Joyce's Benefictions

Helmut Bonheim’s Joyce’s Benefictions offers a lucid, tightly argued tour of Joyce’s major works, reading rebellion and anti-authoritarian play as the motor of both style and theme. Moving from Dubliners and A Portrait to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Bonheim shows how Joyce’s “outlaw” procedures—parody, portmanteau, montage—are inseparable from his persistent fascination with the very institutions he resists. Chapters on Leopold Bloom’s humane but compromised paternity, the alphabetic and musical “os” motif in Ulysses, and the serial role-reversals that unsettle any fixed hierarchy frame Joyce’s art as a long experiment in fusing technique with a heterodox ethics. Part of the influential Perspectives in Criticism series, the book situates Joyce’s innovations within broader debates about authority, language, and the cyclical logics of history.

Equally attentive to close reading and big claims, Bonheim reconceives Finnegans Wake as a theater of competing sovereignties—fathers, kings, priests—perpetually toppled and reinstalled, with Earwicker’s fall and return emblematic of the work’s comic-epic design. A culminating chapter casts Joyce’s art as an “epic of anarchy,” balancing formal audacity with a surprisingly stable prose lucidity that keeps even the Wake’s densest passages tethered to intelligible rhythms and social comedy. For scholars and advanced students of modernism, Joyce’s Benefictions remains a compelling synthesis: a study that models how to read across oeuvre, medium, and myth to disclose the ethical pressure under Joyce’s verbal pyrotechnics.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.