“쉿! 조심! 에코랜드”: 조이스의 『피네간의 경야』 탈식민적 에코로 다시 읽기 (“Hush! Caution! Echoland!”: Rereading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a Postcolonial Echo)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국제임스조이스학회
· 수록지 정보 : 제임스조이스저널 / 24권 / 2호 / 9 ~ 27페이지
· 저자명 : 김경숙

초록

This essay aims at interpreting Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a postcolonial echo. In his earlier works, Joyce expresses his anxiety over English, the colonizer’s language, as the tool of his art. The English Joyce uses as the colonized cannot, so it is an imperfect imitation of the original English the British use as the colonizer. However, in Finnegans Wake, Joyce does not represent any self-consciousness about English. What Joyce does in Finnegans Wake is not imitation but echo. Echo does not seek for perfection because it is amputation and fragmentation in itself. 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. It does not allow any space for cultural purity, either. This essay aims at analyzing how Joyce’s language experiment deconstructs the authority of English and reverberates recalcitrant echo.
The essential concept of this essay comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thesis “Echo” (1993). According to Spivak, the nymph of the mountain, Echo, provides a crucial moment of reinterpreting the myth of Narcissus. If Narcissus symbolizes the western epistemology centered on the knowledge of the self, Echo represents the subaltern who exists at the margin of such epistemology. However, interestingly enough, Spivak re-interprets Echo’s echoes as a deconstructing reverberation to subvert Narcissus’s speech. If we apply this inspiration to Finnegans Wake, we can re-read Joyce’s language experimentation not as a passive repetition or imitation of the colonizer’s language, but as a recalcitrant echo destabilizing the very base of epistemology upon which English as the language hinges.
To sum up, this essay tries to reinterpret Finnegans Wake and its political/historical meanings from the perspective of postcolonialism, by analyzing its language experiments. This reinterpretation of Finnegans Wake as a recalcitrant echo in the context of postcolonialism will open the door to reading the text as an alternative historiography on a postcolonial Ireland.

영어초록

This essay aims at interpreting Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a postcolonial echo. In his earlier works, Joyce expresses his anxiety over English, the colonizer’s language, as the tool of his art. The English Joyce uses as the colonized cannot, so it is an imperfect imitation of the original English the British use as the colonizer. However, in Finnegans Wake, Joyce does not represent any self-consciousness about English. What Joyce does in Finnegans Wake is not imitation but echo. Echo does not seek for perfection because it is amputation and fragmentation in itself. 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. It does not allow any space for cultural purity, either. This essay aims at analyzing how Joyce’s language experiment deconstructs the authority of English and reverberates recalcitrant echo.
The essential concept of this essay comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thesis “Echo” (1993). According to Spivak, the nymph of the mountain, Echo, provides a crucial moment of reinterpreting the myth of Narcissus. If Narcissus symbolizes the western epistemology centered on the knowledge of the self, Echo represents the subaltern who exists at the margin of such epistemology. However, interestingly enough, Spivak re-interprets Echo’s echoes as a deconstructing reverberation to subvert Narcissus’s speech. If we apply this inspiration to Finnegans Wake, we can re-read Joyce’s language experimentation not as a passive repetition or imitation of the colonizer’s language, but as a recalcitrant echo destabilizing the very base of epistemology upon which English as the language hinges.
To sum up, this essay tries to reinterpret Finnegans Wake and its political/historical meanings from the perspective of postcolonialism, by analyzing its language experiments. This reinterpretation of Finnegans Wake as a recalcitrant echo in the context of postcolonialism will open the door to reading the text as an alternative historiography on a postcolonial Ireland.

참고자료

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