"Oyeh! Oyeh!"

(85.20-87.24)  Today's passage is a particularly challenging one.  The narrator, having finished an aside about HCE's one-time political aspirations, shifts courses again "to return to the atlantic and Phentitia Proper" (with "Phentitia Proper" in one sense representing Phoenix Park).  The scene now shifts to the trial of Festy King.  The true identity of Festy King is not immediately apparent.  One would assume it's HCE, but there are indications (and Campbell and Robinson and Tindall make arguments supporting those indications) that Festy King is one of HCE's sons.  The king has been brought up on dubious charges and hauled into court.  The trial begins with "Oyeh!  Oyeh!"  The prisoner Festy King appears in court wearing a somewhat ridiculous hodge podge of clothes and says (in one sense) that his fellow citizens and the coppers seized him as he was trying to set fire to himself.

The Crown calls an officer, P.C. Robort, to testify against King Festy.  Robort explains that, one Thursday, the King, who was once known as Meleky and used the alias Crowbar, impersonated a chimney sweep and attended a pig fair with an unlicensed pedigree pig "under the illassumed names of Tykingfest and Rabworc" (King Festy with the "ty" moved to the front and Crowbar backwards).  Robort further testifies that, after working his way through the fair with little success, King Festy sold his pig in order to repay a debt.

The second witness called is "an eye, ear, nose and throat witness, whom Wesleyan chapelgoers suspected of being a plain clothes priest W.P."  As McHugh notes, this character stands in (in at least one sense) for Joyce's one-time friend and long-time nemesis Oliver Gogarty, a Dublin doctor who was an ear, eye, nose, and throat specialist and who served as the basis for the Buck Mulligan character in Ulysses.  This witness (who tells his attorney that he'd spent the previous evening engaging in some illicit behavior) reports that the "mixer and wordpainter," Hyacinth O'Donnell, B.A. (is O'Donnell here another pseudonym for King Festy?), sought to assassinate two former kings, Gush Mac Gale and Roaring O'Crian, Jr.

Just as with the latest HCE-Cad encounter described on the last handful of pages, the identity of who is on trial here seems to be almost constantly shifting.  My secondary sources indicate that the defendant here possesses a number of qualities belonging to HCE's sons, Shem and Shaun.  While I'm inclined to think that these sources are on the right track, I'm reserving judgment on that because (obviously) I haven't gotten to the Shem/Shaun portion of the Wake yet.  I'll have to flag this section as one to revisit at a later time . . . .