Coincidance - Principia Discordia

96 COINCIDANCE
"mere coincidence"? We are privileged to peep into the mind of a typist
named Martha (who works part-time for Blazes Boylan) but we don't know
if she is thinking about Bloom or about the hero of a novel she has been
reading. Since Bloom's thoughts, like everybody's, contain wishful thinking
and self-deception, we cannot believe him totally, but the other narrators
are so prejudiced pro-Bloom or anti-Bloom that we can't trust them either.
We have seen Reality and found it an abyss indeed; Blake only claimed to see
infinity in a grain of sand, but Joyce has shown us the infinity by opening
every hour of an ordinary day to endless interpretations and re-interpretations.
Things become even more interesting, and weirder, when we begin to
count the coincidences in this very, very average day: a day so banally
normal that early critics complained chiefly that many chapters are boring
and pointless. On the first page. Mulligan is performing a parody of the
Catholic Mass* and whistles to summon the Holy Spirit; a mysterious
returning whistle answers from the street. Mulligan, a devout atheist, is not
impressed by this coincidence, but it is the overture to a rising crescendo of
synchronicity throughout the day. A few pages on, Mulligan mentions
working at the Mater hospital; Bloom lives on the same street with that
hospital. Mulligan then talks of a friend named Bannon who is courting a
girl in a photo shop in Mullingar; at the same time, but three chapters away
in the text, Bloom is reading a letter from that girl, who happens to be his
daughter, Milly. Bannon arrives in Dublin at 11 that evening, just in time to
see the meeting of Stephen and Bloom in conjunction with another
appearance of the enigmatic man in the brown mackintosh. Moses is the
topic of conversation in the newspaper immediately before and after Bloom
enters, and when Bloom arrives at the library two hours later, Mulligan
anti-semitically calls him "Ikey Moses"; at the end of the day, Bloom
suddenly guesses the answer to the child's riddle, "Where was Moses when
the candle went out?" Other coincidences connect Bloom and Moses
throughout the day; a secondary string of synchronicity links bloom with
Elijah; a third famous Jew, Jesus, gets linked to Bloom in Chapter 12, where
the narrator's favorite oath is "Jesus" and the Citizen threatens to "crucify"
Bloom.
Weirder and more wonderful: in the newspaper office, Bloom reflects
that William Braydon, the editor, looks like Jesus and then remembers that
Mario "the tenor" also looked like Jesus. Giovanni Matteo Mario (1810-1883)
was famous for looking like most popular portraits of Jesus, but equally
renowned for his role as Lionel in Flotow's opera, Martha. Jesus was associated
And don't forget that the climax comes when Bloom and Stephen share the
"massproduct," Epp's cocoa.