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]