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produces a word which did not previously exist in the English lexicon. On the other hand, it produces a metaphor in praesentia because it does not annul one term, substituting it with another, but unites three preexisting words (scherzo, charade, and Scheherazade), in a sort of lexical monstruum (metaplasm), and in so doing it obliges us to see similarities and semantic connections between the joke (scherzo), the enigma (charade), and the narrative activity (Scheherazade).
3. Pun and Unlimited Semiosis
In Eco 1979 (2.4) I tried to show that each metaphor produced in Finnegans Wake (FW) is comprehensible because the entire book, read in different directions, actually furnishes the metonymic chains that justify it. I tested this hypothesis on the atomic element of FW, the pun, seen as a particular form of metaphor founded on subjacent chains of metonymies. Such a chain of metonymies is presupposed by the text as a form of background knowledge based on a network of previously posited cultural contiguities or psychological associations. But at the same time it is the text itself which, by a network of interconnected puns, makes the cultural background recognizable. I thus proposed to consider FW as a contracted model of the global semantic field.
Let us take the lexeme Neanderthal (not found as such in the text) and see what mechanism led the author to modify it into meandertale. Naturally, we could also follow the inverse process: we could take the pun found in the text and trace it back to its original components. But the very fact that we can conceive of two possible courses indicates that, in this case, the two moments coincide; it was possible to invent the pun because it is possible to read it; language, as a cultural base, should be able to allow both operations. It should be noted also that, for reasons of a simple operative convention, we will start from one of the component words of the pun in order to deduce the other; probably another one would serve our purpose equally well.
Our experiment thus has two senses: first, to see if, from a point outside Joyce's linguistic universe, we can enter into that universe; then, departing from a point internal to that universe, to see whether or not we can connect, through multiple and continuous pathways, as in a garden where the paths fork, all the other points. It will then come down to defining whether or not this entrance and this traversability are based on simple relationships of contiguity. For the moment, however, we will attempt to reason in termshowever imperfectly definedof "association" (phonetic and semantic).

 
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