FW pp. 169-87
Chapter VII is about Shem. That's him up there.
Wait, you're thinking, isn't that JJ? Yep. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1934, still a few years away from publishing Finnegans Wake. But isn't HCE supposed to be a stand-in for JJ? Yep. So is Shem. Shem's a writer, after all - and, like his creator after Ulysses and its obscenity trial, not well-liked, or even liked at all in some circles. (OM's recent post about FW as autobiography is particularly relevant here.)
This chapter (the first half of it anyway) is a flame session, in which JJ torches both Shem and himself. It's mostly written, in a vague authorial third person voice, as a sort of catalog of characteristics and anecdotes, beginning with "the first riddle of the universe" that Shem asked his childhood peers.
Q: "[W]hen is a man not a man?"
A: "[W]hen he is a ... Sham."
Shem, Sham. Sham = fake. Fiction is fake - not only made-up, but borrowed/stolen and later bent from stories as old as we are.
This material, though, isn't simply JJ painting an unflattering picture of Shem and, therefore, himself. It's not self-loathing, but rather the opposite - what Tindall calls "[d]efensive jocularity," or "the author's apology and his boast." Tindall is crap for most of these two twelve-page segments (or, more precisely, focused on things about which I didn't care and not on those about which I did), but he's right when he says this chapter starts with a "caricature so unfavorable that, reacting to it, the reader may find it favorable." JJ hated his haters, and so loved himself. Meta af, and completely badass.
There's so much JJ, so much "meeingseeing," here that even I caught it. (Per Tidall, there's a lot of Jonathan Swift, too, but I obviously missed that except for the reference to "gullible's travels," ha. O, why do we care about Swift again?) At one point, the narrator talks about how Shem testified at HCE's court-of-public-opinion trial, but what he said sounds a lot like FW, to me, with him "unconsciously [dream-stuff] explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused and cuttlefishing every lie unshrinkable about all the other people in the story."
Later, Shem flees Dublin for the Continent/Paris, as JJ did, anchoring his "Inkbottle" near the "beerlitz" (or Berlitz) school, as JJ did, where he wrote a "usylessly unreadable" book or "an epical forged cheque" from "his plagiarist pen," each page of which he told himself with "aisling vision" was "more gorgeous than the one before." The amazing passage on page 180, lines 17-30, too long to type out here, seems in my imagination what JJ's life at that time was like. Later, he describes he (Shem) "scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met" (Tindall says that's Ulysses) in "alphybettyformed verbage" and "imeffable tries at speech unasyllabled" (Tindall says that's FW). Tindall even finds Chamber Music ("chambermade music"), A Portrait of the Artist and - wow, I was kinda blown away by this - every story in Dubliners in a passage that spans pages 186-87.
JJ's fake hate/real love for Shem and himself ends when the voice changes from "the inspired form of the third person singular" to the first person plural and Shaun enters to debate his brother. That's next the beginning of the next segment, and the next post.
Oh, to close, how about this line: "bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear." Pretty sure that inspired Dr. Suess to write Hop on Pop.
More soon.
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