JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 021:
Gun Dogs, Slow Fox
PAGE 96:25-100:4 OF CHAPTER 4 | 2026-01-01
PODCAST AUDIO
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[Music: Instrumental of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” with Adam Seelig on piano and Brandon Bak on drums, from the film series of Finnegans Wake. Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 21, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 96 to 100 from Chapter 4 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
This episode is releasing on January first of 2026, so I wish you all a happy new year!
[Music: Adam Seelig plays piano]
Adam Seelig: Finnegans Wake is a production of One Little Goat Theatre Company. 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 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. 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]
Robert Burns (1902) by David Watson Stevenson, Toronto, still from the film, “Finnegans Wake, Chapter 4” (2026).
Adam Seelig: We left off last time with the four old men singing — most fittingly for this new year’s day episode — Robbie Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” that classic hit of new year’s eve. The song’s refrain,
We'll take a cup of kindness yet
for auld lang syne,
you may remember in its Finnegans Wake version as performed by Richard Harte. Here’s that moment again, should your memory want refreshment, so to speak [Harte reads/sings (Ep019)]:
Ah ho! It was too too bad to be falling
out about her kindness pet and the shape of O O O O O O O O
Ourang's time. (96:21-23)
It sounds like Finnegans Wake is wishing us all a happy new year.
The opening, 10-line sentence of today’s reading from Chapter 4 ends with one of my favourite phrases in the Wake, which frames us, the readers and listeners of this novel, as the inheritors of our protagonist HCEarwicker’s story. The text first points to “you,” then to “us”:
you, charming coparcenors, us, heirs of his tailsie. (96:35)
We, my fellow readers and listeners, are receiving HCE’s legend. We are at once the heirs — H-E-I-R-S — of the tale — T-A-L-E — and hairs — H-A-I-R-S — on the tail — T-A-I-L — of this shaggy-dog story that is Finnegans Wake.
Or more accurately, shaggy-fox story, because today’s reading opens with a fox hunt, with Earwicker playing fox to his pursuers’ gun dogs. HCE manages to outfox his predators by hiding and holing up with a warm drink, and the hunt is called off.
Red fox (vulpes vulpes). Source: Nature Canada.
Why is HCE portrayed here as a fox? The beginning of Chapter 4 zoomorphized him as a lion; why now this volpinism? Adaline Glasheen sees the fox as Charles Stewart Parnell (Ep008, Ep018), the Irish nationalist leader who, like Earwicker, was hounded by scandal. In Glasheen’s own words:
Fox — I am baffled by the animals of FW e.g., Bear, Lion, Bull, Hound; Fox is specially dodgy, foxy. Uncertain, I suggest that Fox […] usually indicates that [Charles Stewart] Parnell is present on the page but is not directly named. […] In “The Shade of Parnell” Joyce says Parnell was hunted to death from city to city like a deer. A hunted deer is poetic, innocent, passive, and it may have struck Joyce […] that better sport — and just as cruel — is hunting a trickster fox. At any rate, foxes are the common prey of the hunter in FW […]; and the hunted (96-97) seems to be Parnell combined with his traducer Pigott, who was hunted through Europe to his death. (99)
It’s worth noting that this traducer, or slanderer, the obscure Irish journalist Richard Pigott, forged evidence against Parnell. His forgeries were exposed at trial because he publicly misspelled the word “hesitancy” as “hesitency,” thereby linking him to the counterfeit documents — a real ‘gotcha’ moment in the legal drama surrounding Parnell. And what word in our text should appear not once, not twice, but three times in the short paragraph following the fox hunt (97:25-27)? That’s right: “hesitancy” in all its misspelled glory (and infamy). So yes, Glasheen, as always, is on to something when she links Earwicker to fox and fox to Parnell, pursued by scandal wherever they run.
Coming to a rest, our fox — or in French, renard — now finds himself surrounded by a group of officials: “Assembly men murmured. Reynard is slow!” (97:28). Early in Chapter 4, Earwicker finds himself surrounded by a different group of officials, described as a “public [body]” (76:14, Ep016). So from the start to the end of this chapter — and let’s not forget the trial in the middle — society in its official, public forms is judging our protagonist.
Morse code in action. Undated photo. Source: Milwaukee Independent.
From here, rumours, as is their wont, spread far and wide, reporting on HCE having run away or died or nearly died in all kinds of absurd ways. The news in this case is — as we hear too often today — fake, but at least it’s entertaining, from stories of HCE escaping overseas via tunnel and ship; to his drunken drowning in a pond (even though he seems to have only waded into the water up to his crotch); to his fantasy-like encounter with Mr. Whitlock (98:25), a character I imagine, based on his name, with the long white hair of a medieval wizard; to reports of Earwicker “disguised [as an] ex-nun” (99:7-8).
In Chapter 2, rumours about HCE spread from person to person by word of mouth, eventually reaching Hosty the Busker, who spread the rumours further through his scandalous Ballad (Ep010). Here, in Chapter 4, the grapevine is boosted by the mass of media and charged by the speed of technology. Early reports on HCE appear in a newsletter, then quickly move from print to radio to morse code. The technological cues abound in short, punchy, mostly two-word sentences throughout today’s last paragraph (97:29-100:4): “Wires hummed.” “Chirpings crossed.” “Cracklings cricked.” “Morse nuisance noised.” “Aerials buzzed…,” and, this being Finnegans Wake, all this technology is also subverted and mocked: “Jams jarred.” “Mush spread.” The Wake never fails to take the piss.
“It’s called technology”: this refrain from a new, mostly-instrumental track by Makaya McCraven, Theon Cross and Ben LaMar Gay keeps echoing in my mind when I think of this ‘technology’ sequence in today’s reading. I’ll link to the song on One Little Goat’s podcast page for those wanting to treat their ears to something different.
Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, page 96 line 25 to page 100 line 4 of Chapter 4. The performance was filmed and recorded at Type Books on Queen Street West in Toronto on January 22nd, 2024 with a live audience.
[Richard Harte reads Finnegans Wake 96:25-100:4.]
[96] Well?
Well, even should not the framing up of such figments in the
evidential order bring the true truth to light as fortuitously as
a dim seer's setting of a starchart might (heaven helping it!) un-
cover the nakedness of an unknown body in the fields of blue
or as forehearingly as the sibspeeches of all mankind have foli-
ated (earth seizing them!) from the root of some funner's stotter
all the soundest sense to be found immense our special mentalists
now holds (securus iudicat orbis terrarum) that by such playing
possum our hagious curious encestor bestly saved his brush with
his posterity, you, charming coparcenors, us, heirs of his tailsie.
Gundogs of all breeds were beagling with renounced urbiandor-
[97] bic bugles, hot to run him, given law, on a scent breasthigh,
keen for the worry. View! From his holt outratted across the
Juletide's genial corsslands of Humfries Chase from Mullinahob
and Peacockstown, then bearing right upon Tankardstown, the
outlier, a white noelan which Mr Loewensteil Fitz Urse's basset
beaters had first misbadgered for a bruin of some swart, led
bayers the run, then through Raystown and Horlockstown and,
louping the loup, to Tankardstown again. Ear canny hare for
doubling through Cheeverstown they raced him, through
Loughlinstown and Nutstown to wind him by the Boolies. But
from the good turn when he last was lost, check, upon Ye Hill
of Rut in full winter coat with ticker pads, pointing for his room-
ing house his old nordest in his rolltoproyal hessians a deaf fuch-
ser's volponism hid him close in covert, miraculously ravenfed
and buoyed up, in rumer, reticule, onasum and abomasum, upon
(may Allbrewham have his mead!) the creamclotted sherriness of
cinnamon syllabub, Mikkelraved, Nikkelsaved. Hence hounds
hied home. Preservative perseverance in the reeducation of his
intestines was the rebuttal by whilk he sort of git the big bulge
on the whole bunch of spasoakers, dieting against glues and gra-
vies, in that sometime prestreet protown. Vainly violence, viru-
lence and vituperation sought wellnigh utterly to attax and a-
bridge, to derail and depontify, to enrate and inroad, to ongoad
and unhume the great shipping mogul and underlinen overlord.
But the spoil of hesitants, the spell of hesitency. His atake is
it ashe, tittery taw tatterytail, hasitense humponadimply, heyhey-
heyhey a winceywencky.
Assembly men murmured. Reynard is slow!
One feared for his days. Did there yawn? 'Twas his stom-
mick. Eruct? The libber. A gush? From his visuals. Pung? De-
livver him, orelode! He had laid violent hands on himself, it was
brought in Fugger's Newsletter, lain down, all in, fagged out,
with equally melancholy death. For the triduum of Saturnalia
his goatservant had paraded hiz willingsons in the Forum while
the jenny infanted the lass to be greeted raucously (the Yardstat-
ed) with houx and epheus and measured with missiles too from
[98] a hundred of manhood and a wimmering of weibes. Big went
the bang: then wildewide was quiet: a report: silence: last Fama
put it under ether. The noase or the loal had dreven him blem,
blem, stun blem. Sparks flew. He had fled again (open shun-
shema!) this country of exile, sloughed off, sidleshomed via the
subterranean shored with bedboards, stowed away and ankered
in a dutch bottom tank, the Arsa, hod S.S. Finlandia, and was
even now occupying, under an islamitic newhame in his seventh
generation, a physical body Cornelius Magrath's (badoldkarak-
ter, commonorrong canbung) in Asia Major, where as Turk of
the theater (first house all flatty: the king, eleven sharps) he had
bepiastered the buikdanseuses from the opulence of his omni-
box while as arab at the streetdoor he bepestered the bumbashaws
for the alms of a para's pence. Wires hummed. Peacefully general
astonishment assisted by regrettitude had put a term till his exis-
tence: he saw the family saggarth, resigned, put off his remain-
ders, was recalled and scrapheaped by the Maker. Chirpings
crossed. An infamous private ailment (vulgovarioveneral) had
claimed endright, closed his vicious circle, snap. Jams jarred.
He had walked towards the middle of an ornamental lilypond
when innebriated up to the point where braced shirts meet knic-
kerbockers, as wangfish daring the buoyant waters, when rod-
men's firstaiding hands had rescued un from very possibly several
feel of demifrish water. Mush spread. On Umbrella Street where
he did drinks from a pumps a kind workman, Mr Whitlock,
gave him a piece of wood. What words of power were made fas
between them, ekenames and auchnomes, acnomina ecnumina?
That, O that, did Hansard tell us, would gar ganz Dub's ear
wag in every pub of all the citta! Batty believes a baton while
Hogan hears a hod yet Heer prefers a punsil shapner and Cope
and Bull go cup and ball. And the Cassidy — Craddock rome
and reme round e'er a wiege ne'er a waage is still immer and
immor awagering over it, a cradle with a care in it or a casket
with a kick behind. Toties testies quoties questies. The war is
in words and the wood is the world. Maply me, willowy we,
hickory he and yew yourselves. Howforhim chirrupeth evereach-
[99] bird! From golddawn glory to glowworm gleam. We were
lowquacks did we not tacit turn. Elsewere there here no con-
cern of the Guinnesses. But only the ruining of the rain has
heard. Estout pourporteral! Cracklings cricked. A human pest
cycling (pist!) and recycling (past!) about the sledgy streets, here
he was (pust!) again! Morse nuisance noised. He was loose at
large and (Oh baby!) might be anywhere when a disguised ex-
nun, of huge standbuild and masculine manners in her fairly fat
forties, Carpulenta Gygasta, hattracted hattention by harbitrary
conduct with a homnibus. Aerials buzzed to coastal listeners of
an oertax bror collector's budget, fullybigs, sporran, tie, tuft,
tabard and bloody antichill cloak, its tailor's (Baernfather's) tab
reading V.P.H., found nigh Scaldbrothar's Hole, and divers
shivered to think what kaind of beast, wolves, croppis's or four-
penny friars, had devoured him. C.W. cast wide. Hvidfinns lyk,
drohneth svertgleam, Valkir lockt. On his pinksir's postern, the
boys had it, at Whitweekend had been nailed an inkedup name
and title, inscribed in the national cursives, accelerated, regres-
sive, filiform, turreted and envenomoloped in piggotry: Move
up. Mumpty! Mike room for Rumpty! By order, Nickekellous
Plugg; and this go, no pentecostal jest about it, how gregarious
his race soever or skilful learned wise cunning knowledgable
clear profound his saying fortitudo fraught or prudentiaproven,
were he chief, count, general, fieldmarshal, prince, king or Myles
the Slasher in his person, with a moliamordhar mansion in the
Breffnian empire and a place of inauguration on the hill of Tully-
mongan, there had been real murder, of the rayheallach royghal
raxacraxian variety, the MacMahon chaps, it was, that had done
him in. On the fidd of Verdor the rampart combatants had left
him lion with his dexter handcoup wresterected in a pureede
paumee bloody proper. Indeed not a few thick and thin well-
wishers, mostly of the clontarfminded class, (Colonel John Bawle
O'Roarke, fervxamplus), even ventured so far as to loan or beg
copies of D. Blayncy's trilingual triweekly, Scatterbrains' Aften-
ing Posht, so as to make certain sure onetime and be satisfied of
their quasicontribusodalitarian's having become genuinely quite
[100] beetly dead whether by land whither by water. Transocean
atalaclamoured him; The latter! The latter! Shall their hope then
be silent or Macfarlane lack of lamentation? He lay under leagues
of it in deep Bartholoman's Deep.
[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 96 to 100 of Chapter 4 from Finnegans Wake, recorded live at Type Books on Queen Street West in Toronto on January 22nd, 2024. Join us for Episode 22 in a fortnight when Richard reads the end of Chapter 4 of Finnegans Wake. In the meantime, to be sure you don’t miss the episode, why not follow or subscribe to this podcast?
[Music: Instrumental of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” with Adam Seelig on piano and Brandon Bak on drums, from the film of Finnegans Wake Ch03.]
For more on One Little Goat’s Finnegans Wake project, including transcripts of this podcast and the complete films of Chapters 1, 2 and 3 visit our website at OneLittleGoat.org. And to hear about upcoming performances and screenings, 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. 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; Stage Management by Sandi Becker; Directed by yours truly, Adam Seelig. A big thanks to Claire Foster and the staff and owners of Type Books, as well as to our wonderful live audience. Thank you to everyone at the Irish Consulate in Toronto. And thank you to Production Consultants Cathy Murphy, Andrew Moodie and Shai Rotbard-Seelig. Thank you for listening!
[Music fades out]
[End of Ep021]
Mentioned: Robbie Burns “Auld Lang Syne,” Earwicker as fox, Parnell, the hunt, gun dogs, public officials judging HCE, absurd news of HCE’s whereabouts and near fatal experiences, media and technology spreading news and rumours, 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.
Cited: “Technology” by Makaya McCraven, with Theon Cross and Ben LaMar Gay, Off the Record (Techno Logic), Nonesuch Records, 2025.