History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

Ulysses by James Joyce

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In the masterful first chapter of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus speaks of his 'two masters': one English and one Italian. England, which at the time ruled Ireland, and the Catholic Church, which Stephen views as the spiritual subjugator of the Irish people. These institutions represent the historical forces that have oppressed him and shaped his identity. Stephen’s interlocutor, an English student named Haines, dismisses the claim with a dry remark: 'It seems history is to blame.'

—The imperial British state," Stephen answered, his color rising, "and the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached some fibers of tobacco from his underlip before speaking.

"I can quite understand that," he said calmly. "An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.”

With this oppressive mood weighing on him, and the fact that his mother had died only days earlier, Stephen sets off for his temporary job as a teacher. Unsurprisingly, the lesson he teaches is a history lesson. The subject: King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who fought against the Roman army, defeating it twice, and being aware that his victory was so costly that it would only be a prelude to certain defeat. In short, the story of the first man to win a Pyrrhic victory.

After the class is dismissed, Stephen goes to Mr. Deasy's office to collect his pay. The pedantic schoolmaster pays Stephen his meager daily wage—while also dispensing stingy advice on how to save the few coins he gives him. He tries to imprint this lesson in Stephen’s mind by quoting the Bard: "But what does Shakespeare say?"

"Put but money in thy purse."

"Iago," Stephen murmured...

In a fascinating twist, Dedalus is fully aware that this line actually belongs to one of Shakespeare’s vilest villains. He murmurs quietly that knowledge but does not insist on it. He knows full well that his employer is not interested in hearing anything except his own voice.

During Mr. Deasy's unsolicited lecture, when the schoolmaster spews his anti-Semitic ideas about Jews being sinners against the light, Stephen responds with a simple question, one that Deasy cannot comprehend:

"Who has not?" Stephen said.

"What do you mean?" Mr. Deasy asked.

To that, Stephen gives the most famous line in the whole gigantic novel: —"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Almost always when Stephen Dedalus’ line is quoted, it is attributed to Joyce himself. Now, I'm not sure Stephen understood that, but by the end of Ulysses Joyce would offer us, his readers, a way to awake.

In Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we follow Stephen Dedalus’s coming of age, from childhood to his surprising decision to flee to Paris, 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.' In Ulysses, we meet Stephen a few years later, back in Dublin, where he has returned to visit his dying mother. Not only has he not yet become the great artist he aspires to be, but in the present of the novel, he wastes his time drinking and possibly pursuing a job as a hack journalist – perhaps as a way of turning away from his dreams.

A man of (shaky and misguided) principles, Stephen refused to kneel and pray for his mother despite her pleas, and now the guilt of having denied her final—and perhaps only—request haunts and torments him. He, the future writer, sees himself as a European and looks at his city and country with detachment. His home, like that of his Odyssey counterpart, Telemachus, has been taken over by outsiders. Stephen, detached from his city and nation, is an exile in his own land. And even in his own home.

True, he is lodging with a friend, but this friend Buck Mulligan exploits him, tries to divert him from his true calling as a writer in favor of quick earnings that will be squandered on drunken nights in Dublin’s pubs, and has invited a proxy of one of Stephen’s "masters" into his home: the Englishman.

At the start of Ulysses, Stephen is completely lost. He tried his luck and creative strength in Europe and returned home with his tail between his legs. Even his exile failed. How will he awaken from the nightmare of history? From the oppression he feels in every corner of Dublin, his home? The answer Joyce offers is almost revolutionary in its simplicity. An open rebellion will not free Stephen – he tried one like that with his mother and even with his father and only gained guilt as a result. His parents, and certainly the repressive British Empire, are stronger than him. In a sense, even the Catholic Church that he left has not truly left him. As Mulligan notes in the first chapter, the principles—and perhaps even the categorical thinking—are a legacy of the Jesuit education Stephen received from a young age.

Okay, if rebellion won’t work, what then? A less talented and profound writer than Joyce might have chosen love as the liberating force. But Stephen does not meet the love of his life. He is too conflicted with himself to make room for a partner. And in the famous chapter titled Circe, he finds himself in a distortion of the romantic search, the degraded sexual desire in Dublin’s red-light district, where he—and all the other characters—are thrown into a surreal nightmare. At one point in that chapter, even his hat scolds him for being a failure.

No, the solution Stephen finds lies in a friendship with an older man, a friend of his father’s. A kind and good-hearted man, who himself chooses to avoid going home to not confront the fact that his wife is cheating on him. The friendship Stephen forges with Leopold Bloom.

Bloom is seen by many as the complete outsider in Irish society. He is considered Jewish by the Catholic inhabitants of Dublin, though his father converted to Christianity. He receives some respect, but also quite a bit of ridicule for his character, his origins, his choice to abstain from alcohol, and his love of simple living. He is aware that his wife is cheating on him, and this provides the structure for the entire plot: Bloom and Stephen will meet again and again during the day the novel takes place. The young Stephen will spend time with his friends. The older Bloom will do everything he can to avoid going home and confronting the harsh truth of his marriage.

Only thanks to the friendship and care provided by a person like Bloom—half father figure, half friend—can Stephen Dedalus embark on a new path. We do not learn about it clearly from the novel, just as we do not know what will become of Bloom’s marriage to his wife, Molly, after the difficult day they’ve had. We don’t even know where Stephen spent the night in the end—since he chose not to stay with the Blooms, despite his two friends having earlier run off with the key to the tower where the three of them had slept. But if Stephen Dedalus is indeed Joyce’s alter ego, something that Joyce not only did not deny but actively encouraged, then we know where the kind of book that Stephen will ultimately write will come from.

The vast, magnificent, and at times unbearable novel that Joyce labored over for years—the novel that secured his worldwide fame even in his lifetime—is an ironic yet affectionate nod to Europe’s literary tradition, Irish history, and Western identity. It is both a critique and celebration of the cultural forces that shape us, and to the Hebraic and Hellenic spirits found in all of us, which is the point of intersection between Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Ulysses is also the fulfillment of Stephen Dedalus’s intellectual dreams, the book he will write when he matures—when he chooses art and friendship as the surest and most successful ways to awaken from the nightmare of history, and, in doing so, discover his place in the world.