Ulysses and the nightmare of history

Abstract

In the final chapter of A Portrait Stephen is looking eagerly towards the future: he hears the call of Europe and is eager to encounter 'the reality of experience' and to forge the uncreated conscience of his race (P257). He rejects Yeats' wish to press into his arms 'the loveliness which has long faded from the world.' Instead, Stephen, young and hopeful, thinks, 'Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world' (P255). Ulysses takes up Stephen's progress approximately two years from the point at which A Portrait leaves off: he is now twenty-two, back from Paris and wandering again along the same Dublin streets. But unlike the Stephen at the end of A Portrait who cries 'Welcome, O life!' this older Stephen's gaze is 'rere regardant', it is oriented towards the past (P257, 3.503). The past oppresses Stephen like a nightmare - his own past and that of his nation. In Ulysses he is burdened with his guilt at having rejected family, country, and religion and at his fear that his rejection might have contributed to his mother's death. (In "Circe" he will tell his mother's ghost: 'They say I killed you, mother ... Cancer did it, not I' [ 15 .4185-86]). The figure of his Mother comes to stand for everything he has turned his back on - she is his nightmere, his pursuing demon of filial and national obligation. In "Circe" he will say non serviam - but that does not exorcise her (15.4228).