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Philip Kitcher on James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode 48

Under a Microscope

Featuring Philip Kitcher

Audio episode · 8 min

Philip Kitcher on Ulysses

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Was it worth it? That is the question every reader asks on the last page of James Joyce's Ulysses, and in this final episode Philip Kitcher answers it the only way a philosopher can, by setting the book beside War and Peace and Middlemarch and asking what a single day under a microscope can show that decades cannot. He refuses to say how the Blooms turn out, and invents a sequel, then a grimmer one, to show that no ending could close this book. What Joyce gives instead is smaller and harder: an emotional return, and a demand on the people who read him.

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Read Deeper

O, I So Want to Be a Mother: The Man Who Gives Birth in Joyce and Shelley

Both novels put a man in labor. Philip Kitcher's Joyce makes him the book's tenderest wish; Charlotte Gordon's Shelley makes him its original sin.

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No Voltaire: Joyce's Priest, Voltaire's Pangloss, and Two Ways of Not Asking

Philip Kitcher calls the Jesuit who blesses a barge of turf a second Pangloss; Salman Rushdie's Voltaire fought Jesuits all his life. One drowned ship each.

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Why Is the Funeral in Ulysses So Funny? Comedy and Death in Joyce's Hades

Ulysses is funny on purpose, Kitcher argues: in Hades, comedy and death share a carriage, and laughter keeps Joyce's seriousness honest.

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The Interior Monologue: How Joyce Puts You Inside Stephen, Bloom, and Molly

The interior monologue is the engine of Ulysses, Kitcher argues: language attuned to each character, opening Stephen, Bloom, and Molly to the reader.

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The Dead and the Yes: Joyce's Two Endings in Mercy

For Banville and Kitcher, 'The Dead' and Molly's 'yes' are the same turn: Joyce ending both Dublin books in mercy, holding the living and the dead together.

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Dublin as a City of the Mind

Kitcher and Banville converge on Joyce's Dublin as a city of the mind: Banville's paralyzed Dubliners, and Kitcher's Bloom, the man who chose freedom.

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Antisemitism and Belonging in Ulysses: Whose Country Is It?

Kitcher names the antisemitism around Bloom and its engine, 'Boys' Club Morality': Dublin excludes its most decent man for the very virtues it lacks.

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