James Joyces Ulysses Episode 2
Blog on James Joyce's Ulysses, Episode 2, Nestor
Readers of Ulysses, and of the earlier blogs in this series, will already have encountered the aspiring writer, Stephen Dedalus, in the book's opening episode, where he was overshadowed by the swaggering, voluble Buck Mulligan. Indeed, those familiar with Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will recall Dedalus, a character based on Joyce himself, as the artist at the heart of that work.
Stephen Dedalus comes into his own in Episode 2 of Ulysses and dominates its pages. The setting here is a private school in Dalkey run by Mr Garrett Deasy, where Stephen is employed as a temporary teacher. James Joyce taught at the Clifton school for a time in 1904 following his return to Ireland from Paris where he had dabbled briefly in the study of medicine.
This is the shortest chapter in the book, just 14 pages long. It is, like its predecessor, a fairly straightforward piece of writing. It does, however, contain a number of passages in which Stephen's innermost thoughts flow freely onto the page. The reader needs to get used to this technique as in the main body of Ulysses Joyce exhaustively explores the freewheeling content of Leopold Bloom's frequently quirky mind. Literary critics call this technique ‘Interior Monologue’, but the terminology is not important. It is usually fairly obvious when Bloom’s or Stephen’s thoughts are streaming across the page mimicking the workings of their minds.
And this chapter has some fine examples of Joyce's dense but stylish writing, as when, thinking of being in a library in Paris, he ruminates on the mind and the soul.
“Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.”
This second episode of Ulysses is known as Nestor, although that name appears nowhere in Joyce's text. We know about the book's Homeric parallels because Joyce let some of his friends in on the secret and they informed the rest of us. In Homer's Odyssey, Nestor, Telemachus visits a “breaker of horses”. He is seeking information about his father, Odysseus, and the Trojan War in which they both fought. In Ulysses, Deasy/Nestor's office walls are adorned with images of "vanished horses" belonging to members of the British nobility, while he seeks to give Stephen/Telemachus a history lesson. Horseracing will play a significant role later in the book.
This episode would make an exemplary short story or a one-act play. It has two scenes, one in a classroom and the second in the office of Mr Deasy, the school's proprietor and principal. Each scene contains a dialogue, between Stephen and his pupils and between the teacher and his school principal.
The theme that runs through this episode is history. In the classroom, Stephen is teaching classical history, the battle of Asculum in 279 BC, which was part of the Pyrrhic War. For Stephen's pupils "history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop". Stephen philosophises about major moments in history, Pyrrhus's victory and Caesar's death.
“Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass. Weave, weaver of the wind.”
The classroom scene ends with an exchange between Stephen and a struggling pupil, Cyril Sargent, who finds it hard to understand the 'sums' he'd been given to do. Stephen pities Sargent's frailty.
“Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart…. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life."
This prompts Stephen to recall his own relationship with his mother, which featured in the book's opening episode. It causes Stephen to identify with Sargent.
“Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. ... Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny. Tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
Mr Deasy, a staunch Protestant, lectures Stephen on the virtues of parsimony, a quality for which neither Stephen in the novel, nor Joyce in life had any flair. Through Deasy, we hear the views of Ireland's unionist community (a rarity in a novel whose characters are drawn predominantly from the world of nationalist Ireland). Deasy, who claims to be descended from Sir John Blackwood who voted for the Union of 1800, although Blackwood actually opposed it. Deasy uses the slogan 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right', which comes out of late-19th century Ulster unionist resistance to Irish Home Rule.
In 1904, the year in which the novel is set, Home Rule would have seemed a remote prospect because at that time the Conservative and Unionist Party ruled Britain, which was firmly opposed to self-government for Ireland. Ulysses was written in the years after 1916 by which time Irish politics had been transformed in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.
While Deasy seems obsessed with looking back into history and revelling in the greatness of Britain and believes that “all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.’ Stephen sees things very differently. As he sees it, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". There is a sense in which Joyce's decision to leave Ireland in 1904 was an effort to escape the clutches of Ireland’s history and to see his homeland from a distance. Ulysses is the result of that arm’s length examination.
Mr Deasy, who knows Stephen to have literary connections, asks him to get a letter of his published in one of the Dublin papers. It concerns a reputed remedy for foot and mouth disease, which he claims to have learned about from a cousin of his in Austria, Henry Blackwood Price.
This story highlights Joyce's fondness for incorporating elements of his own experience into his writing. Joyce knew Blackwood Price in Trieste and learned about his veterinary cure. Indeed, he passed on a letter from Price to William Field, MP, who published it in Dublin’s Evening Telegraph. Deasy’s fictional letter as summarised in Ulysses is based on the one that Price wrote. Not only that, but in September 1912 Joyce contributed a piece entitled 'Politics and Cattle Disease' to Dublin's Freeman's Journal (in James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, Oxford, 2000, pp. 206-208) in which he argued that the threat of foot and mouth disease was being used by British politicians to exclude Irish beef from the British market. This must rank as the strangest thing Joyce ever published! His foray into agricultural journalism means that Buck Mulligan's description of Stephen as the "bullockbefriending bard” may have had greater justification than Mulligan might have imagined!
The episode ends with Deasy railing against women and Jews. Deasy targets Helen of Troy for causing the Trojan War, Mrs O’Shea for the fall of Parnell and Dervogilla, ‘a faithless wife”, for bringing the Normans into Ireland in the 12th century. Here he gets his history tangled. Dervogilla was Tiernan O’Rourke’s wife and not Dermot McMurrough’s as Deasy claims.
Deasy believes that “England is in the hands of the Jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength.
Among other things, this is Joyce's way of pointing to the existence of anti-Jewish sentiment just before we encounter his Jewish Everyman, Leopold Bloom, and the redoubtable Molly, who is also a “faithless wife”, in Episode 4. But before we get there we need to navigate Episode 3, Proteus, a difficult chapter where I am sure that numerous determined attempts at reading Ulysses have come a cropper. My first effort certainly ran aground on the rocks at Sandymount Strand. But that's a story for my next Ulysses blog!
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador to the United States.