“Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is jokey for Jacob.”

Thus begins James Joyce’s parody of himself, which is an exploration of how “Shem the Penman” is a gross, smelly weirdo whom no one likes. 

Shem is one half of HCE, the introverted and artistic side of human nature. His brother, Shaun, is the extroverted and practical side.

Narrated by a Shaunish voice that condemns Shem, the chapter takes us through all the examples of his “lowness,” from his disgusting physical appearance, his disgusting choices of food, and his immoral writing: “covetous of his neighbour’s word,” he begins to “tell all the intelligentsia […] the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were.” He was obsequious and refused to fight (“He went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row”).

So one “hailcannon night” — in the halcyon days of the storm of the fall — he was treated with “parsonal violence” (his brother Shaun is often figured as a priest or parson) and beaten. “[T]here was a hope that people, looking on him with the contemp of the contempibles, after first gaving him a roll in the dirt, might pity and forgive him, if properly deloused, but the pleb was born a Quicklow and sank alowing till he stank out of sight.”

So away he flees and locks himself in his home/mind/inkbottle, laid out wake-like in an HCE-ish or Finnegan-ish manner.

And we are told that once — “only once” — “he did take a tompip peepestrella throug a threedraw eighteen hawkspower durdicky telescope […] out of his westernmost keyhole […] with an eachway hope in his shivering soul, as he prayed to the cloud Incertitude, of finding out for himself […] whether true conciliation was forging ahead or falling back after the celestious intemperance.”

So badly abused by others, he sought to find what “true conciliation” consisted of. Does one fall back into memory, nursing wounds (and holding grudges), or does one forge ahead to try to repair what has past in what is to come (moving past the pain but risking to repress)?

It was only after consulting guidebooks I realized that the “threedraw eighteen hawkspower” telescope is Ulysses, which has eighteen chapters broken into three parts. Indeed, Shem spends his time “making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles.”

But curiosity killed the cat. That little peep through the telescope found him looking down the barrel of a gun, like HCE before him who was accosted by a Cad holding some kind of phallic weapon.

Maybe the point here is that seeking to remedy the wounds of the past, which is a process that involves art, requires reliving that past, bringing it again into the present.

Perhaps it is a false choice between forging ahead and falling back: maybe the best choice is to embrace the present (the Now) as the palimpsest of all history containing — here, now, at this very moment — the wounds and the healing and both and neither — all at the same time.

There’s a passage in Ulysses I’m recalling that speaks to this, where Stephen Dedalus describes the artist’s mind in terms of the past and the future.

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Also relevant from Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”

The Moment of artistic inspiration — like Blake’s Moment in which the poet’s work is complete — is where the past and future meet, where the act of creation can free us from holding grudges over the past and having anxiety over the future. In the Moment of artistic creation, we construct the self anew, find new ways to narrate our story of the self.

This idea is also relevant to the description in I.7 of how Shem cooks eggs. Cracking the eggs is a repetition of the Fall of Finnegan, who is likened to Humpty Dumpty: you can’t make art without breaking eggs. You can’t heal the broken past without more breaking because the Breaking, the Fall, is not an event confined to the past: it is each moment, but each moment is equally the redemption, the Putting Back Together Again (that’s the thing to discover through the art).

Is this making any sense, or is it the ravings of a madman? It certinly makes no sense in the language of the “land of space,” where everything is zero sum. To the language of the land of space — that is, from the perspective of our normal way of looking at things, a perspective that corresponds to waking consciousness — the egg is either broken or not. And once it’s broken, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t repair it. That is, the land of space conceives of the past as “back there.” We can obsess over it or try to repress our memories of it and move on.

But Shem has a different way of working, as an artist. After all, he reiterates the Fall of the Father: he is the past again. The “umpple does not fall very far from the dumpertree.” As he cooks those eggs, he chants, “abracadabra calubra culorum.” That’s “snake of the posteriors.” He does this cooking in “what was meant for a closet.” This implies both the water closet/bathroom (with its association with Joyce’s bathroom fetishes) and the “in the closet” of queer or unconventional sexuality in general. Art is associated with an embrace of the body and desire.

So when Shem’s publishers “boycotted him of all muttonsuet candles and romeruled stationery for any purpose” — and in this passage, there’s a reference to the destruction of Dubliners by its first printer — Shem “made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit’s waste.”

He made his own tools for art, corresponding to Joyce’s development of his style in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The words “end” and “waste” ought to give us a clue of the nature of these tools. The narrator then says he’ll explain it in Latin so that an “Anglican ordinal” (Shaun-type, moralist) won’t blush like the brow of Babylon.

The Latin paragraph says he excretes and urinates in a bucket and mixes it all up into ink, and then — now the book switches back to the “basically English” language it’s written in — the narrator explains that Shem writes all over his own body:

>when the call comes, he shall produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Ourania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with this double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, faithly, nastily, appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud.

This is a marvelous description of James Joyce’s own art here, which is born out of the slime we’re all made of, produced by the artist’s body and written upon his body — his corpus, his body of work — a “squidself” — ink produced by the body itself — that squirts out of (and reflects) the “crystalline world” of ideal beauty (it reminds me of Yeats’ Byzantium, though Joyce doesn’t directly refer to it in this passage). I wonder what the reference to Dorian Gray is doing here. It’s like the art reflects a beautiful, unchanging “crystalline world,” but it itself (or the ink) wanes in color. Maybe this is meant to convey how art cannot fully communicate Beauty?

I’m so struck by this bit:

>till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history

This art corrodes and sublimates — I’m put in mind of Blake’s printing through corrosion, where acid literally eats away at the copper plates, which Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell explicitly makes a metaphor for the way that art eats away at the limitations of our perception — and the thing that achieves that corrosion and sublimation is “one continuous present tense integument.” The word “Integument” actually means the outer covering of something (like Shem’s skin).

The “one continuous present tense” is what Finnegans Wake is. It is an alternate conception of time that defies the perspective of the land of space. From this artistic vantage point, the Fall is not just an ancient event: it is relived in everything and will be relived anew tomorrow. [In the final chapter: “Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend”] Everything in the Wake is written to see the past and the future in the present. And each piece contains the whole. Recall that there are no “things.” We invent things — and a self — as we feel and fall into the story of ourselves as individuals. We can either get caught in that story — trapped in a Blakean “state” of Selfhood as we look to our ideas of the past or the future — or we embrace an artistic perspective that enables us to craft new stories of the self.

The idea of time laid out in I.7 reminds me of some of those theories that suggest time-space is an already whole, existent thing, and that our experience of the passage of time is an illusion created by our consciousness moving “through” the…block of time-space. [this “block” would correspond to HCE as a tesseract from I.4, as the key to the worldroom beyond the roomwhorld of our normally limited individual consciousness]

This suggests that any moment of time, in theory, could be accessible because none of them have ever ceased to “be” in this sense. It gives a new color to the idea of “spots of time” from Wordsworth’s poetry. These are moments of the past that can live again for us, to lift us from our low moods and nourish and repair the mind:

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence–depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse–our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks

Among those passages of life that give

Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,

The mind is lord and master–outward sense

The obedient servant of her will.

This corrosion and sublimation — corrosion of the ego? sublimation of our unhelpful feelings into artistic expression? — unfolds into (a perception of, a glimpse of) that tesseract that is HCE, that eternal archetype of Humanity in which we all participate: “marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.”

An ever present, returning cycle of the same anew, that is many-voiced — that marries together the many voices — and is moulded by moods (or moulded to moods).

“his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos”

I think “chaos” is meant here in the Greek sense of the vacuum of Nothingness that preceded all things, where all things lose their (apparent) individuality. “Transaccidentated” suggests to me the opposition between essence and accident: 

That is, consciousness takes us through the accidents of our own existence until we understand that in our essence we are not an individual. We are dividual. Interestingly, the word “dividual” apparently both means “separate” and “divided among or shared in common by a number of people/things.”

To use the language from I.6, we only seemaultaneously systentangle ourselves from others: we clutch onto the little accidents, the little arbitrary bumps in the soup of existence, and we declare that “this is me, me, me.” I am in-dividual! I am dis-entangled from the universe!

This is the Fall. This is the source of all hurt. But it’s also the source of all joy. This is the source of all blame and anger and resentment. But it’s also the source of the possibility of forgiveness.

Felix culpa. Fortunate Fall. Phoenix culprit.

But, of course, we’re not individuals, ultimately in the final analysis. There is a worldroom out there beyond our little roomwhorld. The key to it is HCE: there is an essence to the human experience. Here. Comes. Everybody. Human. Erring. Condonable. If you have a human nervous system, you have such a good idea of what it’s like to be someone else that it’s a joke to suggest otherwise.

[The chapter opens with a telling of Shem’s first riddle of the universe, a riddle that speaks to us all. When is a man not a man? When he is a — all give up? — sham. I think the word “man” here is meant in the sense of Latin homo, human, although there’s plenty of work for feminist critics to do in unpacking Joyce’s idea (which he borrows from Blake) that all of Humanity is One Man. The Wake presents HCE both as a symbol for all people (male and female) and as a male specifically. It’s easy to read that as simple sexism, but it’s also the case that it mixes together seemingly contradictory ideas in a way that produce tensions that might cause us to question the conventional categories by which we understand our experience. More on that, perhaps, in another post.]

Shem and Shaun represent people fully lost in the dream of individuality, fully fallen people, those who are truly lost in the dream of their thoughts (one favoring space, one favoring time). But it’s Shem alone who realizes the problem. It’s Shem alone who has the key to redemption.

He has ALP on his side. He has Art.