Word: burgess
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...most part the production's lifelessness is all-pervading. Several actors have been more appropriately cast than the rest and shine by comparison--Leland Moss as Fluther, Kenny McBain as the Covey, Beatrice Paipert as Bessie Burgess, even Jennifer Crier as Nora. But there are no exciting performances of any size simply because the parts, good and bad, are so deeply rooted in the whole, which...
...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Readers get a guided economy tour of the night life of H. C. Earwicker, mightiest of Irish dreamers, whose nocturnal visions embrace all human history, from the fall of man to Judgment Day. A gifted novelist and linguist, Burgess plays a lively Virgil to the Dublin Dante...
Dream Logic. With such details in mind, and with Burgess' assurance that Joyce was not a deliberate mystifier but "an intellectually superior writer unwilling to compromise with subject matter of great complexity," the reader is presumably in shape to cope with the first sentence of Wake: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"-a reference, on one level, to the Liffey, which runs past Adam and Eve's Church and Howth Castle in Dublin...
...Burgess defends Wake against the obvious objection that it lacks intelligibility: "A book about a dream would be false if it made everything as clear as daylight. If it woke up and became rational it would no longer be Finnegans Wake." True enough, but a more serious charge is that the dream of H. C. Earwicker does not in fact follow a dream like logic but conforms to the logic imposed upon it by the esthetic, moral and historical theories of James Joyce...
...Burgess uneasily concedes this point against his master by saying that Joyce simply imposed his dream upon the dreamer-which is, after all, an author's prerogative. What Joyce imposed, however, was less a dream than a highly conscious apparatus of thought, scholarship and linguistic virtuosity...