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ever, intermediate modes create themselves from terms that are all present in the text of FW. Here the associations can be of either a phonetic or a semantic type. |
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It should be noted that all the lexemes mentioned here are only those which are to be found in the text of FW. The same psycholinguistic test might have generated, in another subject, other equally plausible responses. Here we have limited ourselves to this type of response, not only because it is the Joycean one (in which case the experiment would only seek to understand how the pun is born, not how it is read), but also for reasons of economy and, in addition, because the reader of FW, controlled by the text, is in fact led into a game of associations that were previously suggested to him 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 the field of oriented possibilities). |
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The interconnections show, moreover, the way in which every lexeme can in this turn become the archetype of an associative series which would lead to the recuperation, sooner or later, of the associative terminals of another lexeme. The whole diagram (Figure 2.1) has a purely orientative 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 language, 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/ (where, to the previously cited associations, is added that of a 'message'), 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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2.5. The Games of the Swedish Stall-Bars |
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Once again we can foresee the objection that can be made to the diagram under consideration. The associative sequences, except for the first |
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