Stephen’s “personal history,” with its bitter internal struggles, is also a microcosm of all of human history, seen in this chapter to be a series of life-and-death battles, ranging from ancient Greece to modern Ireland. However, the allusions to Helen, Julius Caesar, and Pyrrhus, while they are significant in a mock heroic novel based upon ancient prototypes, are less important than the references to the more contemporary betrayal and imprisonment of Ireland by England. And the spokesman for the Establishment is Garrett Deasy, who is a true West Briton—that is, he is an Irishman who imitates English manners and takes the British position on all matters.
Joyce feels that Deasy’s view of Irish history is so destructive that he turns over the second half of the chapter to him, letting Deasy condemn himself with his own words. Joyce also gains an excellent structural framework for this chapter by placing Deasy at the center of the stage. In the first half of the chapter, Stephen attempted to lecture to his unwilling and somewhat obstreperous students; now Deasy is the instructor and Stephen is his reluctant interlocutor, as he repeats the part of gadfly-acolyte that he played for the celebrant Mulligan in “Telemachus.”
Deasy blames women for the evils of history, and his views are as specious as those of Haines, who, in “Telemachus,” maintained timidly that history, not the English, was to blame for Ireland’s troubles. Apart from Eve, who first introduced sin into the world, Deasy censures Helen of Troy; Dervorgilla (the wife of the twelfth-century O’Rourke, Prince of Breffni and East Meath); and Kitty O’Shea (the wife of Captain O’Shea and the mistress of Charles Stewart Parnell). Helen is humorously appropriate in the mock heroic Ulysses since Nestor, in the Odyssey, sent Telemachus to Menelaus and Helen when he was unable to tell Telemachus much about his father. The reference to Dervorgilla shows that Deasy is not a precise scholar of Irish history; MacMurrough was not her husband; he was the lover with whom she ran off, occasioning O’Rourke to call in the English to help and bring them to Ireland for the first time (they never left). And the allusion to Parnell, the “Uncrowned King of Ireland,” recalls the great political trauma of James Joyce’s youth: the betrayal of Parnell by his followers because of the scandal of Parnell’s involvement with Mrs. O’Shea. Of greatest importance about the stories of these three faithless wives, however, is that all three are different versions of Molly Bloom, who, on June 16, 1904, with Blazes Boylan, will enjoy an act of adultery.
In much the same manner, Deasy’s distorted view of Jews foreshadows the treatment that Leopold Bloom will receive in Ulysses at the hands of predominantly Catholic Dubliners. Deasy feels that England is decaying because Jews are controlling the finances and the press. He sees them as “sinners against the light” in their unwillingness to acknowledge Christ as their Savior, and the image blends well with Bloom, who wears a black suit all day after attending the funeral of Paddy Dignam in “Hades.” Deasy’s description of Jews as being wanderers over the earth anticipates the role of Bloom as the Wandering Jew. And the crude joke that Deasy tells about Ireland’s being the only country never to have persecuted the Jews (the Irish never let them in) establishes the scornful atmosphere that Bloom must wander in throughout the day.
Reinforcing the historical motif in “Nestor” is the theme of money and Joyce’s insistence that excessive stress on monetary values has done much to destroy Ireland. Talk of money permeates the chapter, and one is reminded of the lines from Yeats’s poem “September 1913”: “For men were born to pray and save:/ Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,/ It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” In the double pun, modern prophets “prey” for forsaking salvation in order to “save” material things; and although in Ulysses, Deasy’s play on words is unintentional, Joyce wants the reader to catch the irony of such an admonition’s being directed at his mock heroic Christ figure, Stephen: “Because you don’t save . . . ...
Deasy, then, is the spokesman for the world-as-finance. The insolence of the students at his school is occasioned by their parents’ wealth; they contrast with Stephen, who was the “poor boy” at Clongowes, forced to make up stories about his parentage. To Deasy, virtue means never having to say you borrowed. Even Deasy’s plan to cure foot and mouth disease by using Koch’s preparation (the wrong antidote, but one which does suggest a favorite author of Molly Bloom, Charles-Paul de Kock) is meant to prevent an embargo on Irish cattle with its subsequent loss of revenue. It is no wonder that the last picture we have of Deasy is epitomized by the last word of the chapter: “coins.”
“Nestor,” then, besides being “about” Stephen’s personal difficulties, concerns two great forces in human history: military conquest and greed. Joyce calls attention to his dual theme by having Stephen’s lesson focus on Pyrrhus during history class and on Cyril Sargent’s “sums” after class.
