Saussure Vedic Anagrams

Saussure's Vedic AnagramsAuthor(s): David ShepheardSource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. 513-523Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3728060 .Accessed: 11/09/2014 00:49

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JULY 1982 VOL. 77 PART 3

SAUSSURE'S VEDIC ANAGRAMS

Introduction Since their discovery in 1964, Saussure's notebooks on anagrams have been attracting a growing amount of interest among scholars and critics throughout the world. Hailed by some as a deuxieme coup de genie after the widely-acknowledged Cours de linguistique generale and examined more cautiously by others, Saussure's anagram theory has been mixed with, and implicated in, the major trends of avant-garde thinking inside France: in Julia Kristeva's literary semiotics and the concept of paragrams; in Jacques Derrida's philosophy of language and the problem of ecriture and logocentric culture; in Lacanian psychoanalysis and the inscription of the letter in the unconscious.1 These debates are still open; but what is remarkable is that so much discussion and dialogue should have been stimulated by so little first-hand knowledge of Saussure's own work: the anagram notebooks are still not generally available and most discussion is based on the few extracts published and com- mented on by Jean Starobinski, now regrouped in the short volume Les mots sous les mots.2 The course of the often technical, though always intriguing, debate on the anagrams over the past ten years has tended to relegate to the background our awareness of the nature and scope of Saussure's own work in the field; while it may not be necessary to call for a 'retour a Saussure', it is as well to remember that there is still a need to examine his extant manuscripts carefully, not only to clarify his own position but also to remind ourselves of the entirely speculative nature of Saussure's Anagram enterprise. The Background Saussure began his work on anagrams in 1906. Two important documents from this period indicate his conception of the phenomenon in its initial phase: firstly, a long letter to Antoine Meillet dated 23 September I907, and secondly, the notebook now known as the '1er cahier a lire preliminairement', thought to have been written some time over the summer of the same year.3 Together these two documents form Saussure's longest continuous exposition of the anagrams. If one bears in mind Saussure's lifelong training in Indo-European philology and comparative linguistics

1 Literature on the anagrams is very dispersed. The most complete account to date is to be found in Peter Wunderli, Ferdinand de Saussure und die Anagramme (Tiibingen, 1972). But for a briefintroduction, see G. Mounin, 'Les anagrammes de Saussure', in Studi saussuriani, edited by R. Amacker (Bologna, I974), pp. 235-42. For a critical approach, see, among others, F. Rastier, 'Le texte dans le texte', in Latomus, Revue detudes latines, 29 (1970), 3-24; M. Dupuis, 'A propos des anagrammes saussuriennes', in Cahiers d'analyse textuelle, 19 (1977), 7-24; and M. Deguy, 'La folie de Saussure', in Critique, xxv, I, 260 (janvier 1969), 20-26. A humorous parody is to be found in Ferdinand von Hintersinnen (pseudonym), 'Nachtrag zu Saussures Anagramm-Studien', in Neue Zircher Zeitung, 9 July 1973.

For the incorporation of Saussure's anagram theory into areas of modern thought, see J. Kristeva, 'Pour une s6miologie des paragrammes', in XlF]tt)LwTtXl: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris, I969), pp. I74-207; J. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, I967); J.-M. Rey, 'Saussure avec Freud', in Critique, 309 (f6vrier 1973), 136-67; J.-M. Adam and J.-P. Goldstein, Linguistique et discours litteraire (Paris, 1976), pp. 42-59.

2J. Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots (Paris, 1971). 3 These texts are reproduced respectively in Emile Benveniste, 'Lettres de Ferdinand de Saussure a Antoine Meillet', in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 21 (1964), 89-135 (pp. 107-15); and Peter Wunderli, 'Ferdinand de Saussure:

Saussure's Vedic Anagrams

(subjects he had been teaching in Paris and Geneva since I88 ), and if one considers the wide focus of interests and the synthesizing, generalizing tendencies such training implies, it is not surprising that Saussure should have viewed the anagram as a widespread feature in all verse, if not a universal trait common to all poetic composition: in the 'Ier cahier' he speaks of the anagram as a 'principe de poesie indo-europeen' and as the 'premier principe de la poesie indo-europeenne' (Wun- derli, 'Ier cahier', pp. 211-12).

In the letter to Meillet, Saussure explains how his study of metrical structures in Saturnian verse had led him to consider the question of alliteration. It then occurred to him that alliteration was itself only one particular manifestation of more general, all-pervasive sound-structures in poetic texts. These structures might take three possible forms. Firstly, each phonetic term in the verse might be repeated in pairs, in such a way that no unmatched sound was left over in a given line or passage (monophones). Secondly, the phonetic structures could involve more loosely-arranged sets of syllables or phonic groups which then 'echo' one another across the line or passage (diphones, triphones, polyphones). And thirdly, there was an independent, though related, phenomenon in which the groups of sounds seem to reproduce the syllables or sounds of a key-word (mot-theme) or of a name important in the context of the passage as a whole (anagramme) (see Benveniste, pp. IO9-12). Later, Saussure was to coin a whole range of neologisms to describe variations on these basic themes. For example, already in the 'I er cahier' he admits that his use of the word 'anagram' is somewhat misleading. In the first place, in ordinary usage the word implies a discrete rescrambling ofmorphemically bound items, whereas Saussure has a more loosely-defined idea in mind, whereby the reordering of sounds need not be complete or may even straddle the boundaries between several words. Secondly, because Saussure is dealing with texts from oral traditions, the notion of an 'ana-gram' is somewhat anachronistic. Although 'ana-phone' would have been a better term, Saussure prefers to reserve this latter for imperfect anagrams, that is, for key-words which have elements missing as they are spelt out in the text (see Wunderli, 'Ir cahier', pp. 203-204). Also, Saussure was later to introduce the less troublesome word 'hypogram' as a technical term for the mot-theme.4

In both the letter to Meillet and the 'I er cahier' Saussure presents his preliminary findings not only on the works of Latin and Greek authors of antiquity but also on stretches of Germanic alliterative verse and passages of Vedic poetry. In the 'Ir cahier' a whole section is devoted to each of these literatures. As far as the Vedas are concerned, says Saussure, two major avenues of research should be followed up: firstly, the extent of the hypogram/key-word, and secondly, the range of'harmonies phoniques', or monophones. In the letter to Meillet, Saussure also discusses the same three literatures. He spends several pages explaining the problems of Satur- nian verse and then, after quoting briefly from the opening lines of the Hildebrands- lied, he goes on to mention the possibility of tracing anagrams in the Vedas.

Saussure's conjectures in the ' er cahier' and in the letter must have been based on actual readings of primary Vedic texts. This is clear from a sentence in the letter which contains an oblique reference to studies carried out in I906: 'Je n'ai pas pousse tres loin les recherches de ce c6ot, que j'avais vaguement entreprises l'an

4 The problem of Saussure's constantly changing terminology is tackled in P. Wunderli, Ferdinand de Saussure und die Anagramme, pp. 44-54.

5I4


DAVID SHEPHEARD

dernier' (Benveniste, p. I 13). And in the '"er cahier' Saussure writes, referring here to the question of monophonic repetition: Sans avoir pu pousse plus loin mes etudes v6diques, j'ai cependant plusieurs petits hymnes donnant des chiffres absolument irr6prochables sur la parit6 des consonnes, quelle que soit la loi des voyelles. (Wunderli, ' er cahier', p. 2 I ) Evidence ofSaussure's Vedic research on anagrams has not appeared, however, and the 'plusieurs petits hymnes' to which he refers in the 'Ier cahier' have not been identified. The Vedic Cahiers Saussure's anagram notebooks were given to the Bibliotheque publique et universitaire in Geneva in I953 by his sons, Jacques and Raymond, and catalogued into eight lots, with the press-marks Ms Fr 3962 to 3969, 'le tout foliote' by Robert Godel. (Starobinski's published extracts draw on this material.) However, Godel also catalogued two further sets of notebooks, 26 in all, under the press-marks Ms Fr 3960 and 396I, to which he gave the heading 'Metrique vedique'.5 It is with the contents of these latter, previously unstudied and unpublished, that this article is concerned.

Godel's title is a misnomer. Although there is a separate set of stapled sheets which gives actual metrical scannings of a number of Vedic hymns, including the famous Rigveda 11.12 to Indra, none of these notebooks contains any reference to Vedic metrics. Instead, they cover many hundreds of monophonic scannings of hymns from the Rigveda (in no apparent sequential order, however), along with a few extracts from the Kathasaritsagara, IX, 1-24. Some of the hymns are only partially scanned (in A 14, pp. 28-30, Saussure gives an analysis of the last stanzas of the first ten hymns of the Rigveda, the first stanzas of the first twelve hymns of the second mandala and the first stanzas of several hymns from the fourth malndala), while others are analysed, in various places, several times over. To this initial Vedic corpus a further notebook, namely Ms Fr 3969, pp. 82-Io2, as well as excerpts from Ms Fr 3969, pp. 57-65 and Ms Fr 3962/8, pp. 18-24, should be added.

Saussure's scannings of the Vedic hymns take the form of more or less systemat- ically tabulated analyses of the number of individual consonants in the text, listed stanza by stanza and hymn by hymn.6 The following gives an idea of what is involved. Across the top of the page Saussure gives the reference to the hymn (RV = Rigveda, with mandala and sukta number), together with an analysis of are metrical arrangements of the stanzas (in the present case, verses I, 2, 3, and 7 are tri?tubh (an eleven-syllable line) and verses 4, 5, and 6 are gagati (a twelve-syllable line)). Down the left-hand column he lists the consonants to be counted and, across the page, the numbers in each stanza, giving a total for each on the right. The crosses by the numbers in the columns under the last four consonants refer to extra notes Saussure made about the way he has construed the text (see below, page 517).

5 See R. Godel, 'Inventaire des manuscrits de Ferdinand de Saussure remis a la Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve', in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 17 ( 960), 5- I . I am grateful to the BPU for permission to consult these manuscripts, and in particular I should like to thank M. Daniel Rysser for his help and kindness. In the quotations that follow, I refer to Ms Fr 3960 as A and to Ms Fr 396I as B, and add both cahier and page number exactly as marked by Godel.

6 There is, in fact, only one analysis of the occurrence of vowels, in the padapatha text of Rigveda I. I (in Ms Fr 3962/8, p. 21). This explains the remark in the 'I cahier' where Saussure speaks of the 'chiffres absolument irreprochables sur la parit6 des consonnes, quelle que soit la loi des voyelles' (my italics). See above, top of this page.

515


516 Saussure's Vedic Anagrams RV. X, 56 -Sept strophes. -

Str. i-2-3: Tri.tubh. - Str. 4-5-6: 'agat. - Str. 7: Tristubh. - P K

3 2 -

2 3 5 4 4 = 2IP - I I i 2 = 7K

2

1

2

2

3 I

2

2

I

1

2

2

- - 2 I - - =

2 2 - I =

I

2

2

I

2X

3

2

I

9 2

3 I

5x

6X

2

I

2X

IOx

3 2

IX

7x 7 I

5

3

3 3x 6 2

i og - Belle distribution I I

7H 4c' 5 6BH ou B

I727DouDH Io) I2$SX

27Sx 4oRX 4R

(AI5, p. 40) In all these analyses, it is Saussure's concern to see symmetry and order emerging

from the text. Often, he tries to arrange things so that in the final count the phonemes fall out in even, matched pairs, or monophones. He even underlines the more interesting results in blue or red pencil. On some occasions he tries to regroup the basic sets of figures into higher, hierarchical patterns, categorizing the consonants into 'occlusives', 'uimans',7 and 'semi-voyelles' (Bg, p. 32 and elsewhere). Or he produces tables to show the symmetrical arrangements of the sounds. The following, from A 2, p. 40, occurs in the course of a scanning of Rigveda VII. 84:

P K G

N dental

Arrangement equilibre

I-II III IV-V

4 (4) 4 2 (2) 2 2 - 2

2 (2) 2

IO (2) 10

When, however, the arithmetic does not produce even numbers of phonemes, Saussure is frequently tempted to cut corners, and arrange the text so that monophones do appear: - tout ce qui est ci-dessus devient pair si l'on supprime la derniere strophe.

(Bi, p. ov)

7 'Usmans' are defined as the class of the following Sanskrit sounds: 'the three sibilants, h, Visarga,

Jihvamuliya, Upamadhmaniya, and Anusvara' (M. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, I899), 223, Column I).

g 2

H - C I BH - B -

2

I

I

3 6 I

D DH

S R R

I

I


DAVID SHEPHEARD

le total g6enral des nasales est de 127, ce qui ressemble fort a 28, double du chiffre royal 64- (la piece a i6 strophes, c'est aussi = 8 par strophe). (AIo, p. 22) On some occasions, Saussure even goes to the point of correcting the original author's text: - toutefois ce chiffre de 64 m-m (par 4om + 24m) est attirant, et on peut se demander s'il n'y a pas eu erreur de compte de la part de l'auteur par ex. sur le mot prathamam (Str. XII), mandratamo Str. XI. (Ao, . 32) (AIo, p. 32)

Elsewhere, Saussure is more cautious. On one occasion he even corrects his own addition: ! correction du Y. II y a 7y, non 6 a la Ie strophe (je m'etais tromp6 sur prayagyavo) selon qu'on ajoute ou non lesy = i int6rieurs, ou tous, on a:

I9Y- 49Y o 2iY- 54Y 1 ou 22 Y-57Y (Ai3, pp. 27v-28) Or Saussure may openly express his doubts: Apres que Auciga a dit en conclusion que c'est lui qui invoque les acvins (str. 9), il est report6 de Pedu et de tel ou tel miracle des acvins - mais peut-etre la strophe a-t-elle simplement ete deplacee, ce qui expliquerait que les chiffres du total soient bons. (AI3, P. 22

Moreover, there is a series of recurrent problems which disturb Saussure's analyses and make the hunt for monophones particularly difficult. Firstly, there is the inherent difficulty of the Vedic language. For instance, Vedic ql and I are often treated as interchangeable when placed between two vowels: how, then, should Saussure count them? And then, as Saussure points out in the 'Ier cahier' and the letter to Meillet, there are the sandhi rules, which cause frequent adjustments in the sounds at the ends and beginnings of words. Indeed, practically every scanning requires some comment from Saussure as to how he has taken the text, as the following notes from his analysis of Rigveda x. 56, given above, show:

Chiffres i la str. 5: 4K 8g I8S avec vagims (presque tous multiples de 4) 4H 8s

4c' i6D-DH (28R + R; - ou 28R avec 4BH cakramur)

(R) - Str. 4. atvisur est au 1/2 pda. (Ibidem punah, pour punar a la pause). Str. 5. cakramu ragah pur cakramur, qui donnerait 28R pour la str. 5.

(S) - (Str. 3 suvita stoman = suvitah stoman \\D'autre part, Str. 2, vagin tanvam, qui avec le sandhi vagims

donnerait 28S et parit6e la strophe 5. I1 y a 4-ah devant p, dont un au 1/2 pada: ragah/purva str. 5 (/2 pada) J'ai conserve de meme adadhus tantum, str. 6, et tanu.ste str. 2.

($) - Conserve vivifuh punah str. 4. Conserve adadhus tantum str. 6 (eu regard de tanuf te, str. 2)

Xadadhus tantum procurerait un pendant au t de str. 2, qui est le seul T de la piece. (Ai5, p. 39v)

Furthermore, since many of the hymns in the Vedas involve a series of stanzas whose metrical type varies or whose authorship is often different or questionable, there is the problem of homogeneity in the material itself: should such stanzas be removed altogether from Saussure's computations, or should a barrier, or 'limite' as he calls it, be incorporated into the findings? For example, Saussure muses: La limite de Str. XV offre de son cote une s6rie int6ressante. Cette limite coincide avecfin des refrains etfin des gayatri [name of a metre]. En outre, les quinze premieres strophes ne sont pas attribuies au meme auteur que les trois dernieres. (Ao, . 28v) (AIo, P. 28V)

5 I 7


518 Saussure's Vedic Anagrams Yet another problem comes with the question of the reliability of the edition to

hand. Saussure notes: Str. X le mot aguryamur inconnu des dictionnaires, peut-etre faute?

(AI2, p. 4V) or

Cf. yufigdhvam V.56.6. ecrit trois fois avec g par Aufr. [i.e. Aufrecht]8

(AI3, p. 23V) or:

A verifier: str. XVI. Aufrecht a une faute d'impression ,,apava". J'ai suppose apaSca (AI5, p. Iv)

And finally, there is the problem of the intelligibility or reliability of the original texts themselves: (c). - Conserve le sandhi d'Aufrecht vigrin chavasd (str. 7) sans quoi il y aurait 3f ladite strophe. (A 3, p. 34v) and: gavitre pour gmate a la derniere strophe rendrait pairs le G et le G, et parait pour le sens aussi bien que grmate. Cette substitution, si elle a eu lieu, n'a pas pu changer la parite pour le R, ni le I; mais seulement pour le r, g, g, n.

(AI2, P. 8) When, however, the consonants do fall out into monophonic pairs 'as required', Saussure is clearly delighted: Les trois sifflantes sont brillantes, et font au total 96 (24 X 4).

(AIo, p. 34) formidable limite impaire apres II.

(B8, p. 4v) assez curieuse distribution de D-DH dans les strophes I-9.

(Axo, p. 22V) jusqu'a la str. X, remarquable distribution du K.

(AIo, p. I8v) belle distribution du P, du g (etc.) jusqu'a Str. X.

(AIo, p. 9") excellente distribution du P, g, s.

(AIo, p. I v) With those findings that Saussure feels are particularly rich and convincing, he marks the hymns with a special red and blue dotted circle. Such hymns include Rigveda x. 50, I. I6I, x. 28, VII. I8, I. 80, I. I9, v. 57. It is probably to these that Saussure is referring when he writes of his 'plusieurs petits hymnes donnant des chiffres absolument irreprochables' (see above, p. 515).

From the use of words like 'belle', 'formidable', 'curieuse', 'excellente', as given in the extracts above, it becomes clear that Saussure's interest in anagrams is quite as

8 Saussure appears to have used Theodor Aufrecht's transcriptions of the Vedic hymns, Die Hymnen des Rigveda, 2 vols (Berlin, 1861-63 and Bonn, 1877), as his main text in his analyses. Saussure does not seem to have possessed an edition of the Rigveda himself, although he did own copies of K. F. Geldner's and A. Kaegi's Siebenzig Lieder des Rigveda (Tiibingen, 1875) and H. Grassmann's MWrterbuch zum Rigveda (Leipzig, I875). For a list of the books known to have been in Saussure's personal library, see D. Gambarara, 'La Bibliotheque de Ferdinand de Saussure', in Genava, 20 (1972), 319-68.


DAVID SHEPHEARD

much an aesthetic as a scientific one. Above all, it is clear that Saussure's finding of monophones in the texts depends on an a priori notion of success: the observer is obviously structuring the verse as he reads, even to the point of rewriting it if it does not provide the required results. The monophonic material in these notebooks is certainly an astonishing blend of prejudice and open-minded speculation, of fantasy and fact.

Hypograms The quest for monophonic repetitions can hardly be considered to have been a success; the Vedic material requires too many reservations, alterations, revisions, and backtracking to offer any findings from which firm theoretical conclusions can be drawn. From these same Vedic notebooks it is apparent, however, that the looser and more flexible notions of polyphones and hypograms, to which Saussure was to devote so much time later, probably first occurred to him in the course of his readings in the Veda. In the 'Ier cahier' Saussure mentions that one of the possible avenues of research in Vedic poetry should be the 'reproduction, dans un hymne, de syllabes appartenant au nom sacre qui est l'objet de l'hymne'. And he continues: 'Dans ce genre, c'est une montagne de materiaux qu'on trouvera'. Later, in the same section on Vedic poetry, he refers specifically to the polyptotic repetition of the god's name Agni in Rigveda I. I (Wunderli, 'Ier cahier', pp. 2I I-12). These passages in turn seem to be later rationalizations of thoughts that came to Saussure en route in his face-to-face reading of the texts. For example, there is the following note on some stanzas from Rigveda I. 78, a hymn likewise dedicated to Agni: RV I. 78 - Piece a refrain. Refrain: |dyumnair abhi pra n6numah

Le refrain 6tant repete 5 fois, les consonnes qui ne sont pas compensees dans le refrain lui-meme, cad toutes sauf m n, devraient se trouver en nombre impairs dans la partie ind6pendante du refrain, afin de les rendre paires au total. II s'agit de g,y, bh, p, n, h. . . . Le theme de cet hymne (1-78) est Anigiras - cofne d'ailleurs dans d'autres, d'apres cert. observ. Fragments ,,anaphoniques": I? A (Abhi) au comencement de l'hymne. 20 gira, deux fois 3? rayaskamo: et cela dans la suite gira, rayaskamo ... A remarquer - ce qui est peut-etre une regle - que la piece commence par A et finit par ah, comme le mot-theme A-hgir-ah. (Elle finit par ah aussi bien si on compte le refrain que si on on [sic] ne le compte pas, le dernier pada etant en vacah).

-Dans l'hymne Agnim zide, pt-etre de meme 1'e final de l'hymne < qu'on 1'arrete au 8e ou au 9e vers, c'est e > correspond a: A-gn-e!

(Ms Fr 3962/8, p. I8) In these last paragraphs comes Saussure's mention of a phenomenon he later

referred to as a 'mannequin', wherein a line of verse (or, as in this case, a whole hymn) begins and ends with the first and final sound of the mot-theme/hypogram.

Perhaps the first understanding that the deity's name might be implicated in the whole phonetic fibre of the text comes in the following brief note:

L'hymne est a Indra au moinsjusque vers Str. XIII; il faut pt-etre remarquer que R et N font partie du nom divin. On a 64 R-h et 64N (128 nasales).

(Aio, p. 37)

5I9


520 Saussure's Vedic Anagrams It is from such 'raw' insights that the concept of the hypogram must have developed, even though the number of extant hypograms that Saussure traced in the Veda is very small, at least when compared to the scores of notebooks he devoted to the subject with regard to the works of European authors. Only one notebook (AI) contains such hypograms drawn from Vedic hymns, and then only on the last dozen pages or so. These pages give extensive analyses of complete lines from a number of hymns, in which Saussure tries to trace hypograms for Surya (Rigveda I. I I5 and vii. 63); ViSnu (Rigveda I. 154 and 156, and Rigveda vII. Ioo); Pusan (Rigveda vI. 56, x. 26, I. 42 and 138); Brhaspati (Rigveda i. I90); Apiam napat (Rigveda I. 35); Usas (Rigveda I. 49); Parjanya (Rigveda v. 83); Vibhindu (Rigveda vII. 2). There are also lists of hymns that Saussure had either looked over cursorily or intended to study in greater detail, to trace hypograms for the Soma grinding-stones (gravanab; Rigveda x. 94), for the A:vins (Rigveda I. 18), the Maruts (Rigveda i. 64), Sarasvati (Rigveda vII. 55), Visnu (Rigveda vII. oo), for the patron Ark$a Qrutarvan (Rigveda vIII. 74, I3-I5) and for Praskanva, in one of the Valakhilya hymns (Rigveda vIII. 56).

In fact, all of these anagrams are what Saussure would have later called 'anaphones', or only partially successful anagrams. The following reproduces one of these Vedic anagrams; in the text of a hymn to the sun, Surya (Rigveda I. I 5), Saussure suspects the name Aditya (literally 'sun' as well) has been implanted:9

I, 15. [Surya]. Anagrame: Aditya. St. I: citram + udagddanfkam + mitrasya + dydvdprth

it ad (i) it d ya St. 2: abhy eti + vitanvate

(a)(y) (i)ti it

9 The full text of this hymn is given by T. Aufrecht, Die Hymnen des Rigveda, 2 vols (Berlin, I861-63), I, 99, as follows:

Citram devanam id agad anikam cakshur mitrasya varunasyagneh apra dyavaprithivY antari- ksham surya atmajagatas tasthishac ca I| i suryo devYm ushasam r6camanam maryo ni y6sham abhy eti paccat I yatra naro devayanto yugani vitanvate prati bhadraya bhadram 11 2 bhadra acva haritah suryasya citra etagva anumadyasah I namasyanto diva a prishtham asthuh pari dyavaprithivi yanti sadyah 1[3 tit suryasya devatvam tin mahitvim madhya kartor vitatam sam jabhira I yaded iyukta haritah sadhisthad ad ratri vasas tanute simIsmai || 4 tan mitrasya varunasyabhicikshe suryo rupam krinute dy6r upisthe | anantIm anyId ruiad asya pajah krishnam anyId dharitah sam bharanti || 5 adya devia diti suryasya nir anhasah piprita nir avadyat | tin no- 11 6

The following translation is taken from H. H. Wilson, Rig- Veda-Sanhitd, 6 yols (London, I850), I, 304-305. i. The wonderful host of rays has risen; the eye ofMITRA, VARUNA, and AGNI; the sun, the soul of all that moves or is immovable, has filled (with his glory) the heaven, the earth, and the firmament. 2. The sun follows the divine and brilliant USHAS, as a man (follows a young and elegant) woman; at which season, pious men perform (the ceremonies established for) ages, worshipping the auspicious (sun), for the sake of good (reward). 3. The auspicious, swift horses of the sun, well-limbed, road-traversing, who merit to be pleased with praise, reverenced by us, have ascended to the summit of the sky, and quickly circumambulate earth and heaven. 4. Such is the divinity, such is the majesty of the sun, that when he has set, he has withdrawn (into himself) the diffused (light which had been shed) upon the unfinished task; when he has unyoked his coursers from his car, then night extends the veiling darkness over all. 5. The sun, in the sight of MITRA and VARUNA, displays his form (of brightness) in the middle of the heavens, and his rays extend, on one hand, his infinite and brilliant power, or, on the other (by their departure), bring on the blackness of night. 6. This^day, Gods, with the rising of the sun, deliver us from heinous sin; and may MITRA, VARUNA, ADITI, - ocean, earth, and heaven, be favourable to this our prayer.


DAVID SHEPHEARD

St. 3: haritah + citra + anumddyasah + diva + paridyavdprthivfyanti it it adya di idya thi iya ti

St. 4: mahitvam + vitatam + madhya +yaded ( = yada id, mais scande yaded) it it ad(y)a yad(i)d

+ haritah + sadhasthdddd it adad

St. 5: anyad + rufadasya + anyad dharitah a ya-d a ad it (y)

St. 6: adyadeva udita + avadyat (Formule a la fin) ady ad it a adya - la finale as peut-etre dans dyor upasthe (5)

Cf. asya (5) amfhasah (6) eti pafcat (2)

- y a-t-il aussi anagrame de Mitra (syllabe it) qui est nofm aux vers I, 5.

As they stand in the notebook, these hypograms are left completely without comment. Here, as elsewhere, Saussure gives no clue as to how he has determined what the hypogram should be. The note at the bottom of the page quoted above alludes to the possibility of tracing the name of Mitra in the text as well: but, one may ask, why not also Agni or Varuna, names actually mentioned in the hymn and whose sounds are likewise as (unconvincingly) present as those of Aditya? The successful search for hypograms seems to depend on the individual observer and his knack for finding them out; or, conversely, on the reader's ability to 'supplement' the text with levels of meaning and structure which, in the absence of any external corroboration, may not have been intentional. A major problem arises to which Saussure never clearly addressed himself: either the hypogram technique is obscure to the extent that it is lost on most readers and its presence irrelevant to an appreciation of the text; or the hypogram is not a technique of composition at all, but the product of a specific mode of reading. The hypogram is thus an ambiguously objective/ subjec- tive notion. Like the monophone, it is, undecidably, both fact and fiction.

Conclusion What is most impressive about the Vedic notebooks is the sense of adventure and enterprise as Saussure attempts to come to terms with the chaotic materiality of the verse. As the number of scannings multiplies, so Saussure develops an increasingly exact analytic method, adapting the layout of data on the page crosswise to accommodate new problems and notes as they arise. But even as Saussure tries to fit more and more of the intractable material into this format, the whole enterprise begins to take on a somewhat bizarre aspect. In spite of Saussure's modest disclaimer to Meillet about the limited scope of his Vedic studies ('recherches ... quej'avais vaguement entreprises l'an dernier' - see above, pp. 5 14 f.), the contents of the notebooks represent an immense amount of work, both in terms of invested energy and time. And yet the findings are inconclusive. There is very little in the way of expository material, or of'thinking aloud', and certainly there is no attempt to revise the initial framework of enquiry once it is established. It is as if the experimental procedure and its frame of reference must inexorably run their course, whatever the results, or lack of them, may be. While Saussure's aims are broad and exciting, his methods look unpromisingly narrow and plodding.

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Saussure's Vedic Anagrams

Taken together, then, it may seem that Saussure's scannings of the Vedas do not really mean anything. But as they stand, the Vedic notebooks do in fact raise a series of tantalizing questions. Firstly, there is the matter of their relevance to the particular field of Vedic studies. It seems to have taken a long time for Saussure to realize that the search for monophones was ultimately an impasse. When he did, he turned to European authors and took up the quest for hypograms. If Saussure had moved on to a serious consideration of the implications of the more diffuse, polyphonic repetitions that he mentioned in the letter to Meillet, he might then have tried to link the purely phonological patternings to other structures in the texts, including the rhythmical, metrical, and accentual schemes, the syntax, and the lexical features. This would have been the beginnings of a formalist approach to the hymns. In fact Saussure is on the threshold of actually inventing stylistics, in a recognizably modern sense of the word. Curiously, the development of modern stylistic studies, with their emphasis on synchrony and linguistic materiality, can be traced back indirectly, via the Russian Formalists and the Genevan School, not to Saussure's anagram work, but to his Cours. Stylistics in the European field has arguably overtaken Saussure's first faltering steps in this direction with the anagrams; but the Vedic work, albeit in its barely skeletal form, may still be seen as inaugurating a whole new trend in Indo-European studies. Sadly, even today, there still exists no properly stylistic or literary account of the Vedic texts.10 It might be hoped that the discovery of Saussure's notebooks will bring about a revival of interest in, and change in attitudes towards, Vedic literature as a whole. At the very least, the parallels between Saussure's anagram findings and the indigenous Indian tradition of Sanskrit poetics should be followed up.

Secondly, Saussure's Vedic material throws a new light on the anagram enterprise as a whole, and the relationship between the anagrams and the posthumous Cours. There is a tendency to think of the two activities as unrelated, or even contradictory, and to entertain two images of Saussure, one as the Genevan professor publicly discoursing on the logical bases of language and the founder of modern structural linguistics, the other as madcap academic anagrammatist poring over runes and ancient scripts. But this opposition is largely a recent fiction:1l the Vedic notebooks remind us of Saussure's long and broad training in Indo-European studies, and once this is properly emphasized the Cours and the anagrams can be seen as quite compatible achievements, as the results of an intelligible continuity of interests in languages in general and Language as a whole. Moreover, both the Cours and the anagrams show Saussure's desire to formulate different sorts of general 10 But seeJ. Gonda, Stylistic Repetition in the Veda (Amsterdam, I959), and 'Syntax and Verse Structure in

the Veda', in Indian Linguistics, Turner Jubilee Volume (1958), pp. 35-43. These texts come closest to a formal/stylistic description of certain aspects of the Vedic hymns. See also V. N. Toporov, 'Notes on Analyses of Some Poetic Texts (on the Low Levels)', in Poetics, ii, Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (The Hague, Paris, Warsaw, 1966), 6I-120, especially pp. 75-77. In a section headed 'On one example of sound-symbolism (Rigveda x, I, 5)', Toporov notes the striking features of sound-repetition in the text and their close imitation of sounds in the hymn's theme and author's name (p. 76):

The reason for this predilection, which reverberates throughout hymn x, I25 with combinations of the type am arm | and va (vi, ve, vo), lies, it seems, in the theme of the hymn and its author. The hymn is devoted to the goddess of speech (word) Vac Ambhrni, as she is called in the commentaries (Cf. Sayana: Vac is the daughter of the great rishi Ambhrna).

For further details on the work of Russian scholars with anagrams, see M. Meylakh, 'A propos des anagrammes', in L'Homme, i6, 4 (I976), 105-15. 11 See also G. Redard, 'Deux Saussure?', in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 32 (1978), 27-41.

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DAVID SHEPHEARD 523

systems and basic principles of high explanatory capacity, even though incommen- surable material may argue against them and logical inconsistencies be incurred. The myopias of the Vedic notebooks - the drive to create coherent systems out of disparate data even in the face of contrary empirical evidence - further illumine a general characteristic of Saussure's thinking, which is also apparent in the concep- tual boldness and elegance of the Cours.

Thirdly, and perhaps most important, there is the extent to which the Vedic work interestingly contributes to recent debates on 'literality' and the nature of the poetic function of language. The notebooks show that Saussure thought of the anagram as an especially powerful organizing principle extending back to the very sources of all Indo-European literature. Roman Jakobson, a great admirer of Saussure's 'poft- ique phonisante', has noted that whereas in the Cours Saussure explains the necessity to move away from the diachronic, historical linguistics of the past towards a synchronic approach to language as system, in the anagram notebooks Saussure's interest is as much diachronic as it is synchronic.'2 On the one hand Saussure tries to produce viable analytical principles (monophones, polyphones, hypograms) which can be seen to be applicable synchronically to any given set of texts. On the other hand, it is equally his concern to trace the fate of the anagram principle throughout history, to develop a set of rules which hold good diachronically when applied to texts written over a vast span of centuries and taken from many different cultures. Till now, the anagram has been thought of primarily as a synchronic linguistic seme, or generative prime. But the diachronic aspect of the anagram raises not only the old question of origins. The implication, in Saussure's mind, is that if it can be shown that even the oldest of Indo-European texts, namely the Vedas, are themselves also the product of an anagrammatic relationship to language, then all subsequent literatures derived from that source are both linguistically and ideologically bound in the anagrammatic matrix. Not only all actual literary texts, but also our very notion of literature might then be at once engendered and circumscribed by a triumphant, though largely unrecognized, 'archi-anagramme'. HARVARD UNIVERSITY DAVID SHEPHEARD

12 See R. Jakobson, 'Saussure's poetique phonisante Seen from Today', in The Sound Shape of Language, with L. Waugh (Brighton, I979), pp. 220-22.


Article Contentsp. [513]p. 514p. 515p. 516p. 517p. 518p. 519p. 520p. 521p. 522p. 523

Issue Table of ContentsThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Jul., 1982), pp. i-viii+513-768Front Matter [pp. i - viii]Saussure's Vedic Anagrams [pp. 513 - 523]The Tragedy of Clermont D'Ambois [pp. 524 - 536]The Principle of Recompense in "Twelfth Night" [pp. 537 - 546]The Variants of Corneille's Early Plays [pp. 547 - 557]Tradition and Innovation in "Paul et Virginie": A Thematic Study [pp. 558 - 567]Sainte-Beuve and Dante [pp. 568 - 576]The Self and Language in the Novels of Nathalie Sarraute [pp. 577 - 584]Boccaccio's Experimentation with Verbal Portraits from the "Filocolo" to the "Decameron" [pp. 585 - 596]Coqun's Conversion: Honour, Virtue, and Humour in "El Mdico de su Honra" [pp. 597 - 605]"Caminos y Lugares": Gabriel Mir's "El Obispo Leproso" [pp. 606 - 617]"Venus Clerk": Reinmar in the "Carmina Burana" [pp. 618 - 628]Schiller and Goethe's "Egmont" [pp. 629 - 645]Thomas and Heinrich Mann: Some Early Attitudes to Their Public [pp. 646 - 654]Hermann Hesse's Castalia: Republic of Scholars or Police State? [pp. 655 - 669]Aspects of the Study of Dostoyevsky's Vocabulary [pp. 670 - 678]Two Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva from "Posle Rossii" [pp. 679 - 687]Reviewsuntitled [pp. 688 - 689]untitled [pp. 689 - 690]untitled [pp. 690 - 691]untitled [pp. 692 - 694]untitled [pp. 694 - 698]untitled [pp. 699 - 700]untitled [pp. 700 - 701]untitled [pp. 701 - 703]untitled [pp. 703 - 708]untitled [pp. 708 - 709]untitled [pp. 709 - 710]untitled [pp. 710 - 712]untitled [pp. 712 - 713]untitled [pp. 713 - 714]untitled [pp. 714 - 716]untitled [pp. 716 - 717]untitled [pp. 717 - 718]untitled [pp. 718 - 719]untitled [pp. 719 - 720]untitled [pp. 720 - 721]untitled [pp. 721 - 722]untitled [pp. 722 - 723]untitled [pp. 723 - 725]untitled [pp. 725 - 726]untitled [pp. 726 - 727]untitled [p. 728]untitled [pp. 728 - 729]untitled [pp. 729 - 730]untitled [pp. 730 - 732]untitled [pp. 732 - 733]untitled [pp. 733 - 734]untitled [pp. 734 - 736]untitled [pp. 736 - 737]untitled [pp. 737 - 739]untitled [pp. 739 - 742]untitled [pp. 742 - 743]untitled [pp. 743 - 744]untitled [pp. 744 - 746]untitled [pp. 746 - 747]untitled [pp. 747 - 748]untitled [p. 748]untitled [pp. 748 - 750]untitled [pp. 750 - 751]untitled [pp. 751 - 752]untitled [pp. 752 - 753]untitled [pp. 753 - 756]untitled [pp. 756 - 757]untitled [pp. 757 - 758]untitled [pp. 758 - 759]untitled [pp. 759 - 762]untitled [p. 762]untitled [pp. 762 - 763]untitled [pp. 763 - 764]untitled [pp. 764 - 765]untitled [pp. 765 - 766]untitled [pp. 766 - 767]untitled [pp. 767 - 768]

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Saussure Vedic Anagrams