Word: burgess
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...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. 256 pages. Viking...
Bravely, Britain's Anthony Burgess, novelist (A Clockwork Orange) and Joyce scholar (Re Joyce), has threaded the labyrinth, determined to demonstrate that Finnegans Wake is more than just a grammarian's funeral. He has reduced the text by about two-thirds, added an introduction that is admirable for clarity, good sense and erudition, and has placed commentaries here and there to help any dog-Latinist through the Joycean style. Even so, the plain reader (if such exists) will soon find himself in waters deeper than the River Liffey...
Vico's Cycle. In brisk, schoolmasterly fashion (both Burgess and Joyce once taught school), Burgess expounds, for those who came in late, the ABCs of Wake. The structure of the book, he explains, follows the four-cycle theory of history devised by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1774), in which human societies progress through the four stages of theocracy, aristocracy, democracy and ricorso (or recurrence). The title of the book is itself a Joycean wordplay. "Finn (fin or finis) -egan" could mean "end again," suggesting the completion of Vico's cycle, while "Wake" suggests rising from...
...pubkeeper named Porter, but his Freudian alias in the dream is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Why Earwicker? Well, Porter's night life is invaded by an incestuous passion for his daughter Isobel (Iseult-Isolde). The inadmissible word "incest" sneaks by as "insect," specifically "earwig." Thus the odd name, says Burgess, is "dreamily appropriate...
...Chimpden Earwicker, "we have the hump of sexual guilt he carries on his back (he is a different porter now), a hint of the ape, and more than a hint of the insect." To the straightforward reader, it may appear that the explanation only compounds the problem, especially when Burgess points out that the French for "earwig" is perce-oreille, which "can be Hibernicized into Persse O'Reilly," a name appropriate to H. C. Earwicker's dream career as an Irish patriot. His initials also mean "Here Comes Everybody" (turning the sleeper into Everyman) and "Haveth Childers Everywhere...