This post continues to look at instances of clothing in the Wake, building on my discussion in my last post.

In I.6, after the telling of the parable of the Mookse and the Gripes, the Shaunish professor illustrates his point differently by discussing Burrus and Caseous (Shaun and Shem, here acquiring the names of conspirators against Caesar/HCE; these names also mean butter and cheese). He explains that these two brothers are connected by a female principle that he calls M (Margarine).

Here’s what he says as part of the discussion:

>it will be very convenient for me for the emolument to pursue Burrus and Caseous for a rung or two up their isocelating biangle. Every admirer has seen my goulache of Marge (she is so like the sister, you don’t know, and they both dress A L I K E!) which I titled The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman which in the presence ornates our national cruetstand. 

The image this evokes is that Burrus and Caseous are the bottom two points of an isosceles triangle, with Margarine (ALP) at the top to hold them together and unite them. Marge here is said to dress A L I K E her sister, suggesting ALP’s role as the temptresses in the Park (doubling into lookalikes: “why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?”) 

[The five letters of “alike” perhaps corresponding to the five members of the Earwicker family?]

The professor describes his painting of her:

>This genre of portraiture of changes of mind in order to be truly torse should evoke the bush soul of females so I am leaving it to the experienced victim to complete the general suggestion by the mental addition of a wallopy bound or, should the zulugical zealot prefer it, a congorool teal. The hatboxes which composed Rhomba, lady Trabezond (Marge in her excelsis), also comprised the climactogram up which B and C may fondly be imagined ascending and are suggestive of gentlemen’s spring modes, these modes carrying us back to the superimposed claylayers of eocene and pleastoseen formation and the gradual morphological changes in our body politic which Professor Ebahi-Ahuri of Philadespoinis (Ill)—whose bluebutterbust I have just given his coupe de grass to—neatly names a boîte à surprises. 

He appears to be saying that there’s another painting of the alternate version (sister?) of Marge, which is made of hatboxes (in the style of cubism?), and these cubes make up the diagram that Burrus and Caseous ascend (the isosceles triangle with boxes or rungs leading up to the top, where they will unite as HCE and/or Marge herself).

These boxes — and thus the diagram — are “suggestive of gentlemen’s spring modes”…styles of dress, which carry us back through the layers of geological time and political development.

It’s important to note that the speaker is the Shaunish, the extroverted, rationalist side of HCE. He is cognate with St. Patrick at the end of the book, and he is associated with rationality and waking consciousness. His attempts to understand the feminine principle of the universe — modes of art that suggest an attempt to limit her to make her understandable — should be contrasted with Shem’s speech at the end of I.7, in which the Mother breaks through his words. Shem does not view her from the outside, as Shaun does, but merges with her.

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There’s also a confusing passage where the Professor describes Marge as taking care of a baby (the infant HCE, the next iteration of HCE, or “Master Pules” (ha), “teaching His Infant Majesty how to make waters worse”).

This infant is 

>being utilised thus publicly by the seducente infanta [Marge as Temptress-Issy] to conceal her own more mascular personality by flaunting frivolish finery over men’s inside clothes

She wears the clothing of men underneath her ladies clothes? And this indicates the masculine side of her personality?

Perhaps the suggestion is that Margarine and Antonio, the combined form of Burrus and Caseous (Issy/Iseult and Tristan) are united at the top of the triangle…HCE and ALP are ultimately identical in their highest senses. The dreamer and the anima are one.

The idea of an ALP figure having “men’s inside clothes” recalls this part from II.2, describing as part of a math problem how ALP produces the phenomenal world:

>her redtangles are all abscissan for limitsing this tendency of our Frivulteeny Sexuagesima to expense herselfs as sphere as possible, paradismic perimutter, in all directions on the bend of the unbridalled, the infinisissimalls of her facets becoming manier and manier as the calicolum of her umdescribables (one has thoughts of that eternal Rome) shrinks from schurtiness to scherts

ALP — the All Mother — becomes “manier”…more many and varied (the plural part of Plurabelle….), but also more like men. That is, the universe — which is often gendered female — gives rise to humans, including male humans. In a sense, each individual person is the universe putting on the “clothes” of a particular body, so each individual man is an instance of the universe (a Mother Goddess) putting on the bodily costume of a male.

So ALP thus becomes “manier” as she becomes more concrete (and as her [female] unmentionables shrink and become…more like [male] shirts? Schurze is German for apron, and scherts is not only shirts but the Dutch word for joke. Maybe she’s getting funnier too: I’m put in mind of I.1’s description of the mourners at the wake as “brekkers” of the cosmic egg, brek meaning not only crying but practical jokes; the egg cracks into the phenomenal world and into its inhabitants/mourners/jokers, in a parallel to the universe/Goddess/ALP shrinking down and becoming those inhabitants/mourners/jokers; many images for the same idea).

The word “schurtiness” reminds me of this line about Marge in I.6, where she is

>ostentatiously hemming apologetically over the shirtness of some “sweet” garment

Hemming and hawing, but also hemming like a Needless Woman (Needle Woman, sewing destiny as the daughter of the tailor, as in I.1: “sewing a dream together, the tailor’s daughter, stitch to her last”).

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There are two other bits of the novel that are relevant to clothing and that I’d like to mention here. The first is that Shem, in I.7, writes his art “over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body,” emphasizing the connection between art and the body, nakedness as opposed to clothing. Art, artifice, fiction — all associated with the naked body. More on this when I write a post about I.7.

And the other bit is one of Issy’s footnotes in II.2. Page 279 is taken up almost entirely by a very long footnote that is another instance of her rambling speeches to herself. This ramble ends with this sentence: “For tough troth is stronger than fortuitous fiction and it’s the surplice money, oh my young friend and ah me sweet creature, what buys the bed while wits borrows the clothes.”

She looks forward to her lover — Tristan/St. Patrick, associated with money/space — who is allied with truth, rather than fiction (which is connected to Shem). Her truth is troth (her union with Tristan), and I think she intends to valorize truth over fiction, money over wits…yet her words can’t help but divulge how fiction can be fortuitous and that the Shem parts of the self — associated with sharing, borrowing, and conceptions of “having” that defy the waking world’s zero-sum idea of property (which I shall discuss in a future post) — help turn the wheel to provide the universe continually with new clothes (specific incarnations of the eternal patterns). By incarnating as humans, the universe flexes its artistic aspects.

Art may be connected to the nude body, but it is the source of facts, of the clothes.