We read as far as "... now pass the fish for Christ sake, Amen: ..." (384.15)
That means we have started a new chapter - book 2, chapter 4. It is a short chapter of just 16 pages. The tavern scene is over. The drinks have been drunk, most of the customers have left.
Joseph Campbell says the following about this chapter in his 'A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake':
(By the way this is the only book I have found which lends lots - I mean real lots - of sense to Finnegans Wake.)
"(HCE's mind now sails forth, like a sea-wanderer returning to the bounding deep, on a ship of dream. What he is to dream will form the matter of the present chapter. It will be a dream of the honeymoon voyage of Tristram and Iseult. His body, helpless on the floor, will be the King Mark of the story; but his spirit, rejuvenated in the sonlike image of the successful lover, will know again the joys of youthful love. The honeymoon ship is surrounded by waves and gulls, and these become the presences of the Four* Old Men asleep. They had failed to quit the tavern with the departing company, and now bear witness to the dream of the broken master.)"
(A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, p. 245)
The chapter begins with a song, the first line of which - Three quarks for Muster Mark!' - is world famous because the Caltech physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, chose the word quark from the above line, to name the building blocks of protons and neutrons that he discovered. Discovery Magazine writes: "It sounds like "kwork" and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it." For his discovery, Murray Gell-Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.
* Today a question came up about the possible significance of the number 7 in Finnegans Wake. Trying to find plausible answers, I realised that Joyce used many numbers apart from 7 again and again. Some of these are 4, 28, 566, 1132, ... More about it another time. Meanwhile, if any of you have some insight into the use of these numbers in Finnegans Wake, would you please share it in the comments box below?
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