Coincidance - Principia Discordia

6 COINCIDANCE
also because Stephens had the same first name as Joyce (James) and had a
last name which differed by only one letter from the first name of Stephen
Dedalus, Joyce's self-caricature in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
Finnegans Wake is in many ways an extension and enlargement of the
forbidden and"unthinkable"areas of human experience first explored in Ulysses.
It is more "difficult" than the earlier book, much more "obscene," more
experimental in styles, much funnier, and contains many, many more
synchronicities.
As Ulysses was the anatomy of one day in Dublin, Finnegans Wake is the
encyclopedia of one night in Dublin. Where Ulysses has a normal day-light
protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who travels through real streets, Finnegans Wake
has a multiple protagonist, abbreviated as in Joyce's notebooks; not a
"character" in the normal sense, this system-function, , wanders
through the labyrinths of alternative realities. In explicating this systemfunction,
I shall try to indicate why Yositani Roshi once said, "There is
nothing special about Enlightenment. You do it every night in your sleep.
Zen is justa trick for doing it while awake."Finnegans Wake is another trick for
doing it while awake.
The "paranormal" aspect of the synchronicities we shall be studying can
be "explained" in various ways, including the Fundamentalist Materialist's
favorite non-explanation or pseudo-explanation, "mere coincidence." My
own preference, as shall become more clear as we proceed, is along the lines
of Yositani's identification of dream processes with those things we call
"mystical" or "occult." As the psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald wrote in New
Dimensions of Deep Analysis, the so-called "paranormal" is very normal:
We have seen time and again that despite their apparently capricious,
haphazard nature ("paranormal" events) are governed by the same laws
which apply to the dream, to the neurotic symptom and to unconscious
processes in general.
This was also the view of Freud in his famous essay "On the Uncanny"
and of Jung in all his writings.
Since a dream conventionally requires a dreamer, Joyce as early as 1923
(one year into the writing of the book, which required 17 years) selected the
name Earwicker for the waking ego of the protagonist. This is the point at
which most Wake scholarship has gone wrong: since Earwicker is the
waking ego, exegetes have thought Earwicker is the protagonist, but he is
only one part of the protagonist. E or Ego or Earwicker is only part of the
system-function , which is the total protagonist, as we shall see. But
before investigating , let us look at E or Earwicker.
Joyce reputedly found the name "Earwicker" on a tombstone in Sidlesham,