Pharaoh with fairy, two lie, let them! (FW65, No. 41 - III.4, 578-584)

Tomorrow we are leaving for Ireland. The original plan was to finish the book tonight, but being sick for a few weeks made that goal difficult. I was reading 13-15 pages a day for a few weeks to try and catch up, but that became a bit hard to sustain. Towards the end, when it became easier, as the book straightened out a bit in III, I realized that I wanted to preserve the original idea of blogging through the book, and having written something for every handful of pages. So in the past week or so I've been doing six pages a day, and will keep up that pace. Right now, I'm planning on finishing Sunday or Monday, six or seven days from now. I do not want to take time away from being with my family, so I will do this at night, or maybe wake up early in the morning. I will not be bringing my computer, and doubtful I will be writing posts on my phone, but I am bringing my notebook and will write there, and type everything up when I get back (and will back date everything to correspond to the day it was written).

Finishing this while in Dublin is going to be a memorable experience. I hope that I find some inspiration to write differently. Being in the midst of III.3 as we pack and begin our journey, with its focus on the relationship of HCE and ALP, is constantly bringing to mind my own relationship with my partner. The chapter bases itself around the mundane occurrence of almost every night when sleeping in a house with a partner and with young children. The narrator does not merely describe them checking on a crying child and walking back down the stairs and climbing back in their bed, but sees the history of the whole human race it seems. As Adam and Eve, what they do effects everyone who comes after them. Their story is universal and also interminable: see the verbs, one after another, describing their history together on pp. 579-580. It feels that way in a relationship with someone, when you fall in love, marry, have children, have difficulties with each other and with other family members, try to be there for friends, take on responsibilities outside the home...After all that they have been through, they have still "left off leaving off and kept on keeping on" (580.8-9) and celebrated. 

There is absolutely something comic about the gigantism (to borrow a term from Joyce's poetics in the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses) of this chapter, making the couple tiptoeing in their house into something so grand, distilling down the events of a chronicle into a few paragraphs, to cover the space of going from the room upstairs to the bed down below. But I think this also mimics the gigantic feeling that I experience in the mundane moments of life with my partner and with children. In small moments you feel like a light is cast on your entire history. It is the kind of thing I would like to be able to express. You feel like you are bearing your past in every moment. As they fall into bed, the narrator exclaims, "Pharaoh with fairy, two lie, let them!" (570.12-13). An odd couple it seems (HCE is described as a large man, barrel-chested, and ALP as a petite woman) but they lie together. The description mimics the principle parts of the Latin verb fero, ferre, tuli, latum: "to bear." Something like principle parts, which you repeat to yourself so much when learning a language, and point to in your brain when reading a passage, is something that will never leave your brain and becomes part of you. You rehearse the words that don't have meaning of their own (you aren't speaking to anyone or saying a sentence that makes any sense), but making sure you have the ability to understand something you will hear or read. It is second nature, like falling into bed and laying next to your wife, but inside those words, those motions, and other like it, is what lets you think, speak, listen, share, confess, question, recall a past, live in a present, and face a future.

[FW 579-580]

hovering dreamwings, folding around (FW65, No. 40 - III.4, 572-578)

The scenes in III.4 of the parents hurrying into the child's room, and the mother comforting and singing lullabies, are touching, and present some temporarily sure ground to stand on, like when you feel the sandy sea floor briefly under your foot as you are swimming towards the shore and testing the depth. Of course, it also confuses me, which shouldn't be surprising. 

In another version, this chapter could have represented inside and outside the dream simultaneously: the frame breaks momentarily to hear the mother's soothing words. This doesn't seem to be the case. The mother's voice is not given after an em-dash, not represented explicitly as quoted speech. More strangely, on p. 576, it is surrounded by five brief quotations marked in this way, which could be read as the four evangelists making comments about what they see, but which, for me, are the mother and father sleepily talking about what to do when their child is clearly not sleeping deeply yet. (Of course it could be both.) This positions the mother's speech as in line with the bulk of the text of FW, visually indistinct from the different narrators, both identified, implied, and not, throughout the book. 

There is, however, an interplay between the child being comforted and the subject of the surrounding dream.

While hovering dreamwings, folding around, will hide from fears my wee mee mannikin, keep by big wig long strong manomen, guard my bairn, mon beau (FW 576.14-16).

Like on p. 565-566, the mother believes the child is having a nightmare. There, she says that the big man won't hurt him; here, she calls him a big man himself (he is growing; the child is becoming the father), although the "fear" that she is protecting him from hide fear (Ir. "man"). She speaks about him not only as her little son (Eng/Ir bairn) but her beau, her handsome man. 

Just earlier, the dream focused on the trail of a man accused of incest, the presentation of evidence against him, the attempt of his wife to exonerate him, and the inconclusive ending (the case seems to be thrown out because a corpse has no right to property). The dreamer being comforted does seem to be reflected in this dream. But what follows does not seem to be the continuation of the dream, but an elaborate prayer (back in FW's usual dream language dialect) for the parents' safe return to their bed. 

We could say that this is Mamalujo speaking, watching what is happening, but I'm not so sure. If FW is not simply the dreams of a person, from falling asleep to waking (with some interruption), there may not be a simple way to explain it in a basic communicative understanding of how narrative works. It is "about" the night, "represents" dreams, mimics them, and even, in III.4, evokes the difference between waking and sleeping, but that does not mean that we are in the thoughts of one or more dreamers, and that the dream speech is coherent with a bedrock real world "reality conceit" as I have called it (I think that is still a thing, but it does not have to ground the dream in the way I am describing here). I am still searching for the way to describe this. 

They arise from a clear springwell (FW65, No. 39 - III.4, 566-571)

The reading is continuing at a good pace, but the writing is becoming labored. I am not doing it under the most ideal circumstances, of course. Occasionally I have time to write during the day, sometimes in my paper journal, and that night I'll copy it out into the blog. More and more now I find myself reading with pleasure, taken along by the book, constantly amused and surprised and moved, and not wanting to write about it.

There is even a perfect passage for tonight. A rainbow glimpsed in a vision of a king's visit to the city, a future of promise. A debate by the observers if they should go for a walk outside (perhaps to take a piss) but confronted with the uncertainties of the staticky night. Echoes of the Book of the Dead; glimpses of Egyptian words and names of gods. The heart at risk of being swallowed and lost. Malevolent entities walking about; sheets of fire that impose. But also glimpses at the limpid waters flowing which "arise from a clear springwell" (571). A moment of peace and of being at peace, with the shimmering words and sentences of this book that is coming to an end soon.

The peace in the book, the thought, the experience, the moment, does not always lead to the will to write. When you are spending time with someone in conversation, you would not stop and begin to write: you are doing it right then, you are speaking and expressing. That is how I feel in moments like tonight (they are frequent). There is a charter and a desire to write that I quietly re-up throughout the day and when I read, but it happens that I'm having a conversation with this book and I can't be rude. The communication is happening. Is it lost? If I re-read, re-start the conversation (play it over in my mind in a sense) to that part where the unity was felt the deepest, I can recapture it, drink again from the springwell. If I keep staying right here, on this porch, in this cafe, in this apartment, the conversation could keep going and never die. What about that charter? Is anyone else listening? Do I need to speak to them as well?

What was thass? (FW65, No. 36 - III.3, 545-III.4, 555)

I am thinking about chapter divisions in FW. In a moment, I'll explain why it is relevant at the end of III.3 and beginning of III.4. The use of chapters in general is not a natural way to organize a story, or at least something necessary, but a convention with an interesting history. If you read Robinson Crusoe, often said to be the first modern novel (published in 1719), you will see that it is one long, unbroken narrative with no artificial chapter divisions. This technique is prevalent, even second nature now, but it is not very old in the grand scheme of things. Chapter divisions are artificial, not part of a text but paratext. 

For novels and other long written stories, chapter divisions present no problem because we accept the fact that the narrative is artificial, something created by the author and not a continuous record of reality. We all know that a story does not, nor need to cover a continuous flow of events, but is judicious in how it strings them together. Uninteresting parts, or parts that would tax the story's audience and distract it, is set between chapters, if you will, and if necessary summarized in exposition elsewhere.

Even in Ulysses, which is meant to tell the story of a single day in its fullness, divides up into chapters, including the stream of consciousness chapters, which purport to be the record of thought and experience. It is OK to have an artificial stopping of the thought process, to tie it up neatly as an artistic whole. We could also say that the maintenance of chapter divisions in a forward-thinking work like Ulysses is done due to its imitation of the epic and episodic storytelling of the Odyssey. The sequentialized and episodic form of works like this, including the picaresque novel, are standard for representing a period in a hero's life time, even a single day thanks to Ulysses.

I cannot yet make any general statements or suggestions about chapter divisions and book structure in FW yet, but the transition from III.3 to 5 raises some issues worth thinking about.

Just like sounds from the outside world can enter into a dream through the ear and impact its course of events, I read the end of III.3 as a dream diverted, or at least colored by, the sound of a horse on the street outside the bedroom window: dawn is approaching, and a cab driver may be getting ready for the day; or the watchman Sackerson, whom we know to be present in the current reality conceit, is accompanied by a horse. 

This would account for two things: the (perhaps unexpected?) focus on HCE riding horses with a delighted ALP at the end of III.3, and the final exclamation ending that chapter:

Mattahah! Marahah! Luahah! Joahanahanahana!

This is a horse's neigh repeated four times and colored each time by the name of one of hte evangelists. 

As often happens with loud sounds to the dreamer, the dream coloring can be overrode by the sheer loudness, and the dreamer is awakened, which is what we have at the beginning of III.4:

What was thass? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth.

 If this reading is at least plausible, then we are confronted with the arbitrariness of chapter divisions in FW. JJ's reasons for introducing a chapter division here, between the sound and the awakening, were, I'm sure, manifold. We certainly have a shift of conceit, from the séance to the (eventual) four-part telescript observing the Porter family. Just like with Ulysses, however, this reminds me that FW is not simply a dream. I don't think dreams have chapters, but rather smooth transitions between segments...perhaps what we have in the terminal parts of FW's chapters? It is not a dream but a representation of one (and things, and parts of things, can be represented in infinitely many ways) that is meant to take the form of a book, or more specifically a novel, or even epic.

The usual understanding of FW's book and chapter division is Viconian, but similar to my earlier discussion about "Silence." in III.3, I think this can be rethought. Vico is only part of the story for FW. THe books are labelled, simply, not with a name but just an (archaic) numbering, I II III IV. The chapters are only marked by white space; the numbers and folk titles and section headings are completely extraneous to the text of JJ. Maybe chapter divisions aren't even what we have in the book. The white space arguably corresponds to nothing in the text/dream, but is simply something for readers, like the paragraph divisions, marked by simple spaces, in the medieval Masoretic bibles.

His thoughts that wouldbe words, his livings that havebeen deeds (FW65, No. 35 - III.3, 531-545)

The reality conceit (a new phrase? could be helpful for analyzing FW) in III.3 is the interview (already discussed), but it amounts to Yawn being contacted through means partly radio, partly necromancy. Yawn is pure potential for the interviewer: his "thoughts" are "wouldbewords"; and his words are about deeds already in the past, the life he leads, "his livings," are "havebeen deeds" (532.31-32). Through Yawn, different familiar voices emerge, and he even speaks as Issy and HCE, at the end of the chapter, for quite some time. The topic, naturally, is what happened with HCE. In many ways, it reads like a who's who and what's what of the entire book, or at least the events spoken about in book I. The more I think about the narrative versus the events they are about, the more disoriented I feel. I started off trying to make sense of it all in a way that reduces it or transcodes it to an understanding which is, alas, foreign and not authentic.

Not only here, but all over FW, it is more about the telling than the tale. When there is a straightforward story, it usually is framed in some way, as a moral lesson or a radio play. Most (all?) of the book is assigned a speaker, with the most omniscient narrator-like figure probably meant to be the voice of a historian, specifically, Mamalujo. We (me, and commentators, and possibly all readers, and hopefully you as well) look for the reality conceit for each chapter or section, and in our reading, anchor the stream of words in a narrative putting a fundamental story (fabula) into words, the story that precedes the narrative. IF we are to talk about the fabula of FW as a whole, it would consist in large part of the impropriety of HCE in the park and the reaction to it. There is also the concrete event settings of the Nightlessons chapter (II.2) or the pub (II.3) or the farewell discourse of Jawn (III.2).

So, given all of this, with reference to III.3, is Yawn telling or retelling the story of FW? Is is another version?

It may be better not to think in terms of events (as we usually do when talking about stories, at least I do) but the characters. Each, in their full, ideal form, is yoked to, maybe not a series of events, but an event cluster that they contribute to. Any time one talks about these characters, the events come out, are told. If, for example, in in the world of the book which is overhung with the heavy branches and knotted vines of this world and its characters, some play is staged (i.e. II.1), or a tale told, these archetypical characters and their inherent event dynamic bleed through in appropriate ways. The same when one character talks about another. The bleedthrough is so intense that the speakers themselves, like a saint receiving the stigmata, become marked by them as if they are the character themselves. In this analysis, Yawn/Shem is not telling the story of FW again, but is becoming transparent in varying degrees to its characters and all that entails. Called Yawn (he is sleepy, he is on the verge of the other, non-waking state, sleep/death), Shaun is particularly prone to this bleeding through. The walls of his personality (which, as the previous chapters show, are well-kept like a hedge) are at their most vulnerable. 

SILENCE. (FW65, No. 34 - III.3, 500-531)

On p.501 comes what, to me, the more I think about it, is a profound and even disturbing silence. Mamalujo has been interrogating/interviewing Yawn from beyond, and all the voices speaking through him. The voices grew more crowded, shouting over each other and not making much sense (like a more out-of-control version of the end of I.8). Then, whitespace and the all-caps message:

SILENCE.

This is like the period of silence in the annals read in I.1, although there the gap in the record was stated to be "Silent." by the tour-guide-historian-narrator. The records and the scribe taking them down stopped; perhaps, as FW interpreters like to think, this corresponds to a gap of the ages in history, a space between the epochs, when things are about to start again, after the Viconian notion of cyclical history. Maybe so. 

It is different in III.3, however. We have here 

SILENCE.

This states directly what was in the hearing of Mamalujo: nothing, no more voice speaking or responding, after so many.

If we can picture the séance (John Bishop's word for what is happening in III.3) of Mamlujo as an archaeological excavation, and Yawn as the stratified remains of generations (eons) of human settlements which are the events and characters of FW, the silence would be the virgin soil you reach, beneath and before the first human traces. Or, if a radio telescope, it is the cosmic background radiation, or maybe the darkness preceding the Big Bang. Maybe we can think of it narratologically as a slowing down of the narration to a crawl, going so slowly in fact that it can't even capture the thoughts and actions of its human subjects and longer. The storytelling tool, the lens of observation, has been overcalibrated, is too fine-grained to let anything pass through and be observed and told about.

I feel like I am reading through the text into the pages themselves and down through the back cover to let the light (or darkness) in.

To bring us a little closer to the reading, what I find to be the disturbing part of this is the way that the text of FW itself (it is implied here) knows its own limits, that the voices brought together into the interviewer's hearing, which theoretically can pick up any figure whatsoever in the book's universe, emerge out of darkness and, it is implied, return to it. 

This is, in fact, how I read the book's final and first sentence. While I think that the common wisdom about them/it is basically right (that they are two halves of the same sentence, implying that the book never ends), what comes after the last "the" is silence  in the first analysis, even if you immediately turn back to page 3. The sentence is unfinished, and this is made noticeable by ending with the one word in English which is the most demanding in its need to be followed and fulfilled by something, whose very existence is to assert the existence of what follows. The silence couldn't be more noticeable.

[FW 501]

My heart, my coming forth of darkness! (FW65, No. 33 - III.3, 490-500)

The "Prankquean refrain" appears in this chapter, originally found in I.1 during the short story centered on the figure of the same name, who poses a riddle to the Jarl von Hoother and steals his children when he fails to answer. There, it reads, "why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?" 

The meaning is, of course, opaque, but I am interested in its role in an interesting section of the long dialogue of III.3, where it is ensconced in an exchange which draws on Egyptian Book of the Dead language:

—Let Eivin bemember for Gates of Gold for their fadeless suns berayed her. Irise, Osirises! Be thy mouth given unto thee! For why do you lack a link of luck to poise a pont of perfect, peace? On the vignetto is a ragingoos. The overseer of the house of the oversire of the seas, Nu-Men, triumphant, sayeth: Fly as the hawk, cry as the corncrake, Ani Latch of the postern is they name; shout!

—My, heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth of darkness! They know not my heart, O coolun dearest! Mon gloomerie! Mon glamourie! What a surprise, dear Mr Preacher, I to hear from your strawnummical modesty! Yes, there was that skew arch of chrome sweet home, floodlit up above the flabberghosted farmament and bump where the camel got the needle. Talk about iridecencies! Ruby and beryl and chrysolite, jade, sapphire, jasper and lazul. (FW 493-494)

My sense is that the first voice is Mamlujo, and the responder is Yawn. 

The basic meaning of the Prankquean refrain is relatively easy to discern. Pretending that we did not know that this was a version of that riddle, the statement here is a question put to Yawn who is imagined to soon to be an Osiris awakening in the underworld...but not yet. The question asks, why are you not presently able to erect ("poise") a bridge ("pont") for safe passage to the realm of perfect peace? Yawn is not yet dead, is still on the journey through darkness towards light, and is stopping for this interview.

The speaker seems to be looking at a copy of the Book of the Dead and notes that the accompanying vignette shows a goose (transformation into different animals, like birds, is a common theme in the Book of the Dead). Most curiously, Yawn may even be identified with ALP: though "Ani" invokes the owner of the most famous BD scroll (published by Budge and known by JJ), Any, it sounds like Annie. There was also apparently a tea in Dublin made by Anne Lynch & Co. As a part of a gate or portal, the postern here invokes another prominent part of BD spells: knowing the names of the gates, and their demon guardians, which lead deeper into the sacred realm of the beyond, each requiring an "open sesame"-type utterance to proceed. The speaker, then, is uttering a spell over Yawn and urging him to shout the right name: he is trying to protect his entry into the afterlife, as a transformed bird, even as ALP (remember: Shaun has been floating down the Liffey in a barrel...).

The Prankquean refrain is transformed, not a riddle to trick an HCE figure, but an earnest question to see whether the entrant into the beyond is ready. Shaun, perhaps, is being prepared to face the task of being confronted by the Prankquean in his next life, after he goes forth by day, and becomes HCE. Accordingly, Yawn reads from another spell of the Book of the Dead, no. 30B, which implores one's heart, tenderly referred to as "heart of my mother" (the heart that your mother knit for you in the womb) not to speak anything false. If it were to, then this could lead to a second death, annihilation, whether in the court of justice where the heart is weighed, or at any point during the treacherous journey. 

Yawn's identification with ALP comes through with his brief address to the preacher, reminding of the beginning of the letter ("Dear Reverend..."). I think he is continuing to speak as her when he notes (to the preacher still?) that he did, indeed, see "that skew arch of chrome sweet chrome" in the sky. As made of chromium, which is a shiny silver color, this could be the fog bow seen in the previous book. But it is also a fantastic and beautiful archway built in what is possibly the realm of the dead ("where the camel got the needle"), made, like the city described in Revelations, of fabulous flashing jewels. I'm not sure if these seven jewels all match up perfectly to ROYGBIV, but they at least evoke it. Characteristically, it begins with red, and you can also see violet at its end; but beryl seems to be able to occur in almost any color. The rainbow after the flood has not come yet, but Yawn imagines it while still "coming forth of darkness," even imperfectly, to exist.

[FW 493]

Dream. (FW65, No. 32 - III.3, 474-490)

The four evangelists, speaking as one or taking turns, question Yawn, who has been sleeping and is slowly waking up, or is dozing and about to fall asleep. He is both laying on the grass and is buried beneath it, creating a gentle hillock over his recumbent form, grown over with grass and flowers. You can still communicate with him: he is not entirely asleep, not too long buried or too deep. 

This situation differs from what is in book I, where HCE's tumulus is so large and so ancient that it is almost completely lost in the landscape, and the occupant of this ancient tomb now only able to be perceived by proxy, by evidence and historiography and folklore. Assuming the speakers early in book I are related to the Mamalujo of book III, there we have learned discourse sorting through facts; here, a lively interview with a very much alive subject.

HCE is present in III.3. Yawn speaks of him as an ancestor. He quotes a short poem about him, but remembers it incompletely, or only knows part of it because it is so ancient that it has only been partially preserved:

Hail him heathen, heal him holystone!
Courser, Recourser, Changechild...............
Eld as endall, earth..............

The interviewer interprets the incomplete lines as purposeful in their form, and scans the stanza as a "cataleptic [this means the last syllable is dropped, though here more seems missing] mithyphallic." It is a song about Bacchus, or an erection. It is mythic. Later, the interviewer finally recalls it, knowing it in three recurring yet changing versions. It originally came from a certain Finnsen Fayean who was called "Ocean," or Ossian (Finn MacCool's son), but now known in the version of Yawn, ascribed to a certain Mr. Tupling Toun of Morning de Heights.

When the interviewer, just earlier, asks Yawn more about the ancestor these three lines speak of, Yawn replies:

Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake. Ah! May he have now of here fearfilled me! Sinflowed! O sinflowed!

 His dream at night ("nonday") was of this figure. Knowing he will wake one day, Yawn wishes him to "fearfull" him: make him be who he should be, and become a man (Ir. fear). Yawn also seems to lament the current time of flood, of "Sinflowed" (Ger. Sintflut), not just a time of deluge but of the preponderance of sin. The statement is paradoxical: flowing water (in baptism) should take away sin, but here it also spread it.

Another reading. "Sinflowed" is not a lament but a repeated exclamation about the ancestral figure in his dream. He prays he will have "fearfilled" him, and then declares him to be "Sinflowed." Sin sounds like Finn. Coming after "O," it sounds like Oisin, the son of Finn, is the one who flowed. The father "flowed" into the son (Finn to Ossian, HCE to Shaun), fulfilling his duty as a patriarch and enabling the same of his son, his task able to be "fearfilled."

When Yawn says "Dream.", is he saying that what he is about to describe was a dream? A dream is both a night vision in the past (they are only known as dreams after the fact) and a hope for the future wished in the full light of day. Shaun dreams of HCE in these two senses.

*    *    *

The effect this dialogue is having on my thought about the book as a whole is immense. It feels like Yawn's dream is mine, thinking back to the beginning of the book. To have such a dilated experience of temporality in less than 500 pages is astounding. And to think ahead, when the reading inevitably circles back to p.3, and I once again see the faint outlines of the prehistorical tomb in the landscape, and hear only echoes of its meaning. Here, in III.3, I feel as if I have travelled in the past, the distant past, to speak with someone now long gone, disintegrated. If I push my ear to the ground I would perhaps just hear a rumbling. I feel that I am meeting him in a dream now. This book is no longer a dream in its linguistic mimicry or its setting. When I open it and read I step inside of a dream and become a dreamer.

the beausome of the exhaling night (FW65, No. 30 - III.2, 445-458)

As Shaun's sermon goes on, the language remains remarkably clear. According to JJ's scheme, III.2 is the second watch of the night, called concubium. It is before impestata nox, where dreams become troubling. In the second watch, a deep sleep may be achieved, but it is also the time that two people sharing a bed may awaken and make love. Shaun speaks about sex so much in this episode that the connection has to be made. 

As he takes a moment to reflect on himself, to assess how he has been doing and let his audience know that he still has plenty of gas left in the tank, he remarks that he is in "no violent hurry." Can we see the color violet here, and the end of the rainbow? A few pages later (453) he thinks about a future when he can return to Dublin "when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower," so the idea that the world is in flood is still in play. He reflects on how lovely a night it is and on "the beausome of the exhaling night." The body (Gk. soma) is perfectly at rest ("lapidated," as he says earlier, turned to stone) and is lost in a lovely sleep, and the harmony of nature around it presents a scene full of beauty. Shaun wishes he did not have to leave but could stay forever under the tree and beside the river, and listen to the birds warble.

Before the modern era, people would often awake at this time of the night and eat, talk, check on their children, or have sex. This does not seem to be the case here, but the texture and topic of this episode suggests the dreamer is in deepest, or at least most placid sleep. The stars are shining at their brightest ("he gaped in wulderment, his onsaturncast eyes in stellar attraction"), at the darkest part of the night between dusk and dawn. Shaun, who is symbolized by the stone and who represents time, would flourish naturally at this point. The dreamer is so lost to himself that he is completely unaware of time passing, just like Shaun is talking and talking, and picking up again after seemingly ending his sermon several times.

If you are awake at this time of the night (as Shaun imagines himself), you can get a profound sense of distance. Shaun mentions how he would like to be "hearing the wireless harps of sweet old Aerial and the mails across the nightrives." At night, when the interference of the sun's rays is gone and the atmosphere presents itself as a wide expanse for long-echoing radio waves, you can pick up stations in AM broadcasting from halfway across the world. With no street noise, you can hear the moving machinery of the night shift and the supply chains moving. This is not something I hear anymore now that I live in Europe, but deep in the night I would listen to train whistles blowing far away, longly as they passed through street crossings, or quickly as they slowly pulled themselves into yards. I remember laying on my bed in my first apartment in Dallas and, one time, hearing a train whistle make the *knock, knock knock KNOCK, knock* pattern, eerily reminding me that there was somebody behind this sound, that it was only disembodied because of my hearing at a distance. The miles between my quiet bedroom window and the train yard, over parking lots and flashing street lights and empty highways and merging lanes were made sensible to me in that instant through the traveling sound and my hearing.

[FW 449]

to belave black on white (FW65, No. 29 - III.2, 429-445)

Well into his long sermon which admonishes Issy to live a chaste and pious life while he is away, Shaun urges her to "Be vacillant over those vigilant who would leave you to belave black on white." He then lists the kinds of books she should read. "Black on white" is the printed page, but Shaun thinks the printed word is able to assert the opposite of the truth of things: to teach you to believe that black is white and white is black. He also undermines his command by confusing "vigilant" with "vacillate." Not sure how "lave" ("wash") fits in; I don't think that mixing whites and darks when doing laundry was a thing in the 20's to 40's? 

The admonishment to be careful with what you read comes after a break in Shaun's long discourse, which ends with "Amene" (Italian for "pleasant"; 439.14). This is one of several "Amens" ending parts of his sermon. Shaun seems to be relieved that his formal speech is over, as well as impressed: "Poof! There's puff for ye, begor, and planxty of it, all abound me breath!" He goes on to praise his delivery, and even considers whether he is a spirit medium: "I feel spirits of itchery outching out from all over me and only for the sludgehummer's force in my hand to hold them the darkens alone knows what'll who'll be saying of next." His body is overcome with the spirit which seeks to talk through him, but he resists this inner voice and associates it with darkness. Shaun fears this voice because he cannot predict what it will say: he wants to be in control of his words. This is part of his connection to orality and speech, and his dislike for books and for writing in general, which is Shem's specialty. 

Shem fears the untethered-ness of writing, its separation from a living voice (its author can no longer defend or explain beyond the words written, and remains at the mercy of the reader/interpreter). Moreover, he does not want to read another's words, but to exert full rhetorical control (wield "the sludgehammer's force") over what he says. 

[FW 439]

How farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary! (FW65, No. 28 - III.1, 403-429)

The chapters featuring Shaun in the beginning of book III find their pendant in the Shem-focused chapters later in book I. The letter of ALP features in both. In the Q&A of this chapter, Shaun answers several questions about the letter, and about his brother, and maintains that, yes, he can read it (although he won't, or can't open it), and, absolutely, he could have done a better job writing it. He wouldn't have plagiarized it or filled it with cliches.

Shaun represents the potency of writing, and the primacy of speech. As the questioner remarks, responding to his tour de force telling of the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper which ended in a series of 17 heroic couples (improvised?), "How farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary!" (419.11-12). Like the language of FW (of course) his vocabulary (Ir. focloir) is far-flung in drawing on languages from across the globe, and mellifluous to boot (Danish velklingende), ringing in the ear, full of euphony, even if he tends towards neologisms (like the invented Volapuk language) to get his point across. 

Though representing and excelling at oratory and orality he is nevertheless obsessed with writing, either because he feels inadequacy about his own writing, or because, unrelated to any merit it may have, he is weary of always conveying the words of others. He is a letter carrier, is always bearing words, and his nearness to them has taken its toll. Even his mastery of oral composition is limited, since he does not seem to believe in the very morals that he preaches so eloquently and piously (ending his Aesopian fable with a sign of the cross). In the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper he preaches the reconciliation of opposites (what the onward-flowing book hastens toward), but he continues to badmouth his brother and criticize his writing. The questioner is onto something, being subtly critical, in praising Shaun's gift of gab.

Shaun also throws his weight around with non-verbal communication. The final two thunderwords of the book are in this chapter: when he clears his throat loudly before telling the fable, and when he farts loudly in his barrel. When Shaun clears his throat before telling his moralizing fable, doing it in that deliberate way that one can do when clearing their throat before everyone's eyes, there is something purposeful as well as trivial in it. The last one is particularly ridiculous and represents a comic diminutive of the earlier thunderings of cosmic proportions, especially the one at the book's beginning which represents the Fall itself; but even HCE slamming the door of the children's room in II.2. Now the thundercloud is further away, almost out of earshot, giving only a deep rumbling instead of a quick and shocking clap. 

As he passes out and vanishes down river, the bluster fades out, and the letter-carrier does what he does best and brings what he was given to the ends of the world.

[FW 419]