When the
lipogram's final quatrain turns to positive advice, the verbs affirm thought, combining physical action, "work," with internal action, "know" and "vow."
As Susan Elkin mentioned in the article that triggered this longer-than-anticipated letter, writing meaningful
lipograms is much more difficult than may appear at first.
A story of about 50,000 words, it is possibly most famous of all Anglic-group
lipograms, and probably most ambitious also.
This rather special type of clinamen occurs essentially in texts written to a "hard" constraint, particularly
lipograms, palindromes, and heterograms, and most frequently occurs as misspelling.
Lipograms, it seems, are nothing new, having been found in classical Greek from the sixth century B.C., and Crystal mentions two famous examples from the twentieth century: Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939), a novel inspired by Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that entirely omits the letter e, and Georges Perec's 1969 novel La Disparition (valiantly translated in 1995 by Gilbert Adair as A Void), which avoids the same vowel.
The negative feedback conditions the patient to think only in
lipograms, and each week the doctors electrify an additional key until the patient can express his thoughts only in images made from punctuation marks.
Of course the well-known palindromes, charades, Tom Swifties, transposals,
lipograms (as you might not know, apart from the English translation A Void--and a Spanish, an Italian, a German, a Japanese, a Turkish and other translations [!]-there is also a Dutch translation [5] of the e-lipogram La Disparation by Georges Perec [6]), eponyms, word ladders, pangrams, word pyramids, spoonerisms, homonyms, collective nouns with a twist ("a handful of fingers", "a church of hypocrites", but the other hundred or so are not translatable that easily), chronograms, epigrams, rebuses ("M A Z T", in Dutch pronounced as "Em-a-zet-thee", meaning "Emma makes tea"), oxymorons, acronyms, acrostic verses, anagrams and alliterations.
Michael Ondaatje's "Billy the Kid and the Princess" is a literary outlaw: in this readymade, Ondaatje addresses the issue of plagiarism head-on by quoting the complete text of a comic strip and presenting it as his own "found story." Stream-of-consciousness, dehistoricization, the use of
lipograms in the manner of the Oulipo: the experiments collected in this anthology are much more than useful tools for Stephen King's "toolbox"--as he calls it in his book On Writing--and prove to be fascinating pieces of fiction in their own right.
145, in the article on
Lipograms. Under the J
lipogram, it states: The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, at least in modern editions, does use J consistently, but its first appearance in Leviticus isn't until after 58036 letters.
But the device, called a
lipogram (or rather, here, a fivefold sequence of vocalic
lipograms) harked back to the practices of the grands rhetoriquers of the sixteenth century, and even further back, to games played by the Romans and the Greeks.
First,
lipograms aren't as unique: whereas there is only one kind of pangram, there are as many different kinds of unigraphic
lipograms as there are letters of the alphabet.
Even here, of course, this is only to give the bare bones of the story: even
lipograms do not write themselves.
Half-alphabet
lipograms (HALs) limit words to half of the alphabet.
His readings of these texts persuade me that all texts--especially when they are constrained or ruled by almost authoritarian laws--in
lipograms or palindromes--somehow free themselves and demonstrate the amazing (pun intended!) and magical lessons not to be learned from conventional "realism." I offer only one example: if we are told about the "disappearance" of an "e" in a text, we will feel its uncanny presence.
Anil has caught below two of the more frazzled of Mary's Lambs: "Surprisingly few words or longer
lipograms can be made from letters exclusively spelled with only-the odd or with only the even.
