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lapsus (linguae or calami). The resemblance becomes necessary only after the contiguity is realized. Actually (FW itself is the proof), it is enough to find the means of rendering two terms phonetically contiguous for the resemblance to impose itself; at best, the similitude of signifiers (at least in the place of encounter) is that which precedes, and the similitude of signifieds is a consequence of it. |
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The exploration of the field of FW as a contracted model of the global semantic field is at once useful and derisive. It is useful because nothing can show us better than a reading of FW that, even when semantic kinship seems to precede the coercion to coexist in the pun, in point of fact a network of subjacent contiguities makes necessary the resemblance which was presumed to be spontaneous. It is derisive because, everything being given in the text already, it is difficult to discover the 'before' and the 'after'. But, before arriving at any theoretical conclusions, let us make an incursion into the text, with all the risks that that involves. |
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Let us take the lexeme /Neanderthal/ (not found as such in the text) and see what mechanisms 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 (as opposed to /Minucius Mandrake/), 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 purposes equally well. But this is the very characteristic of a language considered as the place of unlimited semiosis (as for Peirce), where each term is explained by other terms and where each one is, through an infinite chain of interpretants, potentially explainable by all the others.
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Our experiment thus has two senses: first, to see if, from a point outside Joyce's linguistic universe, we can enter into the 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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Let us take the word/Neanderthal/. In the following schema we will notice how the lexeme generates, through a phonetic association, three other lexemes: /meander/, /tal/ (in German, 'valley'), and/tale/, which combine to form the pun/meandertale/. In the associative course, how- |
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