I'm not sure if my brief time away reduced my Finnegans Wake Comprehension Level, but I am sure that I struggled through today's passage. After going through the two pages a few times, though, I feel like I've got a decent enough sense of what might be going on.
Coming off the two challenging transition paragraphs in the publican's tale(s) of HCE, it seems that he picks up his story in the voice of HCE addressing "Cod," who in one sense must be the Cad. (Maybe also God? I'm not sure.) Basically, HCE seems to be attesting to the upstanding nature of his life and actions. "Meggeg, m'gay chapjappy fellow," HCE stutters to the Cad, "I call our univalse [universe] to witness." Part of the challenge in this paragraph comes from the narrative interruptions to HCE's address. These appear here (like the other narrative interruptions we've seen so far in the book) in parenthetical form (just like my own narrative interruptions in this sentence). The lengthy narrative interruption in this paragraph contains further subinterruptions and lasts about eight lines and appears in the middle of a single word: "gllll . . . lobe." Nobody said reading Finnegans Wake was easy. Leaving the interruptions aside, HCE says that his wares, real property, and business practices are as straight as Wellington Monument. In the interruption, it seems like the publican is telling us that while saying the word "globe," HCE perhaps reverentially raises his hat and encourages the Cad to do the same (and to be more like HCE in general).
It's not immediately clear if the paragraph beginning on page 55 is voiced by the publican or HCE, but I think it's the publican talking directly. He says, "The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust." McHugh notes that "Atreox" both references Atreus (father of Agamemnon, whom you'll remember from the Iliad) and includes the Latin word "atrox," meaning cruel. This suggests the literal reading "The house of cruel Atreus is fallen, indeed, into dust," but obviously Joyce's phrasing of it is more economical and fun. The house is fallen, but it will "arise again." The narrator interrupts the next sentence by stating that HCE's "biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon." "Biografiend" can be read both as Joyce engaging in a little comical self-deprecation and as a thinly-veiled shot at Herbert Gorman, Joyce's authorized biographer (even though Gorman incorporated material written by Joyce and allowed Joyce to make certain changes to the biography, Joyce had a number of problems with Gorman's process and product). Regardless, we're told that HCE once said, "Life . . . is a wake." I love this next bit:
. . . and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn.
We can't become functional human beings without relying upon the both the literal and figurative "crops" of those who came before us, but we can't be ultimate breadwinners -- or the people who are the bosses/rulers of the world -- without supplanting those who came before us. On the bed of our victory lies the corpses of those seedfathers. And yeah . . . "manorwombanborn." Awesome.
McHugh notes that the rest of the paragraph (particularly the bit at the bottom of page 55) contains more references to old actors, which makes sense because the narrator describes "one of that puisne band of factferreters" who "later in the century" reenacts the story of HCE and the Cad. Some tourists (I think maybe the publican's listeners, who are still on their literal or figurative tour of Phoenix Park) circle around "the gagantig's lifetree" and see a scene in which humanity seems to be in an endless cycle of evolution/de-evolution. Then, on page 56, the reenactor salutes Wellington Monument in the style of HCE.
Today feels like one of the heavy load days, during which most of my mental energy is dedicated to figuring out what's happening. There's a sort of intangible deeper understanding coming together in my head, but for now I'll have to put off fully formulating it for later.
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