Thesis- “The Riddle: Connecting the Disconnected”
Critic-John Hejduk
for
role
status
year
The Cooper Union
Student
Complete
1989
Thesis
The Thesis began with the Riddle as a model through which to explore particular qualities associated with the fundamental act of connecting two or more identities. Through describing one thing in terms of another wholly dissimilar thing, the riddle succeeds to join the disconnected even if only momentarily.
As an architect, I had hoped, since my job is that of making connections, proposing joints, linkages and networks of relations, that by studying the riddle form, I could understand better how to make difficult connections, where the non-fit is as important as the fit in understanding the things that are being joined.
After a series of attempts to define “the space of the third”, I began to study the painting of The Annunciation by Duccio as a model, similar to the riddle, which defined a passage between worlds. I became interested in the black field, which enveloped the figures. I saw this black field as unifying them and consequentially implying that the event could be conceived of as a catastrophe, a point of rupture in an otherwise unified field.
Naming is the preoccupation to the riddle and hence it is a space of doubt, deliberation and becoming. It is a threshold, a transitional space. The image of Oedipus before the Sphinx became a model for the act of proposing a thesis.
History
Etymologically, the word riddle springs from two roots, which individually contain opposed meanings; to divide as in to separate or sift and to arrange, join and connect.
Today our culture has relegated the riddle to the kindergarten. Being associated with games, it is merely thought of as a minor form of folk literature. However, riddles were once associated with esoteric knowledge, philosophy and a great deal of seriousness as in the case of the riddle posed to Oedipus for whom it was to find the answer or lose his life.
The riddle was considered to enshrine the deepest wisdom, as in the kenning, an early form of the riddle, where seeing and knowing, naming and teaching were intended to suspended classificatory schema so that knowledge may be advanced. In its origins, the riddle was designed to create a space of greater knowledge.
Questioning
The riddle metamorphoses meaning by attacking the fixity of object through a subversion of their identities. In order to bring together elements doomed to remain separate, the true riddle establishes correspondences between apparently dissimilar people objects, events or processes.
As an act, the riddle poses a question that at its best is greater than the sum of its parts. Since the riddle contains its answer, to riddle is to answer and ask a question at the same time,
The illumination that the riddle brings is irreversible. In a riddle, to decipher is to uncover the realm of the dream from which all phenomena emerge and eventually return. The riddle world is therefore a world between dream and objective existence, a world of metaphor like our whole fullest world. As a world, it is one of revelation where things are really only stranger still. An enigma contains the sum of correlations by which the hidden architecture of the universe is revealed. Through the play of riddles, great connections and equivalences are discovered.
The riddle is a subterfuge designed to admit the ineffable into human discourse.
Naming
A riddle is a monster rendered powerless by knowing its name. It assumes that to find the name of something it is necessary to know it and to know something it is necessary to see it with a particular type of clarity. To name is to have known. To know is to have seen. The riddle is a naming and a teaching. It is the description of one thing in terms of another.
In the process of finding a name, of reading the unknown in terms of the known, paradoxes arise
since the unknown never completely fits into the known. In that space of non-fit, new meanings emerge. The process of resolving paradoxes leads to a way of knowing. In having seen in a new way, the riddle creates a space of fuller knowing.
The most illuminating example of the riddle is the kenning. A condensed form of riddle, the kenning consists of a word, a riddle in miniature. The word itself derived from Old Norse verb “keno” which combines in its meaning the verbs to see, to know, to name and to teach. A kenning is the name of an object based on a way of knowing it. An example of a kenning is “battlelight” (sword) for which, in a traditional riddle form, might be queried as; what light flashes in battle?
Taboo
The riddle is often associated with transgression of taboo as in the Riddle of the Sphinx in the Oedipus myth. Riddles operate in gaps between boundaries presumed doomed to remain separate. Space is not homogeneous it requires to be connected. Oedipus’ itinerary crosses spatial accidents, bifurcations, catastrophes and loops.
Riddles are located at cracks and, in the case of the Oedipus myth, are located on cracks, thereby offering bridges. Here the model of the riddle is more than just the Sphinx’s riddle. The riddle is a set of three desperate conditions, and Oedipus, who embodies the answer, constitutes a paradox by satisfying all three. Oedipus, in his answer, supplants the Sphinx through an act of self-choice.
