Tuesday, 1 July 2014, Pages 28 - 31, Nestor, Episode 2

Please note there will be no reading next Tuesday, 8 July 2014.
Also: no readings at all during the workshop week (4 – 9 August).

We have now read as far as: "A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's looms. Ay" (Gabler 2.87) (Penguin p. 31).

We have started the second chapter (which also goes by the name of Nestor). It opens in the middle of a lesson on Roman history that Stephen is teaching to a class of well to do boys. He is questioning them on Pyrrhus and his doubtful victory (which gave rise to the notion of a pyrrhic victory). "Another victory like that and we are done for" is the phrase attributed to him as one boys remembers it (2.14). However, while he is questioning the boys, Stephen's mind repeatedly wanders off to other thoughts. They seem distracted but not, however, completely disconnected from what has just been going on. They are likely to have been triggered by something — a word, a sound, a concept, a memory. When we notice Stephen's wandering off into his own world, it is often worth asking what was going on before his drifting that might have kicked off his train of thought). For example, we find him thinking about Aristotle's theories (treating notions of actuality, possibility, imagination, the 'might have been' etc.) and Blake's poetry, which speaks of the relation between reported fact and memory (history as "Fabled by the daughters of memory" (2.7)), which are ideas his mind becomes entangled in while he is himself trying to get his pupils to memorize a history lesson. In it, his thoughts often turn to the topic of frustration: Pyrrhus' "victory", a pier as a "disappointed bridge" (a joke that is completely lost on the boys and he is trying to save for Haines later), his envy of the boys' presumed success in amorous adventures.

The lesson turns, rather abruptly, to poetry, Milton's Lycidas on the subject of a drowned friend (remember Stephen had been thinking about a drowning case nearby and imagining the dead body turning up as expected after nine days). Stephen's mind then wanders off to his days in Paris, where he had spent a lot of time at the Geneviève library (here described as a factory of insects, with the students reading busily and avidly under the library lamps) and then to "Him that walked the waves" (2.78), i.e. to Jesus, who still seems to cast a shadow over people today. He remembers particularly Jesus' rather cryptic answer to his questioners about whether it is right to pay Cesar his tribute. The answer "To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's" (2.86) has been riddling church people for a centuries. Indeed, the echo of a riddle that is brought to Stephen's mind and appears in the lines that follow may again have been triggered by what we have just read: Stephen thinks of Jesus' answer as a "riddling sentence" (2.87).

It remains one of the reader's tasks to try and distinguish (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) between what is going on in the classroom, what Stephen's thoughts are, what they might have been triggered by, when a narrating voice is describing something from the outside etc. Perspectives keep shifting and exterior description keeps blending with interior monologue — a feature typical of the book and that is worth staying attuned to.