[I'm chopping out all the earlier lecture-style stuff and previous years'
attempts at summarizing and making this file a finally modified 1997
summary one. I'll keep the other file, though, because there is good
generalizing stuff in it and the summaries are often more elaborate and
complete. I finally get the end straight here, I think.]

First, a boiled-down summary, then some useful stuff, then the full
summary.

Truly boiled down summary of the whole passage: Frank (Dolph)(Shem)
educates himself, starting with his five fingers, into numbers and gambling
and masturbating etc. But abstractions from this drive him crazy, "Show
that", "find", "extract": until he sees that permutations and combinations
depend on the thunderclap of sexual energy like anything else (see
284.22ff). With this in mind he sets out to draw the only geometry that
matters, the sexual geometry, and (teaching being the best learning, I
guess) to show it to his innocent brother who is just learning along by
rote. Drawing the diagram really runs from 286.31-296.30 (with of course
the interruption for the long single sentence about Patrick/Tristan in
which as if in a vision Dolph sees himself in terms of the downside of
becoming "singulfied" with Kev as he does at the end of the chapter, namely
that after his initial contrarian pure energy he becomes a betrayer like
everyone else). The point alpha is found at 287.15; the line AL is drawn at
293.16; the first circle is drawn at 294.10 (each has a variant of "allow
me" and note how each time he does the drawing he says "Bene": 287.16,
294.05, now 295.16 and "Beve" at 295.29: which Kev rejects with his "Well,
well, well, well" at 299.21); the second circle is drawn at 295.24: finally
at 296.24-7 he encloses the lower triangle with "dotties" and the upper
with lines, "trunkles". And then (starting 296.30) he interprets it, the
"whome of your eternal geomater", to 298.07, reflecting though, on to
299.03, on the mathematical aspects of cunt.

And then a real new unit starts, Kev's response, first amazed and impressed
by the demonstration and then (starting 299.21) getting mad and ironic --
"that's very lovely" -- that Dolph makes so much of sex: he carries on like
Justius to 300.08. After which he turns toward food and continues to
discuss Dolph, presenting the writing Dolph starts to do after his math
doodles, parodying it through a version of the Letter (301-2) and
dismissing the writing project and Joyce's writings as self-indulgent. He
tells Dolph (302.31ff) he should write simply and with "bould strokes"
about Irish characters like Connelly and Parnell (and Steele and Swift),
and Dolph, thinking he should cut through the "fruits of culture etc." shit
like the professor with his fork and that Cain was right, hits him
(304.01). But Kev finds this illuminating, it makes him see that rainbow on
the waters we were promised since page 3, and he assents they're both
"offals boys" though he himself has tried to have it both ways, taking
Dolph's (Joyce's -- it surely seems Stanislaus talking) crumbs but bilking
people by pretending piety (305.02). And he says (305.04) Dolph has changed
him away from his own "hesitency", his establishment bias, and he praises,
blesses Dolph and asserts unity with him -- "let us be singulfied" (306.06)
. And the whole sequence closes like the Mass closing: Ite, Missa est,
"Item, mizpah ends".

And suddenly "Enter the Cop and How" says Shem's right note, and it must be
HCE saying that they should stop messing with this Mookse and Gripes stuff
and study study study, and we have the list, typical dumb phrases going
with classical canonical figures, not what education should be or what this
schoolroom self-education has been. And then they have tea, the mysteries
of the Kabbala are implied in the striking clock, and the three kids send a
"Nightletter" to their parents which is little less than a declaration of
war: how they're as dead as the other "old folkers" and so (ironically)
happy incarnations to them in their prosperous preposterousness, concluding
with the mocking thumb to nose, skull and crossbones, Tunc page drawing in
the left margin.

Then:

Some useful stuff: McHugh, Sigla p.61 says (and I think a Joyce letter said
so too) that up to page 287 the footnotes are Issy's, the left margin is
Shem's and the right margin is Shaun's. Issy's notes are often written in
the distinctive style of a bizarre Italian textbook on English, P.
Carolino, English as She is Spoke. Then after the long margin-to-margin
paragraph on Tristan's return (i.e., at 293) the margins have changed
speaker: now Shaun has the left margin, Shem has the right, and Issy still
has the footnotes.

The beginning of the chapter, 260-275.02, was published separately as a
set-piece, Storiella as She is Sung. Our part, or at least 282.05-304.04
(and note that I mistyped the assignment and do mean 282.05 not 282.02,
which would make no sense), was published separately as The Muddest Thick
That Was Ever Heard Dump. . Also I have what may be useful, a quick
transcription of the whole very-first-draft of 295.29-304.02: starting,
that is, right after Franky (mostly called that in the first draft) gets
the second circle drawn, and ending with what ended the unit as far as
transition publication (except that "wreathed with his pother" gets added
somehow for that), namely that the "countinghands rose".

The summary:

282.8¶. Campbell and Robinson, and Glasheen, say Frank is Shaun, and is who
we start looking at; Rose and O'Hanlon and McHugh in the Sigla book say
it's Shem. What causes the trouble is Cain/Abel identifications, but
finally I am quite sure that Frank is Shem, mostly called Dolph (for
Adolphus, brother): the Cain/Abel stuff in fact works out right, and C&R
and Glasheen are just wrong

Franky was a quick study at arithmetic because he knew from birth that his
fingers were given him to fight with (to be a tool). He saw that first came
nose, the eyebrows, titties, cheeks and near that (or them) the hand, with
thumb and point, prod, promise (ring) and 'upwithem' fingers. And he got
fonder, the more he played with them, of the cardinal numbers (and
Cardinals and the compass, and the Vico cycles). He'd always be reciting
them, first to last and around the calendar, to get them down pat. And
always he'd be working them over numerous ways, counting (and the count
adds up to 111--i.e., he'd be counting up ALP's children, which is to say
all the things in the world). And he'd sum, and multiply. (Gordon, on the
times through the fingers, says innocence, mischievous (pocketpicking),
religiously repressed (the Cardinals), [he leaves out pippive etc], then
backsliding into cards and adult vices (including masturbation). He learns
various disreputable translations, into trouble, chains, death, lots of
oozing into liquor, living stone laughing to the grave, archers etc. into a
rule of 'fumb' or thumb. [he sounds dangerous and hostile]. Good as he was
at the 3 r's, he couldn't do algebra: substitutes and unknowns beat him up
terribly ("jerrybly": but still not clear if that means because he is
Jerry, i.e. Shem, or because he's beat up as Jerry beats up Kevin, in which
case he's still Shaun: I still lean to the former, hard to see Shaun as
Huck Finn)--in a very Huck Finn way he wants things to be direct, not
substituted.

For an example, they'll say 283.32 like "Show that...", a geometry problem.
[I.e., Shem has been shown to be very good at counting, replacement of
numbers with objects and units of measure, being concretely rakehelly, but
not good at the abstractions of algebra. So now we turn to the
generalizations we have to deal with; he disgustedly recounts how he has to
"Show that" the simple sexual scenario of hce's "median" intersecting the
'paralegs' (284.02) can be put in rational, mathematical terms. That is to
say, how 'telegraph pole' and 'graphplot' get energized ("involted", see
285.18ff) into the "zeroic couplet" by the process of dividing actuality, a
number, by zero, which gives us infinity.{May 7, 1997: simpler: the
telegraph pole divided by the vaginal 0 gives infinity}. And the next
problem is to "find" (as is indicated by the grammar, which sets "find" at
284.11 in apposition to "Show" at 283.32) how many underwears (combinations
etc.) can be the consequence of, the grand irrational surd which is the
thunderclap {again seems sexual}. And finally as the thunderclap, climactic
problem, after taking the cube root put it in terms of the five (fingers,
but I guess it means count by a five system instead of ten). And then the
"Answers are for teachers only" 284.17. It all is saying that reality with
all its sexual energy is ridiculously reduced into these abstractions.(a
unit to .18 maybe).

R&O'H say that all this just continues to list all the awful math he has
trouble with. But it's more than that: basically it's an exercise in
relating the concretions of the "family umbroglia" (284.04) to the
abstractions of culture and language--i.e., deriving words from the
relation between the fairly simple terms we all start with (the one, two,
three) and the consequences of the creative thunderclap, with its "volts"
and the words those volts make out of the twelve letters which are in the
thunderclap word. Culture comes out this action of energy on a material
base (i.e. the fashionable 'factionables' we find in 'The Evening World',
285.26), though there is inaccessible excess (285.28-9) left over.

[revised May 7, 1997] The whole point is the sentence starting 284.22 (and
a unit runs from it to 286.03).: if you just picture the family unit in its
nice pretty captured Kells 'pictorial summer' suggested by the Tunc page,
it gives us the combinations, NCR, and everything feels secure and fine,
but (285.01) if there is a 'roundtableturning' (some infusion of energy of
a political, like Arthurian, or liquor-driven, like Guinness, nature) it
turns that very Kells picture into the permutations, MPM, servants running
around with eggs [in that recurrent image, also from ch5 and from Book IV]
into Shem scuttling back into his house, as usual (like 93.14-18 in chapter
4 and 187.01 and earlier, I think around 178, in chapter 5), into the girls
and soldiers, into HCE as not the secure Big Whiggler but an ambivalent
winner/loser, hetero- (he wins her hand) and homo- (he falls to tail)
sexual first-last/last-first (first shall be last and...) driven by sex
alone (jinnies and dorkeys, 285.13), and then we get the 'rainborn'
pandemonium (rain attending the thunder and lightning, and cf Prankquean
etc, and also Shem fleeing in the rain) which 'finishes' (in Finnish) as
hell's fractions. [May 7, 1997: in short, permanence (combinations) and
change (permutations) alike give us the same panorama of 2s and 3s, male
and female, and offspring, but the stability of the summer scene (I think
of Wildu Picturescu) with its Tennysonian heterosexual family can't help
but be changed into the rainborn pandemonium which entails social struggle
(servants and all) and sexual ambiguity of hell's fractions, those twelve
letters of the thunderword as 12 factorial, a huge number rather than a
stable scene [I am not sure why we don't have a number for the combinations
as we thus seem to for the permutations].

At that point (286 top) Shem really has come to knowledge. From his simple
counting, and his understanding of how physical objects get divided into
"thine-to-mine articles" (283.10) and a 'rude rule of fum' which just
translates objects into shots of liquor, he has come to understand how
infinity, all the endless complexities of things, derive from what seems so
simple, which is to say he sees how anything divided by zero equals
infinity (284.11). This is both by the divine energy of the thunderclap,
and also I think from zero itself, the female "O"-- NCR gives us stability
and is associated with HCE, MPM gives us pandemonium and is associated,
rainborn as it is, with ALP. This is what leads to the next question,
namely the closer look at his source of energy, which is taken in the form
of constructing the "aqualittoral dryankle" (which in turn will lead to
concocting the "equoangular trilitter" (286.19-22).

286.04¶ After the 'initials falls' (from the simple picture to all that
complexity) allthose exercises are in the books, and Shem realizes he has
to 'revoke' (.16) the simple life of cardinal numbers, childish card games
and other simplicities we saw him appropriately working his way through on
282, and turn the page over (there's 'no help fort') and go at the problem
of origins 'in the name of the tizzer and the tongs and the mythy-mathy
tripod--tongs and tripod at least being the sexual parts.

286.19¶. And the 'first problem' (in importance too) is the triangle. Thumb
in mouth, the solution of that problem will lead to a "trilitter" equally
from the three children (though Issy keeps making her ironic footnotes,
like this one, 286.F1).

286.25¶. So the exposition becomes more dramatic: Shem (Dolph) after
checking with Shaun (Kev) if the latter can do it (knowing he can't) seems
to be "made vicewise" [that is, he catches on--though it also seems to say
the roles change, maybe that's a red herring but look at note 4: they are
parallel]. And Kev (much like Taff egging Butt on in II.3) urges Dolph
along--he says in his Northern way 'tell it to me', and Kev in his Southern
(Langue d'Oil) says here's how you do it: take a 'mugfull of mud' (can't
help thinking of the crap on 185--ALP's mud [Glasheen emphasizes that this
is what it is--you get at the creative triangle by starting with the
mother's body] and Shem's crap will be the same because he's in tune with
her, her writer so to speak). Kev is upset on religious grounds and Dolph
says you have to be willing to see it in devil not angel terms (287.01-4)
(at which Issy makes one of her ironic comments, .F1, that Shem is
entrapping Shaun). Any little mud out of the river, out of ALP, will do (I
take it it implies man is dust, and it's the process that counts), and take
a Howth perspective on her "O"--if Cain/Abel questions come up, let's be
Seth instead (is this important, that they move from Shem vs Shaun to
Tristy?)--and put that mudpack right at the point alpha (which is going to
be her privates, very visually--the 'isle of Mun' or urine). R&O'H say they
draw the two circles, but clearly it is only one, the other is drawn at
293.23 (and "Tis just" and "Tis perfect" in the two places match.

287.18ff¶. But then there is the long interruption of the sentence which
tells the story of Dolph as $/( , Patrick and Tristan. The Latin invocation
(which we have to see in the context of the description of Shem's writing
earlier) is more formal this time, and says that what we are about to read
in this second-grade papyrus is a reflection on the river's eternal process
of depositing things on its banks and taking them back again, and that the
river itself is held fast by the eternal principle, that there are always
opposites, its banks, which reflect each other.--that is, we're thinking
about the relationship between the principle of creation and continuity,
and that of opposition of equal opposite principles: about Shem and Shaun
and their mother, in short.). This is the point where, I think, what McHugh
describes as the strand of Shem-ness entering from Book I and the strand of
Shaun-ness entering from Book III coalesce, and though there is a listener
(Kev, here, as Taff in II.3) he is less simply Shaun as against the
teacher's Shem than a sort of mirror of the dominant ShemShaun: the thing
to figure out is if the Kev figure is what's left out of Dolph, though both
are ShemShaun. [May 7, 1997: that is, in plan it seems simple enough: the
brothers having decided to be Seth instead of Cain and Abel, that puts the
focus back on the inter-generational roles, Tristan as against Mark and the
ShemShaun as against HCE: thus Dolph is ShemShaun and Kev is HCE, or at
least in those roles]

287.28ff--Dolph as a student would 'take the chair' among the rebels he was
brought up with (Catholics, by the way), and/or do their writing for them
(like the Gogarty last line, cf 302.23), but brooding about Kitty O'Shea
and the "whole damning letter" (about politics, its lies and relations to
texts--and especially the relations between sexual indiscretion and
language: it is, let us remember, a matter of forging.

Tristan came and converted the natives who ever since have refused to
convert back to their old habits, "which" old habits (289.10) they let drop
as a dead body drops, colon (289.17): and as we go along to the madhouse
talking of the church's business and all, of course it has precious little
to do with the serious matters of death, exile and resurrection; but to
return from the Patrick-dominated age of reptiles to his first landing in
Ireland (and he becomes Tristan here), if the pretty lady (Isolde) -- she
set her sights for him, and who knows where she is now, she (O'Shea) who
then right at 4:32 (when Patrick landed) as Mamalujo and their watches
attest gave him a bath (as Isolde nursed Tristan back to health, I think)
-- if (to repeat) she then ... -- an interjection (290.14): but she never
could have foretold, when love breaks out, such a cold fish as Tristan
coming back a second time later (having heard those voices from the Wood of
Foclut) with a new insistence on purity acting like Diogenes to "buy her
in" (290.22) for the day and forever (along with lots of other girls), to
seduce them this time on behalf of the old firm Tears and Grief (I think in
Patrick terms to turn people to religion rather than love, but more
directly to get Isolde for Mark) -- it must have been a terrible grief
(291.02) to have to give up that old Adam for the imprisonment of being
with who knows who(Mark) with whom she just earns her bed by being pretty,
and small wonder so many Tom Dick and Harrys in our "timocracy" (the Free
State under Tim Healy) come by to console her till everybody in Ireland
shows up in their finery ... : [and this too abruptly breaks off from
commiserating with Isolde, at 291.13, with a] "but to think" (returning to
Tristan) of him fondling a second Isolde (note Issy's footnote 3), he the
"retriever to the last" -- [and the narrator again breaks in saying
291.16-20] it escapes me just when this was and what the excuse was -- for
he whispered falsehood into many lily ears; and to try to analyze how that
pair of arms [the second Isolde's, I think] tried to get all that virility
into herself as if he were a baby [I think the narrator is contemptuous of
the second Isolde for mixing up mothering and sex] , well, if that's what
love is like out there heaven help us (292.04) , and if the diagrams in
Time and Western Man are any indication it begins to look like it (that is,
the narrator is getting more and more offended at modern mores, like
Lewis), and there's no use preaching against sexual immodesty because man
is the more what he is the more the skirts wiggle, and therefore they won't
take warning (and 'they want to do it'); and what's more, if you could look
inside his head you'd see a litter of times, lands and tongues lost and
derelict, and not only that, you'd find in your own head that your language
was decaying and everything was getting mixed up in this jazzy modern way
too; and,the cream of the whole thing, whether your mood is light or heavy,
is that when your pupil/teacher sense of things will remind you that
Parnell was right and "no man has a right to set a limit on the march of a
nation" so you should push ahead, common sense lurking inside your
establishment collar ("S.S." I think too early for Germany) is going to
tell you to draw the line.

In short, the picture is of Tristan arriving in Ireland and seducing
Isolde, then coming again, grown up, and buying her off for Mark while he
just canoodles the second one, (Occurs to me that the number two of chapter
3 is the second Isolde, never thought of that before) which is what the
narrator finds appalling about modern life. The early honest passion is
lost, Tristan has sold out and become, like Patrick, an establishment man,
and that's what the modern world is--look in yourself and you'll see that
prudence will always hold you back from the old Parnell heroism..

293.01¶. Back to the lesson. What? What are you making? (and in truth, says
the narrator, referring I think to both brothers,"he and he", just as
between gyres one is dying into a life and vice versa, 'he or he' had lost
himself or himself in a dream (surely the passage we've just completed, the
historical vision of Tristan/Patrick) , as he (interiorly) gazed, while
potatoes come and potatoes go, in his eye of lapis, visions which are among
the dozens darkies dream in the wood), it's [I think] tree and stone (.14).
'Given AL you take in all (by drawing with the compasses). ' And just
leaving out algebraic expressions, A is for anna and L is for liv, as he
has drawn his line. [It can go both ways, like the gyres:) aha! Ann is
going to ape 'alive', since 'dawn gives rise'. And then at the other end
"love lives" and Eve takes the fall, and 'laugh' leaves 'alass' behind as
the line goes from left to right. [Is he looking at this both ways, or just
saying the A is the rise or beginning and L the last or fall?

Now we have this fig (female part) in the forest (294.03). He anchors his
compass there (.05) and draws the circle which seems to be described in
terms of HCE as mountain, volcano (.17-26). But it's not over yet, the
mystery repeats itself, as mother used to sing in her bass voice reminding
him of Christmas [so right after drawing the circle he thinks of father
mountain and mother singing], and it seems to connect to Yeatsian stuff
about spiritualists and to All Souls Day, and the departed (cf Rest in
peace at 295.15 and 304.01) [all about mysteries and circles, I think][and
note how each time he does the drawing he says "Bene": 287.16, 294.05, now
295.16] . But then (295.17) he gets ready to draw the next circle (nothing
up my sleeve, or Nothung). He does so, and Kev admires and says it makes us
the dainty pair of compasses/accomplices. Solomon says the circles are the
boys, too, Dolph for art and Kunst (cunt) and he Kev for music (Handel) and
something with a handle to it (i.e., the sexual preferences--except I
thought Shem was Dolph was homosexual and vv.; she says Kev as Shaun will
be the female partner in any homosexual symbolism.)--and I guess that makes
sense since Shaun is the closer to HCE and he the closer to being bisexual,
or all-sexual (as Everybody).

Dolph goes on, I think, to point out the two "tricklesome" points, P and
pi, where the two Dublin Circular Roads bisect each other. And he makes his
P for pride down at the bottom, (seems pretty clearly the anus--heaving,
connected with Finnegan and Adam and Eve and the masterbuilder balking
(with) his bawd at paradise, (and/or cheating the woman, I guess, by
substituting it for the proper vagina); and he tells Kev to go make his
humble pi [heaven, and "humble pee" as opposed to prideful poop, for some
reason] up top, where his 'apex of Jesus' will be a point of order (rather
than disorder). Not quite clear why pee is more heavenly angelic than poop,
except for what's above and what's below, but he mocks Kev sitting up there
"tight" on the seat of virtue, who responds that if it's "angelous" that's
not so dangerous and (mocking) I'll write. And he (I think) ends up that it
(the drawing of the diagram) is 'the muddest thick that was ever heard
dump' since the egg hit the fan, or got fried: i.e., he does recognize the
connection between the diagram and shitting, and the fall, as of Humpty
Dumpty, and does find this 'mad' or dangerous.

The diagram they're drawing and exploring is thus not only the female parts
but the whole human disposition, as well as the Dublin they're
investigating.

So (.22), he completes the angles with dotted lines for below (though in
language of angels) and solid lines, 'trunkles', above, ( spermatically
logical): he emphasizes himself as line and what he is enclosing as space
(and 'like Pa, I pee'), and calls it an 'innate little bondery', something
built-in which binds; likewise a plane for a stiff poker. So he is
focussing on it as ALP's parts, though only now he goes on to show Shaun.

So (296.30) he tells him to come and see the eternal geomater. You'll learn
why Solomon's wisdom takes the form of the six-pointed star (because that
too looks like a vulva-delta). And he hisses (partaking of The Snake 297.04
) and says it's not only Finn's salmon-Solomon wisdom, but for fun. And he
carefully lifts her skirts, her apron, till it's at her naval, tells Kev to
approach, light his match (like Prometheus) and 'this is what you'll say':
Waaa! Tch! (i.e., it's partly Dolph saying Watch and partly Kev crying like
a baby and emphasizing the "Tch" from 111.20, the stain, the pee, its
source: maybe it means the actual gaining of wisdom, since at this moment
we know what the stain at the end of the letter is. He further exclaims
"sluice": cunt and "Pla", or ALP as if seen upside down. And Dolph goes on
to rhapsodize, [the grammar is: "there, redneck..., in the midden of the
stream [i]s your delta, plain for you now..., and when the tidal bore
rushes up from the sea that cunt is where he makes his bed]

, emphasizing the riverine nature of it, its distinct and
sexuous/six/sinuous parts, muddy, and at the very middle of the midden
wedge is the "triagonal delta"(I take it the vagina itself, the middle
between pee-hole and anus, and also the hen's midden), and how "plain's for
you now, appia lippia pluvaville" [very climactic here], the first of all
triangle, constant mid all changes, the Eastern great sow, pride of the
province ("And all meinkind" says Issy below)--and when the boar (or tidal
bore) rushes up the delta from the sea, that "quarrons" (cunt) is his bed
and beer (that Viking king's). And he thinks (98.01)of that meeting, Pa
licking her, lying on her. And tells Shaun for sure: "this 'it' is her
herself, and this is her 'it', when you see it you see her". And if you
could go one better with her eggbeater we'd soon have some action--which
seems to have to do with the Notebook entry that the two circles look like
an eggbeater seen from the end (and suggesting to Kev that his mother is
for fucking!! This was what we wanted to prove, and QEF, this is the
'fosse' ending, so put it in your pipe and smoke it, and haul up that
languid pennant, mate (i.e., close your gaping mouth and haul your tongue
in), I see through you, I've know you've understood the message of the Tunc
page: [I.e., religion centers on "it" as much as I do]. [Or as Gordon has
it, the pennant is now languid because Dolph has given a masturbation
lesson and Kev's pennant is now "Doll the laziest" rather than "Doll the
fiercst"--

A unit ends here (298.05), I think, and he goes on to more math say R&O'H.
Something about algebra, radius of circles, logorithms, it all tending to
say, always thinking about ALP's private part, that it is the center of the
world, equals one exactly like everything else in its light, and somehow
like a logarithm tends to expand in sexual action to eternity until it
becomes a joke (298.01).

['94--here's an attempt at 298.08-18, paying more attention to watching and
filming than to the (incomprehensible to me) math: since the female part
(her "little nest") is so small and so apparently un-'attractive' (of so
little "magnet-ude"), and since the delta unaroused seems so lazy and
unstimulating, so little "fierce", we males have to say that this power of
emptiness, this (traditional) 'nothing' or 'O' is either insignificant or
wondrously more significant than the power of our '1', the male part; or we
can also say ("hence") that the inquisitive eyes of males like us, always
looking around those circles of the buttocks we're considering in the
diagram, will never record or figure out or capture satisfactorily
("film"), given the "ellipses", the emptiness, the apparently 'left
outness' of what those circles revolve around, the reasons for stimulation
to fucking (the power to make it "returnally" happen again and for
"reprodiction" at that) of those "fickers", those shadows (via 'flickers'),
those apparent emptinesses.

In other words, a point familiar to film students is being made, that
there's a paradox in the film viewer's object of desire, the apparent and
engrossing presence of what is actually only shadows, a set of present
absences (hence the notion "imaginary signifier", with a lot of echoes I
won't go into here), which is parallel to the paradox in the (heterosexual
male's) object of sexual desire, the female parts which are likewise more
an absence than a presence, something which can never be seen, incorporated
into the visual imagination with anything like that fullness which we
envision: we males try to see what can't be seen, what seems when we get
there to be nowhere. (This is a central point in the book on pornography).

Boiled down even further: the female parts seem so little, yet have such
power of making desire return--it's as amazing as the ways a movie, mere
shadows, can make us not only believe it but want to see it again and
again--these emptinesses are "reprodictive of themselves". (To which Issy,
in her ironic footnote, seems to say "I enjoy as good as anyone", i.e.,
from the woman's point of view what we're talking about isn't as empty and
insubstantial as all that (it lets her 'nothing' get as much pleasure as
any male '1', "anyone"), and it isn't a "nothing" which we're talking about
at all! Which is a point theorists and Lacanians and such might remember.)

And Dolph goes on (298.19) (I do this less carefully) that 'our orientation
to that base someting is to nothing, finally, but this is just what we've
had since Adam and Lilith, the tendency of the delta to multiply into
rivulets, of the woman to cover more and more of our (psychological)
ground, as the "facets" of this imperial sexuality multiply like the
streamlets in the delta: it's as if her underwear shrinks, her sexuality
gets so big and all-covering!

A break comes after Dolph's summary sentence 299.01: scholar of mine, there
are three sighs for every sing, but 'x' on the 3 brings 'x' on the fourth
[somehow, I think, 'it all works out in the end'. But for a little more on
that, this: 299.01-3: "ichs on the freed brings euchs on the feared": I
don't quite get it. 'x' as an unknown quantity which replaces both 3 and 4
implies, consolingly, that it's all right that the world works with three
sighs for every song? This 'x' which marks the spot we've been talking
about, ALP's "it", is what underlies everything, QED, right? Or, 'I [ich]
having brought freedom of knowledge to you, you [euch] are brought to
panic. (This is what happens, in fact). And/or is there something about
knowing this 'x' moving one from domination by three [penis and testicle,
the Solomon argument] to the more aware, the narrative condition of the
four, $X? [In support of that, Kev's tag line is one of the 4's, "Oh, Dear
me" [which also I've always thought somehow contains "O Diarmaid", as well
as ALP's "O"]. It's a climactic moment, and I'd like to be clearer about
what's in it.

299.04: Kev responds in amazement, he's amazed that the "superposition" of
pa on ma seems to be true, amazed at the spectacle of the female parts, and
Dolph in turn is ironic about his response--it takes thunder and lightning
to give you the courage to face up to this (.11-12) and he's amazed at
Kev's boldness . But he tells him he's "mooxed" about it (i.e., reading
things as we would expect the Mookse to), looking in the wrong place (he's
up at the top of the diagram at pi, not below at P, remember 296.09), at
her naval, and he has to look below (where's the letterman's (postman's)
lamp he had at 297.16?, he asks --something has to illuminate this dark for
Kev), at the waveline (note that it remains river as well as woman, this
delta) since 'her trunk's not her brainbox'.), but Kev finally sees the
puncture/gets the picture/is a spectacle himself as he realizes
(299.19-20).

And then Kev gets mad, ironically and angrily (starting 299.21ff) saying
sure this will be a lesson to him all his life, the "very lovely" spectacle
when the father rolls over and hows his heels on top of her (and echoing
and parodying the language of the revelation: "Luck" for "look" and "lick",
"well, well..." for "bene".). Your action describing it reduces language
and the world to just one thing--after all our lessons and the richness of
the world, like Silvertongue O'Hagan, you are just johnny-one-note
Singlespeech Hamilton: showing the father rolling over like that [I get a
strong sense of the sons of Noah seeing him--this is right in John Gordon's
country, putting it all in terms of witnessing the primal scene) reduces
the world and language to just that: as a wolf with the sheep, so you a son
with the words ("yangsheepslang with the tsifengtse"). This will be a
lesson to me all my life--and you would have been better occupied to think
about money [I think this is the usual reproach to Shem/Joyce for not
having any, and in general like Justius], and shouldn't you have gone to
work for Guinness like his father said? Kev goes on on 300 (to .09) getting
madder, bawling Dolph out for being a fake, stuck-up (equal to himself and
unequal to any other, like HCE 32.20-1), and will get his comeuppance
soon!, all of which complaints are on the basis of faith, hope and charity
(which he's saying Shem lacks), and the usual claim of his being a fake.
[It's all entirely defensive, but is just like Justius]. Issie's footnote
2, wryly remembering the newspaper seller sucking up to Edward VII, on that
visit where the king knighted a lord mayor, in effect agrees with Kev--it
tells Dolph that, like HCE with the king at the start, getting ahead in the
world comes from that sort of thing, not from the sort of creative
understanding and analysis which Dolph has shown in the demonstration of
the eternal geomater.

The way Kev keeps saying "O dear" or "O dee" (299.21, 294.11 etc etc) makes
me realize that Mamalujo are primarily the Shaun part grown old--he has the
same sort of timorous querulousness they have. And then I realize that the
Snake is the Shem side grown old: 297.04: as the writer and thinker as
opposed to transmitter of wisdom (like the gospels) he links to the serpent
in Eden who similarly caused the accession to knowledge: knowledge is
guilt, as creation is. (But of course there are two sides to everything,
and the Snake side is also the Constable Sackerson, the Shaun side of Shem
so to speak--hence, perhaps, Kev's snotty remark about joining the police
(300.01): serpentine rebellion is also the repressive side of society.
Similarly, the writer has a kind of pride which is like the HCE pride (is
part of it, in fact), hence the "aequal to yourself" echo at 300.05).

300.09¶. Whereupon Kevin, knowing that if you stop you lose ground and if
you hurry you get the last word, eats sweets and glances at the handwriting
book which he gets by heart (that is, I think he just memorizes rather than
working out) and nibbles at his mother [a little graphic!] while being
amazed at his tutor (there's a textual issue, of whether or not there's a
period after "candykissing", but I think Archive p. 31, the first draft,
shows that the basic idea is that Kev eats candy while Dolph works till the
sweat pours off himm--see Archive p. 42 for a fair copy level--though also
there is a copulation being watched.)

[I think he is taking it in but defending against it--and here's the origin
of his eating so much, as in III],

i.e. (.20) while the Other (Dolph) sought to think directly about reality
(the mass) our Same (Kev) sought with the help of food to get reality out
of his mind (or Mund, mouth)--all in Yeatsian language, hence ironizing the
way idealisms seek to evade reality, but I think while ironizing it still
using it: here's the point where the two brothers really go their own ways:
Shem towards more and more contrarian analysis (and eating less and less,
like Joyce ), Shaun towards more and more placid transmission and
acceptance (and eating more and more, like McCormack).

[May 8, 1997: to chop down the Yeats: the antithesis phase (Shem's) uses
creativity to get the social persona separated from the 'body of fate',
i.e., ideology; the primary phase is to join up with ideology [enter the
symbolic, in lacanian terms] in order to get the mask, the social being,
well adjusted and hence let the creative mind come forth. The primary phase
makes one a productive person by being one with the world, like Shaun; the
antithesis phase makes one independent and contrarian by separating one's
own thinking from what's expected, from the social mask [i.e., the
Imaginary].

300.09¶: May 8, 1997 -- and I finally feel as if I have it right. The
Same/Other doesn't compute as I worked it out above, quite, but "Same"
seems "Shem", and the one whose writing progress we track from 300.09 just
has to be Shem, how he doodles trigonometry and other math in a Browne and
Nolan notebook till the veins stood out in his neck, the pile of waste
paper piling up, and how hard he works at it and how it must be "itwas
[etwas] in his priesterrite" (301.02-3) which makes him be this way, and
how he writes to a "noncredible fancyflame" [cf the imaginary women of the
lover poetry and Portrait] what amounts to his only subject, the Letter, of
which we now get this version (which is thus, since Kevin is telling us all
this, basically a parody of Dolph's style, Dolph/Joyce as seen
unsympathetically by Kevin/Shaun/Lewis etc.) which has all all his typical
self-pity and whining, and themes like sad/happy and sucking up to ALP
(Moreover Shaun interjects his own envious remark that he could do as well
himself). The trouble is that in it he writes contemptuously of Jerry and
his political ambivalence, but that is Shaun stuff, so the name Jerry
doesn't fit: this is what makes McHugh's notion that he's writing in
Kevin's voice plausible (and McHugh says Bouvard is closer to Shaun), but
for the letter as a whole I don't believe it: after that he goes right back
to Shem stuff asking for money and fawning. And after the latter from
302.11 it is totally clearly the response of Shaun scornful of Shem and his
writing (and saying again, at the parenthesis 302.19ff, that he could do it
too if he wanted, as he had back at 301.06), and implying that writing is
the only sex he has, "jirryalimpaloop"[cf. 29.06-7] -- he lists Joyce
writings and contemptuously says they're self-published and go on forever.

[ah, I see]: in contrast, and returning to the language of the nursery, he
says (302.31) to Dolph that he should look rather at "All the charictures
in the drame!", hold the pen the way he does and the way they were taught,
and give politically correct readings in "Bould strokes for your life!" --
he should render the classics, Steele and Burke and Swift and W B Yeats and
Connelly and Parnell. And he's "wreathed with his pother" for not doing it.

But (303.15) "our frankson" (.30) "could not but recken" (.28-9) that all
the kind of public culture Kevin is pushing, the "autocratic writings" and
the fruits of culture and all, deserves "one able rep of the triperforator"
(.21-2), the professor's fork, to cut right through writing like that and
do what Cain did to Abel, and well deserved. [that is, Joyce is giving the
other side -- his personal stuff can be said to be whiney and apolitical,
but the Irish Renaissance is pompous and stupid, and deserves a good belt].
So he hits him in the name of one one one, Rip, and feels the better for it
(his countinghands rose--304.01). [both of them seem thoroughly to be Cain:
Kev is wreathed, Franky is a "misocain", hater-of Cain, but his countenance
rises].

[I am finally quite confident that Shem hits Shaun--and since back in I.7
Justius had said so, it has to be so. What has been confusing is that
McHugh says Shem got hit by Shaun. But R&O'H say that it is Shaun who got
hit by Shem, and I just guess McHugh is wrong.]

304.05¶. And surprisingly Kev accepts it: the red mass Dolph showed him
(the pubic hair and its area) or the blow have let him see the rainbow
promised on page 3. Turning to Issy for once directly, he's patronizing to
her (she ironizes in the footnotes) as a potential loony and asks her to
confirm that Dolph "done that lovely", maybe implying that she, with her
hopes of being presented to majesty, needs the same , and with only a few
undercutting echoes ("I'd send you a toxis", implying poison), he praises
him for having brought about his rebirth. And he assents "We're offal boys
ambows" (.29), for, he acknowledges, he has picked up Dolph's crumbs [Joyce
seems to be writing here for Stanislaus] while pretending piety--and he
knows he's deceived people as he does it.

305.03¶: And Kev goes on thanking Dolph, saying that that celebrated
signature of yours on the letter -- the stain (302.10) -- has dispelled
(teaspilled) his hesitency [i.e., he's accepting that Dolph has pulled him
away from being an establishment toady like Pigott], and tells Dolph
(actually, Joyce ) to "forge away, Sunny Jim." (I guess that means that we
are to accept a certain guilt in being a writer, a forger like Pigott, and
that we are not to keep a relentless political correctness attitude of
absolute Parnellism.) And he calls Shem Einstein for socking Newton in the
jaw and getting him (Kev--as if Lewis would) to give up Euclidian space.
Though recognizing "the guilt of the gap" and seeming to say he could argue
him into blueshirt-ism, he still praises him, and says that no matter what
he may have said he is indeed his "bloater's kipper". He says go on
writing, blesses him for it ("shanty..." echoing the Waste Land) and
asserts unity with him: "I plant my penstock in your postern" -- both pen
and post are in both of them. And Kev says they'll both be "singulfied", as
one, from here on, as they go back to the schoolroom and hypocritically
accept the praises of the schoolmaster like the bull laudabiliter andget
the Nobel Prize and sweets from the "heavy sugar daddy". (It is a compact
of subversion.)

So the education is complete--Dolph figured out what is at the root of
things, Kev resisted and tried to counterassert the official training
(saying at the same time that Dolph is just a whiner and scuzzball for
seeing things that way), but when Dolph hits him he realizes that
everything isn't as piously simple as he thought, and the rainbow rings and
non-Euclidian space are more true than the world which leads to hesitency.
From this point the two are one, not in conflict though not, of course,
exactly the same either: that is, we have ShemShaun now.

But then a narrator comes in (Shem's margin says ENTER THE COP AND HOW),
wonders what the devil they're doing going back over that Mookse and Gripes
territory, and asserts one of Joyce's wonderful lists, of things we should
be studying, "studiavimus", which amounts to phrases in the text which give
the usually slightly askew summarizing phrase for the lists of people in
the classical canon in the left margin (I think of them as along the lines
of saying Othello is instruction to wives to watch out for their linen).
And (308) they are told to hurry because tea is set, and soon the clock
will strike. Which it does, in Irish (10, McHugh telling us, is the number
of the Sephiroth, and it must be right because of the footnote to 5, "Cush"
(cúig), with Kish lighthouse in the note and that it's "anticheirst", while
5 is the Kabbala number of the Messiah.)

And they send a nightletter: to their parents and other "old folkers" as if
they are dead ,wishing them happy incarnations and prosperity (also
"preposterousness", surely) in New Year New York. It's from all three of
them (described much as in the Prankquean), with the final drawings
(thumbing the nose, skull and crossbones, the two together looking like
Kells Tunc page, and McHugh saying to see 292.31-2, "you must...draw the
line somewhawre", as in the note, "our drawings on the line".