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Page 145
Except that we have to admit that the wavelengths can change according to new messages emitted and that therefore the possibilities of attraction and repulsion change in time. In effect, this model presupposes that the system can be nourished by fresh information and that further data can be inferred from incomplete data.
The maze-like structure that represents the ideal competence of a Finnegans Wake reader results in being very similar to the Quillian modelas well as to the most up-to-date models provided by the so-called new connectionism. When one tries to provide a machine with a sort of competence that can match our own way of thinking and speaking, one is obliged to conceive of a cultural universe structured more as Finnegans Wake than as a grammar made with a dictionary plus some syntactic algorithms.
If the model of our encyclopedic competence is an immense web of interpretants where from every single point of the net every other point can be reached, then one could reread the whole Joycean opus as the gigantic attempt of presupposing, as its own reading code, an encyclopedia.
The first intuition of a semiosic encyclopedia came to the young Joyce through a decadent heritage, as if the encyclopedia was something that only the poet could call into life from a previous chaos. Roughly encyclopedic is the idea of a tissue of events that the epiphanic intuition can correlate in different ways, finding out new meanings from an unheard-of correlation. Walter Pater was teaching Joyce that reality is a sum of forces and elements that fade away as soon as they arise, a world of incoherent, flashing, and unstable impressions. To isolate epiphanic events means to dissolve the most conventional entities into a network of new relationships. The poet alone ''is capable of absorbing in itself the life that surrounds him and flinging it abroad amid planetary music" (Stephen Hero). The artistic activity consists in positing new relations between the elements of the "rhizome" of experience: "The artist who could disentangle the subtle sound of an image from the mesh of its defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist" (Stephen Hero). One of the most probable sources for the invention of the stream of consciousness was James's argument according to which reality has a myriad of forms, experience is never limited and is never complete: it is like a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every particle in its tissue.

 
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