Coincidance - Principia Discordia

158 COINCIDANCE
appropriate because as Joyce's anima, ALP should be the female part of his
own personality and his middle name was Augusta, due to clerical error.
(His parents intended Augustine, but the clerk was Irish and these things
happen.)* Augusta was the title of the Roman Livia, wife of Augustus
Caesar, so Livia=Augusta=the woman inside James Joyce.
Plurabelle (or sometimes Plurabella) seems more simple and just means
"many beauties" or "many women" in Joyce's mixed Latin-Italian. However,
it also includes a reference to Vico's repeated phrase "O pura et pia bella" (Oh
pure and holy wars), an expression used often in his Scienza Nuova and
entirely typical of his Neapolitan trickiness. Norman O. Brown in Closing
Time takes the phrase at face value and thinks it expresses religious piety, but
J. Mitchell Morse in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake thinks the expression
contains veiled irony and as much sarcasm as Vico dared to show with the
Inquisition looking over his shoulder. As somebody said, it is hard to
translate Vico into English because English is a basically honest language.
Anna Livia Plurabelle is thus a very feminine and yin symbol, containing
its own opposite—the yang (or macho) warfare imagery that links Vico to
the brawl at Finnegan's Wake in the balad. (Similarly, or HCE, Joyce's
male or yang force, has a hidden female element, as in "Hag Chevychase
Eve," where he has become bisexual. Chevychase invokes bear-goddess and
huntress Artemis, or the virgin; Eve is the mother of us all; and Hag is the
Crone or Wise Woman. We thus have the three aspects of the ancient
Moon Goddess, virgin-mother-crone, within the male HCE.)
Permutated, ALP becomes APL which brings us back to the apple in the
Garden of Eden, the Fall theme and Adam and Eve who are always lurking
below the surface from the first sentence onward: "riverrun, past Eve and
Adam's ..." (For instance, "a turn" page 7, with Adam mixed with Alum;
"eddams ... aves" page 69, "Hoddum and Heave" page 296, etc. etc.
Especially delightful is "atoms and ifs," page 455, where quantum indeterminacy
appears.) APL, however, also forms the initials of Alice Pleasance
Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland.
As is well known, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) loved Alice very
warmly but perhaps not wisely—not wisely enough to avoid the speculations
of Freudians. Thus Alice and Lewis Carrol] link to the "incest" or Paedophilia
theme in FW, as well as to Humpty Dumpty, the warring twins theme (Cain
and Abel or and , who appear in Carroll's masterpiece as Tweedledum
and Tweedledee), and the "nat language" which Joyce and Carroll both
employ for non-aristotelian modes of mentation. It is appropriate that
"Jabberwocky," Carroll's most Joycean verse, is recited by Humpty Dumpty
* By a similar clerical error, Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses acquired Paula instead of Paul
as a middle name.