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Page 146
Between the first novels and Ulysses, however, this idea of encyclopedia undergoes a substantial change. If in the early work this tissue was only something imprecise between our psychological activity and metaphysical structure (something midway between the impalpable structure of "reality" and the equally impalpable network of the creative imagination), in Ulysses it was more clearly referred to a supposed structure of the physical world as described by modern science.
With Finnegans Wake this semiotic process is definitely implemented; the tissue of events has become a tissue of linguistic entities. The encyclopedia underlying Finnegans Wake is a purely linguistic or semiotic one, a world of infinite semiosis where words (along with their meanings) "by the coincidence of their contraries reamalgamerge in that identity of undiscernible" (FW, p. 49).
5. Early Jesuit Semiotics
It seems that in order to read and understand Finnegans Wake the "ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia" ought to possess a sort of global index of all the knowledge ever expressed by language. It is curious to note that this idea of an encyclopedia index had been developed in the seventeenth century by a Baroque rhetorician of metaphor, the Italian Emanuele Tesauro, whom Joyce probably had never read. We cannot, however, underestimate the fact that Tesauro was a Jesuit, and that the search for a multiple combination of elements, the idea of an Ars Magna and of a total encyclopedia, obsessed many Jesuits during and after the Baroque era (see, first of all, Athanasius Kircher, but also Gaspar Schott and many others). I do not know whether someone has carefully studied the relationship between Joyce's cultural background and that very peculiar mainstream of Jesuit culture.
Tesauro wrote a treatise on metaphor, Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1655), in which he appears to be aware of the fact that, after Galileo, the way of looking at the universe had changed. Nevertheless, Tesauro wants to demonstrate that the Aristotelian notion of metaphor still represents a valid instrument (a telescope) with which to know, not the world of physical events, but that of human language and the possibilities within it for creation and knowledge.
Here we won't concern ourselves with the minutiae or with the enthusiasm with which the author extends the metaphorical mechanism to visual witticisms, painting, sculpture, actions, inscriptions, mottoes, maxims, broken sentences, laconic letters, mysterious characters, hiero-

 
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