"“Make His Private Linen Public”: Rereading Finnegans Wake through Gossip and Echo"

Abstract

The eighth episode of Book I of Finnegans Wake consists of a series of gossips between two washerwomen, who gush out all the rumors about HCE(Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) and ALP(Anna Livia Plurabelle). Here, HCE’s fall caused by gossips resembles Parnell’s downfall; HCE and ALP’s marriage allegorizes early colonial history of Ireland. Much like Shem who writes with his own excrement like ink, these washerwomen rewrite HCE and ALP’s stories and Irish history using the dirty water from their laundry. Their uncouth gossips provide alternative, unofficial history retold obliquely. In his earlier works, Joyce expresses his anxiety over English, the colonizer’s language, as the tool of his art. What Joyce does in Finnegans Wake is not imitation but echo. Echo does not seek for perfection. The language of Finnegans Wake is not English but the echo of English, which is amputated, fragmented, and hybridized. It does not permit any space for cultural hegemony or power of the British Empire. Much like echo, gossips also disrupt the authority and authenticity of official historiography. In case of Parnell, gossip played a huge role in his downfall. Gossips can be an alternative vehicle to shape and reshape history/historiography. In a word, this essay aims at rereading the washerwomen’s gossips about HCE and ALP as an alternative historiography. To conclude, gossips exercise a centrifugal force to spread out alternative, heterogeneous, versions of official historiography, which wields a centripetal force to assimilate various voices into a homogeneous version.