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Philip Kitcher on James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode 39

The Author's Obsessions

Featuring Philip Kitcher

Audio episode · 15 min

Philip Kitcher on Ulysses

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Past midnight, walking home, the book stops telling a story and starts asking questions. Ithaca, the seventeenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, was Joyce's favourite and is many readers' least, and Philip Kitcher thinks the scholars who defend it and the readers who skim it have both missed what it is for. He has a name for the voice behind all those questions, and a case about what that voice sees and what it cannot: a list of dates that is not about dates, a drop over the area railings, and the objects on Bloom's kitchen dresser. Does Ithaca serve the novel, or a theory of the novel?

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Read Deeper

O, I So Want to Be a Mother: The Man Who Gives Birth in Joyce and Shelley

Both novels put a man in labor. Philip Kitcher's Joyce makes him the book's tenderest wish; Charlotte Gordon's Shelley makes him its original sin.

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No Voltaire: Joyce's Priest, Voltaire's Pangloss, and Two Ways of Not Asking

Philip Kitcher calls the Jesuit who blesses a barge of turf a second Pangloss; Salman Rushdie's Voltaire fought Jesuits all his life. One drowned ship each.

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Why Is the Funeral in Ulysses So Funny? Comedy and Death in Joyce's Hades

Ulysses is funny on purpose, Kitcher argues: in Hades, comedy and death share a carriage, and laughter keeps Joyce's seriousness honest.

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The Interior Monologue: How Joyce Puts You Inside Stephen, Bloom, and Molly

The interior monologue is the engine of Ulysses, Kitcher argues: language attuned to each character, opening Stephen, Bloom, and Molly to the reader.

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The Dead and the Yes: Joyce's Two Endings in Mercy

For Banville and Kitcher, 'The Dead' and Molly's 'yes' are the same turn: Joyce ending both Dublin books in mercy, holding the living and the dead together.

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Dublin as a City of the Mind

Kitcher and Banville converge on Joyce's Dublin as a city of the mind: Banville's paralyzed Dubliners, and Kitcher's Bloom, the man who chose freedom.

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Antisemitism and Belonging in Ulysses: Whose Country Is It?

Kitcher names the antisemitism around Bloom and its engine, 'Boys' Club Morality': Dublin excludes its most decent man for the very virtues it lacks.

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