Can you make a sentence without using the letter E?

It may seem a bit hard, but not impossible. How about a 500 characters text? It’s getting more complicated, right?

Now try to write a 500 pages novel without one of the most commonly used letters in the alphabet (at least in most of the European languages).

Well, this is what the French author Georges Perec did in his novel La Disparition. The English translation (A Void) doesn’t contain any E either. 

Being part of the Oulipo literary movement and inspired by one of the most creative French authors Raymond Queneau, Perec used constrained writing techniques such as lipograms (avoiding a particular letter) and univocalism (using only a single vowel).

After all, what did Perec have against the letter E?

A Void is more than just a simple product of Georges Perec’s refined taste for aesthetics. The absence of the most essential letter in his works is often linked to the loss of his parents, both of them perished in WW2. 

Once you start reading this book, your mind will make you look for E’s instead of actually reading the story. Don’t spend time doing that. There is not a single E. Focus on the story and enjoy the mystery plot.

In the 1960s, amidst a wide variety of literary movements such as surrealism and existentialism, a group of French writers had the noble idea of renewing the act of writing. A new literary movement Oulipo (short for French Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, meaning “workshop of potential literature”) was founded in France by the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais. Being deeply inspired by mathematics, the Oulipo team used combinatorics and algorithms to give life to a plethora of literary creations. 

For Georges Perec, writing is above all a kind of salvation. In the words of Claude Burgelin, “The letters will allow him to leave the passive status of orphan-victim to become a craftsman of his life (writer) and builder of lives (novelist)”.

A child of Jewish immigrants of Polish origin in France, Perec lost his father at four and his mother two years later, both of whom disappeared during the Second World War. This disappearance will mark his childhood and leave many questions unanswered. 

The lipogram (from the Greek leipen “to remove” and gramma “letter”) is a literary constraint that consists in removing one or more letters of the alphabet in a text. Lasos of Hermione, a Greek poet of the 6th century B.C. is the first author to have created a lipogram, having written two poems without the letter sigma.

A Void

As the title indicates, it is the disappearance that plays an essential role in the whole novel. It all starts with the vanishing of the letter e, which will be the main theme of the novel. This lipogrammatic novel tells the story of a family curse that causes the successive disappearance of all the main characters. Between the intertwined stories of rediscovered families and the thousands of literary references, the most striking element remains the constraint which itself symbolizes a disappearance – that of the most frequent letter of the French alphabet.

By becoming a member of OuLiPo in 1967, Georges Perec further confirmed his taste for wordplay and accepted the task of being a craftsman and innovator of language.

As paradoxical as it may seem, Georges Perec ended up freeing himself from the strict rules of language, while at the same time imposing constraints on himself. Finally, the literary constraint for Perec represents the liberation of the constraint of life, notably that of a lost childhood marked by the disappearance of his parents. It is History with its great axe (wordplay in the French language “Histoire avec une grande Hache”), as he defines it in his autobiography W or the Memory of Childhood, which is at the origin of his adventure as a writer. Georges Perec saw in the OuLiPo literary movement an attempt to reinvent his own life and to fill in the gaps of his own memory.

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