Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian and Others

Abstract

This chapter discusses various theories of happiness and gives particular consideration to Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that we need to rethink how the affect relates to the haphazard. Ahmed’s suggestion fits with Lyn Hejinian’s poetic experiments that present happiness as affirming happenings of the happenstance. After considering examples of that in Hejinian’s Happily (2000), the chapter then considers how John Cage used ‘chance determinations’ to make the happenstance happen in a range of his poetic ‘lectures’, including ‘Juillard Lecture’ (1952), ‘Indeterminacy’ (1958), ‘Diary: How to Improve the World’ (1965-82), and ‘Themes and Variations’ (1982). In analysing examples from those texts, the chapter reflects on how Cage’s lectures present and encourage modes of experimental reading that include being happily open to surprising aesthetic and affective possibilities. It concludes by comparing such happy reading to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of ‘reparative reading’.