I'm trying to write do this post without using the a letter E fifth letter thing in the alphabet thingy. Oh bugger sod this for a lark.
In 1969 Georges Perec wrote a three-hundred page novel, La Disparition, without using the letter e. I can't even write a single sentence. The novel was translated into English for a dare - sorry, by Adair. Somebody once lent me a copy, but I couldn't read it without feeling dizzy. I admire the ingenuity of both Perec and his translator, but don't tell me it's a good read.
Walter Motte, writing in Context magazine, reads a great deal into the absence of the E:
The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of écriture ["writing"]."
Or perhaps he wrote it because he could. Isn't that enough?
More on lipograms from Wikipedia:
"Unhooking a DD-Cup Bra without Fumbling" by Adam Adams (Monsoon Books, 2008) is a 60,000-word lipogrammatic thriller, written without the letter "E", in which protagonist Shannon Dublin swaps a quaint sanctuary in Bangkok for a hard-riding gothic road trip through Asia.
The eponymous cycle of poems from Cipher and Poverty (The Book of Nothing) by Canadian poet Mike Schertzer was created "by a prisoner whose world had been impoverished to a single utterance... who can find me here in this silence". The 4 vowels <a e i o> and 11 consonants <c d f h l m n r s t w> of this utterance comprise the alphabet for the subsequent poems.
The Wonderful O by James Thurber describes what happens to the inhabitants of the island nation Ooroo when two pirates and their crooked lawyer forbid the use of the letter 'O', and ban every object containing an 'O' in its name. Ooroo is renamed R, while a citizen of Ooroo named Ophelia Oliver is renamed Phelia Liver, and so forth. Citizens greet each other by saying "Hell" rather than "Hello". The new laws are applied capriciously: the crooked lawyer dislikes grapefruit (which contains no "o" in its name), so he bans it by invoking the French translation pamplemousse. While not formally a lipogram, sections of Thurber's novel are devoid of "O" or otherwise subjected to wordplay.
