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glyphs, logogryphs, ciphers, hints, medals, columns, ships, garters, chimeras. Joyce shared with him the same taste for lists and inventories. What interests us is that Tesauro knows quite well that metaphors are not created by any inventive felicity but require labor, the mastery of which takes practice. The first exercise is the reading of catalogues, anthologies, collections of hieroglyphics, medals, reverses, and emblems: it might be called a clear invitation to intertextuality, to the imitation of the "already said." But the second exercise presupposes the apprehension of a combinational mode.
Tesauro speaks of a categorical index made with files and tables, that is, a model of an organized semantic universe. This proceeds from Aristotle's categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, to be in a situation, to have, to act, to undergo), and then the various members that collect everything that can be ordered under the categories are systematized with them. Does one need a metaphor about a dwarf? One runs down the categorical index under the heading of Quantity, one identifies the concept Small Things, and all microscopic items that are found there will still be able to be divided into contextual selections: astronomy, human organism, animals, plants, and so on. But the index which proceeds according to substances should be integrated with a second index, in which every substance is analyzed for the particles that define the way in which the object in question manifests itself (in the category of Quantity one should then find "How large it is," "How much it weighs," "What parts it has;" in the category of Quality, there will be: "Whether it is visible," ''Whether it is not visible," and so on). This is obviously an actual and authentic system of content organized into an encyclopedia. At this point one will say of the dwarf that to calculate his tininess a geometric digit would be too vast a measure.
Using the categorical index, Tesauro creates and interprets not only metaphors but also neologisms and actual puns. Taking a linguistic invention as a departure point, he deduces an infinite number of others. He shows how from a witty invention one can arrive at an entirely infinite series of other inventions. The Cannocchiale aristotelico of Tesauro seems, in short, a manual with which to read Finnegans Wake. In point of fact, Finnegans Wake is an example of a categorical index put into practice, a sort of computer which has received the input of all available knowledge and which returns an output of new connections effected among the various elements of this knowledge. Finnegans Wake is the representation (even if in an artistic rather than theoretical form) of an encyclopedia in action.

 
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