This post continues the last one by examining HCE’s encounter with the Cad in I.2.

This meeting occurs on “one happygogusty Ides-of-April morning (the anniversary, as it fell out, of his first assumption of his mirthday suit and rights in appurtenance to the confusioning of human races)”

April is an important month in Western literature. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begins in April (“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”), as does Eliot’s Wasteland (“April is the cruelest month”). In both works, and in many others, April is associated with rebirth because of spring (and Easter). So HCE falls during the time of rebirth because his fall is also his resurrection (or the next incarnation of HCE from the next generation taking his place). Every fall is a rebirth, and every rebirth is a fall. Turn your eyes and see.

The word “suit” is the body he was placed into by his fall, which corresponds (as we saw in the last section of this chapter) with HCE’s birth into a particular incarnation. It’s his birthday suit and his source of making mirth. He is dressed in this suit by the three tailors/tale-ers, who are the three soliders, who are Tristan, who are the Cad.

Notice how the symbols all run into each other. He was “dressed” by these tailors ages ago when he fell into birth. But that “ages ago” is also now, when he encounters the tailors in the form of the Cad. The tailors are tale-ers, spreading rumors about him (which is what the Cad does in this section). These rumors are symbolically dressing him in the suit: they are his death (destroying his reputation) and his birth (creating versions of him in the minds of the people by means of storytelling). It is the “suit” of life/incarnation and the “suit” of a court case brought against him. This encounter with the Cad rehearses the same encounter he had ages ago. It sets a pattern that a future HCE will enact, once the Cad steps into HCE’s suit and carries on the eternal story into the next generation. That next generation is also now. The Cad is already HCE and has already been encountered by himself.

Everybody got that?

It’s hard to explain it because it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t respect the normal rules of causality. It’s too easy, though, to just throw up your hands and say that the Wake doesn’t mean anything or that the Wake is implying some kind of relativist denial of truth.

I interpret the Wake’s subversions of linear time and logic as ways of disrupting our usual patterns of reading as a way to shock readers out of their usual ways of reading/interpreting the world and themselves, helping them to understand that they themselves are in some ways a story that they can narrate differently.

Ok, here goes the next part:

ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour [with the girls in the Park] when the tried friend of all creation, tigerwood roadstaff to his stay, was billowing across the wide expanse of our greatest park in his caoutchouc kepi and great belt and hideinsacks and his blaufunx fustian and ironsides jackboots and Bhagafat gaiters and his rubberised inverness, he met a cad with a pipe.

Here it is (cue sound effect). The central event of the novel.

The latter, the luciferant not the oriuolate (who, the odds are, is still berting dagabout in the same straw bamer, carryin his overgoat under his schulder, sheepside out, so as to look more like a coumfry gentleman and signing the pledge as gaily as you please) hardily accosted him with: Guinness thaw tool in jew me dinner ouzel fin? (a nice how-do-you-do in Pool-black at the time as some of our olddaisers may still tremblingly recall) to ask could he tell him how much a clock it was that the clock struck had he any idea by cock’s luck as his watch was bradys.

The encounter with the Cad is in some senses HCE’s encounter with his younger self, an earlier version of himself who appears as a son, the one who is to replace him. The king was his encounter with the older version of himself, one he supplants but of whom he fears he is but a pale echo. But now encountering his son, he meets a plucky young version filled with an energy and power he doesn’t have.

Again, he’s encountering the ideas of these Freudian figures — he’s coming face to face with the parts of himself that doubt himself. He worries that he doesn’t live up to the past and that the future will be better than he is.

In this version of the encounter, HCE is the older man. And where he was earlier the Irish subject greeting the king, he’s now accosted by an Irishman while he assumes the figure of an Englishman or Viking invader of Ireland. HCE is the outsider now. I wonder if people generally experience (their memories of) the past as an outside, foreign authority but experience (their anticipation of) the future as more fully authentic than they are. Both are threatening in different ways. Perhaps one way to define the “Fall” is to say that it involves becoming caught in narratives about the past or future, to the neglect of an experience of the Now. Such narratives, which distract us from the Now, entail the belief in Platonic forms.

The narrator suggests that HCE may still be about, “carryin his overgoat under his schulder, sheepside out” — his overcoat has two sides, one sheep and one goat. Biblically, these animals correspond to the saved and the damned, both of which are inside HCE (which eventually separate as Shaun and Shem). He points the sheep side out to the world, appearing innocent, but containing guilt within.

“Luciferant” refers to the Cad. It means the one with the light (the pipe) (but it also suggests Lucifer). “Oriuolate” refers to HCE. It comes from the Italian meaning watch (he is about to use his watch to give the time). They’re each armed with their weapon.

The Cad’s greeting is a mangled version of the Irish “Conas tá tú inniu mo dhuine uasal fionn?” which means, “How are you today, my fair gentleman?” But it sounds like he’s offering a drink of Guinness or is drunk and is referring to a “tool” (penis) or is alluding to someone having dinner or oozing. HCE (who in this version of the story apparently doesn’t speak Irish) takes this either to be a sexual come-on or an insinuation about his crime in the Park. And then the Cad asks the time — a question that could signal the end of an era or the end of HCE’s life — by cock’s luck…cock, clock, cluck, cuck.

Guilt, shame, and anxiety!

The feelings the encounter stirs:

Hesitency was clearly to be evitated. Execration as cleverly to be honnisoid.

That’s H-C-E, and E-C-H.

They are met, each a mirror for the other.

“Hesitancy” is HCE’s word, repeated throughout the book — a result of his guilt, which manifests in his stutter. It’s also a word that, in real life, exposed the forgery of a letter that (falsely) implied Charles Stuart Parnell supported the Phoenix Park murders. The forger spelled the word wrong, and that’s how the ruse was revealed. “Hesitancy” is misspelled throughout Finnegans Wake.

The Earwicker of that spurring instant, realising on fundamental liberal principles the supreme importance, nexally and noxally, of physical life (the nearest help relay being pingping K. O. Sempatrick’s Day and the fenian rising) and unwishful as he felt of being hurled into eternity right then, plugged by a softnosed bullet from the sap, halted, quick on the draw, and replyin that he was feelin tipstaff, cue, prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen’s shrapnel waterbury, ours by communionism, his by usucapture, but, on the same stroke, hearing above the skirling of harsh Mother East old Fox Goodman, the bellmaster, over the wastes to south, at work upon the ten ton tonuant thunderous tenor toller in the speckled church (Couhounin’s call!) told the inquiring kidder, by Jehova, it was twelve of em sidereal and tankard time, adding….

I cut off this quotation before HCE’s defense.

This section is actually pretty straightforward.

HCE feels threatened and fears for his life (and worries he might be shot, as if the pipe is a gun), so he gives him the time. Notice that he thinks of both St. Patrick’s Day (the “K.O.” is knockout, when Patrick fells the Druid, but also “Knights of St. Patrick,” an Irish club in the States) and the Fenian Rising (an Irish revolt against the English). The two events referenced here roughly correspond to the Russian General’s/St. Patrick’s victory over Buckley and Buckley shooting the Russian General, both later in the Wake. This Cad encounter is the prototype for both events, the destruction of HCE and his resurrection as St. Patrick (which is the Cad becoming the next HCE…both events, though, mean the end of *this* HCE).

His watch emerges from his “gunpocket” — it’s a weapon too.

I like that the watch is “ours by communionism, his by usucapture.” To us, reading this story about the deeds of this figure from the distant past, HCE is the kinglike father to which *we* do not measure up. He gained his position by usurpation and capture; we moderns partake in that past glory: we commune with it by sharing it in common.

One could argue that sharing the bounty of what our ancient ancestors bequeathed upon us is a great good. But there’s also that part of us that feels like we’re these soft moderns who were just handed everything good in life, that we didn’t have to struggle for survival in the way of our evolutionary forebears.

Anyway, after telling him that it’s 12 (an important number in the Wake: the total hours on a clock face, 12 jurors, the 12 apostles, the signs of the zodiac, the 12 Buddhist nidanas), he adds a defense of himself:

adding, buttall, as he bended deeply with smoked sardinish breath to give more pondus to the copperstick he presented (though this seems in some cumfusium with the chapstuck ginger which, as being of sours, acids, salts, sweets and bitters compompounded, we know him to have used as chaw-chaw for bone, muscle, blood, flesh and vimvital,) that whereas the hakusay accusation againstm had been made, what was known in high quarters as was stood stated in Morganspost, by a creature in youman form who was quite beneath parr and several degrees lower than yore triplehydrad snake.

The gist of this is that the “accusation againstm” comes from a snake in human form, an untrustworthy source. Here, his “copperstick” (phallus) appears to be a symbol for his physical body, that “mirthday suit.” See my post on Telescopes in Finnegans Wake for more on the idea of HCE’s “tallowscoop”: the physical body as an instrument for observing/experiencing/”knowing” that universe.

The phrase “hakusay accusation” is an instance of his stutter (which I only detected when reading it outloud). It also sounds like this accusation is hacking at him (as one might hack at a tree with an axe) or was made by a hack. Further, “hakusay” sounds like “the heck you say,” an exclamation of surprise that must have been produced when this rumor was shared.

I’m skipping over several lines here to arrive at his longer defense:

after a rendypresent pause [he] averred with solemn emotion’s fire: Shsh shake, co-comeraid! Me only, them five ones, he is equal combat. I have won straight. Hence my nonation wide hotel and creamery establishments which for the honours of our mewmew mutual daughters, credit me, I am woo-woo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption, any hygienic day to this hour and to make my hoath to my sinnfinners, even if I get life for it, upon the Open Bible and before the Great Taskmaster’s (I lift my hat!) and in the presence of the Deity Itself andwell of Bishop and Mrs Michan of High Church of England as of all such of said my immediate withdwellers and of every living sohole in every corner wheresoever of this globe in general which useth of my British to my backbone tongue and commutative justice that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications.

Here it is — he stutters like a mess and absolves himself of all wrongdoing.

Of course, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

The Cad thanks him for the time and goes on his way, muttering to himself as many of HCE’s words as he can remember, goes home, and has a huge feast as he continues to repeat HCE’s words (“Grampupus is fallen down but grinny sprids the board” — after a Fall comes a feast: there’s lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake).

The Cad’s wife overhears this and spread the rumors of what HCE did or may have done to her priest over tea. The priest spreads it to another man and is overheard, and it passes to what Campbell and Robinson call the city’s “social unconscious,” criminals and the poor. Finally, a guy named Hosty (Latin “hostis,” enemy) gets ahold of the story and makes up a scurrilous ballad condemning HCE, and he leads what seems like the whole city in singing it.

All these people are the constituent parts of HCE, the Finnegans Waking up (and becoming individuals) as the dream rolls on. So this works as a symbolic representation of the creation of the universe. But to the extent that they are parts of the dreamer’s psyche, they’re also his own unconscious fears that people will find out about what he’s done or what he desires to do — for in a dream, desiring and doing are identical, and his “ensectuous” (incestuous?) desires make him feel like an insect, an earwig.

The encounters of HCE reveal the anxieties of each individual about our desires and wrongdoings and insecurities, as well as our fears that others will see us in the worst ways we think of ourselves — anxieties that prompt our conscious mind to offer defenses that only incriminate us all the more from the perspective of our unconscious judges.

And yet, even as the scandal mounts, HCE probably wasn’t guilty of anything *too* terrible. We always seem worse to ourselves: we’re our own worst critic. Perhaps his only “offenses” are improper thoughts and desires. In the dream, they echo out into social condemnation and a trial, detailed in Chapter I.3. We learn that he becomes something of a scapegoat for the people, who are eager to convict him of their own sins, which is part of our own psychological mechanisms (we condemn ourselves to feel good about ourselves) and a foretaste of Shaun’s tendency to condemn others to distract from his own insecurities.

There’s another way of reading this whole section as part of the development of man, from early history (meeting the king along the road) to modernity (running into a tramp in a public park). The same sorts of anxieties underlie all ages, all times, all encounters, all people within their own minds. Here Comes Everybody.