Far More Than Throwaways

A man buys peaches and pears for a woman who is not his wife, and half a mile off her husband is hunting her a book. James Joyce's Wandering Rocks, the tenth episode of Ulysses, is built from moments like these: a scene in one street, interrupted by a sentence from another. Philip Kitcher has a way of reading those interruptions, and tests it here on Blazes Boylan in a fruit shop, on Boylan's secretary alone with her typewriter, and on Buck Mulligan and Haines in a Dame Street tea room, passing judgment on Stephen Dedalus in his absence. A scrap of paper on the Liffey gets the last word.