link two different images by shifting in its own meaning. This may be illustrated by the lines:
What use are riches when you diamonds,
Rubies and gold are dross.
In this crude example, “diamond” shifts as it is pronounced from the word “die”, necessary to complete the thought “when you die” to the full meaning of the precious stone, as though the sound “die” started in the poet’s subconscious mind a train of images associated with “riches”.
The Japanese “pivot-word” shows a characteristic feature of the language, the compression of many images into a small space, usually by means of puns which expand the overtones of words. In English the use of the pun, or the play on words, for this purpose is not common, but there are examples even before Joyce pushed this method to the extreme with such creations as Meandertalltale. In Macbeth, for instance, at a highly tragic moment in the play occur the lines:
Your castle is surpriz’d; your wife and Babes
Savagely slaughtered: To relate the manner
Were on the Quarry of these murther’d Deere
To adde the death of you.
Shakespeare certainly did not intend the pun on “deer” and “dear” to be greeted with laughter; it serves rather to increase the complexity of the lines, as it would in a Japanese drama.[1] The great number of similar-sounding words in Japanese affords a perhaps unique range of play on words. Puns were sometimes used for comic effects as in other languages, but the tragic pun
- ↑ See Muir, Kenneth, “The Uncomic Pun”, in the Cambridge Journal, Vol. 3, No. 8, May, 1950.
