Among the most beguiling passages in Finnegans Wake is that in which the text relates its own myth of historical origin. A literary version of the paradigmatic chicken and egg conundrum, the passage recounts the discovery by an “original hen” of a letter which contains the Wake in microcosm and, implicitly therefore, the hen and her discovery as well. After some necessary distilling, the passage reads as follows:

The exhumed letter, fragments of which the passage goes on to quote, is, like the Wake itself, only partially legible; its content (something about a funeral) is ultimately obscure, as are the identities of both its addressee (one “Maggy”) and its author (in place of a signature one finds only a tea stain: “affectionate largelooking tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain … marked it off“ [Joyce, FW 111.15–18]).