Full of Tricks and Traps

Five minutes to three, and a Jesuit checks his watch before setting out across Dublin. The tenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses looks like the simplest chapter in the book: nineteen scenes and a passing cavalcade. Philip Kitcher thinks that is the trap. He reads the chapter as sentences that sit side by side on the page while pointing half a mile apart, names that belong to the wrong man, and he argues that Joyce lays them on purpose, for a reason that reaches past Dublin to Nietzsche. Then he turns to Father Conmee, the kindly rector from Portrait, and asks what a thousand drowned Lutherans do to his theology.