Coincidance - Principia Discordia

92 COINCIDANCE
cover the case is indicated by the secondary level of parallels with Hamlet
which underlie and reinforce the parallels with Homer. In the first Chapter
the Martello tower is compared to Elsinore, and Stephen wears a "Hamlet
hat." He is asked his theory about Hamlet, and evades the question for the
moment, to answer in full in Chapter 9. A whole stream of symbols linking
Stephen with Hamlet, Bloom with the ghost of Hamlet's father, Molly
Bloom with Gertrude etc. gradually emerges on re-readings of the book.
What Joyce is exhibiting to us is, in fact, a coherent synergy or knot, as Bucky
Fuller would say: a pattern that co-exists in many places and times. The dead
and absent will be again live and present, in this context, because history
repeats the same stories endlessly, just changing the names of the players.
But Ulysses is also a mock-encyclopedia, with every chapter corresponding
to one human science or discipline; and the discipline emphasized in chapter
one is theology, as Joyce's notes indicate. This begins with Buck Mulligan's
burlesque of the Mass, runs on through Stephen's tortured reflections on
the "mystic oneness" of Father and Son in the Trinity, comes back in
Mulligan's hilarious 'Ballad of Joking Jesus," and permeates every paragraph
in subtle ways. If Stephen = Telemachus as son disinherited (Stephen's
father, a drunk, has sold at auction the properties Stephen expected to
inherit) and Stephen = Hamlet as son haunted (by a mother's ghost, not a
father's, but still haunted), the theological context of the chapter implies that
Stephen = Telemachus = Hamlet because all young men, at some point, are
obsessed with a father who is either dead or missing-in-action: namely, God
the Father. Ulysses is set exactly 18 years, or nearly a breeding generation,
after Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Stephen as young rebel or
puer aeternis is a perennial archetype; Stephen as individual is representative of
the first generation to arrive at maturity with that grim Nietzschean
autopsy on their minds.
This is why Mulligan remarks that he and Stephen are both "Hyperboreans."
He is almost certainly referring to the startling opening paragraph
of Nietzsche's The Antichrist.
Look me in the face. We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far
out we have moved. "Neither by land nor by sea will you find the Hyperboreans"—Pindar
already knew that about us. Beyond the north, beyond
ice and death, lie our life, our happiness. We have discovered joy, we know
the way, we have the exit out of the labyrinth of history.
Nietzsche's labyrinth of history, which Stephen later calls the nightmare
of history, is the rules laid down by State and Church. Mulligan has indeed
found his way out of the labyrinth; but Stephen has not. He is named after
the maker of labyrinths, remember, and he remains trapped in the labyrinth