To quote
Joseph Campbell and
Henry Morton Robinson in their essential companion volume,
A Skeleton Key To Finnegans Wake:
"Running riddle and fluid answer, Finnegans Wake is a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind. It is a strange book, a compound of fable, symphony, and nightmare--a monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle, and end."
James Joyce wrote
Finnegans Wake as "the ideal book for the ideal
insomniac." It was designed as the perfect bedside companion, which is why so many people have trouble with it in school.
In order to achieve a "successful" read, it is imperative that the reader eschew goal-oriented "understanding" of the book. The book is non-linear. It is unproductive to apply traditional narrative requirements to a work that tells the same story over and over again from different points of view in a totally revolutionary manner. Finnegans Wake is virtually impossible to read all the way through right out of your B&N bookbag. Better to dive in anywhere, to swim along in the full-flood of the river metaphor.
Write in the book. Get intimate with it. Read it in unusual places. Especially, read it out loud. Sing it. Use it the way you'd use a friend who knows you well. Grab a word or a phrase or a paragraph or a chapter that catches your eye and hang on tight.
Once you get wet, Finnegans Wake will carry you places you've always imagined you'd like to go.
It's Dr. Seuss for grownups.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1944
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