Homer shows Telemachus taking action first by calling an
assembly of the men of Ithaca to condemn the suitors'
depradations, and, when that fails, by voyaging to Pylos and
Sparta on the Greek mainland to see what Nestor and Menelaus
may know of his father. Nestor receives him hospitably and
tells him the relevant story of what happened to Agamemnon
when he returned home, but he has no information about
Odysseus. Stephen's case is worse: Deasy afflicts him with
unsought and aggressive advice, and Stephen actively resists
the headmaster's assumption of intellectual authority.
Joyce's narrative clearly associates Deasy with Nestor. The
portraits of "vanished horses" on the walls
of his study—champion racehorses from the 1860s, 70s, and
80s—echo Nestor's reputation as "the prince of
charioteers," a reputation that is illustrated when
Nestor sends Telemachus and his son Peisistratus off to Sparta
behind a pair of "thoroughbreds, a racing team."
The concern for cattle that Deasy shows in writing his letter
about foot-and-mouth disease reflects the monumental sacrifice
of bulls that greets Telemachus when he arrives at Pylos, as
well as the sacrifice of a prize heifer to Athena the next
day. There are many additional
echoes, but Joyce's episode engages with Homer's most
crucially on the theme of a young man seeking advice from an
old one. Athena urges Telemachus to learn from Nestor:
"Go to old Nestor, master charioteer,
so we may broach the storehouse of his mind.
Ask him with courtesy, and in his wisdom
he will tell you history and no lies."
But clear-headed Telémakhos replied:
"Mentor, how can I do it, how approach him?
I have no practice in elaborate speeches, and
for a young man to interrogate an old man
Seems disrespectful—"
Despite this veneration for the old man's wisdom, Nestor does
not have any actionable information. His knowledge of
Odysseus' whereabouts ends with the departure from Troy. Joyce
took this deflation of patriarchal wisdom considerably
further. Mr. Deasy tells Stephen (who has not asked) a
boatload of "history," including the United
Irishmen rebellion of the 1790s, the Act of Union in 1800-1,
Daniel O'Connell's parliamentary reform movements in the first
half of the 19th century, the famine of the 1840s, and the
fenian conspiracy of the 1860s. But his Protestant unionist perspective on these
events is one that Stephen can hardly embrace. And his
aggressively partisan position is undermined by many, many "lies."
For Stephen, Deasy's biased memories are not simply
inaccurate. They are depressingly representative of history in
general, which is written by the winners and effaces the
losers. In Deasy's complacent unionist view, "All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of
God." In Stephen's subjected condition, history is "a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Joyce named
history as the "art" of Nestor in both of his schemas. It is an art whose
practice depends hugely on one's subject position.
According to the Linati schema, the episode takes place from
9 to 10 AM. According to Gilbert's, the time is 10-11 AM.
Neither of these on-the-hour times fits precisely with the
details that can be found in the text or inferred from it. The
chapter begins in the middle of a lesson, so the time must be
later than 9:00, since Telemachus ended at 8:45
and it must have taken Stephen at least 15 minutes to walk the
mile from the Sandycove tower to Dalkey Avenue. It is
impossible to say exactly how long the lessons have been going
on, but not very much textual time elapses before the boys
remind Stephen that they have "Hockey at ten, sir."
Estimating backward from this hour to account for the history
and literature lessons that we hear narrated, for Stephen's
riddle, and for his tutoring of Sargent while the boys dress
for the match and Deasy sorts the teams, one may reckon that
the action of the chapter begins somewhere around 9:30.
The conversation between Stephen and Deasy in the
headmaster's office must begin at about the same time as the
boys' recess, 10:00, and it occupies slightly more than half
the chapter. An estimate of 10:30 would fit with the time
frame of Lotus Eaters,
preserving the temporal parallels that Joyce evidently
intended between Stephen's first three chapters and Bloom's.
It clashes, however, with the time of 10:00 that Clive Hart
infers from his account of how Stephen travels from Dalkey to
Sandymount Strand between Nestor and Proteus (James
Joyce's Dublin, 27-32). Persuasive as Hart's account of
Stephen's movements is, it seems impossible that his
conversation with Deasy could conclude by 10:00.
