“Justice” is cruel authoritarianism when it’s not tempered by Mercy.

Mercy is wishy-washy weakness when it’s not balanced by Justice.

Thus the brothers, Shaun and Shem. At the end of Chapter I.7, Justius (Shaun) monologues, followed by Mercias (Shem).

Justius is a brute, a moralist who enjoys condemning others. He resembles the narrator of I.7, who speaks poorly of Shem throughout. He’s lost in the world of space-space, the zero-sum game, as first expressed by the professor from I.6, another of Shaun’s forms. He’s focused on himself, what he’s owed, what Shem has failed to do.

HCE’s fall has divided him into Shaun and Shem, who each are in their own ways egotistical and are opposed to each other. This division represents, among other things, the way that each of us feel and fall into individuality (“First we feel. Then we fall”). When we emerge into consciousness, we “fall” out of a state of connection with the universe and conceive of the story of ourselves as separate, individual, self interested, and locked into conflicts with others. Shaun/Justius is precisely such an individual: he takes his little story about himself, and about what he is owed, not as a story he is telling himself but as fact.

He addresses Shem like a priest urging him to confess:

I advise you to conceal yourself, my little friend, as I have said a moment ago and put your hands in my hands and have a nightslong homely little confiteor about things. Let me see. It is looking pretty black against you, we suggest, Sheem avick. […] Let us pry.

And pry he does. He is obsessed with the wrongdoings of others, eager to judge.

Among the charges he brings against his brother, among his many immoralities, is the idea that Shem has squandered his money — his wealth of food and funds:

Malingerer in luxury, collector general, what has Your Lowness done in the mealtime with all the hamilkcars of cooked vegetables, the hatfuls of stewed fruit, the suitcases of coddled ales, the Parish funds […] Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact (gainsay me, cakeeater!) that, while whistlewhirling your crazy elegies around Templetombmount joyntstone, (let him pass, pleasegoodjesusalem, in a bundle of straw, he was balbettised after haymaking) you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance

He even says, “Don’t tell me, Leon of the fold, that you are not a loanshark!”

That line puts me in mind of the battle between Proto-Shaun and Proto-Shem in I.4, where Proto-Shem lends money to Proto-Shaun, who vows to pay it back. In the fallen world, a loan can only have ulterior motives — because to Shaun-ish ways of thinking, debts have to be paid in zero-sum ways.

Shaun is consumed by stories about what he’s owed. What Shem owes. Shem’s duty to country and family, which he shirked. 

Shaun ends by telling him a secret: “Sh! Shem, you are. Sh! You are mad!”

He means crazy, a madman — but it occurs to me that Shaun is the one who is “mad” in the sense of being angry. As ever, he sees the motes of wood in his neighbor’s eye but cannot see the beam in his own.

He concludes with an arcane gesture:

He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm.

The perspective of Justice — conceived in such a way — is a kind of moral sleep. Of course, Shaun considers himself to be awake, aware: his is the perspective of a waking consciousness that sees people and objects as entirely separate (and with self-interest that leads them to conflict, caught in a zero-sum game of debts and payments). But Shaun is blind to his own flaws.

Mercias seems to be a form of Shem that has begun to realize a way out of their opposition. His monologue begins like this: “My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault!”

This is a parody of Richard III’s “My kingdom for a horse.” The first thing Shem says here is to admit his own fault, but he also notes that his brother is in the wrong as well.

Their kinship lies in the fact that both have done wrong: each one has wronged the other, and each has told himself a story where he is the aggrieved party. And together, their acknowledgment of those wrongs can lead them to a Kingship — their recombination into HCE (or the new replacement for HCE in the next generation). The king is dead; long live the king.

Shem is no saint. He is angry with his brother as well, but he gives this short speech where he articulates the contrasts between them and says, basically, “Brother, to you and me, our mother is coming to join us together.”

He summons the mother, the unifying principle between people, with his art.

It’s a lovely enough passage that I’ll just quote it here:

because ye left from me, because ye laughed on me, because, O me lonly son, ye are forgetting me!, that our turfbrown mummy is acoming, alpilla, beltilla, ciltilla, deltilla, running with her tidings, old the news of the great big world, sonnies had a scrap, woewoewoe! bab’s baby walks at seven months, waywayway! bride leaves her raid at Punchestime, stud stoned before a racecourseful, two belles that make the one appeal, dry yanks will visit old sod, and fourtiered skirts are up, mesdames, while Parimiknie wears popular short legs, and twelve hows to mix a tipsy wake, did ye hear, colt Cooney? did ye ever, filly Fortescue? with a beck, with a spring, all her rillringlets shaking, rocks drops in her tachie, tramtokens in her hair, all waived to a point and then all inuendation, little oldfashioned mummy, little wonderful mummy, ducking under bridges, bellhopping the weirs, dodging by a bit of bog, rapidshooting round the bends, by Tallaght’s green hills and the pools of the phooka and a place they call it Blessington and slipping sly by Sallynoggin, as happy as the day is wet, babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia.

Not only does he summon ALP, it is as if he calls from out of the dreamworld her avatars, the washer women who speak the next chapter.

He concludes with a magical gesture of his own, wielding the phallic wand that is his pen, his tool of art:

He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
—Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!