"Mind your hats goan in!"

(7.4-9.2)  The Wake's encyclopedic scope almost seems to have anticipated the Internet.  One idea flows into another and into another and into another, and soon you realize you've been sucked down the rabbit hole.  Today's reading took me from Finnegan's wake straight into the (mythical) Wellington Museum in Dublin's Phoenix Park.

Tindall writes in the Reader's Guide that the Wake's dense overture ends about three-quarters of the way through page seven.  This lines up with my first impression while reading the passage.  As we pick up at the wake, we see ALP and company preparing to engage in a eucharistic feast, with Finnegan's corpse functioning as the Body/Blood of Christ.  The language here did seem dense to me, and it wasn't until I got to the secondary sources that I got a good handle of what was happening.

The reading went a lot smoother, however, after Finnegan's body vanishes, leaving only "a fadograph of a yestern scene," that the proverbial scales fell off my eyes.  The scene shifts to HCE (joined by ALP) as the Finnegan figure asleep in both his bed bed and in the Dublin landscape, then zeroes in on Phoenix Park, which is identified as the site of Finnegan's fall (and foreshadowed to be the site of HCE's fall).  This is also the site of the "Willingdone Museyroom," and we're kindly invited inside for a tour of its exhibits.  While I didn't initially catch many of the references inside the museum, this passage made a good deal of literal sense to me on the first read through (the museum's got a fair amount of Russian, French, and English memorabilia), and after having gone through my secondary materials, I now find it thoroughly fascinating and entertaining.

I don't know if it says something about me beyond just being fairly well-acquainted with Joyce's other works, but in reading this a lot of the phallic puns/references jumped out (this could've gotten way more cringe-inducing) at me here.  I guess it's kind of obvious, though, when we see a "big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop" with "Sexcaliber hrosspower" that is trained on "the flanks of the jinnies."  (Jinnies, in one sense, are the female soldiers under Willingdone's "wartrew" -- Waterloo -- rival, "Lipoleum.") Also, stops during the tour of the museum, which is conducted by "the mistress Kathe," are frequently punctuated by, "Tip."  Here, "Tip." could be ol' Kathe looking for some change as a tip for her work as tourguide, or (as Campbell and Robinson note in the Skeleton Key) it could be a tree branch hitting the window (and Mother Nature looking for attention) as HCE sleeps, or it could be . . . another phallicism.  It's probably all three.