This quotation appears in Episode Two,
during Stephen’s conversation with Mr. Deasy. With Sargent and his
class earlier in Episode Two, Stephen was the reluctant teacher,
and now Deasy attempts to position him as the pupil. But Stephen
blithely maneuvers out of this role by way of a few cryptic statements,
such as the one above. Here, Stephen’s version of history as a “nightmare”
is an explicit challenge to Deasy’s conception of history as moving
toward one goal (the manifestation of God), and an implicit challenge
to Haines’s version of history in Episode One as something impersonal
and cut off from the present (“It seems history is to blame”). Stephen’s
conception of history has several meanings. Stephen sees history,
and Irish history in particular, as filled with violence—Deasy’s
and Haines’s conceptions of history enable this violence by excluding
certain people from history in Deasy’s case (those who do not believe
in a Christian God) and by absolving those who perpetrate violence
from any blame in Haines’s case. Stephen’s comment also refers to
his conception of the tensions between art and history—Stephen sees
history as an impossible chaos and art as a way of representing
that chaos in an ordered fashion. Finally, Stephen’s statement is
also an extremely personal one—his own history is something he is
trying to overcome. At the opening of Ulysses, Stephen
is feeling particularly hopeless about the possibility of rising
above the circumstances of his upbringing.