This means that on the one hand all of the connections were certainly culturalized before Joyce justified them by pretending to institute them or discover them, while on the other they become evident to us (and allow us to reconstruct the ontology underlying the text) only because Joyce brought them to light (by making obvious the relationships among the terms of a domain that he himself brought into focus).
What makes the pun creative is not the series of connections (which potentially precedes it because they are already culturalized): it is the decision to oblige us to construct, by way of an unfamiliar ontology, short circuits that are possible but not yet evident. Between message and dream there is no phonetic similarity and only a weak semantic contiguity (whereby, but only in certain cultures, or as part of a psychoanalytic koiné, a dream is a message), and to bring them together the reader has been obliged to make the leap over unconnected points of the diagram so as to get from songe to mensonge or from message to mensonge. But from that moment—from the moment when the text has spoken—those points are no longer unconnected.
Language, carrying to creative outcomes the encyclopedic process of unlimited semiosis, has created a new polydimensional network of possible connections. This creative “gentle violence,” once set in motion, does not leave unaffected the collective encyclopedia (and indirectly, not even the one shared by those who have not read Joyce). It has left behind a trace, a fruitful wound.
1.9. The Formats of the Encyclopedia
1.9.1. From the Individual to the Maximal
However intriguing this reconstruction of a “Joycean ontology” may have proved to be, it cannot be denied that the model of a reduced labyrinth illustrated in Figure 1.21 is infinitely more impoverished than Finnegans Wake taken as a whole. As useful as it has been in understanding a series of implicit and explicit connections at the basis of a number of puns, and as instructive as it perhaps is as a miniaturization of an encyclopedic network, nevertheless, just like the rest of the ontologies we have spoken of so far, it fatally reduces the riches of the Maximal Encyclopedia (of which the entire text of Finnegans Wake is in any case only a part) to which it certainly refers us, though by means of a work of domestication.
We remarked in section 1.4 that a Maximal Encyclopedia cannot be consulted in its entirety because it represents the sum total of everything that was ever thought or said, or at least of everything that could in theory be discovered, to the extent to which it has been expressed through a series of materially identifiable interpretants (graffiti, stelae, monuments, manuscripts, books, electronic recordings)—a sort of World Wide Web far richer that the one to which we have access through the Internet.
Pavel (1986) invited us to try a fascinating mental experiment. Let us suppose that an omniscient being is capable of writing or reading a Magnum Opus that contains all of the true assertions regarding both the real world and all possible worlds. Naturally, since we can speak of the universe using different languages, and since each language defines it in a different way, there exists a Maximal Collection (Pavel calls it the “Total Image”) of Magna Opera. Let us now suppose that God charges a number of angels with writing Daily Books for each individual human being, in which they take note of all the propositions (concerning the possible worlds of that individual’s desires and hopes and the real world of his acts) that correspond to a true statement in one of the books that make up the Maximal Collection of Magna Opera. The collection of Daily Books belonging to a given individual must be produced on the Day of Judgment, along with the collection of the Books that assess the lives of families, tribes, and nations.
But the benevolent genie who writes a Daily Book is not content to align true statements: he connects them, evaluates them, builds them into a system. And since on the Day of Judgment individuals and groups will each have a defending angel, the defenders will rewrite for each individual another astronomical series of Daily Books in which the same statements will be linked together in different ways, and differently compared to the affirmations of some of the Magna Opera.
Since infinite alternative worlds make up each of the infinite Magna Opera, the angels will write an infinite number of Daily Books in which affirmations that are true in one world and false in the other will be mingled together. If we further hypothesize that some of the genies may be clumsy and mix up affirmations registered as mutually contradictory by a single Magnum Opus, what we will end up with will be a series of compendiums, miscellanies, compendiums of fragments of miscellanies that amalgamate strata of books of different origins, and at that point it will be very difficult to say which books are truthful and which fictional, and with respect to what original. We will have an astronomical infinity of books each of which will straddle different worlds and we will no doubt consider as true stories that others have considered as fictional.37
This gives us a good idea of what the Maximal Encyclopedia might look like, if we substitute for the angels the human beings who took time to leave behind their traces (from the bison depicted in the Altamira caverns to the invention of writing and beyond). The legend Pavel narrates gives a reasonable representation of our situation when confronted by the universe of affirmations that we are accustomed to accept not as “true” but in any case enunciated.38
In the preceding sections we saw how, confronted with the virtual immensity of the Maximal Encyclopedia (a regulatory hypothesis, a stimulus to the understanding of sentences of every type), we usually attempt to reduce its format, to construct local representations with the purpose of understanding a single context. Nevertheless, this entire dialectic between local and global is not so simple. In other words, recognizing it does not mean answering a question but formulating one. When in a given context we endeavor to reconstruct the portion of encyclopedia probably activated by some enunciator, to what format of the encyclopedia are we referring? Clearly, if a child tells us that the sun has moved, in our understanding of what the child means we do not refer the statement to complex cosmographical notions concerning a galactic revolution of the sun, but instead to the set of “ingenuous” habits of perception on the basis of which we say that the sun rises and sets. But what encyclopedic format do we refer to when we are talking to a scientist, to an educated person, to a farm laborer, to an inhabitant of a far-off country?
In Kant and the Platypus I discussed the difference between Nuclear Content (NC)—a set of interpretants on the basis of which both a lay person and a naturalist can agree on the properties evoked by the term mouse, both understanding in the same way the sentence there is a mouse in the kitchen—and Molar Content (MC), which represents the specialized knowledge that a naturalist may have of a mouse. We are justified, then, in thinking that on the one hand there is a Median Encyclopedia (shared in the present case by both the naturalist and the common native speaker) and on the other an unmanageable plethora of Specialized Encyclopedias, the complete collection of which would constitute the unattainable Maximal Encyclopedia. Accordingly, we could imagine the states (or strata) of what Putnam has called the social division of linguistic labor by hypothesizing a kind of solar system (the Maximal Encyclopedia) in which a great many Specialized Encyclopedias describe orbits of varying circumferences around a central nucleus (the Median Encyclopedia), but at the center of that nucleus we must also imagine a swarm of Individual Encyclopedias representing in sundry and unforeseeable ways the encyclopedic notions of each individual.