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

Just a whisk Of pitY a Cloud in pEace and silence (Joyce 627) 2. Accidental punctuation. In his 1978 interview with Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage referred to another chance procedure he was going to adopt in redoing the Wake: "Then what I'm going to do, Richard, is distribute the punctuation by chance operations on the page like an explosion. Read just the text and you'll see the punctuation omitted. You can imagine it where you like. You can replace it where you wish." (Cage and Kostelanetz

—Gena, Brent and Gillespie, JCR 145) 3. Orienting punctuation according to the twelve parts of the clock. Since the night hours are significant in Joyce's dream myth, on page 1 of Cage's version of the Wake "the exclamation point ... is tilted slightly like the tower of Pisa." (Cage and Kostelanetz

—Gena, Brent and Gillespie, JCR 145) 4. Keeping an index. To cut down the enormous size of his Writing through Finnegans Wake

, and to maintain the importance of chance, for the purposes of Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake

, Cage kept a card index of mesostic syllalbles already used and thereby discarded unnecessary repetitions. In this manner, he reduced 125 pages to 39. 5. I Ching. One of Cage's favourite methods in deciding what musical notes to put down, or what phrases, words, syllables and letters to use and how to combine them in composing or recomposing a text was tossing up three coins six times or throwing up marked sticks - as it is described in minute detail in the ancient Chinese book of oracles, I Ching. Tom Stoppard caricatured the procedure at the witty start of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Marcel Duchamp played with the idea of composing chance music by numbering the keys of the piano and pulling out numbers at random from a hat (Musical Erratum

) or - in another version - from a vase {The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Musical Erratum). 79