Anagram – A very short introduction

Abstract

The history of forming anagrams spans from antiquity to the present time. It connects different areas, experiences and discourses – magical rites, religious texts, cryptography and science on one hand and poetry, language, literary theory, social games, and enigmatography on the other. Anagram undermines the stability of discourse and introduces a new perspective on the nature of communication. The scholars always link Greek poet Lycophron of Halkida and Kabbalah with the origin of anagrams. Lycophron (3rd century BC) formed anagrams by using the names of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II and his sister Arsinoe I in his poem Alexandra. Kabbalah, however, uses anagram as an idea of creating the world by means of language. Kabbalist who tries to understand the text of the eternal Torah, disintegrates the existing text into letters and recombines them anew, believing that by doing so a perfect sacred language, from which all the existing imperfect languages are derived, will eventually be decoded. There are many subcategories and occurrences of anagrams, but the most frequent and popular ones are those of personal name, expression or sentence being anagrammatized. Anagrammatization of names often has a cryptic function, and can be used as praise or criticism. Forming anagrams out of popular expressions provides various opportunities for stylistic and semantic replication. In the past, anagrams were often used in science and literature. Researchers have used them as a good way to keep scientific discoveries. Anagrammatization allowed them to use additional research, before the final disclosure, and safely confirm their discovery without fear that somebody else will reveal it before them. In literature anagram usually appears within the text. Its task is to embellish the discourse, draw attention to the writer’s elegance of style, ingenuity and wit. It is particularly common in the visual and avant-garde poetry. Ferdinand de Saussure undoubtedly marked the recent history and the position of anagrams in rhetoric, semiotics, linguistic and literary theory. The Geneva thinker obsessively read Saturnian, Homeric and Vedic poetry for three years (1906–1909), believing that the names of the heroes, gods, authors, and the like will appear regularly anagrammatized. De Saussure speculated that those texts contain additional sign system, independent of the author’s will, that transforms a poetic discourse into a place of mysterious extension of one’s own name via syllables and lyrics of the song. One hundred forty-one notebooks, filled with notes about anagrams, testify of his fascination. Saussure’s folly’ (la folie de Saussure), which represents a strong departure from the theory of language introduced in his Course in general linguistics, was the subject of numerous treatises (Starobinski, Jakobson, Derrida, Kristeva, Riffaterre, Culler, etc.). Among other things, de Saussure’s research of anagrams prompted discussions about the nature of sign, the linearity of the signifier and the logocentrism. Moreover, it was interpreted as a counterpart of Bakhtin’s dialogic, and as an important link between the concept of intertextuality and contemporary theories of reading. This very brief introduction into anagram offers some basic information on the history and practice of anagram forming, singles out typical examples and describes the role this procedure has in contemporary discourses.