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Chapter 7 - Wakean history: not yet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Derek Attridge
Derek Attridge
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

–You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

– Tarentum, sir.

– Very good. Well?

– There was a battle, sir.

– Very good. Where?

The boy's blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?

– I forget the place, sir. 279 bc.

– Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book. (U2.1–13)

This passage opens the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses, the episode in which the question of history – a topic explicitly raised at many points in the book – is posed most insistently. Is history a matter of dates and names in books (‘279 BC’, ‘Asculum’), Blakean fables of memory, ‘a tale like any other too often heard’ (U2.46–7), a route of possibilities carved through infinite impossibilities (U2.49–51), an inescapable nightmare (U2.377– and see chapter 6 above), humanity's movement ‘to one great goal’ (U2.380–1), a shout in the street (U2.386)?

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Chapter
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Joyce Effects
On Language, Theory, and History
 , pp. 86 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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