Looking Back over That Strange Time

A lawyer takes out a cigarette case and does not light a cigarette, and for four lines the seventh episode of James Joyce's Ulysses stops making sense. Philip Kitcher, in the newspaper office of Aeolus, with Stephen Dedalus blushing at a compliment and Bloom out chasing an advertisement, treats that strange paragraph as a case to be solved: whose judgments are these, and how did a cigarette case become a lit cigar? Then he turns to the headlines that chop the chapter into pieces and reads in their swings between sobriety and silliness a verdict on the hour, and on whether Stephen belongs in a newsroom at all.