JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE
Episode 017: LAST BATTLE
PAGE 81:12-86:31 OF CHAPTER 4 | 2025-11-06
PODCAST AUDIO (AT FOOT OF THIS POST)
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
[Music: Instrumental of “The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly” with Adam Seelig on piano and Brandon Bak on drums, from the film of Finnegans Wake Ch03. Music fades out]
Adam Seelig: Welcome to James Joyce’s divine and delirious comedy, Finnegans Wake. In this episode, number 17, we’ll hear Irish-Canadian actor — and my good friend and colleague — Richard Harte performing pages 81 to 86 from Chapter 4 of Joyce’s last novel. I’m Adam Seelig, the director of the reading you’ll soon hear.
Pip Dwyer and little sister Kate near Clifden County Galway, summer 1993.
Irish-Canadian actor Pip Dwyer has joined the cast of our film/podcast series for Chapter 8 of the novel, which we recently shot at what might be the most fitting venue in all of Toronto, given that Chapter 8 is known as ‘the washerwomen’ chapter: and that is a laundromat called Ulster Coin Wash. Yes, to the Irish listeners out there, Toronto, once called ‘the Belfast of Canada,’ has a robust history of Northern Irish Protestant immigration, resulting in a downtown residential street named Ulster, where you will find, naturally, Ulster Coin Wash. We will edit and release Chapter 8 in the future, and I promise you, it’s truly something to look forward to.
[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 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]
Adam Seelig: John Cage’s essay on “Experimental Music” (1957) provides a way of thinking about Joyce’s ‘Experimental Novel’ — and I’m sure in what I’m about to quote you’ll notice John Cage’s use of the verb ‘to wake’:
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living… (Silence 12)
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was a major inspiration and source text for John Cage, so I’m not surprised that the stated purpose of Cage’s playfully purposeless art, like Joyce’s, is to wake us.
Sex and violence: in Chapter 4 we get the violence first. Today’s reading opens with the fourth and final confrontation between the Cad and our protagonist, HCEarwicker.
The first confrontation occurs in chapter 2 when HCE encounters the so-called Cad. [Richard Harte reads] “he met a cad with a pipe” (35:10-11, Ep008)
The second, a variation on the first, makes a gun more explicit, and also puts a kind of English complexion on the Cad. [Harte reads] “It was after the show at Wednesbury that one tall man, humping a suspiciousparcel, 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 unknowable assailant (masked)” (62:26-33, Ep013).
That’s from Chapter 3, which later includes another variation on this confrontation, this time with the Cad appearing as a German newspaper reporter, Herr Betreffender (69:32), who attacks Earwicker with a verbal barrage of 111 insults. [Harte reads] “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…” (71:19-22, Ep015). That’s confrontation #3.
The fourth and final one, the ‘last battle,’ if you will, occurs now in Chapter 4, with the fight instigated by an “attackler” described as “a cropatkin” (81:18), making him either (or both) a Russian revolutionary (McHugh) and/or Irish anarchist (Rose). And they fight, the attacker attacking and the defender, HCE, defending. But as so often happens in the fluid, dream language of Finnegans Wake, these opposing figures become confused to the point where we can no longer tell the attacker from the attacked. Perhaps they’re ultimately one and the same; perhaps they’re both HCE himself, as Danis Rose has theorized, and the confrontations we’ve been witnessing all along are internal to the sleeping Earwicker, divided within, and at times against, himself. No wonder both assailant and assailed need to break after their brawl not merely for refreshment, but for a complete refresh of identity, or as the Wake puts it, they take a “pause for refleshmeant, the same man (or a different and younger him of the same ham)” (82:10-11).
This merging of identities, which happens throughout the novel, reminds me in particular of a phrase early in Chapter 3: “by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans may they cease to bidivil uns…” (49:36-50:2). I love that “coincidance of their contraries”.
The “purposeful purposelessness or purposeless play” of Chapter 4 continues with some “collidabanter” between the attacker and the attacked, who appear to make up and get along before parting ways. One of them crosses a bridge, spits out his teeth—a very dream-like image—and, still bloody from the brawl, files a police report (84).
Adaline Glasheen points out that the pattern of encounter, plea, attack and counter-attack may owe something to Charles Baudelaire’s fable “Let's Beat Up the Poor!” (Assomons les pauvres !, 1865), in which the narrator randomly attacks a beggar (Glasheen, “Beggar” entry, 27). The beggar’s counter-attack, however, is so successful that the narrator ultimately acknowledges the beggar as his equal. “Monsieur, vous êtes mon égal !” (“Sir, you are my equal!”) That the Wake goes further by fusing and confusing the opposing parties might be something else Joyce learned from Baudelaire, in this case from the French poet’s most famous line of all: “Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!” (Au Lecteur, 1857); “Hypocrite — brother — we’re the same!”
John Tenniel’s illustration of the trial in Alice in Wonderland (1890).
And then we’re at a trial. You’ll hear the court convened and called to order to solve “the wasnottobe crime cunundrum” of HCE (85:22), the crime conundrum being the hazy sin committed by our protagonist which the Dublin public won’t let go of since the scandal surrounding it first spread back in Chapter 2. To allege HCE of wrongdoing, let alone convict him, based on a “wasnottobe crime cunundrum” could not possibly hold up ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ in any proper court of law. Luckily for us readers and listeners, this court is far from proper, resembling more of a show trial or kangaroo court à la Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland or the 1992 courtroom comedy My Cousin Vinny.
A drunk prisoner, Festy King, is called to the stand, though he’s hardly a reliable witness given that he comes from “a family long and honourably associated with the tar and feather industries” (85:22-23). Crown attorney P.C. Robort attempts to dig up dirt on HCE via Festy King. And the public gallery, “convened by the Irish Angricultural and Prepostoral Ouraganisations” (86:20-21), is clearly ready to get their hate on. There’s plenty of purposeful purposelessness at play.
Now it’s time for Richard’s performance of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, 81 line 12 to page 86 line 31 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 75:1-81:11.]
[81] It was hard by the howe's there, plainly on this disoluded and a
buchan cold spot, rupestric then, resurfaced that now is, that
Luttrell sold if Lautrill bought, in the saddle of the Brennan's
(now Malpasplace?) pass, versts and versts from true civilisation,
not where his dreams top their traums halt (Beneathere! Bena-
there!) but where livland yontide meared with the wilde, saltlea
with flood, that the attackler, a cropatkin, though under medium
and between colours with truly native pluck, engaged the Adver-
sary who had more in his eye than was less to his leg but whom for
plunder sake, he mistook in the heavy rain to be Oglethorpe or
some other ginkus, Parr aparrently, to whom the headandheel-
less chickenestegg bore some Michelangiolesque resemblance,
making use of sacrilegious languages to the defect that he would
challenge their hemosphores to exterminate them but he would
cannonise the b — y b — r's life out of him and lay him out
contritely as smart as the b — r had his b — y nightprayers
said, three patrecknocksters and a couplet of hellmuirries (tout
est sacré pour un sacreur, femme à barbe ou homme-nourrice) at the
same time, so as to plugg well let the blubbywail ghoats out of
him, catching holst of an oblong bar he had and with which he
usually broke furnitures he rose the stick at him. The boarder
incident prerepeated itself. The pair (whethertheywere Nippo-
luono engaging Wei-Ling-Taou or de Razzkias trying to recon-
noistre the general Boukeleff, man may not say), struggled
apairently for some considerable time, (the cradle rocking equally
[82] to one and oppositely from the other on its law of capture and
recapture), under the All In rules around the booksafe, fighting
like purple top and tipperuhry Swede, (Secremented Servious of
the Divine Zeal!) and in the course of their tussle the toller man,
who had opened his bully bowl to beg, said to the miner who
was carrying the worm (a handy term for the portable distillery
which consisted of three vats, two jars and several bottles though
we purposely say nothing of the stiff, both parties having an
interest in the spirits): Let me go, Pautheen! I hardly knew ye.
Later on, after the solstitial pause for refleshmeant, the same
man (or a different and younger him of the same ham) asked in
the vermicular with a very oggly chew-chin-grin: Was six vic-
tolios fifteen pigeon takee offa you, tell he me, stlongfella, by
picky-pocky ten to foul months behindaside? There were some
further collidabanter and severe tries to convert for the best part
of an hour and now a woden affair in the shape of a webley (we
at once recognise our old friend Ned of so many illortemporate
letters) fell from the intruser who, as stuck as that cat to that
mouse in that tube of that christchurch organ, (did the imnage of
Girl Cloud Pensive flout above them light young charm, in
ribbons and pigtail?) whereupon became friendly and, saying not
his shirt to tear, to know wanted, joking and knobkerries all
aside laying, if his change companion who stuck still to the in-
vention of his strongbox, with a tenacity corrobberating their
mutual tenitorial rights, happened to have the loots change of
a tenpound crickler about him at the moment, addling that hap
so, he would pay him back the six vics odd, do you see, out of
that for what was taken on the man of samples last Yuni or Yuly,
do you follow me, Capn? To this the other, Billi with the Boule,
who had mummed and mauled up to that (for he was hesitency
carried to excelcism) rather amusedly replied: Woowoo would
you be grossly surprised, Hill, to learn that, as it so happens, I
honestly have not such a thing as the loo, as the least chance of
a tinpanned crackler anywhere about me at the present moho-
moment but I believe I can see my way, as you suggest, it
being Yuletide or Yuddanfest and as it's mad nuts, son, for you
[83] when it's hatter's hares, mon, for me, to advance you something
like four and sevenpence between hopping and trapping which
you might just as well have, boy baches, to buy J. J. and S. with.
There was a minute silence before memory's fire's rekindling and
then. Heart alive! Which at very first wind of gay gay and whisk-
wigs wick's ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him
pink, became strangely calm and forthright sware by all his lards
porsenal that the thorntree of sheol might ramify up his Sheo-
fon to the lux apointlex but he would go good to him suntime
marx my word fort, for a chip off the old Flint, (in the Nichtian
glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues
this is nat language at any sinse of the world and one might as
fairly go and kish his sprogues as fail to certify whether the
wartrophy eluded at some lives earlier was that somethink like a
jug, to what, a coctable) and remarxing in languidoily, seemingly
much more highly pleased than tongue could tell at this opening
of a lifetime and the foretaste of the Dun Bank pearlmothers
and the boy to wash down which he would feed to himself in
the Ruadh Cow at Tallaght and then into the Good Woman at
Ringsend and after her inat Conway's Inn at Blackrock and, first
to fall, cursed be all, where appetite would keenest be, atte,
funeral fare or fun fain real, Adam and Eve's in Quantity Street
by the grace of gamy queen Tailte, her will and testament: You
stunning little southdowner! I'd know you anywhere, Declaney,
let me truthfully tell you in or out of the lexinction of life and
who the hell else, be your blanche patch on the boney part!
Goalball I've struck this daylit dielate night of nights, by golly!
My hat, you have some bully German grit, sundowner! He
spud in his faust (axin); he toped the raw best (pardun); he
poked his pick (a tip is a tap): and he tucked his friend's leave. And,
with French hen or the portlifowlium of hastes and leisures, about
to continue that, the queer mixture exchanged the pax in embrace
or poghue puxy as practised between brothers of the same breast,
hillelulia, killelulia, allenalaw, and, having ratified before the
god of the day their torgantruce which belittlers have schmall-
kalled the treatyng to cognac, turning his fez menialstrait in the
[84] direction of Moscas, he first got rid of a few mitsmillers and
hurooshoos and levanted off with tubular jurbulance at a bull's
run over the assback bridge, spitting his teeths on rooths, with the
seven and four in danegeld and their humoral hurlbat or other
uncertain weapon of lignum vitae, but so evermore rhumanasant of
a toboggan poop, picked up to keep some crowplucking ap-
pointment with some rival rialtos anywheres between Pearidge
and the Littlehorn while this poor delaney, who they left along
with the confederate fender behind and who albeit ballsbluffed,
bore up wonderfully wunder all of it with a whole number of
plumsized contusiums, plus alasalah bruised coccyx, all over him,
reported the occurance in the best way he could, to the flabber-
gaze of the whole lab, giving the Paddybanners the military
salute as for his exilicy's the O'Daffy, in justifiable hope that,
in nobiloroman review of the hugely sitisfactuary conclusium
of their negotiations and the jugglemonkysh agripment dein-
derivative, some lotion or fomentation of poppyheads would be
jennerously exhibited to the parts, at the nearest watchhouse in
Vicar Lane, the white ground of his face all covered with digon-
ally redcrossed nonfatal mammalian blood as proofpositive of the
seriousness of his character and that he was bleeding in self
defience (stanch it!) from the nostrils, lips, pavilion and palate,
while some of his hitter's hairs had been pulled off his knut's
head by Colt though otherwise his allround health appeared to
be middling along as it proved most fortunate that not one of
the two hundred and six bones and five hundred and one muscles
in his corso was a whit the whorse for her whacking. Herwho?
Nowthen, leaving clashing ash, brawn and muscle and brass-
made to oust earthernborn and rockcrystal to wreck isinglass but
wurming along gradually for our savings backtowards mother-
waters so many miles from bank and Dublin stone (olympiading
even till the eleventh dynasty to reach that thuddysickend Ham-
laugh) and to the question of boney's unlawfully obtaining a
pierced paraflamme and claptrap fireguard there crops out the
still more salient point of the politish leanings and town pursuits
of our forebeer, El Don De Dunelli, (may his ship thicked stick
[85] in the bottol of the river and all his crewsers stock locked in the
burral of the seas!) who, when within the black of your toenail,
sir, of being mistakenly ambushed by one of the uddahveddahs,
and as close as made no matter, mam, to being kayoed offhand
when the hyougono heckler with the Peter the Painter wanted
to hole him, was consistently practising the first of the primary
and imprescriptible liberties of the pacific subject by circulating
(be British, boys to your bellybone and chuck a chum a chance!)
alongst one of our umphrohibited semitary thrufahrts, open to
buggy and bike, to walk, Wellington Park road, with the curb
or quaker's quacknostrum under his auxter and his alpenstuck in
his redhand, a highly commendable exercise, or, number two of
our acta legitima plebeia, on the brink (beware to baulk a man at
his will!) of taking place upon a public seat, to what, bare by
Butt's, most easterly (but all goes west!) of blackpool bridges, as
a public protest and naturlikevice, without intent to annoy either,
being praisegood thankfully for the wrathbereaved ringdove and
the fearstung boaconstrictor and all the more right jollywell
pleased, which he was, at having other people's weather.
But to return to the atlantic and Phenitia Proper. As if that
were not to be enough for anyone but little headway, if any, was
made in solving the wasnottobe crime cunundrum when a child
of Maam, Festy King, of a family long and honourably associ-
ated with the tar and feather industries, who gave an address in
old plomansch Mayo of the Saxons in the heart of a foulfamed
potheen district, was subsequently haled up at the Old Bailey
on the calends of Mars, under an incompatibly framed indictment
of both the counts (from each equinoxious points of view, the one
fellow's fetch being the other follow's person) that is to see, flying
cushats out of his ouveralls and making fesses immodst his forces
on the field. Oyeh! Oyeh! When the prisoner, soaked in methyl-
ated, appeared in dry dock, appatently ambrosiaurealised, like
Kersse's Korduroy Karikature, wearing, besides stains, rents and
patches, his fight shirt, straw braces, souwester and a policeman's
corkscrew trowswers, all out of the true (as he had purposely torn
up all his cymtrymanx bespokes in the mamertime), deposing for
[86] his exution with all the fluors of sparse in the royal Irish vocabulary
how the whole padderjagmartin tripiezite suet and all the sulfeit
of copperas had fallen off him quatz unaccountably like the
chrystalisations of Alum on Even while he was trying for to stick
fire to himcell, (in feacht he was dripping as he found upon strip-
ping for a pipkin ofmalt as he feared the coold raine) it was
attempted by the crown (P.C. Robort) to show that King, elois
Crowbar, once known as Meleky, impersonating a climbing boy,
rubbed some pixes of any luvial peatsmoor o'er his face, plucks
and pussas, with a clanetourf as the best means of disguising him-
self and was to the middlewhite fair in Mudford of a Thoorsday,
feishts of Peeler and Pole, under the illassumed names of
Tykingfest and Rabworc picked by him and Anthony out of a
tellafun book, ellegedly with a pedigree pig (unlicensed) and a
hyacinth. They were on that sea by the plain of Ir nine hundred
and ninetynine years and they never cried crack or ceased from
regular paddlewicking till that they landed their two and a
trifling selves, amadst camel and ass, greybeard and suckling,
priest and pauper, matrmatron and merrymeg, into the meddle
of the mudstorm. The gathering, convened by the Irish Angri-
cultural and Prepostoral Ouraganisations, to help the Irish muck
to look his brother dane in the face and attended thanks to
Larry by large numbers, of christies and jew's totems, tospite of
the deluge, was distinctly of a scattery kind when the bally-
bricken he could get no good of, after cockofthewalking through
a few fancyfought mains ate some of the doorweg, the pikey
later selling the gentleman ratepayer because she, Francie's sister,
that is to say, ate a whole side of his (the animal's) sty, on a
struggle Street, Qui Sta Troia, in order to pay off, hiss or lick,
six doubloons fifteen arrears of his, the villain's not the rumbler's
rent.
[End of excerpt]
Adam Seelig: That was Richard Harte reading pages 81 to 86 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 18 in a fortnight when Richard continues 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 and 2, 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 Ep017]
Mentioned: Pip Dwyer, John Cage “Experimental Music,” “a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play,” the fourth and final confrontation between two men (the Cad and HCE), perhaps HCE is both attacker and attacked?, merging of identities, Charles Baudelaire’s “Let’s Beat Up the Poor,” the trial, Festy King, crown attorney P.C. Robort, 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: John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings (50th anniversary edition). Wesleyan, 2013.
Charles Baudelaire, “Assomons les pauvres !” (1865).