-
4. Transcoherence and Deletion: The Mesostic Writings of John Cage
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Transcoherence and Deletion The Mesostic Writings of John Cage It is a pleasure to witness, so to speak, the action of this hidden principle that forms languages. Sometimes we see it struggling against a difficulty that arrests its path: it seeks a form that is lacking, the materials at its disposal resist. —Joseph de Maistre A song means filling a jug, and even more so breaking the jug. Breaking it apart. In the language of the Kabbalah we perhaps might call it: Broken Vessels. —H. Leivick I take this short epigraph by H. Leivick that prefaces Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism as my entry into the semiology of John Cage’s mesostic (medialacrostic ) writings. My point of reference will be his mesostic treatments (called by Cage the “writing-through” method) of Finnegans Wake, a text conceived by Joyce on the wrong side of speech as a subterranean warren of polyglossia, anagrams, portmanteaux, and eponymous theme-words, to which Cage’s reductive treatments proffer both homage and a testimonial of descent. Cage’s “writing-through” engages an interventional poetics designed to disclose a hidden coherence by eradicating a manifest coherence. In this manner Cage risks both cognitive and formal coherence to advance a variant coherence, which is doubled, sublimated, and paradoxical and what I call a “transcoherence.” The central investigation of this chapter pertains to the affinities of Cage’s mesostic practice with Saussure’s earlier investigations into anagrams, which earned the Swiss linguist his posthumous logophilic reputation. En route I will touch upon a partial genealogy that helps historicize Cage’s practice and underscores its complex resonances and affinities. 52 Chapter 4 I feel the meaning that words hide; they are anagrams, cryptograms, little boxes, conditioned to hatch butterflies . . . H. D. The Walls Do Not Fall, XXXIX Saussure’s research into non-linear textual economies, collected in one hundred and fifteen notebooks between 1906 and 1909, remained unknown until their discovery by Jean Starobinski in the mid-1960s.1 The research, staggering in its breadth, covers late Roman Saturnian verse, Homer, Virgil, Seneca, Horace, Lucretius, Angelo Politian, and the Vedic Hymns. The search for a latent yet accessible transcoherence was central to the project; the notebooks chronicle an obsessive hunt for a message across a message that is recoverable from the fragments of a theme-name scattered through a text but capable of being reconstituted via a non-linear reading across the textural separation of its parts. Saussure referred to these theme-words variously as “anagrams” and “hypograms ” designed to emphasize “a name, a word, making a point of repeating its syllables, and in this way giving it a second, contrived being, added, as it were, to the original word” (Starobinski 18).2 Saussure later replaced these terms by “paragram,” (moving gram), claiming it a more accurate term, thereby altering the topological bias of the text from a surface-depth model to that of a transspatial disseminatory dynamism.3 Saussure draws attention to a preoccupation in certain Vedic hymns with organizing a text around the syllables of a sacred name (Ms. fr. 3963). The famous Rg-Vêda, he claims, explicitly declines the sacred name of Agni: agnim, agninâ, agnayê, agnê. Saussure hears the phonemes of a proper name gradually declare themselves transcoherently across a separation brought on by other phonetic elements (Starobinski 15). Yet the centripetal force of paragrams resist containment; they inhabit that position from which language looks at us, a site of elusive and omnipresent alterity; they are what is not seen but nonetheless there, unsettling the coherence of conventional word order by offering an infinity of signifying networks accessed only through nonlinear methods of writing and reading. In Ms. fr. 3963, Saussure comments: “to write lines incorporating an anagram is necessarily to write lines based on that anagram and dominated by it” (quoted in Starobinski 17). Yet, though assignable to an order of production (either through detection by a reader or deposit by the writer), the paragram does not derive necessarily from a conscious intentionality on the writer’s part. Saus- [34.230.66.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:10 GMT) Transcoherence and Deletion 53 sure’s error at this point lies precisely in not recognizing that paragrams and words-within-words are an inevitable consequence of Western writing’s alphabetic , combinatory nature, which ineluctably compromises any monological coherence . By 1908, however, he writes to his friend Leopold Gautier admitting profound perplexity as to the real or phantasmagoric status of the paragram...