A Field Guide to the Modern Lipogram

With More General Reflections on Literary Constraint to Follow

Now updated with more lipograms—see below.

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We do not pretend that systematic artifices are identical to writing, but only that they constitute a dimension of writing which must not be ignored. Rather than harrying the ineffable to who knows where, shouldn't we first examine the reasons for the persistence of the sonnet? And why should we forget that the most beautiful line of poetry in the French language is composed of monosyllables?...

...the suppression of the letter, of the typographical sign, of the basic prop, is a purer, more objective, more decisive operation [than suppressing a given word], something like constraint degree zero, after which everything becomes possible.

-- Georges Perec, "History of the Lipogram" (translated by Warren F. Motte, Jr.)¹

A lipogram is an ancient literary form in which a single letter of the alphabet is omitted: no word which uses it is indulged. In most cases—exceptions will be noted below—mispellings aren’t permitted, although standard abbreviations are: you might find “Dr.” in a lipogram in O, even though “doctor” would be forbidden. In his superb book Oulipo Compendium,² oulipian Harry Mathews explains it through a series of examples:

Lipogram in c, d,, f, g, j, k ,l ,m, p, v, w, x, y, z:
     To be or not to be: that is the question
Lipogram in a (&c):
     To be or not to be: this is the question
Lipogram in e (&c):
     Survival or oblivion: this is our quandry
Lipogram in t (&c):
     Being or non-being: such is my dilemma

Depending on the letter, writing such at work could be a trivial operation. This paragraph, for instance, is a lipogram in both the final and antepenultimate letters of the alphabet. That, of course, is essentially trivial—I wrote it in normal English without thinking and it came out that way. (As long as I avoid places where they cage animals or palaces that Kubla Khan built I should be fine.) But some letters are quite difficult—at first blush some people will say impossible, at least for a work of any length, but enough have been done to render that judgment suspect even in cases not yet attempted.

What I propose here is a tour of a few more recent (20th and 21st century) lipogrammatic works—a guide book to what is out there. For older lipograms—as I said, the lipogram is an ancient form—see the Perec essay from which the above epigraph is taken, which I will attempt neither to summarize nor to duplicate, and which overlaps this field guide only in one entry—the last in Perec being the first one here.

Two further pieces of background before I begin. A univocalism is a specialized form of the lipogram: it suppresses all save one vowel, using only one. These are, obviously, harder than a single-letter lipogram, but they, too, are not impossible.³

Finally, in discussing literary constraints in the modern age one can’t help but refer to the Oulipo—I have already mentioned it twice—so I had better introduce it. The Oulipo is a French literary group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, and which is still ongoing (making it, as has been widely noted, the longest-lasting French literary group in history). The group, whose full name is the Ouvoir de literature potentielle , which translates to “workshop on potential literature”⁴ (“Oulipo” is an acronym—OUvoir de LIterature POtentielle) has dedicated itself to the study (and devising) of literary constrants; its members have developed new constraints, written works under constraints old and new, and furthered the theory of literary constraint. The most famous French writers to be⁵ members are founder Quneeau and Georges Perec; Italo Calvino is probably their most famous member tout court.⁶ There have been three anglophone members: Harry Mathews and Daniel Levin Becker from the U.S., and Ian Monk from the U.K. (both Mathews and Monk will be mentioned again, and Mathews already has been). The Oulipo’s efforts have been prominent enough that it has made itself central to literary constraints as a subject and approach, hence their inevitable inclusion in any discussion of such.⁷

Please note that the area of constrained literature, as niche as it may sound to some, is in fact a vast domain: there is a great deal of it, of varying quality naturally, and using a bewildering number of different constraints. This field guide will focus on lipograms; thus even superficially similar forms (such as that used by Walter Abish in his fascinating yet flawed novel Alphabetical Africa), will be omitted. Leave out a letter, or I’m leaving you out. For those interested in other forms of constrained literature, please see The Field Guide to Literary Constraints (Snark & Boojum Press, forthcoming).

One final note: this one is definitely blowing past the email length limit, but the part you get by email (assuming you have subscribed & are seeing this in email) should be plenty to tell you whether or not it’s worth a click, or if this is one that, not unlike the Es in a great many texts discussed below, is better passed over.

Any walk down the path of the lipogram in the modern era inevitably stops for a drink at the Place Georges Perec (Perec was, of course, an ecrivain Francais (1936-1982)., This is a a real sign in Paris on Rue Linné, where Perec lived.

Ernest Vincent Wright, Gadsby (1939)

The first major lipogram written in English, Gadsby is a self-proclaimed stunt. Wright wrote it not to fullfill his nominative deterministic destiny as an author and craftsman, but simply to show that it could be done. He didn’t aim for literary merit, and by all accounts he did not hit it by accident.⁸ If, despite this, you wish to read it—although why would you?—it’s online at Gutenberg.

Did he succeed? Alas, no. Even aside from its utter lack of literary merit, he—more importantly? Less? A subtle question we will return to—failed at his self-appointed task, to the tune of three uses of “the” and one of “officers”, as is noted by the transcriber of the Gutenberg text. I believe there may have been later editions which corrected the errors, but I have not seen them.

Georges Perec, La disparition (1969)

This is where the true history of the modern lipogram begins. Perec was a member of the Oulipo (q.v.), and decided to write what (at the time) seemed a wildly ambitious constrained novel: a novel not using the letter “e” (a feat which is even harder in French than in English, apparently). It was a turning point for the Oulipo: while they had (so to speak) talked big, none of them had previously tackled a challenge on that sort of scale. (This judgment is probably unfair, but none of their constraints were that hard or that simple—”constraint degree zero”, as Perec puts it.)

Perec did: and did it splendidly. It’s a marvelous book, weird and wonderful. Unlike Wright, Perec did not fail to hit literary merit—perhaps because he aimed for it.⁹ La disparition is a metaphysical mystery (what others might call a postmodern mystery), in which a man named Anton Voyl (whose name is the French word for vowel—”voyelle”—omitting the Es (and one extra L I guess)) has vanished, and his friends try and find him, while one by one they are disappearing too. The book, while humorous, is fundamentally haunted: the pun at the heart of the novel is that the French name for the letter E is pronunced just like the French word for “them” (eux); so when E has disappeared it sounds like they have disappeared. Perec, who was Jewish, was orphaned by the Holocaust (his mother died in Auschwitz, his father served in the French army and died fighting the Nazis). The sense of loss, palpable but unspeakable, ubiquitous but hard to see, runs throughout the novel, and sharpens its humor and wit.

But some have said that the finest mark of the novel’s achievement was, in fact, a negative review it received. David Bellos, Perec’s biographer,¹⁰ writes:

[T]he longest review published was an attempt to drive a blunt nail into Perec’s coffin… Those in the know could only view the article as Perec’s greatest triumph to date: a professional reader simply had not noticed the lack of es in La Disparition. Perec had pulled off his challenge to the alphabet and to the French language. [Emphasis in the original.]

There is something odd—something that perhaps calls into question the entire project—that the “greatest triumph” could be a review and not, say, the literary text itself. (Perhaps I read Bellos too literally.) And while I have admittedly read the book only in English translation, I must say that a reviewer who didn’t notice that it was a lipogram was simply not doing his job very well. It’s really bloody hard to miss—not simply because of the language, but because of the plot.

La disparition, by the way, is a fine book, but by no means Perec’s best. While he has written many I have not read, by common consensus his masterwork is La Vie mode d'emploi (translated as Life: a User’s Manual), which is in fact superb.¹¹ If you are going to read one lipogram, read Perec’s; but if you are going to read one Perec, read Life: a User’s Manual. — Which, perhaps, also says something about the lipogram—or, perhaps, simply about the achievement of that other novel.

Georges Perec, A Void (trans. Gilbert Adair, 1994)

Perec’s novel was translated by Gilbert Adair—and, in a feat that is in some ways more impressive than Perec’s original novel, it was translated as a lipogram. Why is this more impressive? As Douglas Hosfstater explains in his superb, enjoyable and ultimately flawed book Le ton beau de Marot, “In all likelihood…Perec’s novel was dictated in large part by idiosyncrasies of the French Language—words and phrases that, in French, just happened to have no “e” in them… In contrast, [his translators] had no such luxury.” (p. 117) Perec could chose to have his characters see (voir) rather than hear (entendre) something… but Adair could not. That he succeeds as well as he does is a marvel.

For me the highlight of the book is in Chapter 10, when the friends of Anton Voyl—who in Adairs translation is renamed Vowl, for reasons I trust the reader will find obvious—have, in the course of their search for him, come across six famous poems that Vowl/Voyl transcribed by hand (“highly familiar madrigals” is how Adair puts it). In the French edition, these are six of the most famous poems in French. Adair, however, does not translate Perec’s lipogrammaticization of those, but rather takes five English language poems, and lipogrammaticizes them (and then leaves one, Rimbaud’s “Vcoalisations“, in untranslated French), producing

• William Shakspar’s “Living or Not Living” 

• PBS's Ozymandias

• John Milton's On His Glaucoma

• Thomas Hood's No

• Arthur Gordon Pym's Black Bird

• Arthur Rimbaud's Vocalisations.

It’s a tour-de-force, and I can’t help but quote the opening bit of two of them. From "Shakspar’s” (sic) monologue:¹²

Living, or not living: that is what I ask:
If'tis a stamp of honour to submit
To slings and arrows wafi'd us by ill winds,
Or brandish arms against a flood of afflictions,
Which by our opposition is subdu'd?

And from Arthur Gordon Pym’s¹³ “Black Bird”:

'Twas upon a midnight tristful I sat poring, wan and wistful,
Through many a quaint and curious list full of my consorts slain -
I sat nodding, almost napping, till I caught a sound of tapping,
As of spirits softly rapping, rapping at my door in vain.
"'Tis a visitor," I murmur'd, "tapping at my door in vain -
                                                     "Tapping soft as falling rain."

Quoth that black bird: not again!

Many thanks are due to the late Adair—whose own novel The Death of the Author I highly recommend, especially to anyone familiar with late 20th-century English departments—for making Perec’s novel accessable to English readers.

Georges Perec, other translations of La dispiration

Although, to be fair, two others have also tried to do so. I have covered this extensively elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point, but even aside from a few snippets which were translated by Perec’s fellow oulipian, Harry Mathews (done prior to Adair’s work), there are apparently two full translations of the work, Jim Lee’s Vanish’d and one by Ian Monk (op. cit.) which I think is called A Vanishing. These are unpublished; a persuasive speculation that this is yet another case of copyright hindering rather than promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”, makes me long, yet again, that the words “limited time” were more reasonably interpreted by our imperial courts.

Ian Monk, “On G. Adair’s A Void”

…Particularly since Adair’s translation maybe wasn’t even all that good?

I would myself say Adair’s translation is superb—at least, it reads extremely well. But Perec’s fellow oulipian Ian Monk (who attentive readers will note is perhaps an interested party) has written a critique of it, that is itself a lipogram in e. Monk largely critiques Adair for being unfaithful to Perec’s text. It is still available online (scroll down), but here’s a small snippet to convey the nature of his critique:

Original: "Portons dix bons whiskys à l'avocat goujat qui fumait au zoo."

Adair (p. 39): "I ask all 10 of you, with a glass of whisky in your hand - and not just any whisky but a top-notch brand - to drink to that solicitor who is so boorish as to light up his cigar in a zoo."

This, similar to our "That quick brown fox is jumping onto a lazy diva", is a familiar typist's workout and should contain all symbols from A to Z (barring, naturally, what it cannot contain in this book) and is also an important, but vain indication to Anton Vowl's pals as to what is going on. Not only is this translation's volubility absurd, but it also lacks all of four symbols: m, q, v and x. How about: "Quick! pour six whisky drams for an unjovial solicitor bringing cigars to a zoo." If not, Anton Vowl's post scriptum is void of any point.

I must admit that, unlike Adair’s rendition of Vowl’s post scriptum, I think Monk very much has a point. I do wish I could read his translation!

Georges Perec, Les revenentes (1973), translated by Ian Monk as The Exeter Text in Three by Perec (1996)

Although I can read this, at least!

Perec, its seems, had a lot of Es left over after he neglected them so long, and produced this univocalism (q.v.) in E. I admit to only having skimmed it. As the intrepid reviewer M. A. Orthofer notes, “it is a fun exercise, and… Perec (and Menk) certainly prove their mettle, though on a certain level the joke quickly wears thin.” It is also filled with sex, far more than is usual for Perec’s work.

Incidentally, Perec published yet a third lipogram (a second univocalism), this one only a page or two long, which is called “What a Man!” (the title is in English in the original, although the work is in French). It can be found in the Oulipo Compendium, in Monk’s collection of his Writings for the Oulipo, or online. I find it (unlike the brilliant A Void) frankly unreadable.

Ian Monk, “Georges Perec’s Letterless Texts”

No, dear reader, we are not done with Perec and Monk yet, although this is the last of them. Also, however, one of the best.

This is 1/6 of a set by Ian Monk called “An Entertainment in Six Univocalisms” that is precisely what the name implies. The first of them is Monk’s translation of Perec’s “What a Man!”; the other four are at best forgettable. But this is, for me, a miniature masterpiece. It is a brief essay about the three Perec works discussed above—A Void, The Exeter Text and What a Man!—written as a univocalism in e. It’s really astonishing. Here’s its thesis, from its opening:

When Perec penned the e-less Enlèvement, the Exeter Text (even the He-Men Legend we've seen here) he set free the letters' secret essences. Secret essences? Well, let's see the texts themselves.

I am not really persuaded by the text’s argument, but regardless it is a delight to read. The highlight, for me, is when Monk quotes a sentence from La Disparation—translating a French lipogram in E to an English univocalism in E. It’s really quite astonishing.

This too is available in the Oulipo Compendium, in Monk’s Writings for the Oulipo, and online.

Philip Terry, The Book of Bachelors (1999)

One might have thought that, after Perec, there was nowhere for the lipogram to go. (Although Perec, given his “History of the Lipogram”, would presumably would not have been such a one.) But there have been a number of interesting experiments, of which Philip Terry’s The Book of Bachelors (named after, and organized around, the artwork The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors by Marcel Douchamp, which graces its cover), which was published as a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, is one. It is a collection of nine stories, each a lipogram in a different letter: he does each of the five vowels, of course, and four consonants: c, m, p, q.

I have to think that writing nine lipograms in nine different letters is in one sense much harder than writing a long lipogram in a single letter. After all, after writing a lipogram (or even a univocalism) in a single letter, you start to get the hang of it: using only those words you are allowed becomes habitual, discovered work-arounds for various common phrases become second-nature, etc., whereas to keep jumping from letter to letter forces you to relearn what you are doing over and over. And yet a short story is long enough that (unlike, say, a work that did a line or even a paragraph as a lipogram) you need to get yourself in shape to write it.

I must admit that, like Perec’s The Exeter Text, I have skimmed rather than read this; the stories are of varying interest, at least to me. But it is an interesting experiment and deserved mention here, the faults and omissions of your poor guidebooker notwithstanding.

Christian Bok, Eunoia (2001)

The twenty-first century got off to a bang with lipograms, with its first year producing two of the best since La dispiration; it is hard to imagine a better year for lipograms this century, even though there is still a great deal of it left to go. The two great lipograms of 2001 are as different in style, tone, and audience as you could imagine: one is by a poet, and was published as a book of experimental poetry (although it can be read as a collection of prose pieces); the other, which I’ll get to in a minute, is a children’s book. But first the experiment.

Chrstian Bök does (in some sense) for the univocalism what Philip Terry did for the lipogram: he runs the gammet. Eunoia¹⁴ is a set of five main texts (with a number of appendices and extras at the end), each a univocalism in a different letter. (Each, charmingly, has a fitting dedictee: so that O is dedicated to Yoko Ono.) It is a masterpiece, crazy and wonderful. SF writer and critic Samuel R. Delany is quoted as saying that “Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.”¹⁵

To give a tiny flavour of this marvelous work, here are the opening sentences of each chapter:

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman.
Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.
Writing is inhibiting.
Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books.
Kultur spurns Ubu - thus Ubu pulls stunts.

It’s not an easy text—of course it isn’t, it’s bloody experimental poetry, or at least that’s how it was marketed (and it won the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2002); and it has, sadly, failed to drive everyone sane (citation: The New York Times, 2001-2023, passim.) But it’s a rich verbal delight and well worth taking a look at.

Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters (2001)

And then there’s Mark Dunn’s book, which feels like a children’s book for older kids, so maybe it’s a YA novel, but doesn’t have the feel that YA novels do, except I haven’t read that many, so what do I know?

It’s an epistolary novel (that is, a novel in letters (get it?)), and is set on an island named for the writer of the sentence “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog”. There is a big monument on the island commemorating this, with the sentence in big letters. But the monument is in ill-repair, and the letters start falling off, and as they do, the island bans the use of any words containing those letters. Things get quite tricky. A novel whose opening letter contains the sentence:

On Monday, July 17, a most intriguing thing took place: one of the tiles from the top of the cenotaph at town center came loose and fell to the ground, shattering into a good many pieces.

Devolves over time to:

Pharewell. Pharewell. Tho we were not phrents 4 long, I will so miss ewe.

It’s quite charming. I suspect that it will find (and has found) more readers than any other work on this list.

Andrew Huang, “Rapping Without the Letter E” (2013) and “Check Perec” (2014)

So where is left to go after that?

How about to music?

Musician and videographer extraordinare Andrw Huang has done two rap songs which are lipograms. The first, “Rapping Without the Letter E”, is just what it says on the tin:

And then—in a nod to George Perec’s path from La disparition to Les revenentes—he followed this up with a univocalism in E. This song is sometimes called “One Vowel Rap”, but on Huang’s album Internet it has what is, to me, the far superior title: Check Perec (Huang is, clearly, a man who pays his debts). Listen here:

And while I said, way up so long ago that the email-only readers who read that won’t see this, that I am not doing non-lipogrammatic constrained literature, I can’t help but note that Huang has done many other constrained songs, including my two (other) favorites, one in which the number of letters in each word make up a mnemonic for π,¹⁶ and one in which every word starts with the next letter of the alphabet.

(New Section:) A Non-Existent Lipogram, or, All Letters Omitted

I read in various places online that Gyles Brandreth had rewritten several Shakespeare plays without various letters. Here is a typical example of the claim made:

Brandreth challenged himself to re-write the major works of Shakespeare -- omitting a different letter of the alphabet in each work. In Hamlet, for example, the famous soliloquy reads "To be or not to be; that's the query." Brandreth also wrote Othello without any o's and Macbeth without any a's or e's and Twelfth Night without the letters l and o.

This sounds like Brandreth had done four full Shakespeare plays—a major work indeed! I had to know more. But I could find no trace of them. His wikipedia page claimed he had done the project—but referenced no publisher, date, production venue, or anything else. Brandreth had in fact stared in a (strange yet fascinating sounding) production of Hamlet—but a quick perusal showed the text to be the usual pangrammatic one.

Finally, a previous inquirer on this topic posted an answer from Mr. Brandreth himself:

I had some fun with lipograms in my book "The Joy of Lex" about 35 years ago and speculated on the possibilities of rewriting Shakespeare lipogrammatically - but, alas, I never got round to it. And now I am embarked on writing a series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde and his circle, so that I fear I never will!

If you look at The Joy of Lex itself, one can understand the confusion: he speaks as if had actually written them. The chapter on lipograms is four pages (pp. 60-63); here is the relevant passage:

For the A. Ross Eckler reference, see below.

Still More Lipograms

Those are, I believe, the major tourist sites for the traveler in this rather provincial realm. But there are, in fact, still more lipogrammatic works. Here are some brief ones worth mentioning:

• Douglas Hofstadter wrote a brief memoir as a lipogram in e.

• Hofstadter includes a number of lipogramatic paragraphs (including a lipogrammatic “translation” of John Searle’s famous Chinese room thought experiment) in his book Le Ton Beau de Marot, which I have mentioned several times, and where he also discusses Perec’s La disparition and its translations. He also discusses a game he played with friends where they tried to speak in lipograms, which is an interesting twist.

• This is a lipogrammatic introduction to lipograms.

• (Update) A. Ross Eckler, the long-time editor and publisher of Word Ways: : The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, has rewritten a number of nursery rhymes as lipograms. His first effort was “Mary Had a Lipogram”,¹⁷ which produced five versions of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” without the letters S, H, A, T, E respectively. He followed this up with “Half Alphabet Nursery Rhymes”, rewriting a series of different rhymes (including “Mary”) each of which left out 13 letters. Then Paul Hellwig followed up Eckler’s work with univocalic versions of “Mary” in “Mary Had a Univocalic Lamb” (Word Ways, August 1986). This reposting of Eckler’s original “Mary” has links to many more lipograms as well.

And then, in my brief glance at the relevant Wikipedia entry diligent research preparing this essay, I saw reference to the following titles, all of which I know virtually nothing about, but for the sake of completeness I mention them here:

• James Thurber’s children’s book The Wonderful O (1957) is about an island called Oooroo where a pirate forbids its inhabitants to use the letter O. It’s the work that, after writing this essay, I want most to go track down—particularly since it’s the only post-Gadsby, pre-Perec lipogram I’ve come across, which makes it interesting even if it weren’t by Thurber (which is also recommendation in itself).

• Mike Schertzer’s book Cipher and Poverty: The Book of Nothing (1998) is described by Wikipedia scholars as “presented as the writings of "a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance ... who can find me here in this silence". The poems that follow use only the vowels A, E, I, and O, and consonants C, D, F, H, L, M, N, R, S, T, and W, taken from that utterance.”

• Rebeccah Giltrow wrote a collection of stories called Twenty-six Degrees (2014) with twenty-six chapters. No points for guessing the precise lipogram connection by this point. In the afterward, she says she was inspired by her teacher, Philip Terry (q.v.).

• The ninth episode of the ninth season if How I Met Your Mother (a show I have never seen even a single episode of) apparently includes a person challenged to get a woman’s number without using any word containing the letter E.

• Update: Poet (and friend of Attempts) Kinton Ford sent me a link to his lipogrammatic translations of the first canto of Dante, the opening of Proust, and a number of other lipogrammatic vairations on poems, including a remarkable 27-poem version of the famous Williams poem “This is just to say”: 26 lipograms and a pangram. Definitely worth checking out.

• Update 2: some time after I posted this, Scott Alexander wrote a parody Republican debate with a lot of fun lipogramming, which sparked much creativity among his commentators.

• Update 3.1: Check out the comments, where commentator EmilyPigeon has helpfully left a number of links to still more lipograms.

• Update 3.2: There is an entire subreddit, r/Avoid5, devoted to posts which are lipograms in e. (See also this comment, below.)

• Update 3.3: Alapanamo, a contributor to the aforementioned r/Avoid5, has a collection of constrained writing here, mostly lipograms and univocalisms.

Anyone who has read (or viewed) any of those—or who knows any other examples worth mentioning—is strongly encouraged to leave a comment below.

Philosophical Summation, Including Brief Remarks About the Future Potential of the Form

So what is there left to do? One way to characterize the history of the modern lipogram is a series of existence proofs:

• Gadsby: It is possible to write a novel as a lipogram in e.

• La dispiration: It is possible to write a good novel as a lipogram in e.

• A Void: It is possible to translate a novel while retaining its lipogram

• The Book of Bachelors: It is possible to write a book as a set of nine lipograms.

• Eunoia: It is possible to write a book as a set of six univocalisms.

• Ella Minnow Pea: It is possible to write a kid’s book as a lipogram, and make that aspect of it fun.

• “Rapping without the Letter E”: it is possible to make a song without using the letter.

The question, now, is what is left?

I won’t say nothing: the invention and creativity of humanity as a whole should never be so blithely dismissed. Nor will I say that there is nothing left interesting to do, for the same reason.

But I do suspect that if the lipogram is ever to become a full-fledged literary form—which, despite Perec’s history and this rather extensive field guide, I have doubts about both whether it should and whether it will (although I don’t doubt that in some circumstances it could)—it will have to be about something other than the fact that the work one is reading is a lipogram, or even the more general point that constraints in some way enrich or hinder us, and the like.

Oulipian Jacques Roubaud has articulated a principle “occasionally observed in Oulipian works”, namely that “a text written with a restrictive procedure refers to the procedure”. This is hardly a universal rule—although sonnets have been written about the sonnet, and sestinas about the sestina, for the most part poets use poetic forms to express things other than thoughts on the forms themselves—and it is also not by itself too constricting: a mere reference to a rule can be done in passing, as a hat-tip or easter egg (as we would say today¹⁸), a mere decoration to a text largely about something else.

The problem, in my view, is that Roubaud’s principle—which as articulated is pretty minor—can become, in practice, far larger. In the critical work The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement,¹⁹ Laruen Elkin paraphrases Roubaud’s principle as “that the constraint must be the theme of the novel”—a paraphrase that, as far as I can tell, is inaccurate to the principle as originally written, but which is all-too-often all-too-accurate for the principle as actually applied.

Consider the works discussed above. Perec’s La dispiration is about other things too, but it is also about the lipogram—that is, about the vanishing of Voyl/Vowl (for all he uses that to symbolize weighty matters). Very much the same could be said of Eunoia: it is about writing, as even a glance at the quoted bit above will tell you. Ella Minnow Pea is about an island-full of people obsessed with letters who progressively mandate their banning. And Huang raps about his own rapping (“Not using it/Do you kids miss this fifth stiff glyph?”). In all four, not Roubaud’s principle, but Elkin’s paraphrase, reigns.

The problem is that these recursive topics have a fairly limited appeal. It’s possible to do well; it’s possible to do in a way that engages other topics. But it hardly has the range of the sonnet, or even the sestina. A work about the way a work is written is a semantic constraint that is simply too inherently limiting to engage the attention for long; writing about the nature of contraints in life is also, ultimately, too constraining. Indeed, I might turn Roubaud’s principle around, and say that what makes something a full, living form is precisely its use without reference to its nature: fledgling forms tend to navelly-gaze at themselves; forms that have left the nest speak of other things.

Will the lipogram become such?

Maybe. As I said, I don’t want to pit my personal imagination against the collective creativity of the human race, stretching out into the indefinite future.

But here is why I find myself thinking it unlikely.

One might divide constraints into two categories: those that are invisible, and those that are evident. Among the latter (which includes, despite one sloppy reviewer of Perec, the lipogram) we might futher divide them into two categories: those that provide some measure of pleasure to the reader, and those that are impressive the way stunts are impressive—that someone could actually do it. (“The amazing thing about a waltzing bear is not how well it waltzes but that it waltzes at all.”²⁰)

The forms of the sonnet and the sestina, and various literary forms—such as, say, the constraints involved in the genre of the mystery novel (like La dispiration) or the form of the epistolary novel (like Ella Minnow Pea)—are all constraints that, in various fashions, give pleasure to the reader. They enhance the reading experience.

Others, however, are stunts.

Now I don’t wish to entirely dismiss stunts. The fact that something can be done is, I think, a basic human pleasure: it’s the pleasure behind juggling and acrobatics and spelling bees and auto racing and many other things. For that matter, dance—an artform about which I admittedly know next to nothing—seems like one in which the amazement at people’s abilities is inseparable from the visual beauty of the performance.²¹ When people speak about liking a movie because the acting is fun to watch they are, I think, expressing something at least close to this.

But still.

I think literature works best when it is, well, about something. Engaging on the merits—and not just the form (for all that form is also quite often central to literature’s plesaures).

I hope I have made clear that the best lipograms do pass this test. But like dance, they do so in part by intermingling the astonishment at the achievement with the beauty of the creation. And the former part of that will wear off as it comes to be seen as something that has been done.

So I suspect that for lipograms to flourish and continue, one of several things would have to happen. In the most limited scenario, people would have to find new challenges to undertake; this I expect will happen. In a more expansive scenario, people would have to decide to use lipograms to write stories, poems, etc, that have nothing (or next to nothing) to do with the fact that they are lipograms. In the most expansive possible scenario, someone would have to find or make in lipogrammatic writing a beauty or engagement in the practice, something equivalent to the way in which rhymes and rhythm enhance a poem, or genre conventions (can) enhance a novel. So far I—despite my what-I-hope-is-by-this-point-apparent interest in the form, and my admiration for a number of the aforementioned examples of it—have never seen this.²² And I sort of doubt I ever will.

But then, human creativity thrives under constraint, so it is also possible that something—possibly even the mere dare implicit in the claim that it probably will never be done—will allow someone to write a work, or set of works, which achieve it.

1. This essay can be found in Motte’s volume Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Dalkey, 1986), which gathers a dozen or so essays and pieces about literary constraint and the literary group the Oulipo. I quote a longer extract from it here.

2. Harry Mathews & Alastair Brotche, Oulipo Compendium (Revised & Updated edition). London: Atlas Press, 2005 (first edition

3. A uniconconantism would presumably allow only one consontant, but in English, at least, such a work does seem genuinely impossible (save perhaps a single sentence).

4. Although its first, and for a long time only, American member, Harry Matthews, used to point out that it could also be translated as “sewing circle for potential literature”.

5. The Oulipo, to end the apparently long-term practice of French literary groups splitting and tossing out various members, have made it a rule that anyone elected to the Oulipo is always a member, regardless of such trivialities of death, although they do say that dead members are “permanently excused” from future meetings.

6. The other contender would be Marcel Duchamp; but his membership was, I believe, largely honorary, and I don’t know that he was much invovlved with the group, so I am not counting him.

7. Unless they make it a constraint not to; Douglas Hofstatder’s Le Ton Beau de Marot, which discusses many constrained works including some that I cite here (and ones by oulipians) does not mention it at all. In a private correspondence he confirmed that this was purposeful.

8. Although not my own, since I’ve never read it; frankly I could not be less interested.

9. Despite this, Perec pays due homage to his predecessor; a minor character in his novel is named “Wright”.

10. Georges Perec: A Life in Words (Random House, 1993).

11. It is also, as it happens, a constrained work, although its constraints are subtler and far more complex than the pure simplicity of La disparition.

12. Note that this is a different line that Harry Matthews’ above-cited lipogrammatic version of that line, “Survival or oblivion? This is our quandry”.

13. “Arthur Gordon Pym”, for those who don’t know, is the protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s sole novel.

14. In his afterward, “The New Ennui”, Bök explains that “'Eunoia' is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means 'beautiful thinking'“.

15. And he also said that a graphic novel called Happenstance is “among the best graphic novels around; and certainly the best photocomic I’ve ever read” so you know his taste is fucking impeccable.

16. This is, believe it or not, an entire genre of writing with its own history, examples, etc; but we at Snark & Boojum Press are waiting to see how this essay does before we commit to a Field Guide to Pi-lish Literature.

17. Said to be riginally from Word Ways, August 1969, but not in the online edition. Reprinted in Eckler’s book Making the Alphabet Dance, p. 4.

18. And since I am old, it’s quite possible that by “today” here I mean “about ten years ago”.

19. By Laruen Elkin & Scott Esposito (John Hunt Publishing, 2012).

20. This is supposedly a Russian proverb, although I’ve also seen it attributed to Samuel Johnson.

21. Would a dance be fun to watch if it were, say, done in CGI, designed to do things that no human could? In some ways, sure. But it would feel like something fundamentally different than dance, in the way that film is fundamentally different from live theater.

22. Although maybe Eunoia does it; it certainly comes close.