Conflict in the works of Joyce and Lewis is inseparable from questions about authority in origin and ideology, combat emerging as both cause and effect of the authors’ “counterpoint words” and the metaphysical and political attacks of their “books of kills.” These questions emerge from Lewis's and Joyce's fictional treatments of the dualities of self and sign, of signs and the referents that ground and exceed them, and ultimately of the relationship of artist with oppositional artist. Joyce's and Lewis's expulsion and acceptance of the other as part of the artistic self is rooted in and paradoxically reflects the oppositions within their works. Lewis appears in Finnegans Wake explicitly, as Joyce and Ulysses appear implicitly in The Apes of God, as both parodic object and authoritative subject.

We have seen that this dual conflation is adumbrated by the metaphysics of Joyce's and Lewis's earlier work, which prepare the terms for the aesthetics of dubious origin in The Apes of God and Finnegans Wake, what Joyce calls the “raiding there originally” of the authorial voice. In Enemy of the Stars Arghol enacts and subverts his own rhetoric.