Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Péter Egri: (Per)chance: Joyce and Cage
on Finnegans Wake 1979, Third, Fourth Writings through Finnegans Wake 1980, Fifth Writing through Finnegans Wake 1980). Cage's interest in Joyce is also evident in his comparative paper "James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Eric Satie: An Alphabet" (1981), an essay of "both re-inscription and deconstruction." (Perloff —Perloff and Junkerman, JCC1A 118) Cage has even claimed that "living in this century, we live, in a very deep sense, in the time of Finnegans Wake " (Cage and Kostelanetz —Gena, Brent and Gillespie, JCR 146). Dissatisfied with limiting his attention to just a few lines of Finnegans Wake as he did in setting The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs , in his later obsessive Joycean ventures, Cage enlarged his focus and extended the scope and variety of his chance operations. 1. Mesostics. While in an acrostic in verse or prose, "usually the initial letters of each line can be read down the page to spell either an alphabet, a name (often that of the author, a patron, or a loved one), or some other concealed message," (Baldick 2) in a mesostic, as Cage uses the term, the same procedure is adopted within the words. A mesostic is an internal acrostic. In Cage's words, an acrostic is "the name down the edge. A mesostic is a name down the middle." (Cage and Kostelanetz —Gena, Brent and Gillespie, JCR 143) Some authors, including Baldick, consider the Cagean mesostic a variant of acrostic. Some of Cage's "mesostics" are, in fact, acrostics. Cage must have supposed that nothing could possibly be more Joycean in Finnegans Wake than Joyce's name, so he has chosen words and phrases from Finnegans Wake that included, somewhere in the middle, the letters J-A-M-E-S J-O-Y-C-E. As a means of convenience, he has capitalized the appropriate letters. Accordingly, the first mesostic is: "wroth with twone nathandJoe," "A," "Malt," "JhEm," "Shen," "pftJschute," "Of Finnegan," "that the humptYhillhead of humself," "is at the knoCk out," and "in thE park." (Joyce 3) Cage was especially proud of the last mesostic of Writing through Finnegans Wake. It comes from the last but one page of Joyce's work and certainly sounds evocative: * 78
