Title:
- Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, A
Authors:
Genres:
Editions:
| # | Date | Publisher | Binding | Cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1944-00-00 | Buccaneer Books Inc |  |
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- Blurb:
- Reader Remarks: One of the first books written about "Finnegans Wake" (by James Joyce), A Skeleton Key has been largely supplanted by the wealth of Wakean research done since its 1944 publishing date, but its value as a seminal text is undisputed, and many -- including me! -- still find it a very useful guide. It opens with a beautiful introduction by Campbell, then explains the purpose of the text, moving on to a synopsis of the overall story. After that, it breaks down FW page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up possible interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. In this way Campbell and Robinson more or less retell the Wake, "prosifying" the text in an attempt to make it more comprehensible to the lay reader. While this is certainly helpful, it must be said that this technique can come across as being a bit dry, and is certainly no substitute for the breathtaking immersion in Joyce"s scintillating river of prose! Additionally, many of Joyce"s meanings were overlooked by Campbell and Robinson, and a few of their interpretations have long since been "overturned" by more recent and intensive scholarship. Because of all this, A Skeleton Key has lost some of the polished glow of its initial reception, and some Joyceans have gone so far as to call it almost completely tarnished, finding it occasionally more misleading than helpful. Although there may be some truth to that, I still enjoy this book, and I find its mythopoetic angle -- this is that Joseph Campbell, after all -- uniquely refreshing, and some of his mythological insights possess a brilliance that has rarely been matched. Still, however, it is no substitute for the text itself, but for a work written only a few years after Finnegans Wake was published, A Skeleton Key is a pretty amazing accomplishment! I would not recommend it over a more recent guide, but I do occasionally enjoy turning to it -- like a slightly dowdy but favorite aunt, I still like to curl up by the fire and hear her stories over a cup of tea. Reader Remarks: One of the first books written about the Wake, A Skeleton Key has been largely supplanted by the wealth of Wakean research done since its 1944 publishing date, but its value as a seminal text is undisputed, and many still find it a very useful guide. It opens with a beautiful introduction by Campbell, then explains the purpose of the text, moving on to a synopsis of the overall story. After that, it breaks down FW page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up possible interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. In this way Campbell and Robinson more or less retell the Wake, "prosifying" the text in an attempt to make it more comprehensible to the lay reader