This post concludes the series begun here and continued here.

Only, no, now it’s me who’s got to give. As duv herself div. Inn this linn. And can it be it’s nnow fforvell? Illas! I wisht I had better glances to peer to you through this baylight’s growing. But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I’m getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again. Imlamaya. And she is coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail. Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own. I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger’s there. Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. 

This is the moment of the puncturing of her fantasy. After pages and pages of her imagining leading a revived HCE around and showing him important places in their lives and reminiscing with him and getting misty eyed about the faithful departed and looking forward to how happy he’ll be that she woke him and how he’ll feel well forever — now we get the gut punch.

All of that fantasy is bullshit. 

Can it be that it’s now farewell?

He’s changing…or is it she that’s changing? Everything is changing all the time.

He’s turning from her — and on the human level, perhaps the dreamer is turning in bed — and in the dream, the husband who is also her son is turning from her to a wife who is also her daughter.

HCE is back, but it’s a younger HCE who wants a younger ALP. ALP is back, but it’s a younger ALP.

The cycle is going to repeat, but — here’s the kicker…we won’t be around to experience the repetition. It’s going to go on and on and on and on…like a river rushing out to sea, and it’s going to…wash us away.

ALP’s accepts this. She’s resigned to it:

And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it’s all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You’re only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You’re but a puny.

The new ALP is like a rain cloud (during The Mookse and the Gripes, she’s called Nuvoletta, Italian for “little cloud”), and she’s about to rain down and become a stream and grow into a river.

So let her rain — that is, let the new queen reign.

I did my best when I was able to. Thinking always that everything I did was so important, “if I go[,] all goes.” The implication is that she was wrong about that. She’s realizing now that if she goes…life just goes on. Death is not a calamity. It’s only a calamity in our minds.

A hundred cares (100), a tithe of troubles (10), and is there one (1) who understands me? That adds up to 111, which is her number throughout the novel.

What a powerful sentence, by the way. Is there anyone who gets me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? A reference to 1001 Nights, a collection of endless interconnected stories (as a palindrome, it represents the Wake, since you could arrange those numbers in a circle and they would endlessly repeat 1001).

Who can blame her for feeling a little sick of people, especially all the people who depend on her and leech off of her? “They are becoming lothed to me,” indeed. She loathes their “little warm tricks” and “mean cosy turns” (like HCE’s turn in bed), and the “greedy” and the “lazy” that “gushes” and “leaks” out of them.

“How small it’s all!” 

She feels fed up with people and unappreciated. Who can’t relate to that?

Addressing her son-husband, she says that she thought he was great in all things, in guilt and in glory. But in fact — he’s but a puny.

What a revelation. To build up others in your mind and then to discover that they’re nothing like that. To discover that they’re actually puny and pathetic, and to discover that you’ve been interacting primarily with a fictional, romanticized version of them that exists nowhere but in your own mind.

No wonder she resigns herself to leaving:

Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can seen meself among them, allaniuvia pulchrabelled. How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast! And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my ownest hair! For ’tis they are the stormies. Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free. Auravoles, they says, never heed of your name! 

She’s going out to sea, to be with the seahags, her people.

And now I’ll just quote the incredible ending in one go:

But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

That’s how the book ends.

There’s so much there that it’s hard to know how to respond, but I’ll try a few brief notes:

ALP is returning to her Father, the Ocean (the River Liffey is passing out of Dublin) — Anna (the mortal woman) will slip out of bed before anyone else is up — the Feminine principle of the cosmos is going to die and then be reborn back on the first page.

[It’s a “bitter ending” because it’s literally salty water]

It’s interesting that after 600+ pages of HCE dying and being reborn, we see here at the end that ALP also goes through dying and resurrection, just her own version of it.

She becomes like a little girl again, asking her daddy to carry her like he did through the toy fair (a reference to Joyce carrying his child).

She’s “loonely” — lonely, crazy (loony), but also La Luna — the moon controls the tides.

The one leaf that remains in the river “Leafy” is the last page of Finnegans Wake.

If I saw him, I “sink I’d die down…humbly dumbly…only to washup.” That’s a modified version of “I think I’d sink and lie down humbly to worship” — like Humpty Dumpty, her own version of fall and rise, where she will wash up on the shore — but it’s also an anticipation of waking up from the dream and going to the sink to wash up in the morning.

And now at the end, she returns to the beginning. First. Behind the bush. The burning bush? The bush in which the human race first arose? The bush where the two temptresses in the Park go? The sexual meaning of the word “bush”? All of these. So just hush. Behush the bush. Quiet — which is what “Whish” means in Irish. But it also sounds like the rushing water. And a wish. And now sounds of gulls.

Finnegan = Finn, again. End, but let’s go again, just as you can wrap the last sentence around to the first.

And here we find that lips are keys to. Something. They’re the keys to everything. In a footnote in II.2, Issy writes that there’s a “key in my kiss.” There are four “kisses” on the Tunc page of the Book of Kells. Merry Kiss Miss. And keys. Remember that HCE is a cluekey. The shamrock is called a key elsewhere too (three-in-one, just like HCE and the three tailors/soldiers).

Lps — there’s no “I” in the spelling. No self.

I think the key is to lose yourself in love. But as ALP’s monologue just showed us, it’s not the love for a specific person because all relationships end (I think it’s Lacan who said something like relationships never begin because we’re always in relationship with our fantasies of other people).

It’s a broad love of life. Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: not just to endure life but to love it.

The Greeks believed that Memory was the mother of the muses: “mememormee,” she implores. Remember me. What more could we ask for when we’re gone?

“Till thousendsthee” — till the millenium, I suppose, a thousand years. But I always read it as “until thou sends thee” — until you send yourself to live again, just as HCE is God who continually sends incarnations of himself into the world, again and again and again and again, and just as a dreamer at night makes endless avatars for himself to live out their dream lives.

That final sentence — or sentence fragment:

Joyce said he wanted to end the book on the least accented word in the English language. So softly. A voice dying away.

The article “the” is the definite article, so it’s always followed by something definite — the dreamer is about to wake up into the world of definite things — solid objects.

The definite article is accompanied by five indefinite articles.

The novel ends in the middle of a sentence, and it begins in the middle of the same sentence. It begins, “riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

So, if we treat the last page and the first page as one sentence, the subject is “way” and the verb is “brings.”

A way along the riverrun brings us back to Howth Castle and Environs (HCE).

But we could read it as “Away, a lone [person] [or a lonely person] brings us back to….”

Or, “Away, alone, a last [a last experience of our lives, a last person left…a “lass”?] brings us back….”

You get the idea.

It’s interesting that there are 5 A’s…and then lone, last, lone give us L’s…and then at the very bottom of the page, after the text officially ends, the book gives the location it was finished and the date. It reads “Paris” — which is the P. So the last page is, in a sense, signed ALP. 

It sends shivers through my body to read the last two and a half pages of this book. When Joyce wrote this bit of the book — it was the very last bit he finished of his very last book — he recalls sitting on a bench feeling utterly drained. He said to Eugene Jolas that upon finishing it, “I felt so completely exhausted, as if all the blood had run out of my brain. I sat for a long while on a street bench, unable to move” (quoted in Ellman’s biography of Joyce, page 713).

And why not? He had gotten into the head of a dying person like no one ever before. He had gotten this remarkable distance on life itself, watching its cycles of coming and going and finding in it a beautiful nobility and sad futility. An inevitability.

It’s another version of Molly Bloom’s final word Yes — which is Nietzsche’s Yes, the Yes to Life, the Eternal Affirmation.

It’s a Yes to all of this — an acceptance of all that has to be: the joy and the sadness and the gains and the losses, even if you’re unappreciated and unnoticed. I did my best when I had the chance (“I done me best when I was let”) — what more could any of us say or want?