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
plot in narrative art and melody, harmony and tonality in music. When the experience of any imposed order, totalitarianism and the mass destruction of world wars make necessity a hostile force and generality an external power, then the artist will experiment with creating counter-worlds. One manifestation of this effort is the extreme patterning of experience in High Modernism. Another expression of this predicament appears at the other pole of moulding the material: doubting the validity of absolute principles, value judgements, feasible aims, viable routes, centres of gravity and directions of movement. This is the plight of Postmodernism. Despite Joyce's constant ironization of the patterns he uses, Ulysses and even Finnegans Wake still represent significant aspects of High Modernism (as well as incipiant traits of Postmodernism). The border between the two is never a fixed line, it is always a moving belt. In spite of Cage's occasional performance of making judgements of value and taste, and despite the poetic and musical beauty and excellence of his setting The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs from Finnegans Wake , his later rewritings of Joyce's work are model examples of Postmodernism. What happens to the constructs of Constructivism if its squares and rectangles are cleared away? What happens to the patterns of Cubism if its cubes are removed? They will certainly collapse with the tremendous noise of Cage's Roaratorio and will ultimately sink to the silence left behind by Cage's last and soft mesostic in Writing through Finne gans Wake. The same polar dichotomy appears in the roaring noise of Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for twelve radios of chance effects of volume and station selection and in his 4' 33" (1952), a composition of complete silence with the pianist playing nothing and the audience hearing nothing but accidental noises. Annihilating musical sounds as such, the two poles of noise and silence are the ultimate consequences of Cage's idea that "value judgments are destructive" (Kostelanetz, JCA 196), and can be taken as negative proofs of the positive claim that a work of art is a specific crystallization of a sensuous value judgement. Cage's observation to the effect that "Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat, and landslide" (Cage — Kostelanetz, JCA 55) expresses something more or less than a 81
