Hump's impeachment

Hump's impeachment is the recurring public condition of HCE as a man accused, ridiculed, and judged through stories that keep changing as they pass from mouth to mouth. It is not presented as a single, settled verdict: the charges remain uncertain, but their social consequences are tangible, from a ballad performed in public to the insults HCE records and the later image of his partial recovery. The gap between disputed evidence and durable disgrace is the state’s defining feature.

Accusation and Unstable Testimony

The underlying scandal is narrated through claims whose versions do not agree. Two women plead that the encounter occurred spontaneously and innocently, while their published testimonies diverge on minor points. The account itself calls the alleged conduct a first offense and invokes attenuating circumstances, but this language neither establishes what happened nor ends the matter. Instead, it reveals how an uncertain allegation can be repeatedly framed as both an intimate offense and an occasion for public judgment.

A later recollection places HCE in a park on an April morning, dressed in a conspicuous assortment of uniform-like clothing, when he meets a man with a pipe. The stranger challenges him with a question about the time. HCE draws a watch from his pocket and answers that it is twelve; at the same moment, church bells sound across the distance. The exchange turns into an opportunity for HCE to defend himself: he invokes the accusation made against him and says that it came from a creature in human form whom he considers beneath him. His reply is preserved as reported speech reconstructed from successive accounts, rather than offered as a transparent record. The scene therefore makes HCE both a participant in the scandal and a subject whose own defense arrives already mediated by other tellers.

From Report to Public Performance

The movement from allegation to reputation becomes especially visible in Hosty's ballad. A crowd gathers around the lawn as the song is introduced as the one Hosty made, and its performers answer one another in refrains. Before the ballad settles on a name, it piles up alternatives for its subject, then identifies him as Persse O'Reilly. The shifting names make the identity at once recognizable and unstable: communal performance can fix a target while keeping the language around him fluid.

The song recasts the disgraced man as Humpty Dumpty, a fallen ruler who once occupied the castle’s height and is now kicked about like a rotten parsnip. It links his fall to the Magazine Wall and threatens his removal from Green Street to Mountjoy Prison. The comic nursery-rhyme comparison compresses political humiliation, bodily collapse, and the prospect of punishment into one singable image. Its chorus gives the accusation a form that can be repeated by a crowd, turning a contested story into a public refrain.

The passage also shows the ballad’s circulation as a performance rather than simply a text. It is sung and chorused at a named street and church, amid instrumental flourishes and a deliberately unruly atmosphere. The account’s shifting voices, stage directions, and sound effects place HCE’s disgrace within a social event where song, gossip, and spectacle reinforce one another. The public does not need a stable legal finding in order to repeat the humiliation.

Gossip, Threats, and the Record of Insults

Rumor expands the case beyond the ballad. One account says that a visitor came to HCE’s house, first threatening to break his head, then to strike him with a monkey wrench, and finally to make him drink blood. The visitor demands more wood alcohol and continues his tirade for hours, from late morning into the afternoon, while HCE remains in a corner of the conservatory. HCE responds not by ending the confrontation but by compiling a list of the abusive names directed at him, preserving a record that is itself described as partly lost.

The list’s scale and variety give public disgrace a material form. Its epithets range from accusations of informing and murder to mockery of HCE’s appearance, religion, nationality, and social standing. The insults do not settle into one coherent charge; they accumulate as a crowd’s competing inventions. Their sheer profusion makes the attack feel less like a focused inquiry than an ongoing process of naming, in which every retelling can add another stain.

The narration repeatedly warns against treating such accounts as reliable. It asks whether the reported outrages were mere merchant-tailors’ fables and observes that the truth is used sparingly by those who recount them. A separate account of an armed threat likewise introduces a masked assailant, a suspicious parcel, and conflicting possibilities, then abruptly challenges its own version as untrue, denying that the supposed person, weapon, or other details existed. The result is not a clean exoneration but a story-world in which accusation and retraction are both part of the public record.

Impeachment as a Continuing State

HCE is addressed as a brother condemned for self-division, rebellion, and failures of religious and social duty. The accusation ranges from his supposed refusal to serve or allow others to serve to an alleged failure to fulfill expectations of reproduction. It also condemns him for putting his apologia onto paper, presenting writing as another offense that enlarges an already unhappy world. The charge thus extends beyond a discrete public incident: it gathers personal conduct, belief, sexuality, and authorship into a generalized indictment.

Other reproaches make the indictment economic. HCE is accused of extracting charitable funds by presenting himself as desperately poor, then living extravagantly, sleeping through holidays, and spending beyond his means. He is also accused of distributing his surplus among dependants and leaving no adequate reserve for a rainy day. These charges sit beside one another without resolution: HCE appears both a calculating manipulator and a spendthrift, a figure whose alleged faults can multiply in incompatible directions.

The public aftermath is staged across everyday places. After HCE’s likeness or caricature has been printed in a mendicants’ publication, his image appears upside down in inns and other locations from city to suburb and countryside. People mock his figure while music plays and a crowd gathers around the spectacle. The repeated display converts disgrace into something encountered again and again, not confined to the original accusation or to a courtroom. In this sense, the printed image and the performed mockery serve as informal instruments of judgment.

Yet impeachment does not produce a final disappearance. In a theatrical scene, Hump is described as having partially recovered from a recent impeachment and as thoroughly converted. He sets sail again, appearing through a deliberately unstable sequence of semblance and substance, as a supercargo entertaining customers at a customs house. The image neither cancels the earlier humiliation nor confirms a lasting restoration. It gives the state its cyclical shape: HCE can be publicly condemned, mocked, and cast down, then reappear in another role while the allegations remain in circulation.