"as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk"

(142.8-144.19)  Today's reading includes three more short sets of questions and answers, and one short question and the beginning of its lengthier answer.  Question seven asks, "Who are those component partners of our societate . . . ?"  The question continues with identifiers of these partners, and (as pointed out by my secondary sources) a close reading reveals that there are 12 partners here and that they're linked with the 12 months of the year and the 12 apostles of Christ.  These 12 men (I'm assuming they're men, based on the apostles link) are variously the 12 men attending Finnegan's wake and 12 men drinking at HCE's pub.  They're assigned 12 attributes based on words ending with "-tion," such as "unify their voxes in a vote of vaticination" and "condone every evil by practical justification and condam any good to its own gratification."  In the answer to the question, the component partners are identified as "The Morphios!"  As McHugh notes, "Morphios" encompasses both Murphy, the common Irish last name, and Morpheus, the god of sleep.

Question eight asks simply, "And how war yore maggies?"  It soon becomes (relatively) clear that this question refers to both maggies in the generic sense of young women (such as the two young women in Phoenix Park) and in the specific sense of the maggie, HCE's daughter, Isabel.  The group of maggies are described in two string-phrases.  The first consists of 14 linked phrases:  "They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling," and so on.  The second string-phrase consists of a 14-word "word ladder," in which one letter is changed to form a new word:  "as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile," and so on.  (I'm guessing we're supposed to count "cometh" as the final word in the ladder, even though the "h" at the end of the word is an extra addition).  The answer finishes by singling out Isabel from the other 28 (14+14) maggies:  "yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more."  Isabel, the 29th maggie, appears during a leap year and elopes, leaving her father and instead pecking at the heart of the husband she has picked.

I like Campbell and Robinson's idea that the ninth question describes the Wake itself.  It asks what a human being in HCE's situation, sleeping through the night, would "seem to seemself to seem seeming of."  In other words, what would his dreams seem like?  The question itself is dense, but well worth unpacking, as it contains fascinating references the Wake, literature, and the Bible (among other things), including the passage I quoted in this post's title, which designates HCE "as hapless behind the dreams of accuracy as any camelot prince of dinmurk."  Here, HCE is equated with King Arthur and Prince Hamlet, while Hamlet's (already bombastic and gloomy) Denmark is devolved into a land of din and murk.  Anyway, there's a lot of stuff to savor that in the question, but I also love the answer to the question:  "A collideroscape!"  So, HCE's dream -- and the Wake -- is a type of kaleidoscope, but it's also a collision landscape (phrases like "camelot prince of dinmurk" are perhaps best described as a "collideroscape").  And, when faced with the task of reading the Wake, we're presented with two options:  collide, or escape.  It might hurt to go up against this book, but I think collision is the better option.

The 10th question asks, "What bitter's love but yurning, what' sour lovemutch but a bref burning till shee that drawes dothe smoake retourne?"  Written as a kind of late-middle English (English professors would scoff at that, I know) lover's lament, this question seems to be answered by a woman (is it Isabel?) who flirts teasingly with her beloved as she makes herself up in front of her mirror.  She mentions the possibility of her man having another lover and talks of her own suitors.  Since this goes on for another four pages, and since I've already had a lot to say today, I'll delve deeper into her answer in the coming days.