What happens at the end of the Prankquean episode? This post explores the baffling ending of this important passage.

On first reading it, I thought that Jarl Van Hoother emerges from his castle and slams the door closed:

>And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy. And the duppy shot the shutter clup (Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifait itillibumullunukkunun!) And they all drank free. For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts. And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world.

It’s Campbell and Robinson (in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake) who read that passage as Van Hoother slamming the door, and their interpretation greatly influenced my first read.

It’s worth noting, though, that they don’t pull their interpretation out of nowhere. I.6 contains the following sentence, which seems to be a reference to this moment:

>The seemsame home and histry seeks and hidepence which we used to be reading for our prepurgatory, hot, Schott? till Duddy shut the shopper op and Mutti, poor Mutti! brought us our poor suppy

The language echoes the Prankquean paragraph, and it would seem that the father shuts the door or the shutter, or shuts up the female figure.

However, I have recently come across more opinions that the Prankquean (or perhaps the “dummy,” who represents Issy) is actually defeating Van Hoother at the end of the Prankquean paragraph, shooting him down. [And indeed, the first draft of the paragraph reads, “the dummy shot the shutter down and they all drank free.”]

Van Hoother calls the Prankquean “dappy.” And then the next sentence reads, “And the duppy shot the shutter clup.” I had always been reading that as “duppy” meaning him and “dappy” meaning her, but it could be that the narrator is picking up “dappy” and garbling it (or, it could be that the “dappy” and the “dummy” work together as the “duppy”).

She/they “shot the shutter” — that is, they shot the one shutting the door.

The thunder here, then, would be the sound of his Fall, like that of HCE’s fall. Everyone drinking free afterward would be like the Wake of Tim Finnegan.

But my favorite alternate interpretation is that Van Hoother shits himself in anger, which is what the thunder also signifies. He “ordurd,” after all (ordure + turd).

He “shot the shutter clup” — that is, he shat the thunder clap.

Or the Prankquean “shot the shutter” — shot the shitter or the one shutting the door.

Or she gave him a shot in the shutter, the eye.

Or he slammed the door closed.

Or he shot it open (“dup,” to open), as Grace O’Malley demanded in the legend.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be all of those things at once, and it’s fairly amazing Joyce compressed all of that into just a few sounds.

I read a fascinating interpretation that the Prankquean essentially “impregnates” Van Hoother by urinating on his doorstep three times, and at the end he “gives birth” by defecating.

This would be, in a sense, a new interpretation of the muse, and the process of bringing art into existence.

And the whole city hearing this sound is inspired, as the “hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis.” The crime in the Park, resulting in the “fall” of excrement from the Father, which echoes out into whispers of rumors (and Hosty’s ballad from I.2), inspires individual fulfillment, sexuality, and creativity. The Fortunate Fall: a crime and scandal becomes the basis for and occasion of redemptive art.

More ambiguity: “For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts.”

I had always read that as saying Van Hoother has defeated the Prankquean — both that she had finally met her match, but also that they would be “matched” as lovers like HCE and ALP, that they are complementary parts of the world system that moves in cycles. However, I now see that it could also be that he is a “fat match” in the sense of “fat chance”…that is, no match for her.

It’s both.

He’s clothed in armor, while she’s referenced as her body (“under shurts”/shirts/skirts, or the German Schürze, apron). Clothing is an important motif in the Wake that I will discuss in future posts. The motif hinges upon a fascinating passage in I.5 where Joyce reverses expectations by treating clothes as a metaphor for fact and the naked body as a metaphor for fiction.

At the time of writing the original notes that became this post, I was starting to think of the two main figures of the Prankquean paragraph as embodiments of fact and fiction: the Prankquean, as a muse-like figure — imagination and inspiration and storytelling and fictionalizing — rouses the fact-based Van Hoother into action and produces a balance between them.

So overall, the answer I give is that the ending of the paragraph is simultaneously a fall and rise. The Prankquean’s process working on the male children has produced a “tristian” and “Mark the Tris”: Tristan, throughout the novel, is the combined form of the brothers, the next incarnation of HCE to take the place of the older one. This new HCE slams the door and triumphs. He also throws the door open and cooperates with the Prankquean (and they “set up shop”). This moment is simultaneously HCE being shot down by the Prankquean and defecating himself in rage, a fall that starts the cycle all over again.

This is why Van Hoother’s emergence is accompanied by the rainbow that signifies renewal and rise, as well as by the thunderword that signifies the Fall. Both happen at once.

It is through this process that the Prankquean “holds her dummyship”: she and the dummy are both aspects of the female principle, the “dummy” representing especially the subjugated element of the personality that resonates with the half of humanity that has long been oppressed and forced to stay mute (“dumb”). The Prankquean is that dummy come into maturity, as sure as Issy grows up to become the next ALP to start the cycle again. She also steers the ship of life, the dummy ship, borne by the “peacewaves” generated by the brother battle reconciling into truce (porter pease waves?). The whole thing is powered by the Father’s Fall, which fills the sails with lust, filth, fear, and inspiration. It is out of these elements that civilization arises, indicated by the Dublin city motto appearing in the final sentence of the paragraph. As the novel later tells us, “that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose, finfin funfun, a sitting arrows.”