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

Stoppard in his turn travestied the method in his Travesties showing Tristan Tzara drawing out in Dadaist fashion the cut-up words of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 from Joyce's hat (Stoppard, T 54-5). Cage, however, was overjoyed by the accidental potential of I Ching chance operations and proudly told Kostelanetz that in rewriting Finnegans Wake he did not have to toss the actual coins any longer, but could now rely on a coded printout simulating the tossing of three coins six times. (Cage and Kostelanetz

—Gena, Brent and Gillespie, J CR 148-9) Chance programmed and modernized - yet patently guaranteed. The printout was devised by a young man called Ed Kobrin at the University of Illinois in 1967-9 for HPSCHD, Cage's composition subtitled solos for one to seven amplified harpsichords and tapes for one to fifty-one amplified monaural machines. Joyce's works are certainly not devoid of chance either. The accidental turns of the short stories in Dubliners

, the free associations of the stream of consciousness, the technique of the interior monologue in Ulysses and the dream-like shifts of people and places in Finnegans Wake bear ample witness to Joyce's interest in chance. Yet Joyce the master builder has created the enormous pattern of Homeric parallels in Ulysses and of Viconian cycles and mythical structures in Finnegans Wake. (Cf. among others Beckett 3-22; Wilson 243-71; Ellmann 565, 575, 706; Campbell and Robinson 327; Gilbert 38; Senn 1-8; Boyle 247-54; Hart-Staley 135-65; Fáj 6580; Bíró 5-26) Mutatis mutandis

, these constructions, I think, correspond to the dodecaphonic serialism of Schoenberg's music. A one-time student of Schoenberg and a professed anarchist (Kostelanetz, JCA 7-8), Cage has learnt all he could from Schoenberg, but decided he would take the opposite course. With Schoenberg, everything is system. With Cage, all is chance. (Boyden 408-19, 524-7; Chase 587-94) With his aleatory operations, Cage has methodically knocked out the system from his master's and predecessor's music. Cage was striving for "heightened incoherence," "an ordered disorder." (Kostelanetz, JCA 196) In his redoing Finnegans Wake, he has deliberately destroyed Joyce's structures and replaced them by clearly calculated accidental techniques. Under "normal" conditions, human life evolves in trends, which are neither all necessity nor mere contingency. This is the precondition of 80