This post continues a series that began with this post and this post.

Finnegans Wake I.3 examines the case against HCE and what we can learn about his fall since its details have been lost in the distant past.

It starts with a survey of the fates of the singers of the ballad mocking him, all of whom seem to be like HCE. Hosty disappears. One of the singers becomes a soldier like (identical to?) Buckley (who shot the Russian General, as is described in II.3). The priest who had initially spread the rumors is a Mr. Browne who is also known as Nolan. The two brothers.

Brown and Nolan was the name of a Dublin bookseller. But their name also sounds like one of the names for Giordano Bruno, whom Joyce had previously called the Nolan — Bruno of Nola or Bruno the Nolan or Nolan Bruno (Nolan Brown-o).

Joyce plays with those words throughout the book, and they form a brother pair.

Giordano Bruno was a heretic who argued, among many beliefs, that the opposites of the universe co-exist within each other — the yin and yang, or the Shem and the Shaun. The “coincidence of contraries,” this is called.

Or, as Joyce puts it in this chapter:

Now let the centuple celves of my egourge […] by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles

The ego urge (to sin), embodied by HCE, is also a gorge that has been gouged in the self, a gaping hole out of which emerge the “centuple celves” of the dream (of life, of individuality). Their coincidence — their ultimate containment in the other — is embodied in the dance of life. They reamalgamate and emerge in each new identity in indiscernible ways, and the dance goes on as the past lives in the present and the future.

*

Chapter 3 is concerned with telling and retelling the story of HCE’s fall, and how the tale persists through all things even to this day. The chapter gradually comes more and more to inhabit the perspectives of those who condemn HCE until by the end, it is swallowed up in the perspective of another version of the Cad who comes to HCE’s locked house/coffin and yells abuse at him until he gets tired out and goes away.

If we look at the novel from the perspective that it is being narrated by a dreaming mind, I take the shift of Chapter 3’s perspective — especially a long paragraph about the public’s opinions about HCE — to be an embodiment of the dreamer’s anxiety about what others will say about him and his sin (whether he acted out this sin or just desires or imagines it). Over the course of that paragraph and, more broadly, the chapter, the dreamer comes to inhabit their perspective of condemning himself, which is the basis of a perspective that condemns the wrongdoing of others (which is what issues forth into the Shaun perspective).

Our sense of our own guilt becomes the basis for a tendency to condemn others.

Often, we blame others because of our own insecurities, or perhaps our condemnation of others is intensified because we see in others a reflection of qualities in ourselves that make us insecure. But if we learn to accept our own insecurities, if we learn to forgive them in ourselves and then forgive the way they manifest in others, we might be able to make contact with the prefall paradise peace in which HCE once dwelled.

We might. Or we might not, because the peace is also the Fall and the Fall is also the peace. It all depends on which way you turn your eyes: turn your eyes and see.

*

There are various other tellings of the Fall. For instance:

the request for a fully armed explanation was put (in Loo of Pat) to the porty [the party, someone who is identified as an Irishman] […] Having reprimed his repeater and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances […] rose to his feet and there […] as he, so is a supper as is a sipper, spake of the One and told of the Compassionate, called up before the triad of precoxious scaremakers […] the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne.

So someone (with a watch) is being asked by three younger men for an explanation about HCE, our father and author of our day. This very request for an explanation is like the encounter in the Park again, with HCE being confronted by three soldiers (pieces of himself or the Cad). [I like how “Our Father” becomes “Farfar,” far in the distant past, while author mixes with King Arthur]

This new version of HCE tells them a version that’s more flattering to HCE:

The angelus hour with ditchers bent upon their farm usetensiles, the soft belling of the fallow deers (doerehmoose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as midnight was striking the hours (letate!), and how brightly the great tri-bune outed the sharkskin smokewallet (imitation!) from his frock, kippers, and by Joshua, he tips un a topping swank cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and how manfally he says, pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan, he was to just pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole half hour in Havana. 

In my original notes for this post, I just wrote “lol” — “laughing out loud” — in response to the final line. Here, HCE tips the Cad by giving him a…cigar. And tells him to suck it. You don’t have to be a Freudian to crack this symbolism.

This telling tries to make HCE sound magnanimous, even as it barely conceals his threatening sexual energy.

The word “tip” occurs throughout the text, where it refers to the colonizers of Ireland condescendingly bribing their colonial subjects. Apparent generosity can also be a way of subjugating others. But it also serves as the sound of a branch tapping against the window of the dreamer, mother nature’s bid for attention (which the male Oedipal conflict often fails to notice, caught up in a battle between men). Also, the tip of the penis.

The sounds of HCE’s encounter echo through all things, we are told — all human language in all nations, even on the radio, where we hear his defense again.

And then we’re told, “The scene, refreshed, reroused, was never to be forgotten.”

Indeed:

For as often as the Archicadenus, pleacing aside his Irish Field and craving their auriculars to recepticle particulars before they got the bump at Castlebar (mat and far!) spoke of it by request all, hearing in this new reading of the part whereby, because of Dyas in his machina, the new garrickson’s grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintuation the axiomatic orerotundity of that once grand old elrington bawl, the copycus’s description of that fellowcommuter’s play upon countenants, could simply imagine themselves in their bosom’s inmost core, as pro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawning (abyss), as once they were seasiders, listening to the cockshyshooter’s evensong evocation of the doomed but always ventriloquent Agitator

I had to read that sentence at least a half dozen times before I (think) I understood it. By the way, that’s not the end of it — it goes on for several more lines.

The trick is that (I think) there’s an implied comma after the word “request” that I bolded. “All” is, I think, the subject of “could simply imagine themselves.”

What it’s saying is that when this story is told yet again by a new HCE-ish type (note that he is Archcadenus, with “cad” in his name), everyone listening to this story could imagine themselves, within their bosoms, teleported back to the time to the far distant past and experience themselves as the three soldiers who were listening to HCE describe an older HCE.

[Cad implies “cadet,” which is French for “young son”]

The “all” includes us, right at this moment, hearing this telling, right here, that we’re reading right now. Through the words of the telling — through art and literature, basically — we’re all right back at that initial encounter in the Park.

All of history is layered on top of itself. The past is never gone: it’s accessible to us right now. Or: the anxiety of the Oedipal conflict underlies everything, even this moment. It’s all here. Now.

But we’re told that we’re unclear on the exact details. There’s one thing that’s clear: HCE was acquitted in the courts but convicted by gossip of the people:

Eher the following winter had overed the pages of nature’s book […] the shadow of the huge outlander […] had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in manor hall as in thieves’ kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con testimony with benefit of clergy. 

The narrator comments: “His Thing Mod have undone him: and his madthing has done him man.”

Again, in my notes I wrote, “Lol.” I added, “His ‘thing’ sure did undo him and did him man.” And, it’s worth noting that the sentence barely conceals its reversal: his man thing has done him mad.

“Thingmote” was the name of the Viking parliament that existed when they conquered Dublin.

So he was convicted by gossip, and the people “have waved his green boughs o’er him as they have torn him limb from lamb.”

Limb from lamb, that’s cute. The innocent creature that they sacrifice. Note the reference to ivy (and “Ivy Day” commemorating Parnell’s death, which I spoke of in Part I of this post series). 

This is followed with references to Finnegan’s wake from the first chapter: the people of Ireland tearing him apart with gossip is like the raucous celebration and mourning and brawling at Finnegan’s wake.

What comes after this is a long paragraph of opinions about HCE from people on the streets. This is how he is torn apart, through gossip. In the paragraph afterwards, the narrator asks if these opinions are “meer marchant taylor’s fablings” — the fables told about him by tale-ers, who are tailors, who are versions of the three soldiers, who are the Cad spreading rumors about him, who are Hosty singing about him: the tailors who fit him for the suit of existence, in which tales about him are how he lives on.

From the perspective of the text as a dreaming mind, this paragraph shows how guilt and anxiety produce excuses for and accusations of the self, which eventually become projected into accusations of and gossip about others — guilt “lives on” in our toxic psychological mechanisms, in the gossipy tales we tell ourselves and others.

It starts with blaming others: “It was the first woman, they said, souped him, that fatal wellesday, Lili Coninghams, by suggesting him they go in a field.”

As “Lili,” she’s both a flower and the Hebrew Lilith, Adam’s first, disobedient wife.

The judgment of a scientist: “Prehistoric, obitered to his dictaphone an entychologist: his propenomen is a properismenon.” Campbell and Robinson have a very long footnote about what these words, in all their roots, might mean.

A chef treating HCE like Humpty Dumpty: “Eiskaffier said (Louigi’s, you know that man’s, brillant Savourain): Mon foie, you wish to ave some homelette, yes, lady! Good, mein leber! Your hegg he must break himself See, I crack, so, he sit in the poele, umbedimbt!”

Some have more positive views: “the Daughters Benkletter murmured in uniswoon: Golforgilhisjurylegs!” A “jury leg” is a term for a wooden leg. The term thus both summons the “jury” of public opinion that condemns him and the “wood” of his erection that is the cause of that condemnation.

Or how about this one, from a “girl detective” who lisps: “Sylvia Silence, the girl detective […] when supplied with informations as to the several facets of the case in her cozydozy bachelure’s flat, quite overlooking John a’Dream’s mews, leaned back in her really truly easy chair to query restfully through her vowelthreaded syllabelles: Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy?” 

However, even she insists he should be punished: “Nevewtheless accowding to my considewed attitudes fow this act he should pay the full penalty, pending puwsuance, as pew Subsec. 32, section II, of the C. L. A. act 1885, anything in this act to the contwawy notwithstanding.”

Oscar Wilde was tried under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (the law apparently has no subsection 32, though) — another hint of the sexual nature of HCE’s offense.

Anyway, it goes on in that manner for a long, long paragraph. The last person, Meagher, who is with “Questa and Puella” — so, he’s another version of HCE with two girls — tells one of the girls, “he was to blame about your two velvetthighs up Horniman’s Hill,” but he tells the other, “I also think […] by the siege of his trousers there was someone else behind it.”

While this means that there may have been someone else behind his misdeed, it also sounds like there was someone else behind the seat of his trousers. The implication is that there may have been anal sex going on in the Park as well.

Here, the voice of this paragraph embodies a blaming perspective keeps looking to ascribe blame — someone else behind the deed as well — but also looks to gossip about sex. This is also the subconscious of the dreamer who fears his own homoerotic proclivities and projects them onto others.

There are two other versions of HCE’s fall that come to us. The first is an account of an attack with a gun by a masked man:

one tall man, humping a suspicious parcel, when returning late amid a dense particular on his home way from the second house of the Boore and Burgess Christy Menestrels by the old spot, Roy’s Corner, had a barkiss revolver placed to his faced with the words: you’re shot, major: by an unknowable assailant (masked) against whom he had been jealous over, Lotta Crabtree or Pomona Evlyn.

The phallic and Oedipal nature of this account should be obvious. The narrator then denies that this account is true.

Then we hear about an account where a man was drunk and trying to open a bottle of booze by battering it against the door of a house, waking up the occupant who was dreaming in bed: this version of HCE claims he 

was merely trying to open zozimus a bottlop stoub by mortially hammering his magnum bonum (the curter the club the sorer the savage) against the bludgey gate

My notes: “Yes, a magnum bonum indeed.” At least I didn’t write “lol” this time.

The occupant of the house is awakened with fear and rushes down to see HCE as liffopotamus, ploring all over the plains, and we get our first echo of the lyrical language that will end I.8:

This battering babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose which would not rouse him out o’ slumber deep but reminded him loads more of the martiallawsey marses of foreign musikants’ instrumongs or the overthrewer to the third last days of Pompery, if anything. And that after this most nooningless knockturn the young reine came down desperate and the old liffopotamus started ploring all over the plains, as mud as she cud be, ruinating all the bouchers’ schurts and the backers’ wischandtugs so that be the chandeleure of the Rejaneyjailey they were all night wasching the walters of, the weltering walters off. Whyte.

“Ploring” reminds me of ALP “laffing through all plores for us.”

Interestingly, HCE is here depicted as the attacker outside someone’s house, which is how his attacker will be figured at the end of the chapter. To the extent that the narrator of Finnegans Wake is a dreaming mind, the dreamer is blending more and more with the perspective of the aggressive parts of himself as the chapter goes on.

Then we get a brief aside about a film concerning a sugar daddy with two young girls. It seems the story of HCE exists even in motion pictures.

I kind of love how this passage ends, with a peppy (and silly and saccharine) little rhyme that folds HCE’s story back into Noah’s Ark:

old grum has his gel number two (bravevow, our Grum!) and he would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is downright fond of his number one but O he’s fair mashed on peaches number two so that if he could only canoodle the two, chivee chivoo, all three would feel genuinely happy, it’s as simple as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean, with their cherrybum chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they all were afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo, a tofftoff for thee, missymissy for me and howcameyou-e’enso for Farber, in his tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can you? Finny

Tofftoff and missymissy are a reference to the first page of the novel (“nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick”). Finny — a funny “Fin” to this film.

Then we hear about HCE’s trial, with testimony from a cop (a “peeler”) who tells about how he had confronted a “querrshnorrt of a mand” who was delivering some “mattonchepps and meatjutes” [mutt and jeff, mute and jute from I.1, the two sides of HCE] [the phrase “queer sort of man” is from that episode too]. The cop “swore like a Norewheezian tailliur” on the stand — he’s a combination of the Norwegian Captain and the Tailor from II.3 — that this strange man kicked at the door and “was challenged about the pretended hick” (it’s not clear whether it was the HCE-like man who was challenged by the cop or the cop on the stand who was challenged in court…as usual with Finnegans Wake, I tend to think it’s both at once). Someone then appears in court and declares that this testimony is in error, and the cop’s face falls, along with his evidence.

So then we finally get the outcome: HCE is acquitted but to protect him against the anger of the populace, he is locked for his own safety inside his house (it’s Stonehenge: it has a “stonehinged gate”). This house is essentially his coffin.

The gate/”gape” is then “triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade’s eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded.”

Patlockt, that’s cute. He was St. Patrick in an earlier part of the cycle, and there’s three parts of him.

His “poorters,” there’s that word “porter” again, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts might be the dreamer’s name.

Anyway, big finish: his final encounter is with a visitor from America (the New World, the next generation) who is apparently upset that something’s been stolen from him (but you need to brush up your Italian to have a chance to figure that out — I missed this detail on the first three readings). He yells and threatens Earwicker, and there’s a catalogue of insulting names he calls him (one of these is “Sublime Porter,” for what it’s worth….). 

He yells at him in “mooxed metaphors,” linking this aggressive individual to the Mookse from I.6, that is to say, to Shaun, the aggressive and eager-to-condemn-others side of his personality. Over the course of the chapter, the dreamer has descended more and more toward this sort of perspective.

But HCE endures this abuse quietly, with the patience of a saint.

anarchistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual, [HCE] did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity, though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in the booth he was in to reach for the hello gripes and ring up Kimmage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist explained, when at last shocked into speech, touchin his woundid feelins in the fuchsiar the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty was on at the time and he thought the rowmish devowtion known as the howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gonn.

“Row” (in the sense of a fight) gets repeated in “rowmish” and “rowsary.” And “howly” suggests howling. I take this to mean that the best way to reform this kind of anger is to let the other party express it. Let him howl. Better than keeping it bottled up. Also, it works as a kind of psychological rope-a-dope. Let your critics wear themselves out.

His assailant does get tired and, 

reconnoitring through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions finally caused him to change the bawling and leave downg the whole grumus of brookpebbles pangpung and, having sobered up a bit, paces his groundould diablen lionndub, the flay the flegm, the floedy fleshener, (purse, purse, pursyfurse, I’ll splish the splume of them all!) this backblocks boor bruskly put out his langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene

The sentence goes on for a very long time after this, containing his recollection of more of his threats of violence, which include his stuttering like HCE (because, again, this visitor is another version of HCE and the Cad).

Leaving down a bunch of “brookpebbles” is, I take it, the equivalent of HCE defecating in the Park, which is one of the many misdeeds he may have done. But these are also the weapons with which he was going to stone HCE, so he abandons his weapon.

Well, there we have it. The story of us all. Guilty, gossiped about, accused, self-accused, accused by others (who are reflections of ourselves because Here Comes Everybody, after all), brought up on trumped-up charges, found to be not so bad, but still despised by the public or his own guilty conscience.

The last encounter is a sort of taste of the brother battle, which will become more pronounced in I.4. As HCE increasingly divides into Shem and Shaun, they will come to represent more fully the battles of history, the self-righteous tendency to condemn others, and the possibility of art to redeem us by leading us back to a recognition of our common humanity with the other. But once we have acknowledged our self in the other and the other in the self, art’s next step is to help us affirm and forgive ourselves.