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This collection of 10 essays, which began as a conference at Cornell in 1985, goes far beyond the pun itself to a consideration of play in language and to language theory as the basis of thought and communication. The pun is a clarion call for breaching the limitations of language and the rules of rhetoric. Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the model text of this book for demonstrating not just the power of the pun, but also the elaborately significative portmanteau word (in Derek Attridge's fine essay), which calls upon the reader to invent the book. On Puns ranges backward to Frederick Ahl's account of classical literature, “Ars Est Caelare Artem (Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved),” and to R. A. Shoaf's “The Play of Puns in Late Middle English Poetry: Concerning Juxtology.” The essays contribute to literary criticism, language theory, and psychoanalysis. One of the best discussions is Debra Fried's “Rhyme Puns,” which falls into the area of poetic and rhetorical theory.
Let me concentrate on the psychoanalytic essays by Joel Fineman, Françoise Meltzer, and Avital Ronell (although there are also psychoanalytic considerations in the essays of Czerniecki and Ulmer). These three authors deal with Freud and Lacan, and the Lacanian subject seems to release a torrent of wordplay and stylistic extravagance—if not downright silliness—inspired by the dadaistic Master. The late Joel Fineman exercises the baroque splendor of his Fancy in ‘“The Pas de Calais’: Freud, the Transference and the Sense of Woman's Humor.” This is an impressive jeu, brimming with suggestive ideas. Basically, the subject is transference, and Fineman ingeniously sets Freud against Lacan. By etymology, “transference” is allied to “metaphor” and “translation”; Fineman skillfully applies ideas from literary criticism to