ULYSSES Funmary #2: Nestor

by BEN VORE

Behold! I am about to reveal to you my amazing ability to perform a super secret Joycean mind meld which allows me to discern some of the thoughts and probing questions of a few Wandering Rocks regulars. Allow me to address those unspoken questions here:

“Could you just give me a brief overview of what’s actually going on in this episode? I’m new to Wandering Rocks and have chosen to remain in the shadows of anonymity until I get my sea legs, so to speak.” – Anonymous 

Yes, Anonymous (although I know who you are!). Stephen Dedalus is a history teacher and he’s teaching his class about Pyrrhus. It’s toward the end of class and the natives are restless. They ask for a joke and Stephen tells a morbid riddle that kinda freaks everyone out. But then class is over and everyone runs outside to play hockey, everyone except a kid named Sargent. Sargent needs a little extra help with math. Stephen helps him and feels an affinity for the kid. After that Stephen goes into headmaster Deasy’s office to collect his paycheck. Not only does he get paid, he also gets an earful of preachy monetary advice, curious historical assessments, anti-Semitic accusations and then some good old misogyny to top it all off. Deasy asks him to deliver a letter to some local newspapers, which is Stephen’s out. 

“I don’t speak Latin, so could you translate Amor matris for me? Also, Mike Allen’s corn hole tournament was a farce.” – Tad Smith

Tad, Amor matris translates to “mother love.” Joyce uses the phrase while Stephen is helping Sargent (with whom he feels a certain kinship) with his sums. This is noteworthy because Sargent ( “ugly and futile”) doesn’t seem like a lovable kid, although Stephen reasons that “someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.” Here we have Amor matris, made all the more poignant because as Eric Jerric Jerry noted in his Telemachus Funmary, “Stephen is haunted by his dead mother, and his guilt surrounding her death. She asked him to pray for her at her deathbed. He refused.”

“This is well and good, but what about the last part of the sentence? It’s ‘Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive.’ And I’m really still steamed about that sham tournament.” – Tad

Based on my copious reading of commentaries, analysis and annotations, I believe I’m correct in saying that “subjective and objective genitive” suggests that amor matris can mean either a mother’s love for a child or a child’s love for a mother. It’s a two-way street. Why is this important? It might have something to do with Stephen’s ability to be the actor — or the acted-upon — for the journey ahead. Sort of like how you, Tad, have the choice to passively accept that it was indeed a sham tournament, or actively lodge an official protest with the International Corn Hole Association (located, conveniently, here in Cincinnati, Ohio).

“You said yesterday that ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ is the episode’s money quote. Elaborate, please. And you know what else is money? Your unparalleled fashion sense.” – Andrew Cashmere

Thank you, Andrew! What a kind thing to say.

This is a money quote on several different levels.

1. It’s a rebuke to Deasy. Deasy tells Stephen that “all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.” Stephen wants none of it.
2. It’s a rebuke to Haines. Back in “Telemachus” Haines tells Stephen, “It seems history is to blame,” an easy way to absolve certain parties (read: Brits) of responsibility. Stephen sees history as personal, close-at-hand, sometimes violent (especially with regard to Irish history). Note too that during this conversation Stephen’s color is rising and that Haines has “detached” some tobacco fibers from his mouth before speaking “calmly.” One speaks of a living, breathing history; the other exists in a sort of “ahistory.” 
3. It’s true on a personal level. Stephen is a gloomy guy. He’s haunted by his dead mother. He’s wracked by guilt. He couldn’t make it on his own and had to move back home. A loudmouth and a freeloader kicked him to the curb. He sits through lectures by anti-Semitic blowhards. He’s literally trying to wake up from the nightmare of his personal life.

There’s also the tension here of how we should read history, a question that echoes from Stephen’s thoughts earlier in the episode. Thinking of Haines (though Deasy fits the bill too), Stephen muses, “For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop.” Stephen’s history isn’t pliable in the same way because it’s anchored by fact, not memory. ( “Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away.”) So while Haines/Deasy absolve themselves of any responsibility for history, Stephen can’t shake it free.

“I have always wanted to be a star hurling player. Do you have any footage I could watch of you playing?” – Brooke Jackson

Yes, Brooke, I do!

“What would you prescribe for someone prone to coughballs of laughter which drag after them rattling chains of phlegm? I’m asking on a friend’s behalf.” – Mark Hoobler

Mark, I would advise your friend that it’s probably time to stop laughing altogether. Or get a lung transplant.

“As you may have noted if you read my spot-on post ‘swine flu — excuse me while i fail to be frightened,’ I’m not buying the media hype. But should I be at least a wee bit concerned about another outbreak of foot and mouth disease?” – Gflawrence 

Gflawrence, your post was indeed spot-on. And while I don’t want to downplay the potentially pandemic effects of another foot and mouth disease outbreak, you should rest assured that humans are rarely affected. Sleep easy tonight.

“Would anyone out there like a little perspective on Stephen’s classroom management skills from an actual 7th grade teacher (and Wandering Rocks participant!)? You would? Great! Because I’ve already written a blog post about it. Enjoy.” – Liza Anne

Thank you, Liza Anne!

“I rather enjoyed John Hodgman’s ‘Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter.’ Might there be one more?” – Katie Else

Indeed there might, Katie! 

A dog goes into a bar. He is wearing an eye patch. The dog says to the bartender, “Have you heard the one about the one-eyed dog?” The bartender, who is deaf in one ear, thinks the dog is making fun of him. He asks him to leave. The dog says, “Don’t you have a sense of humor, deafie?” At the end of his shift, the bartender is tired of all the jokes. Today it’s a one-eyed dog. Yesterday it was a horse with rickets. The day before: ants. He lives above the bar, in a small room. He spends the night alone there, listening to his battery-operated radio, which picks up only a bad jazz station. He listens to bad jazz with his bad ear.

 

That closes the book on “Nestor”!

NEXT UP: The orphaned “Proteus”! What kind of monster would fail to adopt this poor child?*

* = clearly not you, as you are not a monster!

ULYSSES pp. 31-36, “Nestor”

by BEN VORE

The pp. 31-36 tweets:

• p31. Greasy Deasy laughs at SD’s debts, calls him a fenian, then lectures him on The Potato Famine. This guy’s a royal prick.
• p32. Deasy asks SD to deliver a letter to the papers. He types, SD reminisces about the racetrack and playing hockey (“the joust of life”).
• p33. Deasy’s letter is about … foot and mouth disease? Cue anti-Semitic bluster!
• p34. Deasy really hates the Jews. SD wants to awake from the nightmare of history, hears God in “a shout in the street.”
• p35. Deasy to SD: You’re not a born teacher. SD to Deasy: “A learner rather.” SD rustles the sheets, really wants this conversation to end.
• p36. Deasy has to get in one last anti-Semitic joke. It’s bad. He’s a sad, phlegmy blowhard. SD says nothing; at last he’s free of him.

On to the recap:

We pick up in the middle of Stephen’s transaction with Deasy, who has just lectured Stephen about thrift and self-reliance and then — being the prick that he is — goes in for the kill by asking poor Stephen if he too can say I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. I owe nothing. Of course Stephen can’t, and p. 31 begins with a comical internal accounting of Stephen’s extensive debts. Stephen answers Deasy’s question with, “For the moment, no,” which prompts Deasy to laugh “with rich delight” and respond ( “joyously,” no less), “I knew you couldn’t.” Say it with me: This guy is a jerk.

But he’s just getting warmed up. Like many a bully who masks his insecurities beneath an obnoxious personality, Deasy assumes Stephen is Fenian (an Irish Catholic nationalist), and thus hostile to Deasy being a Tory (an English-fearing Protestant). This is all Deasy needs to begin espousing his views on Irish history, going back to the Irish potato famine. 

Let’s watch a short clip for some background on the famine. For our purposes, the first 40 seconds are the most relevant here. Should you choose not to watch the remaining 2:38, please just put your head down on your desk and go to sleep or something.

Can someone get the lights please?

How about that creepy Famine with the scythe? Yikes!

For fun: Read through the comment thread on the video to get a little taste of the ongoing Irish/British hostilities with regard to this little bit of history.

As for its relevance to us and “Nestor,” it’s worth one more quick tangent on the name Deasy. According to Ulysses Annotated, The Deasy Act (1860) was “an act ostensibly intended for land reform in Ireland but in practice a ruthless regulation of land tenancy in favor of landlords (i.e., in favor of the pro-English, anti-Catholic establishment).” If Joyce named his Nestor after this Act, as seems likely, then we can see Deasy as the smug, self-serving, condescending embodiment of English Superiority whose selective reading of history would pin blame for the famine back on “you fenians.” The SparkNotes commentary sums it up nicely: “The purpose of [Deasy’s] lecture is less to teach than to assert authority, an authority that is undermined by several factual errors.”

Once Deasy is done lecturing he asks Stephen for the favor of delivering a letter to the papers (Stephen has the hook-up). The hot button issue Deasy is eager to sound off on? Foot and mouth disease. ( “There can be no two opinions on the matter,” Deasy says. That’s another way of saying, “Everyone who doesn’t agree with me is an idiot.” Blooooooooow-hard, Blooooooooow-hard.)

As Deasy types, Stephen (seated “before the princely presence,” a nice little echo of Telemachus/Nestor) recalls a trip to the racetrack with his friend Cranly, then — hearing shouts and whistles from the hockey game outside — imagines himself down on that field, engaged in “the joust of life.” But in Stephen’s head, the game takes a rather grisly turn and ends with “the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men’s bloodied guts.” (He’s been watching The Last Boy Scout one too many times.)

Then we get an ugly blast of anti-Semitic bile from Deasy, who suspects Jews have infiltrated every sector of the “highest places” in England. (He’s just getting warmed up.) Stephen recalls standing on the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange and contends that greedy merchants can be Jew and Gentile alike. Jews, Deasy retorts, “sinned against the light.” Stephen counters by asking, “Who has not?” This leads to the money quote of this episode, spoken by Stephen: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Deasy, surely caught off guard by cryptic non-responses to his anti-Semitic charges, tells Stephen that “the ways of the Creator are not our ways. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.” At that moment there are more shouts from the hockey game. “That is God,” Stephen says, gesturing outside. This throws Deasy for a loop. “A shout in the street,” Stephen adds. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

Deasy is way off-balance by this point, so he shifts from anti-Semitism to some good old-fashioned misogyny. He trots out the tireless charge that “a woman bought sin into the world.” Stephen has had enough and politely raises the letters, indicating he’ll be off to take care of Deasy’s business. But Deasy keeps going, telling Stephen “you were not born to be a teacher.” Stephen is strangely passive here. “A learner rather,” he responds, but his heart isn’t in the fight. He rustles the sheets some more and keeps trying to get out the door. The conversation ended long ago for him.

Deasy, perhaps worried Stephen didn’t pick up on how Deasy really felt about the Jews, runs after him in the street to tell one more anti-Semitic joke. After he tells it, we get this rather repulsive little sentence:

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. 

Yum! Who’s hungry?

You’d better get hungry for the Nestor Funmary tomorrow. We’ll try to draw together the loose threads and tease out this “history is a nightmare” business. Until then, some questions for discussion:

• Can you feel that you paid your way and never borrowed a shilling in your life? No? Are you ashamed of yourself then?
• Have you suffered from foot and mouth disease? Really? You have? Sick. You disgust me.
• How is God like a shout in the street?
• Is Deasy right in his assessment of Stephen as a teacher? 
• What to make of Stephen’s increasing non-responsiveness from that point on? His internal monologue basically gets turned off.

Also, anyone with a firmer grasp on European history (here I’m thinking particularly of resident scholar Katie Else) care to tell us more about the Irish Potato Famine?

TOMORROW: The “Nestor” Funmary!

But who has adopted “Proteus”?

ULYSSES pp. 24-30, “Nestor”

by BEN VORE

I have attempted to replicate Jerry’s Eric’s exemplary twreading skills. (Emphasis on “attempted.”) Let’s revisit the tweets before launching into the analysis:

• p24. SD teaches remedial History. One student thinks Pyrrhus was a pier. Classmates chortle.
• p25. SD perplexes class with “a disappointed bridge.” Indulges in reverie about Aristotle, gets swarthy kid named Talbot to read Milton.
• p26. More Aristotle: “Thought is the thought of thought.” Class winds down and asks for a riddle. SD tells a terrible one.
• p27. punchline: “The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.” Wah-wahhh. SD misses his mom. Ugly kid fails math but mom loves him.
• p28. Torturous math problem. Makes SD think about Hamlet again. Ugly kid just wants to go outside and play hockey.
• p29. Enter Deasy. He’s our Nestor: Blowhard, also pompous, self-righteous and misogynist. Now he’s the teacher and SD is the student.
• p30. Deasy pays SD, says “Money is power,” takes Shakespeare out of context. Deasy paid his way — the pride of the English!

Some observations:

Stephen is not teaching AP History.  He’s got some rowdy kids in his class, but he’s not much of a disciplinarian either. A student named Armstrong gets a laugh out of answering that Pyrrhus (he of the Pyrrhic victory) is a pier. Stephen seems like that poor teacher who can’t translate what’s in his head to how he teaches. Nor does he seem able to steer discussion down any constructive path, leading to a terrible riddle (which Ulysses Annotated notes “is a joke at the expense of riddles, since it is unanswerable unless the answer is already known”). This made me recall the section of John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise entitled, “Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter.” He lists five; I will choose my two favorite:

A duck goes into a pharmacy. He says to the pharmacist, “I need some ointment for my beak. It is very chapped.” The pharmacist says, “We have nothing for ducks here.”

and

A man goes into a bar. He has a dog with him. The dog is wearing an eye patch. The man says to the bartender, “Ask me about my dog.” Unfortunately, the bartender does not hear him, because he was deaf in one ear as a child. He serves a woman at the other end of the bar. When he comes around to the man with the dog again, the man orders an imported beer. He forgets what he was going to say about the dog. 

Stephen sure misses his dead mom. So why does he tell this terrible riddle? It hints at not just his extremely poor sense of comic timing but also the fact he’s still grieving. (To the grief-stricken, morbidity does acquire a certain hilarity.) Stephen’s one redeeming moment with a student is after class with the “ugly and futile” Sargent. As Sargent reworks a math problem, Stephen notes the boy’s physical oddities (a “lean neck and tangled hair”) but then reflects “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?” We’re back at the grace and miracle of a mother’s love (amor matris), something Stephen no longer has.

Deasy is a pompous windbag. He’s Joyce’s Nestor. (In all fairness, Homer’s Nestor is far less pompous.) He’s also the school headmaster. The first physical trait we see of him is his “angry white moustache.” Joyce doesn’t say as much, but I get the impression Deasy is a large man. (Joyce refers to him several times as “old,” and at the end of the chapter we see Deasy running after Stephen and “breathing hard,” suggesting he’s out of shape. Then he coughs up “a rattling chain of phlegm.”) Deasy, who is pro-British (and anti-Semitic … more on this tomorrow), pays Stephen and delivers a lecture entitled “Money is Power.” While there are merits to Deasy’s thrift and self-reliance (he tells Stephen the Englishman’s proudest boast is I paid my way), certain flourishes in his speech suggest Deasy is a self-righteous blowhard. He begins his speech, after all, with the dreaded “When you have lived as long as I have…,” then takes Shakespeare out of context (quoting Iago unironically, which Stephen calls him on). Now we have Stephen, previously the (mostly ineffectual) teacher, sitting as the pupil under another (mostly ineffectual) teacher.

Finally, a couple small sidenotes:

• It is noteworthy that Stephen’s students play hockey, an English game, and not something more authentically Irish like hurling. Here’s a picture of a large man hurling:

“I accidentally put my jersey in the dryer!”

• Stephen thinks a lot about Aristotle, and I would try to flesh some of this out tomorrow (specifically about Stephen’s reading of Aristotle as it relates to questions of history) if not for the fact I’d have no idea what I was talking about. So I open the floor to any Aristotelian scholars who would like to shed greater light on these themes.

Questions for discussion:

1. What is a disappointed bridge? 
2. Does Stephen’s identification with Sargent ( “like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness”) explain why their encounter appears to be the only connection between a student and teacher in this episode?
3. Why don’t pharmacists sell beak ointment?

We’ll tackle the rest of “Nestor” tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m off to intramural hurling!