Word: viconian
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...letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament...
...Viconian Thunderclap. Finnegans Wake, say Campbell and Robinson, "is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind." (Tim Finnegan was originally the hero of an Irish vaudeville song who falls off a ladder and is thought to be dead until a friend splashes whiskey over him at the funeral wake.) The four parts of Joyce's novel reflect Italian Philosopher Giovanni Battista Vice's theory that history eternally passes and repasses through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, chaotic. Finnegans Wake suggests that life has again reached the stage of chaos and is awaiting a divine thunderclap...
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