Horseness

Two o'clock in the National Library, and James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus has finally got the room he wanted: a poet, an essayist, a librarian, and a theory that the ghost in Hamlet is Shakespeare himself. This is the ninth episode of Ulysses, Scylla and Charybdis, and Philip Kitcher begins with a single strange word in Stephen's head: horseness. Unpack it, he argues, and you have the whole afternoon's quarrel, two ideas of what a book is for, facing each other across a desk. Then he reads Stephen's dazzling opening paragraph the way nobody in that room does, and follows the argument to the one question Stephen has been avoiding.