Perceiving how any element of a book is integral to a text, whatever the granularity of that element, whether it is a chapter or thought, gesture or character, is the perennial task of the reader. Nestor’s place in Ulysses, and the place of Nestor’s elements, stands in contradistinction to the grappling with more dynamic episodes, like Helios. Nestor feels almost too staid, Helios too divergent. They both require close examination nonetheless. Monumental criticisms have previously discerned how all is all in Joyce’s opus, although, for all the valid insights of those scholars, the case they litigate remains undecided, and the personalization of understanding will be put at risk If those treatises are taken as gospel. Our discernment of secondary importances in those portions that register with the reader forms the basis of literary cogitation. It follows almost necessarily that the personalization of understanding in a literary context facilitates cogitation’s every walk. That is why we read and discuss books and why reading and discussing books remains important. I find that the less likely a book is to be widely discussed, the more academic analysis tends to gain sway over the map of the book, and the more this sway tends to malign the book’s vitality. Some of the best books inspire the most pedantic of conversations that were otherwise spontaneous. Books cannot survive exclusively in the academy, but then the fact that books do not seem to be able to survive outside the academy leaves room for pessimism. Nestor begins in an academic setting, and here, having just endured the ceremony of Mulligan, the book settles down mightily. It is in this room left for pessimism that Daedalus manifests realization, able in himself to find significance in the setting, if the setting though, in itself, is unable to live up to this signification. Helios’ strangeness feels inexhaustible, as does Proteus, perhaps because Homer spins a figure of metamorphosis in their respective sections, but the land of Nestor is almost entirely lacking enchantment. Still, the ideas presented in the mundane setting of a schoolroom prove uncanny.
I will eschew delving too far into found or supposed correspondences between books 3 and 4 of The Odyssey and Ulysses’ Nestor. Nestor takes us through Telemachus’ arrival on the shores of Nestor’s homeland, Athene with him, where they are greeted by Nestor’s son, Peisistratus, and invited to feast with them. The episode announces the most obvious correspondence by way of Deasy’s comparison of Helen to O’Rourke’s wife whilst recounting the events that led to the first Norman conquest of Ireland. The lack of conscience in the Englishmen, Haines and Deasy, is striking. This lack of conscience gets indirectly excused by Blake, and that seems to be integral to Daedalus’, and Joyce’s, contention with history as fable. It moreover seems that the Homeric world disagrees with Blake’s view of history, and this, insofar as we are meant to see these characters as ancient and modern at once, can help explain Joyce’s use of The Odyssey. Nestor relies more upon the wider import of books three and four than it does the arcana. In my opinion, the reader of Ulysses will be better provided for with a discussion of anxiety than by the tracing of specifics. Nestor’s horses and eldest son are certainly made manifest through Daedalus’ interactions with Deasy and Sargent, but I find Joyce’s inspiration more in the drift of Nestor than in the enumeration of hairs in a horse’s mane.
The notion of anxiety is central to Western literature. To the Greeks, anxiety is detectable but, while I struggle for the exact word, it remains impermanent. Epic and divinity abrogates anxiety’s centrality to man’s experience. According to the corporeal Bloom, Harold, and not Ulysses’ Leopold, the demonstration of change in character absent the import of the divine was vital to Shakespeare’s invention of the human. Whereas Telemachus is chided by Athene for doubting the authority of the gods to influence all, his distant cousin, Hamlet, has no such recourse but to doubt, to reconcile experience with that more essential authority self. Telemachus is faced with matters of state and finds himself unsure of his capacity to give voice to the occasion, unsure, too, of how he will endure the waste of the suitors in his father’s absence. Save for the accompanying divinity, he would likely blunder. Ascendency or existential impotence hang in the balance, and there may be no extremes more intuitive to us than these, especially when the generational import is considered. Fate and the will of the gods nonetheless render this somewhat moot. It is this anxiety, fundamental to Telemachus, albeit enveloped, that Joyce attunes to and applies to the condition of Ireland, history, and a dark more true than light. In the stead of the gods, to whom anxiety in particular is irrelevant, a clarion, its students and administrator, leave Daedalus’ insights yearning for resolution. Deadeuls’ rejection of Blake would be like Telemachus successfully rejecting Athene. The fact that Daedalus does reject Black accounts for the patter of similarity and dissimilarity comprising a mimetic distinction. Daedalus’ success establishes the unique place of Ulysses in all literature. So Nestor begins, not with a flight of imagination, but a thud. The window that feels almost obstructive, described, like memory, as blank, will soon be the shattered glass of Daedalus’ refusal of Blake’s interpretation of history. Whereas the flights of Blake’s interpretation of imagination’s role in history professes that the ruins of time lead to the eternal, Daedalus perceives fault, Ireland one such fault. Time’s destructions are the inheritance of the living. The disregard of the lesson will be like the cause of the disruption, a schoolboy’s joke, as is the failure to engage with one’s station in the world like a pier; and Daedalus’ waste of his time is likewise a disappointed bridge between himself and Ireland’s future. Daedalus’ perspective is wasted in like the students’ waste of their papa’s pay in the classroom.
