The four evangelists, speaking as one or taking turns, question Yawn, who has been sleeping and is slowly waking up, or is dozing and about to fall asleep. He is both laying on the grass and is buried beneath it, creating a gentle hillock over his recumbent form, grown over with grass and flowers. You can still communicate with him: he is not entirely asleep, not too long buried or too deep.
This situation differs from what is in book I, where HCE's tumulus is so large and so ancient that it is almost completely lost in the landscape, and the occupant of this ancient tomb now only able to be perceived by proxy, by evidence and historiography and folklore. Assuming the speakers early in book I are related to the Mamalujo of book III, there we have learned discourse sorting through facts; here, a lively interview with a very much alive subject.
HCE is present in III.3. Yawn speaks of him as an ancestor. He quotes a short poem about him, but remembers it incompletely, or only knows part of it because it is so ancient that it has only been partially preserved:
Hail him heathen, heal him holystone!
Courser, Recourser, Changechild...............
Eld as endall, earth..............
The interviewer interprets the incomplete lines as purposeful in their form, and scans the stanza as a "cataleptic [this means the last syllable is dropped, though here more seems missing] mithyphallic." It is a song about Bacchus, or an erection. It is mythic. Later, the interviewer finally recalls it, knowing it in three recurring yet changing versions. It originally came from a certain Finnsen Fayean who was called "Ocean," or Ossian (Finn MacCool's son), but now known in the version of Yawn, ascribed to a certain Mr. Tupling Toun of Morning de Heights.
When the interviewer, just earlier, asks Yawn more about the ancestor these three lines speak of, Yawn replies:
Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake. Ah! May he have now of here fearfilled me! Sinflowed! O sinflowed!
His dream at night ("nonday") was of this figure. Knowing he will wake one day, Yawn wishes him to "fearfull" him: make him be who he should be, and become a man (Ir. fear). Yawn also seems to lament the current time of flood, of "Sinflowed" (Ger. Sintflut), not just a time of deluge but of the preponderance of sin. The statement is paradoxical: flowing water (in baptism) should take away sin, but here it also spread it.
Another reading. "Sinflowed" is not a lament but a repeated exclamation about the ancestral figure in his dream. He prays he will have "fearfilled" him, and then declares him to be "Sinflowed." Sin sounds like Finn. Coming after "O," it sounds like Oisin, the son of Finn, is the one who flowed. The father "flowed" into the son (Finn to Ossian, HCE to Shaun), fulfilling his duty as a patriarch and enabling the same of his son, his task able to be "fearfilled."
When Yawn says "Dream.", is he saying that what he is about to describe was a dream? A dream is both a night vision in the past (they are only known as dreams after the fact) and a hope for the future wished in the full light of day. Shaun dreams of HCE in these two senses.
* * *
The effect this dialogue is having on my thought about the book as a whole is immense. It feels like Yawn's dream is mine, thinking back to the beginning of the book. To have such a dilated experience of temporality in less than 500 pages is astounding. And to think ahead, when the reading inevitably circles back to p.3, and I once again see the faint outlines of the prehistorical tomb in the landscape, and hear only echoes of its meaning. Here, in III.3, I feel as if I have travelled in the past, the distant past, to speak with someone now long gone, disintegrated. If I push my ear to the ground I would perhaps just hear a rumbling. I feel that I am meeting him in a dream now. This book is no longer a dream in its linguistic mimicry or its setting. When I open it and read I step inside of a dream and become a dreamer.
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