Coincidance - Principia Discordia

172 COINCIDANCE
"Micholas de Cusack" conflates Nicholas of Cusa with Michael Cusack, a
notorious anti-semitic nationalist of the Dublin of Joyce's day (who,
incidentally, was the model for The Citizen in Ulysses). Since Mick and Nick
in FW are usually opposites of the variety—they are, in fact, most
often the Archangel Michael and Satan, or the duality as cosmic
principle in Christian mythology—this Mick/Nick unity ( ) is itself a
"coincidance of contraries." The brown candlestock that melts Nolans is
Bruno of Nola ( ) divided into contraries ( ). The Baxters and
Fleshmans are a variation on the Bakers and Butchers who run all through
FW; these are extensions of Cain ( ) the tiller of fields and hence an
ancestor of Bakers, and Abel ( ) keeper of herds and an ancestor of
butchers. The sequence butcher-baker-candlestock invokes a familiar trio of
childhood lore, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, another of
Joyce's trios ( ) that emerge from a duo ( ) .
The O'Loughlins, meanwhile, are an Anglicized version of the older
Gaelic tribe correctly spelled O'Lachlann. This means "son of the Dane," and
brings us back to Hamlet, Prince of Demnark; but that should not surprise
us because the butchers in FW always are in "coincidance" with both Abel
and Shakespeare, who worked as a butcher in his youth and had a butcher
as a father. What does seem strange to me is that this pivotal passage should
directly involve my own family, because my grandmother was an O'Lachlann.
(But then Stan Gebler Davies, who wrote a biography of Joyce while living,
unknowingly, in the same building with Morris Ernst, the lawyer who
convinced an American court that Ulysses was not obscene, points out that
coincidence haunts all commentators who get involved with Joyce.)
The O'Lachlanns or O'Loughlins are said to be descended from Olaf the
White, King of the Isle of Man in the 9th Century. This Olaf links directly to
Hamlet, because, as C'Hehir has documented, Olaf became Amhlain in
Gaelic and it was from this that Saxo-Germanicus developed the further
"corruption" which became the Hamlet we know. We have already indicated
that the same root gave us the Humphrey that is our dreamer's first name.
The Fleshmans as butchers also tips a hat to Martha Fleishmann, a young
lady with whom Joyce had a brief affair in 1917, and who previously got into
his works as the mysterious "Martha Clifford" in Ulysses. Bloom, you may
recall, corresponded with her under the pen-name, "Henry Flower." That
was actually the name of a Dublin policeman who was suspected of murder
in 1902, never brought to trial because of lack of evidence, and finally left
Dublin because gossip continued to accuse him. In the Cyclops chapter of
Ulysses, it is Michael Cusack, called only The Citizen, who appears as the only
overt anti-semite in the book and threatens to "crucify" Bloom. The punchline
did not come until 1942, a year after Joyce's death, when an old woman
in Dublin, dying, summoned a solicitor and dictated a confession. She had