You're such a Cassandra

Being that the narrative is supposed to take place at night, perhaps in a dreamworld, which explains the portmanteaus and garbled words - and perhaps even the colloquialisms - the narrator is ridiculously humorous and, more importantly, untrustworthy. This is no major epiphany, as it's not a foreign idea to Joyce narratives - Ulysses and even Dubliners have their fair share of unreliable narrators.

Why am I not trusting the narrator(s) to this novel? For some reason I'm finding that his/her/its trusting in HCE a bit disquieting. As if whilst he's trying to convince us (the readers) of HCE's innocence, he's trying to convince himself. His pressing of the issue, which appears in chapters 2 and 3, have made me very suspicious.

One of the first 'descriptions', a very loose term for what actually is 'described', of HCE reads as follows:

it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation, every time he continually surveyed, amid vociferatings from in from of Accept few nutties! and Take off that white hat!, relieved with Stop his Grog and Put It in the Log and Loots in his (bassvoco) Boots, from good start to happy finish the truly catholic assemblage above floats and footlights from their assbawlveldts and oxgangs unanimously to clapplaud . . . (32:16-28)

The first bit of chapter 2 is devoted to the 'naming' of HCE, and here we get to one of the more famous versions: 'Here Comes Everybody'. Again Joyce is playing with the Everyman - as this one man is representative of 'everybody'. Or perhaps this is a more ironic nomenclature, as this character seems much more seedy than Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, or Molly Bloom.

But there is something within this description that is a bit awkward. First, he is described as 'imposing'. This word has its connotations to being princely, regal, and of stately appearance. But in my mind, this is a more threatening word. To be 'imposing' is to make things a bit uncomfortable - at least in modern usage. The word obviously brings me to the pilot of 'Arrested Development', where the Bluth family mistakes an intervention for an imposition:

Terribly unfriendly. Imaging 'imposition' I think of someone leaning over and above the person, threatening. A step away from 'usurping', the keyword of Hamlet and Ulysses. Although HCE is being portrayed as stately, as 'magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation' (the narrator is really fawning here), that a 'catholic assemblage' (suggestion diversity to the nth degree) 'gathered together in that king's treat house of satin . . .' - all of this revelry reminds me of chapter 12 aka 'Cyclops' in Ulysses, as the narrators gawk over the citizen, the major 'villain' of Leopold Bloom's day. By mimicking Biblical aggrandisements to a common man, there is something offputting.

Later the narrator states that 'To anyone who knew and love the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giants H. C. Earwicker throughout his excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing around for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous' (33:28-32). This seems to be dripping in guilt. I feel like most narrators, especially when they want to give of the idea that their protagonist is Christlike, would refuse to bring up Jesus in the narrative. They may have the protagonist spread his arms, as if he were being nailed to the cross; they may make the protagonist's initials JC; they may have the protagonist speak in parables and in phrases that eerily sound like Jesus. But they don't come out and say it straightforwardly. 'Vicefreegal' brings forth 'vice' and 'free', that vice could be running rampant; 'lustsleuth' suggests a Sherlock Holmes-esque character that, instead of looking for clues to solve a crime, is actually looking to start a crime - of lust; 'boobytrap', when taken literally with 'lustsleuth', elicits the concept of a woman's breast as a trap.

The narrator then says: 'Truth, beard on prophet, compels one to add that there is said to have been quondam (pfuit! pfuit!) some case of the kind implicating, it is interdum believed, a quidam (if he did not exist it would be necessary quoniam to invent him) . . .' (33:32-36). The 'pfuit!' sounds make me think of a booing and hissing crowd; the choice of 'implicating' makes me think of the need for a trial. (It's also interesting to note that the narrator believes that if HCE didn't exist, someone would have had to invent him, meaning that this would have had to happen one way or another, with HCE or with someone else. That history perhaps has a story that it needs to tell and will choose its heroes or villains, even if they don't step up to the challenge or choose to sidestep the issue.)

There are a couple more great instances of this in chapter 2, but bringing it to chapter 3, I'd just  like to bring forth the following:

The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum, Maeromor Mournomates!) averging on blight like the mundibanks of Fennyana, but deeds bound going arise again. Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if not yet, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, an on the 'bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwomanborn' (55:3-10).

The house of Atreos is that of Atreus, the doomed Greek family cursed from the beginning that is basically dismembered when Agamemnon, son of Atreus, returns from Troy (Ilium) after sacrificing his daughter and taking a sexslave out of the unlistened to Cassandra, only to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra. The story doesn't end well for any of the survivors, as all Greek tragedy works. I'd take a look at Aeschylus' plays.

'Cassandra' from Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite

The narrator and HCE don't have a good relationship with this 'biografiend'. And there is a phrase that the establisher of the world, a father, a god or perhaps even HCE would like to stamp on to all of his creations/children 'pretinately' or prenatally: 'on the 'bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather'. The father sows his seeds, in all senses of the phrase. Good or bad. Everyone, Everybody has to follow blindly - perhaps follow this terrible fate that the Fates have laid out for us; and perhaps, like Cassandra, even if we know our doom, everyone else is deaf to our plight, refuses to listen to reason. And therefore that's why I refuse to think of HCE in a kind light. Whatever his crime is at the moment, he is able to use and abuse his power to justify his existence, to justify his actions, regardless of whom he's taking down in the process.