Word: waked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...SKELETON KEY TO FINNEGANS WAKE-Joseph Campbell and Henry Mor ton Robinson-Harcourt, Brace...
...demand I make of my reader," the late James Joyce once remarked, "is that he should devote the whole of his life to reading my works." Many readers of Author Joyce's obscure 768-page Ulysses and his even more obscure 628-page Finnegans Wake would agree that a lifetime is no more than enough. But ever since Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce enthusiasts have sought to cut down this lifetime labor by laying a trail through this Joycean jungle, in which Erse, Latin, Dutch, Greek, French, Sanskrit, Russian and Esperanto rankly intertwine themselves with nightmared snatches of popular songs...
Most recent, most ambitious Joyce interpreters are Joseph Campbell (former intercollegiate half-miler and now English professor at Sarah Lawrence College) and Henry Morton Robinson (former English instructor at Columbia University, now senior editor of Readers Digest).† They have spent five years "hacking a narrative trail" through Finnegans Wake which was "like going through the heart of darkest Africa...
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...
...sense syllables in Joyce . . . any intelligent reader can shave off some rewarding layers of meaning." They also believe that "Joyce provides an answer to every riddle he expounds," and that "in every passage there is a key word which sounds the essential theme." Example (from page 1 of Finnegans Wake}: "The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohooordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy." Old Parr, Campbell and Robinson explain, was the grand old man of Shropshire who finally trembled into his grave at the age of 152 (1483-1635). Parr...