No, not “…trouble, and make it double.” Well, sort of — this post will begin a series detailing the conflict between HCE (“Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker” or “Here Comes Everybody”) and his double or alter-ego, who is sometimes referred to as the Cad.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have written about the battles of Shem and Shaun, who are two halves of HCE that have more fully split into distinct individuals (and who remain locked into what they see as a zero-sum competition, but who can, through a process of recognizing the self in the other and sharing their perspectives, come to understand their essential union as Here Comes Everybody).

One way to look at the conflict between HCE and the Cad is that it reflects the Shem/Shaun brother battle on a deeper, intrapsychic level: if the brothers are individuals who dream themselves to be separate (“systentangled”), HCE and the Cad are the inner conflicts within the self before fuller separation/individuation. If we were to use Freud’s terminology, we might attribute them roughly to the ego and superego. They reflect the anxieties of the self encountering a hostile world, but they mostly deal with guilt, shame, anxiety, and blaming the self. Their encounters are the unresolved energy of the Oedipal conflict.

On one level, HCE is a cosmic oneness, the All-Father whose misdeed and condemnation by his inner other shatters him into all the individual people who exist. He’s the unity that we all participate in but have lost touch with in the fallen world (that is, in our fallen psychology and fallen ways of perceiving things).

Another way to put this is that HCE is each one of us, the Real Us, each individual self, falling from wholeness or grace into the despair of a fallen world where we are more like a Shem or a Shaun and must claw our way back to redemption/integration through our recognition of the self in the other. The encounter with the Cad is the first stirring of what Blake would call Selfhood.

HCE’s encounters with the Cad all involve recurring tropes: two men meeting each other, one or both of them brandishing a phallic object, one or both of them misunderstanding the words of the other, and one or both of them feeling anxiety about threats of violence and/or implications about sexuality (either past misdeeds or some sort of proposition or mockery in the present).

It’s primarily a representation of the Oedipal anxiety within the self, which contains the seeds of anxiety in our encounters with others (which blossom finally as Shaun and Shem and their conflicts: in fact, toward the middle of I.4, HCE and the Cad become proto-Shem and proto-Shaun, and we see them fight and make up, which I’ve written about in an earlier post: this is an anticipation of, and blueprint for, the more externalized conflicts to follow, as well as a way of healing the conflicts. After this point, we see in I.4 another version of HCE’s trial, repeated generations hence, at which point the defendant and the witness properly separate into Shem and Shaun).

As such, I’m coming to see things this way: if Shem and Shaun’s reconciliation is largely about learning to forgive the other (which involves seeing and voicing the self’s capacity for misdeeds), HCE’s anxieties and defenses of himself are primarily about learning to forgive the self, or at least accept the self in all of its flaws and anxieties, all of which are summed up in the encounters between HCE and his double. Of course, this being Finnegans Wake, the Shem/Shaun material is also about forgiving the self, and the HCE material is also about forgiving the other.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to look at the first encounter of HCE with the Cad in the form of a king.

*

When we meet HCE in I.2, the narrator tells us that we will begin with the “genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen” — that is, where he got his name “Earwicker” from.

He is introduced to us like Adam in the Garden of Eden, in “prefall paradise peace.”

We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus the grand old gardener was saving daylight under his redwoodtree one sultry sabbath afternoon, Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of mobhouse, ye olde marine hotel, when royalty was announced by runner to have been pleased to have halted itself on the highroad along which a leisureloving dogfox had cast followed, also at walking pace, by a lady pack of cocker spaniels.

The chapter is written in a style of discovering what we can about HCE from the legends told of his distant past. This style fits with Campbell and Robinson’s idea that Book I of the Wake is largely about HCE’s past (while Books II and III detail his present and [hopes for the] future). Chapters 2-4 of Book I comprise what Joyce called the “Humphriad,” giving the story of Humphrey: they describe his Fall (Chapter 2), the consequences of the Fall (Chapter 3), and the gathering up of the pieces of that Fall to continue into the future (Chapter 4). All of it is narrated like a legend lost in the mist of time, yet one whose energies are eternal and ever accessible in the present.

Cincinnatus was a legendary Roman consul who was a simple farmer and who was, during a time of crisis, promoted to emergency dictator and who, after the crisis was over, willingly gave up his political power and returned to the farm. HCE is elsewhere compared to Caesar (as suggested by the reference to the Ides of March toward the end of this section). All great leaders of history manifest his energy, whether their “Fall” is peaceful retirement or assassination.

“Cabbage” recalls HCE’s defecation in the Park (Compare I.4, where the Four Old Men say of HCE, “Gob and I nose him too well as I do meself […] puffing out his thundering big brown cabbage!”)

He’s plowing for “rootles” — roots, but also riddles — as Shem asks his nursery mates the first riddle of the universe at the start of I.7.

He may also be committing some kind of indiscretion with his “redwoodtree” and all the “ploughing” he is doing on such a “sultry” afternoon.

Anyway…the king is coming!

This first encounter has been compared to Adam meeting God, an Irishman encountering an English king…and a child feeling weak before his Father.

HCE is apparently also a turnpiker — a guard of the turnpike along which the king is traveling — so out he goes:

Forgetful of all save his vassal’s plain fealty to the ethnarch Humphrey or Harold stayed not to yoke or saddle but stumbled out hotface as he was […] jingling his turnpike keys and bearing aloft amid the fixed pikes of the hunting party a high perch atop of which a flowerpot was fixed earthside hoist with care.

Earthside hoist with care contains the initials EHC.

He carries a phallic symbol: a pole with a big perch with a flowerpot atop it.

The king asks him about it:

On his majesty, who was, or often feigned to be, noticeably longsighted from green youth and had been meaning to inquire what, in effect, had caused yon causeway to be thus potholed, asking substitutionally to be put wise as to whether paternoster and silver doctors were not now more fancied bait for lobstertrapping honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones very similarly with a fearless forehead: Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers.

The king wanted to know what had created potholes in the road (perhaps because he is longsighted and cannot see well), but he asks, as a substitute for that question, aren’t there other things that are better for catching lobsters?

This is just plain old crazy dream logic. But it could also be a dream representation of the dreamer’s anxieties over his masculinity and fears of failing to live up to the Father. Perhaps it also embodies the dreamer’s shame over his desires, since he seeks not just to capture lobsters (women?) but phallic earwigs, which penetrate the ear. To put it crudely, the king/father is symbolically challenging the son’s penis, asking whether it is the most effective tool: the king wants to know if HCE has been wielding his “tool” properly, whether it was the cause of the potholes on the road (presumably the flowerpot would create the holes by penetrating the road), but in lieu of that question, he asks whether it is the best weapon for attracting the “proper” creatures. The king/father thus casts aspersions on the tool’s effectiveness and/or on the dreamer’s desires.

An Interesting sidenote: he calls the king “maggers” for majesty — the girls in the Park are called “maggies,” and the narrator later suggests that there was a false report that it was actually the girls who delivered the king’s reply that I quote below. It has been speculated that in the dreamer’s “real life” (outside the text), the family has an American cousin named Maggie, and ALP’s Letter in the dream is based on a real life letter written by the dreamer’s wife (which perhaps contains the line “How are you, Maggie?” — a line garbled throughout Finnegans Wake).

The king then mocks the guilty and anxious turnpiker for his reference to catching earwigs:

Our sailor king, who was draining a gugglet of obvious adamale, gift both and gorban, upon this, ceasing to swallow, smiled most heartily beneath his walrus moustaches and indulging that none too genial humour […] turned towards two of his retinue of gallowglasses […] and remarked dilsydulsily: Holybones of Saint Hubert how our red brother of Pouringrainia would audibly fume did he know that we have for surtrusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger.

And that’s how HCE got the name “Earwicker.”

The King/Cad is drinking/feasting at this moment of HCE’s fall into Selfhood, which is a reference to the wake of Tim Finnegan, where the Fall is accompanied by a feast (“Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the boord,” I.1). The Fall of HCE is the Feast of existence. The king’s mockery jokingly turns “turnpiker” into a “pikebailer.” Maybe that means sometimes HCE bails on wielding a pike (symbolic penis) and desires to be the receptive sex partner (symbolized by receiving an earwig in the opening of his ear).

Essentially, the king is mocking his manhood or character, just as the rumors spread by the Cad will do in the other telling later in I.2.

I noticed on my third read that the bolded part above indicates that the earwigger (HCE) has two aspects, a turpiker and a pikebailer (Shaun and Shem). The brothers are further indicated by the two members of the king’s hunting party, to which he turns.

Like the Cad passage later, this meeting has a man ask a question of and cause humiliation to befall HCE. The whole scene captures the unconscious energies that precipitate the creation of a sense of self separate from others or the world, the beginning of alienation. Here, this version of the scene is framed as an encounter with the Father/king/superego — the internalized father — whose questions produce a sense of insufficient individuality, of doubt and shame.

Mocking laughter lingers in the road in the wake of this encounter:

(One still hears that pebble crusted laughta, japijap cheerycherrily, among the roadside tree the lady Holmpatrick planted and still one feels the amossive silence of the cladstone allegibelling: Ive mies outs ide Bourn.)

This bit anticipates the “stem and stone” that ends I.8, which signify Shem and Shaun. The Freudian import of a phallic object and stones should be clear.

I don’t quite know how to interpret the ending of the above extract. “I’ve me outsides born”? I guess that means the stone says something like “I’ve now been born outside, into the world.” HCE’s fall is his confinement to individuality, his birth into the outside world. This is the HCE archetype manifesting as a specific individual, and it’s also each of us becoming a Selfhood. But also, I’ve borne the Ides of March. The word Ive perhaps recalls Ivy Day, the commemoration of the death of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish politician who fought for Irish Homerule and who was destroyed by a sex scandal. Parnell is an obvious manifestation of the HCE archetype: it is noteworthy that the king and his party are hunting a fox, and Parnell referred to himself as “Mr. Fox” in his letters to the married Kitty O’Shea. In I.4, HCE will appear as a fox being hunted.

So overall I take this encounter with the king in I.2 to signal an encounter with the (internalized, idea of the) Father. The individual feels anxiety that he doesn’t measure up to the Father, doesn’t win his approval; he feels put down by the Father, and feels shame at his own non-normative desires. Out of these insecurities, neurotic defense mechanisms are born, along with a calcified sense of self as alienated from others.