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, 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."

Wallstrait Oldparr. The authors base their interpretations of this nightmare on their certainty that "There are no non sense syllables in Joyce . . . any intelligent reader can shave off some rewarding layers of meaning." They also believe that "Joyce provides an answer to every riddle he expounds," and that "in every passage there is a key word which sounds the essential theme." Example (from page 1 of Finnegans Wake}: "The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhoun awnskawntoohoohooordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy." Old Parr, Campbell and Robinson explain, was the grand old man of Shropshire who finally trembled into his grave at the age of 152 (1483-1635). Parr and wallstrait are puns ("par" and "Wall Street") on the rise & fall of stockmarket values. The immense polysyllable that fol lows the word "fall" is the voice of God's wrath over the fall of man, the crash of Finnegan from the ladder, and the thunder clap that inaugurates a new period of history.

A Skeleton Key is likely to be of help to readers of Joyce. It is also likely to stir up plenty of controversy. James Joyce's theme and dreams are usually so elaborately interwoven that even the most prominent incidents and characters invite multiple interpretations. "Indeed," conclude the authors, "the baffling obscurity of Finnegans Wake may be due to [Joyce's] determination to muddy the track of his narrative with a thousand collateral imprints, lest we trace him to the scene of his own life secret, which he yet describes in compulsive half-revelation." Campbell and Robinson offer no key to Joyce's life.

* When Russia invaded Finland, Author Joyce wrote: "The most curious comment I have received on the book is a symbolical one from Helsinki, where, as foretold by the prophet, the Finn again wakes. . . ."

/- In 1942 Authors Campbell and Robinson agitated literary teacups by asserting that Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth was only "an Americanized recreation, thinly disguised" of Finnegans Wake (TIME, Dec. 28, 1942). Retorted Playwright Wilder: "All I can say is to urge those who are interested to read Finnegans Wake and make up their minds for themselves."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.