FINNEGANS WAKE

Protodrafts

2nd draft, December 1923, I.5§1 draft level 1

MS British Library 47471b 43-49 Draft details

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Her untitled memorial to the allhighest has gone by many names at |1separated disjointed1| times. Thus we hear of Pro Honofrio, The Groans of a Britoness, An Apology for a Husband, Can You Forgive Him? First Only True Account all about Mr Earwicker and the Snake by a woman of the world who can only tell the naked truth about a dear man and all his conspirators how they all tried to fall him putting |1it all1| around Lucalizod about Earwicker and a pair of sloppy sluts, plainly showing all the unmentionablenesss falsely accused about the redcoats. The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a very pure deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidexterous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput. Closer inspection of the bordereau would however reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by one unwary before any suitable occasion for it or them had yet arisen. But under the close eyes of the inspector the traits which featuring |1the this1| chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated,
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in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartbreaker against housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker our social somethings something bowls along bumpily down the long lane of generations, more generations and still more generations.

Say, who in hell wrote the durn thing anyhow? Erect, seated, |1on horseback ahorseback1|, against a partywall, below zero, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of person to scribe or of scribe to place, rained upon or blown aroundº by a regular racer from the soil or by a whittlewit laden with the loot of learning?

Now, patience. And remember patience is the great thing. And above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming impatient. A good plan used by worried business folk is to think of all the patience possessed by both brothers Bruce and their Scotch spider. If after years and years of delving in the dark a sage has arisen am in our midst for the purpose of assuring us that our great ascendant
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was properly |1speaking1| 3 syllables shorter than his own surname, that the ear of Earwicker was the aforetime the trademark of a broadcaster with wicker a local cant for an ace's patent, then as to this radiooscillating epiepistle, to which we must ceaselessly return, |1where whereabouts1| exactly at present is that bright soandso to give us the dinkum oil?

Naysaying is no pacemaking. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and of blank that its page cannot ever have been the penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at and like inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas or (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was constitutionally incapable of ever misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Has any fellow, it might with profit some dull evening be quietly hinted, ever looked sufficiently longly on a stamped addressed envelope. Admittedly it is an outer covering: its face is its fortune: it exhibits the civic clothing of whatever passionpallid nudity or plaguepurple nakedness it may or may not have inside. Yet to concentrate solely
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on the literal sense |1or1| even the psychological texture of a document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves which circumstanced it is quite as hurtful to sound sense (and, let it be also added, to the truest taste) as where anyone in the act of being perhaps presented by a friend of his to a lady of the latter's acquaintance straightway to vision her |1plump & plain1| in her unapparelled naturalness, deliberately closing his eyes to the fact that she was after all wearing for the time some definite articles of clothing, inharmonious, a captious critic might describe them as, or not strictly necessaryº or a trifle irritating here and there but for all that suddenly full of local colour and personal perfume, and suggestive too of so much more and capable of being stretched if need or wish were, of having their surprisingly similar coincidental parts separated for better survey by the deft hand of an expert. Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothing are there or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the
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same time, only somewhat behind them? Or that one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be considered in turn apart from the other?

Here let a few facts speak in their own favour. It was wont to be wittily said by the stern chuckler Mahappy Mahapnot that Lucalizod was the one place in this world where the possible was the improbable & the improbable the inevitable. If he was right this implies a sequentiality of improbable possibles though possibly nobody having read up his subject probably in Aristotle will applaud him on the head of his remark for, utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which took place as any others which never took place at all are ever likely to be.

About the original hen. Midwinter was in the offing when a thinclad shiverer, the merest bantling, observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden (or call it dump, for short) afterwards
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changed into the orangery when in the course of deeper demolition it unexpectedly threw up a few fragments of orange peel, the only remains of an outdoor meal of some sunseeker unknown illico in a mistridden past. What child but little Kevin, in the despondful surrounding of such biting cold, would ever have found a motive for future saintity in euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another holy innocent on the seasands in sight of the scene of the massacre of mostº the jacobiters. The singular bird in the case was the hen of the Dorans and what she was scratching at looked for all the world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating from Boston (Mass) of the 11th of the 5th to a dear and it proceeded to mention Maggy well and everybody at allathome's health well and a lovely face of some born gentleman with a parcel of cakes for dear well with a grand funeral Maggy and hopes soon to hear well & must now close with fondest and four kisscrosses from affectionate largelooking stain of tea. The stain, and that a teastain, marked it off on the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish poetry.
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Explain this.

|1Well,1| Any photoist worth his chemicals will tell anyone asking him |1at home1| that if a negative |1of a horse1| melts when drying well the resultant postive will soon be a grotesque distortion of |1horse1| values, |1tones1| and |1horsy1| masses. Well, this freely is what must have happened to this missive unfilthed by the sagacity of a slanteyed hen. Heated residence since nobody knows when in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the first impression and caused some features palpably nearer the reader to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we seem to get the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw.