Feeling that some "wisdom" is being expected of him in Nestor
(and not just sardonic replies), Stephen weighs an answer to
the triumphalist version of history that he has been hearing
from Deasy: benighted Jews
eternally cursed by enlightened Christians, anarchic Fenians held at bay by resolute
Tories, spendthrift Catholics bested
at the bank by thrifty
Protestants. His counter-vision is a simple statement of
despair: "History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake." The metaphor implies that human history is no place to
look for enlightenment or justice.
Citing a note by J. Prescott, Thornton finds an analogue to
Stephen's statement in a letter of the French poet Jules
Laforgue (1860-87): "Life is too sad, too coarse. History is a
gaudy old nightmare who does not suspect that the best jokes
are the shortest." (I.e., get them over with as quickly as
possible, because there is not very much to relish in the
telling?) Robert Spoo
quotes several early 20th century writers who used the same
image in relation to World War I: D. H. Lawrence made it the
title of a chapter on the war in Kangaroo (1923);
Yeats wrote in Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, "Now
days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep";
and, remarkably like Stephen's sentence, Henry James wrote in
a letter to Edith Wharton in 1914 that "Life goes on after a
fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no
waking save by sleep." (The letter was not published until
1920, so Joyce could not have been thinking of it as he wrote
Nestor, any more than the other two. But all these
uses of the same image suggest that it was widely current in
the culture of the time.)
In addition to the war, one can identify many reasons Stephen
might have for thinking of life as nightmarish, including
British colonialism, the long and depressing saga of Irish
resistance and acquiescence, and many other kinds of national,
ethnic, and religious hatred, one of which he has just been
thinking about in connection with the Jews. The word "history"
is often attached to such struggles in Ulysses.
Haines has said in Telemachus, and Stephen thinks
again in Nestor, that "history is to blame" for
England's brutal subjugation of the Irish. Stephen has thought
at the beginning of Nestor that for Irish leaders "history
was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a
pawnshop." In Aeolus Myles Crawford
refers to the story of the Phoenix Park murders as "the
whole bloody history," and Stephen thinks, "Nightmare
from which you will never awake." In Cyclops
Bloom inveighs against "Persecution" and says that "all
the history of the world is full of it.
Perpetuating national hatred among nations." "Force,
hatred, history," he says, "all that. That's not life for men and
women, insult and hatred." And in Eumaeus
Stephen asks Bloom to remove a knife from his sight because "It
reminds me of Roman history."
Nightmares also play an ongoing role in the book, from
Haines' black panther to
Dennis Breen's ace of spades to Bloom's
fears about sleep. Circe can be described as
(among other things) a long nightmare, during the course of
which both Bloom and Stephen valiantly struggle to "awake."
