Finnegans Wake - James Joyce [65]
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
floprightdown determination and reminding uus ineluctably of nature at her naturalest while that fretful fidget eff, the hornful digamma of your bornabarbar, rarely heard now save when falling from the unfashionable lipsus of some hetarosexual (used always in two boldfaced print types —
one of them as wrongheaded as his Claudian brother, is it worth while interrupting to say?— throughout the papyrus as the revise mark) stalks all over the page broods
sensationseeking an idea,
amid the verbiage, gaunt, stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin, with its basque of bayleaves all aflutter about its forksfrogs, paces with a frown, jerking to and fro, flinging phrases here, there, or returns inhibited, with some half-halted suggestion, F, dragging its shoestring; the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the words which follow may be taken in any order desired, hole of Aran man the hat through the whispering his ho (here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again); those haughtypitched disdotted aiches easily of the rariest inasdroll as most of the jaywalking eyes we do plough into halve, unconnected, principial, medial or final, always jims in the jam, sahib, as pipless as threadworms: the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings: that strange exotic serpen-tine, since so properly banished from our scripture, about as freak— wing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don a corkhorse, which, in its invincible insolence ever longer more and of more morosity, seems to uncoil spirally and swell lacertinelazily before our eyes under pressure of the writer’s hand; the ungainly musicianlessness so painted in sculpting selfsounder ah ha as blackartful as a podatus and dumbfounder oh ho oaproariose as ten canons in skelterfugue: the studious omission of year number and era name from the date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint; the lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first: the gipsy mating of a grand stylish gravedigging with secondbest buns (an in terpolation: these munchables occur only in the Bootherbrowth family of MSS., Bb — Cod IV, Pap II, Brek XI, Lun III, Dinn XVII, Sup XXX, Fullup M D C X C: the scholiast has hungrily misheard a deadman’s toller as a muffinbell): the four shortened ampersands under which we can glypse at and feel for ourselves across all those rushyears the warm soft short pants of the quick-scribbler: the vocative lapse from which it begins and the accu— sative hole in which it ends itself; the aphasia of that heroic agony of recalling a once loved number leading slip by slipper to a general amnesia of misnomering one’s own: next those ars, rrrr! those ars all bellical, the highpriest’s hieroglyph of kettletom and oddsbones, wrasted redhandedly from our hallowed file:///E|/Books/Top%20100%20Novels%20list/Finnegans%20Wake/complete.html[9/12/2007 12:21:58 PM]
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
rubric prayer for truce with booty, O’Remus pro Romulo, and rudely from the fane’s pinnacle tossed down by porter to within an aim’s ace of their quatrain of rubyjets among Those Who arse without the Temple nor since Roe’s Distillery burn’d have quaff’d Night’s firefill’d Cup But jig jog jug as Day the Dicebox Throws, whang, loyal six I lead, out wi’yer heart’s bluid, blast ye, and there she’s for you, sir, whang her, the