Coincidance - Principia Discordia

90 COINCIDANCE
This story is autobiographical. Nora Barnacle, Joyce's mistress 1904-1931
and his wife 1931-1941, had been courted in Connacht by a Michael Bodkin,
who actually did die of pneumonia after singing lovesongs to her in a
rainstorm. Joyce changed Bodkin to "Furey" to add violent, fiery connotations
to the ghost that afflicts Gabriel Conroy. In 1909, Joyce even went to
Galway to look at his dead rival's grave, and found beside it a grave for one
"J. Joyce"—an incident that left him with a lifelong preoccupation with
synchronicity long before Carl Jung named that phenomenon.
In Ulysses, the dead and absent are not only present but omnipresent.
Stephen Dedalus is afflicted with what psychiatrists would call clnical
depression; Stephen with his medieval erudition, prefers to call it "agenbite
of inwit"—the incessant gnawing of rat-toothed remorse. His sin? He
refused to kneel and pray when his dying mother asked him, an act not
motivated by atheism but by anti-theism: Stephen fears that there might be
a malign reality in the God he has rejected, and that any act of submission
might open him to invasion and re-enslavement by that demonic Catholic
divinity. Probably, only another ex-Catholic can understand that anxiety,
but any humane person can understand the dreadful power of the guilt
that, personified by Stephen's mother, haunts him all through the long day's
journey of 16 June 1904 into night.
Stephen is the overture, and, later, the anti-chorus. The major theme of
Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, Irish Jew, timid hero, solid wanderer in the
formless abyss, the greatest comic and tragic figure in modern literature. If
Stephen is haunted by a dead mother, Bloom is equally preoccupied with a
dead son: Rudy Bloom, dead at the age of 11 days, absent from the public
world of Dublin, alive and ever-present in Bloom's memories.
If the dead have power over our imaginations, the absent have even more
power. Conspicuously absent form the text of Ulysses—he only appears on
stage once, to utter banalities to a shopgirl—is Hugh "Blazes" Boylan, who is
also over-conspicuously absent from Bloom's thoughts most of the day.
Only about two-thirds of the way through the book, on first reading, do we
discover why Bloom's private inner conversation with himself (which we
are privileged to share) always wanders into chaotic images and a wild
search for a new topic of interest whenever Boylan's name is mentioned by
another character. Bloom knows, but does not want to know, that Blazes
Boylan is having an affair with Bloom's wife, Molly. By being absent from
Bloom's consciousness, Boylan acts like an invisible magnetic field governing
thought processes that we can see, but cannot understand, until we know
Boylan is there, unthought of, deflecting and determining the conscious
thoughts we do see. That the name Blazes Boylan suggests devils and hell
reminds us that Joyce's "man of timid courage," Bloom, will seize "the keys of
hell and death" before the book is over.