The word "veil" and its Indian equivalent, "purdah", also recur a few times in some of the notebooks Joyce used for the Ondt and the Gracehoper, once in B.26 (p. 80: "purdah (veil)"), once in B.04 (p.17(h): "purdah"), and once in B.27 (p. 134(i): "purdah (veil)"). According to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (XXII p. 659), a purdah is "The curtain which screens women from the sight of men in Eastern countries (...) (the term has passed into common Anglo-Indian usage, and to "lift the purdah" means to reveal a secret.)"

The same applies to the notion of "Ding an sich". It is not because Schopenhauer uses this notion to describe what is being veiled in the world as representation, that every time it recurs in the Wake, Joyce is referring to Schopenhauer. The term was of course invented by Immanuel Kant. If we had the chance to ask James Joyce whether it was Kant or Schopenhauer he was referring to with the "Ding an sich", we would run the risk of being ridiculed, as on page 528: "Is dads the thing in such or tits the that? (...) Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland? Ding dong! (...) Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Anupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion. Knock and it shall appall unto you! Who shone yet shimmers will be e'er scheining. Cluse her, voil her, hild her hindly." (FW 528.15-22) In his Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Roland McHugh suggests the word "e'er scheining" refers to Kant's concept of Erscheinung, but also notes the reference to the French word "voile" (veil) in "voil her". The veil recurs mostly in a context of illusions and reflections, e.g. when Issy talks to her mirror image: "Mirror do justice ... My veil will save it undyeing from his ethernal fire!" (FW 527.23)

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