Chance and Indeterminacy in Hardy’s Novels and Poetry

Abstract

The Surrealists were not the first, nor the last, to use aleatory techniques. But no doubt their procedures in painting, and, to a very limited extent, in writing, were an encouragement to further developments in music and in writing in the middle of the twentieth century. John Cage is an interesting example of a composer taking chance probably as far as it is possible to go. His 4′33″ almost succeeds in eliminating the composer. It is based on his knowledge that ‘there is no such thing as silence, something is always happening that makes a sound’.¹ At each performance of 4′33″, as the pianist sits motionless at the piano, different sounds occur; the ‘music’ is totally dependent on chance. But even so, the composer has intervened to the extent of allotting his audience four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which to listen to ‘no such thing as silence’. Literature, using words, cannot incorporate within itself the external world in such a direct way, though Woolf suggested an identical procedure some years before 4′33″ in Between the Acts, Her playwright, Miss La Trobe, arranges for ‘nothing’ to happen on her stage; wind, cows and rain perform the same function as the random noises in Cage’s concert hall.² These and other chance techniques, designed said Cage to ‘free himself from his own taste’, anticipate by over 20 years Foucault’s ‘What is an author?’ and Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’.