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A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: James Joyce's Masterwork Revealed
Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of Finnegans Wake — James Joyce's masterwork that consumed a third of his life — have given up after a few pages and dismissed it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of Finnegans Wake. The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. A Skeleton Key was Campbell's first book, published five years before he wrote his breakthrough Hero with a Thousand Faces.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1944
137 people are currently reading
2091 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Campbell
431 books6,258 followersJoseph Campbell was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles.
Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.
Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.
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April 18, 2014Brief addendum addend’d.
Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was the first book-length critical study published on Joyce’s Meisterstück. It was also one of Campbell’s first books, which alone ought to earn him a great deal of respect.
But aside from the importance of this book in the reception history of Finnegans Wake, is it still current, still useful for the novice Wake Reader? Yes it is. But it is no longer the indispensable guide it once was. That honor goes to Roland McHugh’s huge volume of Annialivvyptations. But these two books are not comparable ; they each perform a different function. What the Skeleton Key provides is a general thread and outline of the narrative action of The Wake, but it is not a universal unlocking mechanism. Neither is the McHugh. The role which the Skeleton Key plays is analogous to that which Blamires’ Bloosmday Book plays for the Ulysses reader, as a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, providing an arc into which all the various pieces of the book might fit.
But Campbell’s book is still dated, even in the form of this new edition edited by Edmund L. Epstein (2005, pb 2013). Unfortunately I do not have a better recommendation at the moment. Wake scholarship has changed mightily since 1978 when the Joyce Notebooks were first published. The past few decades have seen significant progress in our understanding of The Wake, with a general scholarly consensus developing beyond the early monomthythic interpretations such as Campbell’s. Epstein himself has published A Guide Through Finnegans Wake which may be a useful alternative.
At any rate, don’t let the scrabbles about the right way to read The Book of Finnegan delay you in entering its riverrun flow. Campbell won’t by any means mislead you. You may find his reading of The Wake delightful, or you may find yourself disagree with his presuppositions. Both are fine manners by which to relate to another Wake Reader. Because who else is Joseph Campbell but another reader who just happens to have written a book about what he’s read. And Reread and Readagain.
Addendum :: Many new Wake Readers are baffled by the beginning of this novel. Correctly so. The first four paragraphs are an intensely dense overture to the whole work. It’s (almost) all packed in there. In his “Synopsis and Demonstration” at the beginning of his book, Campbell demonstrates what a first-pass close reading of these four paragraphs might look like. On the one hand, this close reading demonstrates what riches of possibility are in store for the adventurous exegete-reader ; on the other hand, the intimidated may want to swiftly pass them through and begin their sternest reading at the fifth paragraph with the story of our titular Finnegan.
Joseph Campbell’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was the first book-length critical study published on Joyce’s Meisterstück. It was also one of Campbell’s first books, which alone ought to earn him a great deal of respect.
But aside from the importance of this book in the reception history of Finnegans Wake, is it still current, still useful for the novice Wake Reader? Yes it is. But it is no longer the indispensable guide it once was. That honor goes to Roland McHugh’s huge volume of Annialivvyptations. But these two books are not comparable ; they each perform a different function. What the Skeleton Key provides is a general thread and outline of the narrative action of The Wake, but it is not a universal unlocking mechanism. Neither is the McHugh. The role which the Skeleton Key plays is analogous to that which Blamires’ Bloosmday Book plays for the Ulysses reader, as a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, providing an arc into which all the various pieces of the book might fit.
But Campbell’s book is still dated, even in the form of this new edition edited by Edmund L. Epstein (2005, pb 2013). Unfortunately I do not have a better recommendation at the moment. Wake scholarship has changed mightily since 1978 when the Joyce Notebooks were first published. The past few decades have seen significant progress in our understanding of The Wake, with a general scholarly consensus developing beyond the early monomthythic interpretations such as Campbell’s. Epstein himself has published A Guide Through Finnegans Wake which may be a useful alternative.
At any rate, don’t let the scrabbles about the right way to read The Book of Finnegan delay you in entering its riverrun flow. Campbell won’t by any means mislead you. You may find his reading of The Wake delightful, or you may find yourself disagree with his presuppositions. Both are fine manners by which to relate to another Wake Reader. Because who else is Joseph Campbell but another reader who just happens to have written a book about what he’s read. And Reread and Readagain.
Addendum :: Many new Wake Readers are baffled by the beginning of this novel. Correctly so. The first four paragraphs are an intensely dense overture to the whole work. It’s (almost) all packed in there. In his “Synopsis and Demonstration” at the beginning of his book, Campbell demonstrates what a first-pass close reading of these four paragraphs might look like. On the one hand, this close reading demonstrates what riches of possibility are in store for the adventurous exegete-reader ; on the other hand, the intimidated may want to swiftly pass them through and begin their sternest reading at the fifth paragraph with the story of our titular Finnegan.
July 11, 2022
This was offputting to me. I read about a hundred pages before I put it down. To me, it is like "translations" of William Shakespeare into contemporary English. Shakespeare stole most of his stories, so the idea that the beauty of his writing is in his stories, and that his language is an obstacle to that beauty, seems dubious to me.
It should be understood that my distaste for The Skeleton Key is more a reflection of my own biases about art and aesthetics than of Robinson and Campbell's work. From what I read of it, Robinson and Campbell were making a kind of sense of much of Finnegans Wake. I found that I disagreed with how they were doing it. To tack on another reference to the Shakespeare cultural industry, to me it smelled of Bowdlerization (which is not to say that Robinson and Campbell "clean up" Joyce's work: rather, for me the Skeleton Key seemed more a dilution of my reading experience rather than a distillation of Joyce's powerful text).
Acquired 1994
Argo Bookshop, Montreal, Quebec
It should be understood that my distaste for The Skeleton Key is more a reflection of my own biases about art and aesthetics than of Robinson and Campbell's work. From what I read of it, Robinson and Campbell were making a kind of sense of much of Finnegans Wake. I found that I disagreed with how they were doing it. To tack on another reference to the Shakespeare cultural industry, to me it smelled of Bowdlerization (which is not to say that Robinson and Campbell "clean up" Joyce's work: rather, for me the Skeleton Key seemed more a dilution of my reading experience rather than a distillation of Joyce's powerful text).
Acquired 1994
Argo Bookshop, Montreal, Quebec
June 23, 2017
Sort of interesting introduction (less so than that in the Oxford Press edition of FW) and a bit confusing to follow while reading FW in parallel
April 16, 2014
Being Campbell, this heavily emphasizes the role the abundance of occurrence of myth plays in Joyce's masterpiece. And it is a large, if not the largest, role. And this skeleton key does a great job pointing the way through key aspects of the "plot" of Finnegans Wake. That being said, one should not rely fully on Campbell's interpretation. One should use McHugh thoroughly and learn to read the Wake oneself. It makes its own meanings. Campbell's work is best used throughout a first reading of Joyce's text, and will go a long way to easing a new reader on. A great achievement, do not doubt it, but I'm not sure I'll be utilizing it with further readings. It is one of Kate's many keys. The door is left ajar.
December 8, 2012
One of the first and still indispensable books for working through Finnegan's Wake. The authors present their sense of the text beneath the text beneath the text beneath the text, along with some commentary and thoughts about what is going on.
Campbell went on to become an icon in the field of mythology, symbolism, and world religions. His knowledge and intellectual powers are at full play here in what was one of his earliest texts.
Campbell went on to become an icon in the field of mythology, symbolism, and world religions. His knowledge and intellectual powers are at full play here in what was one of his earliest texts.
August 16, 2016
Mankind should be grateful for Campbell's 1st elucidation of FINNEGANS WAKE (FW) - or someone else may have "translated" the text, but not as expertly. Sadly many readers start with "A Skeleton Key..." or read it without first spending more time with FW, correctly most criticisms center on Campbell's "personal commentaries" which are "extremely limited", confined to his personal knowledge at the time of his writing - absolutely inadequate to tackle Joyce's two decades (lifetime) of work.
Caution - Reading Campbell's "A Skeleton Key..." is NOT reading FINNEGANS WAKE.
First page error (72 yrs now): When Campbell was 9 yrs old (1913) he was NOT introduced to FINNEGANS WAKE (1939, Ulysses not published till 1922). However sometime between 1939 (Campbell was 35 yrs old) and when Campbell and Robinson published "The Skin of Whose Teeth? (December 19, 1942 in The Saturday Review) identifying "The Skin of Our Teeth" Thornton Wilder's (Pulitzer Prize) appropriation of some of Joyce's (FW) themes - (Campbell) started reading FW and by 1944 "A Skeleton Key..." was published.
Campbell, most famous for "Follow your Bliss", was greatly (possibly entirely) influenced by FW. In many ways Campbell's body of work (which may establish him as America's greatest 20th century "philosopher") grew from Campbell's first published book "A Skeleton Key..." - and the many streams of thought emanating from Joyce's FW. "A Skeleton Key..." elucidates both Joyce's FW, as well as, Campbell's lifetime body of work. It must be remembered that Campbell was just 40 yrs old and had spent only 3 yrs writing "A Skeleton Key..." when published - though the "translation" is excellent, almost all Campbell's "personal commentaries" of FW's meanings can (and should) be challenged.
I suspect "A Skeleton Key..." will always be the first place readers start (for elucidation) and all scholarship begins, sadly many readers will never escape Campbell's interpretations. "A Skeleton Key..." 1) removes some of the difficult reading of FW and 2) adds much understanding. "A Skeleton Key..." is a scholarly, challenging and an easier read than FW - however, it is NOT a replacement for FW. Personally, most helpful is Campbell's elucidation of 1) FW's framework, Giambattista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova's" 4 stages of history (cyclic), theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos (followed by Joyce's God "thunderclap") which ends chaos and restarts the world again with theocracy, 2) Campbell's misinterpretation of Tiberiast Duplex (Non-Dual Tantras), 3) Campbell's lifetime body of work, most importantly his writings on Tibetan Buddhism/Yoga, and lastly 4) his misinterpretation of FW's book II:2, but his other writings and understandings of UNMANIFEST METAPHYSICS.
Corrected "A Skeleton Key...":
*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence "A away a lone a last a loved a long the" - the first words of FW is the second half of the sentence "riverrun,...".
1) FW's "book I:1" (Vico's theocratic) describes 1) Finnegan's passing (pedantic fall, an aeon ends), Joyce's God "thunderclap" restarting "book I" from ending "book IV" and 2) transition from Finnegan (his fertile historic home) to HCE (an invading Ulysses). The first 4 chapters of "book I" introduces readers to the father (protagonist HCE, his syncretic history and "folk" hearsay) and the second 4 chapters of "book I" are devoted to the woman (who will catch her man) who becomes mother (HCE's wife ALP, her syncretic history and "folk" hearsay). Finnegan represents the archaeological "past" (a passing aeon) held by a forefather (a Brahma, Ireland's Brahmas / impermanent ants upon a whale carcass) with his wisdom of the history of all men and times. Finnegan passes his baton (his place in the fabric of the universe) to HCE now present in time with his particular past. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the new "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.
After 4 billion years of biological evolution, Here we are!, well, Where are we?, and, Where did we come from?; Our individual particular consciousness has been inherited from the past (a temporal space in an expanding consciousness), and, Biological evolution has divided us by sex (which induces Social evolution) to procreate offspring to fill our temporal consciousness when we expire:
2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world, stasis/space - Sartre's Being) carrier of the letter (cleric of "church") and builder, Shem (introvert, artist, change/time - Sartre's Nothingness) revealer of the letter (prophet), and Iseult (nature's direction) gatherer and composer of letters. The children are the "present future" of FW.
Biological and Social evolution engenders parental responsibilities, to successful offspring (brother's battle: Shaun in accord and Shem in conflict with local Dharma), to continue and expand consciousness:
3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children's - the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Iseult (daughter). The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.
Our offspring will inherit and evolve their Own individual particular temporal consciousness within their local (social Dharma, MaMaLuJo) community despite our efforts, our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams:
*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with ALP's (& HCE's) lovemaking dissolution dream. Joycean Nirvana is attained by ALP (via Dzogchen Tögal) and HCE (via Dzogchen Trekchö) - realizing the heart of enlightenment in the present moment, transcending all defilements and fixations (beyond all dualistic polarities) so that their rainbow bodies are realized, unification with the Unmanifest (Creation, Incarnate conception) and Reincarnation (the baton has been passed on again) - Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon 2010/12 "corrected" edition reveals the converging 4 visions of Tögal and 4 stages of Trekchö.
Ever-living Tree of sentient life (time/compassion) and Immutable stone (space/law), "Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!" Should we Aspire? Aspire to what? To that which manifested consciousness:
- ALP's & HCE's converging Tögal & Trekchö: The night has passed (all dissolves), the Lotus blooms (sunrise), a Christ/Krishna "Saint Kevin" is born illuminated by light (an aeon begins). Muta (native didicism) and Juva (invading docetism) observe Mankind's existential struggle "Archdruid vs St. Patrick" (Unmanifest, spiritual vs Manifest, deities/idols). "Revered Letter" (FW, Joyce's West/East Tibetan bardos). ALP's (& HCE's) "Moksha revelation" (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation), to end/restart again (Shiva's trident ending the world) "Save me from those therrble prongs!".
Joycean Nirvana lies on the surface of FW's text (mandala, available to all) - excavating below the surface of the text reveals the arguments that support the Nirvana (present granular mindfulness) and refutes all institutional/religious dogma (children's marginalia righting/reversing misconceived lessons) and authoritarian oppression (Wellington Museum's militarism expressed as instrument of people or oppression by rulers). Joyce reveals the Dzogchen "Father Tantras" or "Maha Yoga" (in book I:1-4) and Dzogchen "Mother Tantras" or "Anu Yoga" (in book I:5-8). Shem is identified as receptive to "Ati Yoga" or Non-Dual Tantras (Tiberiast Duplex, book I:6); the answer to the Riddle(s) the "Tiberiast Duplex" is Shem (Joyce, the Enlightened One). The Children learn in "book II" Dzogchen Semde (Mind/Time Series) self-knowledge (awareness) and Dzogchen Longde (Space Series) evolution-knowledge (primordial wisdom, rigpa). HCE dreams (intends) in "book III" to impart Dzogchen Mannagde (Secret Instruction Series) Self-Liberation-knowledge to his Children.
FW is aural (oral) history like Homer's Odessey and Celtic folktales - when one pronounces (phonology) FW's words (aloud) there are more languages than just English; also, when one reads (morphology) FW's words almost all the words are "portmanteaus / neologisms" which gives each of FW's "poly-syncretic" words many meanings (universal impermanence, Heisenberg uncertainty/obscurity), each FW syncretic sentence dozens of possible messages, each FW syncretic paragraph hundreds of possible readings, Joyce's rendering of a more expansive English language and multiplicating universal book with coalescing syncretic themes/stories (that responds/opens to each reader's inquiries). Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the mindfulness of human consciousness) breathes in the spirit of expansive Celtic (Irish) democratic community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. Tavern life teaches the evolution of Joyce's ten God "thunderclaps" (one hundred lettered words) pushing man's evolution forward from cave man's tales to modern tv media tales. Inside the tavern man learns of the purely human (animal) fall, taken down by another human(s) - like animal taken down on the African savanna. A granular reading of FW can render FW as an updated John Milton's Paradise Lost (regurgitated knowledge from the tree, to affirm man's damnation); however, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and Joyce in FW book II clearly walks Shaun, Shem and Iseult through their earthly evolutionary lifetime travails, our mortality is a consequence of Life's evolution. Every page of FW speaks to man's evolution (unconscious biological, conscious social, aspirational personal) and to Life recirculating (West meets Dzogchen East a "meeting of metaphysical minds") that binds humanity together into the future. Dzogchen (beyond all dualistic polarities) the heart of human consciousness - Joyce's underlying (subcutaneous) arguments refute the "Western curse of metaphysical/mythological damnation", the curse does not exist in the Eastern mind. Like "counting the number of angels on the head of a pin" (Aquinas 1270) Joyce provides a granular/expansive reading of FW as a "defense against all Western adversity" for our conscious and unconscious Western travails. HCE's angst is caused by his community that imposes a Western curse (damnation) upon him that man is not guilty of...to experience Joycean Nirvana, a defense against this man-made guilt is required - for as Zoroaster revealed cosmogonic dualism, evil is mixed with good in man's universal everyday travails (even the Dalai Lama must defend Nirvana rigorously from the most populous authoritarian state in human history).
UNMANIFEST METAPHYSICS, Western = Eastern (FW book II, ch 2), misinterpreted by Campbell, but implied through other Campbell works:
112 LUTHER'S EPISTLE SERMONS ["Christ Consciousness", Gnostic Christianity, intellectual revelation of His message]: 8. Paul's assertion that the glory of God's children is now Unmanifest but shall be revealed in them. Colossians 3, 3-4: "Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory." So long as God's children...wear the livery of the devil (they have the world's pleasures. They are wealth and powerful, have honor and money in plenty)...Thus the rightful order of things is reversed: they who are God's appear to be the devil's, and the devil's to be God's. This condition is painful to the pious. Indeed, heaven and earth and all creatures cry out in complaining protest, unwilling to be subject to evil and to suffer the abuse of the ungodly...
Joseph P. Macchio, The Christian Conspiracy - destruction/suppression of diversity and doctrines [39th Festal Letter of Athanasius 367 CE: gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene expunged, leaving Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], the "lost years" of Jesus 13-30 yrs old [Nag Hammadi manuscripts: "direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence are accessible to human beings"; "a knowing by and of an uncreated self...leads to freedom"; "mytho-poetic in story and allegory...subtle visionary insights inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation"; "God is imaged as a duality and as a unity of masculine and feminine elements"]. Jesus' possible travels [or] knowledge of India (Tibetan text, trans. Notovitch: Jesus equated women with the Divine Mother of the Universe)...Jesus adept in [Eastern] traditions...interpreted mystical meanings beyond that accepted in the orthodox framework...the vast number of "gospels and writings" that were excluded from the Christian canon...apostle Paul's theology...affinity with Christian Gnosis...that Paul may have taught the preexistence and resurrection of the soul...doctrines of preexistence and reincarnation...embodied fallen angels, watchers and Nephilim...embodied evil was a part of early Christianity [cosmogonic dualism]. Doctrines of Augustine: how he formulated the dogmas of original sin, infant damnation and predestination - and rejected preexistence and reincarnation.
Krishna is the original person. From Maha-Visnu expands this universe; from Maha-Visnu’s abdomen a lotus stem grows and a beautiful lotus flower blooms and in that lotus flower Brahma is born. When Brahma (Creation) becomes angry Shiva (Destruction) is born from between Brahma's eyebrows. Three things are present in a material world: Creation (Brahma), Maintenance (Visnu, most difficult) and Destruction (Shiva, not the origin of "the Aum and the Scriptures"). Shiva (Shiva-Tattva) is a temporal manifestation of Visnu (a product of Visnu's contact with material energy), there is no Shiva in the spiritual world. The entire universe consists of unlimited universes (sometimes manifest and sometimes unmanifest), when unmanifest Shiva is also unmanifest (Shiva has no permanent existence). Krishna (in all his Visnu-Tattva forms) continues to engage in his pastimes in the spiritual world that is eternal (blissful and full of knowledge) and unaffected by the destructions that Shiva causes in the material world (there is no Shiva nor destruction in the spiritual world).
Thrice-Greatest Hermes - Vol 2 by G.R.S. Mead, CORPUS HERMETICUM, Unmanifest God is most manifest of Hermes to his son Tat:
1. I will recount..that thou may’st cease to be without the mysteries of the God beyond all name...but the Unmanifest for ever is, for It doth not desire to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh manifest all other things. Being himself Unmanifest...God is not made himself; by "thinking-manifest", he thinketh all things manifest. Now “thinking-manifest” deals with things made alone, for "thinking-manifest" is nothing else than making.
2. He, then, alone who is not made, ’tis clear, is both beyond all power of "thinking-manifest", and is Unmanifest...pray first unto...the One-and-Only One, from whom the One doth come...For thought alone “sees” the Unmanifest, in that it is itself Unmanifest.
3. Who is the One who watcheth o’er...all of the heavenly gods...this so-great One.
4. There is someone who is the Maker...which lacketh place and lacketh measure...the One who hath not yet ordained it order.
5. Would it were possible...poised midway ’tween earth and heaven...the motionless in motion, and the Unmanifest made manifest; whereby is made this order of the cosmos and the cosmos which we see of order.
6. If thou would’st see Him too through things that suffer death...think of a man’s being fashioned in the womb...while hiding out of sight those of least honour?
7. Behold how many arts...all in perfect measure, yet all diversified! Who made them all? What Mother, or what Sire, save God alone, Unmanifest, who hath made all things by his Will?
8. And no one saith a statue or a picture comes to be without a sculptor or [without] a painter...he greater than all names...For verily he is the Only One.
9. His being is conceiving of all things and making...all things, in heaven, in air, in earth, in deep, in all of cosmos, in every part that is and that is not of everything. For there is naught in all the world that is not he. He is himself, both things that are and things that are not. The things that are he hath made manifest, he keepeth things that are not in himself.
10. He is the God beyond all name; he the Unmanifest, he the most manifest; he whom the mind [alone] can contemplate...he is the One of no body, the One of many bodies, nay, rather he of every body...
Joyce's FW celebrates the Joys of Christian/Buddhist diversity of humanity (expansive human consciousness: Gnostic Norwegian Captain, Shem, Archdruid), Brahma (Finnegan, HCE, Shaun), Divine Women (ALP, Iseult, Nuvoletta), his family - and the Sufferings of the inescapable "evil" of Shiva (Buckley), the debilitating harmful sterile intrusive authoritarian institutionalizing damnation (MaMaLuJo, St. Patrick) by Augustine, the manufactured clerical corruption identified by Luther (since 367 AD) and the burdens of "survival of the fittest" anxiety (modern commerce) met with a Dzogchen Buddhist stance. The (innocent infant) Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE), occasionally defensive (Shiva, HCE), though concretized (Brahma, HCE) by community family life (MaMaLuJo) - through spirits (drink) HCE can access his spirituality (dreams) and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) can access (their Krishnas) unification with the Unmanifest. Joyce was a Prophet who consumed Man's conscious and spiritual "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip, efforts and failings" - to reveal the joys (Nirvana) and sufferings (Saṃsāra) of Mankind.
Hermes Trismegistus reveals in the Corpus Hermeticum the Unmanifest to his son Tat; however, Maha-Visnu's unlimited universes (sometimes manifest and sometimes unmanifest) predates Western revelations by centuries. Unmanifest "spiritual" God (Visnu) is omniscient compassionate eternal. Manifest universes consist of Equilibrium (Visnu), Creation (Brahma) and Destruction (Shiva) - Shiva is a ''temporal manifestation of Visnu'' whose destructions are manifest and cannot interact with the Unmanifest. Zoroaster revealed Cosmogonic dualism where inescapeable manifest "evil" (Shiva) is mixed with good (Visnu and Brahma). The 39th Festal Letter 367 AD expunged Unmanifest spirituality from Christ's message (Nag Hammadi manuscripts, spiritual revelations beyond the orthodox cannon). Doctrines of Augustine: dogmas of original sin, infant damnation and predestination were brought to Ireland by St Patrick (Conquistadors quash Latin America's Toltec seers), consequently extinguishing Unmanifest spirituality, sentient's place in the fabric of the temporal universe (preexistence and reincarnation). All Manifest gods are deities/idols (creations of man) - only the Umanifest (untouched by man) is affirmative by definition (our universe's reality: its matter, its laws & consciousness manifest); manifest local ephemeral astronomic physics vs Unmanifest universal eternal quantum (Maya Thaya & Tamas Rajas Sattvas) physics. Joyce returns Mankind to the path to the Unmanifest.
Joyce's FW message: Christian/Buddhist omniscient compassion (Christ/Krishna) is eternally joyful and recirculating. Affirmative family (HCE/Brahma, ALP/Divine woman & children) existentiality: life's biological evolution (sex), modern survival (money), constraining community (Dharma, social evolution) are constantly assaulted by inescapable "aggressive insidious vile" corrupt soul(less/sucking) ossified demonic antipathetic attacks. Joycean Nirvana is attained via the Christian/Buddhist affirmative middle way, "beyond polar opposites" the path of Christ/Buddha.
JCB
Caution - Reading Campbell's "A Skeleton Key..." is NOT reading FINNEGANS WAKE.
First page error (72 yrs now): When Campbell was 9 yrs old (1913) he was NOT introduced to FINNEGANS WAKE (1939, Ulysses not published till 1922). However sometime between 1939 (Campbell was 35 yrs old) and when Campbell and Robinson published "The Skin of Whose Teeth? (December 19, 1942 in The Saturday Review) identifying "The Skin of Our Teeth" Thornton Wilder's (Pulitzer Prize) appropriation of some of Joyce's (FW) themes - (Campbell) started reading FW and by 1944 "A Skeleton Key..." was published.
Campbell, most famous for "Follow your Bliss", was greatly (possibly entirely) influenced by FW. In many ways Campbell's body of work (which may establish him as America's greatest 20th century "philosopher") grew from Campbell's first published book "A Skeleton Key..." - and the many streams of thought emanating from Joyce's FW. "A Skeleton Key..." elucidates both Joyce's FW, as well as, Campbell's lifetime body of work. It must be remembered that Campbell was just 40 yrs old and had spent only 3 yrs writing "A Skeleton Key..." when published - though the "translation" is excellent, almost all Campbell's "personal commentaries" of FW's meanings can (and should) be challenged.
I suspect "A Skeleton Key..." will always be the first place readers start (for elucidation) and all scholarship begins, sadly many readers will never escape Campbell's interpretations. "A Skeleton Key..." 1) removes some of the difficult reading of FW and 2) adds much understanding. "A Skeleton Key..." is a scholarly, challenging and an easier read than FW - however, it is NOT a replacement for FW. Personally, most helpful is Campbell's elucidation of 1) FW's framework, Giambattista Vico's "La Scienza Nuova's" 4 stages of history (cyclic), theocratic to aristocratic to democratic to chaos (followed by Joyce's God "thunderclap") which ends chaos and restarts the world again with theocracy, 2) Campbell's misinterpretation of Tiberiast Duplex (Non-Dual Tantras), 3) Campbell's lifetime body of work, most importantly his writings on Tibetan Buddhism/Yoga, and lastly 4) his misinterpretation of FW's book II:2, but his other writings and understandings of UNMANIFEST METAPHYSICS.
Corrected "A Skeleton Key...":
*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with a half sentence "A away a lone a last a loved a long the" - the first words of FW is the second half of the sentence "riverrun,...".
1) FW's "book I:1" (Vico's theocratic) describes 1) Finnegan's passing (pedantic fall, an aeon ends), Joyce's God "thunderclap" restarting "book I" from ending "book IV" and 2) transition from Finnegan (his fertile historic home) to HCE (an invading Ulysses). The first 4 chapters of "book I" introduces readers to the father (protagonist HCE, his syncretic history and "folk" hearsay) and the second 4 chapters of "book I" are devoted to the woman (who will catch her man) who becomes mother (HCE's wife ALP, her syncretic history and "folk" hearsay). Finnegan represents the archaeological "past" (a passing aeon) held by a forefather (a Brahma, Ireland's Brahmas / impermanent ants upon a whale carcass) with his wisdom of the history of all men and times. Finnegan passes his baton (his place in the fabric of the universe) to HCE now present in time with his particular past. The parents (HCE & ALP) are the new "present anchored by their particular pasts" in FW.
After 4 billion years of biological evolution, Here we are!, well, Where are we?, and, Where did we come from?; Our individual particular consciousness has been inherited from the past (a temporal space in an expanding consciousness), and, Biological evolution has divided us by sex (which induces Social evolution) to procreate offspring to fill our temporal consciousness when we expire:
2) FW's "book II" (Vico's aristocratic) devotes itself to HCE & ALP's children: Shaun (extrovert, man of the world, stasis/space - Sartre's Being) carrier of the letter (cleric of "church") and builder, Shem (introvert, artist, change/time - Sartre's Nothingness) revealer of the letter (prophet), and Iseult (nature's direction) gatherer and composer of letters. The children are the "present future" of FW.
Biological and Social evolution engenders parental responsibilities, to successful offspring (brother's battle: Shaun in accord and Shem in conflict with local Dharma), to continue and expand consciousness:
3) FW's "book III" (Vico's democratic) devotes itself to "what will be of" HCE & ALP's children's - the baton will be passed on (again) from HCE & ALP to: Shaun, Shem and Iseult (daughter). The children's "influences upon the world" is the "future generation" (presently unknowable) of FW.
Our offspring will inherit and evolve their Own individual particular temporal consciousness within their local (social Dharma, MaMaLuJo) community despite our efforts, our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams:
*4) FW ends "book IV" (Vico's chaos) with ALP's (& HCE's) lovemaking dissolution dream. Joycean Nirvana is attained by ALP (via Dzogchen Tögal) and HCE (via Dzogchen Trekchö) - realizing the heart of enlightenment in the present moment, transcending all defilements and fixations (beyond all dualistic polarities) so that their rainbow bodies are realized, unification with the Unmanifest (Creation, Incarnate conception) and Reincarnation (the baton has been passed on again) - Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon 2010/12 "corrected" edition reveals the converging 4 visions of Tögal and 4 stages of Trekchö.
Ever-living Tree of sentient life (time/compassion) and Immutable stone (space/law), "Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat!" Should we Aspire? Aspire to what? To that which manifested consciousness:
- ALP's & HCE's converging Tögal & Trekchö: The night has passed (all dissolves), the Lotus blooms (sunrise), a Christ/Krishna "Saint Kevin" is born illuminated by light (an aeon begins). Muta (native didicism) and Juva (invading docetism) observe Mankind's existential struggle "Archdruid vs St. Patrick" (Unmanifest, spiritual vs Manifest, deities/idols). "Revered Letter" (FW, Joyce's West/East Tibetan bardos). ALP's (& HCE's) "Moksha revelation" (Creation, Incarnate conception and Reincarnation), to end/restart again (Shiva's trident ending the world) "Save me from those therrble prongs!".
Joycean Nirvana lies on the surface of FW's text (mandala, available to all) - excavating below the surface of the text reveals the arguments that support the Nirvana (present granular mindfulness) and refutes all institutional/religious dogma (children's marginalia righting/reversing misconceived lessons) and authoritarian oppression (Wellington Museum's militarism expressed as instrument of people or oppression by rulers). Joyce reveals the Dzogchen "Father Tantras" or "Maha Yoga" (in book I:1-4) and Dzogchen "Mother Tantras" or "Anu Yoga" (in book I:5-8). Shem is identified as receptive to "Ati Yoga" or Non-Dual Tantras (Tiberiast Duplex, book I:6); the answer to the Riddle(s) the "Tiberiast Duplex" is Shem (Joyce, the Enlightened One). The Children learn in "book II" Dzogchen Semde (Mind/Time Series) self-knowledge (awareness) and Dzogchen Longde (Space Series) evolution-knowledge (primordial wisdom, rigpa). HCE dreams (intends) in "book III" to impart Dzogchen Mannagde (Secret Instruction Series) Self-Liberation-knowledge to his Children.
FW is aural (oral) history like Homer's Odessey and Celtic folktales - when one pronounces (phonology) FW's words (aloud) there are more languages than just English; also, when one reads (morphology) FW's words almost all the words are "portmanteaus / neologisms" which gives each of FW's "poly-syncretic" words many meanings (universal impermanence, Heisenberg uncertainty/obscurity), each FW syncretic sentence dozens of possible messages, each FW syncretic paragraph hundreds of possible readings, Joyce's rendering of a more expansive English language and multiplicating universal book with coalescing syncretic themes/stories (that responds/opens to each reader's inquiries). Joyce schooled in Christian Jesuit metaphysics (pushed down into the mindfulness of human consciousness) breathes in the spirit of expansive Celtic (Irish) democratic community tavern life where man's stories of life are told. Tavern life teaches the evolution of Joyce's ten God "thunderclaps" (one hundred lettered words) pushing man's evolution forward from cave man's tales to modern tv media tales. Inside the tavern man learns of the purely human (animal) fall, taken down by another human(s) - like animal taken down on the African savanna. A granular reading of FW can render FW as an updated John Milton's Paradise Lost (regurgitated knowledge from the tree, to affirm man's damnation); however, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and Joyce in FW book II clearly walks Shaun, Shem and Iseult through their earthly evolutionary lifetime travails, our mortality is a consequence of Life's evolution. Every page of FW speaks to man's evolution (unconscious biological, conscious social, aspirational personal) and to Life recirculating (West meets Dzogchen East a "meeting of metaphysical minds") that binds humanity together into the future. Dzogchen (beyond all dualistic polarities) the heart of human consciousness - Joyce's underlying (subcutaneous) arguments refute the "Western curse of metaphysical/mythological damnation", the curse does not exist in the Eastern mind. Like "counting the number of angels on the head of a pin" (Aquinas 1270) Joyce provides a granular/expansive reading of FW as a "defense against all Western adversity" for our conscious and unconscious Western travails. HCE's angst is caused by his community that imposes a Western curse (damnation) upon him that man is not guilty of...to experience Joycean Nirvana, a defense against this man-made guilt is required - for as Zoroaster revealed cosmogonic dualism, evil is mixed with good in man's universal everyday travails (even the Dalai Lama must defend Nirvana rigorously from the most populous authoritarian state in human history).
UNMANIFEST METAPHYSICS, Western = Eastern (FW book II, ch 2), misinterpreted by Campbell, but implied through other Campbell works:
112 LUTHER'S EPISTLE SERMONS ["Christ Consciousness", Gnostic Christianity, intellectual revelation of His message]: 8. Paul's assertion that the glory of God's children is now Unmanifest but shall be revealed in them. Colossians 3, 3-4: "Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory." So long as God's children...wear the livery of the devil (they have the world's pleasures. They are wealth and powerful, have honor and money in plenty)...Thus the rightful order of things is reversed: they who are God's appear to be the devil's, and the devil's to be God's. This condition is painful to the pious. Indeed, heaven and earth and all creatures cry out in complaining protest, unwilling to be subject to evil and to suffer the abuse of the ungodly...
Joseph P. Macchio, The Christian Conspiracy - destruction/suppression of diversity and doctrines [39th Festal Letter of Athanasius 367 CE: gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene expunged, leaving Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], the "lost years" of Jesus 13-30 yrs old [Nag Hammadi manuscripts: "direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence are accessible to human beings"; "a knowing by and of an uncreated self...leads to freedom"; "mytho-poetic in story and allegory...subtle visionary insights inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation"; "God is imaged as a duality and as a unity of masculine and feminine elements"]. Jesus' possible travels [or] knowledge of India (Tibetan text, trans. Notovitch: Jesus equated women with the Divine Mother of the Universe)...Jesus adept in [Eastern] traditions...interpreted mystical meanings beyond that accepted in the orthodox framework...the vast number of "gospels and writings" that were excluded from the Christian canon...apostle Paul's theology...affinity with Christian Gnosis...that Paul may have taught the preexistence and resurrection of the soul...doctrines of preexistence and reincarnation...embodied fallen angels, watchers and Nephilim...embodied evil was a part of early Christianity [cosmogonic dualism]. Doctrines of Augustine: how he formulated the dogmas of original sin, infant damnation and predestination - and rejected preexistence and reincarnation.
Krishna is the original person. From Maha-Visnu expands this universe; from Maha-Visnu’s abdomen a lotus stem grows and a beautiful lotus flower blooms and in that lotus flower Brahma is born. When Brahma (Creation) becomes angry Shiva (Destruction) is born from between Brahma's eyebrows. Three things are present in a material world: Creation (Brahma), Maintenance (Visnu, most difficult) and Destruction (Shiva, not the origin of "the Aum and the Scriptures"). Shiva (Shiva-Tattva) is a temporal manifestation of Visnu (a product of Visnu's contact with material energy), there is no Shiva in the spiritual world. The entire universe consists of unlimited universes (sometimes manifest and sometimes unmanifest), when unmanifest Shiva is also unmanifest (Shiva has no permanent existence). Krishna (in all his Visnu-Tattva forms) continues to engage in his pastimes in the spiritual world that is eternal (blissful and full of knowledge) and unaffected by the destructions that Shiva causes in the material world (there is no Shiva nor destruction in the spiritual world).
Thrice-Greatest Hermes - Vol 2 by G.R.S. Mead, CORPUS HERMETICUM, Unmanifest God is most manifest of Hermes to his son Tat:
1. I will recount..that thou may’st cease to be without the mysteries of the God beyond all name...but the Unmanifest for ever is, for It doth not desire to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh manifest all other things. Being himself Unmanifest...God is not made himself; by "thinking-manifest", he thinketh all things manifest. Now “thinking-manifest” deals with things made alone, for "thinking-manifest" is nothing else than making.
2. He, then, alone who is not made, ’tis clear, is both beyond all power of "thinking-manifest", and is Unmanifest...pray first unto...the One-and-Only One, from whom the One doth come...For thought alone “sees” the Unmanifest, in that it is itself Unmanifest.
3. Who is the One who watcheth o’er...all of the heavenly gods...this so-great One.
4. There is someone who is the Maker...which lacketh place and lacketh measure...the One who hath not yet ordained it order.
5. Would it were possible...poised midway ’tween earth and heaven...the motionless in motion, and the Unmanifest made manifest; whereby is made this order of the cosmos and the cosmos which we see of order.
6. If thou would’st see Him too through things that suffer death...think of a man’s being fashioned in the womb...while hiding out of sight those of least honour?
7. Behold how many arts...all in perfect measure, yet all diversified! Who made them all? What Mother, or what Sire, save God alone, Unmanifest, who hath made all things by his Will?
8. And no one saith a statue or a picture comes to be without a sculptor or [without] a painter...he greater than all names...For verily he is the Only One.
9. His being is conceiving of all things and making...all things, in heaven, in air, in earth, in deep, in all of cosmos, in every part that is and that is not of everything. For there is naught in all the world that is not he. He is himself, both things that are and things that are not. The things that are he hath made manifest, he keepeth things that are not in himself.
10. He is the God beyond all name; he the Unmanifest, he the most manifest; he whom the mind [alone] can contemplate...he is the One of no body, the One of many bodies, nay, rather he of every body...
Joyce's FW celebrates the Joys of Christian/Buddhist diversity of humanity (expansive human consciousness: Gnostic Norwegian Captain, Shem, Archdruid), Brahma (Finnegan, HCE, Shaun), Divine Women (ALP, Iseult, Nuvoletta), his family - and the Sufferings of the inescapable "evil" of Shiva (Buckley), the debilitating harmful sterile intrusive authoritarian institutionalizing damnation (MaMaLuJo, St. Patrick) by Augustine, the manufactured clerical corruption identified by Luther (since 367 AD) and the burdens of "survival of the fittest" anxiety (modern commerce) met with a Dzogchen Buddhist stance. The (innocent infant) Norwegian Captain (Krishna, HCE), occasionally defensive (Shiva, HCE), though concretized (Brahma, HCE) by community family life (MaMaLuJo) - through spirits (drink) HCE can access his spirituality (dreams) and through spiritual (cutting through) love-making with ALP (direct approach) can access (their Krishnas) unification with the Unmanifest. Joyce was a Prophet who consumed Man's conscious and spiritual "thoughts and dreams, history and gossip, efforts and failings" - to reveal the joys (Nirvana) and sufferings (Saṃsāra) of Mankind.
Hermes Trismegistus reveals in the Corpus Hermeticum the Unmanifest to his son Tat; however, Maha-Visnu's unlimited universes (sometimes manifest and sometimes unmanifest) predates Western revelations by centuries. Unmanifest "spiritual" God (Visnu) is omniscient compassionate eternal. Manifest universes consist of Equilibrium (Visnu), Creation (Brahma) and Destruction (Shiva) - Shiva is a ''temporal manifestation of Visnu'' whose destructions are manifest and cannot interact with the Unmanifest. Zoroaster revealed Cosmogonic dualism where inescapeable manifest "evil" (Shiva) is mixed with good (Visnu and Brahma). The 39th Festal Letter 367 AD expunged Unmanifest spirituality from Christ's message (Nag Hammadi manuscripts, spiritual revelations beyond the orthodox cannon). Doctrines of Augustine: dogmas of original sin, infant damnation and predestination were brought to Ireland by St Patrick (Conquistadors quash Latin America's Toltec seers), consequently extinguishing Unmanifest spirituality, sentient's place in the fabric of the temporal universe (preexistence and reincarnation). All Manifest gods are deities/idols (creations of man) - only the Umanifest (untouched by man) is affirmative by definition (our universe's reality: its matter, its laws & consciousness manifest); manifest local ephemeral astronomic physics vs Unmanifest universal eternal quantum (Maya Thaya & Tamas Rajas Sattvas) physics. Joyce returns Mankind to the path to the Unmanifest.
Joyce's FW message: Christian/Buddhist omniscient compassion (Christ/Krishna) is eternally joyful and recirculating. Affirmative family (HCE/Brahma, ALP/Divine woman & children) existentiality: life's biological evolution (sex), modern survival (money), constraining community (Dharma, social evolution) are constantly assaulted by inescapable "aggressive insidious vile" corrupt soul(less/sucking) ossified demonic antipathetic attacks. Joycean Nirvana is attained via the Christian/Buddhist affirmative middle way, "beyond polar opposites" the path of Christ/Buddha.
JCB
Read
March 3, 2017not sure how much insight was provided, but it did give some structure to my own reading. much of campbell's later proto-myth bs is thrown throughout, although in joyce's case he might have been right about what the attempt was. who knows. preferred anthony burgess' essay (http://www.metaportal.com.br/jjoyce/b...), although any interpretation is really hard to separate from the interpreter.
mostly joyce loved puns, but not the funny kind.
in the beginning of the ALP section that ends the book you read:
"Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speaing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have failed on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf, and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so hesleems?"
this is one of the least nonsensical passages, and gives a glimpse of what campbell and morton mean when they talk about the ur-meaning of joyce's language. Here ALP is the wife of HCE waking him up, the river Liffey running through town ("I am leafy"), and a tree losing its leaves (as ALP loses her hair). All three are one and conjure images of decay, rebirth, renewal. The fall and the rising (and the suddenness of both), the themes which do poke through whenever meaning seems close by.
mostly, though, i think of my own dreams where two people might be the same people, a place may shift from one to the next without a thought or explanation, and a never ending dread of the future and misremembering of the past might weigh over everything. that is the only lens i could find to make any sense of the wake.
mostly joyce loved puns, but not the funny kind.
in the beginning of the ALP section that ends the book you read:
"Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speaing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have failed on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf, and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so hesleems?"
this is one of the least nonsensical passages, and gives a glimpse of what campbell and morton mean when they talk about the ur-meaning of joyce's language. Here ALP is the wife of HCE waking him up, the river Liffey running through town ("I am leafy"), and a tree losing its leaves (as ALP loses her hair). All three are one and conjure images of decay, rebirth, renewal. The fall and the rising (and the suddenness of both), the themes which do poke through whenever meaning seems close by.
mostly, though, i think of my own dreams where two people might be the same people, a place may shift from one to the next without a thought or explanation, and a never ending dread of the future and misremembering of the past might weigh over everything. that is the only lens i could find to make any sense of the wake.
Want to read
September 30, 2011I doubt that even 400 pages of cliff notes will be enough.
So far, incredibly helpful. In addition to pointing out major themes and structural points in the beginning, this is basically a paragraph by paragraph “translation” of Wake. Read a paragraph of Wake, read the corresponding paragraph in this, then re-read the paragraph in Wake. That’s how I plan to get through the book with at least some basic, elementary level of comprehension.
So far, incredibly helpful. In addition to pointing out major themes and structural points in the beginning, this is basically a paragraph by paragraph “translation” of Wake. Read a paragraph of Wake, read the corresponding paragraph in this, then re-read the paragraph in Wake. That’s how I plan to get through the book with at least some basic, elementary level of comprehension.
October 25, 2024
Overall, felt like I was reading Foucault’s Pendulum again, but a lot of sincerity can be found here.
The Wake isn’t a normal book and Campbell takes it seriously.
The Wake isn’t a normal book and Campbell takes it seriously.
abandoned
January 6, 2016The parts that announced the themes were very useful but I couldn't see the point of paraphrasing entire chapters - I chose to read Joyce's original instead.
Read
January 22, 2020Joyce and Finnegans Wake reminds me of Caden Cotard and his play in Synecdoche, New York. Caden is nominated for a MacArthur Fellowship grant, and he decides to go about writing and directing a radical, revolutionary play. His aim is to encapsulate life itself by mimicking life itself. As the movie goes on, the play becomes more and more complicated because Caden adds more and more individual storylines occurring concomitantly. The play is eventually moved to an abandoned jet hangar to fit the set. The set is a microcosmic honeycomb of the world outside it: couples are breaking up in one room, a woman is pregnant unexpectedly, someone kills themselves, etc. Everyone is enamored with Caden's genius until he becomes overly engrossed with his work and the play subsumes his reality.
So why does Caden's masterpiece never entertain a real audience? Why is Finnegans Wake often deemed "a piece of literary curiosa"? The book is so expansive that to really enjoy it, one would have to be an omnipotent power. There's absolutely no way one can be so erudite as to understand every pun, reference, and trope. One would have to be fluent in French, Russian, German, Irish Gaelic, Italian, maybe even Chinese; one would have to be familiar with Nordic, Irish, Indian, Chinese (etc. etc.) myth; one would have to be not just familiar with world geography, but be a human atlas. Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake for fourteen years with help from the likes of Samuel Beckett. Joyce was no omnipotent being. This isn't inherently bad, but it makes this book a life project, and even as one coughs up a couple last breaths as a well-read octogenarian, they still would have missed something in the book.
Having not read the book, Campbell does a decent job of dumbing it down for you, but even in reading the idiot's guide the book is clearly outrageously difficult. Anyway, I'm gonna go for it.
May 21, 2015
finnished! finnel thawts: http://www.5cense.com/15/433.htm
January 25, 2017
If you're going to read Finnegans Wake (and let me make it clear that I'm not saying you should), this companion is incredibly valuable. The one knock against it is that the authors ascribe such lofty powers and all encompassing intent to Joyce that they are more acolytes than critics. On the one hand, you would need to be so obsessed in order to spend the time to write this commentary. On the other, they come perilously close to the kind of lickspittle academicians that Joyce is satirizing in the book. They're also prone to hyperbole, as in:
That said, if you want to understand Finnegans Wake without taking ten years to decipher Joyce's intentionally obscure prosetry, I'd keep this book close at hand.
Clearly, a new kind of communication has been encountered in these pagesor
Of one thing we can be sure: There are no nonsense syllables in Joyce
That said, if you want to understand Finnegans Wake without taking ten years to decipher Joyce's intentionally obscure prosetry, I'd keep this book close at hand.
November 23, 2009
For those merely curious about an intended meaning behind the Wake, reading this study may suffice; but for readers of Joyce’s “Night Tome” looking for more, the Key is a better compliment than guide. It’s opening and closing chapters do present a laudable insight into Joyce’s technique; but in demonstrating the possibility of a linear narrative, the Key invites the danger of experiencing more difficulty in reading Finnegans Wake than is typically assumed, as readers may attempt to fit a conventional plot into a work that cannot be read in any conventional way. Anyone with an interest in Finnegans Wake is probably as fascinated by what it isn’t, as those who disdain are irritated by what it is; it’s probably best to keep that fascination alive.
November 9, 2012
I was just reminded, after reading an upbeat review of Finnegan's Wake, how my reading years ago would have been impossible had it not been for this book. While I am not entirely sure it was exhaustive, it was more than enough food for thought.
Finnegan's Wake was frustrating in a way I cannot define, more so than any book before or since. I cannot get beyond the issue of the writer's continuously writing jokes to himself which, when deciphered, appeared anti-climactic in a way in which Ulysses and other excellent writings by Joyce never did.
I actually enjoyed reading this book more than the book, which it attempted in a very great way, to explain. Without it I would never have finished my Joyce studies with a passing grade.
Finnegan's Wake was frustrating in a way I cannot define, more so than any book before or since. I cannot get beyond the issue of the writer's continuously writing jokes to himself which, when deciphered, appeared anti-climactic in a way in which Ulysses and other excellent writings by Joyce never did.
I actually enjoyed reading this book more than the book, which it attempted in a very great way, to explain. Without it I would never have finished my Joyce studies with a passing grade.
September 3, 2016
Very helpful for getting started in understanding Finnegans Wake.
I wished the book had covered the entire Wake.
There are plenty of aids available now for making sense
of books, allusions, names, religions, geographies, sigla, figures,
and all sorts of things appearing and reappearing in the Wake.
Nonetheless, while now superseded, it was one of a kind when I got my first copy.
If you are reading Finnegans Wake for the first time,
you will find the first pages of the Key helpful.
I wished the book had covered the entire Wake.
There are plenty of aids available now for making sense
of books, allusions, names, religions, geographies, sigla, figures,
and all sorts of things appearing and reappearing in the Wake.
Nonetheless, while now superseded, it was one of a kind when I got my first copy.
If you are reading Finnegans Wake for the first time,
you will find the first pages of the Key helpful.
March 10, 2009
So far, a great commentary to read along with The Wake. The line-by-line translations are silly, but the footnotes are great. I'm sure they do not match Joyce's intentions exactly - they are obviously defenses of Campbell's own idea of the unity of mythology - but they point out many allusions I would read over, and I'm interested in Campbell's interpretation because his fascination with myths mirrors my own.
March 26, 2017
I mean it's really good and necessarily they have to ignore a lot of stuff but they don't really emphasise enough that this is just a single, individual reading, like hm maybe a cultural anthropologist is gonna find a lot of cultural anthropology to talk about in a famously opaque and multifaceted book, when all you have is a hammer u kno
January 21, 2021
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, was published in 1944, five years after the lackluster appearance and near disappearance of Joyce's last book from the literary stage. A certain amount of other activity and drama was unfolding around the world during this period of time which, to be fair, also tended to distract attention from the literary arts.
We should acknowledge and honor first what Campbell and Robinson attempted to do: they made an effort to come to terms with what was widely accepted to be an unintelligible book. By "come to terms with" I mean they sought to understand Finnegans Wake, something that all of us who are interested in Joyce's last book have been trying to do ever since. Were they the first to do so? No. The literati had been struggling with bits and pieces of the Wake during the long years when it was still known only as Work in Progress and was appearing piecemeal in the literary journals Transatlantic Review and transition. But A Skeleton Key was the first to take on the published book in its final form and in its totality. If for no more than the daring effort that this project demanded, Campbell and Robinson deserve no small praise.
Many have subsequently followed the route blazed by Campbell and Robinson into the Wakean wilderness; many have built, and continue to build, entire careers on scholarly exegeses of Finnegans Wake. Uncountable articles and more countable books about the Wake have boldly gone where no men (but Campbell and Robinson) had gone before: shall we mention Tindall, Gordon and Bishop among those shining stars?
Probably inevitably, the stock of Campbell and Robinson has been weak among the "professional" Joycean crowd, for three important reasons. One reason is that any number of interpretations and provisional conclusions arrived at in A Skeleton Key have been supplanted by later, more evolved and differentiated and subtle theories. Conceivably then, the interpretations of Campbell and Robinson might be misleading. But of course the evolution of common wisdom of so complex a work as Finnegans Wake is a natural and expected process and should not lead to an attack, overt or covert, on its early pioneers: no one attacks Beowulf for not being Hamlet. A second reason to be considered is that of professional jealousy, or as part of a turf war: an uneasy truce has long existed between the careerist English teacher crowd and amateur Joycean enthusiasts. As elitist as this argument sounds, it should not necessarily be rejected entirely out of hand. There's a case to be made for preferring a Harvard medical doctor to oversee one's healthcare to the advice of a witch doctor. Two of the most popular writers about the works of James Joyce ― Joseph Campbell and Anthony Burgess ― we would probably not mistake for Joyce scholars. Regardless of our degrees and training, all of us who admire the works of James Joyce are certainly Joyce enthusiasts. It seems to me that a common shortcoming of both Campbell and Burgess is that they spent far too many pages floridly enthusing instead of putting forward and defending their own original insights. This is related to the third reason for a subdued esteem among the more formally trained Joyce scholars for A Skeleton Key: the intrusive voice, or personality, of Joseph Campbell upon a text about James Joyce.
I would say Campbell's peremptory presence does inform A Skeleton Key, but not excessively so. The result is that if one is a fan of Joseph Campbell then one is more likely to be a fan of A Skeleton Key than if not, but that fandom is not a prerequisite. Campbell is always watching for opportunities to use the text of Finnegans Wake to prop up his own theories about mythology and storytelling, so to a degree A Skeleton Key attempts to usurp Joyce for Campbell's own benefit. If you buy into Campbell's theories, you may come to see Finnegans Wake through Campbell's well-known monomyth lens. I doubt that was Joyce's intent.
The approach taken by Campbell and Robinson to Joyce's text appears to be that they sought first to rewrite the original in more straightforward and standard syntax and vocabulary; after this, they started layering on various annotations and somewhat discursive opinions of their own. The annotations and discussion are the most appealing part of the book; however, it seems that Campbell and Robinson ran out of steam about half way through, or perhaps they merely ran up against deadline pressures. The first half of the book is far more interesting than the second half, which is more a retelling of Finnegans Wake in something a bit closer to English, but it doesn't provide much insight into that story.
Some books deserve to be read if for no other reason than because of their historical significance. I'd recommend that students of the Wake first read Tindall and at some point later read Campbell and Robinson in order to see A Skeleton Key in an appropriate perspective. The online Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET) site is extremely valuable as well.
We should acknowledge and honor first what Campbell and Robinson attempted to do: they made an effort to come to terms with what was widely accepted to be an unintelligible book. By "come to terms with" I mean they sought to understand Finnegans Wake, something that all of us who are interested in Joyce's last book have been trying to do ever since. Were they the first to do so? No. The literati had been struggling with bits and pieces of the Wake during the long years when it was still known only as Work in Progress and was appearing piecemeal in the literary journals Transatlantic Review and transition. But A Skeleton Key was the first to take on the published book in its final form and in its totality. If for no more than the daring effort that this project demanded, Campbell and Robinson deserve no small praise.
Many have subsequently followed the route blazed by Campbell and Robinson into the Wakean wilderness; many have built, and continue to build, entire careers on scholarly exegeses of Finnegans Wake. Uncountable articles and more countable books about the Wake have boldly gone where no men (but Campbell and Robinson) had gone before: shall we mention Tindall, Gordon and Bishop among those shining stars?
Probably inevitably, the stock of Campbell and Robinson has been weak among the "professional" Joycean crowd, for three important reasons. One reason is that any number of interpretations and provisional conclusions arrived at in A Skeleton Key have been supplanted by later, more evolved and differentiated and subtle theories. Conceivably then, the interpretations of Campbell and Robinson might be misleading. But of course the evolution of common wisdom of so complex a work as Finnegans Wake is a natural and expected process and should not lead to an attack, overt or covert, on its early pioneers: no one attacks Beowulf for not being Hamlet. A second reason to be considered is that of professional jealousy, or as part of a turf war: an uneasy truce has long existed between the careerist English teacher crowd and amateur Joycean enthusiasts. As elitist as this argument sounds, it should not necessarily be rejected entirely out of hand. There's a case to be made for preferring a Harvard medical doctor to oversee one's healthcare to the advice of a witch doctor. Two of the most popular writers about the works of James Joyce ― Joseph Campbell and Anthony Burgess ― we would probably not mistake for Joyce scholars. Regardless of our degrees and training, all of us who admire the works of James Joyce are certainly Joyce enthusiasts. It seems to me that a common shortcoming of both Campbell and Burgess is that they spent far too many pages floridly enthusing instead of putting forward and defending their own original insights. This is related to the third reason for a subdued esteem among the more formally trained Joyce scholars for A Skeleton Key: the intrusive voice, or personality, of Joseph Campbell upon a text about James Joyce.
I would say Campbell's peremptory presence does inform A Skeleton Key, but not excessively so. The result is that if one is a fan of Joseph Campbell then one is more likely to be a fan of A Skeleton Key than if not, but that fandom is not a prerequisite. Campbell is always watching for opportunities to use the text of Finnegans Wake to prop up his own theories about mythology and storytelling, so to a degree A Skeleton Key attempts to usurp Joyce for Campbell's own benefit. If you buy into Campbell's theories, you may come to see Finnegans Wake through Campbell's well-known monomyth lens. I doubt that was Joyce's intent.
The approach taken by Campbell and Robinson to Joyce's text appears to be that they sought first to rewrite the original in more straightforward and standard syntax and vocabulary; after this, they started layering on various annotations and somewhat discursive opinions of their own. The annotations and discussion are the most appealing part of the book; however, it seems that Campbell and Robinson ran out of steam about half way through, or perhaps they merely ran up against deadline pressures. The first half of the book is far more interesting than the second half, which is more a retelling of Finnegans Wake in something a bit closer to English, but it doesn't provide much insight into that story.
Some books deserve to be read if for no other reason than because of their historical significance. I'd recommend that students of the Wake first read Tindall and at some point later read Campbell and Robinson in order to see A Skeleton Key in an appropriate perspective. The online Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET) site is extremely valuable as well.
March 30, 2011
Joseph Campbell understood more about storytelling than just about any other person I can think of. This book, which he cowrote with Henry Morton Robinson, helps to illuminate one of the most difficult - but most rewarding - books ever written.
March 6, 2023
well I finished the guide to the book that i haven't been able to finish, but it too was actually pretty difficult. Finnegan and i have a very cool relationship compared to his siblings, but i will say it is thawing after this.
Want to read
July 1, 2007someday I hope to have the time to study this novel long enough to understand it.
September 24, 2008
O' the labyrinthine ways of it... and what a guide!
May 31, 2010
I heard this was the hardest book to read...I'm not even going to start reading this, Can't even understand the title...
March 29, 2014
A pretty good map of complex territory. I'll be coming back to this one. In tandem with Tyndall's guide, all the help one needs....
September 26, 2020
En 1944, cinco años después de la publicación en 1939 edl Finnegans Wake, Campbell y Robinson ya ofrecieron su guía de lectura, que aún sigue siendo vigente, aunque la de Tyndal se ha instituido como la de referencia.
Campbell no incide en una interpretación mitográfica (aunque hace un apunte en su bella conclusión sobre este tema y cómo Joyce crea una clave mitológica global como substrato de su obra, y no solo grecolatina).
Ofrece una introduccción extensa, un análisis promenorizado de los famosos y fundamentales primeros párrafos del primer capítulo, claves en toda la novela, y luego sigue parte a parte, capítulo a capítulo y página a página este libro, ofreciendo una extensa "traducción" abreviada (si existiera una traducción de la novela a un lenguaje "inteligible", debería contar con lo menos 4 o 5 mil páginas) que facilita el seguir su hilo y no perderse.
La referencia son las ediciones clásicas, basadas en la de Faber & Faber, y no la reciente edición revisada.
Campbell no incide en una interpretación mitográfica (aunque hace un apunte en su bella conclusión sobre este tema y cómo Joyce crea una clave mitológica global como substrato de su obra, y no solo grecolatina).
Ofrece una introduccción extensa, un análisis promenorizado de los famosos y fundamentales primeros párrafos del primer capítulo, claves en toda la novela, y luego sigue parte a parte, capítulo a capítulo y página a página este libro, ofreciendo una extensa "traducción" abreviada (si existiera una traducción de la novela a un lenguaje "inteligible", debería contar con lo menos 4 o 5 mil páginas) que facilita el seguir su hilo y no perderse.
La referencia son las ediciones clásicas, basadas en la de Faber & Faber, y no la reciente edición revisada.
April 30, 2018
So far, this is the most helpful companion text to Finnegans Wake that I've used. I've been reading it to help me along. It of course is alone not enough -- I've used a set of glosses and audio recordings, both found online -- but this is the primary companion that has allowed me to move forward.
I also appreciate the introductions, which supply snippets from well-written negative critiques of the Wake. before launching into its defense.
I also appreciate the introductions, which supply snippets from well-written negative critiques of the Wake. before launching into its defense.
January 8, 2018
I am currently reading the books that greatly influenced Sylvia Plath. Finnegans Wake, and A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (to understand it) were heavy-weights for her, as Plath first attempted to write her undergraduate thesis at Smith College on Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. In other reviews I mention Literary Alchemy, and the conscious effort that some poets and writers have made throughout history to interweave mysticism into their art in order to make it into something larger than themselves. This is not a new idea, and I am not the first one to notice it, but I may be the first to have noticed it with Sylvia Plath. James Joyce was a big practitioner of literary alchemy, and the famous mythologist and author Joseph Campbell, along with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote a whole book as to how Joyce structured Finnegans Wake, which is called A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. Campbell’s book is the principle text of Plath’s time (and maybe of ours too) to understanding Joyce’s work, and Plath mentioned several times in letters (The Letters of Sylvia Plath, pp 762-3, 780).
Joyce spent eighteen years writing his book, published in 1939, and he died a few months later. Campbell says in the Foreword, “The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium.” (A Skeleton Key, p. xxiii)
James Joyce was seriously fascinated by mysticism. A quick search of his name and the word occult will yield hundreds of journal articles and papers on his esoteric pursuits. Oh yes, Sylvia Plath chose the greatest teachers to model her work after. Everything Campbell said here can also be said for Plath’s Ariel poems.
After the Foreword is the Preface, because these old books enjoyed a lot of such things, and also of course because the world continues to change and updates are needed. In this Preface, Campbell says Finnegans Wake is “the integration, total and complete, of Joyce’s personality and creative powers.” (ASK, xxv)
In Introduction to a Strange Subject (Yes, an Introduction, after a Preface, after a Foreword), Campbell says Finnegans Wake is “a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind.” He calls it a “gigantic wheeling rebus” with “mythological heroes and events of the remotest antiquity occupying space with modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously […] Multiple meanings are present in every line; interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work. Finnegans Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth…” Sound familiar? If you have read my work (Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath and the Decoding Sylvia Plath series), it does.
At the bottom of page 191 from A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Campbell says, “Thus, throughout the work, there is a continual intermelting of the accused and his accusers. All these characters, moving around and against one another, are but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical—each, as it were, a figure in the dream complex of all the others.” (ASK, 9)
Campbell continues about Joyce’s repetitive death and resurrection themes. He describes Joyce’s Cosmic Egg (Plath played with this idea in “Morning Song”; you can see it explained in Fixed Stars Govern a Life), and how its fall is Lucifer’s fall, and Adam and Eve’s, and the sun, and the fall of Rome, and Wall Street, Humpty Dumpty, Newton’s Apple, spring rain on seeded fields, and every man’s daily fall from grace. Each fall implies a corresponding resurrection, both again seen all over Plath’s work. Joyce made sure everything had a historical allegory too, drawing both on things of the long past and also the contemporary politics and happenings of his time. It’s all just so Plathian.
These high-level overviews are key to understanding the multi-dimensionality of Joyce, and then understanding that this is what Plath did too, making a model of him, to steal from “Daddy.” And “Daddy” is so appropriate here, because Campbell explains the older man-girl/father-daughter impropriety through Finnegans Wake which Plath cast as an Electra complex with the father seen from the Freudian-Jungian point of view, and the children in Finnegans Wake of course address their father “Daddy” in God-like reverence. Finnegans Wake also explores King Brutus’ founding of Albion, as William Blake saw it and cast it against the new world of America. For more on how these themes fit with Plath’s “Daddy,” please see my book, Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”
In this Introduction, Campbell goes on to explain the parts of the story which we can actually identify as story (Joyce gets tough sometimes): how twelve citizens of the jury represent the twelve signs of the zodiac; four senile judges are the four winds; the wife, “ALP” (which makes Plath’s “nine black Alps” from “The Couriers” have yet another meaning), Anna Livia Plurabelle. She is the “Bringer of Plurabilities” and all things possible with words. She is the letter writer in Finnegans Wake. She is Isis and Mother Earth with her 28 little companions (the days of the month); there is the battle between the sexes and the battle between brothers; good versus evil and magic versus ego—pretty much all of the polarities that make the world –and our heads--spin. Joyce even put autobiographical elements into Finnegans Wake, where his character Shem the Penman, the seer, poet, mother’s pet, and misunderstood artist, who writes “a phosphorescent book in a corrosive language which Shaun [who later becomes “Yawn,” his ego-focused brother] cannot understand.” (ASK, 11)
Campbell writes: “Shem’s business is not to create a higher life, but merely to find and utter the Word. Shaun, on the other hand, whose function is to make the Word become flesh, misreads it, fundamentally rejects it, limits himself to a kind of stupid concretism, and while winning all the skirmishes, loses the eternal city.” (ASK, 12) This, my friends, is the story of the majority of Plath scholarship today.
Chapter VII of A Skeleton Key is devoted to Shem the Penman. Shem’s section includes alchemical operations and Campbell explains how Book II is full of alchemy while also paralleling Christianity. Chapter II, Book II in A Skeleton’s Key, called The Study Period— Triv and Quad, explores what Campbell admits is the hardest part of Finnegans Wake: Kabbala (Campbell’s spelling). (ASK, 163-193) This chapter explores the creation of the universe, history, myth, playing with verse by other poets, letters and numerological correspondences, nine principles, polar [opposite] principles, more alchemy, Latin invitations to spirits of the ancients, mythology, double-meanings, Judaism, cosmology and constellations, Veda, Sanskrit, Celts and Druids, Tantric spellings, Bible stories, Freud, the Atlantic Ocean, syllables and the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, representations of the numbers one through ten in Kabbala, manifesting God through word construction, and of course, riddles and puns. Read this book and The Painted Caravan, and just try to tell me Plath didn’t know about Qabalah and Alchemy. She knew plenty.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake continues with a Synopsis and Demonstration (we still haven’t gotten to Chapter One yet!) where the author talks about word structure and sound, what happens in each part, and the children’s (and readers’) lessons in Kabbalistic Theology, Viconian Philosophy (a cyclical theory of history), the seven liberal arts and cosmogony (ASK, 19). A lot of British colonialism is built into this book, with “raped India and Ireland,” as well as gypsies, sprinklings of the German language—ideas that Plath also played with in her “Daddy” poem.
Campbell writes of how the author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) appears often in Finnegans Wake, and interestingly, Plath played with ideas of Twain in “Lady Lazarus.” Campbell also mentions other symbols also seen in both “Lady Lazarus” and in Finnegans Wake: the goddess of fire, Brigit (the Gaelic Isis) who speaks, “I am, I am”; Venus; Helen of Troy (ASK, 156—not found in the Index); the Qabalistic importance of the decade, or ten years; a poem of Exiles (ASK, 108); The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Lilith (p. 79 of ASK, but not in the Index), Adam and Eve; the fallen angel Lucifer; the wreck of the Hesperus (ASK, 255—not found in the Index), the Tree of Life as Liberty (p. 309 of ASK—not found in the Index). See Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” for more on how these themes fit with Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.”
We finally get to Chapter 1, Finnegan’s Fall. There is an apostrophe here because this speaks of a character named Finnegan who fell. The lack of apostrophe in the title leaves the title open to other meanings, Finnegans Wake might even being read as a directive to all Finnegans (every man) to awaken. Finnegan is Mr. Finn who will resurrect and be Finn-again. He is Ireland’s legendary giant, Finn MacCool. Campbell explains that in those first seventeen pages, Joyce wove in geography, pre-history, medieval history and Joyce’s history, fragments of folklore, and even a comical vaudeville song. (ASK, 39)
A part of Finnegans Wake I have not gotten to read yet, but read about first in A Skeleton Key, is the character Sylvia Silence, the girl detective (ASK, 70, 312-313), which must have given Plath a laugh. Suddenly now, I get the joke that was behind this short film series. Plath probably also enjoyed the character St. Sylvanus and the importance of the Elm tree.
I have owned A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake for years, and skimmed it, but until my recent trip to Ireland and newfound personal interest in Joyce’s book, I hadn’t looked at Campbell’s too closely. I knew Joyce was a model and influence for years, but I did not fully understand the extent until now. A part of me wishes that I had read these books first, before having written my first three books. But I am also delighted. “No man is an island,” as the great John Donne said, and Sylvia Plath did not create herself, but let her influences guide and create her. I always knew that A Painted Caravan first taught Plath the basics about tarot, alchemy and Qabalah. I knew also that Finnegan’s Wake was a model of Qabalah, but I didn’t have the specific details as to how. Now, I do. We all do. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was Plath’s instruction manual. It is such a huge and wonderful validation of my Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath work. If only HCE and Shaun could realize.
Joyce spent eighteen years writing his book, published in 1939, and he died a few months later. Campbell says in the Foreword, “The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium.” (A Skeleton Key, p. xxiii)
James Joyce was seriously fascinated by mysticism. A quick search of his name and the word occult will yield hundreds of journal articles and papers on his esoteric pursuits. Oh yes, Sylvia Plath chose the greatest teachers to model her work after. Everything Campbell said here can also be said for Plath’s Ariel poems.
After the Foreword is the Preface, because these old books enjoyed a lot of such things, and also of course because the world continues to change and updates are needed. In this Preface, Campbell says Finnegans Wake is “the integration, total and complete, of Joyce’s personality and creative powers.” (ASK, xxv)
In Introduction to a Strange Subject (Yes, an Introduction, after a Preface, after a Foreword), Campbell says Finnegans Wake is “a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind.” He calls it a “gigantic wheeling rebus” with “mythological heroes and events of the remotest antiquity occupying space with modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously […] Multiple meanings are present in every line; interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work. Finnegans Wake is a prodigious, multifaceted monomyth…” Sound familiar? If you have read my work (Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath and the Decoding Sylvia Plath series), it does.
At the bottom of page 191 from A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Campbell says, “Thus, throughout the work, there is a continual intermelting of the accused and his accusers. All these characters, moving around and against one another, are but facets of some prodigious unity and are at last profoundly identical—each, as it were, a figure in the dream complex of all the others.” (ASK, 9)
Campbell continues about Joyce’s repetitive death and resurrection themes. He describes Joyce’s Cosmic Egg (Plath played with this idea in “Morning Song”; you can see it explained in Fixed Stars Govern a Life), and how its fall is Lucifer’s fall, and Adam and Eve’s, and the sun, and the fall of Rome, and Wall Street, Humpty Dumpty, Newton’s Apple, spring rain on seeded fields, and every man’s daily fall from grace. Each fall implies a corresponding resurrection, both again seen all over Plath’s work. Joyce made sure everything had a historical allegory too, drawing both on things of the long past and also the contemporary politics and happenings of his time. It’s all just so Plathian.
These high-level overviews are key to understanding the multi-dimensionality of Joyce, and then understanding that this is what Plath did too, making a model of him, to steal from “Daddy.” And “Daddy” is so appropriate here, because Campbell explains the older man-girl/father-daughter impropriety through Finnegans Wake which Plath cast as an Electra complex with the father seen from the Freudian-Jungian point of view, and the children in Finnegans Wake of course address their father “Daddy” in God-like reverence. Finnegans Wake also explores King Brutus’ founding of Albion, as William Blake saw it and cast it against the new world of America. For more on how these themes fit with Plath’s “Daddy,” please see my book, Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”
In this Introduction, Campbell goes on to explain the parts of the story which we can actually identify as story (Joyce gets tough sometimes): how twelve citizens of the jury represent the twelve signs of the zodiac; four senile judges are the four winds; the wife, “ALP” (which makes Plath’s “nine black Alps” from “The Couriers” have yet another meaning), Anna Livia Plurabelle. She is the “Bringer of Plurabilities” and all things possible with words. She is the letter writer in Finnegans Wake. She is Isis and Mother Earth with her 28 little companions (the days of the month); there is the battle between the sexes and the battle between brothers; good versus evil and magic versus ego—pretty much all of the polarities that make the world –and our heads--spin. Joyce even put autobiographical elements into Finnegans Wake, where his character Shem the Penman, the seer, poet, mother’s pet, and misunderstood artist, who writes “a phosphorescent book in a corrosive language which Shaun [who later becomes “Yawn,” his ego-focused brother] cannot understand.” (ASK, 11)
Campbell writes: “Shem’s business is not to create a higher life, but merely to find and utter the Word. Shaun, on the other hand, whose function is to make the Word become flesh, misreads it, fundamentally rejects it, limits himself to a kind of stupid concretism, and while winning all the skirmishes, loses the eternal city.” (ASK, 12) This, my friends, is the story of the majority of Plath scholarship today.
Chapter VII of A Skeleton Key is devoted to Shem the Penman. Shem’s section includes alchemical operations and Campbell explains how Book II is full of alchemy while also paralleling Christianity. Chapter II, Book II in A Skeleton’s Key, called The Study Period— Triv and Quad, explores what Campbell admits is the hardest part of Finnegans Wake: Kabbala (Campbell’s spelling). (ASK, 163-193) This chapter explores the creation of the universe, history, myth, playing with verse by other poets, letters and numerological correspondences, nine principles, polar [opposite] principles, more alchemy, Latin invitations to spirits of the ancients, mythology, double-meanings, Judaism, cosmology and constellations, Veda, Sanskrit, Celts and Druids, Tantric spellings, Bible stories, Freud, the Atlantic Ocean, syllables and the Kabbalistic Sephiroth, representations of the numbers one through ten in Kabbala, manifesting God through word construction, and of course, riddles and puns. Read this book and The Painted Caravan, and just try to tell me Plath didn’t know about Qabalah and Alchemy. She knew plenty.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake continues with a Synopsis and Demonstration (we still haven’t gotten to Chapter One yet!) where the author talks about word structure and sound, what happens in each part, and the children’s (and readers’) lessons in Kabbalistic Theology, Viconian Philosophy (a cyclical theory of history), the seven liberal arts and cosmogony (ASK, 19). A lot of British colonialism is built into this book, with “raped India and Ireland,” as well as gypsies, sprinklings of the German language—ideas that Plath also played with in her “Daddy” poem.
Campbell writes of how the author Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) appears often in Finnegans Wake, and interestingly, Plath played with ideas of Twain in “Lady Lazarus.” Campbell also mentions other symbols also seen in both “Lady Lazarus” and in Finnegans Wake: the goddess of fire, Brigit (the Gaelic Isis) who speaks, “I am, I am”; Venus; Helen of Troy (ASK, 156—not found in the Index); the Qabalistic importance of the decade, or ten years; a poem of Exiles (ASK, 108); The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Lilith (p. 79 of ASK, but not in the Index), Adam and Eve; the fallen angel Lucifer; the wreck of the Hesperus (ASK, 255—not found in the Index), the Tree of Life as Liberty (p. 309 of ASK—not found in the Index). See Decoding Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” for more on how these themes fit with Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.”
We finally get to Chapter 1, Finnegan’s Fall. There is an apostrophe here because this speaks of a character named Finnegan who fell. The lack of apostrophe in the title leaves the title open to other meanings, Finnegans Wake might even being read as a directive to all Finnegans (every man) to awaken. Finnegan is Mr. Finn who will resurrect and be Finn-again. He is Ireland’s legendary giant, Finn MacCool. Campbell explains that in those first seventeen pages, Joyce wove in geography, pre-history, medieval history and Joyce’s history, fragments of folklore, and even a comical vaudeville song. (ASK, 39)
A part of Finnegans Wake I have not gotten to read yet, but read about first in A Skeleton Key, is the character Sylvia Silence, the girl detective (ASK, 70, 312-313), which must have given Plath a laugh. Suddenly now, I get the joke that was behind this short film series. Plath probably also enjoyed the character St. Sylvanus and the importance of the Elm tree.
I have owned A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake for years, and skimmed it, but until my recent trip to Ireland and newfound personal interest in Joyce’s book, I hadn’t looked at Campbell’s too closely. I knew Joyce was a model and influence for years, but I did not fully understand the extent until now. A part of me wishes that I had read these books first, before having written my first three books. But I am also delighted. “No man is an island,” as the great John Donne said, and Sylvia Plath did not create herself, but let her influences guide and create her. I always knew that A Painted Caravan first taught Plath the basics about tarot, alchemy and Qabalah. I knew also that Finnegan’s Wake was a model of Qabalah, but I didn’t have the specific details as to how. Now, I do. We all do. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake was Plath’s instruction manual. It is such a huge and wonderful validation of my Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath work. If only HCE and Shaun could realize.
December 5, 2017
Was a great help. The first guide to Finnegans Wake, written relatively soon after its publication, I understand some scholars consider some of its insights and interpretations outdated, but it helped me stay on track when making my way through Wake reading #2. I'll take an outdated (partial) understanding over none.
May 17, 2014
In this work, Campbell and Robinson (i.e., Campbell) provide a running synopsis to Finnegans Wake, establishing what they take to be the essential line of its polysemic plot and presenting it in concise, articulate terms.
Along with McHugh's "Annotations to Finnegans Wake," this book has been my constant companion for the last five months, and as with McHugh's book, I can't even imagine trying to read the Wake with out its assistance. Part of the Wake's effect is to allow scenes to gradually come into focus, so that one might read a section of eight pages before encountering the signature that establishes clearly that the preceding material has been a letter, and who has written it. With Campbell's capable assistance, you have a pretty good idea of what you're getting into at any particular stage.
Is it a perfect book? No. I believe Campbell overstates his mythopoetic reading of the Wake, which is certainly a primary theme, but I'm not sure it's the raison d'etre of the book that Campbell makes it out to be. In general, I've marked a pronounced tendency by critics of Finnegans Wake to find their own interests at its core, and Campbell is no exception.
That said, this is one of the earliest guides written, and based on my cursory comparison of available alternatives, I believe that it remains one of the best. Campbell championed Joyce's masterpiece at a time when it was greeted overwhelmingly with perplexity, hostility, or both. He was a congenial companion to its riches, and I feel deeply enriched by virtue of his contribution.
Along with McHugh's "Annotations to Finnegans Wake," this book has been my constant companion for the last five months, and as with McHugh's book, I can't even imagine trying to read the Wake with out its assistance. Part of the Wake's effect is to allow scenes to gradually come into focus, so that one might read a section of eight pages before encountering the signature that establishes clearly that the preceding material has been a letter, and who has written it. With Campbell's capable assistance, you have a pretty good idea of what you're getting into at any particular stage.
Is it a perfect book? No. I believe Campbell overstates his mythopoetic reading of the Wake, which is certainly a primary theme, but I'm not sure it's the raison d'etre of the book that Campbell makes it out to be. In general, I've marked a pronounced tendency by critics of Finnegans Wake to find their own interests at its core, and Campbell is no exception.
That said, this is one of the earliest guides written, and based on my cursory comparison of available alternatives, I believe that it remains one of the best. Campbell championed Joyce's masterpiece at a time when it was greeted overwhelmingly with perplexity, hostility, or both. He was a congenial companion to its riches, and I feel deeply enriched by virtue of his contribution.
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