Many Novels Tell Stories

Eleven in the morning on Sandymount Strand, a young man with his eyes shut, and an opening paragraph that ends more first readings of James Joyce's Ulysses than any other. This is Proteus, the third episode, and Philip Kitcher opens it with a claim about what kind of book this is and is not. Then he shows how much of Stephen Dedalus you can see with the Aristotle switched off. Two women come down onto the sand, and within a page Stephen has given them a profession, a widowhood, and a telephone line to Eden. Kitcher follows that line to where it leads, and it is much closer to home.