Stephen remembers the Jewish merchants standing outside
the Paris stock exchange. Stephen again challenges Deasy, asking
who has not sinned against the light. Stephen rejects Deasy’s rendering
of the past, and states, “History is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake.” Ironically, a goal is scored outside in the hockey
game as Deasy speaks of history as the movement toward the “goal”
of God’s manifestation. Stephen counters that God is no more than
“a shout in the street.” Deasy argues first that all have sinned,
then blames woman for bringing sin into the world. He lists women
of history who have caused destruction.
Deasy predicts that Stephen will not remain at the school
long, because he is not a born teacher. Stephen suggests that he
may be a learner rather than a teacher. Stephen signals the end
of the discussion by returning to the subject of Deasy’s letter.
Stephen will try to get it published in two newspapers. Stephen
walks out of the school, pondering his own subservience to Deasy.
Deasy runs after him to make one last jab against the Jews—Ireland
has never persecuted the Jews because they were never let in to
the country.
Analysis
History is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake.
See Important Quotations Explained
Episode Two, “Nestor,” takes place at the boys school
where Stephen teaches. It is a half-day for the students and Stephen
will leave for the day after he teaches his class and is paid by
Mr. Deasy. The episode focuses on teaching and learning. We see
Stephen positioned first as a teacher and then as a student in his
conversation with Mr. Deasy. The subject of both educational scenes
is history, and history as linked to memory. Stephen’s history lesson
for his class relies on their memory of learned historical facts.
Mr. Deasy’s impromptu history lesson for Stephen is anchored by
Deasy’s own personal memories of historical events. Stephen himself
resists the linking of history with memory. For Deasy to define
history in terms of his personal recollections affords him too much
control over the reconstruction of it (thus do Haines and Deasy
use history to absolve themselves of responsibility). For Stephen,
history is something that he cannot control: “History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.” Stephen’s statement refers both
to his grappling with the circumstances of his own past, and to
the philosophical problem of how history should be used to understand
present circumstances.
Part of Stephen’s personal history that has nightmarishly,
though subtly, plagued him through this episode and the first is
his mother’s death. Stephen’s unsolvable riddle about the fox burying
his grandmother suggests this personal pain. As he tutors Sargent,
Stephen’s ruminations about a mother’s love and love for one’s mother
also evoke her absence and stand in contrast to Deasy’s later misogyny. Stephen’s
imagination of a mother’s love creates a moment of compassion and
allows for an effective teaching between Stephen and Sargent. Otherwise,
Stephen’s interactions with his students have been distracted and
cryptic. Stephen himself credits Deasy with accuracy when Deasy
intuits later in the chapter that Stephen was not born to be a teacher.
On the whole, Deasy seems pompous and self-righteous.
We are prepared for the didactic nature of Deasy’s conversation
with Stephen by our first glimpse of Deasy on the hockey field,
yelling at the students without listening to them. Deasy is unperceptive—mistakenly
assuming that Stephen is Fenian, he launches into a history lecture.
The purpose of this lecture is less to teach than to assert authority,
an authority that is undermined by several factual errors that Deasy
makes. Like Haines, Deasy (a Unionist from the north) is pro-British
as well as anti-Semitic. Just as Haines used history to clear himself
of blame in Episode One (“It seems history is to blame”), so Deasy
uses history to blame others, notably Jews and women.
This prelude of anti-Semitism will be evoked later in
the day, as Jewish Leopold Bloom faces similar bigotry. Deasy’s
anti-Semitism rests on his sense that the mercantile Jews have brought
decay to England. According to Deasy, the Jews have sinned against
“the light,” the light being those Christians who understand history
as moving toward one goal—the manifestation of God’s plan. But the presentation
of Deasy’s character undermines his own convictions. Instead of
Christianity and light, Deasy himself deals in coins and material
goods. His moralistic color scheme, in which good Christians are
light and dangerous Jews are dark, is not to be the color scheme
of Ulysses, in which the two heroes, Stephen and
Bloom, are dressed in black, and the dangerous characters, such
as Buck Mulligan, are associated with brightness.
