"Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob."

(169.1-171.28)  The Wake's seventh chapter begins with the word "Shem," which pretty much gives us all we need to know about what material the chapter is going to cover.  We're told from the first paragraph that the general sentiment is that Shem is not a respectable man, and that the story of his life can't be written in black and white.  The narrator's going to make an attempt at distilling Shem into text, though:  "Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at."

After this introduction, the narrator begins by painting an unflattering physical portrait of Shem.  It's said that Shem's body is unproportional, unsymmetrical, and fishlike.  The narrator goes on to say that young "Master Shemmy," upon seeing himself for the unattractive person he was while playing with a group of other children, asked them "the first riddle of the universe":  "when is a man not a man?"  The children give a number of incorrect guesses (ranging from "when the heavens were quakers" to "when he is just only after having being semisized") before Shem tells them the riddle's solution: When he is a Sham.

And the narrator makes it clear that Shem isn't a man:  "Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs."  Shem preferred tinned salmon and canned fruit to the finest fresh fish and imported pineapples.  He abstained from meat, and eventually fled for continental Europe so that he could "muddle through the hash of lentils" rather than eat Ireland's split peas.  Once, while Shem was drunk in Europe, he said that he could flourish forever off only the smell of a citron peel.  What's worse, he didn't like, whiskey, gin, or beer.  Instead, he drank "applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice," which, when he was so drunk that he was almost vomiting, he would say was the urine of an archduchess.

This chapter's begun on an entertaining and fairly-easy-to-read note.  The secondary sources highlight the parallels between Joyce and Shem, including the facts that both were exiles, both had exceptional diets, and both likened their favorite alcoholic beverage to the urine of an archduchess.  I also saw a parallel between Shem and Stephen Dedalus (the Joyce figure in Portrait and Ulysses) in that both characters ask a group of children a riddle (Stephen's appears when he's teaching the class in the Nestor episode of Ulysses).  It goes without saying (yet I'll say) that it will be interesting to see how James the Penman further treats Shem the Penman.