A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, put out in 1969 by Georges Perec, written wholly without using the letter e, following Oulipo constraints.
A Void's plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void's protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story's constraint risk fatal injury. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words, said: "This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown."
Major themes
Georges Perec's direct kin passed away in World War II: his father as a GI, his mother in the Holocaust. Perec was brought up by his aunt and uncle after serving in the war as a parachutist. Warren Motte finds the lack of any e in the book as a stand-in for Perec's own notion of loss and spiritual limbo:[1]
The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with connotation, and each points toward the existential void that Perec fought with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of écriture ["writing"].
Various English translations are titled A Vanishing by Ian Monk,[4]Vanish'd! by John Lee,[5] and Omissions by Julian West.[6]
All translators have asked that the text follow the lipogrammatic constraint of the original work, avoiding the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. This precludes the use of words normally considered crucial such as je ("I"), et ("and"), and le (masculine "the") in French, as well as "me", "be", and "the" in English. The Spanish version contains no a, which is the second most common suffix in the Spanish language (first being e), while the Russian version contains no о. In Japan, "A Void" contains no syllables with the sound "i" (い, き, し, etc.) at all.
Other languages translations
Language
Author
Title
Year
German
Eugen Helmlé
Anton Voyls Fortgang
1986
Italian
Piero Falchetta
La scomparsa
1995
Spanish
Marisol Arbués, Mercé Burrel, Marc Parayre, Hermes Salceda and Regina Vega
Perec found a similar constraint for Les Revenentes, using words containing “e” and no other vowels.
References
↑"Reading Georges Perec". Context (11). Dalkey Archive Press. Archived from the original on 21 March 2017. Retrieved 28 July 2014.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
↑Levin Becker, Daniel (2012). Many subtle channels: in praise of potential literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-06962-6. OCLC794004240.
↑Bensimon, Paul; français, Centre de recherches en traduction et stylistique comparée de l'anglais et du (1995). La lecture du texte traduit (in French). Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. ISBN978-2-87854-098-7.
↑Esme Winter-Froemel; Angelika Zirker, eds. (2015). Enjeux du jeu de mots: Perspectives linguistiques et littéraires. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-040834-8. OCLC1013955053.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
