The Voices Resonate Within Him

A thunderclap over a maternity hospital, and a very drunk Stephen Dedalus who hears in it the anger of God. Halfway through James Joyce's Oxen of the Sun, the fourteenth episode of Ulysses, the prose has reached John Bunyan and the talk has settled on sex and childbirth. Philip Kitcher listens to that talk as Leopold Bloom must: as a man with a dead son and a wife who spent the afternoon with another man. He follows Bloom into an opium dream, decodes a horse race told as a Greek idyll, and ends on a historian's judgment of a man who has stared at a bottle for four minutes.