The “Nestor” section begins with Stephen as gentle and reluctant schoolmaster and then, more memorably, passes to his colloquy with Mr. Deasy, the Scottish headmaster of this Dalkey school, not far from Dublin. Mr. Deasy is a dreadful old man who loathes women, Jews, and all those who do not pay their way:
—Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. 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. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction. Old England is dying.
He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.
—Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.
His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which he halted.
—A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?
—They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the earth to this day.
On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the gold-skinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabbles of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
—Who has not? Stephen said.
—What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Mr Deasy looked down and held for a while the wings of his nose tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.
—I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will fight for the right till the end.
For Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right.
Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.
—Well, sir, he began.
—I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.
—A learner rather, Stephen said.
It is admirable how calmly and evenly Joyce paces this. Though he is dreadful, Deasy is accepted as what he is, however little. This is certainly not the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who experienced the temptation of becoming a Jesuit priest and rejected it for the hazardous aesthetic flight of a new Icarus, as though the father could be his own son. William Blake haunts Stephen, and Joyce echoes him throughout Ulysses and the Wake. Painfully wincing at Deasy’s anti-Semitism, Stephen remembers a couplet from William Blake’s Notebook poem “Auguries of Innocence”:
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding sheet
To Mr. Deasy’s “They sinned against the light,” Stephen replies, “Who has not?” A vision, a kind of negative epiphany, suddenly possesses Stephen:
On the steps of the Paris Stock Exchange the gold-skinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabbles of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
It is not just exile that informs this vista; even in 2018, this retains relevance. My mind wanders to the tragic story of Paul Léon, Joyce’s unpaid secretary and adviser, a learned lawyer who had mastered seven languages, and who risked his life by returning to Nazi-occupied Paris so as to save and bring away Joyce’s papers. Eventually, Léon was seized by the Nazis and sent off to perish in a death camp. Samuel Beckett, who was close to Léon, intimated that he joined the French Resistance because of this atrocity.
With ironic courtesy, Stephen attempts to rid himself of Deasy, but not without being afflicted by a final nastiness:
—Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.
He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield. The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate; toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.
—Mr Dedalus!
Running after me. No more letters, I hope.
—Just one moment.
—Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.
Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.
—I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.
—She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That’s why.
On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
The dancing coins return us to Stephen’s contempt for much-needed money, and Deasy’s worship of cash. I remember Christopher Smart’s description of coins as “dead matter with the stamp of human vanity” (Jubilate Agno), though I do not believe Joyce ever read Smart’s Jubilate, since it was first published in 1939. Joyce endows Stephen with a knifelike edge as a maker of apothegms: “—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Justly famous, that is followed by an even deeper slash into credulity:
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying
:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
The “Proteus” episode follows, in which Stephen walks on the beach at 11:00 a.m., brooding on the tides and on his predicament. In the fourth book of the Odyssey, Menelaus tells the story of his capture of Proteus, the old man of the sea, on the island of Pharos. Menelaus and his men rush upon Proteus and hold him fast, despite his willed transformations into a lion, a snake, a panther, a boar, running water, a flowering tree. The wily Proteus yields and prophesies that Menelaus will not die but will be taken to the Elysian Fields, reserved for those descended from the gods.
Stephen’s meditation on the strand begins with a clear summoning of the great mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), who composed The Signature of All Things (1621), which William Blake read and partly absorbed, partly rejected, and which James Joyce evidently read and admired. In Stephen’s beach reverie it is Boehme, more than Bishop Berkeley, who is prevalent:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
This rich passage is an epitome of Stephen’s and of Joyce’s minds. Intricately it mixes Jacob Boehme’s idea of correspondences between the physical and the spiritual with a good dose of Aristotle, adding a dash of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s kicking a stone to cast aside Bishop Berkeley’s Idealism: “I refute it thus.” Later legend attributed baldness and enormous wealth to Aristotle, described by Dante as the “master of those who know”: maestro di color che sanno. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary is parodied in the pragmatic difference between gate and door. And yet what matters most here is transparency and its limits, an Aristotelian testing of transcendence against objects.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.
Won’t you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
“The black adiaphane” is the opaque. Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) provides Stephen with his nacheinander, or one thing after another, the audible being temporal and the visible spatial. Eyes tight shut, the Irish magister-to-be thinks of Hamlet being warned not to follow the Ghost lest he be led to a sudden cliff. Wearing Buck Mulligan’s shoes and trousers, Stephen plays with the nebeneinander or side-by-side aesthetic idea of space. The old Blakean in me always thrills to the invocation of Los the artificer, but Blake might not have been happy with Stephen’s identification of his Real Man the Imagination with the Gnostic Demiurge, who at once makes and deforms the world. Still, Blake’s spirit is with Stephen as he walks into eternity along the strand:
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.
Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before the ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long on the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.
Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan.
Joyce’s knowledge of Kabbalah remains a puzzle to me. Both in Ulysses and the Wake he intimates more detailed and accurate notions of Jewish mysticism than were available to him in the various esotericists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps his genius intuited what it needed to know. In the first paragraph quoted above, the Adam Kadmon is the Divine Man of Kabbalah, androgynous and containing all things in heaven and on earth in himself, as William Blake remarked. “Orient and immortal” is a clear reference to the most famous passage in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations:
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.
Stephen’s meditation proceeds to mix profundity with jesting in regard to the unfortunate end of Arius (256–336), who died in Constantinople in a Greek watercloset, his bowels collapsing. Arius argued that the Father preceded and was of a higher substance than the Son, a view eventually ruled heretical by the Church. It fascinates me that God, in whom Joyce did not believe, having made and not begot Stephen, is bound by eternal law never to end him, so that Joyce becomes a Christ or Messiah. Hamlet, always near in Stephen’s consciousness, is echoed throughout this passage. The steeds of Mananaan are the waves, since he is the Celtic god of the sea, a Proteus figure.
In the episode “Scylla and Charybdis,” set in the Dublin library at two in the afternoon, Stephen expounds his splendidly outrageous theory of Hamlet, in which he himself says he does not believe. Richard Ellmann, in his definitive biography of Joyce, nevertheless insists that Joyce himself never abandoned the theory.
—A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
But we had spared…
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
—He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best’s behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.
List! List! O List!
My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
If thou didst ever…
—What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo pa
trum, returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
Lifted.
—It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.
Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
—Shakespeare has left the huguenot’s house in Silver street and walks by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has other thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
—The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name:
Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit,
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 35