BENGALURU: Constrained writing is a literary technique that sees the writer bound by a condition that forbids something, or ensures a particular pattern. One of the most famous of these constraints is a ‘lipogram’, where a particular letter is forbidden. This seems easy when the letter in question is Q or Z, for example, but to really challenge yourself, you can ban the use of a much more common letter. Or the most common letter of all – E.
Gadsby is a 50,000-word novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which was published in 1939 and doesn’t use the letter E at all. Wright spent five-and-a-half months writing on a typewriter with the ‘e’ key tied down so that it couldn’t be used at all. A warehouse holding copies of the book burned down shortly after it was printed, destroying most copies of the ill-fated novel. The book was never reviewed but by word-of-mouth it has become an underground cult classic. The book’s scarcity and oddness has seen copies priced at $4,000 by book dealers. Over time, this peculiar masterpiece has opened up many curious readers to this unusual reading experience. Later editions of the book have sometimes carried the alternative subtitle 50,000 Word Novel Without the Letter “E”. Despite Wright’s claim, however, published versions of the book may contain a handful of uses of the letter ‘e’.
A Void by Georges Perec is another of the most famous lipogrammatic novels, but even more impressive is the number of translations it has undergone. Originally published in 1969 in French as La Disparition, the novel follows a group of friends who are trying to find their companion Anton Vowl. The novel doesn’t contain a single letter E (except the four unfortunately found in his name). It has since been translated into various other languages, with a similar rule being imposed on every translator. Because E is so prevalent in many languages, that’s usually the one that gets removed, but the Spanish version removes the A, Russian the O and Japanese the I.
Dr Seuss was famous for books with simple language and catchy rhyme schemes, but perhaps his most famous title was written as the result of a bet between Seuss and his publisher, Bennett Cerf. Following on from The Cat in the Hat which used 236 different words, Cerf bet Seuss that he couldn’t complete one with even fewer. Green Eggs and Ham was published in 1960, with just 50 different words used in the whole text. Despite this stringent limitation, by 2001 it had become the fourth-best-selling English language children’s hardcover of all time.
And for those who are curious, some of the 50 words are: a, am, and, are, be, boat, box, car, dark, do, eat, fox, goat, green, ham, here, I, if, in, let, like, may, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.
Another example of constrained writing is Peter Carey’s book True History of the Kelly Gang which doesn’t use a single comma. In Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, every word in the first chapter begins with A. In the second chapter, words beginning with both A and B are allowed, and so on.
It seems to me that the only purpose of constrained writing is as a good writing practice. For trivia and quiz junkies, it may provide some fun facts to remember!