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Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake

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First, please accept my disclaimer for this review: I have been a fan of Joseph Campbell for many years. The objectivity may be lacking, therefore, in this assessment - freely admitted, and accept my apologies.

Campbell spent ~4 years, if memory serves, on this book. He said he finally had to get away from the Wake because everything he read started to sound as though it was from the Wake.

Having been an avid reader of Joyce for many years, Campbell's Key is to my mind THE definitive work on the Wake. Anyone can criticize another's work, and perhaps it is unreasonable to expect a critic to be as brilliant as the victim of his wiseacreing, but to my mind criticisms of this beautiful and inspired work are rather worthless.

The Key is always my primary reference for the Wake. Annotations (Roland McHugh) is just a phone book of references; the Key is first-rate scholarship. Infallibility is not a requirement for brilliance, assuming there is merit to criticism of this work.

But as Joseph Campbell would say, don't buy a book because it is said to be important; buy it because it "catches" you. Campbell's grasp of the Wake is a wonderful help to appreciating the Wake in less than a lifetime.

One of the first books written about the Wake, A Skeleton Key has been largely supplanted by the wealth of Wakean research done since its 1944 publishing date, but its value as a seminal text is undisputed, and many -- including me! -- still find it a very useful guide. It opens with a beautiful introduction by Campbell, then explains the purpose of the text, moving on to a synopsis of the overall story. After that, it breaks down FW page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up possible interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. In this way Campbell and Robinson more or less retell the Wake, "prosifying" the text in an attempt to make it more comprehensible to the lay reader. While this is certainly helpful, it must be said that this technique can come across as being a bit dry, and is certainly no substitute for the breathtaking immersion in Joyce's scintillating river of prose! Additionally, many of Joyce's meanings were overlooked by Campbell and Robinson, and a few of their interpretations have long since been "overturned" by more recent and intensive scholarship. Because of all this, A Skeleton Key has lost some of the polished glow of its initial reception, and some Joyceans have gone so far as to call it almost completely tarnished, finding it occasionally more misleading than helpful. Although there may be some truth to that, I still enjoy this book, and I find its mythopoetic angle -- this is that Joseph Campbell, after all -- uniquely refreshing, and some of his mythological insights possess a brilliance that has rarely been matched. Still, however, it is no substitute for the text itself, but for a work written only a few years after Finnegans Wake was published, A Skeleton Key is a pretty amazing accomplishment! I would not recommend it over a more recent guide, but I do occasionally enjoy turning to it -- like a slightly dowdy but favorite aunt, I still like to curl up by the fire and hear her stories over a cup of tea.

This book still represents the single best "foray" into "Finnegans Wake" -- stepping mindfully but surefootedly through the entire riverrun of the text. Starting with an overview, "The Skeleton's Key" attempts to summarize the major "narrative events" of the "Wake." While Joyce scholars might (rightly...) argue the feasibility or advisability of such an approach, it still proves indispensible for the "novice...." Other books have perhaps surpassed it in their analysis of particular issues or themes within the text, but none have so gracefully and appreciatively unpacked the work as a whole. This and McHugh's "Annotations" can serve as an excellent "right- and left-hand pair" for tackling this under-appreciated work of brilliance...."

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce's MasterworkThe beauty of this edition is that it includes an *index*! In fact, it's the 2006 winner of the H.W. Wilson Award for excellence in indexing from the American Society of Indexers. With this accomplished index, not only is Campbell's work more accessible, the text of Finnegan's Wake is made more so, as well. Don't read either without this edition.

Unfortunately, as wonderful and well-intentioned a work as this is, the interests of the authors (as well as their disinterests and their blindspots) make this introduction to James Joyce's brilliant Finnegans Wake a hindrance to newcomers to the Joyce work more than a help, unless the newcomer can allow themselves to see around the doors that this Skeleton Key unlocks.

Let's get this straight out in the air: Finnegans Wake is not overly concerned with "the hero's journey" or the "myth with a thousand masks." It is, at its heart, the love story of a mountain and a river. Beyond that, it's about family dynamics, human history, entertainment history, and the joys and traumas of individual life, in a broad sense and in very specific ways.

A Skeleton Key chooses, via its authors, to see Finnegans Wake pared down to the elements that have something to do with monomyth, with a universal humanity or culture, and even there, only with its most serious components. Finnegans Wake is a serious work, this is true, but it is often most serious about being really completely hilarious or rushing along into pure romanticism. For whatever reasons, the authors of this text, have chosen to completely downplay or outright ignore the more ribald aspects of the novel, either the humorous or the simply enthusiastic. They choose to see the puns and parodies that are quilted together to comprise much of the novel, as a scholarly effort, and nothing more. The rendering of Ireland as excited genitalia is not allowed entertainment value, nor are lines such as "[A] hot fellow in his night, may the mouther of guard have mastic on him!"

Don't get me wrong, this is an entirely thorough work when covering the aspects of the novel that appeal to the authors' sensibilities and training, but it is not a skeleton key to Finnegans Wake, so much as a very not-dirty peeping-machine. You put in your money, lean to the eyepiece, and get shown exactly what part of the picture is in front of those lenses, nothing around them, no chance of moving the lenses to see more, and just as often frustrated by that myopia, as titillated by what is made visible to you.

I'm just a simple person wanting to understand what is probably the most complicated novel written in the 20th century. There has been a lot more written about Finnegans Wake since this early study, but this is clear and present a cogent outline of what is going on. While I'm not in a position to make recommendations to literature majors, for the average person, this is an excellent overview of what Joyce was trying to do.

The book is by far one of the best on Finnegans Wake. If you are or are not familiar with the story and James Joyce, this book with get you there.
Insightful, keep your copy of Finnegans Wake beside you while you read Joseph Campbell's work and enjoy the ride.

A very good guide to Finnegans Wake with amazing insights, but it's often difficult to see how they came about. While many things are purposely left unexplained, you can at least know who's talking to whom, and what the general drift of conversations are when you take on Finnegans Wake.

A Sleleton Key to Finnegans Wake is a great way to unlock the master work of James Joyce. It gives the reader enough information about every chapter to open up the thousands of threads on every page. The reader can experience as much or as little of the puzzles, puns, and brilliance of the author as she wants. The avid reader may need a word by word translation of the novel in addition to the skeleton key.

Everyone should read this book and wallow in James Joyce. This takes away all the fear your teachers and peers have instilled in you. A wonderful book, and a great read in itself, actually. just GET IT.