Where the Return Begins

A tenor sings to a woman he has lost, and the man at the next table hears his wife. This is the end of Sirens, the eleventh episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, and Philip Kitcher reads it as the hour the whole book turns on: the point where Leopold Bloom, who has spent the day arranging not to go home, first hears something he could answer. Kitcher follows him through an aria and a ballad, keeps an ear on a blind piano tuner tapping his way back to the hotel, and walks him out onto the quay, where a dead patriot's last words settle over a passing tram.