Two essays that explore portmanteaus and puns for the last reading group at Site:
Derek Attridge - Unpacking the portmanteau, or who's afraid of Finnegan's Wake?
Soeren Hattesen Balle - Slips of the pun: signifying sex in the poetry of John Ashbery
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puns and ambiguities are to common language what adultery and perversion are to ‘chaste’, that is, socially orthodox, sexual relations. They both bring together entities (meanings/people) that have ‘conventionally’ been differentiated and kept apart; and they bring them together in deviant ways, bypassing orthodox rules governing communications and relationships. (A pun is like an adulterous bed in which two meanings that should be separate are coupled together.) It is hardly an accident that Finnegans Wake, which arguably demonstrates the dissolution of bourgeois society, is almost one continuous pun (the connection with sexual perversion being quite clear to Joyce).
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 1979, quoted by Derek Attridge in Peculiar Language, quoted by Soeren Hattesen Balle in Slips of the pun.
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