The City Laughs

It is three in the afternoon, and for one hour James Joyce's Ulysses forgets its heroes. Wandering Rocks, the tenth episode, sends a priest, a viceroy and most of Dublin through the streets in nineteen scenes, and plants traps in most of them. Philip Kitcher is not interested in the traps for their own sake. He reads the hour as an argument about who deserves a novel, as a lesson in connecting things once the usual map is gone, and finally as a question about the voice doing the telling. His answer is stranger than a narrator. By the end you may suspect the city is in on the joke.