Joyce and Militarism

3. Gorescarred Books

3 Gorescarred Books Culture is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another. Far from being a placid realm of Apollonian gentility, culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism At the start of Ulysses’s “Nestor” episode, Stephen leads the students of Mr. Deasy’s school through their ancient history lesson. The topical focus on this presumably typical morning is not the Golden Age of Pericles or the splendor that was Rome but the narrow and costly triumph of King Pyrrhus over Roman forces at Asculum, a syllabus selection that emphasizes the enormous price of war, even for its winners. After all, it represents the advent of the term “Pyrrhic victory.” Moreover, this portrait of the schoolroom emphasizes the interrogative pedagogy and textual authority that were typical of the day: —I forget the place, sir. 279 B.C. —Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book. —Yes, sir. And he said: Another victory like that and we are done for. That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. (U 2.11–15) While Stephen, reluctant teacher, teases out the answers from the pupils with his own halfhearted look at the book, the stupefying classroom drill gives over to a transhistorical vision. The image of teacher quizzing students transmogrifies into that of field commander interrogating subordinates : “From a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers, leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear” (U 2.16–17). Indeed, in the clipped cadences of the question-answer format, • 112 · Joyce and Militarism in the students’ constant repetition of “sir” after each response, the classroom discourse resembles a martial interview. Even student surnames like Armstrong and Sargent help complete the segue from modern schoolroom to ancient battlefield. There emerges a perspective not typically realized through the stultifying pedagogical procedures of rote memorization and authoritative interrogation. At the very least, it reflects Stephen’s conflicted attitude about serving an educational system primarily geared to transformingyoungboysintofuturesoldiers .AsDeclanKiberdnotes,“Theboysfrom such a colonial school could hope for nothing more—either military/naval service, or becoming apprentice Yoricks, fellows of infinite jest, at the London court” (58). The famously proleptic development of Ulysses—written during and after the Great War but set in the previous decade—anticipates the paradox by which Paul Fussell famously defines post–World War I literature: “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. . . . Irony is the attendant of hope, and the fuel of hope is innocence. One reason the Great War was more ironic than any other is that its beginning was more innocent” (7, 18). Innocence, hope, and irony abound in “Nestor” as the episode takes its shape at the nexus of schoolroom order and historical chaos. Joyce’s composition of the episode during the peak of the fighting in Europe underscores this juxtaposition, since as James Fairhall notes, “Corpsestrewn plains and Pyrrhic victories, in 1917, were topical subjects” (165).1 Schoolboys are made to reflect upon the facts of ancient battles as they are groomed for future ones known only too well to Ulysses’s author and first readers: “The teaching of Roman history, along with the practice of field sports, had fed a cult of manly prowess designed to counteract the enfeeblingacts oftheprolonged peacebefore1914.ButJoyce,writingthisepisode in Locarno in 1917, knew what the ‘back kick’ of aerial bombardment could wreak” (Kiberd 59). As Europe awoke from its historical nightmare, the earlydaysofthecenturymusthaveseemedallthemorehalcyonandremote in hindsight. Stephen seems eager for the students to escape at least from history as schoolroom subject, even if he knows none of them can escape from history as the confines of human experience. His Blakean vision of history’s end—“the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one final livid flame” (U 2.9–10)—suggests as well the apocalyptic potential of the modern weaponry unleashed in the new century. For their part, the students voice a preference for a fanciful tale from Gorescarred Books · 113 Stephen rather than a deadening account of military history. But instead of the entertaining ghost story they desire, they are treated to Stephen’s baffling riddle of the fox, which, according to Spoo, suggests the act of writing amid the episode...