(184.11-186.18) Once again, the Wake throws me a curveball. Today's passage was as tough to plod through on the first go-round as yesterday's passage was "easy." Most of the challenge today came from the fact that there's a lot of foreign words here (yeah, I know, maybe a majority of the Wake's words are foreign, but today there was a lot of French and Latin). One paragraph on page 185, for example, is written primarily in Latin. It's days like these that McHugh's Annotations (and the Google Translate app, for what McHugh doesn't get to) is absolutely necessary for people like me, whose foreign language proficiency comes from two years of high school German, two years of high school Latin, a semester of college Italian, and a good number of hours of having sat through Latin masses and French films.
Today's reading starts off with Shem -- "our low hero" -- cooking eggs (because he's his own valet "by choice of need"). There's a lot of detail about the ingredients he mixes in with his eggs and the variety of egg-based dishes he makes, but one of the key lines of this section is found in a parenthetical: "the umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree." This variation of the saying, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," calls to mind Shem's father, HCE, who is also Humpty Dumpty (another cracked-up egg). So, like father, like son here.
But it's not all cooking and singing for Shem. He's got his detractors, and we learn that two of them, "Robber and Mumsell, the pulpic dictators," once "boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose." With his writing material sgone, Shem "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." So, once again, we get a parallel between Joyce and Shem, as Joyce, who found Ireland antithetical to his vocation as a writer, fled for the European continent to engage in the solitary pursuit of that vocation.
How does Shem make these writing materials? The narrator tells us in Latin as a sort of jab in the direction of any "Anglican ordinal" who might be listening in. The Latin paragraph, as translated by McHugh, basically says that Shem . . . get ready for it . . . shat into his hands, put his excrement into an urn, urinated into the urn, mixed up the waste, chanted a psalm, baked the mixture, and let it cool. When his work was complete, he had indelible ink. (This paragraph begs the question, how much of this paragraph is Joyce having fun, and how much of it is Joyce writing from experience?)
The narrator compares the ink Shem produced from his body with the "obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United States of Ourania" that Shem produces with his pen. Here's another Joyce-Shem parallel: During the time that Ulysses was banned in the United States as obscene, it wasn't protected by copyright and was accordingly pirated until it began to be lawfully published. Shem used the ink to write a work akin to Finnegans Wake, which Shem "wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body." The work written on his body "slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history," just like the all-encompassing Wake. Eventually, Shem made his "last public misappearance," where, "circling the square" (both walking around the public square and amazingly transforming a square into a circle), he fell under the watchful eye of a blond cop, who seeing the tattooing on Shem's body, thought that the the markings were ink. The narrator says that the blond cop "was out of his depth but bright in the main."
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