(427.10-428.27) "He was ours, all fragrance," the crowd says as Shaun drifts away under the shining stars. "And we were his for a lifetime." As the charming scene (made all the more charming by the exquisite prose of today's reading) continues, Shaun's lamp goes out, "for it couldn't stay alight."
The chapter's final paragraph functions as a kind of ode to Shaun, who will go down the river, drift into the ocean, and float from Germany ("Tuskland," which McHugh equates to the Danish word for Germany, "Tyskland") to America ("Amiracles"). Shaun, "the walking saint," is proclaimed as "[w]inner of the gamings, primed at the studience, propredicted from the storybouts, the choice of ages wise!" McHugh notes that each of these four titles correspond with the four chapters of Book II of the Wake (dealing with, respectively, the children's games, the children's studies, HCE and the patrons' stories, and Tristan and Iseult's love affair). The crowd, which refers to itself here as "poor twelve o'clock scholars" (implying that the crowd consists of the twelve patrons of the pub -- and members of the jury that finds HCE guilty -- in their midnight, sleep-induced dream state), asks Shaun to remember them and to come home.
The people of "Samoanesia" will not forget him, and the four old men will mark his journey. The crowd wishes him the blessings of the four elements -- earth, water, fire, and wind ("And may the mosse of prosperousness gather you rolling home! May foggy dews bediamondise your hooprings! May the fireplug of filiality reinsure your bunghole! May the barleywind behind glow luck to your bathershins!") -- and proclaims that he'll be named a saint "some canonisator's day or other." Until then, the crowd offers Shaun a final blessing: "may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops." This being the Wake, though, it's unsurprising that Shaun will return just as soon as we begin the next chapter.
No comments:
Post a Comment