While Joyce used puns as a means to compress statements, he would string together words and syllables that as they collided released new meanings, more puns. This practice is no novelty in the Menippean tradition of language experimentation. Dorothy Coleman, for example, devotes much of her chapter 'Poetic Prose,'to this aspect of Rabelais, for example, his 'Antipericatametanapareugedamphicribationesmerdicantium.' Joyce carried that excess to new lengths (101 letters, at full stretch) and added to the horseplay a serious poetic (and satyric) dimension. His vehicle is the famous 'thunderclaps': the hundred-lettered words, not spoken by any character but environmental utterances made by the language itself. Any word that draws attention to itself independently of its meaning, whether by inappropriateness or by density or richness of meaning or texture or any other feature (such as unusual spelling), becomes a thing, an object of scrutiny as an artefact. Joyce routinely pushed words to this point in the Wake, and not only words themselves: he even meditates, at one point, upon the writer as alchemist, magically transforming events with literacy and writing on his own skin (reversing the usual process of making parchment from hides: the page as extension of skin): '... this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud' (FW, 185.34-186.08).
Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake