25 June 2011

LIPO GLOSS

Lipograms are novels, poems, paragraphs--any zoo or salad of words assembled for pleasure--whose inscribing is bound by rules decided in advance.  Reading works of such lexical perversion can produce a sense of subliminal unease, as if minuscule changes in Planck values (imaginably arising from random local variance in ylem before a Big Bang) had produced a universe which we only gradually recognize as indefinably diverging from our own.

Georges Perec, founding member of Oulipo--a French gang of serious-wordplay-fashioners--famously published a long novel called Disappearance which, while looking easy, lacked all E's.  E, you'll remember, is of primary frequency in English and French.  In a succeeding novella, Perec re-balanced his keyboard by using no vowels besides E--no simpler an exercise, even if E's are so common.

You've been reading an hommage à Georges Perec, a lipogram from which a phoneme, majusculed as a Greek cross--whose frequency in English is precisely below E's--was banned.  Beyond such exclusion, however, all possible phonemic marks in English were encyclopædically included: quick brown foxes jumping high over lazy dogs.  A genuine Œdipal challenge, dancing on such a leash.  Such praxis resembles Zugzwang in chess: an approaching cul-de-sac seen from afar, a [horrifyingly] rigid narrowing of successive choices.

As you see, lipograms, schooled in such a hard-Scrabble discipline, regularly display excessive use of commas, colons, semicolons, and dashes; obscure and bizarre words; and fanciful expressive arcs resembling eddies and whirlpools (or even, perhaps, in places, a congealed lacy foam overlying such fluid phenomena): display, indeed, a near-palindromic sinuous oddness overall.  Well, anyway, mine does.  Some fun, eh? 

Did I really say "an hommage?"  Sorry.  Merely minding my p's and q's; crossing a t.
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Added 13 July (OK, OK, my final word, I promise...maybe):

As my use of "phoneme" above is obviously in error (see below), "grapheme"--given my self-imposed maze--seems a usable moniker for vocally derived marks found in inscribed or graven discourse.  Accordingly, please replace "phoneme" by "grapheme" passim.  And consider, if a second reason for such an exchange is needed: nunnish young Grapheme, academy-born, smelling so preciously of lamp-wicks, by-blow of the palaver of rude para-mechanicals, clearly longs for ravishing embrace by Oulipoid Gypsies--in such rococo frolics and ludicurlicues as would gladden any Perec-ocious Calvinophile's cockles, and perhaps even yank a minuscule half-unwilling chuckle from James Joyce, our (alas!) no longer Waking friend--whereas her noisy older sib Phoneme has carried major speaking roles and innumerable beaux over many long years now.  Hurrah for Grapheme!  Queneau dig it?

5 comments:

  1. Actually, it's the letter t that's absent from your text, not the phoneme /t/. If you were really dealing in phonemes, there would be no reason to omit the word the, which does not contain /t/.

    By the way, the English translation of Perec is called The Vanishing, and its hero is namd not Voyl but Vowl.

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  2. Thanks for your comments. You're right, of course: I couldn't easily think of a synonym for 'letter' which didn't contain 't.' The French name of Perec's novel is La Disparition, for which I thought Disappearance a reasonable translation. Incidentally, I revised this episode on 3 July.

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  3. Incidentally, 'lipogram' is not etymologically linked to 'Oulipo,' who frequently composed them. 'Lipogram' comes from a Greek word meaning something like 'missing letter,' while 'Oulipo' stands (in that inimitable French way) for "Ouvroir de la Litterature Potentielle, " meaning 'workshop for potential literature,' according to Wikipedia. Thus, the 'lipo' in both is exactly the kind of pun Oulipo is so fond of.

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  4. Incidentally, the translation of "La Disparition" which I own is called "The Void," which works too...

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  5. I was wrong: it's called "A Void." Oh well...

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