narked place

It’s hard to find a map to theWake Words “narked place.” Louis O. Mink’s “A Finnegans Wake Gazeteer,” which is the go-to book for locations in the Wake, does not offer any gloss on narked place. Roland McHugh’s “Annotations to Finnegans Wake” offers up a few suggestions that get us closer.

One suggestion for narked place is “market place,” a venue for buying the stuff you need. You have to change the “n” and the “d” to “m” and “t” to get from the narked place to the market place, but it is somewhere nearby.

What about “narked” spelled as it is? The Urban Dictionary on the web lists some slang I have never heard uttered in America: “To be very annoyed about something,”  which seems chiefly Australian (so a narked place might be a “agitated mood”) or “catching a buzz from Nitrogen Narcosis,” something that happens to divers who go too deep too fast (in which case narked place is “under water”).

It was only the third slang definition of narked in the Urban Dictionary that seemed familiar to me: “1) past tense of Nark 2) Word used for when a “Nark” tells about something you have done.” In which case a narked place would be “a location that the authorities know about.”

But how old is the word nark meaning “informer”? Old enough for Joyce to know about it? Absolutely. The British slang nark, meaning “stool pigeon or informer” dates back to 1860-1865, about twenty years before James Joyce was born. Discovering nark derives from the Romany word nāk meaning  “nose,” the British and Australian slang suddenly makes sense: a nosy person makes for a good informer, and someone who is too nosy can make a person very annoyed.

What about narcs (or narks, as they are sometime spelled,) officers from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who might be called to testify against drug users in court? This slang term dates from the mid-sixties, or if you want a specific year, the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it at 1967. Although a “narc” can “nark” on someone, the dictionaries are clear that the two words derive from different sources. While the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was created in 1930, back then their agents (and some of their drug-using targets) were called “narcos,” not “narcs.”

So while it’s possible narked place meant to Joyce “a location that the authorities know about” it wouldn’t have had a druggy overtone or him.

More support for the police informant angle of narked place is found in the larger phrase, “Lowe, you blondy liar, Gob scene you in the narked place” (as well as suggestions of other possible venues.) The great online line-by-line Wake annotation site, Fweet, (Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury) notes a “J. Lowe. Chief Inspector, Detective Department” mentioned in a Thom’s Directory of 1903.  Joyce used Thom’s lists of businesses and street addresses in the creation of Dublin June 16th, 1904 in Ulysses, so it’s entirely possible Joyce learned the name from Thom’s and placed the Chief Inspector Detective near his nark. By 1907, John Lowe had been promoted to Superintendent, and worked the case of the Theft of the Irish Crown Jewels in 1907. As the jewels were never located, you might say that particular narked place was never found.

What if Gob in this phrase is a Judeo-Christian God? “God scene you in the narked place” sounds like narked place could be the Garden of Eden (where God’s “naked” Adam narked on Eve and the serpent,) the mountains of Ararat (the ‘arked place” where Noah landed after the flood,) the doorframes of Jewish homes smeared with lamb’s blood (the “marked place” that was a sign for Death to see and “pass over”) or the “market place” of moneylenders in the temple, something  Jesus seen, found obscene and made a scene.

McHugh detects “obscene” in the words Gob scene, which makes me think the narked place might be the “naked place,” either a location, like an illegal nude beach, or a location on the body witnessed in a naked condition. When you add “Love,” just one letter away from Lowe, into the mix, consider the sexiness of a “blondy liar” (the nark might see a “bloody liar” but there’s a “blonde lier” laying about too) the location of the narked place on the body seems somewhere in the “strike zone,” between the knees and nipples.

So as best as I can make out, a narked place is somewhere cops are hip to, where people feel agitation or euphoric highs in wetness, an obscene naked place laid out with bloody blond hair, where a serpent slithered, all life started, and perhaps, money is made. Where is it? I don’t have a map, but here’s a diagram from page 293.