The New Womanly Man

A crowd that crowned James Joyce's Leopold Bloom a few pages ago now wants him burned, and the witness who saves him does it by announcing that he is about to have a baby. Midway through Circe, the fifteenth episode of Ulysses, the hallucination hands Bloom eight sons at once, and Philip Kitcher refuses to read it as a joke. He follows the fantasy back to a funeral carriage, to a strange evening at Glencree, and to the loss that changed the Blooms' marriage, and finds in it the two things Bloom wants most and cannot say. Then a nymph steps down from the bedroom wall to argue the opposite.