Ep.015: 111 Insults (p. 69:5-74:19, End of Ch03)

February 6, 2025 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 015: 111 INSULTS

PAGE 69:5-74:19 | END OF CHAPTER 3 | 2025-02-06

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Richard Harte sings “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” from Finnegans Wake]
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall
[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 15, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 69 to 74 to conclude Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

I’m recording this episode on February 2nd, 2025, James Joyce’s 143rd birthday. Happy birthday!

On the last weekend of March of 2025, the Toronto Irish Film Festival will screen excerpts from our film of Finnegans Wake Chapter 3 at TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival theatres). We’ll announce the details in early March through our mailing list and on our website: www.OneLittleGoat.org. If you’re in Toronto in late March, come join us.

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. For the next five years, One Little Goat will film and record all 17 chapters (roughly 30 Hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book in time for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States — if you’d like to support our work, please visit us online at www.OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. And if monetary support is not an option, you can still help this podcast by rating and reviewing it and by spreading the word. To get in touch, you’ll find our email address on the One Little Goat Theatre Company website and we’d love to hear from you.
[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: To dream is to go beyond yourself. But to go beyond yourself is impossible.

So how about this: To dream is to go — impossibly — beyond yourself.

Through the dream language of Finnegans Wake Chapter 3, our protagonist, HCEarwicker, runs away from confrontation and slander, but ultimately fails, as you’ll soon hear in today’s excerpt, when confrontation and slander come knocking, literally and figuratively, in the form of a newspaper reporter hurling insults and stones at Earwicker’s door.

I want to share a discovery from rehearsal that enabled Richard and me to see the overall gestalt of Chapter 3 in one distilled image. (For those who want to see a drawing that gives the basic idea of the image, I’ve posted a sketch from my production notebook, which you can find in this episode’s transcript on the Podcast page of One Little Goat Theatre Company’s website.) I’ll describe what led us to the image, and then the image itself.

Chapter 3 begins in a cloud, “a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed” (48:5), a spit-fog, if you will, produced by the salacious and slanderous “Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” that ended Chapter 2. And since Persse O’Reilly is a Gallicization of Earwicker’s own name — perce-oreille is French for earwig — this toxic cloud that opens Chapter 3 is, perhaps, produced by Earwicker himself. Chapter 3 ends with rain, a rain preceded by its own “cloud barrage” of insults aimed at Earwicker in the form of 111 insults. So the beginning of Chapter 3 is inverted by the end: the fog of slander spat and sprayed out at the start transforms in the end into insults and rain falling on our sleeping protagonist. The toxic cloud in the beginning spreads out to many different people; the rain at the end falls down on only one.

**Gestalt of Chapter 3 — production notebook sketch, Adam Seelig.**

With this inverted precipitation in mind, the image Richard and I imagined for Chapter 3 looks like this: a man, HCE, spits up and out, only to have it rain down on him. Think of the image as the expectorating version of pissing in the wind. It’s a reminder that every element in this epic fugue that is Finnegans Wake circles and cycles again and again. We are always reading, as the book’s opening line tells us, “a commodius vicus of recirculation” (3:2, Ep002).

How could Earwicker ever escape the slander that hounds him when that slander may very well have issued from Earwicker himself? As the Bob Marley song we discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3 puts it (Ep011): “You’re running and you’re running and you’re running away/ But you can't run away from yourself.” Or to borrow a beloved phrase of my parents’ generation, often attributed to Rod Serling’s TV series, The Twilight Zone: “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.” Maybe Earwicker, ultimately, is his own worst enemy.

At the start of Chapter 3 (Ep011), we asked if Earwicker is purely victim or if he is also victimizer? My sense is that he’s both.

True, he’s hard to identify at times, especially when, as this chapter warns us early on, “the shape of the average human cloudyphiz […] frequently altered its ego with the possing of the showers […]. Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility […] to idendifine the individuone” (50:36-51:6, Ep011). But identify him we have, and his name is HCEarwicker. There’s no escaping that.

**Phoenix Park pubs: Hole in the Wall in the north, Mullingar House in the south.**

In his final, futile attempt to escape slander and confrontation at the end of Chapter 3, Earwicker locks himself up in a pub near Dublin’s Phoenix Park, although this time, rather than the Mullingar House on the south side of the park, which we usually associate with HCE and his family, it appears to be the Hole in the Wall Pub on the north side of the park, as the second sentence of today’s excerpt indicates. This sentence also has a once-upon-a-time ring to it that echoes the opening line of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wall-hole did exist” (69:6-8).

The very first sentence that opens today’s excerpt sets the stage for Earwicker locking himself away and for the confrontational scene that unfolds soon after — it begins, “Now by memory inspired […]” (69:5). “By Memory Inspired” is an Irish Ballad that pays tribute to heroes who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, suggesting confrontation; it also influenced W. B. Yeats’s poem “September 1913,” which readers often relate to Ireland’s labour strike of the same year known as the “Dublin lock-out.”

In our case, Earwicker, having fortified the pub’s front gate, is locked in, and his assailant, a version of the Cad from the first confrontation in Chapter 2 (Ep008), is locked out. The attacker is a German newspaper reporter, Herr Betreffender (69:32), who bangs on Earwicker’s gate for a couple of reasons: first, because he’s writing a story on the central theme of our novel, the fall of humanity, or in the Wake’s own words, Betreffender is “making his reporterage on Der Fall Adams” (70:4-5), and Earwicker certainly personifies that fall; the second reason, arguably more urgent, is that Betreffender badly needs a drink, even though it’s ten in the morning, threatening to pummel Earwicker if he doesn’t serve him alcohol right away (69:27-35). Betreffender even blows some quaker oats through Earwicker’s keyhole in an effort to get his attention (70:18-19), but to no avail, so he ratchets up his assault by unleashing an exhaustive litany of 111 insults against our protagonist. The indignant and undignified list of epithets is a blast, and I won’t spoil it for you; I’ll just mention that my favourite insult is also the audience’s favourite, as you’ll soon here from their laughter, and I’ll hint that, for those also peeking at the page, it’s a one-word insult beginning with the letter A that you’ll find on line 21 of page 71. Enjoy.

Following this offensive barrage, Betreffender adds injury to insult by by chucking some stones at Earwicker’s pub/fortress (72:27).

And there. The siege is over: “came to close that last stage in the siegings round our archicitadel” (73:23-24). Earwicker is finally by himself. As he settles into sleep, the dream language of Finnegans Wake conjures up an image of our protagonist as a hero returning — quite the opposite of the fleeing fraidy-cat we’ve been following until now — in words that invoke the title of our book: “(some Finn, some Finn avant!), he skall wake from earthsleep […] (lost leaders live! the heroes return!)” (74:1-3). This also invokes the Irish nationalist slogan, “Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin Amháin,” meaning “Ourselves, Ourselves Alone,” and Earwicker is indeed himself alone, at least until he is visited, à la Genesis, by God in an exchange reminiscent of Biblical dialogue between the Almighty and Abraham. In Wake-speak, Abraham becomes “Allprohome,” with “All” spelled A-L-L, as in Everyone, a fitting pseudonym for our multifarious protagonist HCE, also known as Here Comes Everybody. Here, in this second to last paragraph of Chapter 3, God’s voice disturbs Earwicker’s sleep, and Earwicker responds grumpily in Latin: “Animadiabolum, mene credidisti mortuum?” (74:8) which translates to, “Soul to the devil, did you believe me dead?”, a riff on the last line of the “Finnegan’s Wake” folk song that gives our book its title (Ep001): “By the thunderin’ Jaysus do you think I’m dead?” It reminds me of the irreverent exchange in History of the World, Part I (1981) between Mel Brooks as Moses and the Voice of God. In the movie, God calls down to his prophet in a booming, reverberant voice: “Do you hear me?” And Moses responds, “Yes, I hear you, I hear you,” followed by a short sharp kvetch under his breath: “A deaf man could hear you.”

Neither deaf nor dead, Earwicker is sleeping deeply. And now the rain falls, the rain that began this chapter in the latent form of cloud and fog, as HCE’s extremities seem to morph into Dublin itself, extending to four districts of the city: Finglas in the north west, Pembroke in the south east, Kilmainham in the south west, and Baldoyle in the north east — plus a fifth district, Rathfarnham, located south of them all. This last paragraph of Chapter 3 is, quite simply, a beauty. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

**“…his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chilblaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim.” (74:15-17)**

So in Chapter 3 our protagonist reacts to slander — however real or perceived, however externally or internally generated — with more flight than fight, and now, at the end, with the third F-response to threats: by freezing, or more specifically, by sleeping.

Our fallen man has fallen asleep at the edge of Phoenix Park, where perhaps (and we can never say perhaps too often with Finnegans Wake, the ultimate book of possibilities), where perhaps, like the Phoenix itself, he will rise again.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 69 line 5 to page 74 line 19 for the conclusion of Chapter 3.

The performance was shot and recorded at my home in Toronto on October 2, 2023 with a live audience. The film will premiere in March of 2025 at the Toronto Irish Film Festival.

The opening music is my own arrangement of “By Memory Inspired,” referenced in the first sentence of today’s excerpt, with Brandon Bak on drums and Adam Seelig, yours truly, on piano.

[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 69:5-74:19.]

[69] Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of
the wall. Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was
once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wall-
hole did exist. Ere ore or ire in Aaarlund. Or you Dair's Hair or
you Diggin Mosses or your horde of orts and oriorts to garble
a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended
with aves. Armen? The doun is theirs and still to see for menags
if he strikes a lousaforitch and we'll come to those baregazed
shoeshines if you just shoodov a second. And let oggs be good
old gaggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr. In the drema
of Sorestost Areas, Diseased. A stonehinged gate then was for
another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged
that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value
of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eight-
pence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the re-
minants of his years; and when everything was got up for the
purpose he put an applegate on the place by no means as some
pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pig-
dirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just
thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent
the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on
purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and
possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and
tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade's egg-
day, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded.
O, by the by, lets wee brag of praties, it ought to be always
remembered in connection with what has gone before that there
was a northroomer, Herr Betreffender, out for his zimmer hole-
digs, digging in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon (Branch of
Dirty Dick's free house) in Laxlip (where the Sockeye Sammons
were stopping at the time orange fasting) prior to that, a Kom-
merzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber)

[70] from Osterich, the U.S.E. paying (Gaul save the mark!) 11/- in
the week (Gosh, these wholly romads!) of conscience money in
the first deal of Yuly wheil he was, swishing beesnest with bles-
sure, and swobbing broguen eeriesh myth brockendootsch, mak-
ing his reporterage on Der Fall Adams for the Frankofurto Siding,
a Fastland payrodicule, and er, consstated that one had on him
the Lynn O'Brien, meltoned lammswolle, disturbed, and wider
he might the same zurichschicken other he would, with tosend
and obertosend tonnowatters, one monkey's damages become.
Now you must know, franksman, to make a heart of glass, that
the game of gaze and bandstand butchery was merely a Patsy
O'Strap tissue of threats and obuses such as roebucks raugh at
pinnacle's peak and after this sort. Humphrey's unsolicited visitor,
Davy or Titus, on a burgley's clan march from the middle west,
a hikely excellent crude man about road who knew his Bullfoost
Mountains like a starling bierd, after doing a long dance untidled
to Cloudy Green, deposend his bockstump on the waityoumay-
wantme, after having blew some quaker's (for you! Oates!) in
through the houseking's keyhole to attract attention, bleated
through the gale outside which the tairor of his clothes was hog-
callering, first, be the hirsuiter, that he would break his bulshey-
wigger's head for him, next, be the heeltapper, that he would
break the gage over his lankyduckling head the same way he
would crack a nut with a monkeywrench and, last of all, be the
stirabouter, that he would give him his (or theumperom's or any-
bloody else's) thickerthanwater to drink and his bleday steppe-
brodhar's into the bucket. He demanded more wood alcohol to
pitch in with, alleging that his granfather's was all taxis and that
it was only after ten o'connell, and this his isbar was a public
oven for the sake of irsk irskusky, and then, not easily dis-
couraged, opened the wrathfloods of his atillarery and went on at
a wicked rate, weathering against him in mooxed metaphores
from eleven thirty to two in the afternoon without even a lunch-
eonette interval for House, son of Clod, to come out, you jew-
beggar, to be Executed Amen. Earwicker, that patternmind, that
paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his of Dionysius, longsuffer-

[71] ing although whitening under restraint in the sititout corner of
his conservatory, behind faminebuilt walls, his thermos flask and
ripidian flabel by his side and a walrus whiskerbristle for a tusk-
pick, compiled, while he mourned the flight of his wild guineese,
a long list (now feared in part lost) to be kept on file of all abusive
names he was called (we have been compelled for the rejoicement
of foinne loidies ind the humours of Milltown etcetera by Joseph-
ine Brewster in the collision known as Contrastations with Inker-
mann and so on and sononward, lacies in loo water, flee, celestials,
one clean turv): Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow Whigger,
Wheatears, Goldy Geit, Bogside Beauty, Yass We've Had His
Badannas, York's Porker, Funnyface, At Baggotty's Bend He
Bumped, Grease with the Butter, Opendoor Ospices, Cainandabler,
Ireland's Eighth Wonderful Wonder, Beat My Price, Godsoilman,
Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Midnight Sunburst,
Remove that Bible, Hebdromadary Publocation, Tummer the Lame
the Tyrannous, Blau Clay, Tight before Teatime, Read Your
Pantojoke, Acoustic Disturbance, Thinks He's Gobblasst the Good
Dook of Ourguile, W.D.'s Grace, Gibbering Bayamouth of Dublin,
His Farther was a Mundzucker and She had him in a Growler,
Burnham and Bailey, Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant
Religion, Terry Cotter, You're Welcome to Waterfood, signed the
Ribbonmen, Lobsterpot Lardling, All for Arthur of this Town,
Hooshed the Cat from the Bacon, Leathertogs Donald, The Ace
and Deuce of Paupering, O'Reilly's Delights to Kiss the Man
behind the Borrel, Magogagog, Swad Puddlefoot, Gouty Ghibeline,
Loose Luther, Hatches Cocks' Eggs, Muddle the Plan, Luck before
Wedlock, I Divorce Thee Husband, Tanner and a Make, Go to
Hellena or Come to Connies, Piobald Puffpuff His Bride, Purged
out of Burke's, He's None of Me Causin, Barebarean, Peculiar
Person, Grunt Owl's Facktotem, Twelve Months Aristocrat,
Lycanthrope, Flunkey Beadle Vamps the Tune Letting on He's
Loney, Thunder and Turf Married into Clandorf, Left Boot Sent
on Approval, Cumberer of Lord's Holy Ground, Stodge Arschmann,
Awnt Yuke, Tommy Furlong's Pet Plagues, Archdukon Cabbanger,
Last Past the Post, Kennealey Won't Tell Thee off Nancy's Gown,

[72] Scuttle to Cover, Salary Grab, Andy Mac Noon in Annie's Room,
Awl Out, Twitchbratschballs, Bombard Street Bester, Sublime
Porter, A Ban for Le King of the Burgaans and a Bom for Ye Sur
of all the Ruttledges, O'Phelim's Cutprice, And at Number Wan
Wan Wan, What He Done to Castlecostello, Sleeps with Feathers
end Ropes, It is Known who Sold Horace the Rattler, Enclosed
find the Sons of Fingal, Swayed in his Falling, Wants a Wife and
Forty of Them, Let Him Do the Fair, Apeegeequanee Chimmuck,
Plowp Goes his Whastle, Ruin of the Small Trader, He — —
Milkinghoneybeaverbrooker, Vee was a Vindner, Sower Rapes,
Armenian Atrocity, Sickfish Bellyup, Edomite, — 'Man Devoyd of
the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature, Bad Humborg,
Hraabhraab, Coocoohandler, Dirt, Miching Daddy, Born Burst Feet
Foremost, Woolworth's Worst, Easyathic Phallusaphist, Guiltey-
pig's Bastard, Fast in the Barrel, Boose in the Bed, Mister Fatmate,
In Custody of the Polis, Boawwll's Alocutionist, Deposed, but anar-
chistically respectsful of the liberties of the noninvasive individual,
did not respond a solitary wedgeword beyond such sedentarity,
though it was as easy as kissanywhere for the passive resistant in
the booth he was in to reach for the hello gripes and ring up Kim-
mage Outer 17.67, because, as the fundamentalist explained, when
at last shocked into speech, touchin his woundid feelins in the
fuchsiar the dominican mission for the sowsealist potty was on at
the time and he thought the rowmish devowtion known as the
howly rowsary might reeform ihm, Gonn. That more than
considerably unpleasant bullocky before he rang off drunkishly
pegged a few glatt stones, all of a size, by way of final mocks
for his grapes, at the wicket in support of his words that he was
not guilphy but, after he had so slaunga vollayed, reconnoi-
tring through his semisubconscious the seriousness of what he
might have done had he really polished off his terrible intentions
finally caused him to change the bawling and leave downg the
whole grumus of brookpebbles pangpung and, having sobered
up a bit, paces his groundould diablen lionndub, the flay the
flegm, the floedy fleshener, (purse, purse, pursyfurse, I'll splish
the splume of them all!) this backblocks boor bruskly put out

[73] his langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene, telling how
by his selfdenying ordnance he had left Hyland on the dissenting
table, after exhorting Earwicker or, in slightly modified phrase-
ology, Messrs or Missrs Earwicker, Seir, his feminisible name of
multitude, to cocoa come outside to Mockerloo out of that for
the honour of Crumlin, with his broody old flishguds, Gog's
curse to thim, so as he could brianslog and burst him all dizzy,
you go bail, like Potts Fracture did with Keddle Flatnose and
nobodyatall with Wholyphamous and build rocks over him, or
if he didn't, for two and thirty straws, be Cacao Campbell, he
didn't know what he wouldn't do for him nor nobody else no-
more nor him after which, batell martell, a brisha a milla a stroka
a boola, so the rage of Malbruk, playing on the least change of
his manjester's voice, the first heroic couplet from the fuguall
tropical, Opus Elf, Thortytoe: My schemes into obeyance for This
time has had to fall: they bit goodbyte to their thumb and, his
bandol eer his solgier, dripdropdrap on pool or poldier, wishing
the loff a falladelfian in the morning, proceeded with a Hubble-
forth slouch in his slips backwords (Et Cur Heli!) in the directions
of the duff and demb institutions about ten or eleven hundred
years lurch away in the moonshiny gorge of Patself on the Bach.
Adyoe!
And thus, with this rochelly exetur of Bully Acre, came to
close that last stage in the siegings round our archicitadel which
we would like to recall, if old Nestor Alexis would wink the
worth for us, as Bar-le-Duc and Dog-an-Doras and Bangen-op-
Zoom.
Yed he med leave to many a door beside of Oxmanswold for
so witness his chambered cairns a cloudletlitter silent that are at
browse up hill and down coombe and on eolithostroton, at
Howth or at Coolock or even at Enniskerry, a theory none too
rectiline of the evoluation of human society and a testament of
the rocks from all the dead unto some the living. Olivers lambs
we do call them, skatterlings of a stone, and they shall be ga-
thered unto him, their herd and paladin, as nubilettes to cumule,
in that day hwen, same the lightning lancer of Azava Arthur-

[74] honoured (some Finn, some Finn avant!), he skall wake from
earthsleep, haught crested elmer, in his valle of briers of Green-
man's Rise O, (lost leaders live! the heroes return!) and o'er dun
and dale the Wulverulverlord (protect us!) his mighty horn skall
roll, orland, roll.
For in those deyes his Deyus shall ask of Allprohome and call
to himm: Allprohome! And he make answer: Add some. Nor
wink nor wunk. Animadiabolum, mene credidisti mortuum?
Silence was in thy faustive halls, O Truiga, when thy green
woods went dry but there will be sounds of manymirth on the
night's ear ringing when our pantriarch of Comestowntonobble
gets the pullover on his boots.
Liverpoor? Sot a bit of it! His braynes coolt parritch, his pelt
nassy, his heart's adrone, his bluidstreams acrawl, his puff but a
piff, his extremeties extremely so: Fengless, Pawmbroke, Chil-
blaimend and Baldowl. Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no
no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all
like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping.
Drain. Sdops.
[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the end of Finnegans Wake Chapter 3, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.

Join us for Episode 16 when Richard begins Chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake. This podcast series is taking a short break between chapters to focus on the film production of future chapters, so please note that the exact date of the next episode’s release is to be determined, and we’ll then resume our fortnightly podcast releases every other Thursday. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete film of Chapter 1, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, including the March 2025 screening of Chapter 3 at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, join our mailing list, also on our website.

One Little Goat Theatre Company is a nonprofit, artist-driven, registered charity in the United States and Canada that depends on donations from individuals to make our productions, including this one, possible. If you’re able, please make a tax-deductible donation through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support!

And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Podcast production by Sean Rasmussen; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Brandon Bak on drums, and recorded at Sound Department in Toronto. A big thanks to our wonderful live audience of Sandi Becker, David Mackett, Andrew Moodie, Cathy Murphy, Nomi Rotbard, Arlo Rotbard-Seelig, Adam Seelig, Aaron Tucker and Catherine Vaneri. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. Thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie and to Music Consultants Warwick Harte and Kevin Kennedy. Thank you for listening!

[Music fades out]

[End of Ep015]

Mentioned: cloud and ‘spit-fog’ at start of Ch03 becomes rain at end, “recirculation,” Bob Marley’s “Running Away,” Twilight Zone ‘the enemy is us,’ Earwicker as his own worst enemy, The Hole in the Wall Pub near Phoenix Park, 1798 Irish Rebellion song “By Memory Inspired,” Dublin lock-out of 1913, HCE locked in his “archicitadel,” muckraker Herr Betreffender, fall of man, Betreffender’s 111 insults, dialogue of God and Abraham/“Allprohome,” Mel Brooks History of the World, Dublin anthropomorphized as HCE’s body, rain, sleep, synopsis.

Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles, University of California Press, 1977.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Raphael Slepon, fweet.org
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Episode 014: reel world! (p. 63:20-69:4)

January 23, 2025 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 014: REEL WORLD!

PAGE 63:20-69:4 | 2025-01-23

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 14, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 63 to 69 from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. For the next five years, One Little Goat will film and record all 17 chapters (roughly 30 Hours) of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake before live audiences in various locations, screening and releasing them along along the way, with the aim of completing the entire book in time for its 90th birthday, May 4, 2029. One Little Goat Theatre Company is an official charity in Canada and the United States — if you’d like to support our work, please visit us online at www.OneLittleGoat.org to make a charitable donation. And if monetary support is not an option, you can still help this podcast by rating and reviewing it and by spreading the word. To get in touch, you’ll find our email address on the One Little Goat Theatre Company website and we’d love to hear from you.
[Music fades out]

Adam Seelig: Let’s go to the movies, or in the words of today’s excerpt, “the reel world,” spelled r-e-e-l, as in a reel of film.

**Kathleen Ferrier sings “The Keel Row”.**

Echoing the chorus of “The Keel Row,” a Scottish traditional that goes something like… “weel may the keel row,/ The keel row, the keel row,/ O weel may the keel row/ That my laddie's in,” today’s Finnegans Wake excerpt transports this 18th-century shanty from the River Tyne to the modern world of the cinema: “roll away the reel world, the reel world, the reel world!” (25:6)

Joyce was seriously interested in the new medium of film, and was instrumental, if not entirely successful, in bringing cinema to Ireland in early last century. In 1909, while living in Trieste, Joyce persuaded several Italian businessmen to open a movie theatre in Dublin by hooking them with this clever sales pitch: “I know a city of 500,000 inhabitants,” he said, “where there is not a single cinema” (Ellmann 301). By 1910, thanks to Joyce’s efforts, Dublin’s first movie theatre, named the Volta, was screening films. Joyce’s affiliation with the Volta was short-lived, lasting less than a year, but it attests to his enthusiasm for the growing medium of film. (The screening room at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, incidentally, where One Little Goat’s films of Finnegans Wake have played, is naturally named The Volta Room.)

It's also worth noting Joyce’s influence on, admiration for, and meetings with a titan of cinematic art, Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), who directed the 1925 landmark film Battleship Potemkin and invented that essential film technique known as the montage. Joyce’s Ulysses was one of Eisenstein’s favourite books, a risky aesthetic preference for the Russian filmmaker given official Soviet hostility toward Joyce. One Soviet functionary dismissed Joyce’s writing as “a heap of dung” (Bergan 261) — a not entirely inaccurate characterization had it referred to Finnegans Wake in light of the “tip” or mound of crap we encounter in “the museyroom” of Chapter 1 (Ep003) — while Moscow’s official newspaper, Pravda, got far more specific and nasty in its denunciation of Ulysses, equally applicable to Finnegans Wake, as “written in English that can hardly be understood by Englishmen… Its style reminds one of the delirious babblings of a mad philosopher who has mixed all the known languages into one monstrous mess” (Bergan 280). What Eisenstein loved in Joyce’s work — to the point where he considered Ulysses “the Bible of the new Cinema” (Bergan 185) — was the “exceptionally musical prose” and technique of simultaneity, the verbal fugue of it all (Ep002 & Ep003), or, in Eisenstein’s own words, “unfolding the display of events simultaneously with a particular manner in which these events pass through the consciousness and feelings, the associations and emotions” of a character (Bergan 185). It’s no wonder, then, that Eisenstein yearned to adapt Ulysses to the screen and that Joyce once commented that if Ulysses were ever filmed, the Russian was one of only two filmmakers who could pull it off (Bergan 185).

Like all art, film can be an escape not merely from but into reality. The r-e-e-l “reel world” is in itself an r-e-a-l ‘real world.’

If the short “reel” we’re about to watch, so to speak, in today’s excerpt had a title, it would be “a strawberry frolic” (64:28), and like so much in the Wake, the “frolic” in question is sexual in nature. Before the reel begins, we’re exhorted to cherchez la femme (here it’s “Cherchons la flamme!” (64:28)), the French expression that literally means ‘look for the woman’ and figuratively means that at the heart of the story, there’s a woman to blame for a man’s misdeeds and downfall. Look, in other words, for the femme fatale. Is this suggesting Eve and her apple, and her man Adam who took the bait, corresponding respectively to our protagonists Annalivia and Earwicker? As the film reel loads onto the projector, we hear the sound of a French woman, or femme, not once, but twice: “Fammfamm! Fammfamm!” (64:28-9) So there are two women involved? This is starting to sound scandalous, and where there’s scandal, HCEarwicker can’t be far away. That’s because the film we’re about to watch is an entertaining adaptation of Earwicker’s alleged sin involving two girls in Phoenix Park (Ep008).

**Benny Hill and two unnamed women in The Daily Mail.**

We don’t have to go as far back as the original sin of Adam/Earwicker in the Garden of Eden/Phoenix Park to follow this scandal; its inspiration is contemporary to Joyce, as Edmund Epstein explains: “another scandal is uncovered — the great Daddy and Peaches Browning scandal of the 1920s in New York. Daddy Browning, a retired taxi-company millionaire, took up with a pudgy 16-year-old whom he nicknamed Peaches. The scandal sheet the New York Graphic (the PornoGraphic, some called it) picked up the juicy morsel and ran with it” (Epstein 44–45). The suggested ménage à trois in the short reel we’ll soon hear also anticipates the horny hijinks of English entertainer Benny Hill (1925–92), whose favourite form of sketch comedy involved young, scantily clad women flirtatiously surrounding the older Hill (over the hill?) himself. Recently, England’s Daily Mail, no stranger to salacious tabloid journalism, sanctimoniously described Hill’s comedy as sexist, to which the character Nigel in the 1984 cult film Spinal Tap might innocently ask, “What’s wrong with being sexy?” (On a side note, this may be the first and only time Battleship Potemkin and Spinal Tap are mentioned in the same piece.)

Going back to our 1939 novel, the “reel world” risqué comedy sketch in today’s excerpt is one page long and a lot of fun to hear Richard read. It ends with “Finny” (65:33), as if to announce “the end” in Italian while echoing the name of Earwicker’s avatar, our book’s eponymous Tim “Finnegan,” who ends (and begins), falls (and rises), again and again.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the rest of today’s excerpt before we get to Richard’s reading.

We left off last episode with our protagonist, HCEarwicker, fleeing “the terror of Errorland” (62:25) only to be subjected to new terrors, with a tall, masked assailant pulling a gun on him.

Now our protagonist appears to be both inside-and-outside a pub both attacking-and-defending himself, somewhat drunkenly; or maybe the attacker is the Cad from Chapter 2 (Ep008) banging at the pub’s door after closing, with the pub appearing to be back in Dublin since its name, “the Mullingcan Inn” (64:9), bears near perfect resemblance to the Mullingar Inn (Ep003), which backs onto Phoenix Park.

We then take “Just one moment” (64:22) to set up the short film reel mentioned earlier and we’re off to the movies to encounter the threesome scandal. The reel ends with “Finny”, and is followed by “Ack, ack, ack” (65:34), which Epstein suggests is the sound of the film flapping once it’s reached the end of its reel (55). (For those accustomed to our current, quieter digital era of movie projection, I have linked in this episode’s transcript to an ‘end-of-film-reel’ “ack-ack-ack-ish” sound effect.)

We then learn that a letter in defence of HCE written by his spouse ALP should land at any moment and vindicate him, clearing him of the scandal that constantly surrounds him. This vital letter will appear in Chapter 5, which we can look forward to.

We then seem to go deeper into HCE’s unconscious, where we find him blaming women for his alleged sins — they teased him, he was pranked (68:22), etc. — but the last two words of today’s excerpt, “whispered sins” (69:4), remind us of the merciless rumours HCE is trying and repeatedly failing to escape.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 63 line 20 to page 69 line 4 for the continuation of Chapter 3. The performance was shot and recorded at my home in Toronto on October 2, 2023 with a live audience. The film premiered at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, European Union Film Festival, and Bloomsday Film Festival at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. The opening music you’ll hear is my own arrangement of “The Keel Row,” the 18th-century Scottish traditional referenced in the “reel world” in today’s excerpt, with Brandon Bak on drums and Adam Seelig, yours truly, on piano.

[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 63:20-69:4.]

[63] Fifthly, how parasoliloquisingly truetoned on his first time of
hearing the wretch's statement that, muttering Irish, he had had
had o'gloriously a'lot too much hanguest or hoshoe fine to
drink in the House of Blazes, the Parrot in Hell, the Orange Tree,
the Glibt, the Sun, the Holy Lamb and, lapse not leashed, in
Ramitdown's ship hotel since the morning moment he could
dixtinguish a white thread from a black till the engine of the
laws declosed unto Murray and was only falling fillthefluthered
up against the gatestone pier which, with the cow's bonnet
a'top o'it, he falsetook for a cattlepillar with purest peaceablest
intentions. Yet how lamely hobbles the hoy of his then pseudo-
jocax axplanation how, according to his own story, he vas a
process server and was merely trying to open zozimus a bottlop
stoub by mortially hammering his magnum bonum (the curter the
club the sorer the savage) against the bludgey gate for the boots
about the swan, Maurice Behan, who hastily into his shoes with
nothing his hald barra tinnteack and came down with homp,

[64] shtemp and jumphet to the tiltyard from the wastes a'sleep in his
obi ohny overclothes or choker, attracted by the norse of guns
playing Delandy is cartager on the raglar rock to Dulyn, said
war' prised safe in bed as he dreamed that he'd wealthes in mor-
mon halls when wokenp by a fourth loud snore out of his land
of byelo while hickstrey's maws was grazing in the moonlight
by hearing hammering on the pandywhank scale emanating from
the blind pig and anything like it (oonagh! oonagh!) in the
whole history of the Mullingcan Inn he never. This battering
babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in
the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose
which would not rouse him out o'slumber deep but reminded
him loads more of the martiallawsey marses of foreign musi-
kants' instrumongs or the overthrewer to the third last days of
Pompery, if anything. And that after this most nooningless
knockturn the young reine came down desperate and the old
liffopotamus started ploring all over the plains, as mud as she
cud be, ruinating all the bouchers' schurts and the backers'
wischandtugs so that be the chandeleure of the Rejaneyjailey
they were all night wasching the walters of, the weltering walters
off. Whyte.
Just one moment. A pinch in time of the ideal, musketeers!
Alphos, Burkos and Caramis, leave Astrelea for the astrollajerries
and for the love of the saunces and the honour of Keavens pike
puddywhackback to Pamintul. And roll away the reel world, the
reel world, the reel world! And call all your smokeblushes,
Snowwhite and Rosered, if you will have the real cream! Now for
a strawberry frolic! Filons, filoosh! Cherchons la flamme! Famm-
famm! Fammfamm!
Come on, ordinary man with that large big nonobli head, and
that blanko berbecked fischial ekksprezzion Machinsky Scapolo-
polos, Duzinascu or other. Your machelar's mutton leg's getting
musclebound from being too pulled. Noah Beery weighed stone
thousand one when Hazel was a hen. Now her fat's falling fast.
Therefore, chatbags, why not yours? There are 29 sweet reasons
why blossomtime's the best. Elders fall for green almonds when

[65] they're raised on bruised stone root ginger though it winters on
their heads as if auctumned round their waistbands. If you'd had
pains in your hairs you wouldn't look so orgibald. You'd have
Colley Macaires on your lump of lead. Now listen, Mr Leer!
And stow that sweatyfunnyadams Simper! Take an old geeser
who calls on his skirt. Note his sleek hair, so elegant, tableau
vivant. He vows her to be his own honeylamb, swears they will
be papa pals, by Sam, and share good times way down west in a
guaranteed happy lovenest when May moon she shines and they
twit twinkle all the night, combing the comet's tail up right and
shooting popguns at the stars. Creampuffs all to dime! Every
nice, missymackenzies! For dear old grumpapar, he's gone on
the razzledar, through gazing and crazing and blazing at the stars.
Compree! She wants her wardrobe to hear from above by return
with cash so as she can buy her Peter Robinson trousseau and cut
a dash with Arty, Bert or possibly Charley Chance (who knows?)
so tolloll Mr Hunker you're too dada for me to dance (so off she
goes!) and that's how half the gels in town has got their bottom
drars while grumpapar he's trying to hitch his braces on to his
trars. But old grum he's not so clean dippy between sweet you
and yum (not on your life, boy! not in those trousers! not by a
large jugful!) for someplace on the sly, where Furphy he isn't by,
old grum has his gel number two (bravevow, our Grum!) and he
would like to canoodle her too some part of the time for he is
downright fond of his number one but O he's fair mashed on
peaches number two so that if he could only canoodle the two,
chivee chivoo, all three would feel genuinely happy, it's as simple
as A. B. C., the two mixers, we mean, with their cherrybum
chappy (for he is simply shamming dippy) if they all were afloat
in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two in his zoo-doo-you-doo,
a tofftoff for thee, missymissy for me and howcameyou-e'enso for
Farber, in his tippy, upindown dippy, tiptoptippy canoodle, can
you? Finny.
Ack, ack, ack. With which clap, trap and soddenment, three to
a loaf, our mutual friends the fender and the bottle at the gate seem
to be implicitly in the same bateau, so to singen, bearing also

[66] several of the earmarks of design, for there is in fact no use in
putting a tooth in a snipery of that sort and the amount of all
those sort of things which has been going on onceaday in and
twiceaday out every other nachtistag among all kinds of pro-
miscious individuals at all ages in private homes and reeboos
publikiss and allover all and elsewhere throughout secular
sequence the country over and overabroad has been particularly
stupendous. To be continued. Federals' Uniteds' Transports'
Unions' for Exultations' of Triumphants' Ecstasies.
But resuming inquiries. Will it ever be next morning the postal
unionist's (officially called carrier's, Letters Scotch, Limited)
strange fate (Fierceendgiddyex he's hight, d.e., the losel that
hucks around missivemaids' gummibacks) to hand in a huge
chain envelope, written in seven divers stages of ink, from blanch-
essance to lavandaiette, every pothook and pancrook bespaking
the wisherwife, superscribed and subpencilled by yours A Laugh-
able Party, with afterwite, S.A.G., to Hyde and Cheek, Eden-
berry, Dubblenn, WC? Will whatever will be written in lappish
language with inbursts of Maggyer always seem semposed, black
looking white and white guarding black, in that siamixed twoa-
talk used twist stern swift and jolly roger? Will it bright upon us,
nightle, and we plunging to our plight? Well, it might now, mircle,
so it light. Always and ever till Cox's wife, twice Mrs Hahn, pokes
her beak into the matter with Owen K. after her, to see whawa
smutter after, will this kiribis pouch filled with litterish frag-
ments lurk dormant in the paunch of that halpbrother of a herm,
a pillarbox? The coffin, a triumph of the illusionist's art, at first
blench naturally taken for a handharp (it is handwarp to tristin-
guishjubabe from jabule or either from tubote when all three
have just been invened) had been removed from the hardware
premises of Oetzmann and Nephew, a noted house of the gone-
most west, which in the natural course of all things continues to
supply funeral requisites of every needed description. Why nee-
ded, though? Indeed needed (wouldn't you feel like rattanfowl
if you hadn't the oscar!) because the flash brides or bride in
their lily boleros one games with at the Nivynubies' finery ball

[67]and your upright grooms that always come right up with you
(and by jingo when they do!) what else in this mortal world,
now ours, when meet there night, mid their nackt, me there na-
ket, made their nought the hour strikes, would bring them right-
came back in the flesh, thumbs down, to their orses and their
hashes.
To proceed. We might leave that nitrience of oxagiants to take
its free of the air and just analectralyse that very chymerical com-
bination, the gasbag where the warderworks. And try to pour
somour heiterscene up thealmostfere. In the bottled heliose case
continuing, Long Lally Tobkids, the special, sporting a fine breast
of medals, and a conscientious scripturereader to boot in the brick
and tin choorch round the coroner, swore like a Norewheezian
tailliur on the stand before the proper functionary that he was up
against a right querrshnorrt of a mand in the butcher of the blues
who, he guntinued, on last epening after delivering some car-
casses mattonchepps and meatjutes on behalf of Messrs Otto
Sands and Eastman, Limericked, Victuallers, went and, with his
unmitigated astonissment, hickicked at the dun and dorass against
all the runes and, when challenged about the pretended hick (it
was kickup and down with him) on his solemn by the imputant
imputed, said simply: I appop pie oath, Phillyps Captain. You
did, as I sostressed before. You are deepknee in error, sir, Madam
Tomkins, let me then tell you, replied with a gentlewomanly
salaam MackPartland, (the meatman's family, and the oldest in
the world except nick, name.) And Phelps was flayful with his
peeler. But his phizz fell.
Now to the obverse. From velveteens to dimities is barely a
fivefinger span and hence these camelback excesses are thought
to have been instigated by one or either of the causing causes of
all, those rushy hollow heroines in their skirtsleeves, be she ma-
gretta be she the posque. Oh! Oh! Because it is a horrible thing
to have to say to say to day but one dilalah, Lupita Lorette, short-
ly after in a fit of the unexpectednesses drank carbolic with all
her dear placid life before her and paled off while the other
soiled dove that's her sister-in-love, Luperca Latouche, finding

[68] one day while dodging chores that she stripped teasily for binocu-
lar man and that her jambs were jimpjoyed to see each other, the
nautchy girly soon found her fruitful hat too small for her and
rapidly taking time, look, she rapidly took to necking, partying
and selling her spare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets
or in the greenawn ad huck (there are certain intimacies in all
ladies' lavastories we just lease to imagination) or in the sweet
churchyard close itself for a bit of soft coal or an array of thin
trunks, serving whom in fine that same hot coney a la Zingara
which our own little Graunya of the chilired cheeks dished up
to the greatsire of Oscar, that son of a Coole. Houri of the coast
of emerald, arrah of the lacessive poghue, Aslim-all-Muslim, the
resigned to her surrender, did not she, come leinster's even, true
dotter of a dearmud, (her pitch was Forty Steps and his perch old
Cromwell's Quarters) with so valkirry a licence as sent many a
poor pucker packing to perdition, again and again, ay, and again
sfidare him, tease fido, eh tease fido, eh eh tease fido, toos top-
ples topple, stop, dug of a dog of a dgiaour, ye! Angealousmei!
And did not he, like Arcoforty, farfar off Bissavolo, missbrand
her behaveyous with iridescent huecry of down right mean false
sop lap sick dope? Tawfulsdreck! A reine of the shee, a shebeen
quean, a queen of pranks. A kingly man, of royal mien, regally
robed, exalted be his glory! So gave so take: Now not, not now!
He would just a min. Suffering trumpet! He thought he want.
Whath? Hear, O hear, living of the land! Hungreb, dead era,
hark! He hea, eyes ravenous on her lippling lills. He hear her voi
of day gon by. He hears! Zay, zay, zay! But, by the beer of his
profit, he cannot answer. Upterputty till rise and shine! Nor needs
none shaft ne stele from Phenicia or Little Asia to obelise on
the spout, neither pobalclock neither folksstone, nor sunkenness
in Tomar's Wood to bewray how erpressgangs score off the rued.
The mouth that tells not will ever attract the unthinking tongue
and so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear not so long
till allearth's dumbnation shall the blind lead the deaf. Tatcho,
tawney yeeklings! The column of lumps lends the pattrin of the
leaves behind us. If violence to life, limb and chattels, often as

[69] not, has been the expression, direct or through an agent male, of
womanhid offended, (ah! ah!), has not levy of black mail from
the times the fairies were in it, and fain for wilde erthe blothoms
followed an impressive private reputation for whispered sins?

[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 63 to 69 of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.

Join us for Episode 15 in a fortnight when Richard concludes his reading of Chapter 3. To be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete film of Chapter 1, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website.

See you in two weeks!
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support! And thank you to the artists for this episode: Richard Harte; Sound by William Bembridge; Podcast production by Sean Rasmussen; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig; Music arranged and performed on the piano by me, with Brandon Bak on drums, and recorded at Sound Department in Toronto. A big thanks to our wonderful live audience of Sandi Becker, David Mackett, Andrew Moodie, Cathy Murphy, Nomi Rotbard, Arlo Rotbard-Seelig, Adam Seelig, Aaron Tucker and Catherine Vaneri. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. Thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie and to Music Consultants Warwick Harte and Kevin Kennedy. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]

[End of Ep014]

Mentioned: “the reel world,” “The Keel Row” song, James Joyce and cinema, film, Dublin’s first movie theatre the Volta, Sergei Eisenstein, “a strawberry frolic,” cherchez la femme, ménage à trois, Peaches and Daddy Browning scandal, Benny Hill, synopsis.

Cited: Ronald Bergan. Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (1997). New York, Arcade, 2016.

Episode 013: I dream therefore I become (p. 58:23-63:19)

January 9, 2025 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 013: I DREAM THEREFORE I BECOME

PAGE 58:23-63:19 | 2025-01-09

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 13, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 58 to 63 from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

Adam Seelig: I dream, therefore I become.

I’ll soon describe how this statement relates to today’s excerpt and to Finnegans Wake in general.

In pursuit of our ever-elusive protagonist, H. C. Earwicker, we left off last episode with “strongers” versus “softsies,” two opposing groups of Dubliners. The former are in favour of punishing HCE for his alleged misdemeanors, the latter prefer to defend him, seeing his actions as “human, erring and condonable” (58:16-19) — note here the initials for each word, H, E & C, drawing on HCE’s monogram. While “the unfacts… are too imprecisely few” (57:16-17) about the wrongs Earwicker may have committed and where he may have escaped, Finnegans Wake is still determined to find out.

**Banksy’s first artwork in Ireland? This photo of ‘lost boy’ was posted in spring 2024 by Galway Tourism.**

Today’s excerpt opens with a fact-finding mission, the narrative moving door-to-door and person-to-person to gather information on our protagonist. We saw in Chapter 2 how gossip spread across Dublin about Earwicker’s alleged misdemeanour in Phoenix Park — a hazy event involving a cad, two girls and three soldiers (Ep008). Now we’re going to get the word on the street, so to speak. Think of it as journalistic reportage, the result being a series of soundbites from a series of interviews, much as you might encounter on the nightly news. Or more specifically, think of the media’s many street interviews over the years in search of one of the world’s most mysterious people, the graffiti artist Banksy. The more testimony gathered, it seems, the less identifiable the person in question.

Here we have 20 different Dubliners providing 20 different takes on Earwicker, some attacking him (the “strongers”), others defending (the “softsies”), all of them comically contradictory and unreliable, including soundbites from three soldiers, an actress, an Irish jaunting car driver, a sweaty-and-out-of-breath tennis player, “a wouldbe martyr” (60:16), a teenage revivalist, a girl detective terrifically named Sylvia Silence (61:1) and many others. Adaline Glasheen elegantly observes that this reportage opens with three soldiers blaming two girls for Earwicker’s fall, and closes the other way around, with two girls indicating three soldiers are behind it (xxxiii). Ultimately, this mishmash of testimony brings us no closer to finding Earwicker and the sin he may have committed, but it does clearly testify to James Joyce’s — not to mention Richard Harte’s — exceptional ear and register for Dublin dialogue.

When I first read this reportage section along with Richard, I was curious about its many Buddhist references woven throughout. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha himself, is mentioned, although this being Joyce, he merges with Sir Arthur Guinness of Guinness brewing fame to become “Sid Arthar” (59:7). Other Buddhist references here include Maya-prajapati, Buddha’s stepmother (59:14); Arata-Kalama and Asita, two Buddhist hermits (59:24 & 60:16); Buddha’s sister teaching the Buddha to wear bracelets (60:17); Sakya Muni, another name for the Buddha (60:19); the tree where Buddha meditated (60:20); Apsaras, the maidens who entertained the young Buddha (60:20); and nirvana, Buddhism’s celebrated concept of enlightenment, which here becomes “nearvanashed” (61:18).

Why so much about this 2,500-year-old religious figure, the Buddha (c.563–c.460 BCE)?

I can answer that question with the help of Karen Armstrong’s biography on the Buddha, appropriately titled Buddha. The following quote from Armstrong’s outstanding book not only provides a key to the Buddhist motif vis-à-vis the ever-shifting identity of Earwicker, it also provides a key to the ever-shifting narrative of Finnegans Wake as a whole. Here’s Armstrong:

The terms “self” and “myself” were simply conventions. The personality had no fixed or changeless core. […] Every sentient being was in a state of constant flux; he or she was merely a succession of temporary, mutable states of existence.

The Buddha pressed this message home throughout his life. Where the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) would declare “I think, therefore I am,” the Buddha came to the opposite conclusion. The more he thought, in the mindful, yogic way he had developed, the clearer it seemed that what we call the “self” is a delusion. In his view, the more closely we examine ourselves, the harder it becomes to find anything that we can pinpoint as a fixed entity. The human personality was not a static being to which things happened. Put under the microscope of yogic analysis, each person was a process. The Buddha liked to use such metaphors as a blazing fire or a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another. At each second, a fire was different; it had consumed and re-created itself, just as people did. In a particularly vivid simile, the Buddha compared the human mind to a monkey ranging through the forest: “it grabs one branch, and then, letting that go, seizes another.” What we experience as the “self” is really just a convenience-term, because we are constantly changing. In the same way, milk can become, successively, curds, butter, ghee, and fine-extract of ghee. There is no point in calling any one of these transformations “milk,” even though there is a sense in which it is correct to do so. (111-112)

**René Descartes, engraving by unknown artist, 17th century,** **National Portrait Gallery** **London.**

As we heard from ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the previous podcast episode (Ep012), “No one ever steps in the same river twice.” So too, as we just heard Armstrong describe, “the Buddha liked to use such metaphors as a […] a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another.” And Buddhism’s conception of a person as a flexible process rather than fixed-and-finished now leads me to adapt Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) to the riverrunning stream of unconsciousness that comprises the flowing dream language of Finnegans Wake: I dream, therefore I become.

**Nora Barnacle, photo by Berenice Abbott, 1926.**

Following this reportage section with its Buddhist motif, we learn of Earwicker’s flight from the terror of Ireland/Errorland with a female Catholic (or “papishee”), much as Joyce eloped with Nora Barnacle (1884-1951) in 1904.

The next paragraph opens with one of my favourite sentences, a sentence that addresses and includes us, the audience collectively reading the Wake, as the narrative conveys us to a zone reminiscent of the 3,500-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead. It’s a zone most fitting for anyone attending a wake: “We seem to us (the real Us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black.” (62:26-27)

**Spells of Coming Forth by Day, the original Egyptian name for the Book of The Dead (Wikipedia**).

We then hear about a tall, masked man pulling a gun on HCE, although this anecdote, as another one of my favourite sentences indicates, is likely spurious: “But how transparingly nontrue, gentlewriter!” (63:9-10)

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 58 line 23 to page 63 line 19 for the continuation of Chapter 3.

The performance was shot and recorded at my home in Toronto on October 2, 2023 with a live audience. The film premiered at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, European Union Film Festival, and Bloomsday Film Festival at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

The brief opening music you’ll hear is my own arrangement of “We Be Soldiers Three,” a 17th-century folk song referenced in the first sentence of today’s excerpt, with Brandon Bak on drums and Adam Seelig, yours truly, on piano.

[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 58:23-63:19.]

[58] Tap and pat and tapatagain, (fire firstshot, Missiers the Refusel-
eers! Peingpeong! For saxonlootie!) three tommix, soldiers free,
cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream. Guards were walking,
in (pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie, eh?) Montgomery Street. One
voiced an opinion in which on either wide (pardonnez!), nod-
ding, all the Finner Camps concurred (je vous en prie, eh?). It
was the first woman, they said, souped him, that fatal wellesday,
Lili Coninghams, by suggesting him they go in a field. Wroth
mod eldfar, ruth redd stilstand, wrath wrackt wroth, confessed
private Pat Marchison retro. (Terse!) Thus contenters with san-
toys play. One of our coming Vauxhall ontheboards who is
resting for the moment (she has been callit by a noted stagey ele-
cutioner a wastepacket Sittons) was interfeud in a waistend pewty
parlour. Looking perhaps even more pewtyflushed in her cherry-

[59] derry padouasoys, girdle and braces by the halfmoon and Seven
Stars, russets from the Blackamoor's Head, amongst the climbing
boys at his Eagle and Child and over the corn and hay emptors
at their Black and All Black, Mrs F . . . A . . . saidaside, half in
stage of whisper to her confidante glass, while recoopering her
cartwheel chapot (ahat! — and we now know what thimbles a
baquets on lallance a talls mean), she hoped Sid Arthar would
git a Chrissman's portrout of orange and lemonsized orchids with
hollegs and ether, from the feeatre of the Innocident, as the
worryld had been uncained. Then, while it is odrous comparison-
ing to the sprangflowers of his burstday which was a virid-
able goddinpotty for the reinworms and the charlattinas and all
branches of climatitis, it has been such a wanderful noyth untirely,
added she, with many regards to Maha's pranjapansies. (Tart!)
Prehistoric, obitered to his dictaphone an entychologist: his pro-
penomen is a properismenon. A dustman nocknamed Seven-
churches in the employ of Messrs Achburn, Soulpetre and
Ashreborn, prairmakers, Glintalook, was asked by the sisterhood
the vexed question during his midday collation of leaver and
buckrom alternatively with stenk and kitteney phie in a hash-
housh and, thankeaven, responsed impulsively: We have just been
propogandering his nullity suit and what they took out of his ear
among my own crush. All our fellows at O'Dea's sages with
Aratar Calaman he is a cemented brick, buck it all! A more nor
usually sober cardriver, who was jauntingly hosing his runabout,
Ginger Jane, took a strong view. Lorry hosed her as he talked
and this is what he told rewritemen: Irewaker is just a plain pink
joint reformee in private life but folks all have it by brehemons
laws he has parliamentary honours. Eiskaffier said (Louigi's, you
know that man's, brillant Savourain): Mon foie, you wish to ave
some homelette, yes, lady! Good, mein leber! Your hegg he must
break himself. See, I crack, so, he sit in the poele, umbedimbt!
A perspirer (over sixty) who was keeping up his tennises panted
he kne ho har twa to clect infamatios but a diffpair flannels climb
wall and trespassing on doorbell. After fullblown Braddon hear
this fresky troterella! A railways barmaid's view (they call her

[60] Spilltears Rue) was thus expressed: to sympathisers of the Dole
Line, Death Avenue, anent those objects of her pity-prompted
ministrance, to wet, man and his syphon. Ehim! It is ever too
late to whissle when Phyllis floods her stable. It would be skar-
lot shame to jailahim in lockup, as was proposed to him by the
Seddoms creature what matter what merrytricks went off with
his revulverher in connections with ehim being a norphan and
enjoining such wicked illth, ehim! Well done, Drumcollakill!
Kitty Tyrrel is proud of you, was the reply of a B.O.T. official
(O blame gnot the board!) while the Daughters Benkletter mur-
mured in uniswoon: Golforgilhisjurylegs! Brian Lynsky, the cub
curser, was questioned at his shouting box, Bawlonabraggat, and
gave a snappy comeback, when saying: Paw! Once more I'll
hellbowl! I am for caveman chase and sahara sex, burk you! Them
two bitches ought to be leashed, canem! Up hog and hoar hunt!
Paw! A wouldbe martyr, who is attending on sanit Asitas where
he is being taught to wear bracelets, when grilled on the point,
revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that
so long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the
mysttetry, with shady apsaras sheltering in his leaves' licence and
his shadowers torrifried by the potent bolts of indradiction, there
would be fights all over Cuxhaven. (Tosh!) Missioner Ida Womb-
well, the seventeenyearold revivalist, said concerning the coinci-
dent of interfizzing with grenadines and other respectable and
disgusted peersons using the park: That perpendicular person is
a brut! But a magnificent brut! 'Caligula' (Mr Danl Magrath,
bookmaker, wellknown to Eastrailian poorusers of the Sydney
Parade Ballotin) was, as usual, antipodal with his: striving todie,
hopening tomellow, Ware Splash. Cobbler. We have meat two
hourly, sang out El Caplan Buycout, with the famous padre's
turridur's capecast, meet too ourly, matadear! Dan Meiklejohn,
precentor, of S.S. Smack and Olley's was probiverbal with his
upsiduxit: mutatus mutandus. Dauran's lord ('Sniffpox') and Moir-
gan's lady ('Flatterfun') took sides and crossed and bowed to
each other's views and recrossed themselves. The dirty dubs upin
their flies, went too free, echoed the dainly drabs downin their

[61] scenities, una mona. Sylvia Silence, the girl detective (Meminerva,
but by now one hears turtlings all over Doveland!) when supplied
with informations as to the several facets of the case in her cozy-
dozy bachelure's flat, quite overlooking John a'Dream's mews,
leaned back in her really truly easy chair to query restfully through
her vowelthreaded syllabelles: Have you evew thought, wepow-
tew, that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy? Nevewtheless ac-
cowding to my considewed attitudes fow this act he should pay
the full penalty, pending puwsuance, as pew Subsec. 32, section
II, of the C. L. A. act 1885, anything in this act to the contwawy
notwithstanding. Jarley Jilke began to silke for he couldn't get
home to Jelsey but ended with: He's got the sack that helped him
moult instench of his gladsome rags. Meagher, a naval rating,
seated on one of the granite cromlech setts of our new fish-
shambles for the usual aireating after the ever popular act, with
whom were Questa and Puella, piquante and quoite, (this had a
cold in her brain while that felt a sink in her summock, wit's
wat, wot's wet) was encouraged, although nearvanashed himself,
by one of his co-affianced to get your breath, Walt, and gobbit
and when ther chidden by her fastra sastra to saddle up your
pance, Naville, thus cor replied to her other's thankskissing: I
lay my two fingerbuttons, fiancee Meagher, (he speaks!) he was
to blame about your two velvetthighs up Horniman's Hill — as
hook and eye blame him or any other piscman? — but I also
think, Puellywally, by the siege of his trousers there was some-
one else behind it — you bet your boughtem blarneys — about
their three drummers down Keysars Lane. (Trite!).
Be these meer marchant taylor's fablings of a race referend
with oddman rex? Is now all seenheard then forgotten? Can it
was, one is fain in this leaden age of letters now to wit, that so
diversified outrages (they have still to come!) were planned and
partly carried out against so staunch a covenanter if it be true
than any of those recorded ever took place for many, we trow,
beyessed to and denayed of, are given to us by some who use
the truth but sparingly and we, on this side ought to sorrow for
their pricking pens on that account. The seventh city, Urovivla,

[62] his citadear of refuge, whither (would we believe the laimen and
their counts), beyond the outraved gales of Atreeatic, changing
clues with a baggermalster, the hejirite had fled, silentioussue-
meant under night's altosonority, shipalone, a raven of the wave,
(be mercy, Mara! A he whence Rahoulas!) from the ostmen's
dirtby on the old vic, to forget in expiating manslaughter and,
reberthing in remarriment out of dead seekness to devine previ-
dence, (if you are looking for the bilder deep your ear on the
movietone!) to league his lot, palm and patte, with a papishee.
For mine qvinne I thee giftake and bind my hosenband I thee
halter. The wastobe land, a lottuse land, a luctuous land, Emerald-
illuim, the peasant pastured, in which by the fourth commandment
with promise his days apostolic were to be long by the abundant
mercy of Him Which Thundereth From On High, murmured,
would rise against him with all which in them were, franchisab-
les and inhabitands, astea as agora, helotsphilots, do him hurt,
poor jink, ghostly following bodily, as were he made a curse for
them, the corruptible lay quick, all saints of incorruption of an
holy nation, the common or ere-in-garden castaway, in red re-
surrection to condemn so they might convince him, first pha-
roah, Humpheres Cheops Exarchas, of their proper sins. Busi-
ness bred to speak with a stiff upper lip to all men and most occa-
sions the Man we wot of took little short of fighting chances but
for all that he or his or his care were subjected to the horrors of
the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)
We seem to us (the real Us !) to be reading our Amenti in the
sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black. It was after the
show at Wednesbury that one tall man, humping a suspicious
parcel, when returning late amid a dense particular on his home
way from the second house of the Boore and Burgess Christy
Menestrels by the old spot, Roy's Corner, had a barkiss revolver
placed to his faced with the words: you're shot, major: by an un-
knowable assailant (masked) against whom he had been jealous
over, Lotta Crabtree or Pomona Evlyn. More than that Whenn
the Waylayer (not a Lucalizod diocesan or even of the Glenda-
lough see, but hailing fro' the prow of Little Britain), mention-

[63] ing in a bytheway that he, the crawsopper, had, in edition to
Reade's cutless centiblade, a loaded Hobson's which left only twin
alternatives as, viceversa, either he would surely shoot her, the
aunt, by pistol, (she could be okaysure of that!) or, failing of such,
bash in Patch's blank face beyond recognition, pointedly asked
with gaeilish gall wodkar blizzard's business Thornton had with
that Kane's fender only to be answered by the aggravated
assaulted that that that was the snaps for him, Midweeks, to sultry
well go and find out if he was showery well able. But how trans-
paringly nontrue, gentlewriter! His feet one is not a tall man, not
at all, man. No such parson. No such fender. No such lumber. No
such race. Was it supposedly in connection with a girls, Myramy
Huey or Colores Archer, under Flaggy Bridge (for ann there is
but one liv and hir newbridge is her old) or to explode his
twelvechamber and force a shrievalty entrance that the heavybuilt
Abelbody in a butcherblue blouse from One Life One Suit (a
men's wear store), with a most decisive bottle of single in his
possession, seized after dark by the town guard at Haveyou-
caught-emerod's temperance gateway was there in a gate's way.

[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 58 to 63 of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.

Join us for Episode 14 in a fortnight when Richard continues with the next five pages of Chapter 3, including the delightful “strawberry frolic” paragraph. To be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast, the complete film of Chapter 1, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website.

See you in two weeks!

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

[Music fades out]

[End of Ep013]

Mentioned: “I dream, therefore I become,” “strongers” vs. “softsies,” reportage, 20 Dubliners, HCE as Banksy, Buddhism motif, Karen Armstrong’s Buddha biography, “self” as process in flux, identity as changing stream, Heraclitus, Descartes, Nora Barnacle, Book of the Dead, “the real Us!”, synopsis.

Cited: Karen Armstrong, Buddha. Toronto, Penguin, 2001.

Episode 012: This river I step in (p. 53:7-58:22)

December 26, 2024 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 012 THIS RIVER I STEP IN

PAGE 53:7-58:22 | 2024-12-26

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 12, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 53 to 58 from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

As I record this in the last days of 2024, One Little Goat Theatre Company, a registered charity in the United States and Canada, is fundraising so we can keep offering our programming. For over 20 years we have been producing poetic theatre of the highest calibre, which wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of individuals like you. We love producing these recordings and films of Finnegans Wake — at the same time, they require money to produce. So please, if you’re financially able, take a moment to donate through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org, and click on “Contact & Donate.” All donations will receive an official tax receipt. Many many thanks to all of you who have already donated to One Little Goat — we really appreciate your support.

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

[Music fades out]

“This river I step in is not the river I stand in” — Eldon Garnet sculpture (“Time: and a Clock” 1995), Queen Street East bridge over the Don River in Toronto. Still from One Little Goat’s “*Finnegans Wake* Chapter 1” film (2023).

Adam Seelig: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.”

These words feature prominently across a bridge over Toronto’s Don River in a public art work by sculptor Eldon Garnet (“Time: and a Clock” 1995). The sculpted sentence, which you can see for yourself online in the opening montage of our Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 film, is a variation on the ancient aphorism of pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.6th century BCE):

“No one ever steps in the same river twice.”

**Heraclitus (detail) as depicted by Raphael in *The School of Athens*, c.1510.**

It’s a fitting way to think of the Wake’s everflowing (and sometimes overflowing) riverrun of words, languages, dreams, time and of course Dublin’s river Liffey itself, which, by very definition of a river, always runs. Everything, after all, changes; or as I often hear said succinctly, change is constant; or if we jump back once more to Heraclitus for another of his evocative phrases: “everything flows.”

Becoming over being. Heraclitus and Finnegans Wake emphasize the former over the latter, favouring flow and process over fixed product. The very language of the Wake, with its seemingly endless evocations of meaning — and also, let’s be honest, confusions and opacities of meaning — enacts this process, this flow, this becoming, this riverrun on every page.

In Music at the Heart of Thinking, Vancouver poet and former Poet Laureate of Canada Fred Wah (b.1939) writes about the elusiveness of linguistic signification in a way that can help us hear, look at and ultimately experience the many meanings generated by the Wake.

As Wah describes, meaning is not predictable. “As a sure thing, it eludes us.” It won’t “stand still long enough to get caught.”

While this describes Wah’s own writing, it could just as easily describe a reader’s experience of Finnegans Wake, especially because it anticipates one of the most pervasive questions from new and experienced readers alike, namely: What does this mean? Here, if you will, is Wah’s answer:

To say: “I don’t understand what this means,” is, at least, to recognize that “this” means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still warm ashes. The meaning available from language goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn’t a container, static and apparent. […] As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an understanding, to interpret. […] No single meaning is the right one because no “right ones” stand still long enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that’s strangely familiar, not quite what we expect, but familiar, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath. [… Meaning] can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought, music at the heart of thinking, go ahead (1-2)

And that’s how Fred Wah’s opening entry to Music at the Heart of Thinking leaves off: open ended without a closing period.

Just as the riverrun-language of the Wake often “eludes us,” so too does the character of Earwicker in Chapter 3; or to put it the other way around, just as Earwicker often eludes us in Chapter 3, so too does the language that follows him, reminding us that form and content in Finnegans Wake are one. As Samuel Beckett insisted, Finnegans Wake “is not about something; it is that something itself.”

So if Earwicker is on the lam in Chapter 3, the language is running away too. To borrow the words of Wah, the language will not “stand still long enough to get caught.” And perhaps there’s no better example of this in today’s excerpt than in the Casaconcordia paragraph on page 54, which presents such an extreme and obscene mashup of languages that it’s almost guaranteed to throw us off Earwicker’s trail. The Casaconcordia paragraph, as I promised at the end of last episode, presents Finnegans Wake at its polyglottal, ludicrous best.

“Casaconcordia” is a Joycean invention in Italian meaning “house of peace.” Edmund Epstein interprets it as a version of the United Nations (then known as the League of Nations); if so, this paragraph seems designed to take the piss out of the UN, figuratively and literally, as it starts off in a tearoom and ends up in the bathroom. The paragraph describes people at “sixes and seventies,” i.e. in disarray, and then invokes the parliaments of Bulgaria, Norway and Russia (the Sobranje, Storting and Duma, respectively, forgive my pronunciations), before entering the Casaconcordia/UN. Here’s how that setup sounds in Richard’s reading:

Any dog's life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes
and seventies as eversure as Halley's comet, ulemamen, sobran-
jewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and
bronze portal of your Casaconcordia (54:7-10)

Once we are in the Casaconcordia, we encounter languages that strike me, contrary to the building’s harmonious name, as more discordant than concordant, a kind of Tower of Babel that might represent more of a Divided than United Nations. On the other hand, the people conversing here ultimately end their interactions politely with expressions of thanks, so maybe while the 17 different languages of this linguistic mashup don’t always agree with each other, the people expressing them sometimes do. In any event, you have to love Finnegans Wake for substituting and subverting the stately bronze doors that open onto the UN’s hallowed Assembly Hall with a “bleak… bronze portal” that eventually leads us to the toilet. The Wake is nothing if not irreverent. Here’s Richard reading the opening lines in this Tower of Babel / UN dialogue:

Huru more Nee, minny
frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue.
Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai
rotty kai makkar, sahib? (54:10-13)

Drawing on Swedish, Danish, English, Old English, Italian, Greek, Pan-Slavonic and Hindi, the phrases here are the kinds you might find in a guidebook for tourists , such as How are you?, or a phrase offering simple directions, or one asking about tea and teapots. Going on:

Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son suc-
co, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A'Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily?
Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. (54:13-15)

The first sentence here, which Epstein calls “a Romance language puzzle,” mentions “succo” or sugar, further suggesting a tearoom. This is followed by a question in pseudo-Irish that might translate into “O, I am sorry, Patrick, do you understand Gaelic?” (McHugh), which is followed by a possible riff on Hawaiian that could translate to “We took a long, long flight to Paris” (Epstein). Saving the best for last, here are the final phrases, taking us from tearoom to bathroom:

Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tu-
vavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de por-
tocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O pic-
colo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and
you? Gomagh, thak. (54:15-19)

The first sentence here is something like, “Well then, listen, Baptiste, you’re going to go to the toilet.” The double ‘O’ that follows is the symbol for a toilet in parts of Europe, which is then followed by the sentence starting with “Os pipos mios…,” for which I’m going to turn to Epstein because he’s done an amazing job at decoding it. Here’s his interpretation:

A mixture of demotic Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, combining to make a truly outrageous phrase about fellatio: “My prick is much too big for your little mouth.” Os pipos mios is “my bird” in some Mediterranean languages, but the identification of the bird with the penis is a feature of Mediterranean culture from ancient times, probably going back at least as far as Aristophanes. Demasiado grueso is “much too thick” in Spanish; por o is Portuguese “for the”; piccolo pocchino is Italian for, literally, “little pocket,” but a similar word, bochino, also means, besides a cigarette holder, an act of fellatio. Has one of the tourists encountered a willing accomplice in one of the toilets of the League of Nations? (42)

So although Earwicker may be absent from the Casaconcordia paragraph with its welter of languages briefly shaking us off his trail, salacious acts and the scandalous rumours they can engender are never far away from our protagonist.

Before we get to Richard’s reading, a quick synopsis of today’s excerpt.

**“The Irish Jaunting Car” by Valentine Vousden, cover page for** **sheet music published in Dublin and London, 1854**.

We begin with a Jehu driver, or coach driver, “jauntyjogging” through Dublin’s Phoenix Park, passing by Wellington’s Monument (Ep003), “the monolith rising stark from the moonlit pinebarren” (53:15-16).

The three aggressive cheers that follow, “Chee chee cheers” (53:36), conjure up the three fusiliers from Earwicker’s Cad confrontation in Phoenix Park (Ep008), which provoked the gossip and slander from which Earwicker is trying to escape; and when we hear the soldiers yell something that sounds like ‘Up and at him’ (54:1), it’s clear that Earwicker should run faster and further.

This is followed by the Casaconcordia paragraph, which is then followed by Earwicker offering a stuttering defense of his respectability [for more on the stuttering motif, visit Ep008].

Earwicker’s fall resulting from his alleged sin in the Park then adopts a tragic, epic tone: “The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum!” (55:2), but as with all falls in Finnegans Wake, “deeds bounds going arise again” (55:5), yet another cyclical fall and rise that honours the perpetually falling and rising mythical bird that gives Phoenix Park its name, and gives Finnegans Wake its main motion and theme.

You’ll then hear a sentence both light and profound on life, death and their cycles, which I’ll simply paraphrase as “life is a wake” and let you enjoy Richard’s reading of that wonderful passage (55:5-10).

A central question returns: Who exactly is Earwicker, our elusive protagonist? “Who was he to whom?” (56:32)

It’s clear we won’t have an answer soon as “the unfacts… are too imprecisely few” (57:16-17).

**Alice Liddell, photo by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), 1858 (at** **The Met, New York)**

Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, whose proclivity for photographing nude children came up in Chapter 2 (Ep008), makes an appearance in an ingenious and appropriately disconcerting passage (57: 23-29) that suggests Earwicker’s “exposure” (the perfect word to couple sin with photography), his “maugdleness” (Dodgson taught at Oxford’s Magdalen College) and his fatherly—and by extension, incestuous—proximity to the adolescent Alice Liddell (1852-1934), muse and inspiration for Alice in Wonderland: “the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his limper looser.”

Today’s excerpt closes with two opposing groups, the “strongers” versus the “softies” (58:16-17), the former inclined to judge Earwicker harshly based on the scandal that surrounds him, the latter preferring to excuse and condone. We will hear more from these characters in our next episode.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 53 line 7 to page 58 line 22 for the continuation of Chapter 3. The performance was shot and recorded at my home in Toronto on October 2, 2023 with a live audience. The film premiered at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, European Union Film Festival, and Bloomsday Film Festival at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. The brief opening music you’ll hear is my own arrangement of “The Irish Jaunting Car,” a 19th-century folk song referenced in the first sentence of today’s excerpt, with Brandon Bak on drums and Adam Seelig, yours truly, on piano.

[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 53:7-58:22.]

[53] And there oftafter, jauntyjogging, on an Irish visavis, instea-
dily with shoulder to shoulder Jehu will tell to Christianier, saint
to sage, the humphriad of that fall and rise while daisy winks at
her pinker sister among the tussocks and the copoll between the
shafts mocks the couple on the car. And as your who may look
like how on the owther side of his big belttry your tyrs and cloes
your noes and paradigm maymay rererise in eren. Follow we up
his whip vindicative. Thurston's! Lo bebold! La arboro, lo
petrusu. The augustan peacebetothem oaks, the monolith rising
stark from the moonlit pinebarren. In all fortitudinous ajaxious
rowdinoisy tenuacity. The angelus hour with ditchers bent upon
their farm usetensiles, the soft belling of the fallow deers (doereh-
moose genuane!) advertising their milky approach as midnight
was striking the hours (letate!), and how brightly the great tri-
bune outed the sharkskin smokewallet (imitation!) from his
frock, kippers, and by Joshua, he tips un a topping swank
cheroot, none of your swellish soide, quoit the reverse, and how
manfally he says, pluk to pluk and lekan for lukan, he was to just
pluggy well suck that brown boyo, my son, and spend a whole
half hour in Havana. Sorer of the kreeksmen, would not thore be
old high gothsprogue! Wherefore he met Master, he mean to say,
he do, sire, bester of redpublicans, at Eagle Cock Hostel on
Lorenzo Tooley street and how he wished his Honour the ban-
nocks of Gort and Morya and Bri Head and Puddyrick, yore
Loudship, and a starchboxsitting in the pit of his St Tomach's,
— a strange wish for you, my friend, and it would poleaxe your
sonson's grandson utterly though your own old sweatandswear
floruerunts heaved it hoch many as the times, when they were
turrified by the hitz.
Chee chee cheers for Upkingbilly and crow cru cramwells

[54] Downaboo! Hup, boys, and hat him! See! Oilbeam they're lost
we've fount rerembrandtsers, their hours to date link these heirs
to here but wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays? Farseeinge-
therich and Poolaulwoman Charachthercuss and his Ann van
Vogt. D.e.e.d! Edned, ended or sleeping soundlessly? Favour
with your tongues! Intendite!
Any dog's life you list you may still hear them at it, like sixes
and seventies as eversure as Halley's comet, ulemamen, sobran-
jewomen, storthingboys and dumagirls, as they pass its bleak and
bronze portal of your Casaconcordia: Huru more Nee, minny
frickans? Hwoorledes har Dee det? Losdoor onleft mladies, cue.
Millecientotrigintadue scudi. Tippoty, kyrie, tippoty. Cha kai
rotty kai makkar, sahib? Despenseme Usted, senhor, en son suc-
co, sabez. O thaw bron orm, A'Cothraige, thinkinthou gaily?
Lick-Pa-flai-hai-pa-Pa-li-si-lang-lang. Epi alo, ecou, Batiste, tu-
vavnr dans Lptit boing going. Ismeme de bumbac e meias de por-
tocallie. O.O. Os pipos mios es demasiada gruarso por O pic-
colo pocchino. Wee fee? Ung duro. Kocshis, szabad? Mercy, and
you? Gomagh, thak.
And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears: Would you care to
know the prise of a liard? Maggis, nick your nightynovel! Mass
Tavener's at the mike again! And that bag belly is the buck
to goat it! Meggeg, m'gay chapjappy fellow, I call our univalse
to witness, as sicker as moyliffey eggs is known by our good
househalters from yorehunderts of mamooth to be which they
commercially are in ahoy high British quarters (conventional!)
my guesthouse and cowhaendel credits will immediately stand
ohoh open as straight as that neighbouring monument's fabrica-
tion before the hygienic gllll (this was where the reverent sab-
both and bottlebreaker with firbalk forthstretched touched upon
his tricoloured boater, which he uplifted by its pickledhoopy (he
gave Stetson one and a penny for it) whileas oleaginosity of an-
cestralolosis sgocciolated down the both pendencies of his mut-
sohito liptails (Sencapetulo, a more modestuous conciliabulite
never curled a torn pocketmouth), cordially inwiting the adul-
lescence who he was wising up to do in like manner what all did

[55] so as he was able to add) lobe before the Great Schoolmaster's.
(I tell you no story.) Smile!
The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum! Mae-
romor Mournomates !) averging on blight like the mundibanks of
Fennyana, but deeds bounds going arise again. Life, he himself
said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not,
after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our bread-
winning 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. The scene, refreshed,
reroused, was never to be forgotten, the hen and crusader ever-
intermutuomergent, for later in the century one of that puisne
band of factferreters, (then an excivily (out of the custom huts)
(retired), (hurt), under the sixtyfives act) in a dressy black modern
style and wewere shiny tan burlingtons, (tam, homd and dicky,
quopriquos and peajagd) rehearsed it, pippa pointing, with a
dignified (copied) bow to a namecousin of the late archdeacon
F. X. Preserved Coppinger (a hot fellow in his night, may the
mouther of guard have mastic on him!) in a pullwoman of our
first transhibernian with one still sadder circumstance which is a
dirkandurk heartskewerer if ever to bring bouncing brimmers
from marbled eyes. Cycloptically through the windowdisks and
with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers, back to back,
buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with in-
touristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the
green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy
wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig's lifetree, our fire-
leaved loverlucky blomsterbohm, phoenix in our woodlessness,
haughty, cacuminal, erubescent (repetition!) whose roots they be
asches with lustres of peins. For as often as the Archicadenus,
pleacing aside his Irish Field and craving their auriculars to re-
cepticle particulars before they got the bump at Castlebar (mat
and far!) spoke of it by request all, hearing in this new reading
of the part whereby, because of Dyas in his machina, the new
garrickson's grimacing grimaldism hypostasised by substintua-
tion the axiomatic orerotundity of that once grand old elrington

[56] bawl, the copycus's description of that fellowcommuter's play
upon countenants, could simply imagine themselves in their bo-
som's inmost core, as pro tem locums, timesported acorss the yawn-
ing (abyss), as once they were seasiders, listening to the cockshy-
shooter's evensong evocation of the doomed but always ventri-
loquent Agitator, (nonot more plangorpound the billows o'er
Thounawahallya Reef!) silkhouatted, a whallrhosmightiadd, a-
ginsst the dusk of skumring, (would that fane be Saint Muezzin's
calling — holy places! — and this fez brimless as brow of faithful
toucher of the ground, did wish it were — blessed be the bones!
— the ghazi, power of his sword.) his manslayer's gunwielder
protended towards that overgrown leadpencil which was soon,
monumentally at least, to rise as Molyvdokondylon to, to be, to
be his mausoleum (O'dan stod tillsteyne at meisies aye skould
show pon) while olover his exculpatory features, as Roland rung,
a wee dropeen of grief about to sillonise his jouejous, the ghost
of resignation diffused a spectral appealingness, as a young man's
drown o'er the fate of his waters may gloat, similar in origin and
akkurat in effective to a beam of sunshine upon a coffin plate.
Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Travel-
ler remote, unfriended, from van Demon's Land, some lazy
skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic
eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along
flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wild-
broom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the
Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and
baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally
quasi-begin to presquesm'ile to queasithin' (Nonsense! There
was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment
through the hat of Mr Melancholy Slow!)
But in the pragma what formal cause made a smile of that to-
think? Who was he to whom? (O'Breen's not his name nor the
brown one his maid.) Whose are the placewheres? Kiwasti, kis-
ker, kither, kitnabudja? Tal the tem of the tumulum. Giv the gav
of the grube. Be it cudgelplayers' country, orfishfellows' town or
leeklickers' land or panbpanungopovengreskey. What regnans

[57] raised the rains have levelled but we hear the pointers and can
gauge their compass for the melos yields the mode and the mode
the manners plicyman, plansiman, plousiman, plab. Tsin tsin tsin
tsin! The forefarther folkers for a prize of two peaches with
Ming, Ching and Shunny on the lie low lea. We'll sit down on
the hope of the ghouly ghost for the titheman troubleth but his
hantitat hies not here. They answer from their Zoans; Hear the
four of them! Hark torroar of them! I, says Armagh, and a'm
proud o'it. I, says Clonakilty, God help us! I, says Deansgrange,
and say nothing. I, says Barna, and whatabout it? Hee haw! Be-
fore he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet,
coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then,
wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow
for an People, one Jotnursfjaell: and it was a grummelung amung
the porktroop that wonderstruck us as a thunder, yunder.
Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely
few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too
untrustworthily irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly
freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos. Neverthe-
less Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance,
one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now com-
pletely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious.
Oblige with your blackthorns; gamps, degrace! And there many
have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a
flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease ha-
bit, watching bland sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore,
a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed
cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his
limper looser.
Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the
pages of nature's book and till Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath became
Dablena Tertia, the shadow of the huge outlander, maladik, mult-
vult, magnoperous, had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in
manor hall as in thieves' kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse
chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here
sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted con-

[58] testimony with benefit of clergy. His Thing Mod have undone
him: and his madthing has done him man. His beneficiaries are
legion in the part he created: they number up his years. Greatwheel
Dunlop was the name was on him: behung, all we are his bisaacles.
As hollyday in his house so was he priest and king to that: ulvy
came, envy saw, ivy conquered. Lou! Lou! They have waved his
green boughs o'er him as they have torn him limb from lamb.
For his muertification and uxpiration and dumnation and annu-
hulation. With schreis and grida, deprofound souspirs. Steady,
sullivans! Mannequins pause! Longtong's breach is fallen down
but Graunya's spreed's abroad. Ahdostay, feedailyones, and feel
the Flucher's bawls for the total of your flouts is not fit to fan his
fettle, O! Have a ring and sing wohl! Chin, chin! Chin, chin!
And of course all chimed din width the eatmost boviality. Swip-
ing rums and beaunes and sherries and ciders and negus and cit-
ronnades too. The strongers. Oho, oho, Mester Begge, you're
about to be bagged in the bog again. Bugge. But softsies seuf-
sighed: Eheu, for gassies! But, lo! lo! by the threnning gods,
human, erring and condonable, what the statues of our kuo, who
is the messchef be our kuang, ashu ashure there, the unforgettable
treeshade looms up behind the jostling judgements of those, as
all should owe, malrecapturable days.

[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 53 to 58 of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.

Join us for Episode 13 in a fortnight when Richard continues with the next five pages of Chapter 3, including a terrific, multi-character reportage-like section in search of our protagonist, Earwicker. To be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast, the complete film of Chapter 1, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website.

See you in two weeks — wishing you happy holidays and a healthy new year!

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support!

[Music fades out]

[End of Ep012]

Mentioned: Eldon Garnet sculpture on Don River Toronto, Heraclitus river aphorism, becoming, Fred Wah on elusive meaning, Earwicker and language running away, Casaconcordia, League of Nations, United Nations, polyglotism, Babel, “Irish Jaunting Car,” Phoenix Park, Cad confrontation, who is Earwicker?, Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, “strongers” vs. “softies,” synopsis.

Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake pages 48-53.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles, University of California Press, 1977.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
Raphael Slepon, fweet.org
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Cited: Fred Wah, Music at the Heart of Thinking. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2020.

Episode 011: Running Away (p. 48:1-53:6, start of Ch03)

December 12, 2024 Adam Seelig

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 011 RUNNING AWAY

PAGE 48:1-53:6 | 2024-12-12

PODCAST AUDIO

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 11, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 48 to 53, to begin Chapter 3 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.

I’m sharing the good news that One Little Goat Theatre Company recently released our film of “Finnegans Wake Chapter 1” online this fall. After several festival screenings last year, it’s now out for all to watch. You can find it on YouTube or through our website, and I’ll link to it in the podcast transcript, which is also on our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org. For the listeners who’ve enjoyed Richard reading Chapter 1 on our podcast, you can now enjoy seeing the face and body that go with the voice. The film also contains a handful of montages shot in Toronto, where the reading took place, thematically connecting some places in the city with some moments in the chapter. Happy watching and listening.

And some more good news that we recently wrapped our film shoot of “Finnegans Wake, Chapter 5,” shot with a wonderful live audience at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in Toronto. Surrounded by dozens of volumes related to Chapter 5 and the Wake, from an original King James Bible to Sir Edward Sullivan’s The Book of Kells, it was a special evening that will make for a terrific podcast and film in future. I want to extend a special thanks to the two regular podcast listeners who schlepped up from New Jersey and Massachusetts to join us for the reading — I’m delighted you were with us on that night.

And finally, as I record this in December of 2024, One Little Goat, a registered charity in the United States and Canada, is fundraising so we can keep offering our programming. For over 20 years we have been producing poetic theatre of the highest calibre, which wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of individuals like you. We love producing these recordings and films of Finnegans Wake — at the same time, they require money to produce. So please, if you’re financially able, take a moment to donate through our website, www.OneLittleGoat.org, and click on “Contact & Donate.” All donations made by December 31 will receive an official tax receipt. Many many thanks to all of you who have already donated to One Little Goat — we really appreciate your support.
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

Adam Seelig: Here we are at Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake. I’m going touch on the chapter’s theme of fleeing, then highlight how the 19th-century Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell informs the character of Earwicker and the Wake, and then offer a quick synopsis of the five pages you’ll soon hear Richard Harte read. As I’ve said in previous episodes, if you’d like to jump straight to Richard’s performance, by all means skip ahead.

Chapter 1 served as an overture to Finnegans Wake, sounding out, among its many motifs, the cyclical fall and rise of humanity. Chapter 2 introduced us to Earwicker, or HCE, including his alleged sin in Phoenix Park and the wildfire rumours that consequently spread across Dublin and Ireland, culminating in the salacious and slanderous public performance of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” by the muckraking street busker, Hosty.

In Chapter 3 we’ll find Earwicker trying to run and hide from all the earwigging gossip surrounding and hounding him. As a lyric from Bob Marley’s 1978 Kaya puts it,
”You’re running and you’re running and you’re running away
But you can't run away from yourself.”
Earwicker is not only running away, perhaps he’s running away from himself. As Joyce’s admirer and occasional amanuensis Samuel Beckett said of his own work, “perhaps” might be the most important word. Likewise with Finnegans Wake. Perhaps Chapter 3 is an evocation of Earwicker’s unconscious, his own dream state, and he’s not only being chased, but also the one doing the chasing through invented characters of his own imagining. In this way, in addition to the cyclical rise and fall at the core of the novel, which we can picture vertically as Tim Finnegan’s rise and fall from the ladder or Humpty Dumpty’s wall fall or the phoenix up from the ashes or Adam and Eve’s Biblical apple grab, Finnegans Wake adds a similar, cyclical loop, which we can picture horizontally as Earwicker running away, perhaps from himself, across Dublin.

Could Earwicker be his own worst enemy, chasing and biting his own tail, a self-persecuting ouroboros? Consider for a moment that Hosty’s caustic ballad, which utterly defames Earwicker at the end of Chapter 2, is titled “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly.” Perce-oreille is French for earwig, leading us to “The Ballad of Earwig” and by extension to “The Ballad of Earwicker,” which we can now hear in two ways: “The Ballad about Earwicker” and “The Ballad by Earwicker.” The title’s ingenious preposition, “of,” “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” allows us to hear and experience the song as a throwdown that could be simultaneously about and by Earwicker, the deliverer and recipient, the subject and object of the musical invective, with Hosty an invention of Earwicker’s own imagination. Perhaps. Regardless of whether Earwicker is persecuted by others or by himself, one thing is (perhaps!) for sure: Earwicker in Chapter 3 is “subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)” (62:24-25).

So is he purely victim or is he also victimizer? Who is Earwicker? As you’ll hear in today’s excerpt, the narrative of Chapter 3 pursues the answer by attempting to tease out the identity of our elusive protagonist from the scandalous fog that surrounds him, “given the wet and low visibility” and “the average human cloudyphiz” it’s a considerable challenge to “idendifine the individuone” (51:1-6).

In short, as Earwicker runs and hides, Chapter 3 will be asking not only where he is, but who.

An elusive protagonist hounded by scandal — this may serve as a description of Earwicker, but it could just as easily describe the 19th-century Irish nationalist, Charles Stewart Parnell. Earwicker is the talk of the town; Parnell was (and in many ways still is) the talk of the Irish nation. Since Parnell’s political rise and ignominious fall provide another facet for understanding Earwicker and the Wake, I’m going to share Adaline Glasheen’s brilliant entry on this larger-than-life figure of modern Irish history.

*Charles Parnell (1846-1891) and Katherine O’Shea (1846-1921)*

Charles Stewart Parnell, born in 1846, died in 1891 — betrayed Irish leader […] who haunts Joyce’s works […] just about everywhere. In [Joyce,] Parnell is not a character, but a presence, ghost, shade […] There was a legend that Parnell would return magically, like the Phoenix, Finn, Christ, or unmagically, like Ulysses, Tim Finnegan.
Parnell was an Anglo-Irish landowner, a skilled political boss who led the Irish nationalist party in the British Parliament. He frightened the British and they set out to destroy him; their first try, the Pigott affair, failed; but they succeeded when Captain William O’Shea sued his wife [Katherine, or Kitty, O’Shea, with whom Parnell had an affair and three children] for divorce. Parnell was revealed as an adulterer, a user of false names, a sneaker down fire-escapes or ladders. The rest [Glasheen writes] may be quoted from “The Shade of Parnell”:
“He was deposed in obedience to Gladstone’s orders. Of his 83 representatives only 8 remained faithful.... The high and low clergy entered the lists to finish him off. The Irish press emptied on him and the woman he loved the vials of their envy. The citizens of Castlecomer threw quicklime in his eyes. He went from county to county, from city to city, ‘like a hunted deer’, a spectral figure. . . within a year he died...’’ […]
[Glasheen goes on:] He was by no means innocent of forging his own destruction; whether from hubris or from not changing his wet socks, he died, and note all the “idol with feet of clay” jokes in Ulysses and FW. […]
Parnell pervades and appears in moments of intensity, but he is not, after all, often named in FW. Parnell’s presence is, then, indicated by indirection, by quoting, by recreating one of his scenes, by using certain words - e.g., treeshade, chief, Fox - which call him up, even when those words are used in ways that do not directly apply to him.
Parnell was elusive. He is elusive on Joyce’s pages. (222-23)

Richard Harte (left) and Adam Seelig at the Parnell Monument, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, June 2023.

Chapter 3 opens with applause for Hosty’s “Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” which closed Chapter 2, with particular praise for the street busker’s impressive “Chest Cee!”, a high-C sung by old-fashioned tenors. And indeed in my co-arrangement of the ballad with Richard in Chapter 2, when Richard, as Hosty, sings the song’s last word, “Cain,” he ultimately ends on a high concert C. (Aren’t we clever.) And since C can stand for Cain, Abel’s lethal brother, it may come as no surprise that issuing from the exhalation of that final Cain-charged chest C is a deadly, toxic cloud, “a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed.” (48:5)

This fog, or spit-fog if you will, clouds the beginning of this chapter. It’s a fog so thick that even my regular trusted guides (Epstein, Tindall and company) seem to differ on what is happening here, so don’t worry in the least if we get a little lost as we try to discern a thing or two in the foggy and fascinating paragraphs ahead!

I’ll also quickly add that Chapter 3 opens with fog and closes with rain. I’ll come back to this drizzle that bookends Chapter 3 when we reach its conclusion in episode 15.

As the poisonous cloud spreads, we hear of how various scandal mongers who sang the toxic ballad ultimately expire, starting with Hosty, here described singsongily—or maybe amid all the fog sing-soggily?!—as “poor Osti-Frosti” (48:19). I don’t believe this series of men, from Hosty to “A’Hara” to “Paul Horan” to “Sordid Sam” and so on, dies as a result of having sung the ballad—the correlation strikes me as more coincidental than causal—but the association between the song and their deaths reminds me of Monty Python’s “Killer Joke” sketch, also known as “The Funniest Joke in the World,” which I would love to tell you but of course anyone who reads or hears the joke promptly dies from laughter, so I will prudently link to it online in this podcast’s transcript — enjoy at your own risk.

*Ireland legalizes gay marriage in 2015.*

There are a few choice phrases that I’d like to point out as you listen. “his husband” (49:2) always catches my ear — it’s not uncommon to hear these two words together today in Ireland and beyond where gay marriage is legal, but when Joyce combined them, “his husband” was unheard of and arguably ridiculous yet a century ahead of its time. “loquacity lunacy” (49:17) is another favourite phrase that seems to address this hyper verbal logomaniacal world in which we find ourselves. And we’ll hear a euphemistic description for a central theme of Finnegans Wake: gossip, that social phenomenon by which people like Earwicker and Parnell are “semiprivately convicted” (50:28).

Following this string of histrionic obituaries, we can discern within the fog a hazy remix of Earwicker’s confrontation in Phoenix Park from Chapter 2, a recurring event in the novel that plays out through different iterations of the Cad, the two girls, and the three soldiers, the male actors intimating violence, the females, temptation, and all suggesting the ambiguous sin committed, if committed at all, by Earwicker. Here the controversial contingent of 1 Cad, 2 girls and 3 soldiers will appear as “the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums” (51:9-10), the main initials of which, incidentally, form Earwicker’s monogram, HCE.

On the same page, page 51, the seven-items-of-clothing motif, which occurs in Chapters 1 and 2 as well, will invoke Earwicker, dressed “in scratch wig, squarecuts, stock, lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers” (6-8).

In the paragraph beginning with, “Sport’s a common thing” (51:21), we will hear about Earwicker’s “regifugium persecutorum” (51:31), a term that provides a key to this chapter. Roland McHugh’s indispensable Annotations to Finnegans Wake breaks it down as follows:

regifugium is an ancient Roman ceremony celebrating the expulsion of kings that literally means ‘flight of the king’;
refugium peccatorum means ‘refuge of sinners’, from the Roman Catholic Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and
persecutorum means ‘of the persecuted’.

So Earwicker’s “regifugium persecutorum” represents his expulsion and his refuge, his sin and his persecution, his running and his hiding. Indeed by chapter’s end, we will find our protagonist holed up behind some fortification, seeking refuge from 111 expulsive, and expletive, insults hurled his way (that will be Ep015).

We then experience an early newsreel via television, still a young technology at the time of Joyce’s writing, and again we’ll encounter Earwicker in another seven articles of clothing, including “the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue” (52:26), which sounds to me like his patched up, reddish underwear. The newsreel also briefly introduces the “brothers’ broil” that plays out between HCE and ALP’s oppositional sons, Shaun and Shem, in Chapter 6 onward.

*Wyndham Lewis in 1929, photo by George Beresford.*

One last note before we get to Richard’s reading: we have a heckler in the house, or at least in the text of Chapter 3. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), the brilliant (Canadian-born) English modernist author and painter and foil of sorts to James Joyce, makes his first intrusions in today’s excerpt. (Lewis, incidentally, escaped during the Second World War to a regifugium persecutorum of his own in Canada, including a stint in my town of Toronto, which he considered, perhaps justifiably, a miserable backwater.) Lewis butts in throughout Chapter 3 (and can barely keep his mouth shut later on in Chapter 6). For today’s excerpt, he limits his contributions to two parenthetical monosyllabic insults, or what my kids would call ‘sick burns’: the first is “cogged!”, i.e. fraudulent, and the second, which also serves as the last word of today’s reading, is “Prigged!”, i.e. stolen.

Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 48 line 1 to page 53 line 6 for the beginning of Chapter 3.

The opening music for the chapter is my own arrangement of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” with Brandon Bak on drums and yours truly on piano.

[Richard Harte reads and sings Finnegans Wake 48:1-53:6.]

[48] Chest Cee! 'Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visibility
in a freakfog, of mixed sex cases among goats, hill cat and plain
mousey, Bigamy Bob and his old Shanvocht! The Blackfriars
treacle plaster outrage be liddled! Therewith was released in that
kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed.
Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family
of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors
as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then not-
ever been. Canbe in some future we shall presently here amid
those zouave players of Inkermann the mime mumming the mick
and his nick miming their maggies, Hilton St Just (Mr Frank
Smith), Ivanne Ste Austelle (Mr J. F. Jones), Coleman of Lucan
taking four parts, a choir of the O'Daley O'Doyles doublesixing
the chorus in Fenn Mac Call and the Seven Feeries of Loch Neach,
Galloper Troppler and Hurleyquinn the zitherer of the past with his
merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim. Of the persins sin this Eyrawyg-
gla saga (which, thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb
to buttom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this
applies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Frosti, described as
quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an
exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone,
but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order (he began
Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-
hang-together Animandovites) no one end is known. If they

[49] whistled him before he had curtains up they are whistling him
still after his curtain's doom's doom. Ei fù. His husband, poor old
A'Hara (Okaroff?) crestfallen by things and down at heels at the
time, they squeak, accepted the (Zassnoch!) ardree's shilling at
the conclusion of the Crimean war and, having flown his wild
geese, alohned in crowds to warnder on like Shuley Luney,
enlisted in Tyrone's horse, the Irish whites, and soldiered a bit
with Wolsey under the assumed name of Blanco Fusilovna Buck-
lovitch (spurious) after which the cawer and the marble halls
of Pump Court Columbarium, the home of the old seakings,
looked upon each other and queth their haven evermore for it
transpires that on the other side of the water it came about that on
the field of Vasileff's Cornix inauspiciously with his unit he
perished, saying, this papal leafless to old chap give, rawl chaw-
clates for mouther-in-louth. Booil. Poor old dear Paul Horan,
to satisfy his literary as well as his criminal aspirations, at the
suggestion thrown out by the doomster in loquacity lunacy, so
says the Dublin Intelligence, was thrown into a Ridley's for
inmates in the northern counties. Under the name of Orani he
may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustain-
ing long parts at short notice. He was. Sordid Sam, a dour decent
deblancer, the unwashed, haunted always by his ham, the unwished,
at a word from Israfel the Summoner, passed away painlessly
after life's upsomdowns one hallowe'en night, ebbrous and in
the state of nature, propelled from Behind into the great Beyond
by footblows coulinclouted upon his oyster and atlas on behanged
and behooved and behicked and behulked of his last fishandblood
bedscrappers, a Northwegian and his mate of the Sheawolving
class. Though the last straw glimt his baring this stage thunkhard
is said (the pitfallen gagged him as 'Promptboxer') to have
solemnly said — as had the brief thot but fell in till his head like
a bass dropt neck fust in till a bung crate (cogged!): Me drames,
O'Loughlins, has come through! Now let the centuple celves of
my egourge as Micholas de Cusack calls them, — of all of whose
I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me — by
the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity

[50] of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may
they cease to bidivil uns and (but at this poingt though the iron
thrust of his cockspurt start might have prepared us we are well-
nigh stinkpotthered by the mustardpunge in the tailend) this
outandin brown candlestock melt Nolan's into peese! Han var.
Disliken as he was to druriodrama, her wife Langley, the prophet,
and the decentest dozendest short of a frusker whoever stuck his
spickle through his spoke, disappeared, (in which toodooing he
has taken all the French leaves unveilable out of Calomne-
quiller's Pravities) from the sourface of this earth, that austral
plain he had transmaried himself to, so entirely spoorlessly (the
mother of the book with a dustwhisk tabularasing his obliteration
done upon her involucrum) as to tickle the speculative to all but
opine (since the Levey who might have been Langley may have
really been a redivivus of paganinism or a volunteer Vousden)
that the hobo (who possessed a large amount of the humoresque)
had transtuled his funster's latitat to its finsterest interrimost. Bhi
she. Again, if Father San Browne, tea and toaster to that quaint-
esttest of yarnspinners is Padre Don Bruno, treu and troster to
the queen of Iar-Spain, was the reverend, the sodality director,
that eupeptic viceflayer, a barefaced carmelite, to whose palpi-
tating pulpit (which of us but remembers the rarevalent and
hornerable Fratomistor Nawlanmore and Brawne.) sinning society
sirens (see the [Roman Catholic] presspassim) fortunately became
so enthusiastically attached and was an objectionable ass who very
occasionally cockaded a raffles ticket on his hat which he wore all
to one side like the hangle of his pan (if Her Elegance saw him
she'd have the canary!) and was semiprivately convicted of mal-
practices with his hotwashed tableknife (glossing over the cark
in his pocket) that same snob of the dunhill, fully several year-
schaums riper, encountered by the General on that redletter
morning or maynoon jovesday and were they? Fuitfuit.
When Phishlin Phil wants throws his lip 'tis pholly to be fortune
flonting and whoever's gone to mix Hotel by the salt say water
there's nix to nothing we can do for he's never again to sea. It
is nebuless an autodidact fact of the commonest that the shape of

[51] the average human cloudyphiz, whereas sallow has long daze
faded, frequently altered its ego with the possing of the showers
(Not original!). Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet
and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one
nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the
body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in scratch wig,
squarecuts, stock, lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and
shufflers (he is often alluded to as Slypatrick, the llad in the llane)
with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness
(one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all
sorts of ages!) who was asked by free boardschool shirkers in
drenched coats overawall, Will, Conn and Otto, to tell them
overagait, Vol, Pov and Dev, that fishabed ghoatstory of the
haardly creditable edventyres of the Haberdasher, the two Cur-
chies and the three Enkelchums in their Bearskin ghoats! Girles
and jongers, but he has changed alok syne Thorkill's time! Ya, da,
tra, gathery, pimp, shesses, shossafat, okodeboko, nine! Those
many warts, those slummy patches, halfsinster wrinkles, (what
has come over the face on wholebroader E?), and (shrine of
Mount Mu save us!) the large fungopark he has grown! Drink!
Sport's a common thing. It was the Lord's own day for damp
(to wait for a postponed regatta's eventualising is not of Battlecock
Shettledore - Juxta - Mare only) and the request for a fully
armed explanation was put (in Loo of Pat) to the porty (a native
of the sisterisle — Meathman or Meccan? — by his brogue, ex-
race eyes, lokil calour and lucal odour which are said to have
been average clownturkish (though the capelist's voiced nasal
liquids and the way he sneezed at zees haul us back to the craogs
and bryns of the Silurian Ordovices) who, the lesser pilgrimage
accomplished, had made, pats' and pigs' older inselt, the south-
east bluffs of the stranger stepshore, a regifugium persecutorum,
hence hindquarters) as he paused at evenchime for some or so
minutes (hit the pipe dannyboy! Time to won, barmon. I'll take
ten to win.) amid the devil's one duldrum (Apple by her blossom
window and Charlotte at her toss panomancy his sole admirers,
his only tearts in store) for a fragrend culubosh during his week-

[52] end pastime of executing with Anny Oakley deadliness (the con-
summatory pairs of provocatives, of which remained provokingly
but two, the ones he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!) empties
which had not very long before contained Reid's family (you ruad
that before, soaky, but all the bottles in sodemd histry will not
soften your bloodathirst!) stout. Having reprimed his repeater
and resiteroomed his timespiece His Revenances, with still a life
or two to spare for the space of his occupancy of a world at a time,
rose to his feet and there, far from Tolkaheim, in a quiet English
garden (commonplace!), since known as Whiddington Wild, his
simple intensive curolent vocality, my dearbraithers, my most
dearbrathairs, as he, so is a supper as is a sipper, spake of the
One and told of the Compassionate, called up before the triad of
precoxious scaremakers (scoretaking: Spegulo ne helpas al mal-
bellulo, Mi Kredas ke vi estas prava, Via dote la vizago rispondas
fraulino) the now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar
and Arthor of our doyne.
Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes de-
mand their turn. Let them be seen! And wolfbone balefires blaze
the trailmost if only that Mary Nothing may burst her bibby
buckshee. When they set fire then she's got to glow so we may
stand some chances of warming to what every soorkabatcha,
tum or hum, would like to know. The first Humphrey's latitu-
dinous baver with puggaree behind, (calaboose belong bigboss
belong Kang the Toll) his fourinhand bow, his elbaroom surtout,
the refaced unmansionables of gingerine hue, the state slate
umbrella, his gruff woolselywellesly with the finndrinn knopfs
and the gauntlet upon the hand which in an hour not for him
solely evil had struck down the might he mighthavebeen d'Est-
erre of whom his nation seemed almost already to be about to
have need. Then, stealing his thunder, but in the befitting le-
gomena of the smaller country, (probable words, possibly said, of
field family gleaming) a bit duskish and flavoured with a smile,
seein as ow his thoughts consisted chiefly of the cheerio, he aptly
sketched for our soontobe second parents (sukand see whybe!)
the touching seene. The solence of that stilling! Here one might

[53] a fin fell. Boomster rombombonant! It scenes like a landescape
from Wildu Picturescu or some seem on some dimb Arras, dumb
as Mum's mutyness, this mimage of the seventyseventh kusin of
kristansen is odable to os across the wineless Ere no oedor nor
mere eerie nor liss potent of suggestion than in the tales of the
tingmount. (Prigged!)

[End of excerpt]

Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading the beginning of Chapter 3 from Finnegans Wake, pages 48 to 53, recorded live in Toronto on October 2nd, 2023.

Join us for Episode 12 in a fortnight when Richard continues with the next five pages of Chapter 3, including the “Casaconcordia” paragraph, one of my favourites, which features Finnegans Wake at its polyglottally ludicrous best. To be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast? For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast, the complete film of Chapter 1, and trailers for others, visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, join our mailing list, also on our website.

See you in two weeks and wishing you happy holidays!

[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]

Finnegans Wake is made possible by Friends of One Little Goat Theatre Company and the Emigrant Support Programme of the government of Ireland. Thank you for your support!

A big thanks to our wonderful live audience of Sandi Becker, David Mackett, Andrew Moodie, Cathy Murphy, Nomi Rotbard, Arlo Rotbard-Seelig, Adam Seelig, Aaron Tucker and Catherine Vaneri.

Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. Thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy and Andrew Moodie and to Music Consultants Warwick Harte and Kevin Kennedy.

Thank you for listening!

[Music fades out]

[End of Ep011]

Mentioned: Earwicker running and hiding from gossip, Bob Marley’s “Running Away,” “perhaps,” vertical and horizontal cycles, Earwicker as his own worst enemy, “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” possibly both about and by Earwicker, where and who is Earwicker, Irish nationalist Charles Parnell, “Chest Cee!”, poisonous cloud, ‘spit-fog,’ Monty Python’s “Killer Joke,” “his husband” and other phrases, Cad confrontation redux, seven-items-of-clothing motif, regifugium persecutorum, TV newsreel, Wyndham Lewis, synopsis.

Resources: Transcript for this episode, including the text of Finnegans Wake pages 48-53.
Finnegans Wake (1939) by James Joyce: there are many free copies of FW to read online or download, e.g. finwake.com
James Joyce Digital Archive, “Chicken Guide” to Finnegans Wake provides a ‘plain English’ paraphrase of each chapter by Danis Rose.
Edmund Epstein, A Guide through Finnegans Wake. University Press of Florida, 2009.
Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles, University of California Press, 1977.
William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (4th edition). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
John Gordon’s annotations on his Finnegans Wake blog.
Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Cited: “Running Away,” Bob Marley and the Wailers, Kaya, Island Studios, London, 1978.
“The Funniest Joke in the World,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, BBC, 1969.

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 015: 111 INSULTS

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 014: REEL WORLD!

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 013: I DREAM THEREFORE I BECOME

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 012 THIS RIVER I STEP IN

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 011 RUNNING AWAY

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 015: 111 INSULTS

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 014: REEL WORLD!

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 013: I DREAM THEREFORE I BECOME

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 012 THIS RIVER I STEP IN

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKEEpisode 011 RUNNING AWAY

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ONE LITTLE GOAT THEATRE COMPANY IS A REGISTERED CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 015: 111 INSULTS

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 014: REEL WORLD!

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 013: I DREAM THEREFORE I BECOME

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 012 THIS RIVER I STEP IN

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 011 RUNNING AWAY