The Prating Portmanteau: can anything be saved for the reader out of Finnegans Wake?

...And I mean for the reader for pleasure, not for the academics who spend their careers studying the book. In a moment, I am going to quote a readable passage from Finnegans Wake. Of course, it's tolerably well-known that when the book was in its inception as Work in Progress, it had many readable passages, some of them published as standalone pieces. But they were then systematically obscured and obliterated by the hyperallusive word-formation with which Joyce processed the hell out of them. Here is one (pp380-82) that escaped only lightly touched - it is, in fact, the germ of the work. It's a whimsical portrait of how, after a banquet, when all the guests have departed, Roderick O'Conor, the High King of Ireland, laps up the spillages left by the drinkers.

King Roderick O' Conor, the paramount chief polemarch and last preelectric king of Ireland, who was anything you say yourself
between fiftyodd and fiftyeven years of age at the time after the
socalled last supper he greatly gave in his umbrageous house of
the hundred bottles with the radio beamer tower and its hangars,
chimbneys and equilines or, at least, he wasn't actually the then
last king of all Ireland for the time being for the jolly good
reason that he was still such as he was the eminent king of all
Ireland himself after the last preeminent king of all Ireland, the
whilom joky old top that went before him in the Taharan
dynasty, King Arth Mockmorrow Koughenough of the leathered
leggions, now of parts unknown, (God guard his generous
comicsongbook soul!) that put a poached fowl in the poor man's
pot before he took to his pallyass with the weeping eczema for
better and worse until he went under the grass quilt on us,
nevertheless, the year the sugar was scarce, and we to lather and shave
and frizzle him, like a bald surging buoy and himself down
to three cows that was meat and drink and dogs and washing
to him, 'tis good cause we have to remember it, going through
summersultryngs of snow and sleet witht the widow Nolan's
goats and the Brownes girls neats anyhow, wait till I tell you,
what did he do, poor old Roderick O' Conor Rex, the
auspicious waterproof monarch of all Ireland, when he found
himself all alone by himself in his grand old handwedown pile after
all of them had all gone off with themselves to their castles of mud, as best they cud, on footback, owing to the leak of the McCarthy's mare, in extended order, a tree's length from the longest way out, down the switchbackward slidder of the landsown route of Hauburnea's liveliest vinnage on the brain, the unimportant Parthalonians with the mouldy Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan googs and the ramblers from Clane and all the rest of the notmuchers that he did not care the royal spit out of his ostensible mouth about, well, what do you think he did, sir, but, faix, he just went heeltapping through the winespilth and weevily popcorks that were kneedeep round his own right royal round rollicking toper's table, with his old Roderick Random pullon hat at a Lanty Leary cant on him and Mike Brady's shirt and Greene's linnet collarbow and his Ghenter's gaunts and his Macclefield's swash and his readymade Reillys and his panprestuberian poncho, the body you'd pity him, the way the world is, poor he, the heart of Midleinster and the supereminent lord of them all, overwhelmed as he was with black ruin like a sponge out of water, allocutioning in bellcantos to his own oliverian society MacGuiney's Dreans of Ergen Adams and thruming through all to himself with diversed tonguesed through his old tears and his ould plaised drawl, starkened by the most regal of belches, like a blurney Cashelmagh crooner that lerking Clare air, the blackberd's ballad I've a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday, well, what did he go and do at all, His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O'Conor but, arrah bedamnbut, he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he didn't go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly-grogging suburbanites, such as it was, fall and fall about, to the brindishing of his charmed life, as toastified by his cheeriubicundenances, no matter whether it was chateaubottled Guiness's or Phoenix brewery stout it was or John Jameson and Sons or Roob Coccola or, for the matter of that, O'Connell's famous old Dublin ale that he wanted like hell, more that halibut oil or jesuits tea, as a fall back, of several different quantities and qualities amounting in all to, I should say, considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure till, welcome be from us here, till the rising of the morn, till that hen of Kaven's shows her beaconegg, and Chapwellswendows stain our horyhistoricold and Father MacMichael stamps for aitch o'clerk mess and the Litvian Newestlatter is seen, sold and delivered and all's set for restart after the silence, like his ancestors to this day after him (that the blazings of their ouldmouldy gods may attend to them we pray!), overopposides the cowery lad in the corner and forenenst the staregaze of the cathering candled, that adornment of his album and folkenfather of familyans, he came acrash a crupper sort of a sate on accomondation and the very boxst in all his composs, whereuponce, behome the fore for cove and trawlers, heave hone, leave lone, Larry's on the focse and Faugh MacHugh O'Bawlar at the wheel, one to do and one to dare, par by par, a peerless pair, ever here and over there, with his fol the dee oll the doo on the flure of his feats and the feels of the fumes in the wakes of his ears our wineman from Barleyhome he just slumped to throne.

   There you have it: a slice of the 'blarneyest blather' in all Ireland (see the second quotation, below). "Whoi, listen to me, and oi'll tell ye something that after ye've heard it, ye'll be wanting that I should have told it to ye, etc." (It's a commonplace that Finnegans Wake makes better sense when read out in a stage Irish accent). Some, taking it more seriously, will see it as an allegory of the process of composition of Finnegans Wake itself. But it is all the same fairly readable. A few references might require a little dipping into works of reference, but they eventually yield up their meaning. If Joyce had persisted with this vein, he might even have developed into a comic writer in the manner of Flann O'Brien. But he had larger ambitions.
   One should note that there are a number of plain passages in Finnegans Wake, passages where the process has not been used at all. These are where the purpose was to imitate other styles (such as the complex case in Roman Law on pp572-3), where processing them would have defeated the purpose. What I have looked for is passages like that quoted above. Unfortunately, there seem to be very few of them. But can one make anything of somewhat denser portions of the text? For example, this passage that follows the Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper on p419,

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their
holocaust. Allmen.
-- Now? How good you are in explosition! How farflung is
your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary! Qui
vive sparanto qua muore contanto. O foibler, O flip, you've that
wandervogl wail withyin ! It falls easily upon the earopen and goes
down the friskly shortiest like treacling tumtim with its
tingtingtaggle. The blarneyest blather in all Corneywall! But could you,
of course, decent Lettrechaun, we knew (to change your name if
not your nation) while still in the barrel, read the strangewrote
anaglyptics of those shemletters patent for His Christian's Em?

Unlike the earlier passage quoted, this is more typical of the Wake as a whole. It's akin to a cryptic crossword puzzle, with this difference, that it demands of the reader an encyclopaedic degree of knowledge ('how farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary'), not excluding knowledge of James Joyce himself. 'Lettrechaun', for example, is made up of at least leprechaun, lettre, and Shaun, the last being the twin brother of Shem, who throughout the Wake represents Joyce ('Shem the Penman'). This also explains how Shem knew Shaun 'while still in the barrel' (the womb). Again, 'volupkabulary' includes at least Volapük (the artificial language), voluptuous, and vocabulary. 'His Christian's Em' is one of the innumerable acrostics for Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the dreamer of the dream that is Finnegans Wake. And so on. Another century of Joyce scholarship might tease out every last allusion in the text, barring thoughts that flashed across Joyce's mind in the course of composition, and which cannot now be reconstructed. But this will not make it more interesting to read. Perhaps less interesting, conceivably, because what emerges after even a partial lifting of the veil is little better than chatter. On the other hand, by then, perhaps, they will have invented a machine that will read books for us as well as write them.