculation (143.28, 03). That siglum is a crude drawing of what we might see looking down the barrel of such a toy.
* A term that’s used only once in a corpus is a hapax legomenon. Fittingly, that term occurs only once in the Wake, as “hapaxle, gomenon” (116.33), shortly before the mention of a cart (116.35). Just saying.
Q: 143.29-30
A: 143.31-148.32
10. Shem’s next question is the plaint of an unrequited lover, as the two brothers vie for the affection of their younger sister Isabel. (Fittingly, the answer will have a high proportion of verbal borrowings from Provençal, the language of the troubadours.) Shaun’s reply is to parody Isabel’s own voice, to have her say not only that he is the favoured brother, but even that their relationship is sexual—and at her instigation.
Like Gerty McDowell before her, Issy used to get bad press. William York Tindall’s 1969 Reader’s Guide, for example, calls her “a constant bonehead” (117). But this is to miss the point that what we are hearing is not Issy, it’s Shaun doing an impression of Issy—and it’s an impression whose point is that it’s meant to be outrageous, to infuriate and humiliate Shem, and to gloat about that. And as the escalation of the brothers’ battle shows in the next question, and in the next chapter—it works. For all that Shaun professes Issy’s affection for him, he has no interest at all in giving a truthful picture of her. If it serves to irritate Shem, he will have no qualms in offering her to his brother as misogynist fantasy.
[We could say similar things about Gerty in Ulysses, whom Q. D. Leavis famously called a danger to society because of her taste for romances (“Such a life is not only crude, impoverished, and narrow, it is dangerous. And it is typical of the level at which the emotional life of the generality is now conducted,” Fiction and the Reading Public (1939), 245). But part of the comedy of “Nausicaa,” surely (and the Leavises were never good at spotting comedy), is that the switch to Bloom halfway through the chapter leads us to suspect that a good deal of what we have just seen may not have been Gerty after all, but Bloom’s masturbatory fantasy. Bloom after all fancies he knows something of the world he attributes to Gerty, as an advertising man who knows his audiences, and a connoisseur and procurer of romantic fiction and bodice-rippers for Molly. Gerty may be as much a pastiche of these elements as Bloom’s earlier fantasy of the Far East in front of the windows of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company in Westland Row (U 5.27-46) was a pastiche of the travel books on the shelf at home in Eccles Street (U 17.1361-1407). The comic extravagance of Bloom’s imagining that he knows what women want adds irony to “Circe”‘s declaration of Bloom as “the new womanly man” (U 15.1798-99).]
Q: 148.33-149.10
A: 149.11-168.12
11. Shaun answered the second question (on their mother) in verse. This time, when the correct answer is Shaun himself, Shem puts the question in verse, as if to underline who it’s about. The familiar editions of the text don’t lay it out as verse, but that’s clearly what it is, as Rose and O’Hanlon’s reformatting makes clear:
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,
played fox and lice, pricking and dropping hips teeth
or wringing his handcuffs for peace, the blind blighter,
praying Dieuf and Domb Nostrums foh thomethinks to eath;
if he weapt while he leapt and guffalled quith a quhimper,
made cold blood a blue mundy and no bones without flech,
taking kiss, kake or kick with a suck, sigh or simper,
a diffle to larn and a dibble to lech;
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? (148.33-149.10)
The verses are a parody of Thomas Campbell’s “The Exile of Erin.” This “poor acheseyeld from Ailing,” ill and with aching eyes, has left behind him a “countrary raged in the weak of his wailing”—all of which is surely much more like Shem (and Joyce) than Shaun. But the question this time is about the one to whom it is addressed, the “you” at the very end of it, Shaun (which, like Jones, is a variant of John). If this pitiful and repulsive figure approached you, Shaun, asking you to “shave his immartial … shoul,” would you do it? Unlike the other questions, which involve the identification of one personage or another, this one just requires a yes or a no, the answer to which will reveal the one who is the subject of the question. Would you stoop to help your brother?
Shaun’s answer is almost as long as the rest of the chapter put together. Just as his previous answer had him putting on Issy’s voice, this one has him in character too, as the sardonic and authoritative Professor Jones. The answer turns into a lecture, with two fables embedded in it.
149.11-33
“No, blank ye!” is both “No, thank you” and “No, ___ you!”, a politeness that serves only to deliver an abuse. Before I confute this begged question about a beggar, he says, you really should have consulted what I’ve already written on this—if, of course, you dare. You’d have noticed my argument that Bitchson’s [Bergson’s] “sophology” is “not without his cashcash characktericksticks” (149.20-22), just as I could have told you that the icing on your own cake just serves to hide what’s in effect a parody of Weinstain [Einstein]. In both cases, “The speechform is a mere sorrogate” (149.29). What Shaun/Jones is describing is not only Shem’s disingenuous presentation of himself as abject, but also the answer that he himself is in the process of making, with its bludgeoning display of erudition and floor-hogging.
Q: 168.13
A: 168.14
12.
collideorscape 