Joyce - Matt

From reading Alice in Wonderland and Edward Lear's poems, we have a strong basis on recognizing when polysemy is at play. In the previous texts, words were chosen for their explicit different meanings. For example, draw has both meaning of drawing on a piece of paper and drawing water from a well. By using specific words with explicit meanings, polysemy enhanced the experience of the text and confused the reader in a fun and silly way. 

Similarly, polysemy is at play in Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. However, instead of using words that have explicit meanings, he uses existing words and uses their sound to give it a double meaning. For example, on page 5 he mentions that "she has the has a gift of seek on site and she allcasually ansars helpers." The word "ansars" is an Islamic term that means helper. So in one sense, he says "helpers helpers." But phonetically, "ansars" is similar to "answers", so in another sense he is saying the person is "answers helpers" as if she was being productive. 

Another example is later when he writes it "may half been a missfired brick, as some say, of it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it." Joyce takes advantage of the phonetic sounds to create a sort of phonetic polysemy. The word "half" is sounds like "have", so "may half been a missfired brick", in a literal sense, is like saying half of a brick was misfired. Another way of reading it is to say "it may have been a missfired brick", which makes more direct sense. Maybe this is poor speculation of phonetic polysemy, but it could be possible. He then creates the phrase "mought have been" which uses a created word "mought" that sounds like a mash of "ought" and "might." So it sounds like "might have been" and "ought have been" at the same time. While there are subtle differences between might and ought, it still draws attention to the fact he mashed two words to create his own polysemy, unlike Carroll and Lear, who use established polysemy words to use. While Joyce plays on phonetics of words, it doesn't mean he deviates completely from the traditional polysemy seen with Carroll and Lear. For example, on page 6, he comments that there "was a wall of course in erection." Erection can be used in the context of buildings; building up a wall or that a wall was constructed and built. However, erection is far more commonly known to describe an aroused penis. Even though it is correct to say that a wall was erected, Joyce probably meant the reader to take the sexual connotation of erection due to the surrounding words in the same paragraph: hugh butt (or huge butt), feeled heavy (how heavy the penis is), shake and mastabatoom, which could be Joyce's take on the word masturbation. While Joyce does use the traditional use of polysemy words that Carroll and Lear use, Joyce does seem to create his own words by combining two words of similar parts of speech. He also uses existing words that phonetically sound like another word, making the sentence have multiple meanings.