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PTHERE IS NO SUCH THING as novelistic" ending" in the ab-stract; there are only different ways of ending, and different endings may support different theoretical assumptions about literature. It is as impossible to assimilate all endings to a formula as it is to say, once and for all, what writing is. Those who define novelistic end-ing as an embodiment of the arbitrary finality implicit in any formal organization, for example, can only account for novels like Finne-gan's Wake by classifying them as iconoclastic works that can only be understood through the conventions of finality they seek to violate.'But Joyce's work does have its own, literal ending, which, in its circularity, affirms his vision of his work as self-referential and continuous rather than dramatic. His ending supports a full-bodied vision of human life as a special kind of texture; it does not merely seek to escape finality. Similarly, critics who take the opposite position …