The clashing sticks of the hockey game and the shouts of the
boys become "Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the
frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited
with men's bloodied guts." The prose has offered
other hints that the hockey game could be seen as a battle: "the
scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife,"
the unfortunate boy whose name is "Sargent."
Clearly, many games (field hockey, ice hockey, hurling, rugby, soccer, American
and Gaelic football, lacrosse, chess) are sublimated and
stylized substitutes for battle. In Stephen
Hero an earlier avatar of Stephen had criticized
field sports as "mimic warfare" (34), picking up on the phrase
"mimic hunt" that he had
used for them in an early essay vesion of the novel. But when
he was writing Nestor in 1917 Joyce had a specific
struggle to think about: the Great War which had been chewing
up Europe's youth since 1914. As he listens to his students
playing, and helps maintain order on the field for an old
commander who does not listen to what people are saying,
Stephen finds himself implicated in militarism, just as
teaching ancient Roman history implicated
him in imperialism.
In "Nestor and the Nightmare: The Presence of the
Great War in Ulysses," Twentieth Century
Literature 32.2 (1986), Robert Spoo observes that
Stephen's characterization of history as "a nightmare"
slightly later in the chapter uses an image that was applied to
World War I by Henry James, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence,
and others. Spoo argues that not only the hockey game but the
entire episode raises the specter of war. Pyrrhus' futile
battle becomes all battles: "Any general to any
officers." The physically decrepit but boisterously
jingoistic Mr. Deasy becomes an antiquated Homeric general, at
a time in European history when people were complaining about
the confident old men who were sending millions of young men
off to die horrible deaths. Stephen's skeptical response to
Deasy's talk of generosity and justice—"I fear those
big words...that make us so unhappy"—resembles
the criticism of noble militaristic sentiments by writers like
Wilfred Owen, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Graves.
Spoo aptly notes that "the boys Stephen teaches in 1904—most
of them from well-to-do families with English or Scottish
names like Cochrane, Talbot, and Armstrong—will be officer
material in ten years. They were being killed as Joyce created
their fictive counterparts." He also observes that Leopold
Bloom is, in the words of the narrator of Eumaeus,
"only too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting
from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity"; bellicose
rhetoric brings "misery and suffering" to "fine young fellows,
chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word."
In the symbolic economy of the book, this makes Bloom a
better father figure than Deasy, who counts on Stephen to
maintain order on a battlefield of which he himself knows
little and cares less. Stephen's role in the school sports is
perhaps analogous to the British officers in the war who were
stationed behind the front lines and charged with the task of
murdering any men who disobeyed orders by retreating from the
carnage. At the end of his math tutorial with Sargent, he
tells the boy, "You had better get your stick and go
out to the others." The pathetic boy answers, "Yes,
sir" and, when his name is called from the playing
field, Stephen adds, "Run on...Mr
Deasy is calling you."
