(148.33-150.14) Ok, we're now embarking on some pretty heavy lifting. Tindall writes that the eleventh question and answer are the climax of the Wake's sixth chapter, and, two pages into it, it looks like he's right. The answer alone takes up 19 pages of the Wake, and it's packed with some fairly complex philosophical and scientific references.
The question (apparently addressed to Shaun) basically asks whether the answerer would be troubled to save the soul ("shave his immartial, wee skillmustered shoul") of a Joyce figure ("a poor acheseyeld" -- an exile with achy eyes). The short answer is, "No, blank ye!" That answer's not going to suffice, though, so we get the aforementioned 19 pages that follow.
A lot of this strikes me as Joyce making fun of some of the more renowned thinkers of his time. He gets a dig in at Proust, for example ("who the lost time we had the pleasure we have had our little recherché brush with, what, Schott?"), and soon after burns Einstein ("the whoo-whoo and where's hair's theorics of Winestain").
From this, the answer moves on to a mini-dissertation on the word "Talis" ("a word often abused by many passims"), which is Latin for "such," and its counterpart, "Qualis" (Latin for "what"). Again, this strikes me as Joyce mocking the professors. Shaun says, "A pessim may frequent you to say: Have you been seeing much of Talis and Talis those times?" In other words, have you been seeing much of such and such? The passage concludes with a parenthetical: "(Talis and Talis originally mean the same thing, hit it's: Qualis.)" Here's hoping more light is shed on the Talis-Qualis dichotomy soon, because I'm a bit lost at the moment.
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