"shall she submit?"

(571.27-573.32)  After remarking on HCE's noisy coughs in yesterday's reading, one of the children notes that HCE perhaps is asleep:  "He is quieter now."  (This could also be HCE remarking to ALP that Jerry has gotten over his nightmare and quieted down.)  If it's the children outside of the parents' room, they hear a noise in the parents' room and wait to listen.  If it's HCE and ALP outside of the twins' room, they hear a noise in that room and wait to listen:  "Wait!  Hist!  Let us list!"  Mark explains that the young generation will knock off the old and take control, with the children "trowelling a gravetrench for their fourinhand forebears."

Regardless of where the parents are at (in their room being spied upon by the children, or outside of the twins' room), they now realize something is amiss.  The door of Buttercup/Isabel is open.  What could be happening?

"Let us consider," Mark says.  This introduces an extended passage, presented (at least initially) by attorney Interrogarius Mealterum, which Campbell and Robinson call "probably the strangest and most complicated in the book."  Essentially, it's a summary of the sexual intrigues that could be arise if all of the thoughts or desires lurking deep within each family member's subconscious were to be acted upon, presented in the form of a legal brief.  Campbell and Robinson write, "One is struck with horror that such matters can be discussed in the boring terminology of everyday legal experience, and that this phraseology, and the social attitude it covers, should be the most characteristic expression of our time."  I haven't found the beginning of the passage particularly complicated (in comparison to many other parts of the Wake), but my lack of confusion might arise from my background in law (a lot of what I read at my job doesn't sound too far off from this).  I think that Tindall does a good job describing what makes it so successful:

The clarity of this abstract, emerging from the darkness of dream around it, insures the effect.  Recoiling in horror from man's humanity to man, we laugh; for this amorous confusion is an example of what Ruskin, a better definer than Webster, called the grotesque, a kind of art, he said, that combines the frightful and the funny.

Joyce was at his best when writing this passage (which begins on page 572, line 18), and it really doesn't lend itself to any kind of summary.  It concerns the family and their close associates, here given Roman names (for example:  Honuphrius (HCE), Anita (ALP), Eugenius (Shaun/Kevin), Jeremias (Shem/Jerry), Felicia (Isabel), and Fortissa (Kate).  Honuphrius has engaged in any number of extramarital affairs (including, it's alleged, incestual ones with his children), and he has set in motion a plan to have Anita commit adultery as well.  Anita, like most of the other adult figures, has engaged in adultery herself, and any number of love triangles can be traced.  Anita is primarily concerned with preserving the virginity and honor of her daughter, Felicia, but she fears "reprehensible conduct" between the sons if she is successful in doing so (it's hinted that the brothers' incestual urge could be turned toward each other if they're shut off from Felicia).  Today's reading ends on a cliffhanger:  "Has he hegemony and shall she submit?"

If you're looking for a taste of the Wake to see Joyce at his best, mark this passage down as one to check out.