HCE's response to the Butt and Taff teleplay of How Buckley Shot the Russian General is to make a plea for the universality of guilt. His first speech, beginning on 355.21, furthers the confusion of speaker and narrator in this chapter. I see a transition, shortly after HCE begins speaking, to a narrator's description. I'm transcoding it thus using our normal markers of quoted speech:
"That is too tootrue enough in Solidan's Island as in Moltern Giaourmany and from the Amelakins off to date back to land of engined Egypsians," assented [HCE] from this opening before his inlookers... (355.21-24)
It is worth pausing a moment and recalling that this is part of the poetics of FW: as much as there is an expansion of meaning in almost every word through wordplay, on the level of passages and paragraphs, there is a deliberate evacuation of context. The basic sense of English-sounding prose, which often grows so slight that it hangs over the words as insubstantially as wisps of smoke, is matched by the bare minimum use of things like em dashes and paragraph divisions to help the reader.
After this passage, there then follows a series of epithets, treating HCE like a god, before he begins speaking again, again with no paratextual markers after the initial em dash that leads off the paragraph: "We all, for whole men is lepers, have been nobbut wonterers in that chill childerness which is our true name..." So HCE begins to reveal that, in pleading for the universality of sin, and implying that one can't be blamed for something everybody has (the "true name" of humanity), he is also going to plea for his own innocence.
The next paragraph continues to report HCE's plea, but it all looks to be indirect discourse (356.05ff). The questions which the narrator says HCE was asking of his (probably bewildered, and definitely inebriated) customers, which I am going to look at in just a moment, are of the utmost seriousness. It is hard for me to put my finger on it exactly, but I find this extremely funny, funnier than if we heard HCE's own voice here. In distilling down what might have been a long series of convoluted questions (based on HCE's lengthy speeches to come) to their essence, there is instead a montage effect.
The core of this montage of questions reads:
...how comes ever a body in our taylorised world to selve out thishis, whither it gives a primeum nobilees for our notomise or naught, the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asame. (356.10-14)
First of all, read this in your best drunk voice if you want a chuckle. Montage though this may be, the ipsissima verba of the drunken questioner come through.
This isn't a question (no question mark) but it wants to be; it is an indirect question (he wondered why such and such is the case) which does not have an answer. The first question doesn't seem to find its verb ("how comes...thishis") but devolves into subordinate clauses explaining...something. It is about the ever-changing nature of human nature, not just in general but of each human ("man" becoming "nother man"). With all this change, what is the principle that allows "man" to be "man," for each one to be "asame." Or...not the same (a-same, alpha privative). We certainly can hear through these words some significant drunken philosophizing.
What does this have to do with his sense of guilt? Why is he asking questions like these? Is he arguing that people change constantly, and the person who committed the transgression in the past is not the same as the one standing before the guilt in the future?
This identity and non-identity of humanity is the "first riddle of the universe," something like the first emergence of life, like the far-distant wriggling of the first worm ("farst wriggle") at the beginning of life itself, the "where" and "whence" ("ubivence") that could have been anywere (Lat. ubivis, any where you please). This is different, by the way, from Egyptian creation stories, which (you'll be shocked to hear) portrayed the first land to emerge at the dawn of the universe from the primeval waters as, you guessed it, Egypt.
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