No Odyssey

A rocket goes up over Sandymount Strand, and James Joyce's Gerty MacDowell leans back to watch it. The second half of Nausicaa, the thirteenth episode of Ulysses, opens on the fireworks everyone remembers, and Philip Kitcher reads them sentence by sentence. Then he stays with Leopold Bloom for the hour after, alone on the rocks, as Bloom tries out some homemade physics, writes a message in the sand, and hears a cuckoo clock in a house out of earshot. Out of those scraps Bloom builds a theory of what he can and cannot do, and Kitcher thinks it costs this novel something it cannot get back.