The Episode That Got the Book Banned

For years Ulysses could not be read in England or America, and Philip Kitcher opens with the reason: this episode. On Sandymount Strand, where Stephen Dedalus walked that morning, Gerty MacDowell sits with two friends and some small children, waiting for the fireworks. Watching her is Leopold Bloom. As the fireworks go up she leans back and lets him see, and Bloom has an orgasm. Then she hobbles away, and he sees that she is lame. Tame stuff by today's standards, Kitcher says, and yet this was the chapter that caused all the trouble.

The chapter splits in two. The first half is written as Gerty would write it, or as the fiction, the journalism and the ad copy she admires would, and it is punctuated by what Kitcher calls Gerty talk: sentences strung together on the word "because" that run on and on. He reads one of them aloud, a single sentence about wearing blue for luck, and fills in who Gerty is, a good-looking young woman of twenty-one or twenty-two, with an accident behind her and a young man who seems to have gone.

The second half is Bloom's. Kitcher follows his mixture of shame and pride, his decision not to go home to Molly yet but to call at the lying-in hospital instead, and the scrap of paper and the stick he writes with in the sand. In this last interior monologue, Kitcher argues, Bloom has turned back toward Molly and begun to think about repair.