Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 95
"as real life." Beneath this surface, as we have already seen, the ghosts of
Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart, and (if I am right about the Good Samaritan
theme) Jesus are present-although-absent as the archetypal themes of their
works are reflected in this everyday bustle of ordinary early 20th Century city.
Everybody in the story is involved in misunderstandings or ambiguities
that become clearer and more hilarious on each re-reading. This existential
fact—that every mind creates its own reality-tunnel—is the abyss of which
Joyce spoke, at nineteen, in the lecture on absence and death from which we
began. Stephen invokes the abyss again in his theory of Hamlet (Chapter 9),
saying fatherhood is like the universe itself in being founded "upon the void,
Upon incertitude." Various Dublin gossips (all male) have different theories
about how many lovers Molly Bloom has had; the reader who believes them
is terribly deceived. In Chapter 17, we are given a list of Molly's lovers which
we are apt to consider definitive; on re-reading, we discover it is not a list of
real lovers but of Bloom's suspicions. Molly's monologue should resolve the
mystery, but only adds to the ambiguity; she is not as promiscuous as gossip
paints her, but the exact number of her infidelities is still uncertain.
By the middle of the book, almost everybody in Dublin thinks Bloom has
won a great deal on the horse race that day. On first reading, we are likely to
think so, too, and wonder why he hasn't gone to pick up his winnings. Only
on careful re-reading do we discover the confusions out of which this
inaccurate rumor got started. A dog who appears vicious and ugly to one
narrator appears "lovely" and almost "human" to another narrator, and a
third narrator claims the dog actually talks. Alf Bergan sees Paddy Dignam
at 4 p.m. but Paddy was buried at 10 in the morning; we are to decide for
ourselves if Alf saw a ghost or just shared in the general fallibility of human
perception. Some Dubliners think Bloom is a dentist, and discovering the
source of that error is amusing to the re-reader. Bloom thinks Molly doesn't
know about his Platonic "affair" with Martha Clifford, but Molly knows
more than he guesses about that and all his other secrets. Nosey Flynn, the
first Dubliner to tell us Bloom is a Freemason, is wrong about everything
else he says; it takes careful study to discover that this font of unreliable
gossip is right about that particular detail.
The tradition of the realistic novel, at this point, has refuted itself, in a
classic Strange Loop. Joyce has given us more realism than any other
novelist and the upshot of it is that we don't know what's real anymore. If
Dante's epic was informed by the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he called
The Master of Those Who Know, Joyce's epic, as Ellman commented, is
dominated by David Hume, the Master of Those Who Don't Know. Is the
man in the brown mackintosh who continually gets entangled with Bloom a
significant figure in Bloom's past (or future?) or is this repeated conjunction