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Philip Kitcher on James Joyce's Ulysses

Episode 47

What Is Molly Affirming?

Featuring Philip Kitcher

Audio episode · 16 min

Philip Kitcher on Ulysses

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James Joyce's Molly Bloom lies awake making plans for the morning: eggs and tea in the moustache cup, her best shift and drawers, and a speech for her husband. Philip Kitcher reads the close of the eighteenth episode of Ulysses, Penelope, as the place where the whole marriage is finally argued out, and he reads it against the grain of her complaints. Her schemes have a purpose she never quite names. Her ledger of Poldy's faults has a second column. And the last word of the book, the famous Yes, answers a question most readers never think to ask: what is she saying yes to?

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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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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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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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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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