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Preface |
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In fact, the "o'corneltree"
as well as many other types of trees flourish in this imagined langscape (FW
595.4). Many scholars have established the
tree/stone as a major motif in the Wake. Moreover,
the letters of both the Modern Irish Alphabet and the Ancient Beth-Luis-Nion Alphabet
signify the names of trees. The Modern Irish Alphabet
was used for the
references in this paper. The reference source for this tree
alphabet is Rev. Patrick S. Dinneen's An Irish-English Dictionary. In A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake (p.
125.), Brendan O Hehir notes that Dinny Finneen (FW 232.6) is "Prof. Dinneen
who was a professor of Irish during Joyce's time at University. Robert Graves (The White Goddess, NY: Farrar Straus &
Giroux, 1948, rpt. 1997 pp.
165 ff.) describes the Beth-Luis-Nion Alphabet. In addition to the tree/stone motif
mentioned above, another important motif featuring natural elements is Joyce's inclusion
of the sentence from Quinet (FW 281.4-13) and his subsequent refashionings of it. Clive Hart in his essay on Joyce's use of this
passage observes that "Joyce was
essentially an urban man....Nature in the Wordsworthian sense seems to have meant little
to him, and although in Finnegans Wake river and mountain, flower and tree are for
the first time used as major recurrent symbols, they are little more than stylized icons
which rarely develop into sensuous living images....Mr. Frank Budgen insists that Joyce
detested flowers and indeed even the graceful periwinkle, hyacinth and daisy of Quinet's
sentence are prized more for the abstractions they embody than their sensuous
qualities" (pp. 185-186). Even if everything growing in this Wake
gaarden is an "abstraction" -
whether "graceful" or gawky - compiling these entries has been both informative
and fun. Annotating every entry in the Wake
would have taken a "leaftime," (FW 88.34) so consider this something of a
"work in progress" - something more than a laundry list but less than a
"glozery farfused ameet the florahs of the follest" (FW 339.24-25). |
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