Georges Perec
Is it possible for you to write some
complete, coherent sentences without using the first letter of our writing
system? The response to the question is
“yes”, though the sentences might end up looking very odd, contorted, or
contrived. For the shunned letter is
indeed the second most frequently used in English writing—only its fellow-vowel
E being more often employed. Hence, few extended prolusions of prose could
omit it.
The gimmick in the paragraph above
is that it contains not a single A. That feature makes it a lipogram—from the Greek λείπω, leave out—a literary bagatelle in which a writer voluntarily
submits to some more or less absurd compositional constraint, such as avoiding
the letter A, in order to demonstrate…exactly
what?
There is a very long
history to this sort of thing. A deservedly
obscure Greek poet named Tryphiodorus is supposed to have written his own
versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, each in twenty-four books
corresponding to the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet. In serial fashion each book scrupulously
avoided its appropriate letter: no alphas in book one, no omegas in book
twenty-four, and so forth in between.
The great Lope de Vega, who could write a play in the time most people
require for a shopping list, wrote five novels in order to omit from each one
of the principal vowels (a, e, i, o, u);
he did not consider y a worthy
challenge, despite the fact it is the Spanish word for “and”. It is alleged that in 1816 a strange drama
entitled “Pièce sans A” had a very
brief run upon the Paris stage. The opening
(and only) night of the “Play without an A” got off to a bad start when the
lead flubbed its initial line. The
curtain rose to discover a man greeting another on stage. “Ah,
monsieur!” cried the first. “Vous voilà.” The audience howled with laughter, but with
the help of the prompter the actor recovered and started again: “Eh, monsieur, vous voici.”
These and numerous
other examples are provided by the estimable William S. Walsh in his
inestimable Handy-Book of Literary
Curiosities (1893). Mr. Walsh had no
high opinion of lipograms, which he regarded as forms of “literary trifling”
and “useless tours de force.” He thought that Tryphiodorus belonged to
“those early centuries of our era during which the world, or the greater part
of it, seems to have been in a state of blue mould for want of work.”
In fact the lipogram
thrives on post-modernity, and I believe its mouldiest days are still
ahead. Perhaps the greatest of modern
lipogrammatologists was Georges Perec (1936-1982), the tragically short-lived author
of the indisputably brilliant Life: A
User’s Manual, a book from which not much was left out. But as a prominent member of an avant-garde
literary conspiracy (in rough translation the “Atelier of Potential
Literature”), Perec was all about pushing envelopes, shattering parchment
ceilings, jumping the barracuda, and leaping the lipogram. His masterpiece in this field was the
full-length novel La Disparition (The Disappearance [1969]), a book in
which the letter E never appears
except insofar as its manifest absence invisibly ministers to major themes of
lack, loss, and mysterious disappearance and is an important plot-theme. In 1994 Gilbert Adair (1944-2011), a brilliant
Brit, published his English translation of this book, eless, as A Void. I
became aware of it from reading an eless
review by my old friend and one-time Princeton colleague, the late Paul Gray,
then the book editor at Time
magazine.
Intelligible language may be the distinctive feature of the human
species and its principal advantage among all other animals. It is difficult to imagine effective human
community without effective speech. What
of written language? For most of recorded history a large majority
of humanity was illiterate, and large swaths still are today. Now most advanced countries enjoy high
literacy rates—one of the features that make them “advanced”. With negligible exception the educational
systems of the world silently subscribe to this view. Human civilization in its entirely depends
upon archived thought and information. How
is it then that although the vast majority of humanity does a fair amount of
talking each day, only a small minority ever does even a little writing?
It is the
view of many that the hardest thing about writing is thinking up something to
write about. I used to think that
too. The old word for this was
“invention,” which in Latin had really meant “finding” or “discovering” as in
the “Invention of the Cross”. The famous
orator Cicero thought that “invention”, the discovery of convincing arguments,
was the first job of rhetoric. My own thinking
about this has evolved.
Thinking up
things to write about is a piece of cake.
The trick is in figuring out what to leave out in writing about them. Say that Shakespeare wants to write about his
terrific girlfriend, a subject for which the potential material is
infinite. How does he discipline the
presentation? Well he limits himself to
fourteen lines of iambic pentameter distributed in three quatrains with a
concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg. That makes him leave an awful lot out, to be
sure, but also forces him to make what he puts in really counts. If literary trifling and useless tours de force can add some variety to a
writer’s workout, I’m all for them.
