A review by jbrown2140
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: James Joyce's Masterwork Revealed by Joseph Campbell

3.0

I used this book the way you might use a travel guide when visiting an unfamiliar city. At first it seems an indispensable text against which to compare my perceptions with its reality. But as I went further into Finnegans Wake itself, I realized that there was no one "reality" for me as a reader to "figure out." The trouble with the Skeleton Key is that it presupposes such a reality. Again, like with a travel guide- sometimes they get annoying, as you find that you disagree with their assessments of various restaurants, hotels, etc. It was the same here - the more I got to know the world of Finnegans Wake, the more I started to feel dissatisfied with the Skeleton Key's assessments. Also - I realized as I went along that one of the central arguments of Finnegans Wake is against the possibility of the sort of static interpretation that the Skeleton Key provides. It places such work in the derivative and limited third age - that of the most verbal clarity and the least dynamism and insight. By the end, I found my readings diverging almost entirely from Campbell and Robinson's.