Coincidance - Principia Discordia

98 COINCIDANCE
contains the whole, Finnegans Wake is structured in puns and synchronicities
that "contain" and reflect each other, creating the closest approximation of
an infinite regress ever achieved in any art-form. The absent is everpresent,
the dead are all alive, and the abyss of uncertainty appears in every
multi-meaningful sentence. (This will be illustrated below.)
The revolutionary nature of this dream-book can be indicated by the fact
that Joyce's notes include four separate symbols to stand for that which in a
day-time novel would be the hero or protagonist: and . There
is, as we have said, no "character" dominating this book, but rather what
mathematicians would call a system function. The first person "dead" or missing
in Finnegans Wake is the conscious ego we normally take for granted. We can
only deduce him, as it were, from the system of which he is part.
The ego Joyce's ), we know, is one Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a
publican (inn-keeper) in Chapelizod, a western suburb of Dublin. Probably,
he was a sea captain for many years before settling down; almost certainly,
he is having this dream in 1921 or when the Irish Revolution was at its most
violent and any stranger in the park might be an I.R.A. terrorist, any three
British soldiers might arrest you "on suspicion." Earwicker is terrorized,
throughout the dream, by ambiguous strangers in the park and three
accusatory British soldiers.
To try to "understand" Finnegans Wake in terms of the life of or
Earwicker, the conscious ego, is entirely mistaken, however. The Ego that
seems so real in day-light is "dead" or comatose in the dream-world, and
Finnegans Wake is dominated by those trans-Ego functions Joyce abbreviates
as and
has some of the qualities of Freud's personal unconscious and also of
his "censor band." Joyce identifies it also with Stonehenge and other Celtic
monoliths (because of shape?) and, by association, with human sacrifice,
religion, guilt, anxiety and the fear of authority-figures. On this level, you
will find on every page of Finnegans Wake disguised, distorted and sometimes
deeply hidden ("repressed") images of everything that is taboo in Catholic
Ireland, especially incest, homosexuality, voyeurism, exhibitionism, urination,
defecation, masturbation, patricide, regicide and cannibalism. In Jungian
terms, this is the Shadow of the waking Mr. Earwicker; it is the Mr. Hyde
within every Dr. Jekyl.
is the "collective unconscious" of Jung, the "phylogenetic unconscious
of Grof, the "neurogenetic archives" of Leary and/or the "morphogenetic
field" of Sheldrake—to use four modern scientific metaphors. In older
mystical languages it is called the " Akashic records" in Theosophy, the "long
memory" in Hermetic texts, the aliyavijnana ("treasury mind" or " storehouse
mind") in Buddhism. On this level, every page of Finnegans Wake is drenched