Repairer, Not Fatalist

Past two in the morning, James Joyce's Leopold Bloom climbs into bed beside his sleeping wife and finds that another man has been there first. The seventeenth episode of Ulysses, Ithaca, answers that discovery with a list of men's names, and Philip Kitcher thinks most readers have been reading that list wrong for a century. He follows the catechism as it sorts Bloom's feelings into tidy nouns and pronounces the marriage irreparable, and he asks what a tired man in a cold bed can actually do about it. Then comes a kiss, a conversation held carefully on both sides, and an old photograph that only Molly would recognise.