This post gives an example of how a single word in the Wake can contain multitudes of meanings.

At the end of The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly, the singer calls HCE garbled versions of the names of great writers, perhaps mocking him for thinking he could be as great as these men:

Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

(Apparently, Joyce had false teeth…”Seudodanto” can be read as pseudo-denti [Italian for teeth]).

To the extent that HCE is Joyce himself, he’s mocking his own pretensions to greatness.

But then again, as the rapper Eminem once put it, “I joke when I say I’m the best / In the booth, but a lot of truth is said in jest.”

The name that struck me in this passage was “Shikespower.” Obviously, Shakespeare is important to Joyce (consult Chapter 9 of Ulysses for Stephen’s “Shakespeare Theory,” which is full of connections to Ulysses and Joyce’s own biography).

Not finding anything for “Shikespower” on fweet.org, I decided to google “Shikes.”

Urban Dictionary defines it as an expletive, a combination of “shit” and “yikes.”

Then I tried “Shike.” Now, this is a real word in Japanese (it would be pronounced something like shee-kay) — it means “poor catch of fish (because of a storm at sea).”

I discovered it also means an “honorific title in Zen for one who possesses the ability to guide ascetic monks.”

Now, did Joyce know any of this? Who knows, but those are all ideas that are associated with those syllables. Those meanings aren’t necessarily tied to the man who wrote the word…the Wake is a web of words that acquires meaning from our engagement with it. It emerged out of the Unconscious, after all, and it’s written by all of us, co-written by its readers. It selves and unselves all of us.

We can say that “Shikespower,” then, is far more than a mockery of HCE/Joyce for failing to live up to Shakespeare (HCE is elsewhere accused of being “Fraudstuff,” a reference to Shakespeare’s Falstaff). 

It’s also a celebration of his power — a creative power in which HCE, as salmon of knowledge (god made man made fish), is the fish that got away in the storm/flood of the Fall. He’s eluding all the fishermen’s nets, as he does in III.3. “Shit!” those fishermen cry. “Yikes! Shikes!”

Indeed, HCE has the power to launch his own expletives at them. In the Willingdone episode, he pronounces a truly Christlike curse: “Figtreeyou!”

And yet, as Shike, he is a Zen master, an inspiration to lead us all. How’s that for an image of Enlightenment: a middle-aged weirdo committing every form of sexual impropriety in Phoenix Park — belittled, laid low, destroyed, and then reborn (Phoenix-like) in each of us. 

I pronounce the word slowly: Shikespower. HCE’s detractors, led by Hosty, the singer of the ballad, mean that he can’t hold a candle to Shakespeare, but maybe it’s Shakespeare that can’t hold a candle to this Power. Maybe HCE is the creative energy from which all great art is derived. HCE is also within the singers of the ballad: he powers the very art used to mock him.

Shikespower. As I pronounce it, all of its meanings run through it. I see a storm at sea, a fish escaping: a Christ-fish turned phoenix to lead us all to enlightenment, toward the Great Yes…and toward the Great Yikes!