Discussion Two - Episode 2, Nestor

[Jim]

Episode 2, Nestor – pp 28 – 45 new (page 21 old)


Scene: The School
Hour: 10 am
Art: History
Symbol: Horse
Technic: Catechism (personal)

Stephen teaches history and helps an awkward young lad with his sums. A word with Mr. Deasy – of debts and rebels, of bullocks and jews - then off he goews.

[Mark]

"Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life?" (27)

"Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea. Cousins, ten shillings. Bob Reynolds, half a guinea. Kohler, three guineas. Mrs McKernan, five weeks board. The lump I have is useless." (31)

Just a little humor about Stephen's relationship with money.

"Croppies lie down." (31)

I've always liked this line. It sort of seems like an equivalent to the "n" word; and it sort of sounds like a military command for the peasants to prostrate themselves before their betters: the English.

Trying to understand Stephen
I think the scene with Sargent is telling: Stephen seems to be drawing a parallel between myself and his mother and Sargent and his. The paragraph continues with Stephen thinking of mother's love, and concludes sadly with "...gone, scarcely having been."

[Just from my tatty memory, the real May Joyce had 11 or 12 children in like 13 years and died in her early 40s.]

[Tracy]

Wow- that's a short one.

Being a teacher I enjoy how close to the bone Joyce gets to the teacher's perspective to be in front a lot of itchy kids who don't value knowledge imparted. The sense is, they've no idea what they have in front of them, the depth of it. He obviously had this experience, and it's amazing how little the dynamic has changed.

Another source of isolation for Stephen, plus Mr. Deasy.

[Mark]

I think that it is generational too: children just don't like listening to grown-ups.
I think most of Stephen's isolation is self-imposed. If Stephen is so unhappy with everything why doesn't he do something about it?

[Jim]

Mark asked me to re-post these comments here in the Nestor thread:


I think it's interesting that when Mr Deasy delivers the punchline to his anecdote to Stephen, about how Ireland never persecuted the Jews because, and he says, "She never let them in,...". And I've always wondered why he doesn't say "We" instead of "She"? Is he trying to distance himself, because it happened in the past?




I've always liked Stephen's question to Armstrong:
"You Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?"

Since we have already talked about ghosts, I like the boys' request to Stephen:
"--Tell us a story , sir.
--Oh, do sir, a ghoststory."

And I think in the interview with Sargent Stephen reviews his own relationship with his mother. Admitting almost it seems that his mother loved him, and he knew it, and he was Ok with that, when he calls it:
"The only true thing in life.'



Tracy responded:

It's just an old fashioned Irish way of talking--Countries are she, boats are she, the weather is sometimes "she"..

[Tracy]

Hey does anyone get the riddle Stephen tells the children in this chapter. The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush? Whizzes right past me.

However, I was highly amused at the exchange about the difference between a pier and a bridge--sometimes I wonder if kids just play that they are thick. A disappointed bridge!!

[Mark]

I don't understand Stephen's riddle.
I think, "A disappointed bridge" is one of Stephen's best lines!