"Terror of the noonstruck by day, cryptogam of each nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he?" (FW, 261. 26–31). Most chapters of Finnegans Wake pass through a moment of quasi-hysterical questioning of everything in the text, including the text itself: its heroes are obscurely mating with unclear nightbrides and tend to people the great Book of Nature with a mushrooming spontaneous generation of coded messages. The wanderer in these densely wooded parts always hesitates between recognition of certain species of botanical excrescences and the decoding of a certain cipher. He has to become a kind of hybrid specialist, half mycologist, half mythologist, like Freud, who took very seriously his Sunday outings in quest of certain types of Viennese mushrooms.¹ A magnifying glass may help the reader's groping progress, so that he will not be ignorant of the fact that he is playing detective. Indeed, such an obstinate and collective search-party was envisaged by Joyce himself when, in the infrequent jocular mode of Stephen Hero, Stephen explains to Cranly that he himself should be systematically inspected: "If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take note of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic instinct in action.