Anna Livia Plurabelle is the
heroine of
James Joyce's monument to
encyclopedic knowledge and pre-computer
noding,
Finnegans Wake.
She is the devoted
wife of
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a tavern-keeper
with political aspirations), and the loving
mother of the
Twins,
Shem and
Shaun, and their younger sister
Issy.
In the
Joycean Grand Scheme for the Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP)
represents the
River Liffey as well as most of the other rivers of the world whose
names also appear throughout the book. Thus she is the symbol of life and
constant
renewal, the mature female
archetype,
Eve, the Mother
of All.
Just as Joyce reflects and refracts
Earwicker, the Male Principle, into a myriad
of forms, ALP, the all-feminine, also transmutes into
Isis, retrieving the
bones of her brother-husband,
Osiris;
Iseult or
Isolde,
the Irish princess who falls in love with Tristan; a grandmother who
serves the feast at the Wake; an old barnyard hen who scratches up
the
scraps of a mysterious letter containing all the secrets of a
woman's heart. She is a passing cloud,
a flowing stream, a memory of girlhood, a premonition of life's passing.
But always and forever, Anna Livia Plurabelle is a river—time, the principle of vivid movement, changing
yet unchanged, the beginning, the middle and the end,
converting the past into the future.
O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia?
Book I, Chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake
Shades of Joyce:
a nice cool glass of Joyce
Anna Livia Plurabelle
Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell
Finnegans Wake
Finn MacCool
Garry Owen
HCE
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
Issy the Teenage Rainbow
Lucia Joyce
Mina Purefoy
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress
riverrun
Shaun
Shem the Penman
Ulysses is not pornography
Volta Cinema