The Myth of Complete Understanding

What led to Princess Diana's death? Philip Kitcher answers that question the way the seventeenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses would answer it, in the exhaustive voice of Ithaca's questioner, and the result is a small demonstration of what that voice can never do. Bloom and Stephen are in the kitchen at Eccles Street past one in the morning, the homecoming written as a catechism that seems to promise everything, and Kitcher's case is that the promise is the joke. He follows the questioner through Bloom's trade, an advertisement for potted meat, and the one domestic problem the questions finally reach, and shows what they still manage to miss.