ABSTRACT
Richard Ellmann, has written a superlatively good biography of Joyce. It assembles, with a mastery Joyce himself would have admired, a great mass of published and unpublished testimony; it proceeds without the least fuss or affectation; and it is informed by critical comment of high quality, all the effective for being sparingly inserted. Joyce industry; witness Mr. Magalaner's scholarly collection, A James Joyce Miscellany and the James Joyce Quarterly. Joyce foresaw this when he kept adding to his puzzles, saying that he would ensure his fame by keeping the professors happy; and, sure enough, they now know so much about Ulysses that they call 'the older studies' merely 'the work of cultivated amateurs'. Joyce put into Ulysses all 'unexpected simultaneities' that hint at an order in a world. Without order, no integrity, consonance, clarity no epiphanies. The last word of the Wake is 'the', standing for all the definite articles out of which such epiphanies must come.
