Be Fruitful and Multiply

Anthony Burgess said this was the episode of Ulysses he would most like to have written, and Philip Kitcher starts there. James Joyce writes "Oxen of the Sun" as a history of the English language, from Latin and Anglo-Saxon through Malory, Everyman, Swift and Dickens, and on into a language of the future. Kitcher calls it the third place readers tend to give up, and tells you why not to: the more styles you know, the funnier it gets.

The scene is the lying-in hospital in Holles Street, where Leopold Bloom has come to ask after Mina Purefoy and ends up among carousing medical students, Stephen Dedalus among them. Every pastiche carries the same message, be fruitful and multiply, and Kitcher argues that the message is aimed at Bloom, who has fathered no child since Rudy died. He reads the Newman passage aloud, the one imitation Joyce plays straight, and shows how it lands on Bloom staring at a bottle. Then the language goes haywire and the party stumbles off toward Nighttown.