Beating the Bounds

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.