S: After all that patter, time to take a stab at mater, because HCE is back, and ALP’s got him! The Lady in invoked with an ecumenical litany of honorifics, the antidote to the catalogue of opprobrium recently heaped on her wayward mate. FW pp 71-72.
M: “…He Can Explain… Look to the Lady… He’s Hue to Me Cry… Fine’s Fault was no Felon…”
There is even hope that she will clear HCE’s name, that she “can Tell Naked Truths about a Dear Man and all his Conspirators how they all Tried to Fall him Putting it all around Lucalizod about Privates Earwicker and a Pair of Sloppy Sluts plainly Showing all the Unmentionability falsely Accusing about the Raincoats FW 107. 4-7.
Might this be a clue as to what HCE did (or didn’t) on the night in question? Urolagnia (also urophilia or undinism) is a form of paraphilia in which sexual excitement is associated with the sight or thought of urine or urination. See Also “Chamber Music.”
See also Joyce’s chamber maid bride Nora from the Finn Hotel, and consider for a moment the flow of both river and micturition.
A freshly discovered manuscript is being examined by a scholarly schoolman, with all the exegetical means at his dispose all. It was unearthed by a hen, (Belinda) as she was “scratching at the hour of klokking twelve.” FW 111. 8. “Klokking” puzzles such Joycean savants as I have consulted, but I know what it means! (Send academic kudos!) “Clecken” hens were the bane of my Irish great uncle, a disgruntled farmer — hens who insisted on hiding and hatching their own or others’ eggs. Anglophonic poultriculturists call them “brooding” hens.
Thereafter, James (Shem) Joyce, formerly known as the author (merci, Monsewer Barthes) has lots o’fun taking the piss (cf urolangia, supra) out of the practitioners of Lit Crit, in their perpetual struggle by means of nit splitting and hair picking to make a mountain out of a sow’s ear. FW pp 111-125.
First, a disquisition on birds, the ms having been dug up by one. Then, an cockeyed exposition on calligraphy. Next, an unexpected digression on lust, in which “an innocent all-abroads adverb such as Michaelly looks like can be suggestive of under the pudendascope.” FW 115. 29, 30. Now, a political decoding, the revelation the “Margaret is the social revolution while cakes mean the party funds.” FW 116. 8, 9.
Here I must pause and reflect – I’m starting to take this poisonally.
Pee Ess. “What a stupid olla podrida of the Bible and so forth James Joyce is: just stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be-dirty mind,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, after reading part of “Work in Progress” in the summer of 1928. Play that on your old Orange skin flute, John Thomas.
sum mer de le wake 