Two Worlds

Past midnight in Nighttown, a gong talks, a dead man walks in, and Leopold Bloom is ridden like a horse. Circe, the fifteenth episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, is the one readers most often give up on, and Philip Kitcher thinks the usual way of explaining it is wrong. He offers a different model and uses it to sort what happens that night from what is only felt. Then he tests it on the shortest and strangest visitation of all: Molly, in Turkish costume, correcting her husband on how to address her. What Bloom says back to her is the whole marriage in a sentence.