Coincidance - Principia Discordia

26 COINCIDANCE
hymns Bonnie Prince Charley and the tragic, gallant, foolish Jacobite
crusade; but Charley the Chimp was a popular attraction in Phoenix Park
zoo in Joyce's day. Perhaps HCE's middle name is Chimpden to remind us of
his, and our, evolutionary forebears.) The patriarchal ego of Earwicker or
tries to restore Irish Puritan values, urging the young lady to improve
her mind with decent literature, such as The Old Curiosity Shape and Doveyed
Covetfilles, two Freudian slips that, alas, only reveal his own guilt. When the
Ondt (the earwig having split in two as the warring Ondt and Gracehoper)
asks a bee to "commence insects" with him, more of the truth seems to be
leaking out. Fortunately, being also a flower is a Hyacinth, remember,
and can therefore find relief—is it not perfectly natural for a hyacinth to be
seen "pollen himself" in the Spring?
One of the more mysterious characters in FW is a shadowy Eugenius. He
seems to contain Eugene Aram, the man who first proved Gaelic is an
Indo-European language and who also had an unfaithful wife, like King
Arthur, Finn and King Mark—and Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. Eugenius,
however, also contains Eugene Schaumann, a Finn (ouch!) who happens to
have shot another Russian General, Ivan Bobrikoff, on 16 June 1904. Since
Schaumann was an anarchist and Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, was
also an anarchist, Stephen is humorously accused of the assassination in the
Cave of Winds chapter of Ulysses, which takes place on 16 June 1904.
The reason Joyce picked that date to immortalize in Ulysses long puzzled
critics and commentators; we know now, due to Joyce's letters, that it was
the day on which he and Nora Barnacle first had sex, of a sort. (He wanted
to have intercourse. Nora, a 20-year-old virgin from Galway, compromised
by masturbating him.) There are Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin every
year on 16 June and, as Stan Gebler Davies has remarked, it is mindboggling
to think how the 95% Catholic population would react if they ever
understood fully what they are commemorating.
Curiously enough, Joyce first met Nora in front of Oscar Wilde's old
house on Merrion Square. Wilde brings in the homosexual theme again and
Merrion suggest Marion (Bloom's wife) and Marian, a Catholic adjective to
describe shrines or churches sacred to the BVM or Blessed Virgin Mary. All
of this gets tangled beautifully in Ulysses. In Chapter Three, walking toward
the Pigeon House on Sandymount Strand, near the place where Nora
masturbated our Immortal Author, Stephen Dedalus thinks of a blasphemous
joke about the Virgin Mary trying to explain to Joseph that she was not
unfaithful with another man but only with a pigeon. In Chapter Thirteen,
Bloom masturbates on the same spot, while a teen-age virgin, Gerty
McDowell is flirting with him, and Joyce intercuts their antiseptic sex
(exhibitionism and voyeurism) with a ritual to the Virgin in the nearby Church.