When the great initials HCE (HCE is a genuine musical phrase, incidentally in Germany, H is B natural) appear, often imperceptible when the enshrining phrase is read aloud, we know that, however much we may seem to have modulated, we are really not very far from home.

So when we see an allomorph of the ‘ppt’ which Swift used when he wrote to Stella, we can be pretty sure that Iseult la Belle is somewhere around. A bad score-reader tackling, say, Wagner’s Ring (which Finnegan’s Wake in some ways resembles) may not be able to hear much with his inner ear, but he may be able to recognise the recurrence of the Leitmotive by their configurations on the stave. Many of the puns have a strong visual element, ‘hesitancy’ and ‘hesitency’ sound the same, and the whole point of the Shem-Shaun lesson is that we should imagine ourselves looking at a book with marginal glosses and footnotes.īut the appeal is ultimately to the auditory imagination, which is what Joyce probably meant, and the book is music perhaps in the sense that the orchestral score one reads in bed is music. We cannot chant a geometrical figure, an E on its back, or a hundred-letter thunder-word (paradoxically, it is only the eye that can recognise the thunder). James Joyce reads Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegan’s Wake, 1929īut, alas, Finnegan’s Wake does not disclose a great deal of its music to a reader unschooled in interpretation of the artist’s notation the script is not phonetic, so that we are often unsure how to pronounce a word, and much of the richness and complexity is only revealed to the eye. Indeed, Joyce demonstrated how potent this music is when he made a recording of part of the end of Book I, the Anna Livia Plurabelle section. His book, he said, would come clear to the reader if the reader listened to its music. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality.

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Joyce, who died only two years after the publication of Finnegan’s Wake, had time to leave one clue. Read Book 1985 Anthony Burgess ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

1985 anthony burgess pdf