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fact led into a game of associations that were previously suggested by the co-text (which means that every text, however "open" it is, is constituted, not as the place of all possibilities, but rather as a field of oriented possibilities). |
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The interconnections show, moreover, the way in which every lexeme can in turn become the archetype of an associative series which would amalgamate sooner or later, with the associative terminals of another lexeme. The whole diagram has a purely orientational value, in the sense that it impoverishes the associations in terms of both number and dimension: a bidimensional graph cannot reproduce the game of interconnections produced when lexemes are brought into contact with their respective sememes. We should consider as multidimensional, not only the game of interconnections produced in the global semantic system of real languages, but also the game of that Ersatz fieldthe literary work, the text (in our case FW, more open to interconnections than are many other texts and thus more fit for experimentation). |
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If we pass from the diagram to Joyce's text, we can see how all the associations have been developed. They actually produce the puns which define the book. The book is a slipping beauty (and thus a beautiful sleeper who, in sleeping, generates lapsus by semantic slippages, in remembering a flaw, and so on), a jungfraud's messongebook a psychoanalytic lie, a virginal trick, a young message, a dream and a confusion, and so on and so on, a labyrinth in which is found a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons, and thus at last a Meandertale. |
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The pun-lexeme meanderthaltale becomes, in the end, the metaphoric substitution for everything that can be said about the book and that is said by the associative chains indicated in the diagram. |
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Thus, dealing with Joyce, semiotics is obliged to study as a specimen of object-language a work which is nothing else but an example of metalinguistic representation of the nature of language. The whole Joycean opus is a living example of a cultural universe ruled by the laws of Unlimited Semiosis. FW seems to instantiate such notions as "infinite regression" and "infinite series" or interpretation as "another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along" (Peirce 1934:1.339). |
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The universe of unlimited semiosis looks extraordinarily similar to the Joycean meandertale. One could say that the whole FW is only a metaphor for the semiosic universe, or that the theory of the semiosic universe is only a metaphor for FW. If it were only so, then the semiotic |
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