Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 91
Concretely, Bloom earns his living cadging ads for a newspaper; on 16
Tune 1904, he is trying to secure an ad for Alexander Keyes, whose company
logo is a pair of crossed keys, suggesting the Coat of Arms of the Isle of Man.
With typical Irish indirection, Mr. Keys is also advertising his loyal
Parnellism: the House of Keys on the Isle of Man is the local parliament,
independent of England, and Parnell's "Home Rule" party used that example
as an argument that the Irish were entitled to their own parliament also.
Symbolically, the crossed keys indicate everything associated with Celtic
crosses, Christian crosses, Egyptian Tau-crosses and all crossed emblems of
rebirth; and the Isle of Man symbolizes humanity's isolation and solidarity at
once (another Joycean paradox): every man is an island, but we are all
crossed or linked with each other, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom
are crossed and linked in ways neither understands. (It is no accident that
the first sentence of Ulysses has 22 words, one for each letter of Cabala, and
that the last is "crossed.")
Indeed, Ulysses is made up of crossed keys in time as well as in space. In the
first chapter, Stephen Dedalus broods on his agenbite of inwit, eats
breakfast, and replies with dry, bitter wit to the more robust, blasphemous
and outrageous jokes of Buck Mulligan. Only when we discover the parallelism
of Homer's Odyssey that explains Joyce's title do we realize that Stephen is
reliving the experiences of Telemachus, who at the beginning of the Odyssey
awakens in a tower, as Stephen does, and is mocked and bullied by
Antonioos as Stephen is mocked and bullied by Mulligan. When Stephen, in
chapter two, is given pompous and pontifical advice by the Ulster
Protestant, Mr. Deasy, we are again watching trans-time synchronicity:
Telemachus was similarly given advice by Nestor in the similar section of
the Odyssey. The parallels follow throughout: Bloom is Ulysses, Molly is
Penelope, the Catholic Church is the island of the lotus eaters, the
newspaper office where everybody quotes their favorite political speeches is
the Cave of Wind, etc. Dead and absent for 3000 years, Homer's images are
alive and present, in some sense, in Dublin.
In what sense (as the impatient may ask)? Is Stephen literally the reincarnation
of Telemachus and Bloom of Ulysses? Or is the connection one of
Jungian synchronicity (not yet discovered when Joyce wrote Ulysses)? Or
might one posit Dr. Sheldrake's morphogenetic resonances in time? Joyce
does not answer. He exhibits the living presence of the absent dead and lets
us draw our own conclusion.
That the simple models of reincarnation or metempychosis* will not quite
*Which is deliberately hinted at by Joyce in Chapter 4, when Molly asks Bloom the
meaning of "met-him-pike-hoses" and Bloom tries to explain "the transmigration of
souls" to her.