Conclusions
The And: 1904-1914-1921-1922-1939.
Toute chanson qui perd sa fin
Mérit’ toujours
un coup de vin.
The ending of a
narrative is generally implicit in its body. This study has shown that the
works of James Joyce brilliantly illustrate this feature. (Kermode’s “little
ends in themselves” are abundantly evident in them.) In fact, in Joyce’s works
this feature is disclosed through a variety of extraordinary forms. First,
when we return to a text by Joyce after having read its ending, “[w]e are
expected to be suddenly jarred into a new awareness of possible meanings overlooked
in the initial perusal. Joyce typically resists closure, refuses to untie
knots of meaning, unravel complications, or reorder confusions, and his most
interesting texts cannot be read, but only reread. Many of his endings seem
to insure a cyclical return to an Ithaca of meaning that can never quite be
reached” (Herring 1987: 168). Furthermore, as I have demonstrated, Joyce’s
endings tend to regenerate or even generate the very bodies of the texts.
This (re)generative process takes on
various forms. In the case of Dubliners,
the final story was written as a deliberate parallel to the opening story.
‘The Dead’ forces the reader to return to ‘The Sisters’; the two stories operate
in a sense as each other’s supplements. Moreover,
as Derek Attridge has proposed, “[...] ‘The Dead’ can be regarded as
a reading of all the stories of Dubliners
that come before it, and thus offers the reader a fresh perspective on them
[...]” (1990: 25). Accordingly, Dubliners
offers us a first example of a text by Joyce in which the linearity of
narrative is bent into circularity. Since we are dealing with autonomous stories,
however, the closed structure of Dubliners
must be regarded as an element that means more for the development of
similar forms in Joyce’s later works, than for the meaning of Dubliners as such. Finally, as this study
has shown, it is important to remember that Dubliners was published in 1914. It proved to be the year which witnessed
both the forging of the conscience of Stephen Dedalus’s “race” (in Dubliners), and of Stephen’s own “conscience”
(in Portrait).
The ending of Portrait presents a step forward in Joyce’s technique to create a
(re)generative momentum: as Stephen calls on his mythological father to “stand
him ever in good stead”, we are reminded of the book’s motto invoking that
father, as well as of his biological father, whose voice controls the opening
page of the book. Here, the momentum affects two directions. First of all,
there is a regenerative movement to be discovered when we regard the opening
of Portrait as the effect of Stephen’s
awareness of his artistic ambitions. In other words, the ending of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man
generates A Portrait of the Artist As
a Young Man. (And as we have seen, the ending of every individual chapter,
through the narrative rhythm of “equilibrium-equilibrium dashed”, animates
the early stages of the subsequent chapter.) In addition, the “equilibrium”
ending of Portrait as we know it
generates the “equilibrium dashed” beginning of Ulysses.
By extension, the ending of Portrait
is located, in one sense, in the opening three episodes of its companion
book. As Attridge has put it, “[...] even the boundaries between works become
porous; in some ways the first three chapters of Ulysses
belong more with Portrait than they
do with the last chapters of Ulysses
[...]. To begin a work of Joyce’s at the beginning and to read to the end
is therefore to exercise only one of many options” (1990: 25-26).
Furthermore, the
“Dublin 1904 Trieste 1914” dateline appended to the text presents two dates
crucial to the genesis of Ulysses,
which takes as its subject 16 June 1904, and was started in 1914.
With regard to Ulysses, the aborted short story ‘Ulysses’ (once envisioned to be
the ending of Dubliners) was partly
reworked into the ‘Eumaeus’ episode, the beginning of the book’s final triad,
from which the book as a whole developed. Thus, the ending became the genesis
of the body of the text. In addition, “the later chapters of Ulysses reread and thereby remake the earlier
chapters” (Attridge 1990: 25). Accordingly, several (re)generative movements
are to be disovered in the book. Attridge’s observation indicates one; however,
because the book has several endings, there are several more to be discovered.
We have looked at the manner in which the ending of one individual episode
may generate themes or motifs in the following one. Moreover, ‘Ithaca’ and
‘Penelope’, both set on Ithaka, take the reader back to ‘Calypso’. The ending
of ‘Ithaca’, Bloom and Molly’s dialogue, triggers Molly’s monologue, the final
word of which takes us back to the opening word of the book. In addition,
the monologue, as Karen Lawrence has demonstrated, is in an important sense
a return to the style of the triad opening the book. Furthermore, Ulysses “might be said to be a prelude
to Finnegans Wake” (Attridge 1990:
26). The dateline to Ulysses, as
I have proposed in this study, may serve to prove Attridge’s point. Its first
year, 1914, is the last year of Portrait’s
dateline; its last year, 1921, links up with the first year of the dateline
appended to Finnegans Wake.
Finnegans
Wake offers the most explicit example of Joyce’s obsession with the particular
circularity through which the ending regenerates the beginning of the text.
The work’s last sentence runs on into the first and the reader becomes locked
in a perpetual narrative chain. “At this point Joyce simply refuses to let
the reader go; regardless of the text’s difficulty, the reward of the cyclical
return now seems to be not so much clarification as the pleasure of reexperiencing
the text” (Herring 1987: 168). At the same time, the full stop which concludes
the book’s dateline signifies, for once, an ending that does not, necessarily,
generate or regenerate a beginning. The Wake, then, both displays the ambiguity
and poly-interpretability resulting from its finely balanced open-endedness,
and dismisses, once and for all, Joyce’s own inclination to bend the linearity
of his narratives into the circularity of his own myth.
Joyce’s oeuvre is linear. It is made
up of components, however, which display all the attributes of circularity:
it is a chain composed of concatenations. Finnegans
Wake is the ending of an oeuvre that is linked by its endings in which,
it will be recalled, the communication-introspection movement becomes an underlying
principle. The final sections in Joyce’s fictions are always in the process
of generating and regenerating their own origins. They are always in progress.
The body of Joyce’s texts, as I have suggested in this study, is generally
implicit in the restlessness of its endings.
.
Cf. also John-Paul Riquelme: “The mixing of narrator’s and character’s
views and voices in A Portrait,
which is prepared for by aspects of Dubliners,
will become the donnée of Ulysses, the stylistic element the later
work starts with, deviates from, then returns to in ‘Penelope’. It is
also an early step toward the radical superimposing of voices in Finnegans Wake” (1983: 48).