Word: dreams
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...those 14 years, earnest, honest Lou Gehrig, the sort of player managers dream about, made a fetish of his endurance record. Eclipsed by his colorful, temperamental teammate Babe Ruth, plodding Lou Gehrig felt that his drawing power was his dependability rather than his brilliance. When, at spring training camp this year, the Iron Horse suddenly realized that he was getting rusty, panic overtook him. He brooded, became tense at bat. Sportswriters, viewing his feeble performance, wrote his batting obituary-for all the world to read - before the season started...
...whether, indeed, he is as central a figure as he appears to be-is open to question: readers can construct a dozen theories to explain the form of the book, and find plausible evidence for each. Thus, it sometimes seems that sane speeches are not part of the dream, but voices from the waking world which dimly reach the sleeper. Sometimes it seems that he is hearing confused sounds of some turbulent life going on around him, which he dimly apprehends but in which he takes no part -as Finnigan might semiconsciously register the fighting and weeping over his bier...
Method. Joyce's idea in Finnegans Wake is not new. More than a hundred years ago, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Salem, he jotted in his notebook an idea for a story: "To write a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations . . . with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written...
...Joyce's method is new. Dreams exist as sensation or impression, not as speech. Words are spoken in dreams, but they are usually not the words of waking life, may be capable of multiple meanings, or may even be understood in several different senses by the same dreamer at the same moment. Since dreams take place in a state of suspended consciousness, out of which language itself arises, Joyce creates, in Finnegans Wake, a dream language to communicate the dream itself...
...closest to English, but Erse, Latin, Greek, Dutch, French, Sanskrit, even Esperanto appear, usually distorted to suggest both an alien and an English notion. The ablest punster in seven languages, Joyce sometimes combines puns and snatches of songs. Example: "ginabawdy meadabawdy!" (from a passage dealing with Earwicker's dream of a night out). Using a favorite device, he suggests that Anna Livia is the River Liffey by slyly punning on the names of other rivers: "he gave her the tigris eye," "rubbing the mouldaw stains," "And the dneepers of wet and the gangres...