Harry Hughes

Asked for a song in Bloom's kitchen, James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus sings an old ballad in which a Jew's daughter lures a Christian boy into her house and cuts off his head. That is the seventeenth episode of Ulysses, Ithaca, at its strangest, and Philip Kitcher refuses the easy account, that Stephen is being cruel to the man who rescued him. Joyce supplies a short, baffling explanation, and Kitcher reads its pronouns three ways at once: the boy, the host, and someone older than both. Then he turns to the music, a few handwritten bars scholars have called incompetent, and asks what kind of singing they record.