"thence your pristopher polombos, hence our Kat Kresbyterians"

(119.10-121.16)  Wow.  Today's passage is a doozy.  These two pages are the first half of a four-page paragraph that, on a literal level, describes the appearance (i.e., handwriting or penmanship style) of the letters that make up the words in ALP's letter.

Campbell and Robinson's Skeleton Key provides, appropriately enough, one of the keys to today's (and tomorrow's) reading.  This paragraph is a parody of an introduction to The Book of Kells written by Sir Edward Sullivan and published in 1914.  (Campbell and Robinson assert that the Tunc page of The Book of Kells sheds light on the Wake, but how helpful it is is beyond my level of expertise right now.)  Joyce, like Sullivan, describes in intricate detail the way each letter appears on the page.  Really, there's no way I can do justice to this parody here.  It's something that has to be read in the original to be understood.

Aside from the parody, these pages also feature Joyce commenting on the intricacy and depth of the Wake itself.  Atherton, in his The Books at the Wake, explains Joyce's respect and admiration for The Book of Kells, and Joyce here is placing his own book on the same lofty level as that early Irish masterwork.  Joyce sets forth the symbols he uses as shorthand for both HCE (an E turned 90 degrees clockwise, so it's face down) and ALP (the Greek letter Delta), as well as a few other symbols.  He provides a bit more information on the significant numbers found in the book (such as 1132), and he references words that have figured prominently in the text (e.g., "maggers" at 120.17, which featured in the story of HCE's name and is found at 31.10).

This is all dense stuff, even by Wake standards, and today is one of those days where my understanding of the passage isn't yet developed enough for me to discuss it more in depth.  This indeed is a passage "very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia."  While I like to think that I'm the ideal reader suffering from the ideal insomnia, I've only read through these pages three or four times so far, so I've got a lot more nuzzling to do here.

I'll close out today's post by highlighting the last lines of the reading:

(here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again)

I feel like this is a perfect encapsulation of what Joyce is doing both with this passage and with the Wake as a whole.  He's taking the English language apart and putting it back together again (perhaps in the manner of Humpty Dumpty) in a way that unites both sound and sense.  So far, I'd say his attempt was fairly successful.