The Line of Infidelity

A dead man has just testified in Leopold Bloom's defence, and the trial in Nighttown is over. Philip Kitcher takes the fifteenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Circe, to a question most readers settle too fast: a husband who has looked, written and wandered all day is grieving over his wife's afternoon, so what gives him the right? Kitcher's answer turns on where Bloom draws his own line, and on a shriveled potato a girl in a sapphire slip pulls from his pocket. Then the madam arrives, and the brothel stops being the subject. The marriage is. Bella Cohen has a question for Bloom, and he has no answer.