Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 93
of his own narcissistic agenbite until Bloom delivers him.
This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish
artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the
Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of
Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made
Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose
Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen
lesser lights along with Joyce.
For Bloom, as for Stephen, God is either dead or missing-in-action; but
Bloom, at 38, has been a freethinker longer and is no longer hysterical about
it. Approaching middle-age (by 1904 standards, when average life expectancy
was 50), Bloom has lost faith, successively, in Judaism, Protestantism,
Catholicism and Freemasonry; one feels that his attachment to Socialism is
precarious also. In the abyss of uncertainty, Bloom remains a modern
Ulysses steering his way diplomatically and prudently among such hazards
as drunken Catholics (Simon Dedalus), anti-semitic Nationalists (the
Citizen) and unctuous undertakers who may be police informers (Corny
Kelleher). Mourning his dead son, ashamed of and yet attached to his father
who died a suicide, knowing his wife is "unfaithful," Bloom retains
equanimity and practises charity discretely and inconspicuously: feeding the
seagulls, helping the blind boy across the road, negotiating to protect the
rights of Paddy Dignam's widow, visiting Mina Puref oy in hospital. Lest we
think this kindly chap a paragon, Joyce keeps Bloom in the same precise
naturalistic focus as we watch him defecate, urinate, peep into a masochistic
porn novel and masturbate. Joyce announced that he did not believe in
heroes, and Bloom is no hero: just an ordinary decent man. There are a
million like him in any large city: Joyce was merely the first to put him in a
novel, with biological functions and timid courage unglamorized and
uncensored.
The climax of Ulysses—the brothel scene in which Stephen, drunk,
actually sees his mother's ghost cursing him, and Bloom, exhausted, dreams
in hypnogogic revery of his son not at the age of his death (11 days) but at the
age he would be if he had lived (11 years)—brings us back to the living
presence of the absent dead. But in that scene also, Bloom's timid courage
becomes timid courage as he risks scandal, gossip, disgrace and even
associating with the possible informer, Corny Kelleher, in order to protect
Stephen from two drunken and violent English soldiers. This is the pivotpoint
of the novel, and, since Joyce carefully avoids revealing Bloom's actual
motivations, critics have had endless entertainment "interpreting" for us.
My own guess is that, even if Bloom is looking for a substitute son, as
some say, or has unconscious homosexual urges as others claim, or is