HCE

HCE is figured as a publican and a focus of communal attention, but the surrounding prose keeps his identity unstable: the house becomes a night-time mirage, a drink opens onto legendary history, and a crowd’s voices turn private hospitality into public spectacle. His portrait brings together the novel’s recurrent entanglement of drinking, storytelling, and reputation.

The publican and his house

The passage presents HCE as the host of a house of call, a place associated with shared bread and drink. Yet the house is not a stable refuge. Its apparent solidity is disrupted by a hallucinatory image of a deed emerging like a mirage in a mirror, making the domestic and commercial setting feel as changeable as a dream. HCE’s role as host is thus bound to a setting where stories and appearances continually unsettle what seems factual.

The scene casts him as a bulky, red-faced hunter and drinker, associated with a bottle-filled gathering and the pledge of a drinking vessel. His presence is conveyed through comic bodily description and the ritual objects of hospitality rather than through a conventional account of his thoughts or history. The pub’s social identity rests on the traffic between the host, the drink, and those who assemble around him.

Drink and legendary time

A drink in the scene becomes a hinge between ordinary pub life and an expansive, legendary past. HCE’s ale is compared with the drink of a Patagonian chieftain, and the image of pulling a turf cork from Lough Neagh enlarges the act of opening a bottle into a mythic gesture. The local drinker and the distant, monumental figure occupy the same imaginative field: the prose lets everyday consumption carry the weight of recurrent history.

The gathering’s movement is equally fluid. A pop gives way to a bodily action described as a cathartic descent, and the imagery then shifts toward a ship being raised or moved alongside a drinker. These transformations do not establish a literal sequence of events so much as show how the scene’s language repeatedly converts drinking into movement, release, and passage. HCE remains at the center of this mutable social and narrative space.

Reputation and public company

A later passage places the host among drinkers and tradespeople, naming lorimers, leather sellers, skinners, salters, pewterers, paper-stainers, parish clerks, bowyers, girdlers, mercers, cordwainers, and weavers. The catalogue gives the gathering a broad civic texture: HCE’s house is associated not only with drinking but with a cross-section of working and commercial life. The hope that a library may be made public further connects his world to communal access and public standing.

The crowd’s speech turns the room into a noisy public stage. Voices urge an agitator onward, while HCE’s answer is framed as a promise to act, followed by a self-presentation as sober and satisfied after sleep and drink. The passage does not resolve his public image into either sober authority or comic disorder. Instead, the contrast between the crowd’s calls, the drinking culture, and the host’s claim to sobriety leaves his dignity exposed to the same communal performance that sustains his status.