Non Serviam

A drunk man at a brothel piano, past midnight, talking to his old friend's cap. Circe, the fifteenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, is a long way from the tower where Stephen Dedalus began his day, and Philip Kitcher reads this stretch of it as a search, one dead end after another, for something that will hold him up. What rises to meet him instead is the one argument he has never won. Kitcher sorts the hallucination voice by voice, and explains why two words of Latin and a swing of the ashplant amount to a decision. Then Bloom, alone with him in the street, sees something of his own.