"It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guinnesses but."

(309.1-311.4)  Alright, here comes the third chapter of Book II of Finnegans Wake.  I've been promised this chapter is quite a doozy (and a long one:  74 pages).  This far into the book (almost halfway through, actually), I feel like I'm up to the challenge.

As hinted by the first line of the chapter (which I quoted as this post's title), our focus now turns toward drinking beer and, more exactly, the goings-on in HCE's pub.  First, in the fashion established thus far in the Wake, we get a brief paragraph to orient us.  It's generally not in dispute, the narrator tells us, that the Viconian cycle is predominant in the affairs of the world.  Our hero starts out in a primitive, god-fearing state ("the fright of his light in tribalbalbutience hides aback in the doom of the balk of the deaf"); marries and enters into the public life ("the height of his life . . . is when a man that means a mountain barring his distance wades a lymph"); falls ("yet that pride that bogs the party begs the glory of a wake"); and goes back to the beginning to repeat the cycle again ("while the scheme is like your rumba round me garden").  The "Finnfannfawners" -- both us as devotees of the Wake and the fawners in HCE's pub -- now find this to be elementary.

With this established, we move into the pub, where we learn that the patrons have donated a radio to the establishment.  This passage (which begins halfway through page 309 and runs to halfway through page 310) is a fun one, describing both the radio (which is "modern as tomorrow afternoon") and the anatomy of the ear (which Earwicker uses to listen to that radio) in intricate detail.  I can't do this passage justice (obviously), so I'll just say it's one I encourage you to read if you want to get a taste of the Wake without committing to read the entire thing.

Moving from the radio, the narrator reacquaints us with HCE, who in the drunken haze of the pub, assumes dual roles of bartender and mythical father.  In the pub, HCE's "deed" (i.e., the event of his downfall) "immerges a mirage in a merror," indicating that this pivotal story will be retold once again in this chapter.  But first, HCE pours some beers.  Like his forefather Finn, a giant who played a part in the creation of the Irish landscape, HCE "pullupped the turfeycork by the greats of gobble out of Lougk Neagk."  In HCE's case, this is him uncorking a bottle, but its mythic connotations are plain as day.