David Prashker's Book Of Days: February 16

1600 (1949, 1959)

Campbell, Wilder, Bruno, Joyce

How do you get from mythologist and anthropologist Joseph Campbell, to novelist James Joyce, via playwright Thornton Wilder, and the philosopher Giordano Bruno? I love these sorts of bizarre connections, especially when they bring together a group of people, such as this one, who are all on my shelves and seeking a place in this collection, especially when such a foursome allows me to indulge the pleasure of creating a title for this entry that mimics Samuel Beckett's own essay on Joyce (you can read it here).

Campbell was essential reading as I built TheBibleNet over several decades, gleaning from him a depth of knowledge about the ancient cults, sects, religions and mythologies that goes deeper and broader than any other scholar has even tried. Starting on page 257 of the Penguin edition of the 4th volume of his "The Masks of God", he explores the work of James Joyce*1, specifically in relation to the Tristan myth, which he demonstrates is a recurrent theme throughout "Finnegans Wake", and on page 265 he notes the profound influence on Joyce of "that bold young Dominican monk [Giordano Bruno]… whose name, in various transformations, appears, disappears, and reappears through every episode of 'Finnegans Wake'."

Now I confess that I have never been able to make head or tail of "Finnegans Wake", which many writers and scholars who I admire regard as Joyce's highest achievement; and so I have always presumed that the fault for my total incomprehension lies with me and my inadequacies, and not with any imputations of madness or abstrusity that I might have directed at Joyce in my moments of frustration. Campbell's comments seemed to offer the possibility of a way in, as I had studied Giordano Bruno in a History of Science class at poly, and knew there was a connection, though I had not fathomed what it was, from Beckett's written account of his personal idolatry of Joyce; but sadly Campbell is not in the business of literary criticism, and so the road I might have taken turned out to be a cul-de-sac.

Enter playwright Thornton Wilder, stage left, with a script in essay-form first published in "Hudson Review" in 1963, and found by the simple task of placing the words "Giordano Bruno" and "James Joyce", separated by a plus-sign, in my search engine - you can find it for yourself by clicking here (since I first found it they have now put up a registration process).

The article (if you bother to go there) is fascinating, and shows very clear evidence that Wilder did not have the difficulty with Joyce that I still have, even after reading Wilder's explanations, even after spending several years writing (but still unable to finish) my novel "In Search of Leo Bloom". If you are interested in "Finnegans Wake", then this is definitely an article you should read; and if you can provide me with a means of grappling with this labyrinthine tome, I would certainly appreciate a comment in the box below. The truth is, I am still struggling with Joyce's somewhat easier "Ulysses", though I believe that I have now mastered, after six attempts, the first two hundred pages.

Bruno belongs in "The Invisible Library", the growing list of writers, artists, composers, thinkers, who have been personally banished, whether to an oblique corner of life, or from life itself altogether, or whose works have disappeared into the flames and vaults of oblivion (see my pages for January 8 and December 6, though the theme runs through many other pages of this blog). To complete the cycle of this essay, let me present Campbell's description of what happened "on the morning of February 16, 1600 A.D., in the Campo di Fiori in Rome", when Bruno "was burned alive at the stake, at the age of fifty-two, for having cast his pearls before Clement VIII and the learned doctors of the Roman Holy Office of the Inquisition" ("The Masks of God", Vol 4, page 265):

"An ordained Dominican, yet to the root of his being an incorrigible heretic, in flight from city to city before the various packs of God's hounds – Naples, Rome, Venice, Padua, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, Chambéry, Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Paris again, then Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfurt-am-Main, Zurich, and (alas!) Venice again (Office of the Inquisition), on to Rome (dungeons of the Inquisition for eight years and finally, infallibly, the stake) – now in clerical, now in secular garb, now here, more often there, unwittingly insulting his friends, intentionally challenging his persecutors, believed by some to have become a Calvinist, yet driven by that pack from Geneva, he was himself an incarnation of that 'coincidence of opposites' of which he eloquently wrote, and, in a truly Joycean way, his own worst enemy. 'A Daedalus,' he called himself, 'as regards the habits of the intellect.’*2 And when his condemnation was read to him, rising before the Triumphant Beast. 'You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with a greater fear,' he said, 'than that with which I receive it.' He was incinerated, and his books as well."

Bust of Giordano Bruno by Maurizio Tazzuti

*1 In partnership with Henry Morton Robinson he also produced a "skeleton key" to Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" which is even more incomprehensible than the book it is explaining.

*2 A comment which makes me wonder if Bruno is not also key to Joyce’s “Ulysses”, whose central character, Stephen Hero in the earliest version of its prequel, “Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man”, became Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego, in the final versions of both books.

And speaking of heretics, Chaim Weizman, the first President of the world's second-most-heretical nation, the "how dare it have the temerity to exist and go on existing" modern state of Israel, was inaugurated today in 1949.