Book III
Like Book II, Book III also consists of four chapters. Some critics assume that these represent HCE, now in bed with his wife, dreaming about his sons with a particular focus on Shaun, and the first of the chapters will indeed include a long interrogation of Shaun.
A first-person voice begins by telling that “as I was dropping asleep” it heard the “peal of vixen’s laughter among midnight’s chimes from out the belfry of the cute old speckled church” (403) and that it saw in the “affluvial flowandflow” of water “garments of laundry” (404). This harks back to the earlier chapter of the washerwomen doing laundry in the stream. But the voice continues to say “as I was jogging along in a dream” it heard a high voice “echoating: Shaun! Shaun! Post the post!” As the clothing of the fellow Shaun is described in exacting detail, he does indeed appear to be a mailman since the initials “R.M.D.,” which presumably stand for Royal Mail, Dublin (according to McHugh [404]), are seen embroidered on his shirt. Shaun is initially described as looking “grand, so fired smart, in much more than his usual health.” But the voice also tells us that “[h]e was immense,” and we soon learn that this is because “he had recruited his strength by meals of spadefuls of mounded food” that includes “half of a pint of becon,” “a segment of riceplummy padding,” “some cold forsoaken steak” and even more than this bacon, plum pudding, and steak (405). The list of his meals goes on and on, and it is therefore not surprising that he not only has a big heart, but “[t]hus thicker will he grow now, grew new. And better and better on butterand butter” (406).
After this description of Shaun as guilty of gluttony, the narrative voice is surprised to find that “I heard a voice, the voce of Shaun, vote of the Irish,” and this will allow an interrogation of Shaun to now take place (407). Shaun begins the conversation by yawning and complaining that he is “exhaust as winded hare, utterly spent,” and disgusted with the weight he has put on. He is after all a “mailman of peace,” “the bearer extraordinary of these postoomany missive on his majesty’s service,” but perhaps this job should be performed by “my other,” that is, his brother with whom he shared “the twin chamber,” and who unlike himself, “looks rather thin, imitating me” (408). But as it is, his job will not be easy, given his excess weight and its effects on his knees and spine, “Fatiguing, very fatiguing. Hobos hornknees and the corveeture of my spine” (409). Shaun’s interrogator addresses him in extraordinarily kind ways, calling him “honest Shaun,” “Shaun honey” (410), “dear dogmestic Shaun” (411), “frank Shaun” (413), “[k]ind Shaun” (421), “Shaun illustrious” (422), and so on. Shaun responds in various moods, sometimes “naturally incensed” (412), and at other times apologetic. But his responses are often engaging, none more so than when he offers a “fable one, feeble too,” of the “Ondt and the Gracehoper” (414), that we might recognize as the Aesop (“Esaup”) fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper.
The charm of the telling of this fable lies to some extent in its poetic prose, but also in its entomological focus on insects. In the fable, the ant is the busy, hardworking creature collecting and saving resources for the winter, while the grasshopper plays and hops about without any thought of the hardships to come, which will force him to beg the ant for help in winter. Joyce, perhaps more spendthrift than miser, may have deliberately glossed himself in the description of the Gracehoper. “The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity,” we are told, while (unlike Joyce) “he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla” to “commence insects with him,” “even if only in chaste” (414). The Ondt, in contrast, seems to resemble the roomy-built and able-bodied (“raumybult and abelboobied”) Shaun. He is “sullemn and chairmanlooking,” unlike the “sillybilly of a Gracehoper” who “had jingled through a jungle of love and debts” and ends up with “[n]ot one pickopeck of muscowmoney to bag a tittlebits of beebread.” Having saved nothing to buy food, the Gracehoper ends up wailing, “I am heartily hungry,” and by the time winter comes he has eaten all the wallpaper along with everything else in the house, and is obliged to seek out the Ondt for help (416).
The Ondt, esconced on his throne, is “smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals,” and his special brand of Havana cigars are not the only thing that makes him “as appi as a oneysucker or a baskerboy on the Libido,” given that the female insects, the flea “Floh”, the louse “Luse,” the bee “Bieni,” and the little wasp “Vespatilla” are now serving him (417). The Gracehoper now offers a despairing concession to the Ondt in the form of a verse or a song. “I forgive you, grondt Ondt, said the Gracehoper, weeping/ For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping,” and he adds, “As I once played the piper I must now pay the count” (418). The chapter ends by returning to Shaun’s job as a postman and a letter that he carries: “Letter, carried of Shaun, son of Hek, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun” (420), and describes how he loses his balance (“lusosing the harmonical balance of his ballbearing extremities” [426]) and appears to fall into a barrel in a stream until he “spoorlessly disappaled and vanesshed” (427).
At the beginning of the next chapter, Book III chapter 2, Shaun seems to have survived his voyage in the barrel and returned ashore. He is now introduced as “Jaunty Jaun,” and we are told that he is “amply altered for the brighter, though still the graven image of his squarer self as he was used to be, perspiring but happy” (429). He appears to have landed near a group of “twentynine hedge daughters out of Benent Saint Berched’s national nightschool,” who are “learning their antemeridian lesson of life” (430). They are “all barely in their typtap teens,” and soon Shaun begins to deliver an extended sermon to them.
If there is a precedent to this chapter it may be found in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the teenage Stephen Dedalus is subjected to a series of sermons at a religious school retreat that increasingly chastise him into a feeling of acute guilt and remorse for his sins. Jaun begins by specifically addressing his “Sister dearest” with “express cordiality” and “deep affection” (431). But he soon begins his moral lecturing, advising “Never miss your lostsomewhere mass,” “Never hate mere pork which is bad for your knife of a good friday,” “Never lose your heart away till you win his diamond back,” among other strictures. Other rules follow, “First thou shalt not smile. Twice thou shalt not love. Lust, thou shalt not commix idolatry” (433), the last one somewhat changing the commandment not to commit adultery. Later he goes on to give advice on health and hygiene, telling them “you needed healthy physicking exorcise to flush your kidneys,” urging them to be sportive and to eat well, perhaps spurred by his own propensity to overeat, “I never open momouth but I pack mefood in it.” He does, of course, put his foot in his mouth, in a sense, when he lectures (437). He gives advice on reading, invoking children’s literature like the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” (“I used to follow Mary Liddlelambe’s flitsy tales”), but also saying that “Sifted science will do your arts good” (440).
A narrative voice at some point begins to talk about “hardworking Jaun” (441), but soon Jaun is back to address his “Sis dearest” in a “voise somewhit murky, what though still high fa luting” (448), and still giving instructions, “So now, I’ll ask of you, let ye create no scenes in my poor primmafore’s wake” (453). At one point he breaks into a “grand big blossy hearty stenorious laugh” that “hopped out of his woolly’s throat like a ball lifted over the head of a deep field,” presumably because “[s]omething of a sidesplitting nature must have occurred to westminstrel Jaunathaun” (454).
Now Issy (or “Tizzy”) seems to respond with sweet nonsense to this sermon in her own inimitable way, “flushing but flashing from her dove and dart eyes as she tactilifully grapbed her male corrispondee to flusther sweet nunsongs in his quickturned ear.” Her response has elements of confession: “I’m ashamed for my life,” she tells h
im, perhaps for having left a “lost moment’s gift of memento nosepaper,” a newspaper or perhaps some tissues, at home (457). She appears to confess to pranks she played on “nurse Madge, my linkinglass girl, she’s a fright, poor old dutch, in her sleeptalking when I paint the measles on her and mudstuskers to make her a man.” “Issy done that, I confesh!” she admits (459).
She ends by offering to say one last little prayer before going to bed, “to thay one little player before doing to deed” (461). Shaun returns to say goodbye to her, perhaps with a lullaby,” So gullaby, me poor Isley!” but promises to leave “my darling proxy” (462), presumably his twin brother, “Got by the one goat, suckled by the same nanna, one twitch, one nature makes us oldworld kin” (463). Still, he goes on and on before once more saying goodbye, “I hate to look at alarms, but, however they put on my watchcraft, must now close as I hearby hear by ear from by seeless socks ‘tis time to be up and ambling” (468). Shaun’s final departure is ambiguous and confused, and he may have pasted a bit of paper like a stamp on his brow, “he gummalicked the stickyback side and stamped the oval badge of belief to his agnelows brow,” in a sense turning himself into a stamped letter (470). But whether he is mailed like a letter or simply runs off or sails off, he appears to be seen off by the girls waving to him “with a posse of tossing hankerwaves,” and bidding him godspeed, “may the good people speed you, rural Haun” (471).
In the next chapter, Shaun has been transformed into “Yawn,” and he is introduced as wailing, “Lowly, longly, a wail went forth. Pure Yawn lay low.” We are told “His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact.” And so he continues to wail, “Yawn in a semiswoon lay awailing and (hooh!) what helpings of honeyful swoothead (phew!), which earpiercing dulcitude.”
His new trial will consist of a series of lengthy interrogations by “senators four” (474), a new version of the four evangelists we encountered earlier and now named “Shanator Gregory,” “Shanator Lyons,” “Dr Shunadure Tarpey,” and “old Shunny MacShunny, MacDougal” (475). We have encountered interrogations before, and these, like earlier ones, will yield little information. “—Y?” a question begins, and the answer “—Before You!” makes it unclear whether the discussion is about alphabetical letters or about “why,” asking for the cause of something (477). Campbell and Robinson suggest that “During the next pages Shaun will be put under terrific pressure by his examiners,” but he will resist answering “with every dodge and artifice.” “He evades with indirections and sophistries, pretends that he cannot speak English, and seizes upon irrelevant aspects of the question under discussion” (295). We get an example of this on page 485 when Yawn claims “Me no angly mo, me speakee Yellman’s lingas.”
Not surprisingly, since Shaun is a postman, some of the questions concern the letter that crops up repeatedly in discussions. “That letter selfpenned to one’s other, that neverperfect everplanned?” someone asks, and is given the reply, “This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel.” (489). Rose and O’Hanlon suggest that Yawn, “lying at the centre of Ireland” may represent both a dump, like the midden heap introduced in earlier chapters, or “a kind of letter-box. Having enveloped and stamped himself in III.2, Shaun now appears to be his own mailbox, containing himself” (244). But at another point a letter appears to have come from ALP, since it is signed “Respect. S.V.P. Your wife. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann” and thereby presumably addressed to HCE rather than Shaun (495).
Later, it is “Iscappellas” or Issy who seems to speak, possibly to herself: “Of course I know you are a viry vikid girl to go in the dreemplace and at that time of the draym.” She goes on to report, “The boys on the corner were talking too,” and appears to make an allusion to menstruation, when “your soreful miseries first come on you. Still to forgive it, divine my lickle wiffey, and everybody knows you do look lovely in your invinsibles” (527). Issy also appears to be identified with Alice in Wonderland, perhaps seen in the looking-glass, “Alicious, twinstreams, twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland” (528).
The ending of this chapter is extremely confusing, because the four old evangelists seem to be replaced by a younger group that Campbell and Robinson refer to as the Brain Trust (320) based on their own claims— “We bright young chaps of the brandnew braintrust are briefed here” (529)—as they appear to take over the questioning not of Shaun but of HCE who has now reemerged. It is as though the generations have been turned upside down once again. When HCE is interrogated, he offers a lengthy self-defense, claiming he is famous in the English-speaking world, “I am known throughout the world wherever my good Allenglisches Angleslachsen is spoken,” and commended for his decency, “I think how our public at large appreciates it most highly from me that I am as cleanliving as could be” (532). And many pages later he ends by citing all the things he has done for the woman he married, “I pudd a name and wedlock boltoned round her the which to carry till her grave, my durdin dearly, Appia Lippia Pluviabilla” (548). He also boasts that “I fed her,” and lists such items as “spiceries for her garbage breath,” “shains of garleeks and swinespepper,” “gothakrauts,” as well as “pudding, bready and nutalled and potted fleshmeats” (550). And he provided a lovely home for her, “I planted for my own hot lisbing lass a quickset vineyard and I fenced it about with huge Chesterfield elms and Kentish hops and rigs of barlow and bowery nooks and greenwished villas” (553).
It is unclear how he is judged by his listeners, but the chapter ends by reporting that his wife appeared to accept his gifts with “pleashadure,” and that “she lalaughed.” And so, apparently, did the four evangelists, “Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!” (554).
Campbell and Robinson call the fourth and last chapter of Book III “HCE and ALP—Their Bed of Trial.” This section does indeed focus on the family with particular interest in the parents. If we were to think of Book III in narrative terms, we could imagine the earlier chapters having the parents downstairs, with the father working in the tavern, while the children are upstairs playing games and doing their homework. Now, however, it is nighttime, and the parents have gone to their bedroom and are in bed, possibly making love, until they are disturbed by a child, or children, having awakened, and possibly seeing the parents in their activities. This may all still be a dream, of course, as the chapter begins by asking “What was thaas?” and suggesting tumultuous sleep, perhaps, “Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth” (555). The parents may be in bed—“while kinderwardens minded their twinsbed”—with the four watchful evangelists now occupying the position of bedposts. Or the parents may be looking in on their twins who are now given the names of Kevin (probably Shaun, the “nicechild” who will be “commandeering chief of the choirboys’ brigade the moment he grew up”) and Jerry—Shem—described as the “badbrat” (555). Their sister, the “infantina Isobel” is described as possibly taking the veil when she grows up, to become a “beautiful presentation nun.” She is clearly much loved, “the darling of my heart,” and “so pretty, truth to tell, wildwood’s eyes and primarose hair” as she “now evencalm lay sleeping” (556).
Although the beginning of the chapter is narrated, it offers the scene of the parents in the bedroom in theatrical language, describing the opening as a “Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set. Salmonpapered walls,” furnished with a “Chair for one. Woman’s garments on chair. Man’s trousers with crossbelt braces, collar on bedknob” (559). The theatrical description continues, announcing “Act: dumbshow/ Closeup. Leads.” It then introduces the characters, “Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position of harmony” (559). The description of the house continues, noting the ”chequered staircase” with “only one square step,” and remarking “It is ideal residence for realtar” (560), suggesting that perhaps we have been given an overview not of a theatrical set, but of a realtor’s tour.
Turning back to the family, they are now called the �
��Porters,” “very nice people,” with Mr. Porter “an excellent forefather” and Mrs. Porter “a most kindhearted messmother” (560). There are two rooms upstairs housing the “little Porter babes.” “Who sleeps in now number one, for example?” the narrative voice asks, and it turns out to be the little “noveletta and she is named Buttercup.” “She is dadad’s lottiest daughterpearl and brooder’s cissiest auntybride” (561). Who sleeps in the second room, the speaker asks, and the answer is the “twobirds,” presumably the brothers who are “so tightly tattached as two maggots to touch other.” The first boy is likely to do well and eventually “wend him to Amorica to quest a cashy job” (562). But the other brother, “twined on codliverside, has been crying in his sleep,” presumably because he is a “teething wretch” (563). In addition to teething, he has wet himself, or possibly spilled ink on himself from his fountain pen, “bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn.” He concedes that he writes a letter, “I write tintingface,” possibly “steelwhite and blackmail.” The weeping boy appears to get conflicting advice from mother and father, with the father telling him “Weeping shouldst thou not when man falls” (563), while the mother comforts him. “You were dreamend, dear,” she tells him, “Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind” (565).
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