A wild slim alien

Tag Archives: Mark Dunn


by 7 Comments

The comical hotch-potch, or the alphabet turn’d posture-master: on writing lipograms (an afterword to Missing letters)

The comical hotch-potch

I’ve just completed a series of stories called Missing letters. Together they make up an alphabet of lipograms, a lipogram being a piece of writing composed entirely without a particular letter (or group of letters). I’m relieved to have finished, and now that I have, I thought it might be interesting to write about the experience of writing lipograms.

While I was working on the first letter in the series, I came across an article by Jonathan Franzen in which he contended the following:

‘My work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual “influence” is negative: I don’t want to be like this writer or that writer.’

Obviously there are some items in that list which most if not all of us would sign up to, but others – well, ouch. I can’t help feeling Franzen is being more than a touch prescriptive about his approach to writing.  He himself is guilty of at least a couple of the items with that very statement, let alone the essay as a whole. I loved The corrections, but ‘negative’ is the word here. We all come to writing from different places with differing intentions and motives. It’s not hard to imagine that Franzen has no truck with or time for the Oulipians. That’s authors like Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Harry Matthews, who provided themselves with constraints which inspired the works they then went on to create. Perec it was who wrote La Disparition entirely without the letter ‘e’; not the first lipogrammatic novel, but probably the most famous, along with Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel Gadsby. Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, written with a full complement of letters, has a complex set of structural constraints based on a chess knight’s tour around a 10 x 10 grid, the squares of which represent rooms in flats in a Parisian apartment block. What the constraint serves to render is a beautiful book full of very human stories, some simple and sorrowful, others humorously fantastical or extreme. Life A User’s Manual or Calvino’s Invisible cities are just two answers to Franzen’s reductive critique.

Perec thrived on the challenges he set himself. You can impose rules on yourself and deliver something which you might not have achieved in any other way. When Franzen dies and is honoured with a sinecure in literary heaven, perhaps he’ll seek out Perec to debate the issue. And Perec might well wave a Gauloises in his face and say that it’s not a trick for trick’s sake. Likewise, though my stories might have been written another way with a different set of rules or a complete set of twenty-six letters, the resulting fiction still has depth of meaning. Playing a game doesn’t necessarily make the way the work unfolds any less emotionally true.

Would my stories have been better for being written unencumbered? The point is that they might not exist but for the constraint. From the choice of title onwards, the constraint shaped the stories and the stories fought the constraint. There are scores of different ways of saying roughly the same thing, and each of them has its own nuances. You choose the nuance which most closely resembles the truth of the fiction you have in your head. The constraint has also served to make me think that much harder about how to avoid the ease and restraint of clichés.

While Perec was the background inspiration for these 27 pieces of mine (I wrote a second story for U, suggested to do so by how the first unfolded), the immediate inspiration came from being reminded of and reading a more recent novel, Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea.  Forbiddingly subtitled ‘a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable’, in fact it is as whimsical as it is clever in following the troubles of islanders who successively lose the use of letters of the alphabet, as a result of the irrational authoritarianism of the island’s elders.  The islanders themselves battle back as flexibly as Dunn negotiates the ever-increasing constraint, and in so doing reinvents the English language:

‘Such a beguiling sight – your long auburn tresses falling as cataract in shimmering filamentous pool upon the table top, gathering in swirl upon your note paper – obscuring? framing? your toil.’

I can’t make such claims for myself, of course, but the commoner the letter, the more I found I had to bend the language, and come up with alternative ways of saying what I wanted to say, which often turned out to be better than the sentence I might otherwise have written. Each letter presented a different challenge. For some, conjunctions and definite articles were out; for others, participles and past tenses.  Every grammatical construct was at one point or another unavailable to me. But language, like water, can find a way around each obstacle it faces. And there is definitely a creative tension between the story-telling and the being one fork short of a full picnic set.

How Perec managed in the age before computers and word processors, I will never know. When I finished drafting a story, I habitually ran a ‘Find’ search on the letter which was supposed to be missing, only to discover there were often several and sometimes even tens of the little blighters highlighted in fluorescent yellow. S was the only story where none of the letter in question got through the net of my finished draft.  I guess it tends to stand out in a sentence.

Along the way, I had a wonderful comment from Lunar Camel Co., which got to the heart of what I was trying to do, and how I viewed the challenge:

‘I’m always interested to see, reading these, whether I’m aware of the missing letter — whether I’m noticing the writerly things you’re doing (not unlike tumbling) or whether I’m too caught up in the narrative to be conscious on that level. Often it’s a mixture of both, but I got too caught up in this one to think for a moment about who, what, wildcats, etc.’

The set of 27 is far from perfect. I only slowly realised that the lipograms were becoming predominantly fictional, and so a few are riddles or non-fiction, and maybe one of these days I’ll have another pass at those letters. Probably some of the narratives need a little more room to breathe, and perhaps if they were appearing in book form rather than here, they would get that.

To which letter would I direct you, if you wanted to sample one in particular? That’s hard. Ironically the last letter of the alphabet is possibly the best story, about a woman leaving a relationship as a result of an ant invasion – but that too would not have come into being but for the suggestion of the missing letter.  Combining Perec and Calvino in a two-headed Hydra for U – imagining first an alien poaching and eating her eggs in The reader [u] and then a talking horse in The horseshoe [u] – gave me most satisfaction and fun. On one occasion a single lipogram wasn’t enough to contain a character’s story so she returned in another – I [b]’s anthropologist is a lone survivor on another planet, until she meets her end in We [r]. Another memorialised a pub in my home town – The Cupola House [q] – which sadly burnt down last year. There was a lot of life, death and meaning in these stories.

But if you forced me to settle on just one, perhaps I would suggest the playful love story that is CK & U [F].  That’s what it all probably comes down to. That I am playing with letters, with words, for the sheer joy of it.  Perhaps it’s what I like to do most of all.  Jonathan Franzen too, I suspect.

And now? I’m not sure what the writing future holds in store. But I am certainly looking forward to being able to use the alphabet’s full range, without constantly double-checking myself for a letter which ought to be missing.

Image of Carington Bowles’ The comical hotch-potch, or the alphabet turn’d posture-master, 1782 via Granger Art on Demand.


by 2 Comments

The reader [u]

The writer can’t help imagining the reader of these words.  He hopes it’s not ill-mannered of him to poke his nose and the imagination which lies behind it into affairs which are none of his concern.  In his mind sirens call and he finds himself irresistibly drawn into another attempt to replicate a three-dimensional life from scratch, from nothing more than the cross a finely sharpened pencil might make on a map; a world from a grain of sand.

So he imagines her, or certainly alternately it might be a him… perhaps it might be safer in terms of not antagonising half his readership to think of this archetypal one as a non-gender-specific alien.  Yes, a race which doesn’t have sexes.  However, they do have sex; it’s the best of both worlds.  When they decide it’s time, they pass the calcified egg between them and go half and half on the rearing, like Emperor or King Aptenodytes.  In most other respects however they are like earthlings.  They enjoy a good breakfast, for example.  Poached eggs – they’re not averse to eating a reptile’s or bird’s – on wholemeal toast, with a pot of coffee.

So he imagines it in its kitchen.  Wait a moment; alien or otherwise, he doesn’t want to label his reader an ‘it’.  Perhaps it’s better after all if he says ‘she’.  Call it an attempt to redress the balance of the ages when it comes to denoting species as a whole by the male gender alone.  Earthlings and aliens in possession of the defining male characteristic will have to forgive him, and place their mind temporarily inside that of a female of the species.

So he imagines his reader first thing in the morning, scratching the scales of her nose with one set of highly developed fascicled toes, and with another clicking her way to this page on her technological device of choice; or perhaps if these stories ever find their way into a hard copy format she will simply take the bookmark from the book which at night resides on her bedside chest of drawers, and there at the kitchen table begin reading the next in the collection, namely this one.  Slowly, with the dawn, the realisation may arise that it concerns her, and the writer hopes that far from giving her a fright, this might make her smile.  As well as the poached eggs – which need exactly 180 seconds, as determined by the special perfect poached egg app on her technological device – she has the toast and coffee on the go, and these moments of waiting to sit at her kitchen table reading.  Really she only needs the app for its stopwatch; she’s cooked dozens and dozens of poached eggs in her time and knows to whisk the sea-salted, boiling water till it resembles a whirlpool before dropping the egg into the centre of the vortex, and that if it isn’t freshly laid, to crack the egg into a ramekin containing a drop of vinegar to aid the congealing process.

The coffee’s percolations travel in scented arabican loops to her nose as this very paragraph is scanned and despite the many tasks she has on the go, her mind’s eye feels it has settled into the rhythm of the writer’s prose.  At the ding of the app, however, she stops reading to plate and begolden the toast, fish the eggs (she’s having two) from the pan with a slotted spoon, and decant herself some coffee.  With the plate before her, she slits the two snowy ovals with her knife and watches with keen appreciation as gooey yolk pools on the toast.  Her tail swishes between the rods which form the back of the wooden chair on which she sits, spiralling one of them in what is evidently a characteristic expression of content.

As she wipes a smear of yellow from her reptilian lips, the writer imagines – especially if she is reading the story on the web where it may be less apparent that it is constrained than he imagines will be the case with a printed version – that the reader has been paying close attention and is in on the raison d’être of these stories.  She knows, for example, that as well as each story missing a letter, each takes its lead from the title, and attempts to tease as it skirts employing typically chosen words, preferring instead less common, lipogrammatically permissible forms.  Paradoxically he also hopes that at the same time as she is aware of it, she is also not noticing that the letter highlighted by brackets in the title has been temporarily excised from written English.  For he hopes that these stories work either way, with the knowledge or in its absence.

Having imagined it, the writer himself can smell the coffee now.  She likes it strong, and he wishes he might have even a thimble of it to keep his brain sharp as he strives to avoid the letter which it is necessary to avoid.  Idly he wonders if she has read anything of the sort before, broadly speaking.  He imagines she is a well-read alien, and will at least know of If on a winter’s night a traveller and Ella Minnow Pea and La disparition – translated as A void – even if she has not read all of them.

It’s a spring morning after a long winter, and the alien carries her device to the back door to keep on reading as she opens it to the day and lets light warm her scales.  Blooms are beginning to appear on the wisteria, and the tips of its stems are starting to seek something to hold onto.  Once again she will smile, he thinks, as she sits down with her second coffee on one of the ironwork chairs at the filigree garden table to carry on reading, over all this metafictional nonsense.  He allows himself to imagine that she likes writers who play with words, who love making them dance to their satisfaction and that of their readers.  However, now that his shaggy alien tale is nearly at an end, he stops to wonder whether she might in fact have preferred a good old-fashioned proper story, and in a flash decides to see if he can incorporate one.  Had he gone down that path rather than this, he might have written something with the title ‘The horseshoe’ and had the aim of transferring to his reader something of the felicity that went into the writing of it.  In the shire where the writer spent his formative years, it was traditional to position a horseshoe over the door of a dwelling place, so as to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  From this detail, he begins to fashion a fairy story, one which describes the mishaps which befall a careless farrier who pooh-poohs old wives’ tales and deliberately challenges the Fates, and that’s what part two of this lipogrammatic clash of postmodernism and traditional narrative is going to relate, a click or a leafing of the page away from here.