Bloom Has Donned a Mask

Past midnight in a cabman's shelter, James Joyce's Leopold Bloom buys Stephen Dedalus a coffee he won't drink, and the sentences describing it are the worst in Ulysses. This is the sixteenth episode, Eumaeus, and Philip Kitcher thinks the badness is the point. Most critics call the prose tired; one famous critic called it Bloom's own writing. Kitcher has a third answer, and it turns on a walk-on's family tree, one phrase inside it, and what Bloom does to his own voice on the one night he wanted to be heard. Then a sailor sits down and talks. Whose bad writing is this, and what is it hiding?