Books: Clues to a Nightmare

A SKELETON KEY TO FINNEGANS WAKE—Joseph Campbell and Henry Mor ton Robinson—Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

"The demand I make of my reader," the late James Joyce once remarked, "is that he should devote the whole of his life to reading my works." Many readers of Author Joyce's obscure 768-page Ulysses and his even more obscure 628-page Finnegans Wake would agree that a lifetime is no more than enough. But ever since Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce enthusiasts have sought to cut down this lifetime labor by laying a trail through this Joycean jungle, in which Erse,...