Coincidance - Principia Discordia

94 COINCIDANCE
hoping to procure for Molly a lover less gross and offensive to Bloom's
sensibilities than Boylan, as Marilyn French recently suggested, the answer
lies in a four-letter word that each of Joyce's three major characters speaks
once at a crucial point in the narrative. Stephen speaks it first, in the library,
when asking himself what he left out of his theory of Hamlet; he answers,
"Love, yes. Word known to all men." Bloom speaks it to the Citizen, offering
an alternative to politics and national hatreds:
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
And Molly concludes her ruminations of What's Wrong With Men by
repeating the theme of the two major male voices in the narrative:
they don't know what love is
When Bloom brings Stephen home to Eccles Street to feed him, they
share "Epp's massproduct"—Epp's cocoa—but Joyce the punster is telling us
what can seize the keys of hell and death, proclaim the praise of life, and
make the abseni present. The cocoa is not only massproduced but is for
Stephen a new Mass produced: a Mass of humanity to replace the Mass of
God who may be dead or missing-in-action. "The physician's love heals the
patient," wrote the psychiatrist Ian Sutrie; Bloom's love, I think we are
meant to believe, heals Stephen's agenbite of inwit. The point of Bloom's
charity is precisely that it has no reasons. Beneath the Odyssey, Hamlet and
Don Giovanni (recently discovered), Ulysses also parallels the most effective and
memorable of the parables of Jesus: the story of the Good Samaritan.
The dead and absent survive, then, because we love them. Ulysses itself,
the most complexly intellectual of comedies, is a testament to love: to Alfred
Hunter, a man of whom we know only a few facts: he lived in Dublin in
1904; he was Jewish; his wife was, according to gossip, unfaithful; and one
night he took home a drunken, depressed, impoverished and totally
embittered young man named James Joyce and sobered him and fed him. All
else about Alfred Hunter is lost, but those facts plus artistic imagination
created "Leopold Bloom"; and if Hunter is dead and absent, Bloom remains
forever alive and present for students of literature.
The curiosity of Joyce's mature technique is that while on first reading
Ulysses seems only intermittently funny and consistently "naturalistic
(realistic), on successive re-readings it becomes progressively funnier and
spookier. None of Joyce's 100 or more major and minor characters knows
fully what is going on in Dublin on that one extraordinarily ordinary day of
16 June 1904. The first-time reader is similarly ignorant, navigating through
18 chapters and 18 hours of "realism" that is often as squalid and confusing