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, Latin, Dutch, Greek, French, Sanskrit, Russian and Esperanto rankly intertwine themselves with nightmared snatches of popular songs, fables, myths, allegories, lyric poetry, puns* and prophecies.
Most recent, most ambitious Joyce interpreters are Joseph Campbell (former intercollegiate half-miler and now English professor at Sarah Lawrence College) and Henry Morton Robinson (former English instructor at Columbia University, now senior editor of Readers Digest).† They have spent five years "hacking a narrative trail" through Finnegans Wake which was "like going through the heart of darkest Africa."
Viconian Thunderclap. Finnegans Wake, say Campbell and Robinson, "is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind." (Tim Finnegan was originally the hero of an Irish vaudeville song who falls off a ladder and is thought to be dead until a friend splashes whiskey over him at the funeral wake.) The four parts of Joyce's novel reflect Italian Philosopher Giovanni Battista Vice's theory that history eternally passes and repasses through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, chaotic. Finnegans Wake suggests that life has again reached the stage of chaos and is awaiting a divine thunderclap that will bring the world to its senses and start the four-part cycle anew.
Man's chaotic world is shown by Joyce in the dreaming mind of Finnegans' principal character, H. C. Earwicker, an Irishman of Germanic stock haunted by his own fall from grace. Earwicker's dream, Campbell and Robinson believe, is of the kind described by Philosopher Schopenhauer when he summed up the modern world as "a vast dream, dreamed by a single being; but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Thus everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else."