Beating the Bounds: Excess and Restraint in Joyce's Later Works

by Roy Benjamin

Exploring the role of boundaries and limits in the
writing of James Joyce



Beating the Bounds examines the role
of boundaries and limits in James Joyce's later works, primarily Finnegans Wake but also Ulysses and other texts. Building on the
ideas of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Giordano Bruno, and scholar Fritz
Senn, Roy Benjamin explains and reconciles Joyce's contrary tendencies to
establish and transgress limits.

Benjamin
begins by contrasting Joyce's exploration of the artificial impositions of
ritual and political power with the writer's attention to natural boundaries of
rivers and mountains. The next section considers sexual, spiritual, and interpersonal
boundaries in the Wake. Benjamin then
discusses how Joyce simultaneously affirms and undermines the limits of
philosophy, geometry, and aesthetics. The final
section covers Joyce's representation of the boundaries imposed in cosmogonic
myths, the collision between the bounded medieval world and the boundless world
of modern science, and the drive to escape from the boundaries of place.

In
this detailed and original analysis, Benjamin demonstrates that in
Joyce's writing, the tendency to disintegrate into
chaos is countered by an urge to impose order. Benjamin's close readings put an
abundance of subjects in conversation through the concept of limits, showing
the Wake's relevance to many
different fields of thought.



A
volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

266 pages, ebook

Published February 7, 2023