Tuesday, June 9, 2015

"This is not the end of this by no manners means."

(373.13-375.13)  Maybe the patrons haven't gotten as far from the pub as I had thought last Tuesday.  Alone in his establishment, HCE now receives a long (i.e., an almost four-pages long paragraph) diatribe that appears to be unleashed upon him by the assembled crowd (of patrons, presumably) outside.  This verbal attack is a bit cacophonous and chaotic, but it seems to follow a general path.

"He shook be ashaped of hempselves, hiding that shepe in his goat," begins the crowd, attacking HCE's physical appearance by disparaging the hump on his back.  They compare him to Richard III, chanting, "Heigh hohse, heigh hohse, our kindom for an orse!"  (Could Joyce be channeling the Seven Dwarves' "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go" from the Disney film here?  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves premiered in 1937, and the full version of the Wake wasn't published until May 1939.  Hmm . . . .)  HCE's sin in the park is brought up again ("Wholehunting the pairk on a methylogical mission"), as is HCE's mutable nature:  "Lodenbroke the Longman, now he canseels under veerious persons but is always that Rorke relly!" (he's always Persse O'Reilly).

The crowd believes that HCE is fundamentally evil:  "When you've bled till you're bone it crops out in your flesh.  To tell how your mead of, mard, is made of."  They threaten to tell HCE's story to a newspaper editor, who will print it with "[s]creamer caps and invented gommas, quoites puntlost, forced to farce!"  "The pipette," HCE's supposed victim will "say anything at all for change," indicating that the crowd will pay her to elaborate on the facts.  When the authorities begin to investigate him, they'll get a kitchen peeler to also testify falsely against him "wearing an illformation," which the crowd will be able to procure "dirt cheap at a sovereign a skull!"

As part of some type of early punishment, the crowd encourages HCE to mutilate himself:  "Just press this cold brand against your brow for a mow.  Cainfully!  The sinus the curse.  That's it."  They produce more witnesses ("Greevy" and "Noordeece") before telling him that "it's all us rangers you'll be facing in the box before the twelfth correctional."  HCE will go to trial, they say, and the scandal recounted in the courtroom will cause the ladies to "dye for the shame."

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