The Artist-God who “disguides his voice”: a reading of Joseph Campbell’s interpretation of the dreamer of Finnegans Wake

This thesis is concerned with engaging a critic who has been neglected by his peers in the field of Joyce studies for more thanforty years. This critic, Joseph Campbell, is an American scholar more popularly known for his studies in myth. However, hebegan his intellectual career contributing to a subject that emerged in the early years of the critical reception of Finnegans Wake:that the dream depicted in Joyce’s final masterpiece is dependent on a Dreamer. The neglect Campbell’s work has endured islargely due, this thesis argues, to an inaccurate treatment of his reading of this dream figure. This inaccuracy largely stems from acritic, Clive Hart, who engages with the debate of the Dreamer as an introductory means to demonstrating the ‘structural’theories involved in the Wake. As a minor feature of Hart’s analysis, Campbell’s theory of the Dreamer is identified with anothermethod, one belonging to a fellow American Joycean, Edmund Wilson, a method incongruent with Campbell theories of dreamconsciousness. Subsequently, Campbell remains an undeveloped scholar within Joyce criticism.To counter Hart’s inaccurate depiction of Campbell, this thesis argues that there is provision in early scholarship to re-evaluateCampbell’s theory of the Dreamer in more developed terms. In this respect, the thesis is divided up into three sections. The firstsection is a literary review of this early scholarship, demonstrating certain influential strains of thought equivalent to Campbell’s‘metaphoric’ concept of the Dreamer, one that contrasts with the rigid, ‘literal’ ideas his work is predominantly identified. Thesecond section examines Campbell’s account in detail and the specific criticism it drew from Hart. Finally, the third sectionargues that Campbell’s interpretation of the Dreamer is best engaged through an archetypal account of the Dreamer, one thatregards the symbols encountered in the Wake through the ‘guiding’ features of a mythological concept of the psyche sensitive tothe reflexive tendencies of the dream portrayed, Campbell’s ‘cosmogonic cycle’