If the rainbow is the most important symbol in FW, the flood of Noah is equally important and productive as a metaphor for the transition from age to age, from waking to sleep, from life to death. [When typing "metaphor" earlier, I was thinking also about adding that it was productive, and ended up typing "productor"] I voiced my thoughts at the beginning of this series about the rainbow which is mentioned ("the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface," 3.12-14) on the first page of the book and which faintly imbues the book's first description of the "when not yet" world before HCE's fall. There, I suggested that, in the creation-story-like language of the opening paragraphs of the book, the rainbow was positioned as the symbol of creation, which means, in terms of the story of Genesis at least, inundation precedes creation. Thinking about this further, I would maybe go further and say that the flood and its aftermath, which the rainbow marks, plays the structural role of creation in the mythology of FW.
A passage from II.3 has brought these ideas back up for me. After HCE has argued for his innocence by pleading that every human is equally guilty (the cause of the flood in Genesis!), we see the emergence of the four historians, Mamalujo, among the chaotic body of voices in the pub (367.8ff.). There is then a passage (367.20-36) which describes how "Jukoleon" (Deucalion, the survivor of the flood in Greek myth, also Napoleon, to whom HCE is often equated, and probably also "Juke" to represent how "Duke" would be pronounced, which means this figure includes the polar opposites of Napoleon and Wellington) released the birds after the flood to see if the waters receded, but saw only "the residuance of a delugion" (367.24). So the floodwaters still covering the globe are remain (Lat. residēre), though they may be just beginning to recede (Lat. residere).
To be inundated is to be overwhelmed with guilt yet deluded ("delugion," delusion) that you are innocent. HCE has not yet experienced relief, and will continue to be the object of verbal mockery (as the rest of this chapter shows).
To be inundated is to be inebriated. As the story about Roderick O'Connor which ends this chapter makes explicit (subject of a future post), but as (I think) we glimpse in the final multi-page sequence of chatter about HCE preceding it, the pub's host is drunk, and maybe soon to pass out.
To be inundated is to sleep, and to die. The rainbow is the sign of awaking and of being born again. Instead of seeing dry land and the rainbow, Jukoleon gazes out over the waters and sees that they are still controlled by "the old thalassocrats of invisible empires, maskers of thewaterworld": the four men were summoned by the word "Mask" just above, and these forces are now seen by HCE to be "facing one way to another way and this way on that way," four directions. They embody "fourdimmansions," mansions or demesnes proper to feudal lords.
The paragraph marks an important transition. No more do we here from HCE, but from voices talking about him and analyzing him. If I can be bold, I would suggest even that this is a moment where the sleeper himself attempts waking but morning has not yet arrived. That may be going to far. In addition to helping the scene in the pub transition to a scene in a ship, first docked on the Liffey then sailing towards Europe (a process started already in the story about the Norwegian sailor), this paragraph is the beginning of a series of water-focused episodes that ultimately brings the book to its final scene when ALP becomes the Liffey flowing into the ocean.
[FW 367]
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