Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, with Anthony Burgess

1973

29min

Author-critic Anthony Burgess explores in a free-wheeling way perspectives of James Joyce's great experimental novel "Finnegans Wake". He is in the unusual setting of an Irish pub, utilizing a variety of props to illustrate his points. Burgess, erudite and ironic, brings in photographs, history and even sings a song from the book -- the "Ballad of Persse O'Reilly." All this with Burgess leaning on the big wooden bar of the pub. Internationally known author Burgess ("A Clockwork Orange", "ReJoyce", etc.) has always been fascinated by "Finnegans Wake", its idiosyncratic language, its enormously complicated structure, and its attempt to address those most universal human questions of life, death, sex, mind, and mankind's fall and resurrection.