In re-reading Ulysses, I was struck by the word “unlikelihood” occurring in a significant place (Stephen’s Shakespeare theory, Chapter 9). The word has a prominent place in the Prankquean episode in Finnegans Wake , where a variant of the word is one of the PQ’s rejoinders to Van Hoother.

This post looks at the word “unlikelihood” in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

In my earlier discussion of the word “likelihood,” I wrote,

The Prankquean paragraph finds her making two statements that both contain the syllable lik: her “Unlikelihud” in the first becomes “Am liking it” in the second. She does not make a third utterance that contains the syllable lik, but there is something in the paragraph that might function as such a third: the thunderword, whose lightning — light, lik, luck, lux, look — can signify not just the Fall but the illumination of Enlightenment (a Rise), signaled also by the rainbow in this passage.

In that post, I also compare the Prankquean’s rounds to the Norwegian Captain’s in II.3, where “All lykkehud!” becomes “Ild luck to it!” (“Ild” is Danish for “fire”). I comment:

In our own lives, we inhabit the affirmative perspective indicated by the phrase “Am liking it” by making contact with the inner light (ild) in all things, by shifting our perspective to see all things as connected to each other in a way suggested by the Wake’s mixing of words. The perception of such interconnection allows someone to open themselves up to the dynamic interplay of contrary forces and, ultimately, the realization that not only do all things participate in each other but all “things” (including the self) are ultimately narratives in the mind.

Permit me to quote myself one more time. I also note that the word “likelihood” — from the “sneeze out a likelihood” [squeeze out a livelihood] of I.1 — can refer to the way that all events and all things are simultaneously wildly improbable and necessary:

“Likelihood,” then, is that set of the possible that often seems improbable but must come to pass. It is life itself, in other words. The odds that any single thing would happen — the odds that, for instance, you would be sitting exactly where you are reading exactly these words at exactly this moment — are astronomically small in the scope of the universe. And yet, from another point of view, given the way history has unfolded, these events may have to happen in the way they do, deterministically, as surely as the position of all the molecules in the universe at one moment, blindly following the laws of nature, inevitably must produce the next moment and the next. Everything that happens is wildly improbable; everything is necessary.

Although I don’t explicitly connect these ideas in that post, it seems clear to me on reading it back that my implication is that making contact with the “inner light” of things involves comprehending the necessity of all things and and their dependence on all other things for their existence. Nietzsche has a nice illustration of this: he argues that an object’s properties are no more than its relations to other things. If all other things ceased to exist, the object would no longer have properties. Hence, each object depends on the existence of all other things. Another way to think of it is that each moment requires that history unfold exactly the way it did: if history had been even a little bit different, that moment wouldn’t have happened in the specific way it did. Hence, everything and every moment depends on everything else being exactly what it is. At the same time, as I note in that above post, “things” are ultimately a construct of the mind. Is the object I’m sitting in front of a desk (one thing), several pieces of wood (many things), or millions of molecules bumping into each other (a great multitude of things)? Each of those statements is accurate in a different context: there isn’t some objective “thing” that exists. We create “things” through different discursive frames (at the same time, though, this does not mean that any statement we make is just as true as any other).

My point is that the above paragraph isn’t a bunch of mystical mumbo jumbo that involves spirits and magic and other things that haven’t been demonstrated to exist. The points I make on this blog — while sometimes expressed in language that sounds woolly and obscure and mystical, like “inner light” — are actually concrete and specific points that refer to actually demonstrable reality. When I blather about “enlightenment,” I’m basically talking about perceiving the above sorts of insights directly in everyday life and living from that depth (not merely grasping these points intellectually).

Whew, okay. That was a long preamble to a post.

Actually, wait. One more quotation. This one from this post, where I comment on Stephen’s claim in Ulysses Chapter 9 that “as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth.”

I comment,

Stephen seems to make the flux of existence (the universe weaving and unweaving our bodies, as our molecules all change position) correspond to the father and the appearance of continuity (the mole remaining on his body in the same spot, even though all of the molecules comprising it are different) correspond to the son.

[…]

In the terms I’ve been sketching out in my discussion of Finnegans Wake on this blog, the flux corresponds to riverrun/selflessness/No-thing/the realization that one can narrate one’s story differently. Yet, in order for the universe to create experience in the first place, consciousness has to feel and fall — it has to form for itself the idea of a discrete “self,” which corresponds to various narratives of the self, which Finnegans Wake symbolizes as articles of clothing. It is easy to become caught in one of these narratives and take it for an essence. These narratives correspond to what Stephen refers to with the mole, patterns within the flux.

Okay, everyone got all that? The flux/riverrun (and the realization that one can narrate one’s story differently) corresponds also to what I call above “making contact with the inner light.”

Elsewhere in his Shakespeare theory, Stephen states,

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. 

This gets to the heart of Ulysses, which in large part is about a father in search of a son and a son in search of a father. But what is fatherhood? Motherhood is assured because we all literally emerge from our mothers, but fatherhood is something less direct and therefore likely to be perceived as more abstract or distant. In the days before DNA tests, paternity could not be proven with certainty, and so we could consider it, as Stephen says, a kind of “legal fiction.” There’s the idea of storytelling again. In one sense, a person’s father is whatever name appears on a legal document. In other senses — ones that tend to be more meaningful to people — a father is someone who acts like a father or who is perceived as acting like one.

On the uncertainty of paternity — which is related to the idea of cuckolding, also central to Ulysses (“I thank my grandmother’s milkman for my genes,” George Carlin used to quip) — we build the story of fatherhood.

On a more cosmic level, every one of our stories (including ideas of fatherhood and our notions of our own identity) are the children of the riverrun/flux that constantly changes all things, the random chance that makes everything unlikely, the lack of absolute certainty that requires us to abide in the tentative nature of knowledge (all of our stories are founded “Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood”).

In Chapter 17, when Bloom and Stephen sit conversing in Bloom’s kitchen, Bloom’s thoughts turn to the question of whether “human life was infinitely perfectible,” and he “desist[s] from speculation […] Because it was a task for a superior intelligence” to improve humanity.

The narrator asks, “Did Stephen participate in his dejection?” Stephen’s answer, presumably spoken to Bloom, calls upon the language of the earlier passage from the Shakespeare theory:

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

Bloom does not understand Stephen’s reply “verbally” but does understand it “Substantially.” I take this to mean that there is something in Bloom’s being, in his way of living in the world, that at least resonates with what Stephen is saying without being able to articulate it consciously. In response to the question “What comforted his misapprehension?” the narrator answers,

That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.

Once again, Bloom and Stephen are two sides of the same man, very much like Shaun and Shem as two sides of HCE in Finnegans Wake. Stephen/Shem seeks the unknown, the abstract, a reasoning process that leads toward new conclusions, and poetry in its more abstruse aspects; Bloom seeks to make contact with and enjoy the known, the concrete, the experience of energy, and poetry in its more down-to-earth aspects (the extent to which advertising is poetry). Both build stories on the incertitude of the void, on unlikelihood, but both only have half the key to the puzzle. Making contact with the inner light, as I put it in my Finnegans Wake posts, requires synthesizing their approaches.

In this sense, Bloom and Stephen are not just symbolic father and son but both symbolic sons in search of a Father, in search of the riverrun of flux, the “inner light” I refer to above, which binds them together and in which they are synthesized. I have always taken the typo in the telegram Stephen received from home — “Nother dying come home father” — to be a symbolic prayer for the “Father” (in the highest, figurative sense) to “come home” to provide salvation to the “dying” fallen world (this idea also accords with the imagery of the father Ulysses returning home to his son Telemachus). But the Father is also a Mother, as the union of HCE and ALP in Finnegans Wake implies. Shem and Shaun are unified in HCE and ALP both, and so too Bloom and Stephen are unified in the cabman’s shelter in Chapter 16 when they gaze together at Molly’s picture, as well as outside Bloom’s house in Chapter 17 when they sense the presence of the “mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp”: after Bloom refers to her (with “description” and “suggestion”), both men are silent, “each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.”

Perhaps at some later point, I will write further about the interactions of Bloom and Stephen at the end of Ulysses, where each mirrors the other and reveals perspectives that readers ought to locate in themselves and synthesize, a la Blake’s contraries. This goes beyond Bloom’s physicality (on their walk in Chapter 16, he “inhaled with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke’s city bakery”) and Stephen’s abstraction (at that same moment on the walk, Stephen “thought to think of Ibsen”). In their interactions, to give one example, Stephen professes a glum belief in an immortal soul and supernatural God demonstrated by Scripture, while Bloom suggests that the supernatural parts of Scripture might be “genuine forgeries” added by monks, and that the question of who wrote the Bible might be analogous to the question of who wrote Shakespeare’s works.

I think it’s more than just that Bloom’s is the mature view and Stephen’s the immature. I think the text implies that there’s something important about both their views: perhaps synthesizing their perspectives would require adopting Bloom’s skepticism while tempering it — not with literal supernaturalism but with a respect for the power of mythology and for the actual truths that are disclosed by some religious symbols: not unevidenced supernatural beliefs, but truths like those I expressed early in this post.

Stephen is an interesting character, someone who appears to understand there’s no good reason to believe in supernatural beings like gods (“You behold in me,” he tells Haines, “a horrible example of freethought,” rejecting the idea of a personal God) but unable to escape the emotional attachment he has to the idea, which is tied to the trauma he experienced over the idea of Hell, as documented in Portrait. When I read Stephen’s sections of Ulysses, I think about Joseph Campbell, the mythologist (and Wakean) who found meaning in all the world’s mythologies, including Christianity — not as literal statements of supernatural fact but as symbolic ways of talking about topics like escaping the ego. Campbell recounts how he had been raised to believe in Christianity and how he had to learn how to “de-concretize” the religion for himself: that is, he had to come to see it as expressing not fact but symbolic truths. I feel like Stephen needs to do something like this, to incorporate some of Bloom’s skepticism to arrive at a place where he can disbelieve the claims of the faith but still accept what is true and useful about its symbols.

Campbell said that it took him until he was 25 to de-concretize Christianity for himself. Stephen still has a few more years. And if Stephen can’t do it, then readers who relate more to Stephen ought to do it for themselves.

Once again, Finnegans Wake enriches Joyce’s earlier works, demonstrating the truth of Joyce’s cheeky claim that the only demand he makes on his readers is that they study his works every day.