A Poet Who Couldn't Write Poems

James Joyce, Philip Kitcher says, was an extraordinary poet who couldn't write particularly good poems. The poetry went into the prose: the last paragraphs of Dubliners, and much of Ulysses, which he asks you to read at the pace you would give a poem. In this closing film he steps back from the episodes to say where the book sits in Joyce's work and what it is finally about.

Dubliners is a set of studies in confined and broken lives, with one exception at the end, Gabriel Conroy and his wife. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus trying to give his life a direction and failing in each one he tries, until he leaves for Paris. Ulysses opens with him back in Dublin, fallen like Icarus. Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom have lost their way too, since the death of their son, and Kitcher reads them through the first lines of Dante's Inferno, the dark wood where the straight way was lost.

Kitcher's argument is that the adultery of the afternoon is what turns them: it drives Bloom back toward Molly and sets off the stocktaking that ends in her verdict in his favor. The book is only a small part of their odyssey, and he thinks readers should be content with that. It is the turning point. He ends by asking you to read it again.