lead us to identify, sooner or later, other associative chains. The whole diagram has a purely orientative value, in the sense that it reduces the associations numerically and dimensionally, but if we proceed from this ontology to Joyce’s text, we observe that all the associations registered by the network have been developed (in other words, we see how that ontology had its origin in the need to render explicit the associations that that text intended to provoke). Indeed, every association produces a pun that defines the book. The book is a slipping beauty (and hence a sleeping beauty who as she sleeps generates a series of lapsus through semantic slips, mindful of an error, etc.), a jungfraud’s messonge-book (where, to the associations already cited, that of message is added), a labyrinth (or meandertale ) in which we find a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons (the expression that gave rise to the schema, which naturally would have been clearer had the various circuits been colored differently). As a final synthesis, in the pages of the book the neologism meanderthalltale becomes the metaphorical stand-in for all that can be said about the book itself and which is said by the associative chains identified in the network.
Figure 1.21
In the associative sequences, semantic rather than phonetic in nature, the terms are associated through identity or similarity of properties (not real, but culturally imputed ). If we reread the associative sequences we see that each of them could be constructed by referring to a “notional field” accepted in a given culture or to one of those typical linguistic carrefours or crossroads theorized by Trier, Matoré, and others. A survey of the notional fields acquired by a given culture would explain not only why Freud and Fraud may be connected, by phonetic similarity, but also Freud-dream and Freud-Jung.
Let us consider, for example, the sequence generated by Tal: on the one hand it refers us to space and place, genera of which Tal is, so to speak, the species. But space in turn refers to time since the relationship between space and time is a typical relationship of complementarity. The relationship between time and the past and between time and the cycles (corsi e ricorsi) of Giambattista Vico arises from a more or less textbook contiguity.
This means that on the one hand all of the connections were certainly culturalized before Joyce justified them by pretending to institute them or discover them, while on the other they become evident to us (and allow us to reconstruct the ontology underlying the text) only because Joyce brought them to light (by making obvious the relationships among the terms of a domain that he himself brought into focus).
What makes the pun creative is not the series of connections (which potentially precedes it because they are already culturalized): it is the decision to oblige us to construct, by way of an unfamiliar ontology, short circuits that are possible but not yet evident. Between message and dream there is no phonetic similarity and only a weak semantic contiguity (whereby, but only in certain cultures, or as part of a psychoanalytic koiné, a dream is a message), and to bring them together the reader has been obliged to make the leap over unconnected points of the diagram so as to get from songe to mensonge or from message to mensonge. But from that moment—from the moment when the text has spoken—those points are no longer unconnected.
Language, carrying to creative outcomes the encyclopedic process of unlimited semiosis, has created a new polydimensional network of possible connections. This creative “gentle violence,” once set in motion, does not leave unaffected the collective encyclopedia (and indirectly, not even the one shared by those who have not read Joyce). It has left behind a trace, a fruitful wound.
1.9. The Formats of the Encyclopedia
1.9.1. From the
Figure 1.21
In the associative sequences, semantic rather than phonetic in nature, the terms are associated through identity or similarity of properties (not real, but culturally imputed ). If we reread the associative sequences we see that each of them could be constructed by referring to a “notional field” accepted in a given culture or to one of those typical linguistic carrefours or crossroads theorized by Trier, Matoré, and others. A survey of the notional fields acquired by a given culture would explain not only why Freud and Fraud may be connected, by phonetic similarity, but also Freud-dream and Freud-Jung.
Let us consider, for example, the sequence generated by Tal: on the one hand it refers us to space and place, genera of which Tal is, so to speak, the species. But space in turn refers to time since the relationship between space and time is a typical relationship of complementarity. The relationship between time and the past and between time and the cycles (corsi e ricorsi) of Giambattista Vico arises from a more or less textbook contiguity.
This means that on the one hand all of the connections were certainly culturalized before Joyce justified them by pretending to institute them or discover them, while on the other they become evident to us (and allow us to reconstruct the ontology underlying the text) only because Joyce brought them to light (by making obvious the relationships among the terms of a domain that he himself brought into focus).
What makes the pun creative is not the series of connections (which potentially precedes it because they are already culturalized): it is the decision to oblige us to construct, by way of an unfamiliar ontology, short circuits that are possible but not yet evident. Between message and dream there is no phonetic similarity and only a weak semantic contiguity (whereby, but only in certain cultures, or as part of a psychoanalytic koiné, a dream is a message), and to bring them together the reader has been obliged to make the leap over unconnected points of the diagram so as to get from songe to mensonge or from message to mensonge. But from that moment—from the moment when the text has spoken—those points are no longer unconnected.
Language, carrying to creative outcomes the encyclopedic process of unlimited semiosis, has created a new polydimensional network of possible connections. This creative “gentle violence,” once set in motion, does not leave unaffected the collective encyclopedia (and indirectly, not even the one shared by those who have not read Joyce). It has left behind a trace, a fruitful wound.
1.9. The Formats of the Encyclopedia
1.9.1. From the
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