Gerty Speak

A girl on the rocks at Sandymount Strand, a church full of hymns behind her, and a book by James Joyce that reads like something bought at a railway station. Nausicaa, the thirteenth episode of Ulysses, hands the page to Gerty MacDowell, and Philip Kitcher has a name for the way she tells her own story: Gerty speak. He listens closely, down to the clause that arrives a beat late, then asks the harder question: why should a reader care about her? His answer runs through her father, her prospects, and a man she has never met. Then the fireworks begin, and Kitcher tells you what the idiom is for.