Mythologist who, in this series, stands for the scholar who dared to make Finnegans Wake legible. His 1944 A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake is cited in Dialogue 1 as a "leap" beyond the routine scholarly hunt for a plot, and returns in Dialogue 37 as the type-case of a tempting error: reducing the Wake to a narrative — as John Gordon's plot summary also does — misses "the message of Joyce," the endless process Bob and Cameron take the book to be.
Across the dialogues
Introduced as the bold Joyce scholar — his 1944 book "a leap" past the routine hunt for a narrative
Campbell's 1944 Skeleton Key enters as the ambitious exception among Joyce scholars — a "leap" beyond the "routine attempts to find a story," even as Bob's Joyce (via the Evergreens channel) preferred McLuhan for reading the book "in its own terms."
"Joseph Campbell's book came out in 1944. What a leap he did."
Turned into a warning — the same reduction of the Wake to a story that, like Gordon's, misses "the message of Joyce"
Campbell reappears as a cautionary parallel — like Gordon's plot summary, his Skeleton Key "reduces" the Wake to a narrative, and making a story of it misses "the message of Joyce," the process he was trapped in.
"That's what Campbell tried to do with the skeleton, too."