There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

Considering its age, it is in good condition, having been kept on a bookshelf where, for several years, the sun struck the spine and front at an angle, fading an L-shaped block of cloud-white into the cover. Obviously the books either side of this one where smaller, their imprint left in a rectangle on either side of A Skeleton Key that must be closer to the cover’s original colour. Inside, the book smells of what it is: old paper; the same smell that the case of an ancient Zenit camera I used to own had. There’s no smell of dust or tobacco or food. I like to think it was kept in some airy study somewhere.

I don’t think it was ever read though, not all the way through at least, because the final page of the conclusion is uncut. (I don’t know exactly how books used to be made, but I think they were printed on sheets bigger than the pages and then cut in half after they were put in. Sometimes pages must have been missed). Inside the front cover, someone has carefully written the number 47 in pencil, and on the following page is an indecipherable signature, probably of the previous owner, certainly not of one of the authors. Otherwise the book is unmarked. The following two pages are blank, and then there is the title, alone on a page in plain Times New Roman font. The next page has a slightly larger title with the authors’ names and the publisher’s information and then the book begins.

Here we move onto the content, which is what makes this book elitistly obscure. People who read my site or study literature are probably aware of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of them might even have read it. Further afield I would guess, and this is a complete guess, that fewer than 1% of English-speaking people are aware of Ulysses. Much fewer had read it. Of the people who are even dimly aware of Ulysses, I would guess that fewer than half are aware of Joyce’s fourth novel Finnegans Wake, and probably fewer than one-in-ten of the very few who read Ulysses have even attempted to read Finnegans Wake. I bet a tenth of those never reach the end.

And so, of that tiny proportion of people who are inclined to read the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, how many do you suppose are inclined to hunt down a book that discusses the novel? Naturally such an elitist challenge piques my interest, so now that I have finished university, I have set myself the ‘summer project’ of reading and understanding Finnegans Wake. Last year I read the first fifty or so pages, but comprehension escaped me, so I moved on to something else. Now I’m making the time for a second, proper effort at the book, with my guidebook, my skeleton key to Joyce’s secrets, firmly in hand. I’ll write about the novel itself at some later date.

Tags: A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Fiction, Finnegans Wake, Henry Morton Robinson, James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, Modernism, Ulysses

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 11:52 am and is filed under Explanations, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.