Anna Livia Plurabelle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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“Hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves.” --Joyce on Anna Livia Plurabelle to Harriet Shaw Weaver, October 28, 1927 |
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Anna Livia Plurabelle is the name of a character in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake who is said to embody the River Liffey, which flows through central Dublin.
- "the original version of the Anna Livia section published in Adrienne Monnier's journal, Le Navire d'Argent, in September 1925, when The Calendar for which it was destined had refused to bring it ... This version was revised and expanded for transition of November 1927, and further revised and expanded when it was published by Crosby Gaige in New York in 1928 under the title Anna Livia Plurabelle."[1]
The chapter known as "Anna Livia Plurabelle", is interwoven with thousands of river names from all over the globe, and is widely considered the book's most celebrated passage.
Patrick McCarthy Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) (the wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE)) as "the river-woman whose presence is implied in the "riverrun" with which Finnegans Wake opens and whose monologue closes the book. For over six hundred pages, Joyce presents Anna Livia to us almost exclusively through other characters, much as in Ulysses we hear what Molly Bloom has to say about herself only in the last chapter." The most extensive discussion of ALP comes in chapter I.8, in which hundreds of names of rivers are woven into the tale of ALP's life, as told by two gossiping washerwomen. Similarly hundreds of city names are woven into "Haveth Childers Everywhere", the corresponding passage at the end of III.3 which focuses on HCE. As a result, it is generally contended that HCE personifies the Viking-founded city of Dublin, and his wife ALP personifies the river Liffey, on whose banks the city was built.
