Molly Alone: Questioning Community and Closure in the ‘Nostos’

Abstract

This chapter considers the closure of Ulysses. In postcolonial writing that operates as homology of the forces in conflict during the revolution, the struggle is represented as a new beginning. The past is, relatively, disregarded: in Ulysses, especially in the first two opening episodes of the text, the accepted version of nationalist history is ridiculed as a pastiche of a series of mythologies, most of them mere faked copies of imperial originals that had been developed in the first place to subjugate the peripheral peoples. Rather it is the future, and the possibility of imagining a newly independent national community that will take shape in that future, which preoccupies the work. For the postcolonial author working up the first tentative texts in the new voices of a national culture, it might appear that the beginning of a narrative would have been most difficult. In practice, however, the writer sustained the act of beginning as a concerted effort to displace those hackneyed discourses of ‘history’ that had already been set in place to narrate the potential new nation. Instead, it is the conclusion of the text, as the test case in the narrative for the successful imagining of a new community, that is difficult.

[‘Nostos’ is Greek for ‘return’ and refers to the last three sections of Ulysses: ‘Eumaeus’, ‘Ithaca’, and ‘Penelope’ — Ed.]