Perhaps to deflect his attention, he goes on the offensive against an imagined paramour of Isabel, and he remains on this offensive for the duration of today's reading (and, I'm guessing, into tomorrow's). "Divulge," shouts Shaun at the beginning of today's passage. After the bit above, he resumes by telling Isabel to "divorce into me and say the curname in undress . . . of any lapwhelp or sleevemongrel who talks to you upon the road where he tuck you to be a roller." The jealous Shaun needs to know who might be after Isabel, and he "don't care a tongser's tammany hang who the muck is nor twoo hoots in the corner nor three shouts on a hill." He goes on to ensure that "as we value the very name in sister that as soon as we do possibly it will be a poor lookout for that insister."
Shaun asks Isabel (and perhaps the other girls) why the "insister" will "be a markt man from that hour." When he doesn't get a reply, he somewhat uncharacteristically insults her, saying, "You are an ignoratis!" He answers his own question, anyway, saying, "Because then probably we'll dumb well soon show him what the Shaun way is like how we'll go a long way towards breaking his outsider's face for him for making up to you with his bringthee balm of Gaylad and his singthee songs of Arupee." And once Shaun's finished with his attack, he might "think strongly about giving the brotherkeeper into custody to the first police bubby cunstabless of Dora's Diehards in the field I might chance to follopon," or he may even bring him up for proceedings "before a bunch of magisrafes and twelve good and gleeful men." This, Shaun said, would "prove more or less of an event and show the widest federal in my cup."
As a side note to today's reading, there's a famous story, perhaps most prominently noted in Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce, that as Joyce dictated parts of the Wake to Samuel Beckett, there was once a knock on the door. Beckett didn't hear the knock, so when Joyce said, "Come in," Beckett wrote those words down, figuring that they were part of the text. When later asked if he'd like to remove the unintended phrase, Joyce said, "Let it stand." The story, if true, sheds light on the way Joyce sometimes relied upon luck or happenstance when composing the Wake. I haven't yet come across the words "come in" in the text, but today's reading does include something close in this passage:
We'll he'll burst our his mouth like Leary to the Leinsterface and reduce he'll we'll ournhisn liniments to a poolp. Open the door softly, somebody wants you, dear! You'll hear him calling you, bump like a blizz, in the muezzin of the turkest night. Come on now, pillarbox! I'll stiffen your scribeall, broken reed!At first, I thought that I'd found the sentence Ellman had mentioned. Rather than "come in," though, it's, "Open the door softly, somebody wants you." One could argue that it is out of place with the text around it, but, then again, it does flow into the following sentence, which begins, "You'll hear him calling you." McHugh notes that in Arrah-na-Pogue, the character Sean the Post sings, "Open the dure softly, Somebody wants ye, dear," so this probably puts to rest my theory that this was the line Joyce unintentionally tossed in to his book.
Hugh B. Staples suggests that the "come in" line might be found on pages 222-223, where during the children's play we find the sentence, "Sammy, call on." This would be Joyce telling Beckett to call on whoever's at the door. This might be a better suspect than mine, but McHugh does note that the phrase could stand for "semicolon," and thus be "mere" verbal punctuation. (In either case, maybe Joyce left in the unintended part, then later revised it to fit better within the text, both in terms of narrative and word play.)
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