The Skeleton Key

The delay in posting can be summarized as follows. I had a baby girl. No, I did not name her Finnegan. But she was born on St. Patrick's Day, so that should suffice as a worthy excuse. :)

I am now going to pick up where I left off by reading the first section of Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key To Finnegan's Wake. The goal here is to check out what I missed from a source I trust, and then plunge into section 2 on my own armed with this new perspective. So here goes.

Right away, it's clear I've missed something. Here's what Campbell says at the beginning of his section on Chapter 1.

The story of Finnegan, freed from the thematic entanglements of the first four paragraphs, now begins to run in a narrative style comparatively easy to follow.

Hmm.

I will have to go back and see where the division between the fourth and fifth paragraph lies. I do remember it getting easier to understand, but never easy to follow. If I look back at the post I wrote at the time, I could easily identify it as a description of Finnegan, but that's as far as I got.

Campbell goes on:

The first twenty-five pages of Joyce's narrative ... deal directly with the subject of the title theme: the fall, the wake, and the portended resurrection of the prehistoric hod carrier Finnegan.

Ok. I got the fall and the wake, and that it was about Finnegan. But I haven't gotten anything about a portended resurrection, and prehistoric? Really? I had no idea what time period this was set in.

Campbell then goes on to translate portions of the book. I find this exercise fairly infuriating. Not because of the translation, but because of how Joyce wrote it in the first place. Here's an example, and then I'll explain more of what I mean.

The original of paragraph 5:

Of the first was he to bare arms and a name: Wassaily Booslaeugh of Riesengeborg. His crest of huroldry, in vert with ancillars, troublant, argent, a hegoak, poursuivant, horrid, horned. His scutschum fessed, with archers strung, helio, of the second. Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O, you're vine! Sendday's eve and, ah, you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again!

And then the translation:

He was of the first to bear arms and a name: Wassaily Bouslaeugh of Riesengeborg. His crest, green, showed in silver a he-goat pursuing two maids, and bore and escutcheon with silver sun-emblem and archers at the ready. Its legend: Hohohoho! Hahahaha! Mr. Finn you're going to be Mr. Finn-again! In the morn you're vine, in the eve you're vinegar. Mr. Funn, you're going to be fined again!

When you look at the two, you can see the translation very clearly. It's like reading Chaucer's English. But the real question I have is - what does it add? Chaucer wrote that way because English was spoken and written that way at the time. But Joyce is deliberately obscuring his story. If it were a map for a hidden treasure, I might appreciate this. But the translation maintains the word play and the important elements. There's not as much alliteration, and the words are undoubtedly less vivid, but I see much more gained in translation than lost.

Reading the translated version first does make reading the original much more fun. I recommend that, actually. Read the translation and then read the original aloud. There is something wonderful gained in that - beyond simple understanding. But to me, this does not outweigh the difficulty and annoyance of the original as written, and I still can't believe Joyce would want us to read it in translation first, with the two texts side by side.

Here's another instructive example. Campbell's book points us to the word "hierarchitectitiptitoploftical" on page 5. The footnote says this:

This is a good word on which to practice. Note the way in which it combines the words "hierarchy," "architect," "tipsy," and "toplofty," climbing up and up, beyond every expectation, like a skyscraper.

That much I would have gotten on my own. But the footnote goes on:

In Joyce's text, the phrase "with larroons o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottering down" refers to Lawrence O'Toole and Thomas a Becket, bishops respectively of Dublin and Canterbury in the time of Henry II. The former advanced his personal career, the latter was martyred.

Now, not only could I never have worked that out on my own, I am also at a complete failure to see why any of it matters. I do see the connection between "laroons o'toolers" and "Lawrence O'Toole," but what is the purpose of this foggy fireworks display? Is the fact that I'm looking for a purpose where I'm going wrong?

Here's another footnote that I find intriguing.

The Blue Book of our local Herodotus, Mammon Lujius, is finally the dream guidebook, history book, Finnegan's Wake itself. It is here regarded as any ancient tome that might be at hand. "Blue Book" suggests the well-known "Blue Guide" series of travel books. The name "Herodotus" is modified in the text to the "herodotary" ("doting on heroes"). Mammon Lujius is a name based on the initials M. M. L. J. of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four Evangelists whose gospels are the history book of the Living Word. The four Evangelists coalesce with four Irish annalists, whose chronicle of ancient times is known as The Book of the Four Masters. These four again coalesce with four old men, familiars to the tavern of HCE, who forever sit around fatuously rechewing tales of the good old days. These four guardians of ancient tradition are identical with the four "World Guardians" (Lokapalas) of the Tibetan Buddhistic mandalas, who protect the four corners of the world - these being finally identical with the four caryatids, giants, dwarfs, or elephants, which hold up the four corners of the heavens.

I am just enough of a nerd that this is the type of footnote that really excites me. It's why I love both Campbell and Stephen Mitchell - their footnotes are often as good as the text itself. Campbell has a similar deconstruction of the Nataraja Shiva image that I enjoy - it unpacks the image for all of its dense symbolism in a way that not only makes sense of the whole, but increases the sense of wonder involved, unlike most analysis, which kills it altogether. I do appreciate the many layers, and so it's not this which bothers me about FW. Instead, it is the thick, metallic curtain of language that Joyce has placed in front of it, making it too much work to even get this far without a sherpa like Campbell to guide you.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not demanding that I should be able to understand all this by myself with my own limited resources. I just would like to be able to get some part of it on my own, and then turn to my sherpa docent for more detail. When I first look at the Nataraja Shiva, I won't get much of the layered symbolism, but it will still arrest me and draw me into itself without anyone to offer any explanation. FW intrigues me, but does not reward the curious adventurer. On the contrary, I feel punished and shunned.

That's enough for now - I've been working on this post for weeks. More to come soon.

By the way, this is a very funny article about someone who tried to get Google's computers to transcribe Joyce reading the work.