Working Through

Close to midnight in the brothel district of James Joyce's Dublin, a tired advertising canvasser is stopped by two policemen and put on trial for his sins. Circe, the fifteenth episode of Ulysses, is the chapter readers most often give up on, and Philip Kitcher has a way through it: he reads the whole hallucination as a course of treatment, with a cardinal's method behind it. Here he walks the opening scene with Stephen Dedalus, stands with Bloom in the street as the ghosts clear, and then follows the arrest, where the charges are grotesque and Kitcher knows exactly where each one came from.