Bloowho

Four o'clock is coming, and Leopold Bloom knows exactly what it brings. Philip Kitcher takes on Sirens, the eleventh episode of James Joyce's Ulysses: it opens with sixty-one lines of apparent nonsense, and it is the second place where readers give up on the book. The usual account says Joyce is writing a fugue. Kitcher thinks the music has a job to do, and that the job is Bloom: a man at a shop counter being smiled at, two barmaids weak with laughter over an old chemist, and a tuning fork struck in a room he has not yet reached. So who, in this episode, is asking Bloowho?