Writing is inhibiting.
Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks—impish
hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?
Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,
writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-
ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-
picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I
bitch; I kibitz—griping whilst criticizing dimwits,
sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-
tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.
—from “Chapter I” in Eunoia
Eunoia
is a univocal lipogram—an anomalous narrative, in which each vowel
appears by itself in its own chapter, telling a story in its own voice.
Eunoia is directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo
(l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle)—the
avant-garde, French coterie renowned for its literary experimentation
with extreme, formalistic constraints. ‘Eunoia’ is the shortest
word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally
means ‘beautiful thinking.’ The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle
of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that,
even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express
an uncanny, if not sublime, thought. The text abides by many subsidiary
rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must
describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau, and
a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the
use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for
each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although
a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax,
belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus). The text
must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally,
no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
Writing this book proved to be an arduous task. I read through the dictionary
five times to extract an extensive lexicon of univocal words, each containing
only one of the five vowels. I could have automated this process, but
I figured that learning the software to write a program would probably
take just as long as the manual labour itself—so I simply got started
on the project. I arranged the words into parts of speech (noun, verb,
etc.); then I arranged these lists into topical categories (mineral, vegetal,
etc.), so that I could determine what stories the vowels could tell. I
then spent six years, working four or five hours every night after work,
from about midnight on, piecing together a five-chapter novel (the first
chapter containing only A, the second chapter containing only E, etc),
doing so until I exhausted this restricted vocabulary. I thought that
the text would be minimally comprehensible, but grammatically correct,
and I was surprised to discover many uncanny coincidences that induced
intimations of paranoia. I began to feel that language played host to
a conspiracy, almost as if these words were destined to be arranged in
this manner, lending themselves to no other task, but this one, each vowel
revealing its own individual personality: the courtly A, the elegiac E,
the lyrical I, the jocular O, the obscene U.
Eunoia, in effect, represents a direct response to my
own misgivings about the influence of Oulipo upon my work. The Oulipo
criticizes the classical paradigm of inspiration by proposing a set of
methodical, if not scientific, procedures for writing literature. The
Oulipo typically imposes some form of constraint upon the practice of
writing in order to discover what kind of aesthetic potential arises from
these experimental restrictions. The coterie has included, among its membership,
such writers as Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Harry
Mathews—but aside from a few selected, athletic works by these famous
writers, most of the texts produced by the group often seem procrustean
and unappealing. The basic fulfillment of the constraint often seems to
take precedence over all other literary concerns (like euphony, meaning,
etc.) so that often the results of such an experiment resemble the completion
of a rote exercise (like writing 14 lines with metre and rhyme and calling
it a sonnet, even though the poem lacks any literary pizzazz). The works
often do not fulfill enough of their potential to make them any more interesting
than a fumbled sleight. The coterie also seems uninterested in exploring
the political potential of writing under such duress in order to expose
the ideological foundations of discourse itself.
Eunoia, for example, retrenches an economy of meaning
that its constraints might have otherwise challenged (hence, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poets might find this work disappointing for its inability to depart from
the prisonhouse of grammatical, referential speech). While the wacky rules
of Oulipo might imply a freedom from traditional conventions, the content
of such work often seems skewed toward normality. The poetic tastes of
the group seem quite banal, insofar as its members admire forms like the
sonnet or the sestina, dickering with the rules of these defunct genres
in order to find new ways to revivify them (hence, I often wonder whether
or not the literary politics of this avant-garde differs from the norm
in specie or merely in degree). The role of constraint in literature (if
not in all ideologies) is to provide a set of rules that can entrench
the generic quality for a particular convention. The members of Oulipo
argue that, if given the choice, we always prefer to follow rules created
by us intentionally for ourselves rather than to follow rules created
unconsciously for us by others. The group suggests that, as poets, we
are better off by being slaves to an obvious, instead of an unknown, master.
The irony here, however, is that the virtuosity of such literature always
seems to be more interesting, the less free it is.
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