The Seventh Degree of Wisdom – Part Five

‘Now it is notoriously known how on that surprisingly bludgeon Unity Sunday when the grand germogall allstar bout was harrily the rage between our wellingtoms extraordinary and our petty-thicks the marshalaisy and Irish eyes of welcome were smiling daggers down their backs, when the roth, vice and blause met the noyr blank and rogues and the grim white and cold bet the black fighting tans, categorically unimperatived by the maxims, a rank funk getting the better of him, the scut in a bad fit of pyjamas fled like a leveret for his bare lives, to Talviland, ahone ahaza, pursued by the scented curses of all the village belles and, without having struck one blow, (pig stole on him was lust he lagging it was because dust he shook) kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle house, badly the worse for boosegas, there to stay in afar for the life .... ’

- James Joyce, ‘Finnegans Wake’

This passage from the Wake comes from a chapter all about Shem the penman, that is, the writer, and is thus a portrait of the artist, but it is narrated from the point of view of his brother, Shaun the postman, thereby indirectly presenting us with a character portrait of him too, with his prejudices against Shem very much in evidence: ‘Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at’. Clearly Shem is a self-parody of Joyce; his wine of choice is also Joyce’s preferred tipple, a white Swiss wine known as Fendant de Sion, which Joyce liked to call the archduchess’s urine and which makes its appearance in the Wake as ‘Fanny Urinia’. Shem’s physical appearance is unflatteringly described, and his cowardly nature exposed. The baseness of such a ‘farsoonerite’ (‘far’ (Danish), father; s?nner (Danish); sons; forsone (Danish), to atone) who abandoned Ireland for Europe is characterised thus: he would sooner find ‘himself up tight in his inkbattle house’ than outside fighting; that is to say, Shem the artist flees into exile, like Oscar Wilde, (1854 – 1900), like Lord Byron, (1788 – 1824), shaking the dust of home from off of his feet; but England is no refuge, rather, it attacks him as it had done the same with Joyce, and so Shem holds up in his ‘Inkbottle’ house on the Continent where he passes his time in exile with creative activities such as cooking and defecating, eggs being his speciality though later he augments his cuisine and ventures upon ‘the merrier fumes’ of a ‘new Irish stew’.

‘Soft Skulls with Fried Egg Without the Plate, Angels and Soft Watch in an Angelic Landscape’, 1977

At one point in the chapter, as Shem observes himself for the first time as an infant, he presents his siblings, Shaun, and sister Issy, with the first riddle of the universe: ‘When is a man not a man?’ They cannot answer and so cannot win ‘the prize of a bittersweet crab’ (crabapple) and they concede defeat; and so it was that Shem ‘took the cake’ and provided the solution: when he is a ‘Sham’, that is, a fraud. In Shaun’s view Shem is ‘a gnawstick’ (crawsick, suffering from a hangover; and gnostic, used as slang for a knowing fellow; and a Gnostic, of an heretical sect) whose character he mercilessly derides, beginning with his eating habits: ‘Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs’. A sham, a fraud, something I myself have been called, a fraud that is, by an Irish lady, no less, and I use the word lady, well, very generously... oh yes but the advantages of having a mind well-stocked with books and learning, not that I compare myself with Joyce, I mean from the point of view of how the unexpected, the confusing, the unpleasant, the incomprehensible situations one may find oneself in can thereby be viewed and interpreted from a perspective that has a rich abundance of material to draw upon; and so it was that rather than being nonplussed and uncertain of response, the unanticipated accusation prompted thoughts of Shem being accused of shamming it; and Shem is Joyce, albeit a caricature.  

The Wake refers on occasion to various phrases from ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, (naturally enough, Finn/Finnegan), such references serving further to universalize the text and provide it with some American colour; and yet, his numerous references to Mark Twain notwithstanding, it would seem that Joyce had never read him. On August 8, 1937, he wrote to his step-grandson, the eighteen year old American David Fleischman:

‘I have sent you registered a book you certainly will have read as a young boy, probably more than once. I need to know something about it. I never read it and have nobody to read it to me and it takes too much time with all I am doing. Could you perhaps refresh your memory by a hasty glance through and then dictate to your mother ... an account of the plot in general as if it were a new book the tale of which you had to narrate in a book review. After that I should like you to mark with blue pencil in the margin the most important passages of the plot itself and in red pencil here and there wherever the words or dialogue seem to call for the special attention of a European. Don't care about spoiling the book. It is a cheap edition. If you can then return it to me soon I shall try to use whatever bears upon what I am doing’.

According to Anthony Burgess, (1917 – 1993), Joyce's interest in Twain was ‘mainly verbal’, and he comments that ‘sadly, it has to be confessed that Joyce was no real Mark Twain scholar’. Why sadly? Burgess himself said ‘it is nonsense to suppose that high art needs high learning. Any peasant can teach himself to write, and write well. Any peasant writer can, by reading the appropriate books and by keeping his senses alert, give the illusion of great knowledge of the world’. He was referring to the authorship controversy (so-called) concerning William Shakespeare, (1564 – 1616), for how, it has been snobbishly asked, could anyone who had never attended a university write plays that display such learning? Such a contention itself displays a lack of knowledge about the workings of the minds of professional writers, as Burgess explains: ‘The plays of Shakespeare, through the trickery of the artist, give the illusion that their creator has travelled widely, practised all the learned professions, bent his supple knee in courts domestic and foreign. The brilliant surface suggests an erudition and an experience that need not, in fact, be there: the artist does not have to be a courtier, traveller, or scholar, though it may be his task to create such men out of his imagination’.

Henri Matisse, ‘Nature morte aux livres’, (second tableau), 1890

A writer is rather ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, to borrow a phrase of Autolycus, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’; and were he writing at a later date Joyce perhaps would have availed himself of SparkNotes rather than debasing himself before his step-grandson; and today there is of course the internet. Would Joyce have needed seventeen years to write ‘Finnegans Wake’ had he had such readily available access to so much information? I believe so, perhaps longer, for technology is making us lazy, although for us readers in this digital age there has been no better time for the reading of the Wake; but as for the creation of the work itself as a whole it far transcends the depth and breadth of the learning it displays; its grand and everlasting themes, of the fall of man, of the promise of resurrection, of sin and betrayal, of guilt, of the need for redemption, of the cyclical structure of time and history, of dissolution and renewal, of doomed love, all are ingeniously interwoven into a text leading towards an ending one of the most magnificent that I know of in any work of fiction; although it takes a long time to get there, and it is not really an ending, stopping as it does in mid-sentence ... the rest of the sentence being the start of the book, and so we go through it all again. (See my article 'The Metaphysics of Memory', Part One).

But to return to Sham, I mean Shem, and Shaun. Shaun accuses Shem of numerous sins and faults, while ridiculing his artistic endeavours. Somewhat like the critic, and I use the word ‘critic’, well, very generously, Roger Lewis, (1960 - ), in his book on Anthony Burgess; very much a Shaun-type, Lewis despises academics because of what he takes to be the ‘abject piss’ that they write; a work that took twenty years of his life upon a subject he quite clearly loathes; not very bright, he says of Burgess, he is ‘like a definition of hell’; sanctimonious lubricious, callous, sentimental, callous, superficial, crapulous, arcane, laborious, sanctimonious, essentially a fake (there’s that accusation again), a ‘lazy sod’, (this composer of numerous musical works as well as a prolific writer), a ‘pretentious prick’ whose sins according to Lewis include xenophobia and downright racism (even though he wrote so positively about other cultures and spent most of his life in foreign climes).

Lewis exemplifies to quite an extreme degree, considering the time spent impugning his subject matter, coupled with the intensity of it, a phenomenon well recognised within psychology, the existence of a quite commonplace apprehension amongst humanity directed towards intelligence; although a distinction is to be made between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence; the former being the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience; the latter being the ability to reason, to analyze and solve novel problems, to identify patterns and relationships underpinning such problems. Shaun or Lewis would no doubt under ordinary circumstances not be so intimidated while conversing with their betters in terms of physical make up, but as for the learned and intelligent, how much do such really know? What might Shaun or Lewis say to them that serves merely to reveal their own ignorance? And so they fear them; knowing full well that however much they read they could never attain to their level of fluid intelligence; increase their store of knowledge however much they may, and in these days of the internet it is easy enough to present oneself as knowing more than one does. The way in which Joyce and Burgess use experience (crystallised intelligence) to transmute shit into gold (fluid intelligence), and oft times in a somewhat literal manner, as I am about to get onto, displays a level of mental acuity that most of us are incapable of ever reaching; and it is a quite natural proclivity for one to repel that which one knows one could never better; they may go on the defensive with jokes and mockery, or become hostile, reducing the learned and their putative learning. And as for the learned and intelligent themselves, they of course are beset by self-doubt, the very thing that forges their learning and intelligence in the first place, the predisposition to question themselves, their surroundings, and for the artist what they produce is always subject to criticism in any case; whereas Shaun and his ilk are seldom troubled with introspection, and are thereby more confident in themselves, a confidence quite often misplaced, but they may never find that out. 

In the Wake the ridiculing and disparaging of Shem culminates in a Latin passage:

‘Primum opifex, altus prosator, ad terram viviparam et cuncti- potentem sine ullo pudore nec venia, suscepto pluviali atque discinctis perizomatis, natibus nudis uti nati fuissent, sese adpropinquans, flens et gemens, in manum suam evacuavit (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!), postea, animale nigro,   exoneratus, classicum pulsans, stercus proprium, quod appellavit deiectiones suas, in vas olim honorabile tristitiae posuit, eodem sub invocatione fratrorum gemino- rum Medardi et Godardi laete ac melliflue minxit, psalmum qui incipit: Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribentis: magna voce cantitans (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated), demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibile (faked O'Ryan's, the indelible ink)’.

Which may be translated thus:

‘First the artisan, the profound progenitor, approaching the fruitful and all-powerful earth, without shame or pardon, put on a raincoat and ungirded his pants, and with buttocks naked as they were on the day of his birth, while weeping and groaning, defecated into his hand. Next, having relieved himself of the black, living excrement, he – while striking the trumpet – placed his own excrement, which he called his scatterings (purgation), into a once honourable vessel (chalice) of sadness, and into the same place, under the invocation of the twin brothers Medardus and Godardus, he pissed joyfully and melodiously, continuously singing with a loud voice the psalm that begins: ‘My tongue is a scribe’s quill writing swiftly’. Finally, he mingled the odious excrement with the pleasantness of the divine Orion, and, from this mixture, which had been cooked and exposed to the cold, he made for himself indelible ink’.

Mark Rothko, ‘Orange, Brown’, 1963

Shem must undergo a complete and painstaking purgation of his sins and faults; and towards the end of the chapter Shem will endeavour to absolve and vindicate himself through his art. Shaun characterises the process of making ink, or writing, as scatological, and Shem ‘through the bowels of his misery’ is ‘the alshemist’ who becomes ‘transaccidentated’ into his art; for amidst the self-mockery Joyce is setting forth a profound and decidely original principle of artistic creativity. First, however, I must say something concerning transaccidentation. In medieval philosophy an accident is an attribute that may or may not belong to a subject, without affecting its essence; were you to lose one of your essential properties rather than one of your accidental properties you would no longer be you. To put it into the terminology of modality, an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it merely happens to have but that it could not have had. In Catholicism, transubstantiation refers to the miraculous transformation of the substance, but not of the accidents, the accidents being the appearance, of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the sacrament of the Eucharist. In transaccidentation, however, a term first introduced by Duns Scotus, (c. 1266 – 1308), it is the accidents of the Eucharistic bread and wine that are changed into the body and blood of Christ at the moment of their consecration.

Shaun thus exploits the term to describe the Eucharistic doctrine of artistic creation whereby Shem’s appearance or ‘bodily getup’ (his accidents) is transmuted into the accidents or appearance of ink or words, within which Shem’s spiritual substance continues to dwell; for the notions that are behind the term transaccidentation are used to give expression to Joyce’s remarkable insight into the act of literary creation and into the artist’s relation to art; as the artist in producing words is ‘transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness in to a divided chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal’, and through these words is thereby present to every reader. The Eucharistic metaphor appears elsewhere in Joyce’s work; in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ the artist is equated with ‘a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’. But in the Wake the Eucharistic imagery attains to a significantly higher level with this use of the term transaccidentation, for now, and somewhat paradoxically, the artist, who must deal with that which is intrinsically human, and therefore with that which is mortal, achieves an everlasting presence in the creation of his or her art and invites all who partake in it to share in a thoroughly extreme and transforming type of liberty that goes well beyond temporal restrictions.

‘Portrait of Simone Fayet in Holy Communion’, 1908, Odilon Redon 

And, I may add, what is more intrinsically human than going to the toilet? We all have to do it; (though I do wonder if having to defecate is one of our accidents, not essential to being human; the distinction between accidental and essential properties is beset with problems in my view but I won’t go into that here). It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the characters in English Victorian literature did not have bodies; hence Ezra Pound, (1885 – 1972), being so shocked by the ‘Calypso’ episode in Joyce's ‘Ulysses’ as it follows Leopold Bloom into the outhouse and stays with him while he does what needs to be done. Pound wrote to Joyce: ‘The contrast between Bloom's interior poetry and his outward surroundings is excellent, but it will come up without such detailed treatment of the dropping faeces’. Pound did not understand its function; perhaps it foreshadows the defecating Shem’s purging of his sins and faults together with his transaccidentation into the divided perilous potent chaos that is the way of all flesh. And one of Burgess’s best known protagonists, the dyspeptic poet Francis Xavier Enderby, a lapsed Catholic, composes his poetry whilst seated on the toilet; that is when he is at his most inspired. And so the artist vindicates himself or herself through art, let the Shauns of this world accuse them or ridicule their alleged pretensions to learning or belittle their achievements as much as satisfies them, the artist is absolved when in communion with the reader. I would not go so over the top as to think of Joyce as a saviour, nonetheless I will say that the discovery of his great work has been something of a revelation for me (or perhaps epiphany is a more appropriate word in a Joycean context). Christianity preaches about sin and guilt and what to do about it; Sigmund Freud, (1856 - 1939), told us all about guilt and repression and how to free ourselves from it, but it is art that can really transmute the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever living life; and so with my own accusers and mockers, say what they will to me, intend what they want, as a consequence of my encounters with Joyce now such experiences are transfigured in such a manner that there is nothing in me that doth fade. but rather doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange; (Shakespearean reference there, 'The Tempest', Act 1, Scene 2).

Here Comes Everybody (aka Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) ....

You may have picked up on the Kantian reference in the quote with which I began: ‘.... categorically unimperatived by the maxims’. Immanuel Kant, (1724 – 1804), held that the fundamental principle of our moral duties is a categorical imperative: ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law'; an imperative because it is a command addressed to us and we could follow it, but we might not; for instance, 'have Fendant de Sion with your eggs', 'avoid the boosegas'; but it is categorical in virtue of applying to us unconditionally, or merely because we possess a rational will, without reference to any ends that we may or may not have in mind; which is to say, it does not apply to us on the condition that we have assumed prior to the imperative some particular goal for ourselves. And in the previous part of this series I discussed Kant’s classification of judgements, in which it emerged that for Kant a judgement is not simply a matter of a comparison of the particular to the universal; but what of moral judgements, if there be such a thing, or are judgements merely a matter of reason?

As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 - 1831), noted, morality lies in the particular, and not in the comparison of the particular to the universal, and the categorical imperative is merely an ‘empty formalism’; empty of any content. What would a genuine universal imperative possibly look like? The categorical imperative may well discern what a free action is, while freedom itself has no content; and for Kant it is a brute fact of reason; but while reasoning upon the foundations of facts himself Hegel has demonstrated that freedom, and thereby morality, is historical; it has not always been the same in history, it has developed through history; and freedom thereby carries a content possessed by human reason that has unfolded itself through the various stages of its historical development. That is to say, in the past humankind was less free than it has proven to be subsequently.... one reason for me why Hegelianism is quite appropriately applicable to Wakean criticism. ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin’, said Joyce, ‘because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal’. And Joyce may have exiled himself from the oppressive power of a Catholic tradition, but not from his cultural history or a particular manner of thinking; and a sombre and somewhat hollow sacramental ritual provides the imagery and the impetus towards a radical kind of freedom that is beyond the limits of time.

But for now to continue with my review of Kant’s 'Critique of Pure Reason'. So far Kant's concern has been to explore the foundations of scientific knowledge and to disclose the dependency of such knowledge upon a smattering of forms, concepts and principles; an exploration that led at times to a head-on collision, albeit obliquely, with the accounts of human knowledge presented by British empiricists. But his conclusions thus far were also fermenting trouble and discomfiture for Continental rationalism in addition; for what follows from demonstrating that concepts such as causality and substance are presuppositions of empirical knowledge? It follows, according to Kant, that their use independent of sense-experience is illegitimate and can only result in conceptual difficulties and empty noise. And recall that Kant’s initial concern was to determine whether humans can fruitfully engage in metaphysical speculation; for in his day such speculation primarily revolved around such matters as the immortality of the soul, the origin and extent of the universe, and the existence and nature of God. Was a science of such matters at all possible? The portion of his inquiry that dealt with categories and principles he titled the 'Transcendental Analytic'. The third and concluding portion of his inquiry he titled the 'Transcendental Dialectic’; wherein the answer he provides to this so pressing question is an emphatic and unequivocal negative.

Salvador Dali, 'Sacrament of the Last Supper', 1955

Kant identified the main concepts of the above mentioned metaphysical issues as the psychological idea, or soul; the cosmological idea, or world; and the theological idea, or God; and he considered the author of such ideas to be human reason rather than human understanding or sensibility. But why is human reason unable to develop these ideas cogently and scientifically? Well, for Kant the chief explanation for this debility was that nothing in sense-experience corresponds to the ideas of pure reason and thus there can be no control over their speculative employment. Followers of René Descartes, (1596 - 1650), and and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, (1646 - 1716), for instance, argued that the soul was an immaterial, simple, therefore indestructible substance. But from where comes the empirical support for such claims? It does not exist, Kant contends, and furthermore the reasoning leading up to such conclusions is wholly fallacious; for the Cartesians and the Leibnizians have treated the ‘I think’ or cogito, which is presupposed by all acts of knowing, as the logical subject of our judgements analogous to the way in which ‘Shem’ is the subject of the judgement ‘Shem kuskykorked himself up tight in his inkbattle houseyears’; or 'Joyce' is the subject of the judgement 'Joyce had a fondness for Fanny Urinia'; and furthermore, Cartesians and Leibnizians have argued that just as ‘Joyce’ designates a real person, (and 'Shem' designates a person too albeit an imaginary one), so too does the knowing subject of the cogito, and Kant’s rebuttal to this argument consisted of saying that it is an analytic truth that acts of knowing presuppose a knower, but the existence of the knower is an empirical question which cannot be inferred from an analytic truth whose validity is founded upon the meaning of terms. The existence of the soul as well as its properties must remain an empirical question, and the concept of substance is properly applied only to the self that is the object of empirical psychology.

Kant next turns his attention to metaphysical speculation about the universe at large; for humans have always asked themselves with respect to the universe whether it had a beginning in time or has always existed, whether it is finitely or infinitely extended in space, and whether it was created; and Kant demonstrates that no definitive answers are possible to such questions; in fact reasoning can establish with equal cogency alternative answers to such questions. His explanation for such a disconcerting and paradoxical state of affairs in metaphysics is that one cannot regard the universe as a substance or given entity in the way a table, for example, can be so regarded; and it is certainly meaningful to ask when a certain table was made, how it was made, and what its spatial boundaries are; such questions can be settled empirically, for we can trace the history of the table and have it before us to measure. But this investigation of the properties of the table and the countless ones like it which we undertake in our daily lives occur within the framework of the universe, so that the questions that can be significantly be raised about things within the universe cannot significantly or profitably be asked of the universe itself. If the categories of substance and causality have as their proper epistemic function the characterisation of given and possible objects of perception, it is an improper use of such categories to apply them to what is neither a given nor even a possible object of perception such as the universe. Because it is not such an object, the universe cannot serve as a check or control upon our speculations about it, and it is this basic consideration again which explains reason’s lack of competence in this area. Can human reason do any better, then, in the area of theological speculation? Can it, in the absence of empirical evidence, produce convincing arguments for God’s existence, his benevolence, his omniscience, and so forth?

'Abstract Eucharist', Franz Marc (1880 - 1916)

‘May thine evings e'en be blissful! Even of bliss! As we so hope for ablution. For the sake of the farbung and of the scent and of the holiodrops. Amems’.

- ‘Finnegans Wake’

To be continued ...

Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ quotation:

1. notoriously = to a notorious degree.

2. bludgeon = a short stout stick or club; to hit with a bludgeon, beat; and bloody Sunday.

3. Trinity Sunday = the Sunday next after Whit-Sunday (a festival in honour of the Trinity); and Bloody Sunday: 21/11/1920, when Black and Tans murdered civilians at Croke Park.

4. Grand-Guignol = Paris theatre noted for scenes of horror; ‘The Letter’, ‘grand funeral’.

5. gall (Irish) = foreigner; and Germans and Gauls (French).

6. all star = composed of stars or of outstanding players or performers; and Ulster.

7. bout = a contest or match esp. of boxing or wrestling; attack; and 'star bout'.

8. harrily = Harry; and merrily.

9. Finnegan's Wake 4 (song): 'Shillelagh law was all the rage' [originally, Poole: ‘Tim Finigan's Wake’ 'Shillalah-law was all the rage'].

10. wellingtoms = Wellingtons; and Tom; and Tommy (Colloquial), a private in the British army ; and 'fighting man extraordinary'.

11. thick = a thick-headed or stupid person; and Dick; and paddywhack (Slang), Irishman; and pathetic; and ‘petty lipoleum’.

12. aisy (Anglo-Irish Pronunciation) = easy; and ‘La Marseillaise’ (song).

13. speak or look daggers = to speak or look fiercely, savagely or angrily; and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ (song).

14. rot, weiss und blau (German) = red, white and blue (French tricolour).

15. noir, blanc et rouge (French) = black, white and red (pre-1918 German tricolour).

16. green, white and gold (Irish tricolour).

17. Black and Tans = popular name for an armed force specially recruited to combat the Sinn-Feiners in 1921, so named from the mixture (black and khaki) of constabulary and military uniforms worn by them. 

18. categorically = absolutely, positively, unconditionally.

19. imperative = expressive of command, authoritatively or absolutely directive; and Kant defined an imperative as any proposition that declares a certain action (or inaction) to be necessary. A hypothetical imperative compels action in a given circumstance: if I wish to quench my thirst, I must drink something. A categorical imperative, on the other hand, denotes an absolute, unconditional requirement that asserts its authority in all circumstances, both required and justified as an end in itself. It is best known in its first formulation: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.

20. maxim = a rule or principle of conduct; and type of gun.

21. rank = unreasonably high in amount, excessive.

22. funk = cowering fear, a state of panic or shrinking terror; and Rundfunk (German), radio.

23. get the better of = to win a victory over.

24. scut = a contemptible fellow.

25. fit = the manner in which clothing fits a wearer.

26. pyjamas = loose drawers or trousers, usually of silk or cotton, tied round the waist, worn by both sexes in Turkey, Iran, India, etc., and adopted by Europeans in those countries, especially for night wear.

27. leveret = a young hare, strictly one in its first year.

28. for dear life = so as to save, or, as if to save, one's life; and 'fly for his life'.

29. talvi (Finnish) = winter.

30. a hon (Hungarian) = a haza (Hungarian), the fatherland ; and ahany haz annyi szokas (Hungarian proverb), as many countries as many customs; and honn (Hungarian), at home; and haza (Hungarian), homeward; and ochone! (Anglo-Irish) = ochón! (Irish), alas!

31. without striking a blow = without a struggle.

32. pig (Slang) = sixpence; and pistol; and Meillet & Cohen: ‘Les Langues du Monde’ 142: 'Example (in Afar): ala yo-k bata wah ani-k ramili yo utuq: camel me to was lost I miss I am because sand me throw. ‘Throw me some sand, since I cannot find the camel that I have lost’' (sand throwing is a form of divination for finding lost items).

33. lag =- to linger, loiter, steal; to serve as convict, to deport as convict (Slang); and to leg it, to use the legs, to walk fast or run.

34. dust (Slang) = money.

35. shook (Slang) =- stole, robbed.

36. Koskenkorva = a Finnish vodka; and koska (Serbian), bone; and Meillet & Cohen: ‘Les Langues du Monde’ 141: 'Couchitique' (French 'Cushitic'; Afar is an Eastern Cushitic language of North-East Africa).

37. The Inkbottle House = Church of the Seven Dolours, Botanic Avenue, Dublin (shape said to have been suggested by Swift).

38. go from bad to worse = to become worse; and 'the worse for drink' = Leader 11 Nov 1922, 319/1: 'Current Topics (on 'the drink evil')': 'poor fellows... make their way home as best they can in the small hours of the morning much the worse of drink... the constable arrived back at the barrack the worse of drink!'

39. boose = alcoholic drink, chiefly beer; U.S. esp. Spirits; and J.B.S. Haldane, the author of ‘Daedalus, or Science and the Future’, defends the cause of the chemical weapons: ‘None of us was much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so’. Joyce thanks to Haldane now changes the phrase, which was already there as 'the worse for drink', into 'badly the worse for boosegas'. (Robbert-Jan Henkes and Mikio Fuse).

40. afar = far, far away, at or to a distance; and fear of his life.

‘Fountain’, 1917, Marcel Duchamp