This post discusses more of Chapter I.8, including the gossip of the washerwomen and the gifts for the children of ALP. It extends my overview of the chapter.

I.8 is written in the form of babbling gossip of two washerwomen — “giddygaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia” — who gradually aren’t able to hear each other over the river (and who eventually transform into a tree and a stone and usher us into Book II).

Campbell and Robinson suggest these washerwomen are based on figures in Irish folklore who appear before a battle and wash the bloody clothes of the men who are to die. Indeed, Joyce’s washerwomen discuss (and rinse out) the “dirty laundry” of the Finnegans Wake characters, which are black with sin.

Amusing moments occur in the conversation (in which it’s difficult to tell always which one is speaking). One of the women calls ALP a “proxenete,” prompting this back and forth:

Proxenete and phwhat is phthat? Emme for your reussischer Honddu jarkon! Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate. Did they never sharee you ebro at skol, you antiabecedarian? It’s just the same as if I was to go par examplum now in conservancy’s cause out of telekinesis and proxenete you.

Ah, that clears it up. Thanks.

A “proxenete” is a pimp. The rumor is that ALP was not so innocent in all of this sin business:

Shyr she’s nearly as badher as him herself. Who? Anna Livia? Ay, Anna Livia. Do you know she was calling bakvandets sals from all around, nyumba noo, chamba choo, to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy? She was? Gota pot!

As they clarify shortly, she was

Throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him!

(“To inny captured wench you wish of no matter what sex of pleissful ways two adda tammar a lizzy a lossie to hug and hab haven in Humpy’s apron!”)

Apparently, the marriage of ALP and HCE was troubled, and he was often moody (“Tell me moher. Tell me moatst. Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus….”).

The washerwomen sing ALP’s cushingloo (lullaby), which claims she is

waiting for my old Dane hodder dodderer, my life in death companion […] to wake himself out of his winter’s doze and bore me down like he used to.

So the rumor is that she recruited a bunch of young women (and men? The three soldiers?) to tempt him into his crime in the Park to rouse him out of his lethargy to restore him to the man he once was. The temptress girls in the park are another form of ALP. The female principle of the universe causes the Fall and reshapes the pieces into something positive.

The washerwomen gossip about ALP’s former lovers, who are all versions of HCE (or of Shaun or Shem in a previous life, the son who replaces the father).

And then — when the rumors about HCE got put in the paper, and the people turned against him, what did she do?

She swore on croststyx nyne wyndabouts she’s be level with all the snags of them yet. Par the Vulnerable Virgin’s Mary del Dame! So she said to herself she’d frame a plan to fake a shine, the mischiefmaker, the like of it you niever heard. What plan? Tell me quick and dongu so crould! What the meurther did she mague? Well, she bergened a zakbag, a shammy mailsack, with the lend of a loan of the light of his lampion, off one of her swapsons, Shaun the Post, and then she went and consulted her chapboucqs, old Mot Moore, Casey’s Euclid and the Fashion Display and made herself tidal to join in the mascarete.

A mascarade (Finnegan’s Wake) in which she wore mascara. So she dolled herself up and

she sendred her boudeloire maids to His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin.

My current reading is that this is an alternate version of the Fall. She sends her maids (the two girls) with this request. According to the annotations, “passer de lui” is idiomatic for do without him, and “passe” is slang for sex. So this phrase could be a request for sex with him or a request for her to have a new sex partner (passing him over for a mannequin or a mini-him, the next version of HCE for the next version of ALP)

[There’s a moment in II.3 where she does send the maid down to the bar to ask HCE to come up for sex]

So then she takes that sack and gathers up the pieces of the Fall, as in I.I, where she is described as “pussypussy plunderpussy” (“And where in thunder did she plunder? Fore the battle or efter the ball?”), and then she distributes gifts to all her children, her 111 children, all the sons and daughters, who are humanity itself:

like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny, nistling to hear for their tiny hearties, her arms encircling Isolabella, then running with reconciled Romas and Reims, on like a lech to be off like a dart, then bathing Dirty Hans’ spatters with spittle, with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door!

So that’s Issy and Shaun and Shem (the twin brothers under the guise of Romulus and Remus). By her intervention, the twins are reconciled to become the next HCE.

And then comes a long epic catalogue of the gifts. Each child gets a gift (several of the names repeat from elsewhere in the Wake).

It ends like this:

She gave them ilcka madre’s daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears as from Shem, her penmight, life past befoul his prime.

Presumably, “moonflower and a bloodvein” is her daughter’s period. Grapes may suggest testicles, but in “The Mookse and the Gripes,” grapes are a stand-in for Shem. The vindedress is maybe a winepress, suggesting the winepress in William Blake’s epic poems, which is both the printing press (tool of the artist, Shem) and a torture instrument that symbolizes the torments of fallen love.

Shem is, of course, the one unlucky in love, the one passed over by Issy for the extrovert Shaun. Shem passes before his prime — he is befouled and consumed by scandal — but his comfort is to ripen into art and be reconciled with his brother into the next HCE (where he can partake in dividing the vine dress, uncovering the next version of ALP and sleeping with her).

The spelling “devide” also resembles “decide” (reason, Shaun). It also begins with the first syllable of “devil” (attributed to Shem; and it reminds me of “Devlin” (Dublin) on the first page of the book]. “Vide” is a root that relates to sight (also attributed to Shaun).

Contained in that word are the rational, Shaunish “decisions” that “divide” things by rational labeling and analysis, and the ripening sexual appetites (Shem) that want to remove Issy’s dress.

I think about this “vindedress” / winepress as related to, or identical to, the “rimepress” of I.2, which stamps onto paper the ballad that destroys HCE’s reputation.

the ballad, in the felibrine trancoped metre affectioned by Taiocebo in his Casudas de Poulichinello Artahut, stump-stampaded on to a slip of blancovide and headed by an excessively rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville

Stump like a tree (woodcut), but also something that stumps whoever tries to decode it.

Perhaps identical with the “vinedress,” this “rimepress” is also operated by the sons. The Fall gives rise to the artistry that seeks to reassemble the pieces and heal the “devide,” through a process of dev-vide-ing. Building toward a goal that can never truly be reached — much as the works of Blake’s Los are “ever building, ever decaying” — artists transmute the tools of torture and pain into the vehicle of redemption.

*

The washerwomen continue to work until they lose track of what age it is and where they are. And they say,

Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late.

According to the annotations, “Fieluhr” is supposed to be “Wieviel Uhr” (German for “What time is it?”). “Filou” is the French word for “scoundrel.”

One of Joyce’s friends told him an amusing anecdote in which a Frenchman shouted across the Rhine at a German, “Filou!” Mistaking what he said, the German called back the time.

This is particularly interesting because one of the tellings of the Fall of HCE, the Cad in the park asks him the time, and HCE misinterprets it as an accusation (or a sexual proposition), prompting him to defend himself, which causes the Cad to spread rumors about him having been up to no good in the Park. It’s hinted that the Cad speaks Irish and HCE speaks Danish or Norwegian (associating him with the Vikings who founded Dublin).

Anyway, “what age is it,” indeed? These women have been washing through all ages (“How many goes is it I wonder I washed it?”). It soon is late. Saon is late. Saone is a river. “Schon” is German for “already.” Soon and already. In the river. You cannot step into the same river twice. Or can you?

This bit always moves me:

Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger.

A beautiful and powerful chapter.

Here’s a recording of Joyce reading it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8kFqiv8Vww