Word: chimpden
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Bearing out that notion, the book deals directly with a man who is made to "relive the whole of history in a single night's sleep." He is a 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...
Furthermore, in Humphrey 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...
...Named for the protagonist of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, who is a fiction favorite of the owner of the gallery, Nat Halper...
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