Category Archives: The Cad

Fights All Over Cuxhaven

Among the catalogue of rumors about HCE in I.3 comes this sentence:

A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point, revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves’ licence and his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there would be fights all over Cuxhaven.

The most interesting thing I learned from the annotations is that Cuxhaven is a real place! It’s a German port where an air-raid was conducted in World War I. On an initial read, I assumed it was a made-up name meant to sound like “cucks haven,” which is an appropriate name for the fallen world in Finnegans Wake.

Read on for thoughts about this haven for “cucks,” which I connect to the idea of the deathbed.

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The Ballad That Hosty Made

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At the end of II.3, as HCE cleans up his tavern, he hears the approach of the people singing the ballad that will destroy him. This is a version of the song that ends I.2, which was created and sung by Hosty (a variant of the Cad, the other side of HCE — from the Latin hostis, meaning stranger, foreigner, or enemy). Of course, the ballad is different now, so much later in the dream.

Read on for a few of my thoughts on one excerpt of this ballad. This will be a pretty brief close reading post, less ambitious in scope than some of my others. Perhaps as time goes on, I will make more frequent brief posts like this.

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When Is a Man Not a Man?

The beginning of Chapter I.7 — all about Shem the Penman — tells the brief story of Shem asking the “first riddle of the universe” to all of his brothers and sisters. The riddle is the title of this post, and it’s written in straightforward English there. The “brothron and sweestureens” take turns guessing, but none can get it right, so Shem has to tell them the answer: “When he is a […] Sham.”

This post looks at the riddle as it recurs throughout Finnegans Wake, considering what it implies about masculinity and art.

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Up and Atom

I’ve been laughing for decades at a joke on The Simpsons in which Rainier Wolfcastle (a fictional analogue of Arnold Schwarzenegger, complete with a thick German accent) is coached on how to pronounce “Up and atom!” He is playing comic book hero Radioactive Man, so it’s a pun on the saying “Up and at them!” (You can watch the scene here)

Plays on the phrase “Up and at them!” appear many times in Finnegans Wake, so imagine my surprise when I went to look it up the other day and found that it is a saying attributed to the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo (!).

Read on for brief reflections on Waterloo and Finnegans Wake.

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