Word: liffey
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Story. As readers hack their way through the thorny pages of Finnegans Wake, they become aware of certain figures and phrases that recur frequently-H. C. Earwicker, Anna Livia, Maggie, Guinness, Phoenix Park, the River Liffey that curves through Dublin. Tracing these characters and places as they bob in and out of apparently unrelated words and sentences, Critic Edmund Wilson has worked out the most intelligible interpretation of the book, supported by Joyce's own statement that, as Ulysses is a Dublin day, Finnegans Wake is a Dublin night. The long confused passages in which people change shape...
...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 of sin in it"-for the Tigris, Moldau, Dnieper and Ganges...
...that James Joyce is a typical Irishman. Born in Dublin, he remains as Irish in Paris or Trieste as he was in the city of his birth. His friends believe that nothing short of a European war could drive him back to the "little brown bog" and the haunting Liffey...
...hotel-room mirror, the audience can see at a glance that it was written with Actress Oberon's lipstick. In the country, horses, dogs and gentry chasing across light-bathed landscapes are hunting prints in motion. As scientifically suspect as the theory that the waters of the Liffey make the best stout is the notion that British water develops the best in Technicolor. But whatever the natural aids, Producer Korda's Technicolor is the best...
...Rabelaisian brood of limericks, bans mots, parodies, a troop of outrageous, robustious characters of fancy, Oliver St. John Gogarty is a doctor by trade (throat specialist). Now an Irish Senator, he was a bitter enemy of the Republicans, once faced a firing squad but escaped by swimming the Liffey. In gratitude he presented the river with a brace of swans. A mighty tosspot in his youth, he made a pilgrimage to the top of Featherbed Mountain to restore the snakes to Ireland. When he and Joyce shared a Martello tower near Dublin (Ulysses' opening scene), they protested...