SOURCE: "Read My Lipograms," in New York Times Book Review, March 12, 1995, pp. 3, 30.

[In the following review, Kincaid focuses on the playfull nature of the lipogram form, and offers several examples.]

"OAF! Pinbrain! Numskull! Big fat ninny! Nincompoop! Half-wit!… Moron! Lazy good-for-nothing!" That's a passage from our novel. Notice anything odd about it? Read it aloud—but don't yell it at somebody. Then sing this song (karaoke background helps). It's the opening of the well-known and affecting "You-Can't-Attain-It Fantasy":

    To fancy that unavailing apparition!
    To fight that dirt-tough bad guy!
    To put up with that aggravating sorrow!
    To run in many risky spots!

That stops before we hit the best line—"To just march right into Satan's pit in support of a good policy"—but you get the idea. The idea is to write without using an E.

The real idea is: "Only within severe, almost crippling restraint do we find freedom." (I'm sure that was said by Schoenberg, Joyce or another just as unlikely; but I can't find it in Bartlett's, so I'll attribute it to Madonna.) Georges Perec published La Disptirition in 1969, and now it's been translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void, with no E anywhere in either, although it's a novel of nearly 300 pages. There's restriction for you, E being by far the most common letter in both languages, as you already knew.

But the paradox of liberating fetters is not one that will puzzle us, not when we think of the way we all narrow our options in order to expand our horizons in everyday life. Think of the new possibilities you have found in denying yourself, no matter what, the use of the far right lane; in never humming a tune whose lyrics employ "baby" or "girl" or "doncha know"; in going one day at a time without using the P-word (pr∗bl∗m∗t∗c).

This early novel by Perec, best known here for Life: A User's Manual (published in France in 1978, in America almost a decade later), is an example of a lipogram, a form in which one or more letters of the alphabet are voluntarily suppressed. It dates from the sixth century B.C., according to Perec, no mean scholar and one of the most dazzling and entertaining game-playing writers of this century. (He later used all the E's saved from La Disparition, pouring those E's, and only those E's, into Les Revenentes.) Perec, who died in 1982 just short of his 46th birthday, was a longtime member of Oulipo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which you can translate as well as I, once you know that ouvroir means "workshop." Oulipo, a group of deliriously brilliant mathematicians, theorists and writers, devoted itself to extraordinary linguistic experiments, designed to test the limits of received esthetics and to drive traditional critics and readers to drink.

Perec himself participated in writing S-7 poems (redoing famous poems by replacing every word with the seventh word following it in the dictionary), snowball verses (start with one word, add a word each line, up to 11, and then go back down), bilingual poetry (easily comprehensible in two or more languages), acrostics, anagrams and various heterogrammatic forms (too complicated to describe, but not for me and you to try, take my word for it). When he turned to a commonplace thing like a palindrome. Perec wasn't satisfied with some piddling "Madam, I'm Adam," but did one 5,000 letters long, a record, he felt. From 1976 until his death he concocted weekly crossword puzzles for the magazine Le Point that I'm told are "difficult." I'll bet.

A Void is a rollicking story, wildly amusing and easily accessible to all of us who don't mind slipping, sliding and being tripped. It's a novel about voids, accidental and murderous, about body snatching and snatching 40 winks, about abduction and seduction. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a detective novel or at least a whodunit, with this twist: E done it, but we mustn't ever say that. We can't. When the characters get close to E, they get written out of the plot (maimed, shredded, fed to carp). The plot, which I can be counted on to have mastered or I wouldn't be writing this review, concerns (probably) the disappearance of one Anton Vowl (A. Vowl) and the attempts of an irregular group of friends to discover what's what. The Sphinx is consulted, and the white whale, and clues start to glimmer dangerously: there are 26 cartons, but the fifth one is missing; and so it is with the 26 (now 25) folios and the number of cousins as well. We may ourselves notice (to our peril) that of the 26 chapters there is no Chapter 5. But I don't want to give too much away.

Understand too much of this book and you die: "Any full and final form of illumination is blinking at us, winking at us, just out of our sight, just out of our grasp." That's the frolic in it—we never get there, which means that the fun never ends, not really, not unless we yearn too much for the secret of E.

But that's a mundane wish, a wish for closure that the translator has blocked as effectively as Perec himself. Allowing himself some sweet liberties (introducing, for instance, Miss Piggy and her "Moil"), Mr. Adair must have found here the same heady linguistic tripping available to the author. Of course, the restrictions are preposterous: imagine having virtually no past tense; no definite article; few personal pronouns; no here, there, where, when; no be; no elephant; no eye, ear, nose, elbow; no yes; no love; no sex!

Who would want to read the starved wee thing that could be squeezed out of what remains? Well, I think anybody who gives this a try will roar along with it, and not just its flashier parts, though those set pieces are first-water bamboozles, certainly. Not only do we have sonnets by Milton and Shelley, but Hamlet's celebrated soliloquy (a sample: "And thus our natural trait of fixity/Is sickli'd through with ashy rumination"). Even finer is Poe's "Black Bird," of which you deserve here at least two stanzas:

      Wondrous was it this ungainly fowl could thus hold forth so plainly,
      Though, alas, it discours'd vainly—as its point was far from plain;
      And I think it worth admitting that, whilst in my study sitting,
      I shall stop Black Birds from flitting thusly through my door again—
      Black or not, I'll stop birds flitting through my study door again—
                 What I'll say is, "Not Again!"
 
      But that Black Bird, posing grimly on its placid bust, said primly
      "Not Again," and I thought dimly what purport it might contain.
      Not a third word did it throw off—not a third word did it know of—
      Till, afraid that it would go off, I thought only to complain—
      "By tomorrow it Mill go off," did I tristfully complain.
                 It again said, "Not Again."

But such excerptible parts do not give a good sense of the pleasures available in this book, in its parodies and borrowings, its allusions and puzzles, its good-natured games and fiendish traps. The characterization is startling in its blissful refusal to psychologize: "Parfait was … simply mad about fighting. If you hit him, Parfait hit you back, again and again and again: it was as basic as that." Communication among these characters proceeds with the lunatic confidence available only to those who haven't the slightest idea what they're doing:

A poltroon if not a coward, anyway a bit of a milk-sop, your son saw a distinct possibility of his also rotting in jail, a possibility that wasn't at all to his liking. So, moving out of that casbah of corrupt cops and cutthroat crooks, Douglas took a maid's room on Boul'Mich. It didn't boast all mod. cons. but it had a kind of comfort that was, shall I say, succinct.

This Nabokovian and thrilling book is also, of course, self-reflexive and jagged, talking to other books, including the author's own, to critics, to itself and, most of all, to readers (even those who move their lips). The characters jabber about the book they're in and consult friends like "Dmitri of Karamazov Bros Inc." Perhaps it is such whirligig exhibitionism that has kept Perec from doing very well, up to now, in America. But I suspect the problem is rather that we have identified him too readily (and falsely) with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and other New Novelists, whose brand of rhinocerine frolic has not been to our taste. But Perec's formal experiments and exquisite comedy are so much lighter, more inviting and self-mockingly hip than anything his pedantic cousins ever manage.

Still, you say: "But so what? What's the point of no E? Why do it at all, this silliness?" In a postscript, Perec mentions that in being forced down so many "intriguing linguistic highways and byways" he discovered unexpected and tickling things that he figured might offer "a stimulant" for "fiction writing today." By abandoning "rampant psychologization" and "mawkish moralizing," by breaking the rules and extending the game, he gives us a glimpse of the rules themselves and how tied to them we have always been. Perec has a firm and courageous allegiance to amusement, to its profound and gleeful ability not simply to solve problems (though that's no small delight) but to find in the game an energy that keeps going outward and onward.

Another, perhaps less inviting, way to view Perec's project is in terms of esthetics, unmediated art. According to Perec, writers write to write and readers read to read, not to promote or restlessly to seek out some activity other than writing and reading. As with Parfait, it's as basic as that. Perec, like the Sterne and Rabelais he cites as models, works within a tradition of pure invention, putting his money on our willingness to play along, participate, get it.

Not that "getting it" means sweating over another's completed masterpiece, trying not to be obtuse, worrying that someone will blow the whistle on our failure to know what's really going on. I was told (or rather, my wife let fall) that certain British reviews in highbrow publications had made fun of amusingly mangled references to "A Void" in the daily papers; my wife also said that two British reviews were themselves written (faultlessly, masterfully) as lipograms. I forgot her valentine, which is why she torments me, I think. Anyhow, Perec (unlike my wife) does not make one defensive, but rather inspires one to invent, to come along and play.

The British may have done these lipogram reviews (sounds very dull to me), but I can actually do lipogrammatic songs and poems, and so can you, if you try. The following will get you started. I included the originals for you to compare.

From The Pirates of Penzance (Gilbert and Sullivan), with the original first and then the lipogram:

      Here's a first-rate opportunity
      To get married with impunity,
      and indulge in the felicity
      Of unbounded domesticity.
      You shall quickly be parsonified,
      Conjugally matrimonified,
      By a doctor of divinity,
      Who resides in this vicinity.
      What a damn good opportunity
      Ho! To marry with impunity,
      And to wallow in the jollity
      Of suburbanist frivolity!
      Think about a happy you and I,
      Matrimonially sharing our own sty,
      Thanks to a doctor of divinity,
      Who hangs out in this vicinity.
      Ho!

(The fifth and sixth lines would be better as "Think about a happy you and dad/Matrimonially sharing our own pad"; but it wouldn't fit the sense that way. No poem is altogether perfect, as Coleridge observed.)

From Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach":

     Ah, love, let us be true
     To one another! for the world, which seems
     To lie before us like a land of dreams,
     So various, so beautiful, so new,
     Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
     Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
     And we are here as on a darkling plain
     Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
     Where ignorant armies clash by night.
 
     Ah, hon, how about you and I cling tight
     And crouch! for this world, which might
     Pass for a goodly gift from God,
     So various, so alluring, so awfully mod,
     Hath in fact no joy, no amour, no light,
     No indisputability, no tranquillity, no succor for pain;
     And you and I lurch dizzily as on a darkling plain,
     All about us whirling alarms of tussling and flight,
     As many ignorant troops clash by night.

As I needn't tell anyone as quick as you, that last item even has rhyme. Top that, British reviewers! But I don't want to discourage you or wear out my welcome. You'll have more fun with your own lipograms and with A Void, which, like me—and unlike British reviewers and my wife—displays the knack Perec calls "knowing just how far to go too far."