We may expect to have the themes we have encountered so far revisited, “a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document” and their “prevision of virtual crime or crimes” (107). But instead, the chapter proceeds to analyze the letter largely for its material detail. The writing is described as a “proteiform graph” that itself is a “polyhedron of scripture” (107). The letter appears to avoid citation, and “inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks)” the narrative voice suggests that “its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others” (108). The discussion directs its focus on the nature of “a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope” and argues that even though it is only an “outer husk,” it nonetheless deserves attention because “to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content” of the “enveloping facts themselves” is “hurtful to sound sense” (109).
But then the narrator turns back to “that original hen,” describing her as “a cold fowl” in “Midwinter” (110) and now gives her a name: “The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans” (111). She scratches at “the hour of klokking twelve” and finds a “goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transcript from Boston (Mass.)”. We now get a sense of the content of the letter addressed to “Dear whom it proceded to mention”—although we are not given the name of the recipient. It then talks about “Maggy well & allathome’s health well,” alludes to “the van Houtens,” mentions “a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty,” remembers the “grand funferall of poor Father Michael,” asks “well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses” (111). The letter is apparently marked by a large “teastain” which certifies it as a “genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery” (111). Later, this teastain is revisited again in a discussion about what appears to be the absence of a signature, perhaps because “it was a habit not to sign letters always” (114), and the question is raised “So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace, is a perfect signature of its own?” (115). The letter chapter goes on a bit longer and then ends with reference to one of the Earwicker sons, “that odious and still today insufficiently malestimated note-snatcher” known as “Shem the Penman” (125).
We might reasonably expect the next chapter to deal with Shem the Penman, but that discussion is postponed until chapter 7. Chapter 6 is known as “the quiz” chapter, a series of 12 questions and answers that deal with the characters, themes, places, and events that have been recurring in previous episodes. Critic Patrick McCarthy reminds us that this question and answer format is not new in Joyce’s work, and that the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses had a similar catechism design (47). But the questions and answers here vary wildly.
In a gloss on Finnegan’s climb up and fall down, the first question relates to a fellow who rose higher than a beanstalk or the Wellington monument, and then goes on for more than 13 pages only to give us his identity in a brief answer: “Finn MacCool” (139). The second query, on the other hand, is simple, “Does your mutter know your mike?”—a question ostensibly posed to Shaun, according to Campbell and Robinson, and answered with echoes of a song called “The Shandon Bells” (108). It is difficult to make sense of the questions or the answers, as these examples show. The fourth question (140) asks about an “Irish capitol city” of “two syllables and six letters,” and while Dublin of course comes immediately to mind, we are given a choice of four answers: a) Delfas (Belfast, according to Campbell and Robinson), b) Dorhqk (Cork), c) Nublid (Dublin) and d) Dalway (Galway). Question 8 asks “And how war yore maggies?” and offers the charming reply that “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,” and so on and so forth (142). Question 9 asks what a person fatigued at night might see, perhaps in sleep, and the answer suggests motions and colors characteristic of a “collideorscape” (143) or the kaleidoscope of the Wake itself. The next question begins with a romantic lament: “What bitter’s love but yurning,” which is given a highly personal response. “I know, pipette, of course, dear, but listen, precious,” the male voice says, and goes on to pay compliments and give advice.
The 11th question is posed in the poetic rhythms of the late 18th century Scottish poet Thomas Campbell’s “The Exile of Erin,” according to Campbell and Robinson (110), and asks if one fellow would help another in need, only to be given the answer “No, blank ye!” (149). But the reply, if it is given by Shaun, goes on for about nineteen pages, and encompasses a lecture by a “Professor Loewy-Brueller” (150) that includes the fable of the “The Mookse and The Gripes” (152), a play on Aesop’s “The Fox and the Grapes,” with allusions to Irish political history. A female figure in the shape of a cloud named Nuvoletta is introduced into the Mookse and Gripes fable (157), and although she does her best to charm them (“she tried to make the Mookse look up at her” and tried “to make the Gripes hear how coy she could be”) she fails (157). The Mookse is “not amoosed” and the Gripes remains “pinefully obliviscent” (158). The brother theme is replayed again with two figures named “Burrus” and “Caseous,” and a girl named “Marge” or “Margareen,” suggesting that we are dealing here with a bit of a love triangle between butter, cheese, and margarine. “Margareena she’s very fond of Burrus but, alick and alack! she velly fond of chee” (166).
The chapter ends with further allusions to the conflict between the brothers (“were we bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt”), who nonetheless declare a curious unity in the end although one that foregrounds Shem: “Semus sumus!” (168) or “We are Shem!” according to Campbell and Robinson (123).
We now come to the penultimate chapter of Book I, the “Shem chapter.” The episode will indeed focus on Shem, but it appears to be narrated by his enemy twin Shaun. As a result, Shaun is as much present in the critical and deprecating narrative voice of the chapter as is his subject, Shem, whose reputation is attacked right from the start.
Shem may have come from “respectable stemming,” but now “his back life will not stand being written about in black and white.” His physical description is entirely negative, telling us he has “one numb arm up a sleeve,” “not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks” and “a bladder tristened,” among other unattractive features (169). His character is equally maligned: “Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs” since he prefers tinned salmon to “the plumpest roeheavy lax” and canned pineapple to its “junglegrown” variety (170). Indeed, “he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea” (171)—an allusion hinting at James Joyce himself, who preferred to spend most of his adult life in Europe rather than in Ireland.
Campbell and Robinson note that Shem, as the penman, “is, in fact, as the reader will immediately perceive, James Joyce himself” (123). But the narrative voice gives him little credit for his poetic skills, and predicts that it will “trickle out” that he was “in his bardic memory low” (172). Like his persecuted father, Shem is also beset by enemies obliging him to cork himself up in “his inkbattle house,” his inkbottle, but also his writing career, in fear for his life, “afar for the life” (176). On a day described as “that bloody, Swithun’s day, though every doorpost in muchtried Lucalizod was smeared with generous erstborn gore,” Shem in a “thorough fright” stays hidden in his room, checking on the events outside only by looking through his “westernmost keyhole” with an “eighteen hawkspower durdicky telescope”—a disastrous move since he finds himself “at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver” (178-179). The weapon is handled by “an unkown quarr
eler” who has apparently been “told off to shade and shoot shy Shem should the shit show his shiny shnout” (179). Shem’s house, known as “the Haunted Inkbottle” (182), is later described as having its floor and walls “literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells” and much more, including “once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink,” and on and on (183).
The chapter ends with speeches from two figures, first JUSTIUS, who seems to speak in the voice of Shaun, and then MERCIUS, the voice of Shem, which is much more self-deprecating than that of his judgmental brother. The latter calls himself a “branded sheep, pick of the wasterpaperbaskel,” announcing the arrival of their mother, “little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog” (194). This will be Anna Livia Plurabelle, the woman who is also a river, and who will be the subject of the final chapter of Book I.
The most famous chapter in the book begins with a narrative voice saying “O/ tell me all about/ Anna Livia!/ I want to hear all/ about Anna Livia” (196). We soon determine that this voice is in dialogue with another speaker, who does indeed begin to talk about Anna Livia, while reminding her interlocutor to “Wash quit and don’t be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes” (196).
Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann reports that Joyce described the chapter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver as “a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls become a tree and a stone” (563). The two washerwomen are doing laundry in the waters of the flowing river, who is Anna Livia Plurabelle or the river Liffey herself. Not only is the figure of their discussion fluid, but so is the story, its telling, and its language. Ellmann notes that on the night Joyce finished the chapter, he went down to the river Seine to listen to the sound of the water to make sure he got the description of the sound right. “He came back content,” Ellmann writes (564 n.50).
In a sense, the river dominates the chapter in its form as the fluid female protagonist, the topic of conversation. Its language offers the sound of flowing water reflected in the flow of the prose, and in the names of a multitude of rivers alluded to in the conversation. One of the washerwomen complains: “My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it.” The moldy stains she has to rub come from the Prague river then known as the Moldau, now called the Vitava, and the clothes are stained by the Russian Dnieper and the Ganges river of India.
The themes of the washerwomen’s story of ALP are familiar to us from previous episodes, telling of a wife whose husband is in trouble and who scavanges gifts for her needy children. “And how long was he under loch and neagh?” (196) one of the women asks, wondering how long the HCE figure was under lock and key or under water in a Scottish loch. But the husband is also given credit for having worked hard to earn his “staly bread” by “this wet of his prow” (198). In turn, the ALP figure is described once again as cooking him breakfast with “blooms of fisk,” “meddery eygs,” and “staynish beacons on toasc,” with “Greenland’s tay” and “Kaffue mokau” (199). According to Roland McHugh’s Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake, the “Tay,” “Kafue,” and “Mokau” are also rivers as well as tea, coffee, and mocha (199).
It is not clear how many children ALP had, with some saying it was “a hundred eleven,” which may be why she “can’t remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them” (201). Various accounts are given of her first love experiences, one of them involving a priest who “plunged both of his newly anointed hands” into the cool waters of a stream, parting the “saffron strumans of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it,” as though the river in which he washes his hands is indeed a young female Liffey (203). Joyce equates strands of hair with the steams of water in a river, and so when ALP is described enjoying her morning bath, we are told “First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils” (206). She then “wove a garland for her hair” of “meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed,” and she adorned herself with jewelry made of “pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble” (207). ALP then gets on her way to care for her family, and “like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny” she responds to the needs of her children, “nistling to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Rheims,” then “bathing Dirty Hans’ spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer” (209).
The washerwomen have now been talking for quite a while and it is getting late. One complains of a backache, “O, my back, my back, my bach,” with “Bach” the German word for a brook. It is time to “Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew!” The clothes have to be spread out to dry, “Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine.” They “lay a few stones on the hostel sheets,” and hold “[s]ix shifts” and “ten kerchiefs” to the fire to dry (213). But the lateness of the hour also applies to their time of life as they are getting old and failing. “Can’t hear the waters of,” one of them says, and “My foos won’t moos,” complains the other, “I feel as old as yonder elm” (215). Despite the tiredness, they continue to talk: “Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of?” But now it is “Night! Night!” (216) and so their conversation comes to an end.
Book II
Campbell and Robinson call Book II “The Book of the Sons,” but it could also be called “The Book of the Children” since Issy and a small cohort of girls will also play a role in the various chapters.
The first chapter begins with a children’s play, not a game but a theatrical performance titled The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies and offering a list of characters that includes GLUGG (Shem), THE FLORAS, IZOD (Issy), CHUFF (Shaun), ANN (ALP), HUMP (HCE), some CUSTOMERS (possibly of a tavern), and SAUNDERSON and KATE, who may work at the pub (219-221). The time of the play is given as the present, and there will be settings, songs, and props.
The play begins by identifying Chuff as a sword-carrying angel (“Chuffy was a nangel then and his soard fleshed light like likening”), while Glugg is identified as a devil figure, “sbuffing and sputing” and “whipping his eyesoult and gnatsching his teats.” The “first girly stirs” come on the scene flittering like insects or birds, “with zitterings of flight released and twinglings of twitchbells,” making the air “shimmershake” (222). Soon a guessing game begins that Joyce identified in a letter as “Angels and Devils or colours,” as John Bishop reminds us in his book (237). In the game, the children form two groups and confront each other (“they are met, face a facing. They are set, force to force”) and ask each other questions (“A space. Who are you? A cat’s mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen”) (223).
We are reminded of the “Nausicaa” chapter in Ulysses, where twin boys quarrel as they play on the beach, while their sister and her girlfriends watch. Glugg, “the poor one” who does not do well in the game, is reminiscent of little Tommy Caffrey, and both boys respond poorly to questions posed by their sister. When the girls in “Nausicaa” jokingly ask Tommy which of them is his sweetheart, he tearfully answers “Nao” three times (Ulysses 285). When Glugg is asked three questions in the Wake, he also answers “No” three times, and it becomes clear that “He has lost” while Chuff, surrounded by the girls, is in his heaven and feels all’s right in the world (“Chuffchuff’s inners even. All’s rice with their whorl” (225). The girls continue to dance around Chuff, “So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round,” and “they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light” (226). Meanwhile, Glugg goes off in desperation, finally deciding that the best thing he can do is to become a writer and join the Society of Authors, “Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs,” and write something on the order of “Ukalepe” or Ulysses. He even appears to echo the titles of various
chapters in Ulysses such as “Loathers’ leave” (“Lotus-Eaters”), “Had Days” (“Hades), “Skilly and Carubdish” (Scylla and Charybdis”), “A Wondering Wreck” (“Wandering Rocks”), and “Naughtsycalves” (“Nausicaa”)” (229). “Nausicaa” will indeed surface again a few pages later when Glugg is once again asked a series of three questions, and this time gives answers even closer to Tommy Caffrey’s: “Nao,” “Naohao,” and “Naohaohao” (233).
For the next 20-plus pages of the chapter, these themes, established at the beginning, will continue, with poor Glugg struggling and spurned by the girls while they praise Chuff (“You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity”) (237). Not surprisingly, religion, prayers, and hymns are evoked since their games have cast them as angels and devils. “Hymnumber twentynine. O, the singing!” is announced, as the “Happy little girlycums” have “come to chant en chor” (234). Soon it becomes dark, and there is a call for “Lights, pageboy, lights!” (245), but the games continue until finally the play comes to an end with applause. “Upploud! The play thou schouwburgst, Game, here endeth. The curtain drops by deep request” (257), we are told, and the children go home: “Now have thy children entered into their habitations” (258).
Right at the opening of the second chapter of Book II we can see a dramatic change in the style of this episode—reminiscent of the changes with their newspaper headlines that mark the “Aeolus” chapter in Ulysses. Here the text takes a scholarly turn with marginalia on both the right and the left side, as well as footnotes at the bottom of each page. The marginalia offer comments by the brothers, each on one side, and changing places about midway through the chapter, while the footnotes give us their sister’s observations. This layout accords with the theme of what is sometimes called “the homework chapter,” or “Triv and Quad,” as Campbell and Robinson refer to it (162). The chapter text suggests the form of a scholarly article, although presumably more advanced than one read by schoolboys for homework.
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