Alphabetical Antics: Lipograms, Abecedaries, and More

Ptim Callan: Postmodernists look at everything around them as potential material for their work. Everything could be a technique or a story driver or grist for the creative mill. And if that's the perspective you have, that everything's fair game, everything is something that should be you should find a way to use it and take advantage of it and it make you make and make it make your writing better. Then why not the alphabet itself? Why not the actual building blocks in the form of letters that we use to create the very language that we write in? And indeed, postmodernists have done that. And let's talk about some of the ways that the alphabet has been used as a postmodern touchstone in postmodern technique. Now, let's start with some easy ones, some fun. light little ones. And these are fun and light, the first two examples, but they do show that sensibility at work. And the first one is Stanislaw Lems the Siberia. And the first story in Stanislaw Lem's the Siberiad is called How the World Was Saved. And what happens is one of the two great inventors, Troll, creates a machine that can develop can that can create anything That starts with the letter N. And Clapausius, who is a little jealous, they're competitive, not one to be one-uped, tells the machine to create nothing. And by this he doesn't mean just don't create anything, create nothing. He means create capital N nothing, create void, create lack thereof. And the machine proceeds to do this. And it starts removing. all sorts of things from the world. And it starts with things that start with the letter ends. So it removes a lot of stuff we wouldn't like. It removes nausea and n nincom poops and things along those lines. Negativity but then it moves on to other things. And as it was removing these things, it's completely removing them in the world. And so at one point we have a passage here which is where but Klepaushus was about to protest, but notice just then that a number of things were indeed disappearing, and not merely those that started with N. The constructors were no longer surrounded by the Gruncheans, the Targlisks, the Shoe Pops, the Kalinatopacts, the Tists, the Warches, and Pritons. And so what happens here is as it's removing all the things of the world. All these made-up words, right? Are clearly the words of things that have been removed from the world and therefore not there. So they strike at the Oath machine. The steam machine stops creating nothing. It doesn't destroy everything in the world. and it restores all of the things that have the letter N, like nausea and nincompoos. But it can't r r restore the prietons and the and the crutchins because of course those don't start with n. So we just don't have those in the world anymore. Right? So It's very clever, it's fun, it's funny, it's light, but you see that sensibility, that sense of saying, I'm gonna take the alphabet and the stuff of the alphabet, and I'm going to use that as the stuff of my story. Light example number two. This is a I guess it's a children's book, but it's a great book. It's great for adults too. It's called C D B by William Steig. And as you can see, the person C D B, right? If you're listening on the podcast, this is just the letter C D B. And yet there's a picture of somebody pointing at a B, right? Flying next to a flower. And it's a whole bunch of one-panel pages. And each of these is a a Is is is a set of letters and it spells something out. So here's a picture of two people standing in a jail cell jail cell and it says Peter and Jay are in jail. Right? So by just taking the letters, you actually say the things that you're seeing here. Right? This guy's sleeping under a tree and he's saying to the guy other guy, I F N N E N R G. Right? So it's a whole book of this. And I think there's a sequel as well, which which I don't own. so it's it's it's again fun, light, pleasant, but showing somebody saying, I'm gonna look at the alphabet and I'm gonna use the alphabet as the stuff for my story. Now, we'll get into some more, let's say, accomplished works. Than just those. And one of the things that I think we all probably are familiar with, and many of us actually surely have had books like this when we were children in particular, is what they call an abactery. So, you know, A is for apple, B is for banana, C is for cherry, right? We've all seen these books, we've all had these books, we've read these books to our kids or read these books as kids. And so that's called an abactery. And this is an abactery. This is Gilbert Sarantino's Splendid Hotel. And indeed, this is the it's a it's a 26-chapter book of Splendid Hotel. And the first chapter is chapter A, and it's all about the letter A. It has A in the front. The second chapter is chapter B. And it's all about the letter B. We see about A going on in this page, we got B going on in this page. And each of them is about that chapter, going all the way to Z. Now, in particular, I want to call your attention to two that I think are especially cool. This is chapter K. And chapter K is a baseball scorecard. Because baseball scorecards prominently feature the letter K to indicate strikeouts. And so we're looking at a baseball scorecard with all the Ks. And there's discussion of that game. And that's what we get for the letter K. So Sorentino is going at this in various ways, and there are all these scenes from the Splendid Hotel. And then finally we get to Chapter Z. There's Chapter Z, and all it says is everyone is asleep in the Splendid Hotel. So, marvelous book, lovely book, smart, fun to read. It's an abacadary. So that's one of the things that you can do. Another game that you can play with the alphabet that is interesting is what's called a lipogram. And a lipogram is where a writer deliberately restricts the letters they allow themselves to use. In their writing. So let's start with Gadsby. Gadsby was written in the 1930s, I think it was 1939, if I'm correct, but it's that ballpark. You can look it up. Tell me in the comments if I didn't get the year exactly right. And Gadsby was written by this author, not really known for anything else, barely known for this, a guy named Ernest Vincent Wright. And he wrote this entire novel, and he attempted to write it entirely without the letter E. I'm told that he actually, or the story goes that he actually disabled the E on his typewriter so that he could not type the letter E in order to not accidentally use E in there. Now that's the story. I am told, for what it's worth, that Gadsby actually has something like a half dozen E's in it where the author screwed up and he missed them. I don't spot any of them myself when I look through the book, but that's supposedly the case. So we didn't quite get that right. How do we reconcile that with the disabled E in the typewriter? Don't exactly know. But it was certainly an attempt at a lipogrammatic novel. Now, why did Wright choose the letter E in particular? Because it is the most common letter in the English language. And therefore, if we're going to remove one letter, that is the one that delivers the most constraint. It makes the work hardest to do. causes us to adjust most to get it done. It's most interesting as a verbal exercise. And if you accept the premise that constraint breeds creativity, then it's the thing that will breed the most creativity. Gadsby, not a very well-known novel, didn't sell very well at the time, but enjoyed a revival in more recent day events, came back into reprint, which is where I got my copy. And the reason for that. Or one of the big reasons for that is that Gadsby was the motivator for a much better, more celebrated author, better known, more celebrated, I would say better too, but better known, more celebrated author, George Perec, to write his book. Now this was written in French, but the English translation of the very competent translation by Gilbert Adair is the English translation of the title is a void, which you see as a pun because it's a void. What's the void? The void is the letter E. But we're also avoiding the letter E. And indeed, in Perek's case, E being the most common letter in the French language, in addition to the English language, Perek wrote this novel entirely absent the letter E. And when Adair translated it, he also translated it entirely devoid of the letter E. So this is a great, well-written novel. If I pick up Passage just almost at random, four ghastly days, which a brutal fifth was to cap Othun's Lipman's arrival at Azincourt. Othan, obviously all in, his body giving off a strong musty odor, his raglan practically in rags, instantly ran toward Augustus with a foul outpouring of profanity, vilifying him, shouted a long string of disgusting cuss words at him, almost physically abusing him. Right, just pulled that at random. And so you see, it reads great. Like it reads very naturally. And you wouldn't even necessarily realize what's going on. If it weren't for the fact that two interesting things, at one point, there actually is a passage in the book where we see somebody has deliberately written a liprogram and they have excluded the letter A. So for this passage in the book, there's neither E nor A, because of course there can't be E. And so now you get to see, you get to watch both of those owl vowels removed from from the alphabet. And then the other thing, of course, is the absence of E, this being PureC, the absence of E becomes p part of the the the the story and the motivator of what's going on is feeling like something is wrong and something is missing from the world and what is it, and that something of course being the letter E. Marvelous book, well written, extremely smart, extremely clever. This is another example of a lipogram. and and I guess I don't know if I close the point. Perek supposedly was was was inspired by Gatsby. Saw Gatsby, read Gatsby, and said, gosh, I want to do one of those. And that's where we get a void. So so that's the connection there. Now let's look at another example of a lipogram. This is Ella Minopee by Mark Dunn. And as you can see, it says it's a novel in letters. And this is letters. It's an epo epistillatory novel. So the entire novel is letters. And it's letters written from residents of a certain town. And this is a town where there's a statue in the town square that has the famous phrase: a quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs on it. And What happens is letters start falling off the statue. And as those letters fall off the statue, the the very aggressive town council makes it illegal to use those letters in writing. And so we see the letters, the epistles in this book have to be written. without the letters that have fallen off the statue. And as the letters continue to fall off the statues, the number of, you know, this is what it looks like after a while. Right? Bunch of letters are missing. And as those letters continue to fall off the statue, they can't be used at all. They can't be anywhere in the in in the in the epistles that are shown. So these epistles get, you know, they do get shorter over time. And you you we are seeing them more constrained in terms of how the people can talk about them and mark dunn has fun with that like like people are struggling right the people who are writing these letters are struggling to say what they want to say while while while not being able to use the words that they normally would choose to work use. So again this is a progressive lipogram right where the lipogram gets tougher and tougher as time goes on. And it's directly connected back to the story. And of course, ultimately, the letters. It's letters about letters. Very postmodern, right? So it's a very postmodern book, very smart book, very well-written book. Mark Dunn, LMNOP. And but probably the most accomplished lipogram that I'm aware of is Eunioia. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. I think I am. By Christian Bach. And there's actually two things in my book, Unaya. First of all, is his, let's call it a novella. It's kind of short. His novella and then secondly, he has a book of poems in here. And Unoia, which is the first one, is a book of, it's in five chapters, and they are called Chapter A, Chapter E, Chapter I, Chapter O, and Chapter U. And In each of those chapters, the only vowel he may use is that vowel. So chapter A only has the vowel A in it of all the vowels. E only has E, I only has I, etc. So we can look at you know let's look at just again picking starting a I'm just grabbed a page at random with A. Hassan can ask that a barman at a bar tap a cask and draw a man a draught, half a dram, a glass. Mark Grappa and Armagna Malt, Arach and Schnapps. Gangs that act as crass as Harvard grads at a frat Gamma Kappa Lambda clack tankards and gawk at a gal as a gal dabs at black mascara. etc. etc. The only vowel is a, by the way, there's no Y, right? He also won't allow himself to use Y. and then we have, you know, the same thing in E. Westerners revere the Greek legends. Versemen retell the represented events. The resplendent scenes where Helbent, the Greek Freeman, seek revenge whether Helen, the new wed empress, weeps. Right? So again we've got this this E and I could do the same thing for, you know, for for O and and I and U. Here's old O. Cold storm fronts from snowstorms blow snow onto fjords north of Oslo. Most storms howl for months. Frost snows into woods. Froth blows onto rocks. From now on, snow plows plough snow. Cool brooks flow from grottos down oxbows to form pools or ponds, etc. And again, the only letter is O. So very clever. Great idea. Marvelous idea. Marvelously written, and then the second half of this book is again a book of poems, and the name of that is ossiu. I don't even know how osi oiso. and that's a French word for bird. And so Onoya is of course contains all the vowels, right? That's the thing. is also a very short word. That's a French word that contains all the vowels. And that's full of a bunch of similar like like spelling and lipogrammic and related exercises in the form of poems. So he does the same kind of thing, but the constraints and the rules are different and they're about poems. So for instance, this one, and sometimes only contains the letter Y as a vowel. It's a poem that only where the only vowel is Y, right? And so that's the kind of thing that he does in this one here, vowels only contains anagrams of the word vowel. So some or all of the letters and vowels are the only things that are in that power poem. So he does that kind of thing a lot. So again, it's it's it's very heavy on the intense use of letters and the lipograms in the word play. So once again, another example of that. Now, is it possible that we could have a lipogram? And an abacadary in the same novel. You bet it is. And let's look at alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish. And this is really the one I think we have to end on. So Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, how this works is it starts with chapter A. And in chapter A, can only begin. Words can only begin with the letter A. So, let's look at the very beginning. Ages ago, Alex, Alan, and Alva arrived at Antibes. And Alva, allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Alan's angry assertion. Another African amusement. Anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. So that's the first sentence, right? Only begins with A. Then we get to B, and now sentences are allowed to begin with A and B. And so as we proceed, you know, before African to German, Alex, Allen, and and Alva, Riven and Teebs, beginning a big bash as August brings back a buoyancy, a belief, right? So now We've got A's and B's. So it moves this way, C, D, E, F, G, as you would expect, and gets eventually to Z. And here we get Z. Zambia helps fill our zoos and our doubts and our extra wide screens as we sit back. Each here we zigzag between the cages, prodding the alligators, the antelopes, the giant ants, just to see them move about a bit. Right? So now it's reading just like what you would expect, because we have all the letters available to us. But then after that Z, we get a second Z. And then after that Z, we go back to, yeah, you guessed it, why? And now the Z's are gone. And so what's interesting is as we make our way back down the alphabet, we see the elimination, the erasure of the things in this novel. So there's a character named, I think it's Shirley. So we know that second S, S number two, is going to be the last time we get to see Shirley. And Shirley has to exit not later than then. Or it's alphabetical Africa, they're moving around Africa. It's for a while they're in Tanzania. We know that second T, by second T, they have to be out of Tanzania. Right? So this structure, this building and de disassembling structure, assembling and disassembling structure, becomes the structure of the novel, and it governs not just the chapters and what their order they're in and some of the things you're gonna say about it, but it also Governs how the characters and the content come and go, when they can arrive and when they must leave. And as we get down toward the end of the book, and it's getting sparer and sparer and tighter and tighter and more and more constrained, there is a sense of the inevitable end of everything, right? That it's all going to be done. And it's all gonna be gone, and we get through D, and then we get through C, and then we get through B, and we know that it's all being erased and it's coming to the end. And finally we get to A and our last A, and our last A is just another big list, another abbreviation, another abdomen, another abduction, another aberration, another abortion ass, another abnormal act, another aboriginal, another approach. Another absence, another abstraction, etc, etc, etc, ending with another Alva, another Alex, another Alan, another Alfred, another Africa, another Alphabet. That's it. All done. Alphabetical Africa is over. And it's an abacadary and a lipogram. So these aren't the only examples of writers doing things with you know abicidarian or alphabetical constraints and and rules and games and structures. but I think there's some of the best and most accomplished and most noteworthy. And I would love for you to tell me in the comments about the thing that you loved and enjoyed, that used the alphabet as part of the creative palette that the postmodern author had to rely on. Thank you very much.