One letter in every eight on an ordinary page of English is an E — it is by far the language's most common letter. In 1939 a retired American author named Ernest Vincent Wright decided to do without it altogether. His self-published novel Gadsby runs to about 50,000 words, and the letter E appears in none of them: no 'the', no 'he' or 'she' or 'we', no past tenses ending in '-ed', no 'love'. Wright claimed he tied down the E key of his typewriter so the letter could not slip in while he worked, and in his introduction he catalogued the sacrifices — among them, that no number between six and thirty can be written out in English without an E. He died the same year the book appeared; a persistent legend insists it was the very day of publication, though the record is murkier. Gadsby sank almost without trace, then slowly became a cult object among lovers of constrained writing.
A text that deliberately excludes a letter is called a lipogram, from a Greek phrase meaning 'leaving out a letter', and the game is ancient. Greek tradition credits Lasus of Hermione, a poet of the sixth century BC, with composing odes that avoided the letter sigma, and the later writer Tryphiodorus was said to have produced a version of the Odyssey that dropped a different letter in each of its twenty-four books. The lipogram's mirror image is the pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet at least once — most famously 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', beloved of typing teachers, telegraphers and font designers.
The disappearance
Thirty years after Gadsby, the constraint produced a masterpiece. Georges Perec belonged to Oulipo — the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or 'workshop of potential literature', founded in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais — a group built on the idea that arbitrary constraints liberate a writer rather than strangle one. In 1969 Perec published La Disparition, a full-length detective novel of some 300 pages written entirely without E, the most common letter in French just as in English. The book is secretly about its own constraint: characters hunt for a vanished companion named Anton Voyl — a play on voyelle, French for 'vowel' — and tend to perish just as they grasp what is missing. The story goes that at least one baffled reviewer assessed the novel without noticing anything unusual about it at all.
The vanished letter carried private weight. Perec's father was killed as a soldier in 1940; his mother was deported to Auschwitz and never returned. In spoken French, sans e — 'without E' — sounds the same as sans eux, 'without them', and critics have long read the novel's unnameable absence as an elegy Perec could not bring himself to write directly. Having proved he could survive without the letter, Perec then reversed the trick: his 1972 novella Les Revenentes uses no vowel at all except E.
Performing the feat twice
Translating a lipogram means committing the crime all over again in a second language, which is why La Disparition was long labelled untranslatable. The Scottish-born novelist and critic Gilbert Adair proved otherwise. His English version, A Void, published in 1994, sustains the ban on E across the entire novel — an act of re-composition as much as translation, since barely a sentence of the French could be carried across literally. Adair even re-performed the famous poems Perec had smuggled into his text: Poe's 'The Raven' becomes 'Black Bird', and Hamlet's soliloquy opens 'Living, or not living: that is what I ask'. A Void won the Scott Moncrieff Prize, Britain's annual award for translation from French. Translators into other languages adapted the constraint to their own alphabets' statistics: the Spanish version, El secuestro, instead does without A, the second most common letter in Spanish.
Why do any of this? The Oulipian answer is that rules force a writer off the rutted path of habit — that the constraint does some of the imagining for you. Wright framed Gadsby as a stunt and produced a curiosity; Perec took the identical stunt and produced literature, threading the largest grief of his life through the hole where a letter should have been. That is the lipogram's quiet lesson: what a text cannot say can still be what it is about. Absence, handled well, is the loudest thing on the page.
Quiz nuggets
- Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) runs to about 50,000 words, none of them containing the letter E.
- A lipogram excludes a chosen letter; a pangram, like 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', uses every letter at least once.
- Georges Perec's E-less La Disparition (1969) was followed by Les Revenentes (1972), which uses no vowel except E.
- Perec belonged to Oulipo, the French 'workshop of potential literature' founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais.
- Gilbert Adair's E-less English translation, A Void (1994), won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French.