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Page 23
Such is the case of Finnegans Wake, where the vanishing of everything into the mist of a linguistic dream does not represent an escape from ideology but, rather, the reiteration of a Weltanschauung transparently expressed by the whole linguistic strategy of the book.
0.6.2. Semantic Disclosures
When faced with a lexeme, the reader does not know which of its virtual properties (or semes, or semantic markers) has to be actualized so as to allow further amalgamations.
Should every virtual property be taken into account in the further course of the text, the reader would be obliged to outline, as in a sort of vivid mental picture, the whole network of interrelated properties that the encyclopedia assigns to the corresponding sememe. Nevertheless (and fortunately), we do not proceed like that, except in rare cases of so-called eidetic imagination. All these properties are not to be actually present to the mind of the reader. They are virtually present in the encyclopedia, that is, they are socially stored, and the reader picks them up from the semantic store only when required by the text. 11 In doing so the reader implements semantic disclosures or, in other words, actualizes nonmanifested properties (as well as merely suggested sememes).
Semantic disclosures have a double role: they blow up certain properties (making them textually relevant or pertinent) and narcotize some others.
For instance, in Un drame bien parisien it is said that Raoul is a /Monsieur/ and therefore a male human adult. Ought it to be actualized that a human adult has two arms, two legs, two eyes, a warm-blooded circulatory system, two lungs, and a pancreas? Since many overcoded expressions (such as the title) tell the reader that he is not dealing with an anatomical treatise, he keeps these properties narcotized until chapter 2, where (see above, text (5)) Raoul raises his hand. At this point the virtual property of having hands must be actualized or blown up. Raoul can very well survive (textually) without lungs, but, were we reading the story of Hans Castorp falling ill in Mann's Zauberberg, the question about lungs would not sound so preposterous.
However, to remain narcotized does not mean to be abolished. Virtual properties can always be actualized by the course of the text. In any case they remain perhaps unessential, but by no means obliterated. It is unessential to the course of the text that Raoul has a warm-blooded circulatory system, but were this property denied the reader would have to refocus his cooperative attention by looking for other intertextual frames, since the story would shift from comedy to Gothic.
To realize all the needed semantic disclosures, a mere comparison between manifested sememes is not enough. Discoursive structures need a textual operator: the topic.

 
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