A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Introduction to a Strange Subject

" ... the ultimate state of the intelligent reader is certainly not bewilderment. Rather, it is admiration for the unifying insight, economy of means , and more-than-Rabelaisian humour which have miraculously quickened the stupendous mass of material..."

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is a revelation. As Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker, the book gives readers a chance to explore the novel, one of the "few great intellectual and aesthetic treats that these last bad years have offered"; the praise holds true today. Although we have a copy floating around at our Finnegan's Wake reading sessions, it's great to have one to pour over at home (thanks Kim!). In its aptly titled "Introduction to a Strange Subject", the authors admit that "the vast scope and intricate structure of Finnegan's Wake give the book a forbidding aspect of impenetrability". An understatement to be sure, but it's somehow reassuring to realize that it has always been dense and somehow walled by its depth of knowledge, a "baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities in form and language."

The authors' assertions that "complete understanding is not to be snatched at greedily in one session; indeed, it may never come" bodes well for our group, since we are moving at a rate of just over 3 pages a month, and often feel no closer to understanding anything than when we began. A Skeleton Key, in so much as it is possible, seeks to clarify, decode and generally open up all levels of the novel's meaning.